Recent coverage of (white) working class voters in the run up to 2024

Here's a Feb. 21, 2024 New York Times column by Thomas Edsall titled, "Does Biden have to Cede the White Working Class to Trump?"  Here's an excerpt:

“For Victory in 2024, Democrats Must Win Back the Working Class,” Will Marshall, the founder and president of the Progressive Policy Institute, wrote in October 2023. “Can Democrats Win Back the Working Class?” Jared Abbott and Fred DeVeaux of the Center for Working-Class Politics asked in June 2023; “Democrats Need Biden to Appeal to Working-Class Voters” is how David Byler, the former Washington Post data columnist, put it the same month.

However persuasive they are, these arguments raise a series of questions.

First, is the Democratic attempt to recapture white working-class voters a fool’s errand? Is this constituency irrevocably committed to the Republican Party — deaf to the appeal of a Democratic Party it sees as committed to racial and cultural liberalism?

Edsall includes this interesting quote from Yale's Jacob Hacker and colleagues:

even as Democrats have increasingly relied on affluent, educated voters, the party has embraced a more ambitious economic agenda. The national party has bridged the blue divide not by forswearing redistribution or foregrounding cultural liberalism but by formulating an increasingly bold economic program — albeit one that elides important inequalities within its metro-based multiracial coalition.

I wouldn't mind some clarification of what they mean by "elides important inequalities within its metro-based multiracial coalition."   Does that mean socioeconomic and racial inequalities are elided in metro areas?  And if so, what does that mean for nonmetro residents?  

Edsall doesn't answer that question but does move on to this: 

With Democrats’ strongest base concentrated in cities, the need to remain competitive, Hacker and his co-authors wrote,

has made the Democrats’ growing reliance on prosperous metro areas (i.e., suburbs) both necessary and consequential. The party’s base has long been in cities, but the party has dramatically expanded its reach into less dense suburban areas that are economically integrated with major urban centers.

Interesting, but still no mention of nonmetro areas.  

Frances Lee of Princeton suggested that the strategy described by Hacker could prove problematic: 

To the extent that the nation’s political discourse is driven by highly educated people, there is danger that opinion leaders are falling increasingly out of touch with the rest of the population.

William Galston of Brookings also commented negatively on Hacker's vision of the Democratic Party strategy (in a way that sorta' implies the strategy does omit rural folks, and highlights the growing cross-racial coalition among working-class folks--a coalition moving toward Trump and Republicans): 

The lines between the white working class and the nonwhite working class are eroding. Donald Trump received 41 percent of the non-college Hispanic vote in 2020 and may well do better this time around. If this turns out to be the case, then the old Democratic formula — add minorities to college-educated voters to make a majority — becomes obsolete.

Then comes Edsall's column one week later, titled "The Red-Blue Divide Goes Well Beyond Biden and Trump."  Here's the lede: 

One of the major reasons white non-college voters turned to Donald Trump in 2016 and 2020 is the fear of lost white hegemony — that the United States will become a majority-minority nation sometime in the near future.

All I can say is that I would love to see one empirical source cited for this proposition.  Surely there are several, but I'd like to see just one for this bold and very damning proposition.   

Here's another piece, this one from The Liberal Patriot, on the non-white working class "bailing out on the Democrats."  Speaking of Obama's 2012 Presidential victory, Ruy Teixeira writes:  

Obama carried nonwhite working-class (noncollege) voters by a massive 67 points, while losing white college graduates by 7 points. That means Obama did 74 points betteramong the nonwhite working class than among white college graduates.

In the next two presidential elections, that differential steadily narrowed as Democrats did worse among nonwhite working-class voters even as they improved among white college graduates. In 2020, Biden carried the nonwhite working class by 48 points (19 points less than Obama did in 2012) while carrying white college graduates by 9 points (16 points better than Obama). That cut the Democrats’ positive differential between these two groups almost in half, down to 39 points.

Now it’s Biden running for a second term and, astonishingly, that positive differential may have entirely disappeared.

Edsall on Democrats' uphill battle in 2022, 2024, with attention to the white working class

The headline for Thomas Edsall's column is "Democrats are Making Life too Easy for Republicans," and an excerpt focusing on the white working class follows:  

At the moment, there is widespread pessimism among those on the left end of the political spectrum. Isabel V. Sawhill, a senior fellow at Brookings, replying by email to my inquiry, wrote that for predictable reasons, “Democrats face an uphill battle in both 2022 and 2024.”

