TRUMP

WHAT CAUSED IT TO HAPPEN? 165
the country into places that you think matter and don’t – acting as
though some places deserve hopelessness and economic malaise and
some don’t – is contrary to the basic moral architecture of the American
progressive tradition.” 528
Another key point is this: even if we acknowledge that a person is
racist, we should understand what the economic roots of racism can
be. Often, prejudices bloom into bigotry because racism offers convenient
explanations for people’s life-conditions. It can be tempting
to blame immigrants for the loss of one’s job rather than blaming
the structural economic forces that are actually, but less obviously, at
play. One job of progressives is to help people understand that people
of different racial backgrounds are not the source of social ills, and
to point people toward true explanations and true solutions. Thus
economic deprivation can lead to an exacerbation of people’s racism,
meaning that it makes far more sense to see “race” and “economics”
as two parts of a complex picture rather than as competing, mutually
exclusive explanations.
In fact, it’s very easy to understand this if you spend time talking
to the voters about whom pundits make countless speculations
based on polling data. Real people are flawed and complicated, and
frequently they will be both racially prejudiced and have difficult life
circumstances. When we understand people in their fullness, we see
that the job of progressives is not to deny the importance of either
prejudice or personal financial situation, but to figure out how to get
people to be less prejudiced as well as ensuring a universal guarantee
of a decent standard of living.
Of course, it’s easy enough to figure out that many Trump voters
aren’t monsters. But many Democrats in coastal cities know very
few Trump voters. 529 Thus many in the press and the Democratic
Party apparatus have a hard time making sense of these voters’ motivations.
In order to understand Trump’s base of support, instead
of trying to speak to and empathize with these voters, they look at