Trump channeled insecurities and disaffection that went deeper than economics, researchers have found. “White voters’ preference for Donald Trump,” wrote the political scientists John Sides, Michael Tesler, and Lynn Vavreck, “…was weakly related to their own job security but strongly related to concerns that minorities were taking jobs away from whites.”
The tremors within the dominant caste had been building long before Trump announced his candidacy. “Defections accelerated over the course of Obama’s presidency,” Sides, Tesler, and Vavreck wrote. “This is why racial attitudes appear the more likely culprit.”
In fact, “no other factor predicted changes in white partisanship during Obama’s presidency as powerfully and consistently as racial attitudes,” they said.
The researchers consider this kind of group hypervigilance to be what they call “ ‘racialized economics’: the belief that undeserving groups are getting ahead while your group is left behind.”
The precarity of their lives and the changing demographics of the country induced a greater need to maintain whatever advantages they had come to expect and to shore up the one immutable characteristic that has held the most weight in the American caste system.
“Whites’ racial attitudes are not merely defined by prejudice,” writes Ashley Jardina of Duke University. “Many whites also possess a sense of racial identity and are motivated to protect their group’s collective interests and to maintain its status….Whiteness is now a salient and central component of American politics. White racial solidarity influences many whites’ worldview and guides their political attitudes and behavior.”
Consciously or not, many white voters “are seeking to reassert a racial order in which their group is firmly at the top.”
The 2016 election thus became a cracked mirror held up to a country that had not been forced in this way to search its origins in more than a generation and was now seeing itself perhaps for the first time as it truly was. It was the culmination of forces that had been building for decades.
In a caste context, the two main political parties bear the advantages and burdens of the castes they most attract and with which they are associated. At times, the stigma and double standard attached to disfavored minorities have accrued to the Democrats, while the privilege and latitude accorded the dominant caste has accrued to the Republicans, who have come to be seen as proxies for white America. This in part explains the unforgiving scrutiny and obstructions faced by Democrats like Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, and before them John Kerry and Al Gore, as white support has intensified for Republicans, now seen as the party of an anxious but powerful dominant-caste electorate.
Clinton, the former secretary of state, was widely viewed as having won the presidential debates, despite her opponent’s stalking of her at the podium and calling her a “nasty woman.” She was seen as having carried herself with dignity and exhibiting a polished, if stiff, mastery of domestic and foreign affairs. Yet in polling she rarely managed to pull much beyond the margin of error against a man considered by some to be the least qualified person ever to run for president.
There were many factors at work in the 2016 election, among them foreign interference and barriers to voting that disproportionately affected marginalized voters. Still, Clinton’s loss in the Electoral College seems shocking until one considers caste, and the historic challenges that subordinate-caste candidates, meaning African-American candidates, have often faced on Election Day despite favorable polling. Seen from a caste perspective, Clinton perhaps suffered from a version of the Bradley Effect—inflated polling numbers that do not materialize on Election Day due to people telling pollsters what they believe is the socially acceptable answer about their voting plans but then choosing differently in the voting booth. This is what happened to Los Angeles mayor Tom Bradley when he ran for governor of California in 1982. That would have made an inability to rise above the margin of error a harbinger of a tough Election Day.
Caste gives insights, too, into the Democrats’ wistful yearning for white working-class voters that they believe should respond in higher numbers to their kitchen table appeals. Why, some people on the left kept asking, why, oh, why, were these people voting against their own interests? The questioners on the left were unseeing and yet so certain. What they had not considered was that the people voting this way were, in fact, voting their interests. Maintaining the caste system as it had always been was in their interest. And some were willing to accept short-term discomfort, forgo health insurance, risk contamination of the water and air, and even die to protect their long-term interest in the hierarchy as they had known it.
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When you are caught in a caste system, you will likely do whatever it takes to survive in it. If you are insecurely situated somewhere in the middle—below the very top but above the very bottom—you may distance yourself from the bottom and hold up barriers against those you see as below you to protect your own position. You will emphasize the inherited characteristics that rank higher on the caste scale.
In the voting booth, many people make an autonomic, subconscious assessment of their station, their needs and wishes, and the multiple identities they carry (working class, middle class, rich, poor, white, black, male, female, Asian, Latino). They often align themselves not with those whose plight they may share, but with those whose power and privilege intersect with a trait of their own. People with overlapping self-interests will often gravitate toward the personal characteristic that accords them the most status. Many make an existential, aspirational choice. They vote up, rather than across, and usually not down. They believe they know who will protect the interests of the trait that gives them the most status and that matters most to them.
