Understanding the 2024 election as a (slim) rejection of “cultural elites” can help us reflect on the appeal of Donald Trump (or “Donald J. Trump,” as his supporters prefer) to a pool of voters with whom he shares statically few demographic traits. The word “elite” has different meanings to different audiences, and Trump’s return to the White House illustrates these differences.
Elitism for the Trump voters was (and is) about cultural markers, above all else. If you mention how those cultural markers reflect other variables, Trump supporters resist whatever words follow. For the Trump voter, based on surveys and focus groups, this election was about defending “American” culture.
For the Make America Great Again voter, elitism isn’t primarily about education, income, race, gender, or faith, though those demographic markers often support the elitism the MAGA audience disdains.
My wife and I, with our two charter school students and in our exurban single-family home, are within the category of elites that Trump’s voters dislike.
Suppose you envision an “elite” as a wealthy, white, heterosexual male who grew up in the top quintile or even the top 1 to 2 percent of households. In that case, your definition aligns with what might be called the socioeconomic understanding of elite, as used in academic discussions and among the political class associated with the Democratic Party.
If, however, you consider an “elite” an individual subscribing to their local NPR and PBS stations, attending performances of the “high arts” (ballet, opera, symphony, classical rep theatre), visiting art galleries, and smoothly speaking of wines and charcuterie, one who slips French phrases into casual conversations, and references public intellectuals as if they are close friends, then your elite is Trump’s elite.
Full disclosure: The Subaru’s radio is tuned to NPR (and I listen to several NPR podcasts); I have attended the ballet and numerous stagings of Shakespeare’s works; I used to relax on a bench across from a pair of paintings by Van Gogh; and I appreciate good wines. Our home library contains a plethora of bestselling pop academics, as expected of the bourgeois creative class. From our academic interests to our viewing habits, we are among the elites.
Donald J. Trump is the anti-elite president, an embodiment of what was once described as low-brow culture. His is the world of country music and “AM rock” from the 1970s. His preference for fast food, especially McDonald’s burgers and fries, is legendary. Trump attends professional wrestling matches, playing along with the enthusiasm of a star-struck teenager. Consider the celebrities with whom Trump surrounds himself for a set of cultural markers.
Trump presents what his followers believe to be the profile of a self-made billionaire. He wears the traditional dark suit, red power tie, and French-cuff shirt with faux-diamond cufflinks. He’s a bigger and gaudier version of the local real estate developer. He runs on pure charisma, not book smarts.
Ask a focus group of Trump voters about the elites and you’re likely to hear the words preachy, condescending, and woke. The elites are not experts to be consulted; they are snobs who believe they know best. The elites cannot even define the two genders, they are so lost in their superiority. The elites virtue signal with “coexist” bumper stickers, Pride flags, and their cultural preferences.
Sociologist Musa al-Gharbi’s new work We Have Never Been Woke offers a definition of the elites that aligns well with how I theorize voters favoring Donald Trump view the “cultural elites” in our society.
When al-Gharbi uses the word elite, he is talking about the group to which he belongs: the “symbolic capitalists”—broadly speaking, the various winners of the knowledge economy who do not work with their hands and who produce and manipulate “data, rhetoric, social perceptions and relations, organizational structures and operations, art and entertainment, traditions and innovations.” These are the people who set the country’s norms through their dominance of the “symbolic economy,” which consists of media, academic, cultural, technological, legal, nonprofit, consulting, and financial institutions.
Although symbolic capitalists are not exactly the same as capitalist capitalists, or the rest of the upper class that does not rely on income, neither are they—as graduate students at Columbia and Yale can be so eager to suggest—“the genuinely marginalized and disadvantaged.” The theorist Richard Florida has written about a group he calls the “creative class,” which represents 30 percent of the total U.S. workforce, and which overlaps significantly with al-Gharbi’s symbolic capitalists. Using survey data from 2017, Florida calculated that members of that creative class earned twice as much over the course of the year as members of the working class—an average of $82,333 versus $41,776, respectively.
— “Is Wokeness One Big Power Grab?” by Thomas Chatterton Williams in The Atlantic. November 16, 2024.
Democratic Party leaders cannot understand the how and why of the shift of “working class” voters away from their candidates and toward Republicans. After all, the Republicans are the party of the wealthy.
Yet, we know that wealth, which corresponds to education, is concentrated within the Democratic Party. The GOP has its billionaires, but the base of the party are the upper-middle-class tradesmen who own local businesses. The local wealthy are Republicans.
“Those most enthralled with Donald Trump were not at the very bottom — the illiterate, the hungry,” she writes. Rather, Trump’s biggest fans could be found among “the elite of the left-behind,” meaning people “who were doing well within a region that was not.”
In 2020, three political scientists studied how location and income affected white voters’ voting decisions. They found that, on a national level, poorer white people were indeed more likely to vote for Trump than richer ones.
But when you factored in local conditions — the fact that your dollar can buy more in Biloxi than Boston — the relationship reverses. “Locally rich” white people, those who had higher incomes than others in their zip codes, were much more likely to support Trump than those who were locally poor. These people might make less money than a wealthy person in a big city, but were doing relatively well when compared to their neighbors.
Put those two results together, and you get a picture that aligns precisely with Hochschild’s observations. Trump’s strongest support comes from people who live in poorer parts of the country, like KY-5, but are still able to live a relatively comfortable life there.
— “Trump’s biggest fans aren’t who you think,” by Zack Beauchamp on Vox. September 4, 2024.
The politicians of the GOP don their cowboy boots and Southern accents, hiding their Ivy League degrees and prep school pedigrees. They want to sound like the car dealer, the hardware store owner, and the residential building contractor you might meet in rural Kentucky or Texas, not the debate team captain of Harvard.
The United States is more divided by education than most other quantifiable metrics. If you doubt this, consider how many Trump cabinet appointees are Ivy grads who don’t want to be thought of as intellectuals. Trump’s voters despise Harvard and Yale and the pampered students who attend those universities.
Democrats focus too much on the “rich vs. poor” narrative. The voters are telling a different story. The voters see the division as being the condescending technocratic cultural elites vs. the hard-working builders of things.
Calling the voters ignorant or simple feeds into their prejudices against the elites. That won’t win national elections.