The Pull of Racial Patronage
Alternatively, the more you favor a left-wing politics that stresses economic forces above all else, the more you’ll cast Trump’s blue collar support as the bitter fruit of the Democratic Party’s turn to neoliberalism
.. My sympathies are with the second group in both debates — as a partisan of a more solidaristic conservatism, and as an outsider who prefers the old left’s class politics to the pseudo-cosmopolitanism of elite liberalism today.
.. Eventually, we ended up with a liberalism that favors permanent preferences for minority groups, permanently large immigration flows — plus welfare programs that recent immigrants are more likely than native-born Americans to use.
.. it still amounts to a system of ethnic patronage, which white Americans who are neither well-off nor poor enough to be on Medicaid see as particularly biased against them.
.. the gainfully employed but insecure lower middle class, is the Trumpian core.
.. By embracing white identity politics, they’re being bigoted but also, in their own eyes, imitative: Trump’s protectionist argle-bargle boils down to a desire to once again have policies that specifically benefit lower-middle-class whites — welfare for legacy industries and affirmative action for white men.
.. the absence of economic common ground between Hillary-voting white moderates and the party’s poorer, minority base means that her temporary coalition is likely to fracture first along racial lines.
That fracturing will help the G.O.P. recover, but it won’t help Republicans build a pan-racial conservatism. The pull of white identity politics can be overcome, but only with great effort.