In “Trump’s election and the ‘white working class’: What we missed,” Christine J. Walley asks the following series of questions intended to complicate our understanding of social class:
“Class” … is a notoriously fuzzy concept, and media coverage during the election only enhanced the confusion. Should social class be defined based on one’s relation to the means of production, as classical political economists might argue? Should it be based on occupation, income, wealth, education, status, cultural capital, or family background? How are its economic dimensions linked to social, cultural, and historical ones? How is class in the United States (and elsewhere) bound up with projections onto others of our own hopes and fears about the future? And how do we often argue about class through discourses of race and gender even as class is co-constituted with them in complex ways…? (232)
According to Walley, how did media and politicians’ discussion of “white working class” Trump voters distort or oversimplify the concept of class?
April 30, 2019 at 12:07 am
Reading this article reminded me of one of the first classes we had this semester. The discussion was about why most people would identitfy as middle class, and why that question is so hard to answer. I think that relates here in terms of the ambiguity of the working class. It is too broad to label. I consider myself from a working class town, but the nuances within my small community are distinct. Some of the most succcessfull people in my town did not go to college, or barely graduated high school. Others went to college and live a modest life. Class to me is to relative to define. Trumps election oversimplified the term which in turn ignored how detailed determining class is. His campaign took a populist turn by appealing to the “working class” which seems synomous with being an American. The definitions used in the media grouped this majority, despite the drastic differences in race, income, education and other aspects that help determine class. This in turn furthers inequality by ignoring the struggles faced by the lower-middle class that are not faced by the upper-middle class.
April 29, 2019 at 2:52 pm
According to Christine Walley, the media and politicians’ have distorted the conception of class by making the definition too vague, which forces people to be placed in certain classes without thinking about many other factors that play into determining social class. The definition that was used in the presidential election coverage was based on the binary distinction between those with or without a bachelor’s degree. By separating class based on this one distinction, the grouping of people does not equate or make sense because other factors are not being thought about. Many people are placed in the working class since they do not have a bachelor’s degree but are making a yearly income that should have them in the middle class. Another example that Walley gives of lumping together different groups based on this definition of class, is how people working on Wall Street in New York, among the top 1% in terms of wealth are grouped with elementary school teachers since they both have a bachelor’s degree. Walley says that perhaps the distortion of class went unremarked because that meant it would reinforce the narrating’s class description of the white working-class bigotry that people use to describe Trump’s rise in popularity.
April 29, 2019 at 2:47 pm
According to Walley, discussion of “white working class” Trump voters distorted the idea of class. For example, both “dislocated workers in the Rust Belt” and “more well-off conservatives in the South and elsewhere” have been defined as the working white class in recent media depictions, despite major differences between the two. The definition of “working class” as used by the media was far too broad, mixing together groups with different political, economic, and social backgrounds. By putting all of these people into one bunch, it “contributed to Trump’s election and a demographic reductionism that distracted attention from other competing factors at play and from the multiple ways that class is constituted”. Voters are instead seen as “demographic groups whose fears and biases are to be marketed to” instead of being seen as individuals who should be engaged in civic debate. By marketing to a white-working class, he is ignoring the intersection between class and other identities. It allowed for the sole focus on things such as “the centrality of economic concerns for many white voters, the “white privilege” of those who could register economic grievances by voting for Trump without having to fear the bigotry his campaign was unleashing, and the channeling of economic resentments against Others” (234).
April 29, 2019 at 2:38 pm
Walley talks about how the phrase ‘(working) class’ is defined too broadly. How one’s class is defined/ accounted for, whether intersectionalities of race, gender, etc. come into play, what its significance is short- and long-term are, etc. is not understood universally. Walley argues that in the U.S. presidential election coverage, class was defined as the binary of those with a bachelor’s degree versus those without one, but class is not nearly this simple. It may not seem like it matters, but when class is oversimplified in these ways and defines class and categorizes people’s classes abstractly, it overlooks problematic inequality that needs to be combatted. When this happens and both the media and politicians further a narrative that doesn’t speak to legitimate issues that many people have (as they did), progress cannot occur. “Contemporary election campaigns, in general, engage in a kind of demographic reductionism that depicts voters as demographic groups whose fears and biases are to be marketed to rather than as citizens to be engaged in civic debate” and this has proven to be the main problem – when political agendas don’t actually help people effectively because they don’t pay attention to people themselves.
