Democrats don't need to place "identity politics" on the back burner to center the white working class; they need to focus on creating a stronger, multicultural coalition that fights racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, and all forms of bigotry while advocating for policy that helps all Americans. That the group should practice more progressive pragmatism is not new advice, but it's alarming to hear pundits push that message in the wake of such big wins — especially when there is so much more room for candidates to grow a multicultural voting base. It's a wildly flawed argument for many different reasons.

Firstly, many among the white working class care more about "cultural displacement" than the economy. Behind "class vs. identity" arguments lies the oft-propagated falsehood that the majority of the white working class don't give a damn about identity, just earning a decent living and providing for their family. But the narrative doesn't stand up: A survey by the Public Religion Research Institute and The Atlantic last spring revealed that many in the white working class harbor fear "about cultural displacement” — a roundabout way of describing fears concerning immigrants and people of other races — more than the economy. What motivated many Trump voters was fear of diversity. Even higher education is seen negatively among them, and not primarily because of student debt or the wage-to-qualification crisis that many graduates are facing, but rather because campuses are more diverse than ever before.

How Trump succeeded with voters was by effectively combining race and class issues. His supporters believe that their economic troubles are rooted in bad immigration policy or "anti-white" affirmative action. But it's problematic because those in the white working class who care deeply about the identity politics of whiteness continually ignore the factual privilege they hold over the minority groups they resent. According to a poll by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, 55% of white Americans say they believe discrimination against white people exists.

In order for Democrats to win this group over, they would need to effectively address that fallacious concern — meaning they'd have to adopt the falsehood that white folks are being disproportionately victimized by policy, and then assist in targeting the "culprits," meaning minority groups. In reality, nonwhite people are the ones who are most hurt by Trump's policy, and they also make up an important election-swinging voting block of the Democrats' base.

That's not how you grow your party; it's how you desert your most loyal core and disrupt its future. By 2018, the entirety of the millennial generation will be able to vote. Turning their backs on America's most diverse generation ever to embrace the falsehood of collective "white economic anxiety" is a formula for losing. If Trump ascended to office on the backs of voters who explicitly care more about race than class, you can't build a class-based coalition with people who see black and Latinx people as the reason they are suffering.

These articles and this logic assume that most Trump voters are suffering from economic inequality, which could make them open to building a class-based voter alliance of poor Americans of all races willing to stand together against corporate plunder. But most Trump voters don't represent that class: He was elected by white voters — the only racial demographic that he won — of all classes, many of whom are in economic brackets well above the working class. A NBC News/SurveyMonkey election tracking poll from April 2016 showed that two thirds of Trump supporters come from households with incomes over $50,000 a year. What's more, 60% of non-college-educated Trump voters are in the top half of income distribution. So whether educated or uneducated, the majority of Trump voters are not hard up.