Trump's Democrats. Stephanie Muravchik
politics endured. And the remoteness of these blue machine towns makes it harder to notice all the ways in which Trump is more like an old-style Democratic boss than a modern Republican.
Like a typical Democratic boss of old, Trump offers his supporters not a grand ideological vision, but rather a promise to take care of them by cutting deals—and corners, if required. Politicians in this mold traditionally also use their own private resources for the public good, and sometimes dip into public resources for their private ends. Trump has been faithful to this model by donating his salary, conducting state business at his resorts, and bullying Ukraine.
The traditional boss expects something in return, of course. He expects loyalty. While all politicians desire loyalty, Trump has placed greater stress on it than his predecessors. As Trump famously told FBI director James Comey, “I need loyalty. I expect loyalty.”15 To the president’s critics, this statement is inappropriate at best, and evidence of malfeasance at worst. But rewarding supporters and punishing opponents is standard operating procedure for political machines everywhere, including in the three places we studied. Whether or not they like it, citizens there expect it. When we asked one voter about the political history of his community, he nervously refused to talk at first, pointing out, “You know how this town is.” Then he paused. “Or maybe you don’t.”
This emphasis on provision and loyalty grows up from the ideals that govern the traditional working-class family.16 Thus it shouldn’t surprise us that boss-centered politics also tends toward nepotism. Many in the professional class were troubled when Trump turned for counsel to his daughter and son-in-law rather than to credentialed experts. But in the towns we visited, extended family ties are often the basis of common enterprises, including politics. For the past half century, in Elliott County, for example, each of the three men who served as the county judge/executive hired their sons as their second-in-command. Thus it seemed normal that Trump’s relatives would play important roles in his administration.
While politics based on familialism help build social trust and solidarity, it has a dark side. It tends to reinforce racial and ethnic boundaries. Like many machine bosses in American history, Trump promised to protect and provide for his people, a category bounded by race. As other research has shown, many citizens supported Trump because they thought he was the patron of white working-class Americans.17
These provincial allegiances, however, may not emerge simply from bigotry, but also from strong loyalties to particular places.18 Because these citizens emphasize the importance of their community’s interests, one might say their dominant political ethos is Ottumwa (or Johnston, or Elliott County) first (see chapter 4, “America First”).
The primacy of these place-based loyalties are evident in everyday life. When Johnston’s indoor basketball courts become crowded, for example, its town officials force outsiders from Cranston (a neighboring suburban town) to wait before they can use them. Meanwhile, in Ottumwa, many citizens prefer to spend their dollars within the city limits, because they think their hard-earned local dollars should enrich their community, not outsiders, even those from other parts of Iowa. Similarly, controversy erupted in Elliott County when an important job in the local school district was offered to someone from a neighboring county. As in Johnston and Ottumwa, many believe Elliott County’s limited resources should benefit its own residents. These examples demonstrate that in all the places we studied, municipal and county borders are not merely administrative districts or lines on a map—they define communities. Thus “white America” is too broad a category to capture the way people we spoke with think about their civic identities. Even identification with rural America—a much-touted explanation for Trump’s success—did not seem especially salient to them. Americans from other counties, states, and regions are all outsiders, even if not to the same extent.
As these findings should suggest, the people we interviewed learn to think about politics primarily in the context of their towns, cities, and counties. These local lessons shape the way they think about their place in the state and national communities. And here, again, borders matter. For example, they think jobs in the state government should go to state residents. Thus one irritated citizen derided Governor Gina Raimondo for her tendency to “Bring people in from Missouri, bring people in from Connecticut, people in from New York. What’s the matter with Rhode Islanders?!” They also prefer to buy American-owned and -manufactured products. In Ottumwa, in fact, it is still impossible to purchase a new Honda. As other scholars found years before the upset of 2016, putting “America first” has long seemed like the logical and ethical thing to do in locally oriented, working-class communities.19
An America-first ethos resonates with the Democrats we studied partly because they envision the national political community as an extension of the ones they know most intimately and to which they owe their primary allegiances. Thus its appeal grows up from their everyday life, not just downward from larger social constructs like whiteness. Such are the local origins of their American nationalism.
But if these place-based identities are distinct from white identity, it is also the case that strong social ties in these communities have long been enhanced by a high degree of racial and ethnic homogeneity. As immigration increases in many small towns and cities, including two of the places we studied, native residents worry about its effects on their community. These concerns are not unreasonable, even though they mix with more irrational prejudices that are inflamed by demagogues like Trump. After all, locals experience firsthand—and a large body of social science confirms—that social trust and ties are undermined by ethnic diversity, especially in neighborhoods.20
The reasonableness of these concerns is sometimes hard to appreciate from afar. Affluent Democratic communities are constituted differently, and so they have less to lose from immigration and, in fact, tend to rely much more heavily on immigration. Unlike Trump’s Democratic towns and counties, the communities of highly educated Democrats are not found primarily in their neighborhoods. They are wider, more virtual, and often centered on professional associations.21 Mass immigration allows citizens in educated Democratic communities to tend to their more diffuse professional networks by freeing them from their neighborhoods. Immigrants, after all, clean their homes, care for their children, and manicure their yards at modest prices, allowing members of the professional class to neglect their neighborhoods.
The strong place-based identities we discovered also help us unravel a paradox of research about Trump voters (see chapter 5, “Make America Great Again”). On the one hand, studies that use community-level data find that various measures of economic and social stress predict Trump voting. Trump, for example, did well in counties with greater economic stagnation and higher levels of disability and suicide.22 On the other hand, studies of individual voters do not find any consistent association between personal measures of economic or social stress and Trump voting.23 These divergent findings are less puzzling once we recognize that many new Republican voters in traditionally Democratic locales feel deeply attached to communities that face existential social and economic threats.
This devotion to community is obscured by some intellectuals who point to civic decline in Trump country. Jim Carney, for example, has described Trump country as a “wasteland of alienation” where residents are no longer rooted in a civic life—especially churches—that once provided them “a deeper sense of self.”24 While it is certainly the case that civic ties have weakened in the places we studied, the citizens we spoke to are not alienated. In fact, the opposite is more nearly true: the people we met are concerned about civic decline because they are devoted to their communities. This is partly why Trump’s campaign slogan—“Make America Great Again”—resonated so deeply in these Democratic towns.
As members of the professional class, we at times felt quite distant from the communities we studied. Despite our concerns about the excesses of political correctness, our interviewees sometimes inadvertently reminded us of its benefits. When one woman described a local beach as “dark beach,” because it was frequented by immigrants and African Americans, we struggled to conceal our dismay. We bit our tongues when another man suggested Obama was secretly a Muslim. We also found ourselves aghast at the worst expressions of their local honor cultures. Several accounts