while there were programs to help, you could see already that welfare reform was more about punishing poverty than ending it.
Poverty is an apocalypse in slow motion, inexorable and generational. Sometimes a personal apocalypse, sometimes one that ruins a whole community. It isn’t a single event of biblical proportions, but it is a series of encounters with one or more of the fabled Four Horsemen. When politicians talk about the working class and the rust belt, we can hear that they understand the consequences of long-term poverty. They can grasp that it isn’t a moral failing or a personal failing, but instead the consequences of bad policy and limited opportunity colliding over time. But when it comes to the inner city, suddenly the morality of poverty must be debated. The idea that working-class people live there suddenly vanishes despite the city functions relying on those populations. Voter suppression collides with voter disinterest to further the disenfranchisement of residents. It’s this recipe that lends itself to the political landscape in America and elsewhere trending further and further to the right, where the belief in bootstrap logic dominates policy making even in the Democratic party.
There’s a blithe assumption that low voter turnout is about laziness or a lack of information or motivation. It almost never comes up in political discourse during an election cycle that for those living in decaying neighborhoods, the years of neglect have left the impression that party doesn’t matter, that no politician cares enough to try to stem the tide. Nor do we address the way that having a front-row seat to the brutality of poverty and neglect can impact a person emotionally. Yet millions of women live right there; they grow up on that precipice, raise children there, and have to navigate life in the shadow of potential destruction.
When we frame the working class as only being white people in rural areas, when we talk about the economic anxieties of that group as justification for their votes in 2016 and 2017, we ignore the very real harm done not only to inner-city communities of color, but to all communities of color here and abroad. From the way multiple American administrations have used deportation to force out immigrants to the way the Trump administration has used not only deportation but outright jailing of asylum seekers, the poor are suffering. Outside US borders, US foreign policy increasingly privileges the wealthy at the expense of the poor. American imperialism has always enabled dictators to access and retain power if it serves Western interests, and now under Trump we have stopped even paying lip service to the idea of the greater good.
When some bigoted white people heard the message of Donald Trump and others in the GOP that their concerns mattered, that the fear generated by their own biases had a target in Mexican and Muslim immigrants, many embraced the GOP to their own detriment. We talk at length about the 53 percent of white women who supported the Republican candidate for president, but we tend to skim past the reality that many white voters had been overtly or passively supporting the same problematic candidates and policies for decades.
Researchers point to anger and disappointment among some whites as a result of crises like rising death rates from suicide, drugs, and alcohol; the decline in available jobs for those who lack a college degree; and the ongoing myth that white people are unfairly treated by policies designed to level the playing field for other groups—policies like affirmative action. Other studies have pointed to the appeal of authoritarianism, or plain old racism and sexism.
Political scientist Diana Mutz said in an interview in Pacific Standard magazine that some voters who switched parties to vote for Trump were motivated by the possibility of a fall in social status: “In short, they feared that they were in the process of losing their previously privileged positions.” Instead of taking rising college enrollment rates by marginalized people as a sign that they would need to improve their own skills, they voted based on a fear they were losing their privilege and thus their positions. This voting phenomenon isn’t just about money or racism or sexism, it is about all of the above, and in many ways, the problem exists because of a refusal to reckon with American history. Americans love the myth of a meritocracy more than anything else, because