“Many analysts and leading Democrats,” Molyneux writes “have attributed Donald Trump’s impressive 2016 vote margin among<br />white working-class voters to his embrace of economic populism.” He quotes Bernie Sanders’ postelection comments:<br />Millions of Americans registered a protest vote on Tuesday, expressing their fierce opposition to an economic and political system<br />that puts wealthy and corporate interests over their own.... Donald J. Trump won the White House because his campaign rhetoric successfully tapped into a very real and justified anger, an anger that many traditional Democrats feel.<br />In May, the Public Religion Research Institute released a report, “Beyond Economics: Fears<br />of Cultural Displacement Pushed the White Working Class to Trump.” It found that<br />more than half (52%) of white working-class Americans believe discrimination against<br />whites is as big a problem as discrimination against blacks and other minorities<br />and that “four in ten white working-class Americans agree” with the statement<br />that “efforts to increase diversity almost always come at the expense of whites.”<br />In a separate argument, Nicholas Carnes and Noam Lupu, professors of political science at Duke and Vanderbilt, challenge a basic premise on the left —<br />that the populism of Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren could have stemmed the loss of non-college whites to Trump.<br />While the populism espoused by Sanders and Warren is economic, challenging C. E.O.s, major corporations<br />and “the billionaire class,” Trump is the messenger of what Molyneux calls “political populism,” which “is, fundamentally, a story about the failure of government.”<br />White working-class voters’ negative view of government spending undermines their potential support for many progressive economic policies.
