“Is democracy really failing, or is it just trying to say something?” I asked before the election, in an article in the magazine about “Against Democracy,” a book by Jason Brennan proposing that the franchise be limited to educated voters. I spelled out why I disagreed with Brennan’s proposal—and I still disagree with it, even though Hillary Clinton, the candidate I preferred, would almost certainly have won on Tuesday if the franchise had been rationed as he suggests. But I didn’t spell out what it was that I thought democracy might be trying to say. I do, however, have a hunch, one that I’ve been mulling over for much of this difficult year and one that you’ve probably heard before: I suspect that working- and lower-middle-class whites feel abandoned, if not sold out, by the élites.
In my Twitter timeline, heavily populated with liberals and radical leftists, the validity of this hunch is currently the subject of bitter debate. Some have disputed the idea by pointing out that, according to one exit poll, voters were more likely to support Donald Trump if their income was higher. Those numbers may be misleading, however, as Philip Bump explained Thursday in the Washington Post. Black voters overwhelmingly chose Clinton on Tuesday, and overall, blacks have lower incomes than whites. If you look at exit polls of white voters only, Bump writes, Trump was clearly “earning more support from lower-income whites than wealthier ones.” Others have noted that exit polls diverged more sharply on racial lines than by income, and that Trump played on racial fears openly in his campaign. They argue that what triumphed on Tuesday was white racism.
That strikes me as true. And it also strikes me as true that white workers were acting out of a deep economic grievance on Tuesday. Argument A doesn’t falsify Argument B, in this case. In the nineteen-thirties, Germans suffered terrible economic pain—and many turned openly and violently anti-Semitic. It has been suggested that people find it easier to sustain moral virtues like racial tolerance, fairness, and open-mindedness when they’re prospering. The idea is a little discomfiting to conventional understandings of moral autonomy and personal responsibility. It suggests that it is impossible to provide ethical leadership for people without also attending to their material welfare—and that it is dangerous morally as well as materially for a demagogue to promise to solve an economic problem that he cannot.
If the election was about revenge for economic grievance, why didn’t working- and middle-class blacks, who have suffered as much if not more economic pain from the offshoring of American manufacturing than whites have, also support Trump? It could be that black voters’ long-standing mistrust of the Republican Party protected them from the miasma of disinformation that now pervades and issues from that party. It could be that, precisely because Trump’s promises had a racist tinge, it was easier for blacks to see through them and recognize that Clinton, despite her close personal ties to the élite, was proposing policies more likely to help workers.
If only whites could have seen this, too! Some advocates of Bernie Sanders are now arguing that Sanders, unencumbered by the financial and corporate relationships that entangled Clinton, would have had been more convincing as a debunker of Trump’s nostrums. (I feel obliged to confess that during the primary, I thought Clinton’s poise and command of policy would go further than Sanders’s independence.) In any case, Trump’s supporters will see the truth about him soon enough, though for a while still he may be able to continue to cloud their vision with fears and hatreds, projecting onto non-whites, non-Christians, and non-natives the failure that he will make of government.
Anger over the jobs lost to free trade was a hallmark of Trump’s campaign, and as it happens, in Brennan’s “Against Democracy”—as well as in books by Bryan Caplan and Ilya Somin that Brennan drew on to support his case—voters’ mistrust of free trade is commonly cited as an example of their ignorance. Trump himself might have made an anonymous cameo in Caplan’s “The Myth of the Rational Voter,” when Caplan writes, mockingly, about a “shrewd businessman I know” who believed that all America’s economic problems could be solved by a “naval blockade of Japan” and “a Berlin Wall at the Mexican border.”
According to Brennan and his allies, economists agree almost unanimously that free trade boosts a nation’s overall welfare. In March, 2012, when the University of Chicago Booth School of Business polled a panel of economic experts, fifty-six per cent agreed and another twenty-nine per cent strongly agreed that “Freer trade improves productive efficiency and offers consumers better choices, and in the long run these gains are much larger than any effects on employment.” But even within the precincts of orthodox trade theory (which is not, I am told, the whole of economics), free trade is acknowledged to have a downside, too. In June, 2012, half of the same panel of experts agreed and another thirty-three percent strongly agreed that “Some Americans who work in the production of competing goods, such as clothing and furniture, are made worse off by trade with China.” The professional consensus among economists, in other words, isn’t that free trade helps everyone; it’s that free trade so benefits the country as a whole that the government should find it easy to compensate the subset of citizens hurt by it—those who lose their jobs because workers abroad displace them.
In practice, such citizens are rarely given adequate compensation. The American government’s welfare program for workers harmed by international competition, the Trade Readjustment Allowance, pays those who have run out of unemployment compensation and are willing to undertake job retraining, but the allowances last a year or two at most; as the economist Susan Houseman recently noted, in an interview with the Washington Post, “Factory closures have large spillover effects, and it can take a community a generation or more to come back.” One night, while following this problem down an Internet rabbit hole, I discovered to my dismay that some economists, when they want to measure the pain inflicted by free trade, tally not only payments like the Trade Readjustment Allowance but also how many working-age American men in a particular industry have begun accepting Social Security Disability Insurance payments. That is, they look at the proportion of middle-aged men who are sick, or who have identified themselves as sick for lack of another way to survive. It’s easy to link such patterns to the recent spike in deaths by suicide and drug and alcohol poisoning among middle-aged whites without a college education, the population most injured by the decline of America’s manufacturing jobs.
Even if a welfare program like the Trade Readjustment Allowance were amped up, it’s not likely that this population would become meek and grateful. They’re aware that the socioeconomic élite—lawyers, financiers, and consultants—profited mightily from the economic changes by which they were dispossessed over the past couple of decades, and I suspect that they don’t want to be the objects of such people’s charity. They want their dignity back. They want to be what they once were: workers, an independent source of economic value, ambivalently regarded by and even somewhat menacing to the upper class. As I wrote on my personal blog in May, they’d rather, if there’s no other choice, be “bad.”
These are the people who have voted into the most powerful office in the world a brittle, vindictive racist with a streak of authoritarianism. It is hard to feel generously toward them at the moment, but they need help as badly as do the people whom they have put in danger. The infrastructure spending that Trump claims to want would, in fact, be salutary; Clinton, too, called for it. But Trump’s other suggestions—walls, tariffs, and bullying—will not be, and when he fails, the rage of those who turned to him may become even more inarticulate.
