Hidden Brain - Voting With Your Middle Finger

Episode Date: October 16, 2018

There is one truth that has endured through the first two years of Donald Trump's presidency: he has kept the support of the core voters who propelled him to the White House. This week on Hidden Brain, we explore two competing perspectives on the motivations of Trump supporters, and what they can tell us about the state of our union.

Heads up parents, this episode contains strong language, so if you're listening with small kids, you may want to save this one for later. This is Hidden Brain, I'm Shankar Vedanta. In all of the drama of current politics in the United States, there is one truth that is endured through the first two years of Donald Trump's presidency. There's only one person, and that's the dog. Finally, we get someone that's not a politician. He is not afraid to say what we're holding. He's the screw you're washing with, that's all you. He has kept the support of the core group of voters who propelled him into the White House. The approval of these voters, often white and often working

class, has meant the Republican Party as a whole, has stayed loyal to Trump. Few Republicans running for high office can expect to win without the Trump base. As Trump himself once famously said, this week on Hidden Brain, we explored two competing perspectives on Trump's supporters and their motivations. One paints a sympathetic picture, focusing on class divisions and economic pain. This is a group that feels belittled and ignored and you know what, some level they're

right. The other is more critical. Race, as we all know, is such a fundamental cleavage in our society. I think Republicans are using it to their advantage. Joan Williams studies gender, class, and work in the United States. She's currently professor of law at the University of California Hastings College of the Law. She is also the author of the book, White Working Class, Overcoming Class Cluelessness in America. Joan, welcome to Hidden Brain.

Delighted to be here. We've heard a lot about the White Working Class since the 2016 election. I'm wondering if you could paint a picture from me, Joan, of who you include in this group and how you distinguish them from the very wealthy and the poor? In order to understand American politics, really for the past 40 years, you need to define three different groups. One is the poor with a median annual income of around $19,000. That's the bottom 30% of Americans by household income. And then the top, the professional manager elite is the top 20% by household income. And I define that as top 20% by household income with one college grad. The group that's being called the working class is the group in the middle. It's the middle 53 percent with a median household income in the in the 70s.

That's the group that's called the working class, although they actually are the middle class. You have some startling statistics about wages in this middle group over the last half century, what's happened to them economically starting, let's say, 1970? Since 1970, the wages and economic prospects of this group have absolutely tinked. Actually, more recent statistics have come out since the book, and the most dramatic is that virtually all Americans born in the 1940s did better than their parents, virtually all. But today it's less than half. And this is the group whose economic prospects has really collapsed. And that's actually true not only in the US,

it's true in advanced industrialized countries throughout the world. A more recent study showed, and that's one of the reasons you find these populist politics arising in many places around the world, not just the United States. I want to spend some time talking about your own journey wandering across these different class boundaries, and I want to start with when you were a fairly young girl. You came from a relatively well off background, certainly by education, your family was very highly educated. But you had a boyfriend who came from the white working class and you went over to his house for dinner when you were 16. Tell me what happened next.

Yeah, I was very much a silver spoon girl. The boyfriend that I had when I was 16, he was actually extremely wealthy, but he came from a strictly working class family and his parents had grown up working class. And so I went over to dinner. I was madly in love with him at the time and very eager to impress his parents. And so I asked afterwards, how did they like me? And he said, my father said, she looked at us

like a fucking anthropologist. And I was really shocked. First of all, I never heard an adult use that word. That's a class distinction right there. And secondly, I was really hurt because I realized that it was really true. What Joan didn't realize at the time was that her boyfriend's father had reason to see her with suspicion. As she was to later learn as a researcher, white working-class men had experience with

social elites studying them, judging them, and finding them lacking. Today, Joan would describe what her boyfriend's father was experiencing as a loss of social honor. I asked her what she means by the term. Well, I mean, in many ways, the way to understand this is to think about WPA murals in post offices across the country. I mean, if you've ever seen them, they're murals all over, and they celebrate the dignity of blue collar work. You have strong, effective guys doing important dirty work,

building the country, and they're really held up as one of the ideals of manliness and strength. And that was very much the cultural image of the blue collar guy until you know the 60s or 70s when it began to wane and we had a flip in the cultural imagery of blue collar men and I think of this you can see this actually through situation comedies. I mean, you think of Homer Simpson. As an emblematic of the stereotype of white working class men today, he's kind of dim-witted, amiable, fat, and ineffectual. Or if you think of Archie Bunker, a famous TV character in the 1970s. Oh, let me tell you something. I have so sick of Washington and all its works.

