What’s Going on With America’s White People?
I highly recommend that you read through this in depth examination of Trump’s white voters.
Case: Yes, that was Nate Silver’s study. The people who are actually voting for Trump, he argued, were the higher class than the people voting for [Bernie] Sanders and Clinton. So, I think our data is very imprecise here, and then, when we try to create a voting bloc and we use one term to describe them—whether it’s “the black vote” or “the women vote,” now it’s “the working class vote”—I think that can be really misleading.
Anderson: I agree. You know, when you’re talking about the angst and anxiety and feeling of being stifled and that kind of despair, what I see is that, as African-Americans advance in this society in terms of gaining their citizenship rights, that there is a wave of what I’ve been calling “white rage,” which are the movements within legislative bodies and within the judicial sector in terms of policies and laws and rulings that undercut that advancement. We saw it after Reconstruction, during Reconstruction. We saw it during the Great Migration, then with the wave that we’re looking at right now, after Barack Obama’s election.
I actually think that Donald Trump is changing the way people think about other groups of people in a very negative way.Thrush: I want to use this word gingerly, but aren’t we also talking about kind of the death of white supremacy in the most literal sense of that term, that there is no longer a premium that one gets because of the color of one’s skin in terms of better wages or better social standing? I mean, are we sort of seeing the death of this system writ large?