by John Ambrosio
In a recent interview in the New York Times Magazine, Robert Reich, a progressive university teacher and prolific writer, who worked in three presidential administrations, including serving as Bill Clinton’s Secretary of Labor, commented that his views of conservatives had changed because of a close friendship with Alan Simpson, a former Republican Senator from Wyoming. After attending a dinner with approximately 20 Republicans at Simpson’s home, including some Trump supporters, Reich wrote that “they were, I think, it’s fair to say, absolutely lovely people. Generous and kind and totally enjoyable. Alan taught me that the humanity of people in Wyoming, and in the center of this country, and many, many Republicans is so much more important than whether they believe in Social Security.”
My experience living in a rural Midwest city for nearly two decades led me to a similar conclusion, that the community where I reside is mostly comprised of very decent people, who care deeply for their families and friends, who are hard-working, responsible, thrifty, and honest, all qualities that I value and admire. There is also a strong and genuine sense of community, of helping neighbors and others in need, which I also find very appealing.
All of this leaves me with a troubling question: How can such genuinely decent people consistently vote for Trump and MAGA Republicans? Part of the answer is simply the inertia of tradition, custom, and habit: voting Republican is an essential part of their identity that is deeply rooted in certain ways of thinking, being, and belonging that do not change easily. It is also due to a kind of complacency, to an ignorance of U.S. history and the structure and functioning of the federal government, and to being embedded in conservative religious and political ideologies that frame how they interpret and understand their lived experience.
Because most working-class people get their news and information primarily from social media and YouTube they are continually exposed to the misinformation, disinformation, and conspiracy theories of far-right pundits and podcasters. These narratives are reinforced and amplified by right-wing evangelical Christian churches in working-class communities, which are often the only local institution that acknowledges and validates their grievances. All of this is not to make excuses for working-class voters who supported an openly racist and corrupt authoritarian for president, but to try to understand how otherwise decent and well-meaning people could vote for Trump and his MAGA allies in Congress when his hateful rhetoric and destructive policies ostensibly contradict their core values and beliefs.
While there is a portion of the working-class that embraces and celebrates Trump’s cruelty, lawlessness, and authoritarianism, there are many others who see him as their champion, as someone who claims to be fighting for them against a rigged establishment and corrupt status quo that serves elite interests at their expense. After more than forty years of being left behind by both political parties, with stagnant wages, sharply rising costs for housing, health care, childcare, and other essentials, and a declining standard of living, many working-class voters are willing to give Trump the benefit of the doubt that he will do something to improve their lives.
All of this is not to dismiss or downplay the ugly reality that some of Trump’s white working-class supporters are drawn to his politics, at least in part, based on his naked appeals to white supremacy and denigration of black and brown immigrants. A deep river of white racism continues to run through the Midwestern city where I live, which has a long history of Klan activity and is still largely populated by low-income whites, the descendants of workers who migrated here decades ago from states that were part of the former Confederacy.
Numerous theories have been offered to explain why the U.S. working-class, half of which is comprised of people of color, could embrace Trump and the modern Republican Party, which is openly racist, has systematically undermined the rights of workers and organized labor, and whose policies have historically been focused on slashing taxes for the wealthy and large corporations, rolling back the welfare state, deregulating the economy, and attacking the “undeserving” poor.
In his influential 2004 book What’s the Matter with Kansas: How Conservatives Won the Heart of America Thomas Frank argued that Republican appeals to culture-war issues, such as abortion, homosexuality, and the role of religion in public life, along with right-wing populist appeals to working-class victimization by educated coastal elites, led many workers to support the Republican Party. That is, many working-class voters no longer see their interests only, or primarily, in terms of economic security, but in restoring a lost era and way of life that existed prior to deindustrialization and the hollowing out of the manufacturing sector.
At a time when political affiliations have become fused with other forms of identity, especially with racial, gender, and religious identities, it has become increasingly difficult to question or challenge the policies of parties without calling into question the core identities of their supporters. However, while there is some evidence to support the view that the economic interests of working-class voters has taken a back seat to the culture war, given the electoral success of Republican appeals on these issues, it does not tell the whole story.
The success of Republican appeals must be understood in the context of the abandonment of the working-class by the Democratic Party, which began with Carter, but accelerated under Clinton and the Democratic Leadership Council, and continued under Obama. More than forty years of neoliberal policies, which include the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), which was signed into law by Clinton in 1993, have decimated the working-class and hastened the decline of industrial unions. International trade deals in which millions of manufacturing workers lost their jobs produced empty storefronts and boarded up main streets across the Midwestern rust-belt.
