HITTING BOTTOM
Why Minorities and Working-Class Democrats Voted for Trump
President Donald is the true Obama-Biden legacy
A Democrat from birth
The Bronx of my childhood was a paradise. My street ran alongside a section of the old Croton Aqueduct, by then long disused, which we kids called the Ackey. On its banks grew trees and bushes and wild flowers forming a ribbon of thicket in which we played, and through which we “hiked.”
We were always in the street. We learned our games and rhymes by word of mouth, from older to younger. We chose our adventures and settled disputes among ourselves. We played stick ball and ringolevio and skully, red rover and stoop ball, and a deliciously sadistic variety of Johnny on a pony. We raced about on cheap noisy skates with metal wheels.
In this urban sanctuary I grew up safe, loved, happy, and unmistakably working class, yet somehow I slipped away. I was reared to become an ironworker or electrician, but I managed to pass through a posh New England liberal arts college and end up a tech journalist and author. I’ve worked unsupervised, chiefly from home, since the 1990s.
Most of my relatives and old neighborhood friends hate people like me. I don’t blame them for that. Most are lifelong Democrats, yet they voted for Donald Trump, and I can’t blame them for that, either. Let me explain.
My career was the product of an economic revival engineered by the center-right New Democrats of the Clinton era and subsequent administrations. I observed the tech industry for two decades; it was a job, but it’s hardly work: I’m a nerd; I like science and technology. I’m retired now but I write the occasional article still. I’m comfortable: I control my environment; I choose the people in whose presence I’ll work, if any. I can smoke and drink on the job if I please. So long as I honor my deadlines and file clean copy, no one has anything to say about it. Tech’s been good to me.
But the guy I was expected to become walks beside me like an imaginary friend I never outgrew. I think of him often — daily, if I’m honest. He’s a Tump voter. His wife, who had earned a second income years ago, is at home supervising their kids because her pay wasn’t sufficient to make childcare an attractive option. She’s a Trump voter too.
He commutes by bus. He lives by the lunch buzzer and the punch clock. If there’s music where he works, it’s amplified by cheap, overdriven speakers and the genre will suit him only by chance. The temperature and ambient noise and lighting were calibrated by industrial psychologists. He can’t evade disagreeable co-workers. He’s paid far less than a family wage, but he’s got no health coverage or pension. He endures daily uncertainty about meeting his family’s needs. Why should he not hate me? I would hate me if I were him.
New and Improved
He and millions of other MAGA voters failed to thrive in the new tech economy, although that was a feature, not a bug. Blue-collar Americans were never going to adapt despite the assurances of techno-utopians in Silicon Valley and New Economy cheerleaders in government, Bill Clinton chief among them. Factories closed and data centers opened. Dotcom outfits traded on nothing more than an online presence, which somehow made sense to us. The New Democrats exalted capital both tangible and intellectual, and devalued labor as if they’d been old-school Establishment Republicans. They fawned over Bill Gates and Eric Schmidt, Steve Jobs and Larry Ellison, Michael Dell and Andy Grove the way one imagines Calvin Coolidge and Herbert Hoover gushing about Rockefellers and Morgans, Vanderbilts and Astors.
A high-tech meritocracy would lead America in a better direction, they told us, and the need was urgent. The Old Economy was failing, undeniably. It was time to re-formulate it with a progressive veneer: no more dirty factories or pollution; NAFTA would ship that mess abroad. America would subsist on green energy, EVs, outsourcing, financial services, the miracle of e-commerce, and high-tech gadgets: a middle-class Valhalla governed by upper-middle-class trustees from the best schools.
There would be no need for troublesome relics like labor unions. The virtuous nature of technological progress would itself ensure quality jobs and dignity for workers. Plentiful consumer credit would replace the family wage and health-care benefits. Blue-collar America would suffer collateral damage, but too much was at stake; it would be a necessary sacrifice. And of course we’d be gentle; we were Democrats and nerds, after all.
Big Tech was hardly the sole disruptor, but the New Democrats fell for, and amplified, Silicon Valley’s specific flavor of vacuous promises wrapped in technobabble. “Delivering the ____ of the future,” they said. We got e-this and i-that and smart everything else. It had a wholesome ring and implied that Richard Feynman and Carl Sagan were finally in charge. The progressive, sciency veneer caught on throughout the commercial ecosphere. Soon everyone was delivering the ____ of the future.