Who also was dimwitted and fat, also racist and sexist. So, you have this sharp fall from social honor of blue collar men. And it's felt very deeply as a personal front. When you speak with people from the working class, one of the things you say in the book is that they feel that they're often stereotyped. The stereotype is being poorly educated. The stereotype is being ugly, coarse,

they have bat teeth, they're fat. I mean, these are very, very personal sort of charges, if you will, that in some ways must be experienced as a form of humiliation. I think they are form of humiliation. I think the American elite has put a lot of thought into self-correcting our stereotypes of the poor. And so it would be considered bad taste in my circles to stereotype the poor is, you know. I think that we stereotype the working class,

especially the white working class as sort of stupid racist losers. And we use that kind of as a mute button to say, I'm not going to listen to anything, they say. But that's really a misuse of anti-racism as an excuse for snobbery. You have elite white people refusing to listen to the legitimate economic complaints of less elite white people on the grounds that those other white people are racist. You know, there's a lot of racism. You know, where you have white people, you're gonna have racism. That's the very sad

history of this country. But using anti-racism as a mute button is not helping the situation. You mentioned Homer Simpson a second ago. We actually found some tape with Homer Simpson. I want you to listen to this exchange. Bump! Time to go to work! Little do they know I'm ducking out early to take the Duff Brewery tour. Rollin' at nine, punch out at five! That's the plan! They don't suspect a thing. Well, off to the plant!

Then to the Duff Brewery. Oh, did I say that or just think it? I gotta think of a life fast! Mom, are you going to the D-brew-y? AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH in sort of an overall, you know, the overall picture is one of, of, of humor, right? I mean, these are elites making fun of people who are blue-collar people. That's right. And I mean, one of the things that blue-collar people are that ethic of self-discipline and hard work is so central to them. And they're, you know, they're very proud of their ability to go to these often not very fulfilling jobs day after day after day for 40 years straight.

And I think here of my father-in-law who went, did exactly that. He worked in a factory that made those machines that measure the humidity in museums and he was an inspector. He hated his job. He went to it for 40 years. And he was proud of doing a good job while he was at work. He was proud of the work that he did. And he took it seriously and he worked very hard and he deserved dignity for that.

And one of the things that I've been trying to explain to people is that these jobs are important jobs. When I get up in the morning and I turn on the tap, it's not because of some knowledge worker that water comes out. It's because of some blue collar person. Another thing that strikes me, and this is actually from a really fascinating article studying class and sitcoms is Marge in the Simpson is depicted as a smarter and more responsible and more grown up than Homer Simpson is and that's a pattern in American sitcoms where in if you look at professional

managerial families in sitcoms, it's father knows best and mother's a good support. But if you look at working class families in sitcoms, the woman is smarter and often the children are smarter than the dimwitted dad. So it's like kind of a class of front

and a gender front exacerbating the class of front. You and front exacerbating the class of front. You and your husband come from different backgrounds. You're the fourth generation of lawyer in your family, and you went to Yale and Harvard and MIT. Your husband came from blue collar roots. He's what you call a class migrant. Tell me about a high school reunion he once attended and the question he asked of a former classmate and what this exchange revealed to you. Yeah, so we went back to his high school reunion and, you know, I'm the anthropologist, he's not.

So he did what he had come to be used to in uperminal class circles, he asked one of his classmates, what do you do? Absolutely the standard question, my crowd. And his classmate was really offended. The classmate put his face very close to my husband's face. He got beat red and he said, I sell toilets. And he obviously felt that the, what do you do question was a class insult from virtually the only member

of their high school class from this blue collar rust belt town that had made it. And what that really shows you is the again going back to the class culture gap. Well, why does my crowd? Why do we ask each other, what do you do? Well, we do because it's a form of social display. What do I do? I'm a law professor. That's a form of social honor. What the I sell toilets comment meant is that I'm not just the man who sells toilets. Don't just boil me down to my job. My job is not who I am. And also it shows that that guy needed to keep close to home in a small circle of friends and acquaintances who knew else toilets. His social honor is not portable. One of the things that people have often noticed is that there is a political gap between

urban areas and rural areas, but one of the things that took away from your book is that the gap is really between people who are cosmopolitan in their outlook and people who are not. So there are going to be people who are veryopolitan in their outlook and people who are not. So there are going to be people who are very much at home working in Washington or New York or working tomorrow in London or Shanghai, but there are also people in the UK and in the US who are rooted to their communities in a way that's very different. And in some ways they resent the people who are cosmopolitan because they can pick up and leave and they don't have sort of the same ties or the same obligations to local communities that they feel that they do.

