Krug­man begins by acknowl­edg­ing what some have denied — that class played some role in what hap­pened on Novem­ber 8: ​“What put Don­ald Trump in strik­ing dis­tance was over­whelm­ing sup­port from whites with­out col­lege degrees,” he writes. ​“So what can Democ­rats do to win back at least some of those voters?”

In the wake of a dis­as­trous Elec­tion Day, does the Demo­c­ra­t­ic Par­ty need to present eco­nom­ic poli­cies that have more to offer the major­i­ty of vot­ers? Don’t both­er, argues New York Times colum­nist Paul Krug­man ( 11/25/16 ).

The colum­nist says that Bernie Sanders — not one of Krugman’s favorite peo­ple—sug­gests it needs

can­di­dates who under­stand that work­ing-class incomes are down, who will ​“stand up to Wall Street, to the insur­ance com­pa­nies, to the drug com­pa­nies, to the fos­sil fuel industry.”

But Krug­man doubts this would do any good. First off, there’s the media:

Any claim that changed pol­i­cy posi­tions will win elec­tions assumes that the pub­lic will hear about those posi­tions. How is that sup­posed to hap­pen, when most of the news media sim­ply refuse to cov­er pol­i­cy substance?

The cor­po­rate media aver­sion to cov­er­ing sub­stan­tive elec­tion issues that Krug­man cites is very real; FAIR has been doc­u­ment­ing it for decades, and it was in full effect in 2016.

But as for how vot­ers might hear about par­ties’ eco­nom­ic pro­pos­als despite media dis­in­cli­na­tion to cov­er them, the rough­ly $300 mil­lion the major par­ty can­di­dates spent on cam­paign adver­tis­ing—three-fourths of which was spent by Hillary Clin­ton — pro­vides an obvi­ous answer. Can­di­dates’ self-serv­ing pol­i­cy claims are no sub­sti­tute for inde­pen­dent media exam­i­na­tion of issues from the vot­ers’ point of view, but ads do give well-fund­ed can­di­dates an oppor­tu­ni­ty to deliv­er any kind of mes­sage they choose.

Clin­ton, as it hap­pens, most­ly chose not to deliv­er mes­sages about issues. UCLA polit­i­cal sci­en­tist Lynn Vavreck did an analy­sis of 2016 pres­i­den­tial cam­paign adver­tis­ing that she wrote up in the New York Times (11/23/16), and the results were striking:

Both can­di­dates spent most of their tele­vi­sion adver­tis­ing time attack­ing the oth­er person’s char­ac­ter. In fact, the los­ing candidate’s ads did lit­tle else. More than three-quar­ters of the appeals in Mrs. Clinton’s adver­tise­ments (and near­ly half of Mr. Trump’s) were about traits, char­ac­ter­is­tics or dis­po­si­tions. Only 9 per­cent of Mrs. Clinton’s appeals in her ads were about jobs or the econ­o­my. By con­trast, 34 per­cent of Mr. Trump’s appeals focused on the econ­o­my, jobs, tax­es and trade.

But from Krugman’s point of view, it doesn’t mat­ter that Clin­ton most­ly chose not to make eco­nom­ic argu­ments to the vot­ers; his larg­er point is that eco­nom­ic argu­ments don’t real­ly mat­ter in politics:

The fact is that Democ­rats have already been pur­su­ing poli­cies that are much bet­ter for the white work­ing class than any­thing the oth­er par­ty has to offer. Yet this has brought no polit­i­cal reward.

His exam­ple of the polit­i­cal use­less­ness of improv­ing people’s lives is Obamacare:

Con­sid­er east­ern Ken­tucky, a very white area which has ben­e­fit­ed enor­mous­ly from Oba­ma-era ini­tia­tives…. Inde­pen­dent esti­mates say that the unin­sured rate [in Kentucky’s Clay Coun­ty] fell from 27 per­cent in 2013 to 10 per­cent in 2016. That’s the effect of the Afford­able Care Act, which Mrs. Clin­ton promised to pre­serve and extend but Mr. Trump promised to kill. Mr. Trump received 87 per­cent of Clay County’s vote.

