Trump voters and economic anxiety, Kwak and DeLong

That “Massive New Study” Says Nothing About Economic Anxiety by James Kwak

Must-Read: Martin Sandbu: Trump Supporters on the Couch:
by DeLong

Economic anxiety can make voters more prone to racial resentment... 

It is, of course, an old trope in social thinking that economic pressure makes it easier to wind masses up against a scapegoated group perceived as “other”. Conversely, times of widespread and rising prosperity are good for liberalism and tolerance. Brad DeLong is quite right that this is a good time to pick up Ben Friedman’s prescient pre-crisis work on the moral consequences of economic growth.... 

Racial status anxiety and economic anxiety can be one and the same phenomenon, insofar as the economic pressure is perceived as affecting a particular social group. Much is said, all correct, about how the American white working class, and Trump supporters in particular, are well off compared with minorities and the real poor. But over the past generation, the trajectory of the white working class has no doubt changed the most for the worse, compared with the previous generation. 

That is true in material, indeed plain physical, terms: while black mortality rates remain higher than those of whites, it’s only for the white working class that the secular mortality decline has gone into reverse. And it is surely true that, as a result, the relative social status of working-class whites has fallen noticeably. That reflects a sharpening of class difference with widening inequality and an unequivocally welcome reduction in racial status difference. 

All told, that is a story of tremendous progress. But there is no need to dismiss the economic roots of the racial backlash we now see...