But, she went on, “the problems are much deeper. First, the white working class that used to vote Democratic no longer does.” Sawhill noted that when she

studied this group back in 2018, what surprised me most was their very negative attitudes toward government, their dislike of social welfare programs, their commitment to an ethic of personal responsibility and the importance of family and religion in their lives. This large group includes some people who are just plain prejudiced but a larger group that simply resents all the attention paid to race, gender, sexual preference or identity and the disrespect they think this entails for those with more traditional views and lifestyles.

Messages coming from the more progressive members of the Democratic Party, Sawhill warned, “will be exploited by Republicans to move moderate Democrats or to move no-Trump Republicans in their direction.”

Sean Westwood, a political scientist at Dartmouth, is highly critical of the contemporary Democratic Party, writing by email:

Misguided focus on unpopular social policies are driving voters away from the Democratic Party and are mobilizing Republicans. Democrats used to be the party of the working class, but today they are instead seen as a party defined by ostensibly legalizing property crime, crippling the police and injecting social justice into math classes.

As a result, Westwood continued,

It is no surprise that this doesn’t connect with a working family struggling to pay for surging grocery bills. By abandoning their core brand, even Democrats who oppose defunding the police are burdened by the party’s commitment to unpopular social policy.

The traditional strategy in midterm elections, Westwood wrote, is to mobilize the party base. Instead, he contended, Democrats

have decided to let the fringe brand the party’s messaging around issues that fail to obtain majority support among the base. Perhaps the most successful misinformation campaign in modern politics is being waged by the Twitter left against the base of the Democratic Party. The Twitter mob is intent on pushing social policies that have approximately zero chance of becoming law as a test of liberalism. Even if you support reducing taxes on the middle class, immigration reform and increasing the minimum wage, opposing defunding the police or the legalization of property crime makes you an unreasonable outcast.  (emphasis mine)

In other words, Westwood is blasting purity tests. 

I have highlighted the column's comment about the rural-urban dynamic in a post at Legal Ruralism.  

Poignant reflection on the working class in central Illinois

The last in a series of essays by Tom Morello (guitarist with Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band, among others). appeared in the New York Times a few days ago.  It's headlined "Class Struggle in My Family's Hometown."  This one is datelined Marseilles, Illinois, population 5,094, where Morello spent summers during his childhood.  The small city is on the Illinois River, and along with the good (e.g,  community events, Little League, bike riding) Morello highlights some negative aspects of its history (e.g., environmental degradation, high incidence of cancer).

Here's an excerpt about the recent "class warfare" there:  

Lately, Marseilles has seen some more hard times. The factories and the mines are long closed. Norman Rockwell streets once vied to see who could have the tidiest lawn. Recently, on our block, three abandoned houses had gone back to nature, roofs collapsed, trees growing through windows, raccoons taking up residence. There may still be a Little League, but when I spoke a few years ago with some teenagers with teardrop tattoos on their faces, they spoke of their limited prospects: Walmart, the Army, selling meth.

The town was once solidly union, voted Democrat and gave birth to America’s most militant leftist grandma, Mary Morello. Now Confederate flags dot some of the lawns. There’s a lot of good, hard-working people doing their best, but there’s a palpable feeling that they’ve been abandoned by Democratic and Republican administrations. It’s fertile ground for a demagogic grifter who attributes their problems to immigrants and Muslims, deflecting blame from a capitalist order that sees them as marks and cannon fodder. Where poverty meets disinformation, intolerance can bloom.

Cross-posted to Legal Ruralism.

A role for the Black Lives Matter movement when police kill white people?

To draw attention to bad things happening to white people is decidedly out of fashion these days.  To do so risks communicating an "All Lives Matter" message, and that is ill advised in most progressive circles in this period when Black Lives Matter has been revived--appropriately, in my opinion--in the wake of George Floyd's killing at the hands of Minneapolis Police in late May.    

So I was surprised to see Jack Healy's front-page story yesterday for the New York Times dateline Sedalia, Missouri, population 21,287.  The headline in the print edition that landed in my driveway is "In Rural Towns, Similar Chants to Find Justice."  The online headline is a little different, "A Family Cries 'Justice for Hannah.'  Will a Rural Town Listen?"  And here's the subhead, which highlights the rural context: 

People in rural areas are killed in police shootings at about the same rate as in cities, but victims’ families and activists say they have struggled to get justice or even make themselves heard.

