Before the w-w-c narrative gets re-entrenched for a second time... a reminder that, in 2016, data from the Pew Research Centre suggested that it was middle‐class communities that overwhelmingly shifted to Trump & were largely responsible for his victory pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2016…
Only one‐third of those who voted for Trump in 2016 came from the lowest income bracket (earning below $50,000) and, as Silver argued, Trump supporters were generally better off than most Americans fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-m…
Trump supporters were generally better off than most Americans. The swing to Trump was carried not so much by the white working‐class vote, but the vote of the white middle class, including college‐educated white people washingtonmonthly.com/2017/01/18/tru…
David Roediger pointed out that the term ‘working class’ was barely present in the 2016 US presidential campaign with candidates referring to the ‘middle classes’ or ‘working families’. It only became a significant rhetorical device after the election lareviewofbooks.org/article/whos-a…
The most stark example of this mis‐description in the US context is Joan Williams's book, White Working Class, which despite its title is not, as Roediger comments, ‘about the working class in any meaningful sense’
As Williams herself clarifies, the ‘object of study is really the “true middle class”’ ... lareviewofbooks.org/article/whos-a…
Similarly, Arlie Hochschild slips from identifying the concerns of the subjects of her book, Strangers in their 'own' Land, as ‘middle class’ prior to the 2016 election to calling them ‘working class’ in pieces written after the election of Trump newyorker.com/news/benjamin-…
This deliberate misrepresentation of arguments about middle‐class voters, relabelled & packaged as being about working‐class experiences, is not only disingenuous on its own terms ...
It also displaces structures of racialized inequality from the conversation, seeking, as it does, to make white working‐class identity, and not structural issues of relative advantage and disadvantage, the primary issue in explanations of the outcome ...
If you interested in the full analysis - which, as an added bonus, throws in Brexit & debates here in the UK - see this piece by me from 2017 ... onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.11…
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