Trump, Class, and Identity Politics in the 2020 Presidential Campaign

Donald Trump has made it clear his 2020 presidential campaign is about identity politics. Unlike 2016 where  economic anxiety and nationalism were pretexts for race and identity, in 2020 white nationalism and racism toward immigrants, Muslims, and people are color are out front and central to his message.  Trump is no long Richard Nixon of 1968 using code words for race, he is George Wallace of 1968 overtly running on race.
Yet Trump is not the first and probably the last candidate to run on identity politics.  Appeals to it have a long American history, dating back to and encouraged by the constitutional framers.
America was born a nation of identity politics.  It was a nation defined by being White, Anglo-Saxon and Protestant (WASP), but also a nation hostile to Catholics, Jews, Native-Americans, and Blacks, the latter who were kept as slaves.  The US was defined both by who “we” were, and by the “other.”  The US is the only country that has the concept “Un-American”; no other national has a similar phrase to identify and define.  Identity is inborn in the logic of American politics, as scholars such as Richard Hofstadter and Perry Miller point out.
But while cultural values may drive identity politics, American political institutions inflame it.  Historian Charles Beard controversially contended in his 1913 An Economic  Interpretation of the Constitution that one the constitutional framers did was to recognize the potency of class politics and seek to transform it into identity or group politics. 
James Madison’s Federalist Paper number 10 opens recounting the dangers of factions or groups that can divide a society.  But he tells us that “the most common and durable source of factions has been the various and unequal distribution of property.”  Decrying the impracticality or desirability  of eradicating property differences as a threatening liberty, Beard seeks Madison’s call in Federalist 51 that “Ambition must be made to counteract ambition” and in Federalist 10 for “greater variety of parties and interests” to check one another.  Pit groups against one another, divide up the people, and prevent a majority from suppressing the rights of the minority who, in the eyes of Madison according to Charles Beard, were the property holders.
The Beardian gloss on the Constitution and the  Federalist Papers saw the brilliance of American politics in how the framers recognized the potency of American politics and sought to transform, sublimate, or displace it into interest group politics.  Eventually mainstream American political science would call a variant of this politics pluralism–the competition of groups for power desegregates it, producing the power-sharing supposedly characteristic of American politics. In theory, such politics would be less confrontational and conflictual than class, arguably allowing for more compromise and sharing of power as coalitions of groups change to pursue their interests.
Nice theory, but there is a problem.  Combine the institutional framework of America’s constitution and pluralism with the deep seated culture of identity and one gets a political system that institutionally encourages identity politics.  Of course racism toward African-Americans has always been there, as has that toward Native-Americans, Latinos, and Asian-Americans.  But over time persecution of the Irish, Italians, Catholics, and other groups have also been a mainstay of America and its politics.  Political campaigns have been defined by both by the “us” and who are the real Americans, and the “others,” those Un-Americans whom we need to purge from out soils.  Moreover, appeals to identity have proved to be anything but less conflictual than class politics; instead they have elicited some of the most passionate and hateful fights in American history.
Throughout American history class and identity have dueled as contenders driving American politics.  While class is always there, and has become more so as the gap between the rich and power in the US has exacerbated since the 1970s, the focus of American politics has mostly been dominated by identity politics in the last 50 years.  For progressives supportive of a civil rights agenda, there are good and important reasons to do that.  But as Tom and Mary Edsell pointed out in their 1991 Chain Reaction: The Impact of Race, Rights, and Taxes on American Politics, progressive identity politics produced a counter or chain reaction in reactionary identity politics that is at the core of the  ideology of Donald Trump’s political message to white working class America today.
Donald Trump’s attacks on Representative Ilhan Omar and three other female members of Congress who are persons of color simply elevates and removes any lasting doubt about intentionality of Trump’s narrative of identity politics in 2020.  It lays bare and returns American politics to its roots, one where race and identity are central.  It shows how combining cultural identity  that defines us versus them, with institutional design, and not party polarization produce a potent recipe for that politics that is driving the 2020 presidential campaign.

The Nixon-Trump Southern Strategy Goes North: The Midwest, Race, and the 2020 Presidential Election

Donald Trump’s recent tweet telling Congresswomen  Ocasio-Cortez, Tlaib, Pressley, and Omar  (all female and people of color) to leave the country is the most recent example of his effort to take Richard Nixon’s old southern strategy and apply it to the Midwest.  Trump is betting that it will work as effectively in 2020 as did it work for Nixon in 1968.  Whether it does, tells us a lot about where the US is today in terms of race relations.

