Dangerous
idiots: how the liberal media elite failed working-class Americans
Trump
supporters are not the caricatures journalists depict – and native
Kansan Sarah Smarsh sets out to correct what newsrooms get wrong
Sarah
Smarsh
Thursday
13 October 2016 12.00 BST
Last March, my
71-year-old grandmother, Betty, waited in line for three hours to
caucus for Bernie Sanders. The wait to be able to cast her first-ever
vote in a primary election was punishing, but nothing could have
deterred her. Betty – a white woman who left school after ninth
grade, had her first child at age 16 and spent much of her life in
severe poverty – wanted to vote.
So she waited with
busted knees that once stood on factory lines. She waited with
smoking-induced emphysema and the false teeth she’s had since her
late 20s – both markers of our class. She waited with a womb that
in the 1960s, before Roe v Wade, she paid a stranger to thrust a wire
hanger inside after she discovered she was pregnant by a man she’d
fled after he broke her jaw.
Betty worked for
many years as a probation officer for the state judicial system in
Wichita, Kansas, keeping tabs on men who had murdered and raped. As a
result, it’s hard to faze her, but she has pronounced Republican
candidate Donald Trump a sociopath “whose mouth overloads his ass”.
No one loathes Trump
– who suggested women should be punished for having abortions, who
said hateful things about groups of people she has loved and worked
alongside since childhood, whose pomp and indecency offends her
modest, midwestern sensibility – more than she.
Yet, it is white
working-class people like Betty who have become a particular fixation
among the chattering class during this election: what is this angry
beast, and why does it support Trump?
Not so poor: Trump
voters are middle class
Hard numbers
complicate, if not roundly dismiss, the oft-regurgitated theory that
income or education levels predict Trump support, or that
working-class whites support him disproportionately. Last month,
results of 87,000 interviews conducted by Gallup showed that those
who liked Trump were under no more economic distress or
immigration-related anxiety than those who opposed him.
According to the
study, his supporters didn’t have lower incomes or higher
unemployment levels than other Americans. Income data misses a lot;
those with healthy earnings might also have negative wealth or
downward mobility. But respondents overall weren’t clinging to jobs
perceived to be endangered. “Surprisingly”, a Gallup researcher
wrote, “there appears to be no link whatsoever between exposure to
trade competition and support for nationalist policies in America, as
embodied by the Trump campaign.”
Earlier this year,
primary exit polls revealed that Trump voters were, in fact, more
affluent than most Americans, with a median household income of
$72,000 – higher than that of Hillary Clinton or Bernie Sanders
supporters. Forty-four percent of them had college degrees, well
above the national average of 33% among whites or 29% overall. In
January, political scientist Matthew MacWilliams reported findings
that a penchant for authoritarianism – not income, education,
gender, age or race –predicted Trump support.
These facts haven’t
stopped pundits and journalists from pushing story after story about
the white working class’s giddy embrace of a bloviating demagogue.
In seeking to
explain Trump’s appeal, proportionate media coverage would require
more stories about the racism and misogyny among white Trump
supporters in tony suburbs. Or, if we’re examining economically
driven bitterness among the working class, stories about the
Democratic lawmakers who in recent decades ended welfare as we knew
it, hopped in the sack with Wall Street and forgot American labor in
their global trade agreements.
We don’t need
their analysis, and we sure don’t need their tears. What we need is
to have our stories told
But, for national
media outlets comprised largely of middle- and upper-class liberals,
that would mean looking their own class in the face.
The faces
journalists do train the cameras on – hateful ones screaming sexist
vitriol next to Confederate flags – must receive coverage but do
not speak for the communities I know well. That the media industry
ignored my home for so long left a vacuum of understanding in which
the first glimpse of an economically downtrodden white is presumed to
represent the whole.
