NC's deeply conservative white working class likely won't walk away from Trump

As state Democrats have sought to preserve their traditional coalition, the white working class has cratered into a void that seems almost limitless. Broadly speaking, most North Carolina demographics have become slightly more Democratic since 2010. But whites without college degrees, particularly in rural areas, are becoming a Republican monolith. Their lurch to the right seems limitless.

The increasingly fierce conservatism of the white working class has been growing for years. In 2008, Barack Obama managed to narrowly win Richmond County, a tough former mill district on the South Carolina border. By 2020, that county had become so Republican it was no longer competitive. Working-class whites trended relatively blue in most states that year, even in Deep-South Georgia. But here, the white working class moved four points to the right, a stubborn trend that may very well have led Democrats to feel hopeless.

If politics were principally about economic interest, the intense conservatism of working-class white North Carolinians might seem bizarre. Whites without college degrees lag their more-schooled peers nationally and face even greater privation in North Carolina. Noncollege whites here make $11,000 less than college graduates of the same race. This gap has been growing for years, as the state’s rural areas and mill towns bled jobs and the knowledge-economy cities of Raleigh and Charlotte became increasingly prosperous. Logically, one might think, the relative poverty of the white working class would inspire them to vote for the progressive party.

It has not. Upscale liberals baffled by the white working class’s conservatism fundamentally misread downscale culture in North Carolina. Class politics has always been weak here. When working-class whites (such as my lode star Kerr Scott’s famous Branchhead Boys) have voted for progressives, it has been episodic and has quickly resolved into the default status quo of broad conservatism. Downscale whites were actively hostile to the attempts by labor unions to organize the exploitative textile industry, with both local dirt farmers and evangelical preachers fulminating about the secular-libertine depredations of the labor movement. When national guardsmen gunned down seven workers in Marion, North Carolina in the 1930s, they did so with the implicit support of most local whites.

White racism is fundamental to working-class conservatism in North Carolina. Ever since Bacon’s Rebellion in 17th-century Virginia, the South’s white oligarchy has successfully used racial animus to divide and conquer the working class. But I think the conservatism of less-educated whites in our state has even deeper cultural, even cognitive, roots than the ancient demon of race feeling. The neoconservative intellectual Daniel Bell famously observed that “the central conservative insight is that culture is more important than politics.” The mores and beliefs of a community precede the development of a political culture among their residents. Thus, people who are culturally hostile to a party are unlikely to be receptive to its economic appeals.

Scholars of cultural cognition divide Americans into three categories: egalitarians, libertarians, and those with a hierarchical psychology. The hierarchs revere tradition and defer to authority. They accept their place in a stratified society and consider traditional social roles to be sacrosanct. When prompted to think about guns, they imagine heroic pioneers conquering the wilderness. These are the kinds of people who live in working-class white North Carolina.

With their hierarchical mentality, working-class whites in North Carolina are beset by a deep bond with the political right. Hierarchy and conservatism pervade nearly every aspect of life in the less-prosperous white communities in our state. Preachers demand strict deference to a vengeful God and women know their place. The old shibboleth of white supremacy remains largely untouched. As a whole, these people live in a world strictly ordered by a cultural hierarchy, and the tropes that flower in more liberal communities—personal liberation, diversity, the happy embrace of change—are anathema to the local consensus. Conservatism is welcomed; liberalism is loathed.

I think it is fair to say that working-class whites in North Carolina are fundamentally conservative. They vote for Republicans like Trump, Ted Budd, and even Mark Robinson because they share those people’s socially conservative worldview. That makes them a tough nut to crack. Conservatism resides so deeply in the culture of the white working class that they simply are not receptive to joining the class-based coalition that many progressives dream of forging from the many component parts of our state’s working class. In the final analysis, the white working class here has seldom supported progressive change. Ambitious progressives will have to find another way to win.