Trump Ignites White Working-Class Revolution

Everyone's looking for what Winston Churchill called a pudding with a theme. How did the likes of Donald Trump make it to the forefront of American politics? How did the British break their strong link with the Europeans just across the channel? The common denominators, so we're told, are "revolution," "down with the elites" and "power to the people."

Or, as Che Guevara put it: "The revolution is not an apple that falls when it is ripe. You have to make it fall."

The idea of revolution, of course, does not apply to Hillary Clinton, the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, because she's the apple clinging to a tree that has survived a lot of shaking and hasn't fallen. She has a native tenacity that gives her staying power, despite being a little too ripe.

Bernie Sanders is too old to play Guevara, and he was never serious enough as a candidate to actually make it to the Oval Office. But he put together a mini-revolution big enough to force Clinton to tack left, despite her sympathies and associations with the superrich who seek access through their big donations to The Clinton Foundation, her favorite charity. She collects millions from Wall Street in over-the-top speaking fees. Ever canny and cynical, she now campaigns with Elizabeth Warren beneath a banner celebrating the convenience of a shotgun wedding: "Stronger Together."

The Democrats are better than the Republicans at protecting their own. They long ago shunned President Ronald Reagan's famous 11th Commandment, "Thou shall speak no ill of another Republican." The Republican party has perfected the circular firing squad, this year with 17 candidates banging away at one other, leaving the loudest, richest, most uncouth and most inexperienced politician as the last man standing.

But the Donald leads an authentic revolution. Many of his followers are perceived by the elites to be vulgar, rough and raw at the edges, untutored in political niceties and underrated by the vain and foolish. When Warren mocks the Trump slogan, "Make America Great Again," as goofy, they retort that she's the goofy one. They answer with the moral clarity of those hurt most by the corrupting spirit of the Clinton mindset. They're demeaned by the emphasis on the ethnic identity of fashionable others, and they laugh out loud at the joke when he calls Warren "Pocahontas," a dig at her claim of Cherokee ancestry. The Trump people have had it with the self-serving self-righteousness of the politically correct.

The Donald's biggest supporters are found in the white working class. Their much-derided way of life, together with their livelihoods, has been destroyed in the new global economy. They think he's got their back. They live in neighborhoods below the shining city on the hill, where the weaker sunlight puts their modest houses and declining businesses in harsh relief. Many of them live depressed in the dark shadows of decay, where working-class white lives should matter, but are sneered at in the cultural salons because they lack what Leon Wieseltier, critic of culture and policy at the Brookings Institution, calls "moral glamour." He describes the scattershot nature of American compassion, the "soft betrayals" where sympathy for what matters is highly selective.

"Since much of the white working class lives in states with large rewards in electoral votes, it had been the national custom to pause and remark upon their misery only every four years," he writes in the Washington Post. "And in the years between general elections, when the course of American history, or rather the interest of American politicians, did not run through Ohio and Pennsylvania, they had generally been met with indifference and even contempt." These voters especially resent the chic Democratic "bi-coastals" to whom the farms and small towns of flyover country are "culturally embarrassing."

The white working class delivered strong victories for Trump in the primaries, and they believed him when he told them "I'll be back often." They don't feel patronized when he says, "I love the poorly educated." The Democrats who preen their faked affection for the white working class and say they're for Sanders are ripe for Trump in November because he speaks their language.

"I want you to imagine how much better our future can be if we declare independence from the elites who've led us to one financial and foreign policy disaster to another," Trump told a Pennsylvania audience this week. He urges them to follow the British who voted for Brexit to take back their future, too. The Donald is ridiculed for his undisciplined, spontaneous rhetoric, but polls show he wins on economic issues, as the candidate who would know how to create jobs. It's the economy, Stupid. And Stupid must understand that the future depends on who can put the right theme in the pudding.

MARS- middle American radicals

In 1976, Donald Warren—a sociologist from Oakland University in Michigan who would die two decades later without ever attaining the rank of full professor—published a book called The Radical Center: Middle Americans and the Politics of Alienation. Few people have read or heard of it—I learned of it about 30 years ago from the late, very eccentric paleoconservative Samuel Francis—but it is, in my opinion, one of the three or four books that best explain American politics over the past half-century.

While conducting extensive surveys of white voters in 1971 and again in 1975, Warren identified a group who defied the usual partisan and ideological divisions. These voters were not college educated; their income fell somewhere in the middle or lower-middle range; and they primarily held skilled and semi-skilled blue-collar jobs or sales and clerical white-collar jobs. At the time, they made up about a quarter of the electorate. What distinguished them was their ideology: It was neither conventionally liberal nor conventionally conservative, but instead revolved around an intense conviction that the middle class was under siege from above and below.

Warren called these voters Middle American Radicals, or MARS. “MARS are distinct in the depth of their feeling that the middle class has been seriously neglected,” Warren wrote. They saw “government as favoring both the rich and the poor simultaneously.” Like many on the left, MARS were deeply suspicious of big business: Compared with the other groups he surveyed—lower-income whites, middle-income whites who went to college, and what Warren called “affluents”—MARS were the most likely to believe that corporations had “too much power,” “don’t pay attention,” and were “too big.” MARS also backed many liberal programs: By a large percentage, they favored government guaranteeing jobs to everyone; and they supported price controls, Medicare, some kind of national health insurance, federal aid to education, and Social Security.

On the other hand, they held very conservative positions on poverty and race. They were the least likely to agree that whites had any responsibility “to make up for wrongs done to blacks in the past,” they were the most critical of welfare agencies, they rejected racial busing, and they wanted to grant police a “heavier hand” to “control crime.” They were also the group most distrustful of the national government. And in a stand that wasn’t really liberal or conservative (and that appeared, at least on the surface, to be in tension with their dislike of the national government), MARS were more likely than any other group to favor strong leadership in Washington—to advocate for a situation “when one person is in charge.”

If these voters are beginning to sound familiar, they should: Warren’s MARS of the 1970s are the Donald Trump supporters of today....

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