Neither headline nor the subhead mentions race, however, which I'd argue is a fairly critical piece of the story--even more central to my mind than the rural angle.  This paragraph, about the young Sedalia woman who was shot and killed by a sheriff's deputy appears deep in Healy's story:  

Ms. Fizer and the deputy who shot her were both white, a common dynamic in shootings that occur in overwhelmingly white, rural parts of the country. Black and Hispanic people are killed at higher rates than white people in rural areas, but the demographics of rural America mean that about 60 to 70 percent of people killed by law enforcement there are white, according to an analysis by Harvard researchers.

To me, its placement feels a bit like burying the lede.  

The lede the editors went with, which doesn't mention race, follows: 

Seven weeks had passed, and still there were no answers. So once again, a small cluster of friends and family gathered in the leafy courthouse square and marched for Hannah Fizer, an unarmed woman shot and killed by a rural Missouri sheriff’s deputy during a traffic stop.

“Say her name! Hannah!”

“Prosecute the police!”

Their chants echoed protests over police killings in Minneapolis, Louisville, Atlanta and beyond. But this was no George Floyd moment for rural America.

Though people in rural areas are killed in police shootings at about the same rate as in cities, victims’ families and activists say they have struggled to get justice or even make themselves heard. They say extracting changes can be especially tough in small, conservative towns where residents and officials have abiding support for law enforcement and are leery of new calls to defund the police.

Hannah Fizer's mother, Amy, commented (in a statement that echoes one of my own mother's favorite expressions):   

It’s like pulling teeth.

Amy Fizer also explains that she and Hannah's father have not been been interviewed or kept abreast of the investigation into Hannah's death--and that the Pettis County Sheriff, Kevin Bond, has not revealed to them the name of the deputy who killed their daughter after stopping her on the way to her night shift at an area convenience store.  The deputy claimed that he "met with verbal resistance" from Hannah Fizer and that he suspected she had a gun.  Subsequent investigation revealed no gun.  

This is the sort of story I've not been expecting to see in national media for the reason I led with in this post:  this story draws our attention to the phenomenon of law enforcement--including white law enforcement, even in (or is the point especially in?) rural areas--killing white people. 

And so the story raises the question:  Where are white victims of police violence in the Black Lives Matter movement?  Should we acknowledge them in the context of that movement?  Or would acknowledging those deaths be tantamount to saying the forbidden "All Lives Matter"?  What are the political, social and cultural implications of not acknowledging them?  An earlier event that took up this conundrum, this one from 2015 in South Carolina, is here.  

We saw a partial response to these questions, I guess, a few weeks ago when Donald Trump answered a journalist's question about Black Americans being killed by police by saying that "more white people" are killed by cops than black people.  Here are some Tweets by  journalists that I captured just after his  comment:  

And here are two of my Tweets about the matter then:

The New York Times responded to Trump's comment with this story by Jeremy Peters:  

Mr. Trump added to his long record of racially inflammatory comments during an interview with CBS News, in which he brushed off a question about Black people killed by police officers, saying that white people are killed in greater numbers.

Mr. Trump reacted angrily when asked about the issue, which has led to nationwide protests calling for major law enforcement changes.

“Why are African-Americans still dying at the hands of law enforcement in this country?” the interviewer, Catherine Herridge of CBS News, asked the president.

“What a terrible question to ask,” Mr. Trump responded. “So are white people. More white people, by the way.”

Statistics show that while more white Americans are killed by the police over all, people of color are killed at higher rates. A federal study that examined lethal force used by the police from 2009 to 2012 found that a majority of victims were white, but the victims were disproportionately Black. Black people had a fatality rate at the hands of police officers that was 2.8 times as high as that of white people.

Of course, what Trump said is technically true.  So were the clarifications by the media.  I call this the "Lies, Damned Lies and Statistics" problem.  Multiple accurate assertions can be made based on available empirical data.  The media choose to highlight one or the other.  In doing so, they drive wedges between folks who have a lot in common:  both people of color and low-income, low-status whites (who are arguably also people of color) are vulnerable to police misconduct.  Indeed, people of color and low-income whites are vulnerable to lots of bad stuff.  

I'd like to see these vulnerable folks banding together across racial lines and not to be put into a contest--or conflict--with each other.  Wouldn't we be better off, at least occasionally, to do what Healy and the New York Times have perhaps done/kinda' sorta/implicitly laid the groundwork for?   Cross-racial coalition building, that is.  It brings me back to a question I've been mulling for a long time, in this context and others:  Wouldn't all parties who have a beef about policing--parties of all colors/races/ethnicities--be better off joining forces rather than strictly competing to say who has it worse?  wouldn't we be better off not engaging in what Chimimanda Ngozi Adichie calls "the oppression Olympics"?  