Consider some American history.  From the US Civil War until the 1960s political scientists such as V.O. Key refer to the “Solid South.”   Republican Party opposed slavery and Democrats resisted civil rights.  The result was that the US South voted consistently for Democrats at all levels of office, but especially for president.  The south was a mainstay for the Democratic Party.

But beginning in the 1960s the Solid South cracked, and it did so over civil rights.  First it was the 1954 Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education decision that demanded integrated schools.  Then it was President Lyndon Johnson’s signing of the 1964 Civil Rights bill (and where he reputedly declared that with the signing of the bill the Democrats had lost the south for the rest of the century).  These two events launched a chain reaction of events. In 1963  George Wallace inaugurated his Alabama governorship by declaring “"segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever," and he mounted his 1968 presidential campaign on opposition to civil rights.

While never as overtly racist as Wallace, Richard Nixon’s 1968 campaign centered on race.  Nixon ran as a law and order, war on drugs, get tough on crime president.  Given the unrest in urban cores in the US and the civil rights demonstrations, these phrases of Nixon were code words for race.  The strategy worked–Nixon won, and he did so by winning several southern states no Republican had secured in 100 years.

The Republican Southern strategy of appealing to race and white conservatism was well described by Kevin Phillips, the architect of Nixon’s 1968 campaign and author of the 1969 The Emerging Republican Majority.  It described a majority of white working class American who in reaction to civil rights and cultural progressivism, would break away from the Democrats and vote Republican.
Largely the strategy worked.  Subsequent Republicans appealed to race and also to economic insecurities and anxieties to move working class Democrats over.  At first they were called “Reagan  Democrats, then perhaps Tea Parties, then perhaps now Trump Democrats.  Race was covert in moving them.  But sometimes, such as in the presidential race between George  H.W. Bush and Michael Dukakis, race was overt.  In that campaign the “Willie Horton” ads depicted a Black felon who had raped and murdered a woman.  Polls and evidence suggested these ads were decisive in helping Bush win by peeling off white voters from the Democrats.  All this was part of the Republican Southern Strategy.

And it worked.  By the mid 1990s Democrats had all but disappeared from the South at all levels of office.  The solid south was now a Republican south.

Enter Donald Trump.  His 2016 presidential campaign was famous for at least two points.  One, it appealed to the economic and racial anxiety of white working class America.  Two, it was a Midwest strategy.  Attacks on Mexicans and immigrants as rapists, drug smugglers, and criminals who take American jobs and collect welfare were a mainstay of his 2016 campaign. No surprise that such rhetoric appealed to many southern whites, but what surprised many was its success in appealing to working class whites in the Midwest.    These were individuals who had seen their coal mine, auto, or steel plants disappear.  Trump offered an answer–it was immigration, immigrants, and off-shoring of jobs that was to blame.  Bringing back coal was less about really bringing back coal than it was code word for race.  And it worked.  Trump split the Midwest–one described as a firewall for Democrats, by winning all the states there except for Illinois and Minnesota.

What Trump did in 2016 was to take Nixon’s Southern Strategy that split the Solid South  in 1968 and use it in the Midwest to break the Democrats’ firewall.  Only now for 2020, the rhetoric  is more explicit–it looks more like George Wallace than Richard Nixon.  Attacking Representatives  Congresswomen  Ocasio-Cortez, Tlaib, Pressley, and Omar was explicitly and outwardly racist.  The House of Representatives will condemn it, the media will attack it, many Republicans will renounce it.  But it may work as an effective 2020 strategy, further motivating Trump’s base to show up and vote.

Longer term the Trump’s Southern Strategy in the Midwest will fail.  Demographic trends  point to working class whites as a decreasing percentage of the electorate each year.  But right now this group is still the largest voting bloc in America.  For Trump to win in 2020 he needs the Midwest, but he needs his base to come out to vote in even greater percentages than in 2016.  Were he to win in 2020 it suggests that America is not yet “post-racial.” that large chucks of the American electorate still resonates to racial cues, and that Nixon’s 1968 Southern Strategy is not dead but has shifted to the Midwest.