Sociology

28 contexts.org

by j anic

e m . irv

ine and

jill a . irv

ine

At fi rst, it almost seemed

to be a joke. He had

fl irted with running

for president

multiple times in

the past, and most

political analysts and

commentators refused

to believe that Donald

Trump intended to mount a

serious campaign. Even after the

campaign’s formal announcement,

many commentators continued to dismiss

his chances, with The Huffi ngton Post

declaring “we will cover his campaign as

part of our Entertainment section. Our

reason is simple: Trump’s campaign is a

sideshow [and] we won’t take the bait [but]

if you are interested in what The Donald has

to say, you’ll fi nd it next to our stories on the

Kardashians and The Bachelorette.”

ethnonationalism and the rise of donald trump by jeff manza and ned crowley

ethnonationalism ethnonationalism

29W I N T E R 2 0 1 8 c o n t e x t s

As the Trump presidency unfolds into a miasma of contro-

versies, scandals, and domestic and international provocations,

it is easy to forget how puzzling his rise to the GOP nomination

was. Indeed, even his shocking triumph in the general elec-

tion over Hillary Clinton might be viewed as less surprising,

in retrospect, than his successful primary campaign. Given a

macroeconomic environment and other factors which prompted

all election forecasting models to predict a close election, com-

bined with the strength of the partisan divide (and the simple

unwillingness of almost all Republican partisans to cast a vote for

Clinton), Clinton’s popular vote margin—a little over 2%—was

right in line with most forecasting models. Only the unexpected

Electoral College verdict, resting on Trump’s small margins in

some key Midwestern states, would hand

him the presidency.

So how did Trump muscle aside an

experienced field of well funded and

far better organized opponents to win

the GOP nomination? The question is

a genuine puzzle. He had virtually no

endorsements from elected Republican

office-holders or other party notables until

the very end of the primary campaign,

when he had locked up the nomination.

He enjoyed a substantial advantage in the

amount of media coverage he received,

but the content of much of that coverage was negative (at least,

as it would have been understood prior to the 2016 election).

His performances in the GOP debates were uneven at best; most

veteran observers consistently graded them as poor.

Two theories about Trump’s rise have been widely advanced.

Both raise classical themes in political sociology. The first is that

Trump’s populist, economic nationalist rhetoric drew strong

support from downwardly mobile and struggling middle- and

working-class voters. In one example, New York Times columnist

David Brooks declared in March 2016 that “Trump voters are

a coalition of the dispossessed [who] have suffered lost jobs,

lost wages, lost dreams.” Veteran political commentator Bill

Schneider suggested, “What we’re seeing right now in American

politics is class warfare…[but] it’s not the working class versus

the 1 percent. It’s the working class versus the educated elite.

In fact, one of the richest men in the world is leading the revolt:

Trump.” Sociologist Andrew Cherlin advanced an intriguing vari-

ant of this argument, suggesting that the key to understanding

Trump’s support among non-college educated voters was their

perception of being left behind and lacking opportunities to live

as well as their parents had.

There are various reasons to suspect that economic distress

and/or declining mobility chances could have motivated strug-

gling GOP primary voters to support Trump. Evidence is mounting

that younger cohorts are not, in fact, experiencing the same

degree of mobility opportunity as cohorts born before 1950.

Further, with populist rhetoric and policy positions sometimes

sharply at odds with the GOP, Trump’s campaign stood out from

the pack. In recent decades, the Republican Party had largely

coalesced around on a number of policy positions: retrenchment

of the welfare state (under the umbrella “entitlement reform,”

which Trump opposed during the primary season before mov-

ing to more conventional GOP stance in the general election);

deregulation and the promotion of free markets (including, criti-

cally, international free trade, which Trump strongly opposed);

an interventionist foreign policy (which Trump opposed); and tax

cutting (the one economic policy topic of the primary season on

which Trump’s views were in line with the GOP mainstream, but

always expressed as being in the interest of “working people”).

The central alternative view is that Trump’s rise reflected

his ability to capture racial resentments and anti-immigrant and

anti-globalization sentiment, a package of beliefs known as

ethnonationalism. A key point of departure for this possibility is

evidence that citizens harboring such sentiments were increas-

ingly moving toward Republican identification prior to 2016.

