The End of the “White Working Class” Hot Take

Early this year, I wrote a post called “Working Class Deplorables are Our Only Hope Against Elite White Supremacists.” I submitted it to Paste Politics and later had it published there. I believe that everything I said in it is correct. But, when I read it now, a major part of it feels dated. It feels like I was responding to, and participating in, a trend of talking about the so-called “white working class” as a voting bloc who determines the fate of America.

When you spend a lot of time reading political opinion pieces online, it’s easy to feel like all of them are worth a response — as if they are inviting you to debate. When you are also on Twitter — a social network dominated by writers— this feeling is exacerbated. You are exposed to more opinion pieces, and are also exposed to the 140-character micro-thoughts of those paid opinionators.

Throughout 2016 and for a portion of 2017, these professional opinionators were focused on a mythical demographic: the white working class. We were supposed to blame this demographic for Trump. We were also supposed to ignore them, even if that meant resigning to more Republicans in office, forever. But, even more oddly, we were supposed to focus our thoughts, and our politics, on the white upper-middle class, a demographic who tends to vote Republican and are also too small to really swing elections.

My article on “deplorables” and on bourgeois liberals’ disturbing forgiveness toward bourgeois racists was a response to that “white working class” discourse. But the interesting thing about that discourse is that, even then, I knew it was fake. I knew that the white working class wasn’t a unified voting bloc. I knew that white liberals and centrists just talked about the white working class in order to ignore a real problem: that many poor people, no matter what pigmentation is in their skin, don’t vote unless they have an exceptionally compelling reason to vote. And even then, sometimes it’s just not worth the trouble (especially in the many places that intentionally make it hard to vote).

But this is not a distinct feature of white working class people. You could just as easily talk about how to win over the black working class, or the Asian working class. The conclusion of all of those conversations would be the same: convince them that their vote will actually improve their lives, rather than make no difference at all, and maybe they will vote. The only reason to focus a conversation on the white working class is to participate in a discourse that was started by disingenuous political operatives and pundits with no attention span.

I see a common conversation about “hot takes.” The conversation often begins with “why did everybody write throwaway articles about this one topic for a week?” The conclusion is often: the topic was hot, so people wrote takes on it in order to get clicks.

I didn’t write my “deplorables” article for clicks, and I think that even the crassest writers don’t actually write for clicks in mind. Instead, they write their hot takes because, to paraphrase Roger Bellin, the hot take cycle is the opposite of writer’s block. Responding to temporary trends in the discourse that you observer online is easy and almost relaxing. To paraphrase Bellin again, the art of mining for hot takes is a respite from staring at a blank page.

In Paste Politics, Connor Southard recently wrote an article entitled “How Should We Write About Trump Voters? The Answer: Don’t.” It takes the Hot Take Discourse into account, and responds to it, but also, constantly, reminds us that there exists a world outside the Hot Take Discourse. The article is rooted there.

If I could send myself a message back in time, to when I was writing the “Working Class Deplorables” article, I would have reminded myself that that mental place exists: a place that converses with the Hot Take Discourse, but doesn’t accept its parameters. A place rooted in reality, where one never forgets that the “white working class” is a mere idea, a fantasy in the mind of people who don’t care about the real, multiracial working class.

I’m not sure how exactly my article would have been different if I’d sent that reminder back in time. It would have covered most of the same ground regarding Richard Spencer and Kevin Drum. It might have even had the same title. But, like Southard’s article, it would have been rooted in a place beyond the takes.