It seems these days that lots of folks, including many non-whites, are skeptical that anything law enforcement do that is "wrong," "inappropriate," even in violation of the constitution, is attributable to anything other than racism or grounded in racial difference.  But don't the data from this Healy story belie that assumption?  Even the data Trump implicitly invoked in his ham-handed comments a few weeks ago?

On a somewhat different note, this story out of central Missouri reminds me of the movie "Winter's Bone," set in southwest Missouri, and the scene where the county sheriff pulls over Teardrop.  If you don't know what I'm talking about, then see the movie. Some prior posts about that movie are here and here.  

I'm also thinking about the movie "Three Billboards Outside Ebbing Missouri," set in a fictitious Missouri town.  That movie features plenty of racism by local police, but also law enforcement failures in relation to the investigation of a local teenager's death, that of a young woman who was raped before she was murdered.

The Healy report wisely addresses two other issues that loom large in rural contexts:  the higher rate of gun ownership and the lower rate of availability of mental health services.  Regarding the former, the story cites David Hemenway, director of the Harvard Injury Control Research Center, who says

the prevalence of guns may explain why cities and rural areas have nearly equal rates of law enforcement killings even though murders and violent crime rates tend to be higher in cities.

More than half of the people fatally shot by rural officers were reported to have a gun, according to a seven-year tally by Mapping Police Violence. Ms. Fizer was among the roughly 10 percent who were unarmed.

And then there is the issue of body cameras, technology and resources.  I published this in 2014, and it was controversial in the U.S. but has been cited widely in Australia and New Zealand.  One of my points about rural socio-spatiality is that if you are going to police vast rural areas effectively, you're going to need technology and resources.  In this case, the Sheriff claims not to have had enough of both to do something else:  hold law enforcement accountable by downloading, sorting and storing body cam footage.  

It is tragically ironic that this story out of Sedalia was published on the same day that another victim of crime in a Missouri small town committed suicide.  Daisy Coleman killed herself yesterday, as Amanda Arnold reports in The Cut:  

Daisy Coleman, the survivor at the center of the 2012 Maryville, Missouri, rape case and whose story was later featured in the Netflix documentary Audrie & Daisy, died by suicide on Tuesday evening. She was 23 years old.

* * * 

Coleman became the subject of national attention in 2012, when she, then 14 years old, attended a party where she blacked out from drinking and was allegedly raped by 17-year-old Matthew Barnett, a senior football player who had familial ties to a former Republican state representative. Before dawn the next morning, Melinda [Daisy's mother] found Daisy, who was wearing just a T-shirt and sweatpants in below-freezing weather, passed out on their doorstep. A hospital exam later confirmed Coleman had been raped, which led to Barnett’s arrest. He ultimately faced few repercussions, however: He received two years’ probation but was never convicted. Meanwhile, Coleman endured relentless victim blaming, and her entire family was harassed. People were “calling me a bitch, a whore, and a slut every single day,” she wrote in Seventeen. One Fox News guest suggested Coleman had “expected” to get raped. Melinda claimed she was fired from her job at a local veterinary clinic over the scandal.

The ruthless bullying took a grave toll on Coleman, and in 2014, she was hospitalized following a suicide attempt; it was not her first. After recovering, she went on to advocate for survivors of sexual assault.

Maryville, population 11,972, is in far northwest Missouri, on the Iowa state line. Interestingly, both of these cases attracted the "intervention"--official or not--of professionals from Kansas City, the regional center. In the case of Audrie and Daisy, a Jackson County prosecutor was brought in to investigate local law enforcement and prosecutorial handling of the case. In the Sedalia matter, a Kansas City police officer who lives in Sedalia is challenging Pettis County Sheriff Bond in the upcoming election. 

And that takes me back to some Facebook comments by Sheriff Bond about the Sedalia protests.

Do you want this to continue and cause irrevocable harm to our community?  Are you willing to allow Pettis County to become the test project for some social justice experiment for rural America?

The use of "social justice" is interesting there, since the right uses it as a pejorative term for the left:  The sheriff also suggested that outside agitators are sowing "social chaos."  Even Hannah Fizer's father invokes similar concerns, as Healy summarizes:

But [Mr. Fizer] counted himself as a conservative Republican and worried that the protests in Sedalia could be co-opted by left-wing outsiders — a pervasive, but largely unfounded fear in small towns after Mr. Floyd’s killing.