Two recent influential studies highlight this critical partisan shift

among voters with anti-immigrant sentiment (by political scien-

tists Marisa Abrajano and Zoltan Hajnal) and racially resentful

Whites (by Michael Tesler); in particular, they reveal how party

Contexts, Vol. 17, Issue 1, pp. 28-33. ISSN 1536-5042, electronic ISSN 1537-6052. © 2018 American Sociological Association. http://contexts.sagepub.com. DOI 10.1177/1536504218766548.

Trump’s political breakthrough fits a much larger set of patterns in American political life, from Andrew Jackson through to the present. It recalls past anti-immigrant movements, red scares, racial wars, and fears of foreign subversion and terrorism.

30 contexts.org

identifiers had been realigning on the basis of racial and ethnic

attitudes, transforming the GOP from below.

The upshot is that while there was a time when racially

resentful White partisans could be found in both parties—

thereby diluting their impact—by 2016, ethnonationalism had

moved into partisan alignment. This outcome was the result

of a slow-moving process. Its roots trace to the 1960s, when

Northern and Western Democrats pushed through the major

civil rights legislation over the strong resistance of their South-

ern bloc. The disillusionment of Southern Democrats led to the

South slowly becoming more Republican, as Democrats in most

Congressional seats without a minority-majority voter base either

switched parties or were displaced by Republicans.

Bill Clinton’s presidency and the centrist Democratic Party

the Arkansas native sought to present to voters in the 1990s

slowed the partisan divide over race. The Clinton Administra-

tion undertook various initiatives to address concerns of racially

resentful Whites—most notably the 1996 welfare reform leg-

islation, the 1994 crime bill, and in Clinton’s famously critical

remarks about the hip-hop artist Sister Souljah. But these efforts

were insufficient to reverse the long-term process of outflow.

The combination of rising population diversity and the

2008 election of Barack Obama fueled another wave of eth-

nonationalist realignment. In spite of Obama’s determined

efforts to avoid politicizing race controversies, America’s first

Black president was symbolically meaningful for many Whites.

By 2016, the Democratic Party was increasingly seen as a vehicle

for helping minorities and immigrants “jump the line” over

White Americans, as Arlie Hochschild put it in her recent book

Strangers in Their Own Land (See Q&A, this issue, for more).

Obama, Hochschild finds in her study of Tea Party supporters

in Louisiana, was himself viewed by many as a “line-jumper,”

someone who got ahead because of affirmative action. Today,

the increasing visibility of both the Black Lives Matter move-

ment and the mobilization of immigrant communities (and the

embrace of these efforts by many Democratic politicians) have

sharpened the partisan divide over race and immigration.

Between the Clinton and Obama presidencies, the views

of White Democrats and White Republi-

cans had diverged substantially. Here’s one

stunning example (identified by political

scientist Michael Tesler): in 1994, there

were no differences between White Demo-

cratic and White Republican voters in their

views of the O.J. Simpson verdict, but by

2013, an enormous 40% gap had opened between White

Democrats and White Republicans in their views of the decision

in the Trayvon Martin case in Florida (in which Martin’s murderer,

George Zimmerman, was exonerated).

Trump’s appearance as a candidate for the 2016 GOP

nomination suddenly provided a voice for these voters. His can-

didacy offered ample, blunt, and sometimes even uncoded racial

appeals. For example, in the run-up to his 2016 bid, Trump seized

on a bizarre conspiracy theory about Obama’s birth certificate to

challenge the legitimacy of America’s first Black president. His

opening campaign speech referred to Mexican immigrants as

“rapists” who are “bringing crime and drugs” to the U.S. And

a federal judge with Mexican ancestors could not rule fairly on

a case against Trump University, the candidate thought, because

Trump did not benefit from a large bloc of poor or low-income voters or draw such voters into the GOP primaries. That’s a powerful myth.

Differences in median annual income

20

40

60

80

100

statewide median*

primary voter median**

trump voter median**

*from CPS **interpolated from exit poll results

(in thousands)

Differences in education

2

4

6

8

10

12

14

16

statewide mean*

primary voter mean** average of 23 states

trump voter mean**

*from ACS 2015 **interpolated from exit poll results

mean years completed

NOTE: State averages from Current Population Survey. GOP primary voter averages estimated by authors from state exit polls. Data from Republican primary exit polls, collected by Edison Research for the National Election Pool consortium of news media outlets. Average income and years education are estimates interpolated from cross-tabulations.

