The White Working Class is a Political Fiction

Credit Image: AlbertHerring / Wikimedia

In the aftermath of President Donald Trump’s victory, as I’m sure you’d like to forget, two primary narratives coalesced around the white working class: pity and scorn. Commentators either gazed upon these wretched souls with a restrained sympathy, believing they’d been driven to the polls as victims of automation or bad trade deals that plagued their communities, or else they saw them as essentially backwards, ignorant racists who had been duped into voting against their economic interests by a demagogue willing to flirt with their reactionary worldview. The former comprised the infamous “economic anxiety” thesis; the latter mutated into a perverse satisfaction that struggling Trump supporters were getting what they deserved.

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There are white people, and there are working-class people. Gather those individuals who meet both criteria and, voila, you have a political demographic. But researchers generally use narrower parameters to define the white working class, focusing on three key attributes: a non-Hispanic white racial identification, the lack of a four-year college degree, and a non-salaried job.

This definition is fraught, if not totally incoherent. First off, the existence of the many white Americans with a four-year college degree who hold non-salaried jobs, myself included, poses a crucial question: Why would college degrees disqualify me and other educated people from the working class? Given the tremendous amount of debt many of us now have as a result of said degrees, our lives are increasingly defined by profound financial precarity that contradicts any traditional notion of middle-class stability.

This can be explained by the definition’s more troubling mistake: a conflation of class with education. Whites without college degrees are often defined in opposition to whites with college degrees (the only race for which pollsters make this distinction). The implication here is that educated whites are more financially comfortable, and for this reason likely have different political interests. But as the existence of a growing pool of educated yet dismally compensated adjunct instructors and bartenders and “independent contractors” proves, education is not a guarantor of financial stability.

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Some of this confusion stems from polling data. When researchers sort white voters by education, it’s true: “non-college whites” prefer Trump by huge margins (between 24 and 26 points, depending on who he’s running against). Combine this with a broader misconception that lack of education implies lack of financial success, you seem to have sufficient evidence that his support comes overwhelmingly from uneducated, working-class whites.

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What those polls don’t tell you is this: despite higher rates of enrollment to the general population, over half of small-businesses owners have no college degree (including Mark Zuckerberg, whose own little business has done quite well). Who, we might ask, has historically supported Republican policies that lower taxes? Small-business owners.

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Nevertheless, the media continues to treat uneducated whites as a monolith, one that not only votes as cohesive block but is so staunchly resistant to progress that their behavior is effectively predetermined. At The Nation, Stephen Philips dismisses the demographic altogether, arguing that “since non-college-educated white Americans will be the last to leave the Trump ship of state, it is foolhardy to spend significant time, money, and attention trying to change their minds.” A recent study by the Center for American Progress, cited in The Atlantic, similarly treats uneducated whites as Trump’s only hope for winning: “For Trump to win the popular vote, he needs—above all—to increase his support among his strongest demographic: white noncollege voters.”

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The framing of this issue is not an accident. Whites with a college degree — to which pollsters and pundits and “expert” mainstream media professionals belong — are predominately liberal, and they understand the world through a lens of meritocracy. For this reason, they tend to have a very poor understanding of class. Just look at the “white working class” label, which treats “working class” as an ascriptive identity no different than race or gender. It turns the working class into something people are, not a function of what they do. It becomes a cultural description totally divorced from labor and wealth, only to be gleaned from outward displays of “class” that come with intelligence, appearance, taste, and all those things that make up meritocratic ideas of “workers.”

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