Reminds me of similar concerns articulated by my mom about her community in nearby northwest Arkansas.  I wrote this about the "outside agitator" trope, and here's another piece about so-called "antifa busses," which are a hoax.

Cross-posted to Legal Ruralism. 

Responding to rural whites, in the context of Mississippi politics

Cindy Hyde-Smith is running against Mike Epsy for a seat in the United States Senate for the conservative state of Mississippi where a democrat has not held office for more than 35 years. At a recent campaign rally, Hyde-Smith ran into a significant backlash for a controversial comment made on camera. The Republican appointee to the Senate in a runoff election set for today, said that she would be in the front row if a supporter invited her to a public hanging.

This morning, the Los Angeles Times ran an article by Jenny Jarvie regarding candidate Hyde-Smith and her words regarding a public hanging. Many critics jumped on this comment and accused her of being unsympathetic to the dark history of slavery. They labeled her as too extreme to represent the people of the state of Mississippi. Ms. Jarvie's posits that voters may not feel the same way, illustrated by the title "Voters may ignore 'hanging' remark." Jarvie suggests that Mississippians may not all feel the same way as many journalists who are commenting from other parts of the country. In Ms. Jarvie's analysis, she quotes several conservatives from the state of Mississippi:

I think she is a good person, said Joe Vaught, a 70-year-old retired nurse from Brandon, a town 15 miles east of Jackson, the capital. We all make stupid mistakes.

The Democrats are just trying to slander her, said Kim Bolding, 51, a marketing officer for a faith-based rehabilitation center who lives in Flowood.

It’s being blown out of proportion, said Robert Norwood, 68, a retired accounting manager from Crystal Springs. I watch a lot of cowboy shows. They used to hang a lot of people. Why does everything have to be about race?

Mississippi has a long history of hanging that began in the 1700's and remained the state's procedure of capital punishment until the 1940's. The backlash stems from those in and outside the state who say that hanging goes beyond capital punishment in the history of Mississippi. Charlene Thompson, a director at the Smith Robertson Museum, says in an interview, that hangings and lynching or lynch mobs went beyond the scope of law in the history of Mississippi:

We also have to remember that in many of these public lynchings, people would dress up. Not necessarily the person who is being lynched, but the crowd itself, and they would sell refreshments. It was like a big outing.

The NAACP reports that from 1882-1968 Mississippi conducted 581 lynchings, the highest number of any state. Similar figures of hanging data can be found here and here. It would seem the residents of Mississippi who are not white and are not the age of 50 (as are the conservative commenters above) have good reason to be outraged. Candidate Hyde-Smith did not even submit in haste an apology for her comments, but rather dropped off of her campaign trail for a few weeks in silence. She than made a short apology and went on the offensive last week when she said:

For anyone that was offended by my comments, I certainly apologize, she said, reading from a script. There was no ill will, no intent whatsoever, in my statements.

This comment was twisted, was turned into a weapon to be used against me, a political weapon used for nothing but personal and political gain by my opponent, she said. That’s the type of politics that Mississippians are sick and tired of.

Her opponent, Mike Epsy, an African American Democrat, politely responded to her statement:

Well, no one twisted your comments because your comments were live, he said. You know, they came out of your mouth.

Ms. Jarvie rounds out her article with the notion that regardless of the mistakes Hyde-Smith has made on the campaign trail (see her comments about possibly suppressing liberal educated voters here) she will likely win the Senate seat. The state is still largely conservative, and voters tend to stick with their political party affiliation, regardless of the policies the candidate advocates. There may also be other factors influencing voters in Mississippi, like resident and independent voter Joe Vaught. Mrs. Vaught said she did not approve of Hyde-Smith's remarks but would still vote for her because of the importance of having a woman representative in the Senate.

The public needs to hold those holding high office accountable for their words and actions. Hyde-Smith saying "I apologize to anyone offended", after refusing to apologize for weeks is a slap in the face to many scarred by this state's past. Hyde-Smith's apology is not one that takes any responsibility for the words spoken or connotations there of. It is dismissive in nature. This means that if you are offended, you are the problem. It was not a big deal, and you should not be offended so easily. Those elected into office should be held accountable for their actions, and the public who they represent should hold them to the highest standard of civility.

