Trump’s
language, unseemly to critics, reassures his base
Christina
Pazzanese
Harvard
Staff Writer
February 7,
2018
First as
candidate and now as president, his word choices and stances are regularly
directed at the worried working class, professor says
One of the
most unusual aspects of President Trump’s unconventional presidency is his
distinctive speaking style. It’s a caps-locked world of mixed syntax, offbeat
grammar, malapropisms, slang, exaggerations, pet phrases, and “us versus them”
contrasts. Nonetheless, the way he communicates proved a powerfully effective
draw for many voters during the 2016 election.
His
communications style has come under renewed scrutiny following the recent
publication of the dishy best-seller “Fire and Fury” and the derogatory remarks
he reportedly made to members of Congress about Haiti, El Salvador, and African
countries.
Since the
start of his presidential campaign, Trump’s colloquial, often strident speaking
approach has proven unusually polarizing for a politician who would be elected
to govern a nation of 325 million. What many listeners find authentic and
unpretentious, others find coarse and off-putting.
Sociologist
Michèle Lamont, the Robert I. Goldman Professor of European Studies and
professor of African and African American studies, believes that, from early in
his candidacy, Trump’s word choices signaled a deliberate effort to court
supporters without college degrees, including working-class whites and those in
lower-paying jobs such as retail sales or bank services, the very subset of
voters who overwhelmingly turned out to put him in office.
Lamont,
director of the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs, extensively
studied the white working class in the United States and France for her book
“The Dignity of Working Men” (Harvard University Press, 2000), and when Trump
stepped onto the political stage, his pitch instantly sounded familiar to her.
Recalling
her interviews with earlier subjects, “I knew that they defined themselves as
the people who keep the world in moral order. That’s done in part by this
notion of ‘providing and protecting’ women,” she said. Also, “They drew very
strong boundaries toward African-Americans and the poor, mostly by emphasizing
the lack of ‘self-reliance’ of these
groups.”
To
understand better how the president’s use of political rhetoric resonated with
these voters (and, by the way, generally continues to do so), Lamont and
Harvard graduate students Bo Yun Park and Elena Ayala-Hurtado examined 73
formal speeches Trump gave during the campaign. In a paper published in the
British Journal of Sociology, they focused on references to social groups such
as refugees, Latinos, and Muslims, and the topical contexts in which those
words were used, such as safety and jobs.
Source:
“Trump’s electoral speeches and his appeal to the American white working
class,” Michèle Lamont, the Robert I. Goldman Professor of European Studies and
professor of African and African American studies
Instead of
analyzing Trump’s word choices through traditionally narrow lenses of race or
ethnicity, for example, Lamont said they looked at how his rhetoric reinforced
a broader theme of exclusion by emphasizing the boundaries that working-class
whites perceive between themselves and others, whether racial, ethno-national,
educational, socioeconomic, or religious.
“We could
immediately see how he was appealing to workers by talking about blaming
globalization, saying he was going to give [them] jobs” — and not just white
workers, but African-Americans and Latinos too, Lamont said in an interview.
“His populist argument was oriented toward appealing to all workers, but at the
same time, he was [engaged in] veiled racism by talking about ‘the inner city’
and things like that.”
Though all
politicians try to use words and phrases to inspire voters to support their
ideas, Lamont said that Trump’s speeches show his expert marketing instincts at
work. His disparaging references in speeches to immigrants, Muslims, and
Mexicans who immigrated illegally, along with his assertion that
African-Americans were predominantly poor and living in gang-ravaged cities,
were strategic “red buttons” that resonated with his white working-class base.
The language was both explicit and implicit, she said, designed both to
reinforce the social boundaries his base perceived between themselves and other
groups and to validate their attitudes about their own inherent worth and the
values they believe distinguish them from others.
“We could
immediately see how [Trump] was appealing to workers by talking about blaming
globalization, saying he was going to give [them] jobs,” Michèle Lamont said.
Trump’s
strategy “to constantly pour oil on the fire” by antagonizing various groups
was a way to appeal to working-class white voters and an effort to accentuate
the differences between them and everyone else, thereby cementing their
loyalty. The language also validated their world view and self-perception as
the hard-working victims of globalization, and it emphasized the perceived
shortcomings of groups that white working-class voters believe are below them
on the social and economic pecking order — immigrants, Muslims,
African-Americans, and Latinos — but also those perceived as above them —
“coastal elites” and other cosmopolitans such as political progressives,
academics, and professionals with special expertise.
Trump’s
remarks about women and LGBTQ people centered on an argument that they needed
“protection” from violent immigrants, especially “Muslims,” a term he used as a
stand-in for radical Islamists, she suggested. Though he sometimes spoke
positively about women, saying he was “surrounded by smart women,” Trump also
“talked about them as people who need to be protected and provided for, which
is very much appealing to the traditional ways workers assert their own worth,
because it’s one of the dimensions of working-class masculinity — to be
providing for and protecting women and family,” said Lamont.
People tend
to make sense of their social world by putting themselves and others into
groups based on perceived commonalities and differences, such as ethnicity,
race, religion, gender identity, sexual preference, and socioeconomic status.
These boundaries function as a way to define who belongs to a particular group
or strata and who does not. In the paper, Lamont noted that one of the more
effective strategies Trump employed was to recognize the important role that
dignity plays among the white working-class and seize on its power by blaming
the economic inequality and unemployment they’ve experienced on globalization,
rather than on a lack of education, training, or other factors.
“For the
working class to find themselves with no job is both an economic tragedy and a
cultural tragedy, since their self-concept is very much about being
hard-working. So by telling them, ‘It’s globalization, and it’s the people who
pushed globalization, such as Hillary Clinton, who are responsible for your
downfall,’” Trump directed their anger outward and removed them from
responsibility for their life circumstances, she said.
“We have to
remember, many workers, they want to think of themselves — and they are — as
extremely hard-working, and they want jobs. … He’s trying to give them their
dignity back by saying, ‘I know that you’re hard-working people, and you’re
capable of doing this.’”
Lamont
disagrees with the contention that Trump’s election was driven by economic
anxiety or by racial resentment. Rather, she sees the outcome as more nuanced,
involving a debate over status positioning. “The sense of status hierarchy that
people are defending has to do with both cultural resources — that is, who is
viewed as the legitimate citizen, who has cultural membership, who defines what
mainstream America is about — but also about economic resources,” she said. “So
it’s both at once.”
One way that
academia can help bridge political divides and social boundaries in this
country and pierce information echo chambers is to work on some of these issues
in a cross-disciplinary way, said Lamont.
“I think
social scientists really need to take on a dimension of inequality that has not
been studied as much as the unequal distribution of income and wealth, which is
this process of recognition by which groups develop their sense of worth,” she
said. “That’s very much my agenda moving forward.”
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