Donald Trump's campaign rally in Iowa Thursday night once again highlighted his own ignorance, which somehow managed to exceed that of his pasty adoring throng. But it also brought into stark relief the degree to which Trump's success with this crowd is completely untethered to ideology, and rooted in good old-fashioned white resentment.
At that rally, Trump told the crowd that he couldn't guarantee the Republican health care plan would be good, but he hoped they would throw more money at it, and seemed keenly aware of the unpopularity of the bill's cruelty.
On MSNBC's “The Last Word” this week, “AM Joy” host Joy Reid made the canny observation that Trump, through his empty promises not to gut programs like Medicaid, has tapped into a key facet of the Republican base voter's psychology:
The thing is Donald Trump, you know, he does understand something fundamental about the Republican Party that Republicans didn't understand, which is that the base of the Republican Party wants big government. They just want big government to only be limited to them.
They want, you know, immigrants to be cut off from programs. They want minorities who they think don't deserve them to be cut off. But they themselves aren't just for big government. They're for huge government.
And so when he says to them something terrific where you won't have to pay, what they hear Donald Trump saying is, I'm going to make sure that whatever I create takes care of just you. And we're still going to cut the bad people out, the people you don't like are going to get nothing. And to them, that sounds like Christmas every day.
Republicans have been playing on part of this dynamic for a very long time, the self-image of the white voter as either self-reliant, or deserving of help when they take it, unlike those other people. It's how they've managed, for eons, to get people to vote against their own self-interest. What Trump did was ditch the pretense that it had anything to do with principles of small government.
But there is a similar psychology at work among some white Democrats and progressives, who feel that the Democrats should be focusing on their concerns, and not so much on those of women and minorities. It's another variation of the idea that if someone else is getting something, it must be taking something away from me.
For a very long time, Democrats fought a rear-guard action against white (particularly male) resentment, but then Barack Obama came along and confronted it head-on, with empathy and complexity. Trump offered a different kind of absolution for white resentment by normalizing it.
If Democrats are to win, they need to understand this fundamental issue that has guided our politics since Reagan's speech in Philadelphia, Mississippi, but which our political media encrypts into divisions over “principles” and ideology. The enemy isn't white people, about a third of whom get it. It's white resentment.
This is a commentary piece. The views expressed in this article are those of just the author.