If you listen to some progressives–including many Christians–Donald Trump won because white people are bigoted. Trump supporters are a bunch of Christian nationalists, patriarchs, and racists, they say. As a result, we must spend the next four years doubling down on our disdain for these people. The goal for these progressives is to use social media, public writing, and speaking engagements to point out the backwardness of working people and, in the process, assert their moral superiority. While these progressives whine and wail about racism and patriarchy, they say very little about social class and economic issues. It is a losing political strategy.
Erica Etelson is president of the Rural Urban Bridge Initiative and the author of Beyond Contempt: How Liberals Can Communicate Across the Great Divide. She seems less concerned about building her brand among progressives by trashing Trump voters and more concerned about trying to understand Trump voters in order to find common ground. Today she has a piece at the socialist magazine Jacobin. Here is a taste of “Democrats Still Don’t Get Why Trump Won.”
If you want to know why seventy-seven million people voted for Donald Trump, don’t assume. Just ask them. As the election postmortems attest, there’s no single reason Trump won, but one common explanation stands out for its presumptuousness and ubiquity among progressives: bigotry.
This Democratic consultant’s election night hot take is typical of the genre:
But this is more than just sour grapes. It points to a deep and very dangerous delusion that’s taken hold of the Democratic Party. One that casts rural voters — supposedly the source of all American backwardness — as scapegoats for electoral catastrophes like this one all while running cover for liberals’ own failed strategy and out-of-touch priorities.
Despite this “it’s the bigotry, stupid!” school of thought, a 2024 metastudy showed that female and non-white candidates do not suffer a penalty. One can’t rule out the possibility that some voters are so racist or sexist that they simply could not pull the lever for Kamala Harris despite being more ideologically aligned with her. But to presume, as many liberals do, that this was a major driver of Harris’s defeat requires a certain amount of mind-reading.
This presumption is treated as so incontrovertible that its adherents scarcely bother making the case for it, opting instead for snarky, know-it-all tweets and memes over reasoned articles or studies. They just know it in their bones.
And this:
Many factors contributed to Democrats’ losses, but party loyalists — especially the ones who oversaw the destruction of small-town and industrial America, are always happy to point the finger at bigotry. It’s a handy excuse for ignoring the party’s many flaws, including its capture by billionaire donors who directed Harris to back off her brief, tepid foray into economic populism.
Despite the rhetoric of the last decade, trying to win elections by exhorting Americans to exorcise their racist demons seems a dubious endeavor and one that, as scholar Adolph Reed has noted, risks “undermining the possibility of a political-economic challenge coming from the lower class.” Under the tutelage of Robin DiAngelo and earlier anti-racist gurus, social justice progressives have been trying for decades to train away the racism they believe is harbored in every “white-skinned body.” The result?
Democrats have now lost the trust of working America. If Democrats’ favorite refrain is that the voters are the problem, the party may as well fold up its tent.
Read the entire piece here.
That’s a good analysis of why the Democrats lost. Even as the Republicans had to rethink things after 2018, Democrats have to do the same now. They need to go back to the kind of party they had been until Clinton came along.
But recall, Richard, that the kind of party the Democrats were prior to Clinton was a “can’t win elections party.” They lost the White House, eg, in five of the six elections after LBJ.
Independent voter here surrounded by Trump supporters who are Christians. It’s not bigotry that I see in my friends, relatives and neighbors. I cannot explain it but it seems like a blindness to what Trump really is. It is beyond the power of reason and it is a dark force. Democrats and Independents are going to have to unite to defeat this.
LVC: I’m ready to entertain the proposal that we’re under a divine curse.
Big problem with this analysis–it’s simply not true that those who attribute Trump’s appeal to racial animus have no evidence. In fact, it’s those like Etelson who argue for deindustrialization as the culprit who lack the evidence to sustain their claim. And she doesn’t present any new evidence here. Yes, the cost of living mattered at the margin (and the margin was enough to swing the election). But what we know about Trump supporters is that by and large they’re pretty prosperous (“working class” doesn’t necessarily mean “poor”). I don’t think it’s racial animus against Harris specifically, but anti-immigrant sentiment (which shows up even among Latinos/Latinas, after all) is a leading predictor of a Trump vote. Immigration is a much more important issue than abortion among *white evangelicals*, as polling repeatedly has shown. Biden in fact bought into the deindustrialization thesis, directing scads of money into reviving manufacturing–to no avail.