That's very, very true. I mean, there's, it does map onto class, but Brexit and Trump's election were both a revolt of the areas that have been left behind. For example, if you look at the counties that voted for Clinton, roughly 500 counties did. 2,600 counties voted for Trump, but the 500 counties that voted for Clinton represent two thirds of GDP. The 2,600 counties that voted for Trump represent only one third. The people

who voted both for Brexit and for Trump were those people who were left behind economically and left behind culturally as you point out because these are people who have the small, very localized, very deep and rooted clique networks of family and friends they've known forever, they actually, social science studies show that this group is more focused on community and solidarity in contrast to the professional managerial elite who are more focused on individual achievement and self-development.

When you think about the ways Blue-Color America and the elites relate to their work, I want to go back in some ways to the exchange that your husband had with his former classmate. In some ways by asking what do you do, elites are asking what another yes, it's a form of social display, but it's also a form of saying, work is really how you define who you are. It's an important part of your identity, whereas as you point out in the book for blue-collar America, work is really a means to an end. Work is what you do to support your family. So it's complicated.

Hard work is valued among both groups and that's one of the key ways we should begin to forge a bridge between these two groups. But the hard work is a matter of persevering and staying in that job despite the fact that you may kind of hate it in order to support your family and provide them with a settled family life. Elites are completely defined by their jobs. You know, what am I? I am a lawyer. I am a techie. This total self definition in terms of your job is one of the emblematic elements of

the elite. Many people may be blue-collar folks think the elite is just a bunch of sort of pathetic power-hungry pencil pushers who spend their whole life sucking up to each other and confuse their jobs with their lives. There's also a huge class divide when it comes to the value of education. Many well-to-do people believe that education is the key to a better life, that if you want to get ahead, you need to get a good education. But as you point out on the book Joan, this idea is a much more controversial idea among the white working class.

Why? Going to college is really, really risky for these groups. First of all, of course, college debt is what quadrupled in recent years. So it's very risky to start to go to college. Many of them ultimately drop out. There's a much higher dropout rate among class migrants, people from non-elite backgrounds. So often they end up paying back large college debts

on the wage of a high school graduate. And they see that. They see it as very, very risky. In addition, that they typically don't get into the same colleges. And social science studies show that if you give people an identical school record, one from an elite family and one from a white working class family, the white working class family has to, kid, has to actually be about three times as good as the elite family kid in order to get to be seen as equally strong. It doesn't end there. In one study, Jones says, researchers sent out two sets of resumes to employers.

The resumes were identical, except for one difference. One set off blue collar signals like pick up soccer like country music. The other set off elite signals, water polo, classical music. Mr. Water Polo got 16 times the number of callbacks as Mr. country music. So you may go through all of this process, incur all of this debt, and then because, you know, so to speak, you don't know what fork to use, you may not get a professional job anyway. John Williams argues that these class differences rooted not just in economic hardship, but in psychological shame and cultural humiliation play out in politics.

When we come back, we'll explore different theories about why the white working class tipped the 2016 presidential election to Donald Trump. I'm Shankar Vedantam and you're listening to Hidden Brain. This is NPR. This is Hidden Brain, I'm Shankar Vedantam. We're talking with Joan Williams, a law professor of the University of California, Hastings College of the Law. She's also the author of the book, White Working Class, overcoming class cluelessness in America. Trump is different because he doesn't have to answer to any donors. He said everything I've always dreamed someone would say. So in 2016, a New York billionaire comes along and tells the white working class they're going to be forgotten no more.

