Exh. motnjj

I agree with Christian Parenti saying that Trump is a big bad wolf and that Trump has legitimized dangerous street-level hate,

Yet I can see where Michael Parenti comes from in saying that he believes people took from Trump’s message what they wanted to hear, and not all the bad bigoted stuff. 

I can see where Christian Parenti comes from when he says they liked the focus on jobs, the recognition of their economic suffering, and the apparent ways Trump’s words owned smug liberal 2.0ers of the professional managerial class

Yes I can see where Christian Parenti comes from when he says that Trump does  “articulate surprisingly subversive political truths about the economy and America’s role in the world.” and where he spbuys into Trump’s rhetoric about withdrawing from NATO commitments and demanding that other countries pay a greater share of global security costs as “anti-war, anti-NATO, maybe even anti-imperialist riffs.” (I am anti NATO after all)

I hear Parenti when he says he believes the MAGA trolls fans may even hear Trump’s constant mantra about building the explicitly anti-immigrant wall, as “a public works scheme, an infrastructure based jobs program.” It appears Parenti wanted to hear a lot of hidden New Dealism in Trump’s rhetoric (which I admit would have been base)

I forsee three main options when I assess Christian Parenti’s claims about how Trump’s messaging is “really” received. 

Option 1 is for me to agree with his portrayal of the pro-working class, anti-imperialist, anti-elitist/professional managerial class, anti-war, Trump exhilarating the US masses on those frequencies (even if he don’t actually mean it). 

Option 2 is for me to contemplate that it is the bigoted, nativist, hyper-nationalist, pro-capitalist, Al Bundy No MAAM, anti-woke traditionalist, macho, street-level haterade messaging that resonated most. 

Option 3 is for me to see both as partially true: Trump’s messaging about restoring the US’s greatness resonates with his base exactly due to it being wrapped in the reactionary bigotry of his presentation. 

In regards to Parenti’s wish (and my wish to a lesser extent) to see latent socialism in Trump’s base, something that Gerald Horne said once comes to mind: “Just because it’s working class doesn’t mean it’s good”

But maybe just maybe before we do we must determine whether or not Donald Trump’s base is even working class. 

Phil Neel, in his book Hinterland: America’s New Landscape of Class and Conflict interprets Trump’s base as mainly “in the whitening exurb,” made up of “the wealthier landholders, business owners, cops, soldiers, or self-employed contractors” who “recruit from adjacent zones of abject whited poverty, essentially funneling money from their own employment in urban industry into hinterland political projects.” 

Mobilizing votes for Donald Trump was one type political project that fits this bill. As for the “working class” as Trump’s base, Neel claims there “was not even resounding support for Trump across the mud-soaked trailer parks and wind-swept mountain hamlets of the American hinterland, where most people simply did not vote” (Neel, Hinterland, 57).(Trump wasn’t bad enough to cause them to vote D though)

Another so called study entitled “Nationally Poor, Locally Rich” claims it found that while a lot of pundits claimed “the white working class” made up Trump’s base, their claims were dependent on national income stats. 

By adjusting the income data to what the average incomes for various regions in the US are, the authors claim they found that “support for Trump was strongest among the locally well off — that is, culturally WASP voters and culturally WASP adjacent voters with incomes that are good enough for their area, though not necessarily for the country as a whole

Christian Parenti’s explanation for “why almost 60 million Americans voted for 45” now has holes in it.

He believed that in 2016 that “[t]he answer seems clear: it was Trump’s ersatz populism, anti-war message, and his ability to, in a Bill Clinton style, ‘feel’ people’s real pain.” 

When it is the more rich voters in any given locale who vote for Trump, and more overall for Republicans, the “anxiety of the white working class” narrative is far less persuasive. Maybe Trump’s rhetoric is not so much “ersatz populism” as it is merely “Right wing populism.”

Parenti was hearing the Donald but without the needed geographical and economic context he was unable to get why people voted for him. 

During this process, Parenti validated Trump’s rhetorical style, a sort of Right wing populism with appeals to working class issues wrapped in hyper-nationalist anti blackness and white chauvinism

The locally more well off voters, a type of small business/petit bourgeois class, listened and understood Trump’s messaging, which is the reason they voted for him. It’s vital also to remember that almost 54 million eligible voters sat out the 2016 election, meaning almost half of eligible voters. So who knows how they would have voted

I understand income is not the same as class but even with caveats about local rich vs national, the correlation between lower income and less voting still seems to go against the idea that Trump’s messaging hooked into working class anxiety and pain to energize them to action.