Trump's Democrats. Stephanie Muravchik
slander them. We are grateful to those who came to trust us, who vouched for us and allowed us to get to know them.
Our ethnographic approach differs from a large and growing body of survey-based research on Trump supporters.8 Although we have learned much from that research and speak to it throughout the book, we nonetheless found it could not adequately address our interests.
This is partly so because surveys tend to ask questions that have long been of interest to researchers. Thus they usually test old theories of political behavior rather than develop new insights. Those old theories also reflect the special interests of researchers.9 As some thoughtful critics of research on the 2016 election noted, “Even the best-designed questions tend to impose the designers’ categories and intellectual frameworks upon respondents.”10
At a time when academics are so culturally and geographically isolated from Trump supporters,11 it is important to question our ability to design meaningful, discerning surveys and perceptive, well-grounded theories from our distant perches. We are struck, for example, by the fact that the dominant explanations of Trump’s appeal all have one thing in common: they all assume that something must be seriously wrong with Trump enthusiasts. Trump won, we are told, either because of racial prejudices or economic distress or various diseases of social despair, such as drug abuse, family breakdown, and suicide. Thus, in these accounts, Trump voters are driven by resentment or anger or desperation. How else could one cast a vote for Trump? Though it is never stated explicitly, such views rest on the assumption that any well-adjusted, healthy, flourishing citizen would reject Trump. Even though we joined in the rejection of Trump, we wonder if that assumption may be a symptom of the social and cultural distance between our community and the ones Trump’s Democrats call home.
Survey research also struggles to understand working-class communities because it rests on a “methodological individualism” that reduces citizens’ politics to a collection of attitudes and personality traits held by individual respondents. As Theda Skocpol and Vanessa Williamson argued in their study of the Tea Party movement, surveys “treat individuals as isolates floating around in asocial spaces—which is not the way real people live their lives.”12 Ethnography, however, begins from a different premise: it assumes that people make sense of politics in particular social, cultural, and institutional contexts.
None of these arguments should be construed as a case against surveys. We have learned much from them. Instead, our case is simply that we need political ethnographies, too, especially in this new era of class isolation. Making sense of what Krugman called “our unknown country” will require more than surface-level surveys of communities that are culturally different from the places where scholars work and live. The age of big data needs ethnography more than ever.
To some social scientists, our approach may seem too unstructured and unscientific. Some may even regard it as indistinguishable from journalism. However, we believe that the comparative advantage of ethnography is maximized when it does not attempt to approximate the methods of survey research. Had we conducted structured interviews, for example, we could not have pursued—or perhaps even been inclined to tune into—new theoretical insights as they emerged in the course of our fieldwork. To some degree, the merits of our approach are difficult to persuasively argue in the abstract. We believe the better test is to read the book and then make a judgment. The proof of good ethnography—like a pudding—is in the eating.
What We Found
To understand Trump’s appeal, one must first appreciate all the ways he reflects values and norms that are common in small, working-class communities. We found, for example, that Trump does not really seem like a political outsider in these places. Instead, he behaves in ways that seem familiar. Thus, when Trump supporters praise him, as they frequently do, by saying, “He’s not a politician,” we came to understand that they mean he is not a Washington politician.
Many of the local Democratic leaders in the communities we studied are Trumpian. They are brazen, macho, and never let an insult slide (see chapter 2, “Dragon Energy”). One Trumpian mayor we observed, for example, called elderly constituents who attacked him “malcontents,” “misfits,” and “douchebags” at a town council meeting. Defending oneself by going on the offense as a method for handling conflict and status challenges is common in many working-class communities, particularly in the “Trump Belt” of the Upper Midwest and New England. The similarity to Trump’s behavior is no accident. Both Trump and his working-class admirers are governed by a common honor culture. Honor cultures exist practically everywhere—everywhere except highly educated cities and college towns. In an honor culture, individuals—and men in particular—are expected to defend their reputation for toughness.13 If they do not, they are dismissed as weak and ineffectual.
Thus, whereas Trump’s sensitivity to slights in college-educated Democratic communities is regarded as a sign of a thin skin and possibly a disordered mind, that same sensitivity is regarded as normal—even admirable—in the Democratic communities we studied. And although Trump was roundly criticized for violating the norms of politics, what he actually did was violate the norms of national politics. In places like Johnston and Ottumwa, political norms are far more Trumpian. This difference, of course, is largely a class-based one. In educated, professional communities, conflict is supposed to be mediated by norms of civility and deliberation. If push really comes to shove, lawyers are summoned. But in working-class communities, conflicts are still often resolved through shows of strength and intimidation. As one local mayor told us: “I’m kinda like a streetfighter when it comes to politics, because that’s the only thing that people understand. You can’t be nice when people are trying to take shots at you.”
This finding should also caution against the interpretation, popular now in some conservative circles, that Trump appealed to the white working class because of his opposition to political correctness. The debate over political correctness is largely of interest to elites, whether conservative or progressive. The people we spoke with had little interest in, or even awareness of, debates over pronouns or microaggressions or safe spaces on college campuses. That world is too far removed from the one they care about. They would dislike the cultures of elite college campuses, if they ever encountered one. Political correctness, after all, functions as the cutting edge of a bourgeoisie culture that prizes civility and gentleness in manners. It’s class, not ideology, that matters.14
In addition to his affinities with these local honor cultures, Trump invokes another important political norm from the communities we studied. Like the popular leaders in these places, Trump presents himself as an archetypal party machine boss (see chapter 3, “The Don”). Trump does so partly for the reasons we just elaborated: he is tough, direct, and brazen. But he also offers something greater: a paternalistic social contract that exchanges provision for loyalty and respect.
In all the communities we studied, politics have been organized around bosses for the better part of a century. It is not too strong to say that these bosses and their networks constituted the party for voters. Thus, to be a Democrat did not mean that one took progressive positions on issues like abortion, crime, and welfare. Rather, to be a Democrat meant that one was integrated into political relationships that rested on a paternalistic social contract. The citizens we got to know remained firmly in the Democratic camp over the past decades—despite often describing themselves as “conservative”—in good measure because they retained their allegiance to Democratic city and county leaders.
Even though the boss-voter relationship has been weakened by reformers (badly so in the case of Ottumwa), it still endures in the memories and political imaginations of local citizens in all of the places we studied. And, to varying extents, it is a mode of politics still practiced by some of these communities’ most popular leaders. Because the power of Democratic patrons has weakened, however, their ability to mediate voters’ connections to the national party has atrophied, as has their ability to remedy local problems.
To see the Democratic Party in these communities, therefore, is to catch glimpses of its former self. That it was so unfamiliar to us, of course, is a reminder of how much the party has changed, especially in its more cosmopolitan centers.