6 HARPER’S MAGAZINE / MARCH 2020
desperation. Such assumptions are the
real condescension, robbing Trump
voters of agency and responsibility.
The hard truth of the matter is that
Donald Trump and his party are ex-
actly what much of white America has
wanted for a long, long time.
The charges of the columnists are
so outlandish that it’s hard to know
where to begin. Democrats abandoned
working people? The only economic
group that Hillary Clinton carried in
2016 was Americans making $50,
or less. The working class in this coun-
try includes many African Americans,
Hispanics, and other people of color,
a fact that so many journalists seem
to have trouble getting their heads
around (Whites are living as bad as
black people do now! Something must
be done!).
The idea that working Americans
are, as Kristof puts it, reeling from “the
mockery of Democrats who deride
them as ignorant bumpkins” is one
manufactured largely by Fox News and
other right-wing media outlets. Bernie
Sanders—among the major candi-
dates, probably the least favored by the
national columnists—speaks raptur-
ously of working people as his heroes.
De industrialization and our conver-
sion to a globalized, high-tech econo-
my have indeed devastated great
swaths of America and millions of the
country’s working families. Who op-
posed this? Not Ronald Reagan, nor
the Bushes, nor any other leading Re-
publican in the past half-century. Not
Republican Senate majority leader
Mitch McConnell, who was recently
revealed to be firmly in the corporate
pocket of his wealthy Chinese in-laws.
Between the two major parties, the
only serious objections to offshoring
the American economy over the past
few decades came from liberal Demo-
crats such as David Bonior and Dick
Gephardt. No Republicans rallied to
their cause.
Today the only governmental pro-
posals designed to help working-class
Americans, white or black, are con-
tained in the dozens of bills that Nancy
Pelosi’s Democratic House shoots over
to McConnell’s Senate, where they are
dead on arrival. “Infrastructure Week”
has become a tired joke. Nobody is
yelling “Rebuild our roads!” or “Give
us health care!” at Trump rallies. In-
stead they’re still chanting “Lock her
up!” about Hillary Clinton or, infi-
nitely worse, “Send her back!” about
the Somali-born Democratic congress-
woman Ilhan Omar, of Minnesota. Or,
as Trump’s “very fine people” have
shouted at other rallies, “You will not
replace us!”S
o determined are otherwise intel-
ligent commentators to believe in
the people that it warps their
political judgment. Their favored can-
didates in the Democratic presidential
primary hail from the very same “elit-
ist,” “globalist” Clinton- Obama wing of
the party that supposedly drove the
working class to Donald Trump: Joe
Biden, who has spent decades carrying
water for the banks and credit- card
companies of Delaware; Mayor Pete
Buttigieg of South Bend, Indiana, the
son of college professors who reads nov-
els in Norwegian; and Mike Bloomberg,
a billionaire businessman from New
York who is the very archetype of the
overweening, nanny-state elitist, trying
to ban your Big Gulp and your gun
while waging an open “war on coal.”
Last summer, Timothy Egan lauded
former president Barack Obama for his
recent scolding of Democratic radicals
and urged Democrats “to rebuild the
Obama coalition.”
The Obama coalition? With all due
respect, that coalition had the life span
of a mayfly. Obama was probably the
most admirable individual ever to be
elected president, a paragon of modera-
tion who spent eight years trying to
reach across the aisle to Republicans.
They responded with an avalanche of
ugly, racist slurs. (But don’t call them
bigots!) And during Obama’s presi-
dency, Democrats lost both houses of
Congress, most of the nation’s gover-
norships, and a stunning 968 seats in
state legislatures around the country.
Donald Trump, for his part, has
proved himself to be nothing if not a
master political anatomist. In his
short time in politics, he has neatly
dissected the modern Republican
Party, cutting away what were sup-
posedly its most revered principles
like so much obfuscatory blubber.
Respect for the military? Trump
spent the 2016 campaign and much of
his term gibing at a dying John
McCain (“I like people who weren’tcaptured”) and the family of Humayun
Khan (“I think I’ve made a lot of sacri-
fices”). The party of faith? (“I don’t like
to have to ask for forgiveness ... I drink
my little wine—which is about the
only wine I drink—and have my little
cracker.”) The party of national secu-
rity? Of morality, of basic civility and
public decency? All that has been
sliced away, without a word of com-
plaint from the Republican base.
What is left? Race, in a word.
This should not surprise us. For all
the advice proffered about what ex-
actly the Democrats should or should
not do to bring the white working
class back into the fold, only one Dem-
ocratic presidential nominee, Lyndon
Johnson in 1964, has won a plurality
of the white vote since the last run of
the old Roosevelt coalition.
Democrats lost the white vote to
Richard Nixon and George Wallace at
the nadir of Vietnam and urban un-
rest, in 1968. Jimmy Carter—a white,
moderate, Southern evangelical, run-
ning amid a recession and in the wake
of the Watergate scandal—lost the
white vote to Gerald Ford, an unelected
president whose approval rating never
recovered from his decision to pardon
Nixon. Another white, Southern mod-
erate, Bill Clinton, lost it to fusty old
Bob Dole in 1996, and Al Gore lost it
to George W. Bush, by 13 points in
2000, at a time of peace, prosperity,
and unchallenged, worldwide Ameri-
can hegemony. Donald Trump’s 2016
victory over Hillary Clinton came by
a margin of 58–37 percent among
whites, though for all of Trump’s sup-
posed magic, he actually received
1 percent less of the white vote than
Mitt Romney did in 2016.
Call white voters bigots or don’t. But
in good times and in bad, in peacetime
and in war, in sunshine or in shadow,
white America votes for those candi-
dates it believes are most likely to keep
people of color “in their place”—either
outside the country altogether, or in
the most servile and subordinate condi-
tion possible within it.T
here is another, early narra-
tive of the people, one voiced
by Benjamin Franklin in sup-
port of that same document that be-
gins so boldly with “We the People.”
It was an odd speech, a backhanded