Why those scorned by the political elites chose a wrecking ball

In his acceptance speech as President-elect, Donald Trump talked of the need for Republicans and Democrats to come together as one nation. It’s a fine sentiment — but it’s being delivered by a wrecking ball.

Having all but destroyed the Republican Party in the primaries, Trump now presents a similar existential challenge to the Democrats. He hasn’t even taken office yet, and the establishment is in pieces. Moreover, you could make a strong case that the reason people voted for Trump was that he would tear down the political consensus.

The New York Times’ exit polling report shows 69% of those who felt America was ‘seriously off track’ voted for Trump. As did a significant majority of people who thought they were worse off today than at the last election, and the 77% who were ‘angry’ at how the federal government is working.

Democrats will say Trump supporters are racist. However Obama won all the swing states (Florida, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Ohio and potentially Michigan) twice, and won Michigan by a double-digit margin both times.

Despite this, Trump polled 200,000 more votes than Romney or McCain in Ohio and 300,000 more in Pennsylvania, while Clinton was more than 200,000 votes short of Obama’s totals in Wisconsin, Ohio and Michigan. What’s more, Trump actually won a higher share of the black and Latino vote overall than Romney did in 2012.

Democrats will also point the finger at sexism; yet while Clinton had a significant lead in the female vote overall, Trump had a 10-point lead in votes by white women. Democrats will also decry the FBI intervention, despite CNN reporting that only 1 in 9 voters decided on their preferred candidate in the last week of the campaign.

While all these things may have contributed, they do not explain how Trump captured the Presidency, especially not in light of the clear links between Trump, Brexit and the rise of Hanson in Australia.

There is little doubt the repeated failure to anticipate these events by pollsters, pundits and political tragics (myself included) suggests something significant has changed, or perhaps more accurately — broken.

Growing dissatisfaction on both sides has exploded into a clear repudiation of the existing right and left orthodoxy — of free trade / smaller government and identity politics / political correctness. As an agent of change, Trump’s base held up while Clinton, as the representative of the status quo, saw her vote collapse.

It is telling that two thirds of voters who thought trade took away American jobs voted Republican, traditionally the party of free trade and free markets. It is equally telling that Trump saw a big jump in votes among those with incomes under $50,000, traditionally a core democratic constituency.

It is tempting to blame stalling income growth for this: the median income in the US increased until 2000 but has declined slightly in real terms since then, while income growth has been stagnant for the bottom two quintiles for decades.

However, neither Australia nor the UK have these problems with income growth. Moreover, free trade delivered significant improvements in standard of living for some time before the recent stagnation; so it must be about more than just protection and immigration.

What has declined, and continues to decline, is the status and importance of lower middle class, and working class, white men. Charles Murray charts this fall in his seminal work Coming Apart. Whites without a college degree, who were once likely to be married and supporting a household are now much more likely to be out of the workforce, an absent father, or in prison, than they used to be.

In a similar vein, in Hillbilly Elegy, J.D. Vance looks at the problems in white working class communities and the rise of people who won’t or can’t hold down jobs; not because of immigrants but because of social decay.

Yet much of this social and economic change has been undeniably positive. The elevated status of white uneducated men was artificially sustained by stopping women and minorities from accessing opportunities. Free trade, though it decimated American (and Australian and British) manufacturing, led to a massive decrease in global poverty and a corresponding increase in standard of living.

The problem is not even that we stopped communicating the benefits of this progress — though we did — but that the elites on both sides actually stopped listening to those who didn’t ‘get it’ altogether. Should we be surprised those people no longer believe the political class are acting in everyone’s best interests?

Building walls, either physically with Mexico or trade barriers with China, is not the answer to the problems besetting these communities — and even Trump voters probably know this. Yet in the face of scorn and indifference from the political elites, people are increasingly voting for anyone who will acknowledge their issues, regardless of the candidate’s personal flaws.

Simon Cowan is Research Manager at the Centre for Independent Studies.