Casting themselves as outsiders allows them to ‘punch up’ at Middle American Trump voters.
Casting themselves as outsiders allows them to ‘punch up’ at Middle American Trump voters.
S ince disaffected white voters in Middle America first flocked to the person of Donald Trump on the 2016 campaign trail, an entire cottage industry of think-pieces, op-eds, and explainers has sought to “debunk” the popular conception of the MAGA-hat voter base as a dispossessed or marginalized demographic. The argument goes something like this: Trump’s “working-class-fueled victory that many journalists imagined” is a myth — actually, “many Trump voters” live in “reasonably good” economic circumstances. His electorate was “driven by fear of losing status, not economic anxiety” — in fact, “it wasn’t the economy, but racism and xenophobia that explained Trump’s rise.” They weren’t the forgotten men and women that the former president appealed to in his inauguration speech; they were just bigots.
The latest example of this is Patrick Wyman’s essay “American Gentry,” published in the Atlantic last week. According to Wyman, America’s “gentry” class is the regional “salt-of-the-earth millionaires who see themselves as local leaders in business and politics,” but they are “distinct from the highest levels of a regime’s political and economic elite.” This gentry is where power actually resides in the United States. They are a “local elite” composed primarily of entrepreneurs, franchise owners, manufacturing or agribusiness executives, and other well-to-do local leaders whose wealth and prestige are inextricably tied to areas that “don’t figure prominently in the country’s popular imagination or its political narratives.” But despite its geographical obscurity, the gentry class “stands at the apex of the social order throughout huge swaths of the country,” he says. “It shapes our economic and political world thanks to its resources and comparatively large numbers, yet it’s practically invisible to the popular eye.”
Trump’s election, as always, lies in the not-too-distant background of this analysis. Wyman begins his essay by referencing pro-Trump boat parades as a prime example of the gentry class, which — unlike the coastal elite — supported Trump in large numbers. “These were the people who, remembering or inventing their tradition of dominance over their towns and cities, flocked to Make America Great Again,” he writes. Much of that sociological account may be true, but it also raises the question: How can a class that “stands at the apex of the social order” also be so dispossessed as to “flock to Make America Great Again,” motivated primarily by a nostalgia for their lost “tradition of dominance”?
The truth is that the gentry’s relative wealth — the main metric that elite progressives use to tell the story of Trump voters and their supposed privilege — has little bearing on their actual power in 21st- century America. A combination of neoliberal economics and aggressive cultural liberalism over the past four decades has led to increased centralization of cultural, economic, and political power in dense urban areas. Financialization, for instance, has rewarded paper-pushers in the managerial class at the expense of brick-and-mortar business owners outside of New York, Chicago, and a handful of other cities. And the credentialed bureaucrats who have benefited the most from this arrangement have wielded their new power to advance a cultural understanding that is actively hostile to the traditionalist, Christian, and primarily white population in the vast American middle — even as they sternly lecture that population about its “privilege.”
If wealth alone were the best measurement of political power in contemporary America, then Asians, especially those of Indian and Taiwanese descent, as well as some Arabic and African immigrant groups, would be far more privileged than whites. Confronted with that point, progressives like Wyman would probably protest that the mechanisms that uphold and reproduce social privilege are more complex than numerical measurements such as household income. In more than one sense, they would be right: Political, cultural, and technological trends have at least as much to do with a group’s status in society as wealth does.
Wyman tries to circumvent that point by arguing that the wealth of these elites “derives not from their salary — this is what separates them from even extremely prosperous members of the professional-managerial class, such as doctors and lawyers — but from their ownership of assets.” Those assets, he argues, can give them a “stranglehold” over what gets done in some regions of the country. But the places in Middle America where those assets are owned and operated are quickly becoming obsolete: While they may continue to be profitable for the foreseeable future, their broader influence on the national stage continues to diminish rapidly. The power of these Middle American “elites” is dying alongside the communities where they reside.