Part of the current
glimpse is JD Vance, author of the bestselling new memoir Hillbilly
Elegy. A successful attorney who had a precariously middle-class
upbringing in an Ohio steel town, Vance wrote of the chaos that can
haunt a family with generational memory of deep poverty. A
conservative who says he won’t vote for Trump, Vance speculates
about why working-class whites will: cultural anxiety that arises
when opioid overdose kills your friends and the political
establishment has proven it will throw you under the bus. While his
theories may hold up in some corners, in interviews coastal media
members have repeatedly asked Vance to speak for the entire white
working class.
His interviewers and
reviewers often seem relieved to find someone with ownership on the
topic whose ideas in large part confirm their own. The New York Times
election podcast The Run-Up said Vance’s memoir “doubles as a
cultural anthropology of the white underclass that has flocked to the
Republican presidential nominee’s candidacy”. (The Times teased
its review of the book with the tweet: “Want to know more about the
people who fueled the rise of Donald Trump?”)
While Vance happens
to have roots in Kentucky mining country, most downtrodden whites are
not conservative male Protestants from Appalachia. That sometimes
seems the only concept of them that the American consciousness can
contain: tucked away in a remote mountain shanty like a
coal-dust-covered ghost, as though white poverty isn’t always right
in front of us, swiping our credit cards at a Target in Denver or
asking for cash on a Los Angeles sidewalk.
One-dimensional
stereotypes fester where journalism fails to tread. The last time I
saw my native class receive substantial focus, before now, was over
20 years ago – not in the news but on the television show Roseanne,
the fictional storylines of which remain more accurate than the
musings of comfortable commentators in New York studios.
Countless images of
working-class progressives, including women such as Betty, are thus
rendered invisible by a ratings-fixated media that covers elections
as horse races and seeks sensational b-roll.
This media paradigm
created the tale of a divided America – “red” v “blue”–
in which the 42% of Kansans who voted for Barack Obama in 2008 are
meaningless.
This year, more
Kansans caucused for Bernie Sanders than for Donald Trump – a
newsworthy point I never saw noted in national press, who perhaps
couldn’t fathom that “flyover country” might contain millions
of Americans more progressive than their Clinton strongholds.
In lieu of such
coverage, media makers cast the white working class as a monolith and
imply an old, treacherous story convenient to capitalism: that the
poor are dangerous idiots.
The two-fold myth
about the white working class – that they are to blame for Trump’s
rise, and that those among them who support him for the worst reasons
exemplify the rest – takes flight on the wings of moral superiority
affluent Americans often pin upon themselves.
I have never seen
them flap so insistently as in today’s election commentary, where
notions of poor whiteness and poor character are routinely conflated.
In an election piece
last March in the National Review, writer Kevin Williamson’s
assessment of poor white voters – among whom mortality rates have
sharply risen in recent decades – expressed what many conservatives
and liberals alike may well believe when he observed that communities
ravaged by oxycodone use “deserve to die”.
“The white
American underclass is in thrall to a vicious, selfish culture whose
main products are misery and used heroin needles,” Williamson
wrote. “Donald Trump’s speeches make them feel good. So does
OxyContin.”
For confirmation
that this point is lost on most reporters, not just conservative
provocateurs, look no further than a recent Washington Post series
that explored spiking death rates among rural white women by fixating
on their smoking habits and graphically detailing the “haggard
face” and embalming processes of their corpses. Imagine wealthy
white woman examined thusly after their deaths. The outrage among
family and friends with the education, time, and agency to write
letters to the editor would have been deafening.
A sentiment that I
care for even less than contempt or degradation is their tender
cousin: pity.
In a recent op-ed
headlined Dignity and Sadness in the Working Class, David Brooks told
of a laid-off Kentucky metal worker he met. On his last day, the man
left to rows of cheering coworkers – a moment I read as triumphant,
but that Brooks declared pitiable. How hard the man worked for so
little, how great his skills and how dwindling their value, Brooks
pointed out, for people he said radiate “the residual sadness of
the lonely heart”.
