The Party of People Who Don't Have Much Money

Jean-Michel Basquiat, Hannibal.

Shorter Will Bunch ("A less-racist brand of Trump populism could bring a GOP dynasty unless Dems do something"):

Wait, I guess that was the shorter—some headline! Also if I looked more like Rafael Nadal I could be having a lot of trouble fighting the women off, but as long as I don't look even slightly like Rafael Nadal, I'm not allowing myself to worry too much about the prospect. 

I think Steve is completely right about Bunch's argument as far as that goes: a Trumpy candidate who's not appealing to racism and who offers a program that genuinely responds to working class needs isn't going to get anywhere with Trump's base and doesn't have a chance of getting the GOP nomination (a candidate who poses that way, like Josh Hawley of Missouri, making sure the voters know he's lying about the racism and the donors know he's lying about the populism, is a different matter, but I don't think that approach works in a national election either), so it's not a serious question. Voters—OK, maybe not all the voters, but certainly some indispensable proportion of them—voted for Trump because they were fine with the racism and donors funded him because they knew the populism was bogus. Bunch's imaginary founder of the new Republican dynasty isn't going to exist.

But I want to take some time to look at the wider premises Bunch starts with about the party that's already less racist and more genuinely responsive to working-class needs—

The Pathology of Trump Voting

Animated GIF by Bill Domonkos (2014).

"What's the matter with Kansas?"  wondered Thomas Frank in his celebrated 2004 book, meaning the political problem of what makes middle-class Kansans such self-defeating voters, continually giving themselves government by a Republican party that seems determined to make their lives worse in more or less every respect, impoverishing them materially (with an unbending insistence on freedom for the employer class, from taxes and regulation) and spiritually and intellectually (with an intolerance for heterodox views in education and religion).

But I'm wondering whether we should start thinking of it as a medical problem, following Shannon Monnat's research finding powerful correlations between the Trump vote and death rates from drugs, alcohol, and suicide in Rust Belt counties, what she refers to as "deaths of despair", or Kathleen Frydl's work focusing on opioid overdoses in Ohio and Pennsylvania in particular, or the study done by The Economist, which got comparable results without considering any drugs other than alcohol:

This demographic will self-destruct in five seconds...

Image by Julian Sancton for Esquire, February 2011.

A few weeks ago it struck me as a funny idea to think of the Trump electorate as 1990s teenage MTV nihilists Beavis and Butt-Head, grown to middle age, by way of some kind of political or postpolitical headbanging, heh-heh-heh, but then I started hearing about this paper by Anne Case and Angus Deaton detailing an ongoing crisis in the health of undereducated white American men between, say, 30 and 64, of just staggering proportions, comparable to the AIDS crisis back then, in which these guys are dying, apparently, of anomie, chronic joint pain and sciatica, and financial worry, shooting themselves, overdosing (on pills or alcohol), or systematically destroying their livers.

That means, quoting from the summary by Paul Campos,

Between 1998 and 2013, all-cause mortality for white non-Hispanic Americans (WNHAs) rose from 382 to 415 per 100,000. For WNHAs with a BA degree or more it declined from 235/100K to 178/100K. For WNHAs with some college but no BA it went from 291/100K to 287/100K.

For WNHAs with a high school degree or less, mortality rose from 601/100K to 735/100K — a 22.3% increase in mortality, in an overall social context in which mortality rates for almost all other groups are dropping by an average of around 2% per year.

For WNHAs with no college education, the annual suicide rate rose from from 22 to 39 per 100K, deaths from liver cirrhosis rose from 27 to 39 per 100K, and overdose deaths rose an astonishing 314%, from 14 to 58 per 100,000 per year. All told, middle-aged WNHAs with high school degrees or less experienced 135 more deaths per 100,000 per year in 2013 than in 1998. 

At a time when death rates for almost everybody in the world, with exceptions like Syria, perhaps, are falling.