April 29, 2019 at 12:51 pm
The media and politicians discussion of the white working class distorted the perception of class by oversimplifying it and disregarding the nuances associated with it. Understanding the complexity of class is important in understanding underlying political motivations, therefore it is problematic to oversimplify the definition of class. In her paper, “Trump’s election and the ‘white working class’,” Christine J Walley, she explains that the definition of class in the 2016 US presidential election was a binary distinction between those who have a bachelor’s degree and those who do not. This definition along with being vague is also disruptive, as many American’s define themselves as middle-class, and this definition of class leaves no middle option, only upper or lower class. Walley explains the flaws in this oversimplified definition of class, stating that although Trump had strong support from industrial areas, the average Trump voter earned $72,000 a year, which is above the US median yearly income of $56,000. This statistic reveals the disparities between the social definition of class and actual income. Walley argues that there are two groups of Trump voters within the media labeled “working class.” These groups are dislocated Rust Belt workers and better off conservatives from the South and other typically conservative areas. These two groups hold largely different experiences, political motives and socioeconomic, yet were categorized together by the media and politicians during the 2016 Presidential Election. Such a binary definition helps Trump succeed with his hateful divisive rhetoric, and the media and politicians should work to define Trump supporters in a more nuanced fashion in order to best understand the roots of political and economic insecurity felt by voters.
April 29, 2019 at 11:59 am
Wally’s main focus of her analysis of the 2016 presidential election was on the targeting of demographics. Here, she discusses the problem of oversimplification caused by the political discourse casting too wide a net to describe “white working-class.” Rather than distinguish class between social capital, earnings, or occupation, the journalists covering the election used the binary distinction of achieving a college diploma as the sole marker of class. Thus, the white-working class became much larger than it truly is, under typical class descriptions. The tendency for people to self select by identifying in the middle of a class spectrum was no longer available. This definition of class conflated several different demographics into one.
The media’s description of the white working-class distorted concepts of class by oversimplifying class barriers. Wally uses examples of “working class” regions to show how diverse groups can be within this distinction.
But it’s not just the working class that were supporters of President Trump. Wally points out that people from all over class lines supported Trump. His promises of new jobs for the working class (whether false or not) appealed to the rust belt region, and his concerns of economic insecurities matched those of his white voters, according to Wally.
In her conclusion, Wally states that Trump was able to market himself to his white voters, but that “marketing is not the same as governing.” However, in modern politics, both are necessary, in order to govern effectively, first a candidate must market themself to larger demographics. This is part of the class distinction problem. As politicians try to market themselves to large demographics of people, they tend to conflate the varying viewpoints amongst individuals. This is what led to the distortion and oversimplification of “Trump’s white working-class.”
April 29, 2019 at 10:31 am
Walley explores the 2016 presidential election, specifically looking at the media portrayals and definitions of the “white working class” – Trump’s support base. The media defined the white working class in multiple ways, which lead to confusion. Walley said, “Part of the confusion stemmed from the overly broad definition of working class used by many journalists and pollsters, one that conflated different groups of whites with starkly different political, social, and economic histories and concerns (Metzgar 2016). As a result, there is a pressing need to untangle election commentary around class.” (Walley 231). Walley finds that the US presidential election coverage focused a crude definition of class – a divide between those who have a bachelor’s degree and those who do not, which subsequently erased the middle category of class many Americans place themselves in.
Walley finds the limits of this narrow definition when analyzing two groups of Trump voters. Looking at two regions that were historically blue – the Lake Charles region of Louisiana and the Calumet region southeast from Chicago, Walley finds vastly different groups of people that the media groups together under the term “white working class.” In Lake Charles, a region historically tied to the southern Democrats, now aligned with conservatives in government. People in this region participate in “identifying up” in class terms, strengthening ties to Trump (233). Similarly, the rust belt region outside Chicago has flipped from blue to red, but this transformation is largely because of the waning steel industry, which hurt both the white and African American middle-class populations. Instead of looking closely at the social and economic factors that contributed to the newfound Trump support in these regions, media outlets placed them together.