In the pivotal election of 2016, whether consciously or not, the majority of whites voted for the candidate who made the most direct appeals to the characteristic most rewarded in the caste system. They went with the aspect of themselves that grants them the most power and status in the hierarchy. According to New York Times exit polling of 24,537 respondents, 58 percent of white voters chose the Republican Donald Trump and only 37 percent went for the Democrat Hillary Clinton. While she won nearly 3 million more votes than Trump by the popular count, she attracted a smaller share of the white vote than any Democratic candidate other than Jimmy Carter in his failed bid for reelection against Ronald Reagan in 1980.
“The parties have grown so divided by race,” writes the political scientist Lilliana Mason, “that simple racial identity, without policy content, is enough to predict party identity.”
There was perhaps no clearer measure of white solidarity than the actions of white women in 2016. The majority of them—53 percent—disregarded the common needs of women and went against a fellow white woman to vote with their power trait, the white side of their identities to which Trump appealed, rather than help an experienced woman, and themselves, make history.
“Trump was ushered into office by whites concerned about their status,” Jardina writes, “and his political priorities are plainly aimed at both protecting the racial hierarchy and at strengthening its boundaries.” These are people who feel “that the rug is being pulled out from under them—that the benefits they have enjoyed because of their race, their group’s advantages, and their status atop the racial hierarchy are all in jeopardy.”
A subliminal awareness of the power of caste (though the word would rarely, if ever, be used) appears also to be at work, to whatever degree, in how the parties respond to their respective bases. The Republican reverence for its base of white evangelicals stands in stark contrast to the indifference often shown the Democratic base of African-Americans, who are devalued for a host of reasons, among them their suppressed status at the bottom of the social hierarchy.
For the Republicans, the singularity of focus, the sense of rallying around an existential threat, combined with
the inherent caste advantages of the collective wealth and influence of its voters overall, gives the GOP a seeming advantage in firing up its supporters against Democratic opposition. For their part, Democrats constitute a diffuse majority of the electorate, but seem at times lukewarm toward a base that the party has often lectured to or taken for granted, chided, if ever there is lower-than-expected turnout, despite voter suppression, sadly buying into caste assumptions rather than bolstering their most loyal voters as do the Republicans with theirs. Democrats expend energy and weaken their power pining for the die-hard voters of their opponents, the homecoming queens of the electorate, while taking for granted the majority that they already have.
As the most loyal voters of their respective parties, white evangelicals are to Republicans what African-Americans are to Democrats, though each makes up a minority of the total electorate. But the foremost concerns of the Democrats’ most reliable voting bloc—affordable housing, clean water, police brutality, the racial wealth gap, and reparations for state-sanctioned discrimination (as has been accorded other groups discriminated against in the United States)—have remained on the back burner, or have even been considered radioactive issues for the party that African-Americans help to sustain. To those who say that this would be impractical, it would be the duty of the party representing and dependent on the subordinate caste to open the eyes of their fellow Americans and make the case for a more egalitarian country.
Meanwhile, the priorities of white evangelicals—ending abortion, restricting immigration, protecting gun rights, limiting government, and, more recently, the disdain for science and the denial of climate change—have become the menu of belief systems for the Republican Party.
“What most distinguishes white American evangelicals from other Christians, other religious groups, and nonbelievers is not theology but politics,” writes Seth Dowland, associate professor of religion at Pacific Lutheran University and author of Family Values and the Rise of the Christian Right. “Over the course of the 20th century, the evangelical coalition entwined theology, whiteness, and conservative politics….To identify as evangelical in the early 21st century signals commitments to gun rights, the abolition of legal abortion, and low taxes.”
People identifying as white evangelicals, regardless of their personal religiosity, “rallied around Trump to defend a white Protestant nation,” Dowland writes. “They have proven to be loyal foot soldiers in the battle against undocumented immigrants and Muslims. The triumph of gay rights, the persistence of legal abortion, and the election of Barack Obama signaled to them a need to fight for the America they once knew.”
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The 2016 election became a remarkable blueprint of caste hierarchy in America, from highest to lowest status, in a given group’s support of the Republican: White men voted for Trump at 62 percent. White women at 53 percent. Latino men at 32 percent. Latina women at 25 percent. African-American men at 13 percent, and black women at 4 percent. Unlike the majority of white voters, every other group of voters supported the Democrat in 2016. The Democratic vote went as follows: White men, 31 percent. White women, 43 percent. Latino men, 63 percent. Latina women, 69 percent. African-American men, 82 percent. African-American women, whose race and gender together put them at the bottom of the country’s artificial hierarchy, supported the white female Democrat by 94 percent. While CNN did not break down the Asian vote by gender, Asians, like other nonwhites, voted overwhelmingly for Clinton, at 65 percent versus 27 percent for Trump, tracking the Latino vote overall.