Now, one of the basic ideas behind Oba­macare is that peo­ple who think that they can’t afford health insur­ance should be forced through increas­ing­ly heavy fines to buy it any­way. While this may or may not be good eco­nom­ics, it shouldn’t be sur­pris­ing that it’s bad pol­i­tics: When asked for their judg­ment on the ACA, peo­ple tend to dis­ap­prove more than they approve by about a 10 per­cent­age point margin.

Yet this is Krugman’s main exam­ple of the help Democ­rats have deliv­ered to ungrate­ful workers.

Let’s look at the big­ger pic­ture: Over the past 40 years or so, medi­an income in the Unit­ed States has stag­nat­ed while income going to the very wealthy has soared; inequal­i­ty of wealth has climbed to the point where the top 0.1 per­cent own as much as the bot­tom 90 per­cent. This has pro­ceed­ed under Repub­li­can and Demo­c­ra­t­ic pres­i­den­cies alike; the US’s GINI coef­fi­cient, the stan­dard mea­sure of inequal­i­ty, has shown a more or less con­stant increase since the late 1960s.

It’s hard to imag­ine a pop­u­la­tion so dis­in­ter­est­ed in mate­r­i­al wealth that this kind of dra­mat­ic redis­tri­b­u­tion of resources would not have an impact. And indeed, there are signs of pro­found trau­ma among the white work­ing class, in the form of increas­ing mor­tal­i­ty from addic­tion and sui­cide (FAIR​.org, 2/3/16).

But Krug­man joins in the wide­spread pre­sump­tion that, in fact, these large-scale eco­nom­ic shifts have had no real polit­i­cal con­se­quence. ​“Let’s be seri­ous here,” he says assured­ly. ​“You can’t explain the votes of places like Clay Coun­ty as a response to dis­agree­ments about trade pol­i­cy.” Based, appar­ent­ly, on the fact that vot­ers in Clay Coun­ty weren’t excit­ed about being com­pelled to buy health insurance.

You get rather a dif­fer­ent pic­ture if you look at the exit polls — which, imper­fect as they are, are the best evi­dence we have for who vot­ed for which can­di­date. The results for 2016 are not too sur­pris­ing: Like a typ­i­cal Repub­li­can, Don­ald Trump did bet­ter with vot­ers who were white, male, old­er (45+) and more afflu­ent ($50,000+/year).

The more inter­est­ing results come if you com­pare the exit polls for 2016 with those for 2012 — in oth­er words, a year where the Repub­li­can won the elec­toral col­lege vs. one in which they lost. (The New York Times has a handy inter­ac­tive fea­ture that allows you to see shifts in vot­ing pat­terns from elec­tion to elec­tion.) Here we see that the changes that gave Trump the vic­to­ry are not the ones you’d expect: Among all white vot­ers, he did only 1 per­cent­age point bet­ter than Rom­ney — who lost the pop­u­lar vote by 3.9 per­cent­age points. This is because Trump’s 14-point gain among whites with­out col­lege degrees was almost can­celed out by a 10-point loss among col­lege-edu­cat­ed whites.

No, the real secret to Trump’s suc­cess is that while he did poor­ly among vot­ers of col­or, he did less poor­ly than Rom­ney did — he was beat­en by 7 few­er points among African-Amer­i­cans, 8 less with Lati­nos and 11 points less with Asian-Amer­i­cans. This is despite run­ning a cam­paign that echoed white suprema­cist themes and was open­ly endorsed by neo-Nazis. Why? As Chris­t­ian Par­en­ti, a pro­gres­sive jour­nal­ist who watched weeks of Trump’s speech­es, relat­ed (Jacobin, 11/22/16):

Con­trary to how he was por­trayed in the main­stream media, Trump did not talk only of walls, immi­gra­tion bans and depor­ta­tions. In fact, he usu­al­ly didn’t spend much time on those themes…. Chop­py as they were, Trump’s speech­es nonethe­less had a clear the­sis: Reg­u­lar peo­ple have been get­ting screwed for far too long and he was going to stop it.