Furthermore, her campaign staff has repeatedly reported to media that her statement was "a joke" and has been blown out of proportion.  The fact that our President rushed down to Mississippi on Monday to hold two rally's in defense of Hyde-Smith and her comments is a mark against the United States in common decency and understanding of all our citizens. More than 100 Republican operatives and field staff flocked to the state for this final stretch. Why is the Republican party not ready to denounce racial slurs and racially suggestive actions? Is maintaining the highest level of power really that much more important to our politicians than dignity and integrity of all African Americans? It is time as a nation of smart, descent citizens to condemn politics that lack all civility and respectability. Regardless of the outcome of this election, the citizens of every state must demand more from those who represent us, or if we don't, all civility may be lost before we have a chance to save ourselves from a deep and dark future of racial divides and class wars.

(Don't miss a related blog post here!)

Is there anything we can learn from professional wrestling? (Part 3 of 3)

This is the final part of a three-part series about sports and the white working class, with an emphasis on professional wrestling. This part discusses elite cultural superiority in their criticisms of Trump and professional wrestling, and what liberal elites can learn about communicating with the white working class from professional wrestling.

Are there any lessons to be learned from professional wrestling? Maybe not. Despite changes to the blood, sex, and violence that characterized pro wrestling during the 1990s and 2000s, the sport remains an oft-maligned curiosity to elites that many would say carries little to no cultural value. According to Common Sense Media, an organization that recommends media for children, WWE Friday Night SmackDown! (a leading pro wrestling show) is “crass, outlandish, and not recommended.” The organization further writes that, “parents need to know that this sporting event-meets-soap opera is brimming with non-stop physical violence, including body slams, headlocks, knees to the groin, smacks, punches, and kicks.”

It’s also quite tempting to dismiss any possible value in pro wrestling not only because of the violence inherent to the sport, but also because until relatively recently matches were replete with extreme racism and sexism. For example, the Mexicools were a group of unmasked luchadores who wore stereotypical Mexican attire like cowboy hats and bandanas and carried leaf blowers and rode in on lawnmowers in their first appearance. Women were also frequently confined to marginalized roles and hyper-masculinized if they dared to deviate at all from the oversexualized, feminine norm. Women in the ring existed solely for the male gaze, as either hyper-masculinized comic relief or arm-candy for male wrestlers.

Since Trump’s election, elites have written many negative comparisons between Trump’s presidency and professional wrestling in the opinion pages. To many elites, pro wrestling is the perfect analogy for Trump: low-brow, racist, sexist, violent, and possessing a shaky relationship with the truth.

To be fair to these commentators, over the years Trump has done much to earn this comparison: at first by sponsoring the wrestling contests, then by throwing thousands of dollars from the rafters in a dramatic stunt, and later by being a physical participant in Wrestlemania 23. All this involvement with pro wrestling earned Trump a place in the WWE Hall of Fame, making his election the “first time in history a WWE Hall of Famer would ever hold the distinguished title of U.S. Commander-in-Chief.”

Indeed, there are many reasons why comparisons between Trump and pro wrestling are likely deserved. For example, who can blame commentators for drawing comparisons when the biggest donor to the fraudulent Donald J. Trump Foundation was the WWE? Or when Trump posts GIFs of him bodyslamming the CNN logo on Twitter?

#FraudNewsCNN #FNN pic.twitter.com/WYUnHjjUjg

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 2, 2017

However, it’s pretty clear when one scratches the surface of these criticisms even a little that the real target of many of these opinion pieces are the white working class. Dripping with condescension, these critical pieces often bear the same hallmarks of arguments for cultural superiority that are frequently levied by elites at the white working class. Fans of pro wrestling are reduced to caricatures of racism, sexism, violence, and yes, white trash. Some commentators have even tried to equate fandom of wrestling or other violent sports with support for Trump, as if by consuming this low-brow, culturally inferior sports entertainment it causes you a more gullible victim for Trump’s lies.

Professional wrestling is the perfect example of a sport that has acquired distributional significance, because it is strongly classed, both internally and externally. Externally, pro wrestling embodies the virtues of the lower classes in open displays of strength and violence. Internally, as discussed in the prior part in this series, wrestlers purposefully work to class the sport by playing on class conflict in their backstories.  What elites seek by putting down pro wrestling are the social profits they obtain by outwardly differentiating their own choices in consumption from the working class.

However, while the elites may continue to thumb their noses at the nation’s first pro wrestling president, they should probably take note that the animosity between wrestling fans and elites is mutual. Like the white-working class heroes that dominated pro wrestling storylines in past decades, white working class wrestling fans don’t very much like being told what to think or how to act.