Trump fared well against Clinton with all categories of white voters, at every age and education level, though his percentages were higher for whites who had no college degree (66 percent for Trump, 29 percent for Clinton) than for those who had a college degree (48 percent for Trump, 45 percent for Clinton). Contrary to popular assumptions that economic insecurity was a driver of the 2016 outcome, Trump beat Clinton in most every income level except those who were least economically secure—those making less than $50,000 per year. This could be seen as a reflection of the fact that marginalized voters in general, and black voters in particular—those more likely to support the Democrat—make up a disproportionate share of voters with lower incomes.
With these stark racial patterns, the 2016 election seemed a consolidation of rank among the historic ruling caste. “Even though white Americans still comprise a clear political majority and continue to possess most of the country’s wealth,” observed the legal scholar Robert L. Tsai, “it is possible to stoke outlandish fears of a coming reckoning where racial and ethnic minorities will seek to subjugate white citizens.”
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The sense of perceived injury found a voice in 2016. “These aggrieved whites are a potentially untapped well,” Jardina wrote, “one whose resentments are primed, ready to be stoked by politicians willing to go down a potentially very dark path.”
For this reason, the ruptures exposed in 2016 transcend a single election or candidate and go well beyond the initial theories of economic insecurity as the driver of the white vote. “In many ways, a sense of group threat is a much tougher opponent than an economic downturn,” wrote the political scientist Diana Mutz, “because it is a psychological mindset rather than an actual event or misfortune.”
Once in office, the forty-fifth president made no secret of his laser focus on the desires of his base. “Whether out of personal animus, political calculation, philosophical disagreement or a conviction that the last president damaged the country, Mr. Trump has made clear that if it has Mr. Obama’s name on it, he would just as soon erase it from the national hard drive,” wrote the New York Times White House correspondent Peter Baker.
Those susceptible to “dominant group status threat,” Mutz wrote, will do whatever they can to protect the hierarchy that has benefited them, to “regain a sense of dominance and wellbeing.”
The election outcome alone had his base feeling better. A couple of days after the election, two middle-aged white men with receding hairlines and reading glasses took their seats in first class on a flight from Atlanta to Chicago. They suspected by looking at each other, and knowing the polling results, that they were likely on the same team. It didn’t take them long to confirm that they were.
“Last eight years,” one of them said, “worst thing that ever happened, I’m so glad it’s over.”
“It was bigger than an election,” the other one said. “It was one of the most amazing events I think we’ll ever witness. I stayed up all night to watch it.”
“Yeah, well, I went to bed that night thinking I’d be crying the next morning. Woke up. Best news I ever heard.”
“There is justice in this world. They made a bad, bad choice with her,” one said.
“The current president was a bad choice,” the other said.
“He was in over his head. It’s a beautiful day!”
“Yep, finally got it right. Yessiree.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
The Symbols of Caste
The Confederate general who led the war against the United States over the right to hold human beings hostage for all their natural-born days, Robert E. Lee, or, more precisely, a bronze sculpture of Robert E. Lee, rose two stories high on its granite pedestal in the center of a village green in Charlottesville, Virginia. On this day in the late summer of 2017, the statue in honor of a hero of the former slaveholding states was now covered with a thin black tarp that had taken two men positioned in cranes something like an hour to stretch across the length and width of it, over the general’s head and the American Saddlebred horse he sat astride.
The statue was under a shroud while city leaders tried to figure out what to do with it. The monument had drawn the attention of the world after a rally of white supremacists turned deadly just weeks before. The rally brought together disaffected members of the dominant caste in protest o
f the city’s plan to remove the statue. It was as if the passions of the Civil War had been resurrected and had merged with a resurgent Nazism, which the forefathers of the young Americans at the rally had fought to vanquish back in the middle of the previous century. The heirs to the Confederates and the heirs to the Nazis could see how much they and their histories had in common even if ordinary Americans did not.
On that day in August 2017, Confederate flags and swastikas interfused above the ralliers, men mostly, some with haircuts as severe as their faces. Together, the night before, they had marched through the campus of the University of Virginia, extending Nazi salutes, chanting, “Sieg Heil,” and “White lives matter,” and “Jews will not replace us.” They held tiki torches in the night air, reenacting the torchbearers’ rivers of light at the old processions for Hitler. The following day, at the rally itself, the neo-Confederates and the neo-Nazis arrived well armed, which in turn drew counterprotesters bearing signs of peace. Then a white supremacist rammed a car into a crowd of counterprotesters, killing one of them, a paralegal named Heather Heyer, and wounding dozens of others.
Now the city was trying to keep the statue from public view, but every time the city covered it, someone would come and remove the tarp, releasing Lee’s likeness in protest. The city would again send in the cranes to put the tarp back over it. The day I happened to visit Charlottesville, shortly after the rally, the city was prevailing.
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