Was it that mes­sage that result­ed in vot­ers mak­ing less than $30,000 shift­ing by 16 per­cent­age points in the direc­tion of Trump? Or was it the lack of a com­pelling eco­nom­ic mes­sage from Clin­ton that caused left-lean­ing poor peo­ple to stay home, allow­ing Repub­li­can gains by default? Either way, the strik­ing class-based shifts in vot­ing are glossed over by analy­ses like Krugman’s, which pre­fer to see work­ing-class vot­ers as dri­ven by entire­ly irra­tional resentments.

The flip­side of eco­nom­ics not caus­ing the Democ­rats’ prob­lems, of course, is that you don’t have to change eco­nom­ic poli­cies to solve those prob­lems. In part, this is because the eco­nom­ic woes of work­ing-class Amer­i­ca are insol­u­ble; as Krug­man says:

Nobody can cred­i­bly promise to bring the old jobs back; what you can promise — and Mrs. Clin­ton did — are things like guar­an­teed health­care and high­er min­i­mum wages.

This is a very attrac­tive cop-out. The real­i­ty is that the loss of jobs and upward trans­fer of wealth were the result of con­scious choic­es by Wash­ing­ton pol­i­cy-mak­ers, and those poli­cies could be changed. (Econ­o­mist Dean Bak­er has writ­ten a book about this, apt­ly named Rigged.) But acknowl­edg­ing this means aban­don­ing the Demo­c­ra­t­ic Party’s attempts to build a win­ning elec­toral coali­tion of wealthy whites and peo­ple of col­or — serv­ing the eco­nom­ic inter­ests of the afflu­ent and address­ing only the social and cul­tur­al con­cerns of peo­ple of color.

As Michael Lind put it in a New York Times piece (4/16/16) declar­ing that this new coali­tion (dubbed ​“Clin­ton­ism”) was the future:

The Clin­ton­ian syn­the­sis of pro-busi­ness, finance-friend­ly eco­nom­ics with social and racial lib­er­al­ism no longer needs to be dilut­ed, as it was in the 1990s, by oppor­tunis­tic appeals to work­ing-class white voters.

As I point­ed out at the time, though (FAIR​.org, 4/25/16), vot­ers of col­or are inter­est­ed in eco­nom­ics as well as civ­il rights issues — sug­gest­ing that ​“cor­ralling [Demo­c­ra­t­ic vot­ers] up again for a Clin­ton­ist future is going to be more dif­fi­cult than Lind and his col­leagues in cor­po­rate media want to believe.”

Krug­man ends his col­umn with a shrug, pre­sent­ing the attrac­tion of Trump for work­ing-class vot­ers — char­ac­ter­ized as ​“white work­ing-class” vot­ers, the bet­ter to pigeon­hole them — as a mys­te­ri­ous phe­nom­e­non that needs to be puz­zled over:

Democ­rats have to fig­ure out why the white work­ing class just vot­ed over­whelm­ing­ly against its own eco­nom­ic inter­ests, not pre­tend that a bit more pop­ulism would solve the problem.

It’s far from clear what ​“fig­ur­ing this out” this would do for the Democ­rats — give them clues for bet­ter ​“mes­sag­ing,” enable them to deploy the right celebri­ty endorse­ments? When you get down to it, to attribute vot­ers’ choic­es to irra­tional resent­ments is to put them beyond the reach of ratio­nal per­sua­sion — in oth­er words, to give up on them.

To do the oppo­site — to refuse to con­cede work­ing-class vot­ers to the right wing — does not mean ignor­ing the role of white nation­al­ism in Trump’s vic­to­ry. Racism and xeno­pho­bia are key ide­olo­gies in Trump’s coali­tion, which dis­pro­por­tion­ate­ly attracts believ­ers in racial supe­ri­or­i­ty.

Find­ing racial and cul­tur­al ene­mies is the nat­ur­al ten­den­cy of far-right move­ments that gain strength from eco­nom­ic dis­lo­ca­tion. They will like­ly con­tin­ue to grow with­out a strong counter-argu­ment from the left that sol­i­dar­i­ty and not scape­goat­ing is the solu­tion to work­ers’ prob­lems. Only if we see eco­nom­ic strat­i­fi­ca­tion and racial resent­ment as inter­re­lat­ed — rather than pre­sent­ing them, as Krug­man does, as mutu­al­ly exclu­sive expla­na­tions — do we have a viable strat­e­gy for deal­ing with either one.