Mr. T Explained

Donald Trump’s white America is revolting: New numbers show just how noxious the GOP front-runner’s coalition is
Exit poll data proves it: Trump is the candidate of voters who resent African-Americans and immigrants

Donald Trump wants more things for “us” and fewer things for “them.” .....

Exit poll results from the New Hampshire primary on Tuesday night showed deep discontent with the Republican Party

and the federal government, and the candidate who railed hardest on those topics, Donald Trump, won with multiple groups of voters. ....... Trump won 6-in-10 voters who said they were looking for an outside candidate. ..... Two-thirds said they support Trump’s proposal to temporarily ban Muslims from entering the country. He won 42 percent of their votes......Four in 10 supported deporting undocumented immigrants; Trump won 46 percent in this group........ measures resentment toward African Americans and immigrants with statements like “blacks could be just as well off as whites if they only tried harder” and “it bothers me when I come in contact with immigrants who speak little or no English.” ......... compares how favorably respondents rated whites to how favorably they rated minority groups. ..... Most striking is how each of these measures strongly correlates with support for Trump. The graph below shows that Trump performs best among Americans who express more resentment toward African Americans and immigrants and who tend to evaluate whites more favorably than minority groups. ....... statistical models show that each of these three attitudes about minorities contributes independently to Trump’s vote share. So much so, in fact, that GOP primary voters who score in the top 25 percent of their party on all three measures are 44 points more likely to support Donald Trump than those who score in the bottom 25 percent ........ he combines the nativism, racism, pro-big business attitude, wants more tax cuts for the wealthy, militaristic nationalism, and out-group animosity that typifies mainstream conservatism, with promises to expand healthcare, enact trade protectionism, fix the nation’s infrastructure, and improve the lives of the (white) working class. ........ Donald Trump’s particular version of right-wing populism is a direct threat to present day Republican orthodoxy. .......... right-wing producerism. ..... Producerism is a belief that society is divided between “makers” and “takers.” Right-wing producerism tries to mobilize “real citizens” against “evil” parasites on the “bottom” of society such as the poor, people of color, immigrants, gays and lesbians, “the lazy” and any other subordinate group that can be identified as the Other. ....... “producerism, with its baggage of prejudice, remains today the most common populist narrative on the right, and it facilitates the use of demonization and scapegoating as political tools.” ......... Trump is also channeling Herrenvolk ideology with his explicit promises to protect the white working and middle class from “those people” (be they supposedly rapine and violent immigrants; scheming Chinese; or nebulous brown Muslim terrorists in ISIS and al-Qaida) while also ensuring that there is a social welfare state, economic mobility and expanded healthcare for “real Americans.” .........

In a Herrenvolk society, the racial in-group is fully enfranchised while the racial out-group is marked as an “anti-citizen” that is not worthy of full democratic rights.

.......... the racial Other’s subordinate status is used as a marker for elevating the status and power for the dominant racial group. Centuries of chattel slavery and then Jim and Jane Crow were means through which white Americans defined the meaning, worth and boundaries of citizenship.

Historically and to the very recent present, American democracy and the exclusive white male franchise were not contradictions in a society organized around the Herrenvolk principle.

......... Citizenship and belonging are demarcated along racial lines in a Herrenvolk society; benefits, resources, rights and support from the state are allocated by the boundaries that separate “us” from “them.” ....... Donald Trump’s right-wing populism is a return to an understanding of the modern American welfare state that dominated from the end of the Civil War through to the Great Society. And while the American welfare state has certainly “evolved” in an era of neoliberalism, extreme wealth and income inequality, surveillance, punishment and austerity, there are a litany of programs that disproportionately benefit the white working, middle, upper classes, and rich as compared to non-whites. This, what is now termed the “submerged state,” is a de facto type of welfare for (white) America. As public policy, the submerged state is heavily protected as an “entitlement” while simultaneously being decoupled from the history of white privilege and white supremacy that birthed, and in some ways, continues to sustain it.

White voters are attracted to Donald Trump because they are afraid that the benefits of the submerged state will be taken away from them.

......... Trump’s supporters are largely composed of frustrated and alienated working-class white Americans who are embracing authoritarian values. ...... A white lower-educated supporter on the lower-income scale is not what we normally term middle-class: It’s more aptly called the working-class. ..... “Trump is the staunchest champion of the white working class that American politics has seen in decades.” .......

“authoritarian predispositions and ethnic prejudice flow more naturally from the situation of the lower classes than from that of middle and upper classes.” These were the people who formed the base of the Nazi labor unions, the White Citizen’s Councils in the segregated American south, and race rioters in England

......... “working-class groups have proved to be the most nationalistic and jingoistic sector of the population. In a number of nations, they have clearly been in the forefront of the struggle against equal rights for minority groups, and have sought to limit immigration or to impose racial standards in countries with open immigration.” This, of course, describes a Donald Trump rally almost perfectly… ......... rather than seeing most Trumpists as Middle American Radicals or even a uniquely American phenomenon, it is more accurate to see them as

the latest in a long line of working-class authoritarians—people with a very scary, very dishonorable past.

........ “Trumpmania” is a combination of the Know-Nothings, the Republican Southern Strategy and a type of right-wing populism that views people of color and non-white immigrants as toxins in the body politic. ...... Donald Trump promises to “Make America Great Again.” Trump cannot do this without excluding millions of Americans who are not white and Christian. In practice, Donald Trump’s right-wing populism will shrink the boundaries of political community. This will make for a less vibrant, rich and productive American society. While Trump promises health, strength and vitality for his voters, the reality is that working-class authoritarianism and right-wing populism are poisons to a modern cosmopolitan society.