I’m hard-pressed
to think of a worse slight than the media figures who have
disregarded the embattled white working class for decades now
beseeching the country to have sympathy for them. We don’t need
their analysis, and we sure don’t need their tears. What we need is
to have our stories told, preferably by someone who can walk into a
factory without his own guilt fogging his glasses.
One such journalist,
Alexander Zaitchik, spent several months on the road in six states
getting to know white working-class people who do support Trump. His
goal for the resulting new book, The Gilded Rage, was to convey the
human complexity that daily news misses. Zaitchik wrote that his
mission arose from frustration with “‘hot takes’ written by
people living several time zones and income brackets away from their
subjects”.
Zaitchik wisely
described those he met as a “blue-collar middle class”– mostly
white people who have worked hard and lost a lot, whether in the
market crash of 2008 or the manufacturing layoffs of recent decades.
He found that their motivations overwhelmingly “started with
economics and ended with economics”. The anger he observed was
“pointed up, not down” at those who forgot them when global trade
deals were negotiated, not at minority groups.
Meanwhile, the
racism and nationalism that surely exist among them also exist among
Democrats and higher socioeconomic strata. A poll conducted last
spring by Reuters found that a third of questioned Democrats
supported a temporary ban on Muslims entering the United States. In
another, by YouGov, 45% of polled Democrats reported holding an
unfavorable view of Islam, with almost no fluctuation based on
household income. Those who won’t vote for Trump are not
necessarily paragons of virtue, while the rest are easily scapegoated
as the country’s moral scourge.
When Hillary Clinton
recently declared half of Trump supporters a “basket of
deplorables”, Zaitchik told another reporter, the language “could
be read as another way of saying ‘white-trash bin’.” Clinton
quickly apologized for the comment, the context of which contained
compassion for many Trump voters. But making such generalizations at
a $6m fundraiser in downtown New York City, at which some attendees
paid $50,000 for a seat, recalled for me scenes from the television
political satire Veep in which powerful Washington figures discuss
“normals” with distaste behind closed doors.
When we talked,
Zaitchik mentioned HBO talk-show host Bill Maher, who he pointed out
“basically makes eugenics-level arguments about anyone who votes
for Donald Trump having congenital defects. You would never get away
with talking that way about any other group of people and still have
a TV show.”
Maher is, perhaps,
the pinnacle of classist smugness. In the summer of 1998, when I was
17 and just out of high school, I worked at a grain elevator during
the wheat harvest. An elevator 50 miles east in Haysville, Kansas,
exploded (grain dust is highly combustible), killing seven workers.
The accident rattled my community and reminded us about the physical
dangers my family and I often faced as farmers.
I kept going to work
like everyone else and, after a long day weighing wheat trucks and
hauling heavy sacks of feed in and out of the mill, liked to watch
Politically Incorrect, the ABC show Maher hosted then. With the
search for one of the killed workers’ bodies still under way, Maher
joked, as I recall, that the people should check their loaves of
Wonder Bread.
That moment was
perhaps my first reckoning with the hard truth that, throughout my
life, I would politically identify with the same people who often
insult the place I am from.
Such derision is so
pervasive that it’s often imperceptible to the economically
privileged. Those who write, discuss, and publish newspapers, books,
and magazines with best intentions sometimes offend with
obliviousness.
Many people
recommended to me the bestselling new history book White Trash, for
instance, without registering that its title is a slur that refers to
me and the people I love as garbage. My happy relief that someone set
out to tell this ignored thread of our shared past was squashed by my
wincing every time I saw it on my shelf, so much so that I finally
took the book jacket off. Incredibly, promotional copy for the book
commits precisely the elitist shaming Isenberg is out to expose:
“(the book) takes on our comforting myths about equality,
uncovering the crucial legacy of the ever-present, always
embarrassing – if occasionally entertaining –poor white trash.”