The Democratic Party abandoned its industrial, unionized family and moved in with its Silicon Valley mistress. It had once believed in collective bargaining. It had once believed that workers were an essential part of a healthy economy and worthy of respect. There was a time when a US president, like Harry Truman, might entertain a labor activist, like Walter Reuther, amiably in the Oval Office. But the Party had fallen hard for its tech femme fatale and began to dream of a meritocracy based on steadily-increasing knowledge, intelligence, and creativity that would lift us all toward self-realization as we bathed in the restorative glow of our screens.
In other words, Democrats put their faith in social vaporware. Old-Economy workers would be “rehabilitated,” language implying that they might be more intellectually challenged than unlucky. “Euthanized” would be a more honest word. The former lower-middle and working classes would listen to three decades of meritocratic cant while their standards of living would fall steadily with no ground floor in sight. They got lip service, but they were never a priority.
Promises, promises
Clinton and Bush were openly in bondage to Silicon Valley and Wall Street. However, the candidate Barack Obama spoke to blue-collar America. He campaigned on change that would rejuvenate careers and restore dignity. Working Americans doubted that Hillary Clinton even knew they existed. They saw Obama as a last hope and supported him enthusiastically in the 2008 primaries and later in the general election, but he soon proved to be a disappointment. He, too, fell in love with Silicon Valley and Wall Street and neglected the people who needed him most. And they punished him: he won fewer states in 2012 than he had in 2008. People felt cheated by a guy who rocked a modest Brooks Brothers suit and talked a great blue-collar game, then gave the Tech, Pharma, and Finance sectors everything they’d ever dreamed of and more because he trusted them. Educated people from the best schools trust the neo-liberal establishment because educated people from the best schools run it. Elites imagine each other to be virtuous because they imagine themselves that way.
Tech giants were understood not as hardy sprouts, but would be treated instead with princess-and-the-pea levels of delicacy, thanks to a superstitious fear that it might all be brought to grief by, say, requiring companies with hundreds of billions in share value to tolerate an employees’ union, offer wages adequate for a decent living, or pay tax proportional to their reliance on public goods.
No one bears greater responsibility for the lack of empathy toward Old-Economy workers that led to Donald Trump’s victory than big-name Tech darlings and the New-Democrat elites who coddle them.
The New Economy is a gated community whose most strenuous guardians have been the Clinton, Bush, Obama, and Biden Administrations. Old-school, working-class Democrats are now unwelcome in the party they built. No one wants them tracking mud through the salon when the Clooneys and the Obamas call.
High-minded elites are thinking fine thoughts and beaming positive energy to ordinary Americans from inside the exclusive ecosystem swaddling the rich, progressive class. No uniformed weasel like Derek Chauvin will dare kneel on any of their necks, we can be certain. There will be no eviction notices, no need for local food pantries, no paltry unemployment checks for them. These people have no clue what’s going on in the workaday neighborhoods of American cities and towns and rural communities, and they’ll be pleased to keep it that way.
Liberals have alienated those who hold low-status jobs with their patrician airs and by flaunting their privileges and superior pleasures: their TED conferences and veganism, their Burning Man retreats, their EVs and fastidious recycling, their Whole Foods Markets, and by welcoming applause lines like Michelle Obama’s famous, “when they go low, we go high.” They can’t understand that “going high” is a deeply offensive slogan. Working Americans hear an echo in their minds; they hear smug elitists with money and enviable diplomas taunting them, saying, “we’re better than you proles.” I would jettison that loathsome jingle from the known universe if I could, but it has stuck.
Yet they warned us to vote for Kamala Harris or risk — what exactly? Poverty wages? Is there another kind? Criminalized abortion? The Republicans will never permit it, lest their lily-white daughters experiment a bit in college and get knocked up by the wrong sort of boy, thereby leaving all manner of family ambitions in disarray. Genocide and its complications? We’re already up to our necks in it. If we’re honest, we’ll allow that the Obama-Biden dystopia is about as bad as it gets.
