“Many analysts and leading Democrats,” Molyneux writes “have attributed Donald Trump’s impressive 2016 vote margin among
white working-class voters to his embrace of economic populism.” He quotes Bernie Sanders’ postelection comments:
Millions of Americans registered a protest vote on Tuesday, expressing their fierce opposition to an economic and political system
that puts wealthy and corporate interests over their own.... Donald J. Trump won the White House because his campaign rhetoric successfully tapped into a very real and justified anger, an anger that many traditional Democrats feel.
In May, the Public Religion Research Institute released a report, “Beyond Economics: Fears
of Cultural Displacement Pushed the White Working Class to Trump.” It found that
more than half (52%) of white working-class Americans believe discrimination against
whites is as big a problem as discrimination against blacks and other minorities
and that “four in ten white working-class Americans agree” with the statement
that “efforts to increase diversity almost always come at the expense of whites.”
In a separate argument, Nicholas Carnes and Noam Lupu, professors of political science at Duke and Vanderbilt, challenge a basic premise on the left —
that the populism of Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren could have stemmed the loss of non-college whites to Trump.
While the populism espoused by Sanders and Warren is economic, challenging C. E.O.s, major corporations
and “the billionaire class,” Trump is the messenger of what Molyneux calls “political populism,” which “is, fundamentally, a story about the failure of government.”
White working-class voters’ negative view of government spending undermines their potential support for many progressive economic policies.