Projecting Your Political Preferences Onto People Is Not Taking Them Seriously

Dylan Matthews’s big piece about Trump voters makes several important points.  Let’s start here:

Donald Trump’s supporters deserve to have their concerns taken seriously.

If the media and commentators in 2016 can agree on nothing else, it’s this. It’s a bit of an odd meme. I can remember literally no one in 2012 dwelling on the importance of taking the concerns of Mitt Romney voters seriously, even though they made up a considerably larger share of the population than Trump supporters. No one talks about taking the interests of Hillary Clinton supporters, a still larger group, seriously.

But Trump supporters, a smaller group backing a considerably more loathsome agenda, have received an unprecedented outpouring of sympathy, undertaken as a sort of passive-aggressive snipe at unnamed other commentators and politicians perceived to not be taking their concerns seriously.

[…]

I agree with a lot of this. The government should help people who are materially struggling. Globalization definitely left some segments of the population struggling, and they deserve help. White people, while still economically dominant over black and Latino Americans in basically every way possible, can suffer from poverty too.

 But there’s something striking about this line of commentary: It doesn’t take the stated concerns of Trump voters, and voters for similar far-right populists abroad, seriously in the slightest.

I wrote about this at the time, but towards the tail end of the Democratic primary a neat little pundit’s fallacy gained substantial currency. The white working class in states like West Virginia — including most typical representatives, who have a voting preference order something like Trump > Manchin > Sanders > Clinton > Obama — are straightforwardly calling for and willing in a general election to vote for MOAR SOCIALISM, and liberals only see white nationalism as playing a substantial role because they despise the working class. (Do, say, Elizabeth Warren and Sherrod Brown and Tom Perez despise the working class and not want to support them materially through public policy? Or are they honorary not-liberals because they’re pro-labor and favor more egalitarian economic policies? Either way, these generalizations are wholly useless.)

But as Matthews says, projecting your ex ante views onto people is pretty much the opposite of taking them seriously. First of all, the data is clear that racial resentment is playing a major role in Trump’s support:

Even in the general election, while support for Trump is correlated most strongly with party ID, the second biggest factor, per the analysis of Hamilton College political scientist Philip Klinkner, was racial resentment. Economic pessimism and income level were statistically insignificant.

The message this research sends is very, very clear. There is a segment of the Republican Party that is opposed to racial equality. It has increased in numbers in reaction to the election of a black president. The result was that an anti–racial equality candidate won the Republican nomination.

Given that the US is one recession away from a Republican winning the presidency, this is a concerning development.

Of course, white nationalism cannot be neatly disentangled from factors like economic insecurity and concerns about status. White supremacy is not the only thing going on here. But while a major expansion of the welfare state is clearly necessary to deal with economic dislocation, it’s wishful thinking to think that it will make racial resentment disappear:

I actually agree that the current capitalist regime is failing. We need truly universal health care, universal child care, a universal child allowance or basic income, and programs to address deep poverty. Redistribution is a very good, necessary thing.

But we have a good case study we can examine to see if Western European–style welfare states can prevent far-right racist backlashes from popping up. It’s called Western Europe. And Sweden’s justly acclaimed welfare state did not prevent the rise of the viciously anti-immigrant Sweden Democrats, which has its origins in the Swedish neo-fascist and white supremacist movements and is now the third-largest party in Swedish parliament.

Nor did Austria’s welfare state prevent the far-right Freedom Party — led by Jörg Haider, who praised Hitler for having a “proper employment policy” — from entering government in 1999. France’s crèches and best-in-the-world government health care didn’t prevent Jean-Marie Le Pen, who has been repeatedly convicted of Holocaust denial, from reaching the runoff for the 2002 presidential elections. It has not stopped his successor and daughter Marine from leading polling for next year’s presidential elections. The Netherlands’ comprehensive welfare state has not prevented first Pim Fortuyn and then Geert Wilders from becoming major political forces, with the latter leading most polls for the next elections.

Nor has Germany’s strong, manufacturing-heavy and export-oriented economy, arguably the strongest in Europe, kept the far-right AfD party from gaining in recent local elections. It’s telling to note that while economically thriving Germany is facing a far-right menace, Spain, where unemployment is 20 percent (similar to the US in the Great Depression), has no far-right movement of much consequence.

An expansion of the welfare state is desirable because it’s the right thing to do. But to assume that doing so will immediately produce solidarity and social democratic governing coalitions is a mug’s game. And in addition to the comparative analysis, American political history makes this clear. The New Deal didn’t stop a coalition of Republicans and conservative Democrats from effectively controlling Congress from 1939-1964, peaking with Taft-Hartley, and effectively shielding the apartheid police states from federal intervention. The Great Society coalition fractured even more quickly. The most progressive Congress since the Great Society was absolutely drubbed the first time it faced an election. If doing the right thing was always good politics, then politics would be easy. But it’s hard. The fact that Trump’s road to the Republican nomination started with literally declaring the first African-American president to be un-American should probably be a hint.