Donald Trump had hardly made it down the escalator in 2015 by the time political commentators had begun to search for ways to explain away his appeal to the public. Eight years later, the search continues — and the stubborn persistence of What’s The Matter With Kansas? reduxes suggests that most of it has been in vain. For most of the people who prognosticate about politics for a living, Trump is every bit as much of an enigma today as he was when he first announced his candidacy.
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The popular stories that America’s opinion-makers tell each other about the Trump phenomenon usually belong to one of two genres: those who place the “blame” for Trumpism at the feet of Republican voters and those who allege that the former — and perhaps future — president’s unlikely rise to power was the fault of the people who run the country. David Brooks’ hotly debated recent New York Times column, “What if We’re the Bad Guys Here?,” falls into the latter category. The column itself mostly misses the point — but the way in which it misses the point can tell us a good deal about why Trumpism continues to elude so many pundits, politicos, and various other kinds of people for whom missing the point is a full-time job.
Brooks — as he goes out of his way to repeatedly remind readers — is no Trump supporter himself. “Trump,” he writes, “is a monster in the way we’ve all been saying for years and deserves to go to prison.” Trump voters, on the other hand, can’t really be faulted for supporting the aforementioned monster, who styled himself as the proletariat’s avatar in what Brooks describes as a “class war between the professionals and the workers” — a class war perpetuated by “an entire social order that sorts and excludes people on the basis of…academic achievement.”
In today’s America, Brooks writes, “the educated class lives in a world up here and everybody else is forced into a world down there.” Trumpism was a revolt against the “world up here” — i.e., those who hold college degrees — from the inhabitants of the “world down there” — i.e., those who don’t. The “less-educated classes,” having concluded “that they are under economic, political, cultural and moral assault … rallied around Trump as their best warrior against the educated class.”
It’s a familiar argument, albeit slightly more sophisticated than the version favored by, among many others, Klaus Schwab, Barack Obama, and Hillary Clinton that attributes Trump support to mere “economic anxiety.” (Brooks maintains that ideological and cultural power play at least some part in the class divide he describes.) But the conclusion is the same: Trump is the product of an inchoate, if not entirely irrational, class resentment driven by unequal access to modern American meritocracy — rather than of a fundamental rejection of the system itself. (READ MORE: Third Trump Indictment Is a Replay of History)
On the most basic analytical level, there are a number of problems with the bipartite class struggle theory of American politics. It is true, of course, that college-educated voters have become more friendly to Democrats and that non-college-educated voters have become more friendly to Republicans. But as Vox’s Zack Beauchamp notes:
Brooks’s column contributes to a false perception that non-college voters form a uniform bloc that moved entirely into the Republican corner. In reality … a majority of Biden’s supporters did not have college degrees — owing primarily to his strength among nonwhite, non-college voters.
Not all non-college-educated voters are Trumpists, and vice versa.
The same is true of the attempt to frame the red-versus-blue division in economic terms. It’s true that Democrats increasingly represent the super-rich and that Republicans increasingly represent the working class — Democrats currently represent nine of the 10 wealthiest congressional districts, and Republicans now represent a decisive majority (64 percent) of congressional districts with median incomes below the national median. But Republicans still tend to do better with the lower-middle, middle, and upper-middle classes, and Democrats still tend to dominate among the very poor. Exit polls from the 2022 U.S. House election, for example, showed Democrats winning voters with family incomes below $30,000 by 12 points and voters with family incomes between $30,000 and $49,999 by five points; Republicans won the $50,000 to $99,999 bracket by seven points, the $100,000 to $199,999 bracket by four points, and the $200,000+ bracket by 17 points.
The nation’s partisan divisions, then, are not “the working class against the elites”; they are an ongoing struggle between a high-low coalition, represented by the Democrats, and a broad middle, represented by the Republicans. Class is deeply intertwined with the nature of American politics — as is true of any society — but the nature of the Republican coalition is impossible to understand in purely class-based terms.
Republican voters don’t resent that the ruling elite has power; they resent the things that the ruling elite is doing with its power — namely, transforming the country they love into something unrecognizable. The problem is not the inegalitarian distribution of the trends that have defined the 21st century — i.e., economic globalization, mass immigration, and cultural liberalization — but the fundamental nature of those trends themselves. (READ MORE: The Left Has Plenty More Reasons to Indict Trump)
This is the core problem with the cottage industry of “we-have-to-empathize-with-Trump-voters” explainers and think pieces: They are less an effort to understand Trump voters on their own terms than an attempt to absolve them of moral responsibility for the ongoing populist rebellion that Trump embodies. But Republican voters aren’t asking for moral absolution. They’re asking for their country back. And maybe it’s time for someone to listen.
Nate Hochman (@njhochman) is a writer whose work has appeared in print and online in the American Conservative, City Journal, the Claremont Review of Books, National Affairs, National Review, the New York Times, and numerous other outlets.