The book itself is
more sensitively wrought and imparts facts that one hopes would
dismantle popular use of its titular term. But even Isenberg can’t
escape our classist frameworks.
When On the Media
host Brooke Gladstone asked Isenberg, earlier this year, to address
long-held perceptions of poor whites as bigots, the author described
a conundrum:“They do subscribe to certain views that are
undoubtedly racist, and you can’t mask it and pretend that it’s
not there. It is very much a part of their thinking.”
Entertain a parallel
broad statement about any other disenfranchised group, and you might
begin to see how rudimentary class discussion is for this relatively
young country that long believed itself to be free of castes.
Isenberg has sniffed out the hypocrisy in play, though.
“The other problem
is when people want to blame poor whites for being the only racist in
the room,” she told Gladstone. “… as if they’re more racist
than everyone else.”
That problem is
rooted in the notion that higher class means higher integrity. As
journalist Lorraine Berry wrote last month, “The story remains that
only the ignorant would be racist. Racism disappears with education
we’re told.” As the first from my family to hold degrees, I
assure you that none of us had to go to college to learn basic human
decency.
Berry points out
that Ivy-League-minted Republicans shepherded the rise of the
alt-right. Indeed, it was not poor whites – not even white
Republicans – who passed legislation bent on preserving
segregation, or who watched the Confederate flag raised outside state
capitols for decades to come.
It wasn’t poor
whites who criminalized blackness by way of marijuana laws and the
“war on drugs”.
Nor was it poor
whites who conjured the specter of the black “welfare queen”.
These points should
not minimize the horrors of racism at the lowest economic rungs of
society, but remind us that those horrors reside at the top in
different forms and with more terrible power.
Among reporters and
commentators this election cycle, then, a steady finger ought be
pointed at whites with economic leverage: social conservatives who
donate to Trump’s campaign while being too civilized to attend a
political rally and yell what they really believe.
Mainstream media is
set up to fail the ordinary American
Based on Trump’s
campaign rhetoric and available data, it appears that most of his
voters this November will be people who are getting by well enough
but who think of themselves as victims.
One thing the media
misses is that a great portion of the white working class would align
with any sense before victimhood. Right now they are clocking in and
out of work, sorting their grocery coupons, raising their children to
respect others, and avoiding political news coverage.
Barack Obama, a
black man formed by the black experience, often cites his maternal
lineage in the white working class. “A lot of what’s shaped me
came from my grandparents who grew up on the prairie in Kansas,” he
wrote this month to mark a White House forum on rural issues.
Last year, talking
with author Marilynne Robinson for the New York Review of Books,
Obama lamented common misconceptions of small-town middle America,
for which he has a sort of reverence. “There’s this huge gap
between how folks go about their daily lives and how we talk about
our common life and our political life,” he said, naming one cause
as “the filters that stand between ordinary people” who are busy
getting by and complicated policy debates.
“I’m very
encouraged when I meet people in their environments,” Obama told
Robinson. “Somehow it gets distilled at the national political
level in ways that aren’t always as encouraging.”
To be sure, one
discouraging distillation – the caricature of the hate-spewing
white male Trump voter with grease on his jeans – is a real person
of sorts. There were one or two in my town: the good ol’ boy who
menaces those with less power than himself – running people of
color out of town with the threat of violence, denigrating women,
shooting BB guns at stray cats for fun. They are who Trump would be
if he’d been born where I was.
We don’t need
their analysis, and we sure don’t need their tears. What we need is
to have our stories told
Media fascination
with the hateful white Trump voter fuels the theory, now in fashion,
that bigotry is the only explanation for supporting him. Certainly,
financial struggle does not predict a soft spot for Trump, as
cash-strapped people of color – who face the threat of his racism
and xenophobia, and who resoundingly reject him, by all available
measures – can attest. However, one imagines that elite white
liberals who maintain an air of ethical grandness this election
season would have a harder time thinking globally about trade and
immigration if it were their factory job that was lost and their
community that was decimated.
