Donald Trump is Every Kind of Villain from the Canons of White Working Class Story-telling

Ever since I read Joan Williams’ article in the HBR on “What So Many People Don’t Get about the U.S. Working Class,” about why the white working class voted for Donald Trump, I have been bothered by her explanation of how the white working class supposedly admires rich people but resents “professionals” like Hillary Clinton. Citing Michèle Lamont, she says:

Michèle Lamont, in The Dignity of Working Men, also found resentment of professionals — but not of the rich. “[I] can’t knock anyone for succeeding,” a laborer told her. “There’s a lot of people out there who are wealthy and I’m sure they worked darned hard for every cent they have,” chimed in a receiving clerk. Why the difference? For one thing, most blue-collar workers have little direct contact with the rich outside of Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous. But professionals order them around every day. The dream is not to become upper-middle-class, with its different food, family, and friendship patterns; the dream is to live in your own class milieu, where you feel comfortable — just with more money. “The main thing is to be independent and give your own orders and not have to take them from anybody else,” a machine operator told Lamont. Owning one’s own business — that’s the goal. That’s another part of Trump’s appeal.

Yet this explanation ignores the long tradition in WWC story-telling — in song, in television, and in film — that mocks and vilifies the rich man as privileged, vulgar, bigoted, misogynistic, race-baiting, demagogic, arrogant, brutal, tyrannical, autocratic, narcissistic, and ultimately incompetent to lead even himself. Donald Trump is all of these things, and yet many in the WWC were not put off by him. Before we get into the question of why that is, consider the evidence.

Country music has a long tradition of resisting the drama and luxury of the Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous, instead taking consolation in the simple pleasures of nature. There is no fetishization of “greatness” whatsoever. Modesty, simplicity, quiet lyric contemplation are the order of the day. Take for example, Don Williams’ “I’m Just a Country Boy”:

I’m just a country boy, money have I none,
But I’ve got silver in the stars,
And gold in morning sun gold in morning sun

Or compare Hank Williams’ celebration of the authentic workaday life to the phony luxury life on television:

I work every day the sun comes up from eight until five
I don’t have a new Mercedes car or a chauffeur to drive
My wife ain’t out shoppin’ with a country club queen
’Cause she’s workin’ in the morning until she picks up the kids at three

This ain’t Dallas and this ain’t Dynasty
This is a real-life two job working family
And I ain’t J.R., you ain’t Suellen
We’re just a man and a woman holding things together.

The lifestyle of the rich man is routinely treated with scorn and suspicion through a number of stereotypes that Donald Trump fits well into.

Donald Trump is like the rich husband of the sexually-repressed woman who in Conway Twitty’s fantasy said, “I married money, I’m used to wearin’ pearls, but I’ve always dreamed of bein’ just a good ol’ boy’s girl.”

Compare the motif common to country music — and to every form of lyric poetry — of the woman who tragically pursues a life of luxury in exchange for true love in Charlie Pride’s “Crystal Chandeliers” and “All I Have to Offer You is Me.”

Unlike the simple man who offers genuine love, Donald Trump is the “gentleman” who seeks to exploit beautiful poor women like Reba McEntire’s “Fancy.”

Donald Trump is like the neglectful husband who sees a wife as just another employee in Mary Chapin Carpenter’s “He Thinks He’ll Keep Her.”

According to Trump’s first wife, Trump was physically abusive and made her feel “violated” during sex. This character is familiar to country music fans in Martina McBride’s “Independence Day.”

Let the weak be strong, let the right be wrong
Roll the stone away, let the guilty pay it’s Independence Day

(I won’t even mention the Dixie Chicks.)

In the political world, Donald Trump stokes racial fears while claiming to be the champion of “the little man,” like Homer Stokes (Wayne Duvall) in Oh, Brother, Where Art Thou?

And I say to you that the great state a Mississippi cannot afford four more years a Pappy O’Daniel — four more years a cronyism, nepotism, racialism and service to the Innarests! The choice, she’s a clear ‘un: Pappy O’Daniel, slave a the Innarests; Homer Stokes, servant a the little man!

At the office Donald Trump sexually harasses women like the incompetent Franklin M. Hart, Jr. (Dabney Coleman) in 9 to 5.

And he pays other people to do his dirty-work for frivolous luxuries and engages in nepotism like Big Enos (Pat McCormick) in Smokey and the Bandit.

Donald Trump is an autocratic bully like Brad Wesley (Ben Gazzara) in Roadhouse (Is there a more privileged-sounding name than “Brad Wesley”?).

Donald Trump lies pathologically and cons people, like Boss Hogg (Sorrell Booke) in Dukes of Hazzard.

Much as he resembles these many villains, Donald Trump could not be more different from the heroes and heroines of these stories, the authentic representatives of the people, who often work together with marginalized members of diverse talent (9 to 5 is one of the best examples of this).

Contrast Donald Trump with one of the great story-tellers and heroes in the white working class pantheon, Johnny Cash. Unlike Cash, Trump seeks to escalate violence wherever possible.

But unlike Donald Trump, Johnny Cash is a sympathetic and lifelong crusader for the less fortunate.

I wear the black for the poor and the beaten down,
Livin’ in the hopeless, hungry side of town,
I wear it for the prisoner who has long paid for his crime,
But is there because he’s a victim of the times.

It is unfortunate that a majority of white working class citizens preferred every canonical villain to the Man in Black — or the Woman in White.

Like puppets on a string, they fell for everything their story-culture should have prepared them to be suspicious of.

The question, then, is why were many in the WWC not viscerally repulsed by Donald Trump, when he fits so many of their canonical stereotypes?

It cannot be that they “just wanted jobs.” Both candidates promised jobs, but under different slogans, “Stronger Together” versus “Make America Great Again.” So, why did so many WWC voters find Trump’s promise of jobs more credible?

• Were they somehow not given enough information about Donald Trump to make a fair assessment? Have they been sealed off so carefully with fake news in their (social) media bubble that they were unable to see how much Trump embodied all they are suspicious of?
• Was Hillary Clinton — and her message of “Stronger Together” — just so repugnant that WCC voters preferred every villain as the “lesser of two evils”? Were all of the examples I used above truly racist, misogynistic, and xenophobic at heart, with just a flaky veneer of contempt for class privilege, mistreatment of the marginalized, and coldheartedness?
• Or has the WWC deviated from the values I was raised in? Have the canonical villains faded from cultural memory, only to be replaced by macho hedonism, worldly ignorance (“I watch CNN but I’m not sure I can tell You the difference in Iraq and Iran”), and truculent patriotism (“we’ll put a boot in your ass, it’s the American way”)?
• Is my use of evidence above too selective? Are there threads of Trump in WWC story-telling that explicitly celebrate his privilege, bigotry, fear-mongering, etc.
• Is there something I’m missing?

All of these explanations seems plausible to me, and obviously I don’t have statistical data to make a determination. I welcome intelligent feedback.