These workers were left to fend for themselves in an emerging high-tech information and finance-based economy in which their skills and experience were no longer valued or necessary. For many manufacturing workers, especially older ones who were unable or unwilling to retrain for other kinds of employment, most available jobs were in the low-wage service sector, in retail stores, restaurants, and similar workplaces, which meant a steep cut in their weekly earnings, a significant decline in their standard of living, and loss of the social status and self-esteem they derived from work. One result of this economic catastrophe was an increase in “deaths of despair” as working and middle class white men between the ages of 45-54 increasingly succumbed to drug overdoses, excessive drinking, and suicide.
A recent study by the Center for Working Class Politics that tracked working and middle/upper class opinion on a broad range of social and economic issues over a number of decades found that the working-class has historically held relatively progressive views on many economic issues, but less so on social issues compared to the middle/upper classes, and argued that a left populism can win over some working-class voters. If this is correct, it raises the same question posed by Frank more than two decades ago: Why does the electoral behavior of working-class voters not reflect their relatively progressive views on economic issues? Are these issues not salient enough to influence their electoral behavior? Has the cautious, incremental, technocratic, poll and donor-driven politics of the Democratic Party, and its preoccupation with politically correct language and virtue signaling alienated working-class people from other key constituencies of the Democratic Party coalition?
In her 2024 book, Stolen Pride: Loss, Shame, and the Rise of the Right, renowned Berkeley sociologist Arlie Hochschild examined the economic and cultural factors influencing the emotions of white working-class conservatives in a deep red Republican congressional district in rural eastern Kentucky. Like the white working-class conservatives in rural Louisiana she examined in her previous book, Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right, Hochschild emphasized the importance of understanding the “deep story”, the emotional narratives that people use to explain their lives, of examining the relation between the social and economic circumstances in which people find themselves and how they interpret and understand them.
In both cases Hochschild found a paradox in the way people thought about their lived experience. In Strangers in Their Own Land the paradox was why white blue-collar workers in Luisiana, who were sickened by local petrochemical plants, opposed federal help to regulate the corporations that polluted their environment. Whereas in Stolen Pride Hochschild examined the paradox of why working-class people in an overwhelmingly white and extremely poor Republican district in rural Kentucky blame liberals, immigrants, and the federal government for their economic decline and cultural marginalization.
By appealing to their pride in hard work and personal responsibility, and to the shame workers feel in failing to live up to these core values, the Republican Party persuaded these white blue-collar voters that their economic circumstances are the result of liberal government policies that enabled educated women and minorities to “cut ahead of them”, to jump the line in obtaining access to resources and economic opportunities. By affirming their pride and shifting the responsibility to others, Republican electoral appeals changed the narrative from one of personal failure, in which workers blamed themselves, to a future stolen from them by liberal government-facilitated line cutters. This narrative served as a powerful motivation to support the Republican Party because it enabled working-class voters to maintain their dignity and self-respect, to see themselves in a positive light, albeit on the basis of a false claim.
How, then, do otherwise decent people, like the mostly white working-class voters in my rural Midwestern community, do indecent things like vote for a convicted felon who was found liable for sexual abuse and incited a mob to violently attack the Capitol to nullify the results of a free and fair presidential election? Is it because many of Trump’s supporters inhabit an impenetrable right-wing information bubble that marinates them in lies and disinformation, that shields them from unwelcome and inconvenient facts? Is it because they refuse to acknowledge empirical evidence and verifiable facts that are inconsistent with their ideological commitments, which would pose a threat to their partisan-aligned identities? Do they dismiss all criticism of Trump as “fake news” because, in an existential struggle against a corrupt and indifferent elite, he is their imperfect champion?
I would argue that examining the relation between the social and economic conditions in which working-class people find themselves, and how these conditions intersect with their psychological need for dignity, esteem, status, and belonging, is essential to understanding and effectively appealing to working-class voters. Fact-based criticism of Republican Party policies that harm working-class people is often ineffective because the personal cost of acknowledging it is simply too high. Acknowledging such criticism would jeopardize the genuine pleasure people derive from belonging to something bigger than themselves, to a political movement that celebrates the unfettered expression of their anger and grievances, and because they are emotionally invested in a nostalgic vision of the future, rooted in a fictionalized and sanitized past, that restores a lost world. These are powerful motivations to deny objective reality and blame others for their circumstances.
Like all people, working-class voters are complicated and often hold contradictory, inconsistant, and incoherent views about society and the world, which leads them to make choices that can have unintended consequences. Individuals should be held responsible for their electoral choices, regardless of whether they are based on easily refutable lies, misinformation, and conspiracy theories. But is it possible that patriotic, honest, and decent people can make bad choices for good reasons, as they understand them? If so, how might this possibility inform our understanding of their complicity in supporting a lawless demagogue?