How does the story that you tell intersect with the rise of Donald Trump? I think the most important insight into why the white working class broke so strongly for Donald Trump, particularly in these left behind areas, is epitomized by a sign that said we voted with our middle finger. Donald Trump is their middle finger. They see the warts in Donald Trump that anybody with eyes sees, but I think that they voted for him and they have been so loyal to him because that's what he is for them. He is a big fuck you to the elites in the United States. And he's really effective at that. Now that is why these middle class guys are very, very loyal to Trump. He is not as popular among blue collar women or women in blue collar families.

So there's that sense of not being able to be a full man because you couldn't get that blue collar breadwinner job. And because you're been insulted by lots of cultural artifacts. A lot has been written about the white working class since the 2016 election zone and I would say there are two main lines of argument. The first that's espoused by you and researchers like Arlie Hopeshield whom we previously featured on Hidden Brain is that Trump was white working class America's response to years of humiliation and neglect. But there's also another theory and it And all the nations sent them in here.

They come small and in my dance. They're Spanish piars from the Calabones. They're jacks, you're Chinom, you're crouching your heaves, and you're leaving space. They're all come in here, and they're all free to live in their own secret sections. When they feel safe and then bust your head if you go in there. That's what makes America great, buddy. So Joan, how much does racial resentment or xenophobia explain the political choices of the white working class? I think the economic deprivation, the class culture gap, and the racial anxiety, they are different

sides of the same coin. Certainly, for someone who's spent much of my life studying gender and race, where you have white people, you have racism. That's just the fact. And it is not my job description to condone racism, no matter who expresses it. And it is not my job to deny the influence of racism in American life, that would be insane. On the other hand, I think that it's a lot easier to decry someone else's racism than to face your own class advantage.

I think that really for me the nub is that if people can't access their hope, they live by their fear. And that's the link between the economic anxiety and the racism. An alternative way of giving people a mechanism for understanding why they feel so dist, so economically bereft, so adrift is to say you haven't been well treated. By the economy, you haven't been well treated in popular culture. You have been disrespected because you're of a different class. And it's not because you're white people. It's because you are our blue-collar people.

And we're gonna stop doing that. Joan Williams studies gender, class, and work in the United States. She is the author of the book, White Working Class, Overcoming Class Cluelessness in America. Joan, thank you for joining me today on Hidden Brain. My honor and my pleasure. Thank you. We're going to turn now to another perspective on the motivations of the Trump base. The white working class is working class, but it is also white, and something dramatic has happened with white voters over the last half century. Marissa Abrahano is a political scientist at the University of California San Diego. Along with Zoltan Heineau, she is co-author of the book, White Backlash, Immigration, Race, and American Politics.

Marissa says the shift of white voters from the Democratic to the Republican Party has been dramatic over the last 40 years. Yes, indeed. So one of the biggest shifts I think that we have experienced in the last three to four decades are the racial and ethnic compositions of who makes up democratic and republican voters today. And much of that has to do with the fact that whites are defecting away from the Democratic Party and solidly aligning themselves to the Republican Party whereas the Democratic Party is the party that has become much more ethnically and racially diverse today.

So the fact that people of color are gravitating toward the Democratic Party and whites are gravitating toward the Republican Party, this isn't a new finding, but you argue, Marissa, that a significant portion of this trend is being driven by one specific political issue. Yes. So my colleague is Zoli Hainollani. That is the main thesis of this book, is that the issue of immigration is one of the main factors that's driving white voters away from the Democratic party.

And as a result of what we're seeing, we are definitely having this realignment, if you will, of the ethnic and racial makeup of that are two major political parties. So you are not the first scholars to identify that immigration matters in politics, but as I read your book, it struck me, you've come to a new understanding of just how much immigration matters. That's right. So it's not this novel finding that immigration matters. We've known that for a long time, but I think what we're

really trying to push forward is that this very essential piece of American politics, partisanship, and something that we hold so central to every sort of explanation of how people behave in politics, that that is really, it's being tremendously shaped by how folks think about immigration. There's been a long-standing debate in political science about the effects of partisanship. I remember talking to a number of experts over the years who've said partisanship and party loyalty is such a powerful force. That many of us often arrive at our views on policy matters

after we have pledged our allegiance to one side or the other. It's almost like following a sports team. You decide to follow a sports team and then you start to like all the things that the sports team does. And this thesis would argue that people's views on immigration are shaped by their partisan loyalties.