Median income and mean years education among all state residents, Republican primary voters, and Trump primary voters.

31W I N T E R 2 0 1 8 c o n t e x t s

he was a “Mexican” who was inevitably biased against Trump.

He repeatedly declared America’s “inner cities” and “African

American communities” places where “you get shot walking

to the store” and where “they have no education and no jobs.”

winning the nomination The two dominant theories of Trump’s rise are not, of

course, mutually exclusive. Indeed, the longstanding sociologi-

cal literatures on “working-class authoritarianism” and “racial

threat” suggests linkages between downward mobility, eco-

nomic frustration and hostility to racial and ethnic minorities.

The notion here is that citizens who feel economically threatened

will often look for scapegoats (especially racial and ethnic minori-

ties or immigrants). It is entirely possible that Trump’s economic

populism and ethnonationalist appeals worked together. Our

research, however, strongly suggests that Trump’s rise to the GOP

nomination did not draw upon a significant base of economically

threatened voters. Instead, ethnonationalist views were very

significant predictors of Trump support.

With regard to working-class voters, exit polling in states

with competitive primaries (i.e., all contests through May 3,

2016, after which Trump’s remaining opponents withdrew) clearly

showed that Trump voters were significantly better educated

and more affluent than the median citizen of that state (see the

figures on p.30). Trump voters were, to be sure, somewhat less

affluent and educated than the average GOP primary voter, but

they were nevertheless significantly above state averages.

This finding is suggestive. Trump did not benefit from a

large bloc of poor or low-income voters or draw such voters

into the GOP primaries (it is worth noting that about half of the

competitive states had “open” primaries in which voters could

vote in either major party primary, regardless of previous party

registration). The claim that he attracted significant support

from below-average voters was no more than a powerful myth.

It is, of course, possible to feel economically threatened

even with above-average income and education. What about

Donald Trump’s feeling thermometer score and standardized attitude items from the American National Election Study, January 2016.

NOTE: American National Election Study pilot survey from January 2016, available at electionstudies.org/studypages/anes_pilot_2016/ anes_pilot_2016.htm. The survey was fielded from January 22nd to 28th, 2016.

32 contexts.org

this possibility? Did Trump appeal to voters most concerned

about their economic status or American trade policy favoring

free trade? Here, we can draw upon the American National

Election Study’s (ANES) January 2016 survey, which contained

the best available items from the primary season for considering

this question. Fielded right before the first primaries, the ANES

allows us to assess the relationship between respondents’ feel-

ings toward Trump (measured with the standard, 100-point

“feeling thermometer” scale, a measure of the “warmth” a

respondent feels for a candidate) and attitudes about social

spending, economic mobility, race (a scale of standard items

used to measure racial resentment), immigration, and letting

in Syrian refugees (a particularly significant topic in the winter

and spring of 2016). We standardized the responses, with more

conservative positions coded positive.

When we look the ANES evidence, a clear picture emerges

(see p. 31, top). In the top row, we see that Trump’s feeling ther-

mometer score shows little significant movement toward voters

expressing higher levels of economic distress. Similarly, attitudes

toward free trade are not closely related to Trump support, with

but a minor increase among those with the highest levels of

anti-free trade views. Trump support grows among respondents

who want less social spending—again inconsistent with the view

that Trump primary voters were motivated by economic distress

By contrast, the role of anti-immigrant attitudes, racial

resentment, and opposition to affirmative action all correspond

with very substantial increases in enthusiasm for Trump as we

move from more liberal to more conservative positions (as shown

in the second and third rows in the feeling thermometer figure).

These impacts are substantial—and entirely consistent with the

notion that Trump’s appeal disproportionately connected to

voters with those sentiments.

There is reason to object to a reliance on feeling ther-

mometers from a survey taken before the first GOP primaries;

although the feeling thermometer has a long history in public

opinion research, it is a less direct measure than asking about

vote choice (e.g., one can feel “warm” toward Trump but vote

for someone else). However, we have at least one measure from

exit polls asking about their immigration attitudes that provides

confirmation. The question asked whether “illegal immigrants

working in the U.S. should be offered legal status or deported”.

Here, we see significantly greater support for Trump among

respondents who favored deportation in every single state in

which this item was fielded (see p. 33).

