Voting With A Middle Finger: Two Views On The White Working Class

In this episode of Hidden Brain, Shankar Vedantam looks at Trump voters and the question of why is it that the president managed to keep their support throughout the first two years of his presidency. 

One of the guests, a professor of law and researcher in gender studies, class and work in the US, holds a sympathetic view about Trump supporters and their motivations, one which is focused on class divisions and economic pain. She explains the changes that working class people in America have gone through from the 1970s—when their economic prospects tanked—onward and their political effects in American politics today. She talks about working class people experiencing a loss of social honour. In the first half of the 20th century, blue-collar work was dignified, and workers were seen as manly, effective guys who were building the country. But around the '70s, the cultural imagery about blue-collar men changed completely—they were now considered "dimwitted, amiable, fat and ineffectual" (Homer Simpson ring any bell?).

The professor, who comes from an elite background, recalls the time when she was 16 and went to meet her working-class-but-wealthy boyfriend's parents. She thought it had all gone swell, but the boyfriend's father later said the she had looked at them "like a fucking anthropologist".

As she was to later learn as a researcher, white, working-class men had experience with social elites studying them, judging them and finding them lacking.  

The other guest, a political scientist, advances an explanation about the white working class' shift away from the Republican party based on racial prejudice and xenophobia. 

The issue of immigration is one of the main factors that's driving white voters away from the Democratic Party. And as a result of what we're seeing, we are definitely having this realignment, if you will, of the ethnic and racial makeup of our two major political parties.