In other words, you'd people decide that party loyalties first and that decides how they think about immigration. In some ways, you're arguing the opposite. You're saying how people think about immigration shapes the way they think about party. Yeah. So anytime any researchers choose to study partisanship, it's always this very intimidating force because, as you said, there's so much research on it, and we feel like this is the one thing that we know so much about. But again, when we started doing all this data analysis, looking at how American voters behaved

over the past 20 years, it was really remarkable that even if we took, say, how they felt about immigration two years prior to a presidential election or any election, that that would still be a very strong predictor of their vote choice in that subsequent election, which means to suggest then that it was immigration that was explaining partisanship as opposed to vice versa. Let's step back for a second and just paint a picture of how you've arrived at this thesis. You say that since 2000, the United States has absorbed an extraordinary number of immigrants.

And in some ways, it will be very surprising if this surge did not have a profound effect on politics. Exactly. States like California, Texas, we already are majority, minority states, meaning that the majority of the population are made up of people of color, most of whom are immigrant descendants. So the U.S. Census predicts that by 2050, one out of every four Americans are going to be of Latino or Hispanic origin. I mean, that's quite astonishing.

So while there are these large numbers of immigrant families in the United States, these families, as you point out, account for a relatively small share of the voting population. And in some ways, this is the source of the friction and tension that's at the heart of your book. That's right. And, you know, I think part of it is that it is an issue that is easily understood by the public. The fact that undocumented immigration is a very easy issue in the sense that for the

average American voter, you can understand somebody who breaks the law and enters the country without proper documentation. And that is a violation of our laws and orders that that can easily animate people. And it seems to me that's closely connected with what Paul Schoemurissa, half of white Americans seem to believe that immigrants are a burden to US society. And it's like majority think that Latinos add to the crime problem. That's right.

And again, if you actually look at the data itself, those perceptions are not the reality, particularly when it comes to crime. So just like many things that's happening right now in politics, what people perceive, what the truth is, and what the facts are, are very different from what the actual evidence is. Rapid demographic shifts, Merissa Abraham and Zoltan Hainal argue,

have created feelings of threat among white voters, especially the white working class. These threats come in different forms. Cultural threat. If you don't speak English and don't contribute, yeah, that. Economic threats. As far as I'm concerned, there's still in jobs. Political threats.

Why don't Republicans on the Hill understand the threat that these policies pose to the country and to them. So you have multiple trends happening at the same time. On the one hand, you have these rapid demographic shifts. You also have these increasing feelings of threat among many white voters. And simultaneously, you also have a situation where one political party is seen as being more responsive to the anxieties of white voters than the other one. That's right. I think the Republicans have really taken all of these multiple factors into consideration and used it to capitalize on a central message and theme that can really, again, mobilize

their voters. And the fact that their base is overwhelmingly white means that they can have a central message such as immigration that can activate and mobilize their voters into not only supporting their candidates, but also supporting the kinds of issues that they want to advocate for. There's been some criticism that, well, this is a short-term strategy and they're going to suffer in the future, and that may be the case, but for the present, it's an extremely successful strategy as we've seen. You've also looked at what happens in states as the demographics of states start to change. So, as the Latino populations in states starts to increase, for example, what do you find in terms

of the behavior of white voters? Well, what you typically see is that as the population of Latino voters have increased, you start to see the shift in the political behavior of white voters to support the Republican candidate. And that would be consistent with the theory the immigration is explaining the voting preferences of white voters. You know, we wrote this book before the 2016 election. So for better or worse, some would say that it was pre-scient of the outcome, but it was just remarkable to us that when we were putting together this book and our analysis

is that from all these different angles, not just of, you know, who white voters supported, but also the kinds of policies that they favor, that it was really just, that immigration was such a strong and important predictor in all of these different political outcomes that we were exploring. And so I think that's where this idea that it was really this white backlash towards immigration that's currently the political climate we live in today. When we come back, what Marissa Abrahamos thesis

about a white backlash means for politics and elections. Stay with us. This is Hidden Brain, I'm Shankar Vedantam. We're talking with Marissa Abrahamos, a political scientist at the University of California, San Diego. She is the co-author, along with Zoltan Heinell, of the book White Backlash, Immigration, Race, and American Politics. Marissa, your book came out in 2015, but as you said, in many ways it anticipated the Central Issue and Donald Trump's presidential campaign.

