I agree with all this, but on a certain level it's difficult for me to have sympathy for people who constantly rail against socialism and communism, and yet the things they complain about, and evidently are motivating them to vote for Trump, are practically the textbook social consequences of capitalism.
It's one of the great ironies of this whole situation that many of the victims of neoliberal policies have been induced to vote for the more extreme of the two neoliberal parties, over and over again. And yet, while Trump will make their situation worse in many respects, he does break with neoliberal (and neoconservative) orthodoxy in enough places that it really drew people to him. Trade and immigration are the issues he's most consistent on, and here he is very much the opposite of a neoliberal. The neoconservative orthodoxy he breaks is that he's a strong opponent of building democracies in other countries and openly admires Putin. He's made a bunch of militaristic statements and advocates torture and resource plundering in the event of war, so he's hardly a dove. But he's definitely not a neoconservative regime changer either.
He does represent a true break in many of the positions the GOP holds (held?) dear, while at the same time giving enough to the rich through tax cuts that he can buy the acquiescence of people like Paul Ryan. He'll make most of his voters worse off, of course, but he's definitely no Ryan or Rubio or Bush.
(edit: forgot to finish this part of post; second paragraph and second half of first paragraph added)
And this says it all (again). Progressives will have to overbear that opposition. The people writing those pieces assume that history can, must, only go one way, their way. That progressives (whatever that may be) will win. Nowhere, in all those pieces pretending to dissect the "problem" of Trump supporters, is to be found an idea of backing off and conceding to them on any issue.
The irreducibility of all those Trump supporters stems from one root cause: they have been told that they must bend. That they are on the wrong side of history. But they don't want to. TINA rears its ugly head and tramples all over those who dare disagree. It must be so and everyone who opposes "progress" is wrong, a "problem" to be solved. This is what has pissed off half of the US (and many other countries around the world) so tremendously that they risk very serious internal conflict if they keep going down that path. There is no one group of "Trump supporters", there are many. United by one thing: opposition to TINA.
Inno, I love you. I don't always agree with you, but this board would be a much worse place without your participation.
I actually now support reducing new immigration substantially, because this one issue has been causing the most anger among the native populace. A functional democracy has to have a bit of give-and-take; if you attempt to steamroll the opinions of 45% of the population, the level of internal tension increases dramatically. At this point we are actually seriously talking about the risk of substantial post-election violence in the USA, of all places, and even if we avoid that, it's hard to see how another 10 years goes by without some sort of rural insurgency without substantial concessions. My turning point on this was Merkel's boneheaded decision to accept refugees without limit in 2015. Seeing how much this destabilized all the countries on the path between Turkey and Germany, along with Germany and Sweden themselves, was enough for me to realize there were indeed limits to my usual pro-immigration stances.
I'd couple this with substantial rural investment programs, perhaps a large jobs program, and an increased welfare state in general, because I'm a social democrat at core. But
How far do the categories "poor rural white" and "Trump voter" actually overlap? Nobody's suggesting it's 1:1, of course, there are still plenty of blue-collar union diehards and Country Club racists. But poor rural whites are consistently presented as a large and growing constituency for Trump, so how far has that actually been demonstrated to be the case?
In the UK, the rise of UKIP is often discussed in terms of white working class resentment, but UKIP members and voters bot remain on the whole wealthier and more South-Easterly than the electorate as a whole, it's simply that the right-wing middle class don't paint their face as an English flag and go around provincial town centers shouting about Muslamic ray guns. It seems quite possible that something similar is at work here.
So, what I have to wonder is, is the big shift here that poor rural whites are voting Republican, or simply that Republican-voting poor rural whites have found a candidate they can get excited about?
Poor rural whites, when they vote, have mostly been voting Republican for a few election cycles now. Only a few cycles, though - a large proportion voted for Clinton in 1992 and/or 1996. The shift has actually continued from 2000; the Democrats have now lost the majorities they held through then in Southern state legislatures. If you take a look at election maps at the county level (
this is my favorite site for this; note that colors are reversed so Dems=red and Reps=blue), you'll see that the shift away from the Democrats has continued on a local level throughout most American rural areas, most dramatically in Appalachia. One of the interesting things that seems to be going on right now is that one of the last rural Democrat bastions (eastern Iowa, NW Illinois, SW Wisconsin, SE Minnesota) is swinging Republican. This area was solidly pro-Obama; Obama won the white vote in Iowa in 2012 while losing it in every other Midwestern state including Illinois (Minnesota was within the exit poll margin of error).
I can tell you I'm very excited not just for the results of this election, but to see the county maps. Elections give you a lot of data about the political microgeography of the country, and this election is going to be more informative than most because of its unusual nature.
The median Trump voter will likely be a middle-class suburbanite with some college but no 4-year degree. A lot of American suburbanites are as conservative as their rural peers, especially small business owners and the like, and people in the suburbs obviously outnumber the rural areas and small towns. One of the more important things to get, that I've never really seen addressed, is that middle-class conservative white people tend to have a lot of relatives, friends, and acquaintances who are lower-class and are struggling. Poor white heroin addicts rarely vote, but they feed into the narrative of social decay that Trump has made the cornerstone of his campaign, and you can bet that their better-off relatives are really angry about what is happening. It also helps to drive home to middle-class people that they are only a job loss and a prolonged period of unemployment from failing the same way, which builds a sense of precariousness that also feeds the Trump narrative. The net effect is that the median Trump voter will be personally doing okay, and this fact will be used (is already being used) as a further tool to denigrate Trump voters as deplorables.