We all live in stories that enable us to understand our lived experience, that help us interpret the world around us and situate ourselves in history and society. These stories become part of our identities, informing our values, beliefs, and behavior, which is why it is exceedingly difficult to change them. Is simply telling a different story, an alternative narrative, enough to breach the formidable psychological defenses that protect cherished identities from threatening facts and information? Or will it take a shock to the system, some kind of social or economic calamity, to break through the psychological barriers of working-class Trump supporters?
Some liberals and progressives argue that working-class people will wake up to the reality of Trumpism when, and only when, it affects their own lives in a direct way, when they cannot escape the negative consequences of their electoral choices. While this is certainly a possibility, it is unlikely that more suffering will lead to better outcomes; they could just as easily lead to worse ones, depending on who people blame for their circumstances. Even if working-class voters don’t blame liberals, minorities, and immigrants for their economic and cultural decline, they may simply decide to sit out elections. The hope that worsening social and economic conditions will compel workers to see the light, to break through the emotional and psychological barriers that keep them from recognizing that Trump and MAGA Republicans have deceived and cynically manipulated them, is a chimera.
The fact that the Republican Party is hellbent on destroying liberal constitutional democracy and repealing the New Deal, the Great Society, and much of the social and scientific progress of the 20th century should be reason enough for workers to reject Trump and his MAGA allies, but the reality is that democracy is not working for many working-class people for whom the American Dream has become a false promise and unobtainable goal.
Of course, some Trump voters are not blinded by the far-right propaganda machine, they know that Trump is a racist, sexist, xenophobic bully, but he’s their bully, fighting for their rights, for their besieged minority, as they see it, against all those who unjustly benefit from liberal Democratic Party policies. Rather than vilify and dismiss working-class voters who support Trump and MAGA Republicans as racists, fascists, or deplorables, perhaps we can agree that all of us make bad choices, often for what seem to us at the time to be perfectly good and understandable reasons. It is important not to vilify working-class Trump supporters because they made the grave, naïve, and unforgivable mistake of voting for a demagogue who falsely promised them a better life. If we want to understand rather than blame them, we might conclude that some working-class Trump voters are responding to the social and economic conditions in which they find themselves in a way that makes sense to them.
Perhaps we can begin with the recognition that we are all flawed and broken people, that we all make bad choices for seemingly good reasons, that desperate people will often be drawn to demagogues who offer them a modicum of hope of improving their lives. I would argue that we need to see working-class Trump supporters with a bit more empathy, cognizant of the fact that we all have the capacity, under certain circumstances, to act in authoritarian and fascistic ways. We need to embrace a form of cognitive dissonance in which we hold two opposing thoughts at the same time: that most working-class people are decent human beings and that decent people can sometimes make indecent choices.
It is imperative that pro-democracy forces not lose hope that some portion of the working-class can be won over, that we do not write them off because we think they made uninformed, self-destructive, and socially harmful choices. Instead of seeking to punish and dismiss all working-class Trump voters, some of whom clearly did not believe he would actually do the things he said he would, were not motivated by his appeals to white supremacy and hatred of black and brown immigrants, and may be experiencing buyers’ remorse, pro-democracy forces should leave open the possibility that they can be reached and are still persuadable.
To defeat Trump’s authoritarianism we must not blame desperate people for making angry or fearful choices that are bad for themselves and the country, but accept their economic grievances as legitimate and offer them a compelling story that connects the dots, meets their emotional and psychological needs, and points to the real source of their suffering.
A left populism that takes account of the emotional and psychological needs of workers would include, not only rhetorical appeals by elected officials, but fiscal policies and legislation that elevates the status and value of blue-collar work and strengthens organized labor. Of course, one could argue that this is precisely what President Biden did. He was the first president to join a union picket line, passed landmark legislation that created millions of good-paying blue-collar jobs, and created an unapologetically pro-union National Labor Relations Board. But it was too little too late to restore the trust of blue-collar workers and turn around decades of political harm and neglect by the Democratic Party.
In the end, a new kind of left populism must be in the service of a larger vision, of an alternative political and economic order that is hopeful, inclusive, radically democratic, and that genuinely addresses the worsening affordability crisis, endemic political corruption and extreme wealth and income inequality, and can capture the imagination of working-class voters who are desperately looking for a reason to believe that their lives can change for the better.
But it must also authentically engage with cultural issues that are important to working-class voters. This does not mean that everyone has to agree, only that different views can be represented within the coalition, can be discussed and contested, that the Democratic Party need not speak with a single voice, even on issues of importance to key constituencies. Rather than coalescing around specific policy positions, the coalition would be united by adherence to a broadly-defined set of core values and beliefs that can accommodate different perspectives without compromising key ethical principles, such as equity, equality of opportunity, and fairness, that liberals, progressives, and others hold most dear.
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