Home / General / Working-Class Trump Supporters: Motivated by Racism, Economic Dislocation, and Community Decline

Working-Class Trump Supporters: Motivated by Racism, Economic Dislocation, and Community Decline

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So you might think that a West Virginia coal miner turned strident anti-coal activist would support the one candidate who might do something about climate change and who would follow up on President Obama’s attempts to mitigate coal fired power plants. But you would be wrong. Meet Ed Wiley, a figure in the interesting looking new book by Alexander Zaitchik, The Gilded Rage: A Wild Ride through Donald Trump’s America. He is said anti-coal activist. He supports Donald Trump.

Most of this is just an interview. In it, he powerfully talks about the horrors the coal mines have caused on people and the land. He even worked with Earth First founder Mike Roselle. But why does he support Trump? Because he’s just angry.

“Trump will get elected. I’m for it. I said it from the beginning, when everybody said I was crazy. People in America like his attitude. We’re tired of being broke. People’s tired of bull crap. Jobs never should have never left here. They should have stayed in America. He’s a businessman, and mostly everything in the world now depends on some kind of business. We need to keep our butts at home, stay out of these wars. That’s the sort of thing you’d have to watch with him, is: Can he keep himself calm? Control of his bipolar. That might be what we need, is a good bipolar president [laughs]. He says it like it is. If he says it, he’s probably going to do it one way or another, or try to. He don’t hold nothing back. That’s for sure. He probably knows people all over the place. Can make some kind of jobs happen.

“But they need to quit talking about that border wall shit. I never did like this. The drugs are going to get here from somewhere, one way or another. We don’t need a damn wall. Get along with the people. Bring them and build more. Help us build the country. They want to work, too. Let’s put them to work. Put everybody to work. You look at all the problems it’s caused in California right now—it’s over that damn wall. We need to just work this out on that. We need to get that straightened out so people ain’t fighting in the street. And Trump should stop calling them scoundrels. Everybody’s not a scoundrel. And them people are desperate. You become a bit of a scoundrel when you get desperate, whether you are or not. You get hungry, you’re going to grab that doughnut, if you can get it.”

When you read something like this, from someone who is not a low-information voter, it’s hard to know what to make of it. He clearly doesn’t really believe in Trump as some great leader or even a stable person. But he doesn’t care. Because Trump is a businessman and we need businessmen, even though Wiley’s spent the last 15 years as the enemy of his state’s biggest business. So what’s going on here? Discussions of Trump voters and their motivations tend to revolve around two themes that I don’t see as nearly mutually exclusive as others often represent them. The first is that people are devastated by job losses in their communities and need good work. The second is that they are racist. Earlier in the interview, Wiley refers to a “colored boy” who died of an asthma attack at an anti-coal rally. So it’s not like he’s a real sophisticated guy when it comes to understanding race, even if I don’t think we can use this as enough evidence to say Wiley’s a racist.

On the other hand, all the conversations about people angry about job losses and believing in Trump because he supposedly will bring jobs back to the good old U.S.A. internalizes the highly unfortunate tendency to equate working class voters with white people. It’s whites in Scranton or West Virginia or Alabama who are angry about this. But it’s not like deindustrialization and globalization hasn’t hurt the economic prospects of African-American and Latino industrial workers as much as whites. It’s probably hurt them even more because they face racism on top of all the other problems economic upheaval and capital mobility creates. And those voters sure ain’t finding Trump appealing.

I’m sure that Wiley’s response, like a lot of other white people, is a combination of both economic problems, community collapse, and racism. I know people like monocausal responses and to just paint the white people voting for Trump as racists, but the reality is more complicated. The other day, I heard an interview with J.D. Vance about his new book Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis. Vance is a right-winger himself who does not support Trump so take it how you will. But in the interview, he talked about his Trump-supporting family in Ohio and Kentucky. And he said that they know Trump is not really going to make their lives better or fix their problems. But at least he’s articulating their problems. Now, of course part of what they see as their problems is the decline of white privilege. White supremacy is what they want back. But at the same time, they also do want jobs and an economic future. And they don’t have that. That’s probably what Wiley is feeling as well.

In the end, the Trump phenomena is more complicated than just racism. Racism is absolutely central to it. But it’s more than that. And it would indeed behoove policymakers to take these concerns seriously, even if Trump gets crushed. That will finally prove that Democrats don’t need to appeal to white working-class voters (so often equated to be “real Americans” in the media) in order to win. But so what? The concerns are greater than just the election. Policymakers need to not only take the opioid epidemic seriously in white working-class communities, but they also need to figure out ways for these places to have jobs. People need jobs. The Trans-Pacific Partnership only makes the unemployment situation worse for working-class communities. Neither Democrats nor Republicans have had any answer to the economic dislocation caused by globalization and free trade except to say “get some more education and maybe we’ll throw a few bucks at retraining programs that don’t lead to good jobs.” It’s a pathetic response that shows the irrelevance of these people to elites of either party. So it’s hardly surprising that such voters, even one who has fought the coal industry, see Trump as someone paying attention to them and are flocking to him.

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