Progressives Play ‘Outsider’ to Attack Middle American Trump Voters

Since 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.”

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Nate Hochman

Nate Hochman was a staff writer at National Review.

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Since 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.”