Biden doesn’t care about poverty wages any more than Obama, Bush or Clinton; he doesn’t care about the pain and resentment that inspired half of America’s voters to put Trump in the Oval Office for a second go. He merely pretends to care. He’s an expert virtue-signaler. Amanda Gorman’s Straight Outta Harvard flow at the 2021 inauguration did not fix anything. Student loan forgiveness is scant cause for celebration when you put in 60-hour weeks delivering Amazon parcels and can’t afford a single article of clothing or costume accessory indicating that you work for a living.
Why should the victims of the New Economy not despise the system, and the people tending it, so intensely that they would willingly vote MAGA Republican? They trusted Obama and he burned them. And he seemed like the very best among them. Why would they not hope that President Donald will cause so much damage that America will be forced to make a fresh start? For them, stability guarantees stagnation while chaos might bring opportunities.
Trump defeated Hillary Clinton in 2016 the same way Barack Obama had in 2008: by characterizing her as disdainful toward blue-collar Americans. It was a potent message among those who once had enjoyed decent wages in return for honest work, lately reduced to Walmart greeters and Uber drivers.
Humiliated by a labor market in which they have nothing to trade, the former Democratic working class understand that they have nothing to lose. Liberal democracy and its supporting institutions lose their shine when dead-end employees can aspire only to dead-end management gigs. Call them “associates” and “technicians” all you want; they know who they’ve become and what others think of them. They are why Trump won in 2016, and again in 2024: he was propelled to victory not by the Republican base, but by disillusioned Democrats — specifically, working class and minority Obama and Biden voters.
Our fiasco
Understand, this was not a mistake. Oh, Donald will surely make a pig’s breakfast of everything he touches, but here’s the thing everyone misses: educated elites will feel the hardships he’s likely to cause more acutely than the millions of workers who have already adapted to poverty wages, dead-end careers, and chronic disrespect. They’ve endured decades of it; they can cope. They’re betting that liberal snowflakes like me can’t.
Trumpism and MAGA cannot be defeated by educating voters, by highlighting what’s wrong with the Republican Party and the MAGA movement. That’s futile; voters didn’t elect Trump because they mistook him for a competent administrator or a decent man. They’re angry, not stupid. They see Donald as an agent of disruption — indeed, of revenge. They mobilized him to express their resentment toward Obama, and now again toward the Obama re-tread, Biden and his mediocre protégé Harris.
Workers and minorities now sense that economic justice — a condition in which labor and capital respect and value each other — is permanently out of reach. The class war is over and it was an absolute rout: insatiable parasites control everything now, and even drain us gratuitously with a new subscription economy, as though exacting reparations for the money and effort they’ve already spent dispossessing us.
We created a vast, permanent underclass of service-sector gig workers who will never earn their way out of the stagnant financial pool they’re drowning in. They occupy a permanent lane a few paychecks ahead of the bailiff and the repo man. Those people hate the American economic system and the educated neo-liberals in charge of it. And with good reason.
No justice, no peace
Asking for relief is futile: the international plutocracy is possessed by greed that defies reason; they cannot be satisfied with anything short of everything. The economy itself, and the institutions protecting it, must be attacked, and actually crippled, to get the attention of the smug patricians in charge. Three decades of appealing to justice, proportion, and common decency have yielded nothing: Capital has got Labor on its knees while Government fastens the zip ties. I’m not looking forward to four more years of Donald, but I understand the impulse to use him as a cat’s paw to break these chains. Or at least try.
Kamala Harris, a ludicrous featherweight, got sucked into the vacuum of Democratic Party politics when her boss retired from politics, content to spend his final months in the White House floating harmlessly in a tank of nutrients while Doctor Jill and Butcher Blinken run the country for him.
At this point, one of the smarter moves would be for Biden to resign immediately and let Harris have at least the honor on paper of being America’s first female president, for around ten weeks. This is good for everyone because once we’ve ticked that box, we won’t feel pressure to vote for the next female candidate merely because we’d like to see a woman in the Oval Office.
But don’t look for an interim President Harris to lift a finger on behalf of the working poor or against the sadistic mass atrocities we’re sponsoring in Gaza. She’s had a taste of Big Media courtship and won’t be retreating quietly any day soon; she’ll be running in the primaries again, and she’ll need Wall Street, Hollywood, and the Israel lobby on her side.
Assuming, of course, that Donald can sidestep World War Three. Hardly guaranteed, but I give his future administration better odds than I would have given Harris’s.