Affluent analysts
who oppose Trump, though, have a way of taking a systemic view when
examining social woes but viewing their place on the political
continuum as a triumph of individual character. Most of them
presumably inherited their political bent, just like most of those in
“red” America did. If you were handed liberalism, give yourself
no pats on the back for your vote against Trump.
Spare, too, the
condescending argument that disaffected Democrats who joined
Republican ranks in recent decades are “voting against their own
best interests,” undemocratic in its implication that a large swath
of America isn’t mentally fit to cast a ballot.
Whoever remains on
Trump’s side as stories concerning his treatment of women, racism
and other dangers continue to unfurl gets no pass from me for any
reason. They are capable of voting, and they own their decisions.
Let’s be aware of our class biases, though, as we discern who
“they” are.
Journalist? Then the
chances are you’re not blue collar
A recent
print-edition New York Times cutline described a Kentucky man:
“Mitch Hedges, who
farms cattle and welds coal-mining equipment. He expects to lose his
job in six months, but does not support Mr Trump, who he says is ‘an
idiot.’”
This made me cheer
for the rare spotlight on a member of the white working class who
doesn’t support Trump. It also made me laugh – one can’t “farm
cattle”. One farms crops, and one raises livestock. It’s
sometimes hard for a journalist who has done both to take the New
York Times seriously.
The main reason that
national media outlets have a blind spot in matters of class is the
lack of socioeconomic diversity within their ranks. Few people born
to deprivation end up working in newsrooms or publishing books. So
few, in fact, that this former laborer has found cause to shift her
entire writing career to talk specifically about class in a
wealth-privileged industry, much as journalists of color find
themselves talking about race in a whiteness-privileged one.
This isn’t to say
that one must reside among a given group or place to do it justice,
of course, as good muckrakers and commentators have shown for the
past century and beyond. See On the Media’s fine new series on
poverty, the second episode of which includes Gladstone’s
reflection that “the poor are no more monolithic than the rest of
us.”
I know journalists
to be hard-working people who want to get the story right, and I’m
resistant to rote condemnations of “the media”. The classism of
cable-news hosts merely reflects the classism of privileged America
in general. It’s everywhere, from tweets describing Trump voters as
inbred hillbillies to a Democratic campaign platform that didn’t
bother with a specific anti-poverty platform until a month out from
the general election.
The economic trench
between reporter and reported on has never been more hazardous than
at this moment of historic wealth disparity, though, when stories
focus more often on the stock market than on people who own no
stocks. American journalism has been willfully obtuse about the
grievances on Main Streets for decades – surely a factor in digging
the hole of resentment that Trump’s venom now fills. That the term
“populism” has become a pejorative among prominent liberal
commentators should give us great pause. A journalism that embodies
the plutocracy it’s supposed to critique has failed its watchdog
duty and lost the respect of people who call bullshit when they see
it.
One such person was
my late grandfather, Arnie. Men like Trump sometimes drove expensive
vehicles up the gravel driveway of our Kansas farmhouse looking to do
some sort of business. Grandpa would recognize them as liars and
thieves, treat them kindly, and send them packing. If you shook their
hands, after they left Grandpa would laugh and say, “Better count
your fingers.”
In a world in which
the Bettys and Arnies of the world have little voice, those who enjoy
a platform from which to speak might examine their hearts and minds
before stepping onto the soap box.
If you would
stereotype a group of people by presuming to guess their politics or
deeming them inferior to yourself – say, the ones who worked third
shift on a Boeing floor while others flew to Mexico during spring
break; the ones who mopped a McDonald’s bathroom while others
argued about the minimum wage on Twitter; the ones who cleaned out
their lockers at a defunct Pabst factory while others drank craft
beer at trendy bars; the ones who came back from the Middle East in
caskets while others wrote op-eds about foreign policy – then
consider that you might have more in common with Trump than you would
like to admit.
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