Around the same time, they [working class voters] will realize that suburban white-collar workers - themselves desparately afraid of being downsized - are not going to let themselves be taxed to provide social benefits for anyone else.
At that point something will crack. The nonsuburban electorate will decide that the system has failed and start looking around for a strongman to vote for - someone willing to assure them that, once he is elected, the smug bureaucrats, tricky lawyers, overpaid bond salesman, and postmodernist professors will no longer be calling the shots…
One thing that is very likely to happen is that the gains made in the past forty years by black and brown Americans, and by homosexuals, will be wipe out. Jocular contempt for women will come back into fashion… All the resentment which badly educated Americans feel about having their manners dictated to them by college graduates will find an outlet.
Except that argument wasn’t just that the working class would lead to a Trumpian figure, it literally says white fear across social class would be led to a Trump - which is 100% accurate. The true Republicans - the suburbanites making white collar wages - is the core of Trump’s base, but his targeting of race and immigration brought in the most white and male votes possible.
This is exactly what happened. The first line makes it clear that the upper middle class will always vote for the Republican, the second makes it clear that rural voters will overwhelmingly support a strong populist that promises to screw over the elites, and the third says that it will be a reversal of any political support for anything that isn’t straight white male. It doesn’t matter that the working class didn’t shift as Republican as the upper middle class, it just matters that millions of working class voters (particularly rural working class) got convinced that Trump would drain the swamp, build the wall, and quash the slight equalization between races that they feel has fucked them over - or at least that there wasn’t any reason to oppose those things.
I have and will continue to defend people against placing all the blame on the working class, but I will also point out that white people overwhelmingly voted for trump and so did men. It’s extremely important to realize how it’s complicated, and that no one actually knows if those groups (white people and men) would have actually supported Sanders over Trump - there is a lot more money behind convincing those groups Trump was the panacea, which is obvious when you look at who is still backing Trump.
