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Going to argue, mildly, with this @streeterryan piece for a moment: https://thedispatch.com/p/trumpism-is-more-about-culture-than">https://thedispatch.com/p/trumpis...
I said mildly because I completely agree with him that Trumpism is "an anti-leftist, anti-elitist cultural stance" and that most working-class Trump supporters do not have deeply-held views on, say, the details of industrial policy.
However the survey data he cites seems to show two things. First that working-class Trump supporters are not suffering from a deep sense of economic despair:
Second that what we call conservative "cultural resentment" or anti-elitism or what-have-you is stronger as you move up the income and educational ladder:
But if the second point is true then it seems less certain, not more, that cultural resentment alone was the elixir that moved more rural and working-class votes to the GOP in the Trump era -- since they& #39;re *not* the most resentful part of the coalition.
So what moved them? Working class Trump voters are as economically optimistic as upper-class Trump voters, but their views on economics nonetheless tend to be less libertarian -- visible, e.g., in the latest polling on Covid relief:
Ryan writes that "if Trump had campaigned on eliminating the inheritance tax for the rich while keeping up his anti-elitist bluster, his support would have remained unchanged." That might be so. But consider a different example: Health care.
Had Trump run in 2016 on the Ryan plan for Medicare and kept up his anti-elitist bluster, would he have won the Midwest? I doubt it, not least because his lowest approval ratings as president came when ... his party attempted to repeal Obamacare:
The point being: Working-class voters don& #39;t necessarily support the specifics of any given populist policy agenda, and they don& #39;t necessarily feel a sense of despair over the economy. But they do hold economic views that place them to left of the Tea Party-era GOP ...
... and moving away from Tea Party policy in some ways, away from austerity and entitlement cuts especially, probably was crucial to Trumpism& #39;s power, no less than all the cultural stuff than Ryan rightly highlights. /end
