Trump supporters

Zohar Lazar

James Wolcott in Vanity Fair:

...Since the election we’ve heard a steady tom-tom beat even from those on the left, such as Bernie Sanders, that it was economic anxiety that drove many traditional white working-class voters away from the Democrats into the pelican flappers of Donald Trump.

But the hate, bigotry, and cackling cruelty of the circus maximus that is Trump’s first term carries too loud a primal yowl to be ascribed to stagnant wages and factory closings. Something far more septic and serrated is going on. Deep data mining, as opposed to anecdotal fishing at the diner, has unearthed a more plausible driver for the Trump victory: not “economic anxiety” but racial animosity. 

A roundup of post-election studies and surveys by German Lopez at Vox cited a paper by a trio of social scientists that found “that voters’ measures of sexism and racism correlated much more closely with support for Trump than economic dissatisfaction after controlling for factors like partisanship and political ideology.” 

The headline for a long, exhaustively detailed article in The Nation by Sean McElwee and Jason McDaniel slammed home the point with a two-by-four: “Economic Anxiety Didn’t Make People Vote Trump, Racism Did”...