At the time, Marissa, many pundits, Trump was running a campaign that was out of touch with a diverse America. But in many ways, your book shows he was actually running a campaign that was perfectly in touch with the anxieties of white voters. That's right. I think what Pundits missed is that Trump isn't trying to attract all voters across the United States. He knew exactly what demographic and what base he was speaking to.

And so again, with these kinds of emotional appeals that are tied to a specific group of individuals, that pitch, that message resonated as we all know now extremely well with his supporters. And I think it was compounded also by the fact that we had eight years in Obama presidency. And so its immigration also tied in with the issue of race. And this is why the subtitle of our book is immigration race and politics because the two things, at least in the context of the United States, they go hand in hand with one another. And so you have eight years of the presidency of the first African-American

president in this country coupled with the specific campaign message of immigration, all together tying in a lot of that racial resentment that happened in that past eight years. I think it just is what galvanized his campaign and his presidency. So one disturbing implication from your thesis, Marissa, is that we're heading to a situation where we have different political parties for people of color and people who are white. And increasingly, what this means

is that our political divides become racial divides. Indeed. And that's one of the, again, more pessimistic outcomes of this research is that really, you know, race, as we all know, is such a fundamental cleavage in our society. But I think also Republicans willingly took on that strategy and are using it to their advantage clearly. There's an interesting tension here. It seems to me for both the Democratic Party and the Republican Party, you know, we alluded to this some time earlier, but what might be in the interest of each party in the short term might not be in its interest in the long term.

Can you talk about that from the point of view of both the Democratic Party and the Republican Party? Sure. I mean, for the Republican Party, right now, they're an overwhelmingly white party. And as we know, with the way demographics are shifting in the United States, we're going to become increasingly a majority minority country, that at some point that strategy is going to be short-lived, right? So, but again, for the time being, for the next five to ten years, it works. So, I think their sense is, well next five to ten years, it works. So I think their sense is, well, let's just go with it, right?

They're not looking further beyond 20, 30 years from now. On the other hand, the problem that Democrats faced is, yes, they're the most diverse party that more diverse than Republicans. But one thing that they really are struggling with is that the voting behavior of voters of color differ in the sense that so many of them are not engaged in the political process, meaning that it is very time intensive and it's very costly to get voters of color to turn out to vote. So again, we still have like a 20 to 30 percentage point difference in turnout rates between voters of color and white voters.

And so the problem that Democrats have is to how do they actually get their voters to get out there and participate in politics so that their numbers actually match their rates of turnout. That's the biggest thing that Democrats are struggling with. I'm wondering if you can tell me a little bit about this other work you've done, Marissa, that looks at this idea that the things that happen at certain moments in our lives, especially when we're young adults, have these profound effects on our political allegiances over the next several decades.

And you've studied the effects of various immigration bills starting with a bill in 1965 and one in the 1980s and one in the 1990s and one of the early 2000s. And you look at how the debate over those bills has reshaped the political allegiances of young people in each of those eras in a way that's very profound and very long-lasting. Can you talk about this process of how this crystallization of political attitudes happens? Yeah, I'm glad you've raised that point because it's a, I think it's a very important thing to bring up, especially if you think about long-term future effects. And what my research has shown is that these galvanizing, these really major moments, for example, the election of President Trump,

I would say, would mark one of them. And particularly the anti-immigrant sentiment, anti-Mexican sentiment that he's taken on really has the ability and power to shape how young voters think about politics and affiliate themselves politically, not just now, but for the rest of their future. And so the research typically thinks about this is called these moments of political crystallization, so really major events like this,

the Vietnam Wars, been something that's been studied. And so, so young folks who've been socialized in this current era, young folks generally, we think about that between the ages of 18 to 35, if they were of that age in this time period, that that's really going to have a very strong predictive power in how and who they support politically for the rest of their lives. So you can imagine that an 18-year-old senior Latino in high school, somewhere in Los Angeles, who it was his first time voting in this 2016 presidential election, hearing all this anti-immigrant sentiment is really going to shape his political views from now until the future. Marissa says that she experienced this in her own life. When she was in college, California's Republican governor Pete Wilson pushed for what was known