In fact, even within these increasingly alienated swaths of America, the relatively conservative class of small-business owners and local philanthropists is being crowded out by economic centralization. Powerful coast-dwelling investors and multinational corporations are ruthlessly hollowing out regional cultural identities and traditions even as they corrode local economies. “Corporations and hedge funds now own most local and regional newspapers,” writes the left-wing blogger Daniel G. Jennings. “Today’s newspaper publisher is a corporate apparatchik whose major role is cost cutting.” That’s not all: “The investor class is even coming for agriculture. . . . Bill Gates and his ex-wife Melinda are America’s largest owners of farmland. The Gates family owned 242,000 acres of farmland in July 2021.” On top of that, Chinese investors now own 192,00 acres of American farmland — so much so “that there is now political pressure to stop the practice,” Jennings writes.
So how does power work in modern America? As Declan Leary points out in the American Conservative, it’s not to the benefit of the so-called American gentry:
Politically, it is virtually indisputable that the vast majority of power is currently vested in the federal government, far removed not just from Americans’ concerns but their influence as well — including even the gentry outside Washington. Economically, power is disproportionately held by multinational organizations — including both highly visible, public-facing ones like Amazon, Walmart, and Apple, as well as less headline-friendly institutions like big banks and holding companies. Culturally, everything lies in the hands of a few Hollywood giants, the Big Five book publishers, and the handful of tech companies that dominate the digital space.
Wealthy or not, rural and exurban America is alienated from the places where most of the nation’s important decisions are made. These urban centers are full of the financially affluent, but that is not what truly makes them the elite. The primary source of their power is their control of American identity — the narratives, symbols, cultural shibboleths and taboos, and social arrangements that define our self-understanding and the structure of our shared political life. A New York Times writer may not be able to buy a multimillion-dollar house in Palm Beach, but he is infinitely more able to imprint in the halls of American power his vision of how the world should be. A well-placed federal bureaucrat may not have immediate access to the capital to build a successful construction company in Little Rock, Ark., or Lubbock, Texas, but he can shape the conditions in which others do so.
It is proximity to these organs of central power — not wealth or control of assets in small-town Idaho or rural Nebraska — that is the basis of status and privilege. The “forgotten men and women” that Trump spoke to and inspired were not necessarily poor, though many of them were. Rather, they had been left out of or actively excluded from the political and cultural center of their own country. Their role in our shared civic life was implicitly viewed as less legitimate than that of their urban counterparts. They no longer had a place in the stories that we told about ourselves as a nation, except as the butt of late-night comedy jokes or as a general representation of stupidity and backwardness in popular culture and mainstream media. It’s no wonder that white working-class voters who told pollsters that “I often feel like a stranger in my own land” were 3.5 times more likely to vote for Trump than those who did not have that feeling.
The repeated efforts to reframe Trump voters as denizens of privilege reads as a desperate bid by progressives to avoid self-critical introspection. If the true elites are the Trump base rather than the progressives who control the universities, Big Business, corporate media, the culture industry, the nonprofit sector, the federal bureaucracy, and almost every other center of power in modern American society, then coastal progressives need not admit the uncomfortable truth — uncomfortable in a culture that prizes victimhood above all else — that they are the ones who hold the reins of power. Today’s aristoi is all noblesse and no oblige: “An outsider pose is appealing because it allows powerful people to distance themselves from the consequences of their decisions,” writes Sam Goldman in the New York Times. “When things go well, they are happy to take credit. When they go badly, it’s useful to blame an incompetent, hostile establishment for thwarting their good intentions or visionary plans.”
What Goldman does not mention — but is at least as important — is that progressive elites’ refusal to acknowledge their own privilege also allows them to mock and denigrate their embattled fellow citizens under the pretense of “punching up.” The insistence that red America is privileged provides the pretext for the relentless assault on its symbols, traditions, and way of life. But that’s no way to govern a nation. Until our leaders recognize that, the possibility of peaceful coexistence in this big, beautiful country of ours will continue to elude us all.