Outside of the opinion pages, a different type of class conflict is happening in the ring. One Appalachian wrestler from Kentucky has capitalized on tension between elites and the working class by dubbing himself the Progressive Liberal. This uniquely Trump-era wrestler wears shirts emblazoned with Hillary Clinton’s face and trunks that bear Obama's face or say "Blue Wave". He berates the Appalachian crowd with airs of cultural superiority, calling them “Fox News maggots” and riffing on country music saying, “it’s simple and it’s boring, just like each and every one of you.” The wrestler also throws out nasty political one-liners like, “You know what, I think Bernie Sanders would make a great secretary of state” or “I want to exchange your bullets for bullet points. Bullet points of knowledge.”

I wonder how much right wingers will like the new gear I’m debuting this weekend. pic.twitter.com/SGzPd65w9a

— The Progressive Liberal Daniel Richards (@ProgressLib804) September 26, 2018

The Progressive Liberal acts out what white working-class fans fear from coastal elites: cultural superiority weaponized into a threat against their existence. The Progressive Liberal's patronizing espousal of elite liberal values makes him the perfect “heel” (i.e. the villain in a wrestling contest) for the Appalachian white working class because he threatens and denigrates their way of life.

So perhaps, instead of adding fuel to the fire and sneering at the “the lowbrow guilty pleasure” of professional wrestling, liberal elites should instead look to pro wrestling for clues on how they can recapture the white working class. It’s impossible to ignore how the average WWE viewer is exactly the sort-of person that Democrats failed to reach in this last election – white, male, low-income, and possessing less than a college degree. Quite simply, pro wrestling offers a unique insight into the white working class in America, primarily because they are its biggest fans.

A good start for elites would be accepting a more nuanced view on the white working class and learning to communicate with them on equal terms. While Trump represents the worst of pro wrestling, it is helpful to instead look at the best. The Dusty Rhodes or the Stone Colds of the sport were clearly able to communicate with the white working class, and it wasn’t because they were overtly racist or misogynist. What these white working class heroes did instead was authentically communicate that being working class was not an inferior way of life and that fans or even athletes didn’t need to change their culture or conform with the values of elites.

Tandem attacks on Trump and pro wrestling may give elites a nice frame for arguments for cultural superiority over the white working class, but ultimately, it’s not productive to moving the conversation forward. Democrats who won in deep red areas often did not directly attack Trump and instead avoided the extremes. They also directly appealed to working class voters by highlighting their working class backgrounds and sticking with non-partisan messaging around education and healthcare instead of divisive social issues.

Understanding the distinction between the worst of group and the best is completely lost on many elites because it is easier to be reductive about sports or classes of people than it is to have a nuanced perspective. (It’s probably also fair to say the same is true of the attitudes of many working class whites towards Blacks and Latinos.) However, if liberals want to be able to recapture the white working class and turn Trump from hero to heel, it may make sense to slack off of criticisms that espouse cultural superiority and instead turn to communications that will reassure working people that their way of life is safe.

On rural whites, in the context of Mississippi politics

The race to fill a U.S. Senate seat from Mississippi has been drawing lots of media attention, in part because it pits a white Republican woman, Cindy Hyde-Smith, against an African-American man, Mike Espy.  The other reason the race is attracting attention is that Cindy Hyde Smith has been--depending on your perspective--either dog-whistling or flat out race-baiting, as she has made comments about, for example, wanting a front-row seat if invited to a public hanging by one of her donors.  To that, Espy, who served as Secretary of Agriculture under President Bill Clinton, said the comment was "awful" and called it "tone deaf," though he did not square respond when questioned whether it was racist.  Both Walmart Corporation and Major League Baseball asked Hyde-Smith to return their campaign donations following that episode.  Hyde-Smith has also been recorded making comments about the desirability of suppressing the vote among liberal-leaning college students.  A few days ago, media outlets like USA Today began pointing out that Hyde-Smith attended high school at a "segregation academy," a private school set up to cater to wealthy whites (and even less wealthy ones) lest they be compelled to attend integrated public high schools.  Phil McCausland, reporting for NBC news, explains:

About 200,000 students moved to private schools between the 1960s and 1980s immediately after a series of Supreme Court decisions that began with that 1954 case. Two-thirds of those students came from six states: Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, and South Carolina, according to the Southern Education Foundation.

Personally, I blame Hyde-Smith much more for what she has said recently, as an adult, than for the decision her parents made to send her to a segregation academy.  The sins of the parents should not be visited on their children.  That said, her education in such a setting might explain her current views, and her lack of sensitization to issues regarding race and the ugly racial history of the South.   Further, a well-educated woman like Hyde-Smith should have caught up on a more accurate version of U.S. history by now.

