In a little known canto of Dante’s Purgatorio, the Florentine poet reaches Terrace 3½ of purgatory’s mountain, a strange space halfway up the path between the levels where the wrathful and the slothful endure their purification. There he finds the pundit class of the present-day United States, a tangle of arms and legs and laptops, with piteous cries and smug certainties rising in a chorus. Their task, imposed by the refining power of divine love, is to wrestle together until they reach consensus on whether it was racism or economic grievances that drove so many American voters into the arms of Donald Trump.



God help me, I am in that number. Which means that to do my part for our purgation, I am obliged to argue once again that the most powerful liberal story about 2016, in which race overshadows everything and white nationalism explains the entire Trumpian universe, is an exaggeration of a partial truth.

The latest example of this narrative is Adam Serwer’s essay in The Atlantic, “The Nationalist’s Delusion,” which has been praised to the skies by almost every liberal in my Twitter feed, and which comes on the heels of Ta-Nehisi Coates’s similarly themed Atlantic essay, “The First White President,” which earned similar encomia a couple of months ago. Both essays present themselves as arguing against a reductionist conventional wisdom that supposedly dismisses the role of race in Trump’s ascent; both tend toward a fatal reductionism in response, one that insists that hard truth telling matters more than hopeful politicking, but tells only enough of the truth to breed racial pessimism or despair.

In his grim analysis Serwer insists that he’s just following the data, which point away from any economic explanation for the events of 2016. The allegedly populist Trump did not actually win large majorities among the lower middle class and poor, Serwer notes; rather, Trump won white voters of all income levels, and did best among what in the European context we would call the white petite-bourgeoisie, the group most likely to be threatened by a kind of psychological status competition from minorities. Thus Trump’s was not really a populist or “working-class coalition,” Serwer concludes, but a “nationalist one,” rooted in white panic over demographic change, with little to do with any genuine paycheck-to-paycheck anxiety or grim opioids-and-family-breakdown socioeconomic trends.