"White Trash" in America: A Guest Perspective

Peter Sage Introduction:    Long established Republican policy is that America needs tax cuts for businesses and wealthy individuals who pay  high marginal rates.  GOP policy is that Americans would benefit from smaller government and less consumer protection and that working people would benefit as Medicare and Social Security are cut, but they would come out ahead as wealth trickles down from economic growth.

Trickle down is ideology, not a description of how the economy really works

That is a tough idea to sell.  

The widespread observation is that the rich have gotten richer and that wealth doesn't trickle down, so working people are getting angry and they are voting for Donald Trump.   They are voting their economic interest and aren't being distracted by talk of ending gay marriage or abortion or other social issues.

In this guest post Thad Guyer writes that Trump voters are acting more like aroused revolutionary mobs than the compliant voters who lined up behind Mitt Romney in 2012, who sold the benefits of trickle down and referred to the people who receive benefits as "takers."  There is a split between the party leaders, who work closely with the businesses and wealthy donors who have led the party platform for a generation, and the voters who have no power except one: the vote.   It turns out there are a lot of them.

Something had to give.

The leadership did not shift toward Trump's positions on taxes and trickle down because such a shift would require the GOP give up its most cherished position: less regulation and lower taxes for the "job creators."  So the party is starting to go to war with its own voters, leading a "Stop Trump" movement and in de-legitimizing the grievances of Trump voters, from immigration, to trade, to government benefits to mitigate the hard edges of global capitalism.

Thad Guyer is an attorney specializing in representing whistleblowing employees, so he pays close attention to the kinds of messages that are persuasive to judges and juries.

Thad Guyer Guest Post

Thad Guyer Guest Post:   White Trash and Our 21st Century Plantation Economy

Yes, UpClose is right, now the Republican establishment has become the leading persecutor of disenfranchised whites. Because disenfranchised whites now largely support Trump or Sanders, Republicans are eager to denounce the whole lot of them as “white trash”. If Trump has done any service to America, it is his exposure of how mean-spirited and vicious the Republican establishment has become. 


It is breath taking. I welcome the curtains being yanked back, I feel liberated by it, it is high time for class warfare. Ready the firing squads like the Romanians did for Nicolae Ceaușescu and his wife after the Soviets fell, or as the Parisian revolutionaries did with the guillotine for King Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette. We have the Second Amendment and open carry firearms. We are ready. 

If entrenched wealth and the donor classes of the Republican Party want to rile up a lynch mob like those who executed the Ceaușescu’s on the street in 1989, then demonizing and trashing “white trash” is just the group to gun them down. Wall Street traders and their elite American Conservative spokesmen are banging the cage in reckless fashion. The Republican establishment’s fears of Trump are palpable and visceral. Just read Michael Lewis’ Flash Boys: A Wall Street Revolt, https://goo.gl/yKbpTS, or the warnings of Carl Ichan about prospects of violent revolution to punish a repressive American oligarchy. White trash armed to the teeth giving a deadly bite is more than merely possible. See, “Billionaire investor Carl Icahn backs Trump” http://goo.gl/Owqvu, and “The Invisible Poverty of ‘Poor White Trash’,” The American Conservative, http://goo.gl/eUgrri.


Use of the term “white trash” is more apropos than our ignorant elites might think. Wikipedia says:   In 1854, Harriet Beecher Stowe wrote the chapter "Poor White Trash" in her book A Key to Uncle Tom's Cabin. Stowe wrote that slavery not only produces "degraded, miserable slaves", but also poor whites who are even more degraded and miserable. The plantation system forced those whites to struggle for subsistence. Beyond economic factors, Stowe traces this class to the shortage of schools and churches in their community, and says that both blacks and whites in the area look down on these "poor white trash". (Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_trash).


America is not just in a long recession or slow recovery. We are quickly moving to a 21st century Plantation economy. As UpClose has aptly analyzed in previous posts, take your pick of perspective: Bernie says our increasingly miserable economy should be seen as class oppression. Hillary says it’s a matter of oppressed racial and gender minorities. Trump says is opportunistic global greed that should have been restrained by smart leaders. 

Where do the “white trash” fit in to these political formulations? Definitely not with Hillary, unless she wants to try to spin white trash as an oppressed minority, which she cannot do without straining her actual racial coalitions. Bernie comes closer, but he makes little effort to address his class rhetoric to white trash voters since he knows they are Republicans unlikely to ever vote for him, and he still hopes to peel off some minority voters from Hillary.

Only one candidate talks directly to the white trash: “We won with young. We won with old. We won with highly educated. We won with poorly educated. I love the poorly educated." Donald Trump, http://goo.gl/DUQZK6.

Elite conservatives fear Trump because they know that “white trash” includes whites who are not poor. The demographic includes a much broader socio-economic group of whites who will self-define with their ballots as to who is and who isn’t feeling stuck in the “the plantation system” described by Harriet Beecher-- those who must “struggle for subsistence”. 

We will know soon enough and see it all play out in cataclysms in Cleveland.