The New York Times reported yesterday on this Mississippi race, and I thought some of the observations there were especially interesting regarding the views of "rural whites," a term that is sometimes a proxy for working-class whites.  The headline for Jonathan Martin's story is, "Across South, Democrats Who Speak Boldly Risk Alienating Rural White Voters" and here's part of the lede focusing on Espy's apparent effort not to alienate "rural white" voters:

When Mike Espy ... faced his opponent at a debate ahead of this Tuesday’s runoff election, he had to make a choice: confront Ms. Hyde-Smith over her comments about attending “a public hanging,” which evoked the state’s racist history, or take a milder approach to avoid alienating the conservative-leaning white voters who will most likely decide the election. 

He chose the latter. 

“The world knows what she said, the world knows that those comments were harmful and hurtful,” Mr. Espy said afterward, sounding not entirely convinced.

In a state where politics has long been cleaved by race, Mr. Espy was reckoning with a conundrum that Democrats face across the South — from Mississippi and Alabama, which have been hostile to the party for years, to states like Florida and Georgia that are more hospitable in cities but still challenging in many predominantly white areas. Even as they made gains in the 2018 elections in the suburbs that were once Republican pillars, Democrats are seeing their already weak standing in rural America erode even further.

Comparing Espy's situation to those of Stacy Abrams (Georgia), Andrew Gillum (Florida) and Beto O'Rourke,  Martin notes that "in rural county after rural county, this trio of next-generation Democrats performed worse than President Barack Obama did in 2012."  The Democrats also lost Senate seats and governor's race outside the South, in places like Iowa and Ohio "with more conventional candidates whose strength in cities and upper-income suburbs was not enough to overcome their deficits in less densely populated areas."

The story quotes Steve Schale, a Florida-based Democratic strategist, saying something I keep hearing in the wake of the mid-term elections:  Democrats don't have to "win" the white working class--they just need to lose them by a smaller margin than they did in 2016 and 2018:

There’s a baseline percent of the white vote you have to get to win and you can’t get to it just through young and progressive excitement. The path from 48 to 50 is like climbing Mount Everest without oxygen.

How do you do that?  Some suggest you have to avoid making white people uncomfortable, and when there's too much focus on race and racism, "rural" whites are put off.  (What are the salient characteristics of "rural" here?  low-education?  traditional?  static?  insular?)   Is it guilt that causes them to be put off?  or "white fragility"?  Espy's avoidance of calling out Hyde-Smith's comments as "racist" seems consistent with this need to coddle whites--not to remind them of this nation's horrific racist past.  An anecdote illustrating that can be found here, from this Washington Post story about evangelical Christians in Alabama.  One feared "the racial divide" was getting worse. 

The evidence was all the black people protesting about the police, and all the talk about the legacy of slavery, which Sheila never believed was as bad as people said it was. “Slaves were valued,” she said. “They got housing. They got fed. They got medical care.”  [See related stories regarding how we teach slavery here, here and here]  

She was suspicious of what she saw as the constant agitation of blacks against whites, the taking down of Confederate memorials and the raising of others, such as the new memorial to the victims of lynching, just up the highway in Montgomery. 

“I think they are promoting violence,” Sheila said, thinking about the 800 weathered, steel monoliths hanging from a roof to evoke the lynchings, one for each American county where the violence was carried out, including Crenshaw County, where a man named Jesse Thornton was lynched in 1940 in downtown Luverne. 

“How do you think a young black man would feel looking at that?” Linda asked. “Wouldn’t you feel a sickness in your stomach?” 

“I think it would only make you have more violent feelings — feelings of revenge,” said Sheila. 

It reminded her of a time when she was a girl in Montgomery, when the now-famous civil rights march from Selma was heading to town and her parents, fearing violence, had sent her to the country to stay with relatives. 

“It’s almost like we’re going to live that Rosa Parks time again,” she said, referring to the civil rights activist. “It was just a scary time, having lived through it.”

This also reminds me of a topic I've been preoccupied with in recent years, especially since the election of 2016:  the divide between the chattering classes' understanding of racism (which is very broad) and the much narrower definition of racism associated with less educated folks.  I wrote about it some here.  How are we going to bridge this gap and get white people to be more comfortable with --or at least more willing--to see how they have been beneficiaries of a racist past and that they have a responsibility to denounce that history and take the nation clearly in a different direction?  Surely it's going to include better educating our students (I'm talking public primary and secondary education)  about slavery and its aftermath, something our nation has not done effectively.  Read more here and here.

Cross-posted to Legal Ruralism.