Ten years into the Trump era, the white left is still recycling the “economic anxiety” myth to explain why white voters, and especially non-college-educated white men, support him overwhelmingly. Why?
On Thursday we saw this post by Thom Hartmann:
What Happens When Trump Voters Realize They Want the Same Thing Progressives are Working For?
The idea here is that Trump supporters—maybe the “soft” supporters, if not full-on MAGAs—suffer from misdirected anger. That they’ve been handed a scapegoat, or many scapegoats—Black people, women, immigrants—and that’s blinded them to their underlying real grief, which is the same class consciousness that motivates the left.
It’s an idea steeped in denial and white innocence. There is nothing “progressive” about it.
More than one supportive commenter quoted LBJ:
If you can convince the lowest white man he’s better than the best colored man, he won’t notice you’re picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he’ll empty his pockets for you.
The problem with this quote is that you don’t need to convince the white man. He already believes. His belief in his innate superiority—whether that belief is touted or is unconscious—is at the very heart of his white identity. This is what whiteness is. The white man doesn’t need to be propagandized or misinformed. He doesn’t need his anger to be redirected. The grievance is already there. History put it there, and only historical change can heal it.
White innocence is the key prop to whites’ belief—again, touted or unconscious—in innate superiority. That innocence is writ all over the “economic anxiety” myth, and shadows so much of “progressive” discourse. As James Baldwin said, “they do not know and do not want to know.”
Take, for example, the claim that white economic anxiety comes from the loss of some halcyon past—FDR is often invoked—where one income, from a steady or even lifelong employer, could provide for a family, who could buy a house. The innocence ignores redlining, segregation, discrimination, and also ignores that this time was the height of US imperial power, which allowed the extraction of raw materials and cheap labor throughout the world, all of which subsidized white workers’ living standards.
The claim that this lost era was “progressive” ignores the racist character of many labor unions and labor’s role in enforcing “sundown towns.”
What does it mean when “progressives” reference those times, and those policies, in terms of white loss and white grief?
Another example of this innocence: The 1960s were economic good times, with rising employment and expanded social benefits. Yet the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was followed almost immediately by the GOP’s highly effective “southern strategy” of a direct appeal to white racial anxieties. How does the “economic anxiety” argument jibe with this history? It doesn’t. A more relevant LBJ quote is (said to Bill Moyers about the Civil Rights Act):
I think we just delivered the South to the Republican Party for a long time to come.
Beyond the conflict with the historical facts, there is “progressive” fascination with white working class culture, ways of being, and affect (specifically the affect of white working-class men). Somehow white workers must be both deluded and authentic, all at the same time. That tells us something about some people’s mistaken idea of what a genuine progressive politics looks and feels like.
Why then, is the “economic anxiety” argument so persistent among progressives? Why hasn’t it been dropped, after much study and evidence have shown that, to the contrary, individual voters’ support for Trump correlates closely with their racist attitudes?
The reason is that many white progressives have not interrogated whiteness; they do not understand and accept their own history as a members of a social group created for the purpose of domination and exploitation, nor have they even begun to come to terms with what to do about that in the present. They are reactive and defensive, at some level, about their own whiteness and because of this, they are motivated to excuse white reactionaries, especially reactionaries who are white working class.
As James Baldwin says of white people:
Many of them indeed know better, but … people find it very difficult to act on what they know. To act is to be committed and to be committed is to be in danger. In this case the danger in the minds and hearts of most white Americans is the loss of their identity.
What white progressives really want, or should want, is a genuinely multiracial democracy, the dismantling of imperialism and colonialism, and a post-patriarchal society. However, achieving this future requires that white people give up whiteness and find a new identity. To begin with, that means giving up innocence and denial, and finding a new relationship with historical truth.
In the current moment, it requires realizing that to be antifascist, you have to fight fascism as it really exists. It requires accepting that fascism is a broad movement supported by a majority, or a near-majority, of white Americans.