as Proposition 187. It attempted to cut off health services and public education for undocumented immigrants. It passed overwhelmingly, although it was later found to be unconstitutional. Marissa, whose family immigrated to the United States from the Philippines in the 1960s, says the anti-immigrant sentiment behind the bill had a profound effect on her. You know, in a lot of immigrant homes, you don't really talk about politics all that much, or if you do, you talk about politics in your home lands. So that conversation really wasn't present at home,

but it was evident in schools and in your communities, and especially on college campuses where you started to see what activism meant and what activism was, that's really what I started to witness how immigration played such a central role in the lives of many folks and of many Californians. And so for me that really opened my eyes to the fact that immigration really affects so many individuals at so many different levels. Did you feel in some ways the rhetoric at that time was personally directed at you that

you felt in some ways that you were the target of attack? Sure. I don't think anybody who doesn't look who's a non-white person, you know, didn't feel that way. I mean, it's just the way of it is growing up in this country. In the quarter century since Pete Wilson pushed forward Proposition 187, it isn't just Marissa whose views have cemented against the Republican Party. As white sees to be a majority in California, the state has now swung so far to the left

that the Republican Party has been nearly reduced to third-party status. Democrats outnumber Republicans nearly two to one. Marissa says California offers a sobering lesson for the future of the Republican Party across the country. Yes, having again grown up in this state for all my life, it's really remarkable to see such a rapid change in my lifetime. And if you think the national parties were really

paying attention to what's happening in states like California, you would think that they wouldn't be advising the Republican candidates to use immigration, this issue, to mobilize their voters because where it alienates such a large percentage of the population. So you think it would be obvious that they would say, hey guys, this strategy is just going to, you know, come back to Baichu in the next 20 years. Don't do it. But currently, we don't see Republicans, you know, paying any attention or acknowledging the fact that

this could very well be their future in the next 20 to 30 years. But there's attention, isn't it, which is if you're a Republican politician today, you are not necessarily interested in winning election 25 years from now. You need to win election today. That's right. They are current election-seeking office seekers. And so they just, all they focus on is the next election, which is typically two years or four years from now, right? So not to say that Republican strategists haven't conceded the fact that their strategies are short-term. And I remember after the 2012 election, the RNC memo came out with this acknowledgement that the party needed to

do a better job at being much more inclusive. But given that that was the minority position, we haven't really seen any kind of meaningful efforts towards that direction today. Marissa Aburjana was a political scientist at the University of California San Diego. Along with Zalton Highinal, she's co-author of the book, White Backlash, Immigration, Race, and American Politics. Marissa, thanks for joining me on Hidden Brain today. Thank you for having me. Joan Williams and Marissa Abrahano

have looked at the very same phenomenon, the shift of white people away from the Democratic Party and toward the Republican Party and drawn very different conclusions. For Joan Williams, class prejudice against working class whites, especially from liberal elites, explains why these voters have deserted the Democratic Party. For Marissa Aburhano, racial prejudice and xenophobia are the answer.

There is evidence to support both contentions. Indeed, as John Williams says, it may be that the loss of social honor experienced by working class whites might itself explain their shift toward the nativist vision of Donald Trump. When you can't access your hopes, all you have to live by are your fears. This week's show was produced by Thomas Liu and edited by Tara Boyle and Kimela Vargas Restrepo. Our team includes Jenny Schmidt, Raina Cohen, Parts Cha, and Laura Quarelle. Today's episode is the second in a two-part

look at American politics and our political identities. If you didn't catch last week's episode about the biology of our political preferences, it's really interesting. Check it out. It's the episode in your podcast feed called Red Brain Blue Brain. Our unsung hero this week is Tara Savage L. For years, Tara has run NPR's Amazing Internship program and brought literally hundreds of young journalists and public radio enthusiasts

into the organization. Some of NPR's more senior reporters, hosts and managers started out as interns, so the internship program is really a way for the organization to renew itself. Tara managed the immense logistics of reviewing applications and organizing interviews, truly the definition of an unsung hero. For more hidden brain, find us on Facebook and Twitter. If you love our show, please tell one friend about us this week. In fact, try and do it right now. Think of someone who might like us and send them a note. And thanks. I'm Shankar Vidantum. See you next week. you