Overall, we think the evidence that Trump’s rise to the GOP

nomination was driven by ethnonationalist sentiment is clear,

though we would underscore that support for Trump in the gen-

eral election, as well as approval regarding Trump’s performance

in office, involves different dynamics and questions.

trumpism after trump? There is widespread speculation about how and when the

Trump presidency might end and what will happen after he

leaves office. The conventional wisdom—shared by many across

the political spectrum—is that Trump’s rise

was sui generis, a unique and unrepeatable

event that is unlikely to leave any lasting

impact or policy legacy.

That conclusion may ultimately prove

correct, but our analysis of how Trump

captured the Republican Party nomina-

tion and the social forces that allowed it

to happen suggest a different possibility.

Trump successfully mobilized that strand

of what the political historian Michael Rogin once character-

ized as the “countersubversive” tradition in American political

culture or what political theorist Rogers Smith has described as

the racialist or “ascriptive Americanism” model of citizenship. By

countersuberversion, Rogin referenced the long-standing, deeply

rooted fears of foreign ideologies and alien groups that have,

throughout American history, prompted elites and sometimes

ordinary people to build campaigns aimed at digging out these

enemies. Trump’s appeal to those survey respondents who worry

most about terrorism, a topic which also closely fits the Rogin

model of the countersubversive mentality, was also very strong.

The Rogin-Smith frameworks provide, we think, a use-

ful master lens through which to view Trump’s rise and his

potential to shape the future. Trump’s political breakthrough

fits a much larger set of patterns in American political life,

from Andrew Jackson through to the present. It recalls past

anti-immigrant movements, red scares, racial wars, and fears of

foreign subversion and terrorism. While such sentiments have

rarely commanded majority support, they are not ephemeral.

They remain available for future mobilizations. The historian

While there was a time when racially resentful White partisans could be found in both parties—thereby diluting their impact by 2016, ethnonationalism had moved into partisan alignment.

33W I N T E R 2 0 1 8 c o n t e x t s

Richard Hofstadter famously described this as the “paranoid

style” in American political life, an apt description for Trump’s

political style.

One reason why Trumpism may persist after Trump is that

the partisan alignment of voters holding racial and ethnic resent-

ments takes a unique form in American politics. In multi-party

European party systems, anti-immigrant parties have emerged

as independent parties capable of winning seats in the national

legislature. But in the U.S., the institutional stranglehold of a

two-party system precludes this possibility. Electoral institu-

tions in which candidates are elected in “first past the post,”

single-member district (or state) elections have made it virtually

impossible for third parties to gain traction. This system pushes

voters and politicians into one of the two major parties, and if

they are a large enough force they can exert considerable influ-

ence. With ethnonationalist sentiment increasingly centered in

the GOP base, the possibility of future Trump-like candidacies

cannot be discounted.

recommended readings Nyron Crawford and Matt Wray. 2017. Trump Syllabus 3.0. publicbooks.org/pb-2-0-10-trump-syllabus-3-0/. An exception- ally valuable course syllabus for the 2016 campaign, with earlier iterations covering more historical background to Trump’s rise.

Linda Gordon. 2017. The Second Coming of the KKK: The Ku Klux Klan of the 1920s and the American Political Tradition. New York: W.W. Norton & Co. An important historical treatment of an earlier episode of political demonology that embeds the reemer- gence of the Klan in American political history.

Arlie Hochschild. 2016. Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right. New York: The New Press. An ethnographic account of Tea Party supporters in and around Lake Charles, Lousiana, which presents a novel account of the “deep structure” of far-right thinking among struggling working-class Americans.

Rogers Smith. 1997. Civic Ideals: Conflicting Visions of Citizen- ship in U.S. History. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. A mon- umental treatment of the deep roots of racial and ethnic resent- ments in American political culture.

Michael Tesler. 2016. Post-Racial or Most Racial? Race and Poli- tics in the Obama Era. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Completed before the 2016 campaign, an important account of the shifting partisan alignments of racially resentful voters that helped create the conditions for Trump’s victory.

Jeff Manza is in the sociology department at New York University, where Ned

Crowley is in the graduate program. Manza is the author of Whose Rights? Counter-

terrorism and the Dark Side of American Public Opinion (with Clem Brooks). Crowley

studies political sociology and public policy.

10

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Trump vote share by attitude toward undocumented immigrants pro-legal status pro-deportation

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Data from Republican primary exit polls, collected by Edison Research for the National Election Pool consortium of news media outlets.