How Fear of Falling Explains the Love of Trump
So, yes, the feeling was, “if we don’t turn this thing around, that could be us.”
Nancy Isenberg, a history professor at Louisiana State University
and the author of “White Trash: The 400 Year Untold History of Class in America,” responded to my inquiry about Americans anxious about losing their place:
Yes, the fear was about rearranging the “pecking order.”
But many working-class and middle-class whites without college educations also hate poor whites, who they see as lazy and worthless.
“Working-class whites are deeply upset that they are losing traditional family structures,” she wrote:
As you know, the divorce rate and rate of unmarried childbearing in the professional-managerial elite have remained close to what they were in 1960, whereas whites in the Missing Middle now are experiencing sharply higher rates of nonmarital childbearing and family dissolution, which of course hit black families a generation earlier, given
that they lost access to the blue-collar jobs that kept family life stable a generation earlier.
The worry that this disorder has become contagious —
that decent working or middle class lives can unravel quickly — stalks many voters, particularly in communities where jobs, industries and a whole way of life have slowly receded, the culminating effect of which can feel like a sudden blow.
Joan C. Williams, a law professor at the University of California, Hastings,
and author of “The White Working Class: Overcoming Class Cluelessness in America,” described in an email how the downward trends are affecting the Trump electorate.
