Finding the White working class in 2016: Journalistic discourses and the construction of a political identity

2018 ◽  
Vol 23 (2) ◽  
pp. 201-222
Author(s):  
Brian Creech
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
American Politics ◽  
Political Identity ◽  
Small Towns ◽  
Political Support ◽  
Economic Decline ◽  
Class Identity ◽  
Cultural Discourses ◽  
News Organizations ◽  
White Working Class

This article argues that the discourses and techniques of political journalism worked to make White working class identity sensible as an assumed norm in American politics during the 2016 US presidential campaign. Throughout the campaign, many news organizations sent journalists to small towns and various Donald Trump rallies to understand what was driving a burbling resentment among his base of White working class voters, and by interrogating the explanatory and long-form reporting produced by these journalists, we can come to understand how the White working class began to cohere as a particular political subjectivity. By documenting the economic decline and social peril borne from neoliberal policies, acts of journalism substantiate the conditions that animate White working class identity and legitimate its resentments. However, that same journalism also failed to adequately deal with the consequences of policy and the way economic conditions and cultural identities reflexively constitute one another, instead focusing on the ways class- and race-based resentments formed a well of political support, constraining any sense of agency to the discursive bounds of a political campaign. This article concludes by arguing that in order to decenter the primacy of whiteness in American politics, it is incumbent upon scholars and observers alike to attend to the various cultural discourses and techniques that render it simultaneously central and invisible.

Linking Moralisation and Class Identity: The Role of Ressentiment and Respectability in the Social Reaction to ‘Chavs’

2015 ◽  
Vol 20 (4) ◽  
pp. 18-32 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elias Le Grand
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
Moral Panic ◽  
Class Identity ◽  
Moral Self ◽  
Social Reaction ◽  
The Social ◽  
Dialectical Process ◽  
White Working Class

This paper aims to link two fields of research which have come to form separate lines of inquiry: the sociology of moralisation and studies on class identity. Expanding on recent papers by Young (2009 , 2011 ) and others, the paper argues that the concepts of ressentiment and respectability can be used to connect moralisation processes and the formation of class identities. This is explored through a case study of the social reaction in Britain to white working-class youths labelled ‘chavs’. It is demonstrated that chavs are constructed through moralising discourses and practices, which have some elements of a moral panic. Moreover, moralisation is performative in constructing class identities: chavs have been cast as a ‘non-respectable’ white working-class ‘folk devil’ against whom ‘respectable’ middle-class and working-class people distinguish and identify themselves as morally righteous. Moralising social reactions are here to an important extent triggered by feelings of ressentiment. This is a dialectical process where respectability and ressentiment are tied, not only to the social control of certain non-respectable working-class others, but also to the moral self-governance of the moralisers.

White Working-Class Attitudes and Beliefs

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Justin Gest
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Working Class ◽  
American Politics ◽  
Democratic Party ◽  
Attitudes And Beliefs ◽  
White Working Class

What are white working-class partisan trends? United States One of the most staggering trends in American politics is the utter collapse of white working-class support for the Democratic Party over the last 50 years. The trend is as extraordinary for its steadiness as it is...

scholarly journals The other side of coastal towns: Young men’s precarious lives on the margins of England

2019 ◽  
Vol 52 (5) ◽  
pp. 916-932 ◽  
Author(s):  
Linda McDowell ◽  
Carl Bonner-Thompson
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
Social Deprivation ◽  
Academic Research ◽  
The Other ◽  
Economic Decline ◽  
Employment Opportunities ◽  
Large Cities ◽  
The Everyday ◽  
The Media ◽  
White Working Class

English coastal resorts are among the most deprived towns in the country, with levels of economic and social deprivation often exceeding those of the inner areas of large cities and former industrial settlements. Their dominant image in the media and other forms of representation, however, is of places of innocent fun and leisure, often associated with their history as holiday destinations for working-class families, although the darker side of these towns is not completely ignored. The lives of white working-class, year-round residents in these towns, however, seldom feature in representations or in policy and academic research. Here, we focus on the everyday lives of one group: young white working-class men whose employment opportunities have been adversely affected by economic decline, austerity and rising inequality. In places where employment is largely restricted to customer-facing jobs in the holiday trade, the dominant construction of youthful masculinity and the associated rhetorical view of these men as troublesome not only excludes them from the labour market but exacerbates their marginality. Through interviews in four English resorts, we explore the causes and consequences of their precarity.

The ‘Fortunate Banner’: Languages of Democracy in the United States, c.1848

2013 ◽  
pp. 28-39
Author(s):  
Adam I. P. Smith
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Political Identity ◽  
The United States ◽  
Democratic State ◽  
State And Society ◽  
White Working Class

By the mid-nineteenth century, inhabitants of the United States generally agreed that they lived in a democratic state and society. But uses of the term were complicated by the fact that it also had partisan associations: one group of politicians claimed to be par excellence leaders of ‘the Democracy’. This party had no single or unchanging political identity: it was strongly backed in slave states, but also had white working-class supporters who pushed egalitarian notions hard. Their Whig opponents were not prepared to surrender the language of democracy to them, yet they were more ambivalent about endorsing it, and sometimes distinguished restrained and principled forms of democracy, which they favoured, from vulgar populist forms. The effect of the European revolutions of 1848 in the United States was to encourage the drawing of such distinctions.

‘I'm a casualty, but it's cool’: 1990s British Masculinities and Twenty Four Seven

2013 ◽  
Vol 10 (4) ◽  
pp. 846-862 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sarah Godfrey
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
Economic Decline ◽  
Feature Film ◽  
Historical Landscape ◽  
Two Generations ◽  
White Working Class

Released in 1997, Shane Meadows’ debut feature film, Twenty Four Seven, offers a striking evocation of contemporaneous debates about white, working-class male dispossession. Focusing on two generations of men living in a downtrodden community paralysed by economic decline, the film sets up a number of tropes, ideas and themes that become central to Meadows’ oeuvre. This article explores the conjoined questions of authorial authenticity and male subjugation with Twenty Four Seven and analyses the representations of white, working-class masculinity within the context of both Meadows’ own directorial persona and the wider socio-historical landscape of Britain during the latter part of the 1990s.

Nationalism

Brithop ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 23-50
Author(s):  
Justin A. Williams
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
Hip Hop ◽  
Rap Music ◽  
First Century ◽  
Pop Music ◽  
Class Identity ◽  
White Working Class ◽  
Dominant Narratives ◽  
English Nationalism

This chapter surveys the performance of attitudes towards English nationalism in hip-hop, from banal nationalism to ambivalent Englishness, to the role of history and tradition in constructing the national, to the localism of “hip little Englishness,” and finally to multicultural Englishness with examples from Lady Sovereign, Speech Debelle, The Streets, and others. Rapper responses to constructed “official” versions of England complicate these dominant narratives, and often create or build upon others such as English white working-class identity. By looking at these various examples and categories based on Cloonan’s types of Englishness in pop music, it provides alternative ways to think about the nation and how it is performed, overtly and subtlety, in twenty-first-century English rap music.

Labor and Chinese Exclusion in US History

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Justin F. Jackson
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Working Class ◽  
International System ◽  
The United States ◽  
Political Support ◽  
Organized Labor ◽  
Chinese Exclusion ◽  
White Working Class ◽  
Chinese Labor

In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, white working-class activists and their allies in the United States acted as a political vanguard in efforts to limit the entry, naturalization, and civil rights of Chinese migrants, especially laborers. First in California in the 1850s, and then throughout the North American West and the nation at large, a militant racist-nativist minority of trade unionists and labor reformers assailed Chinese as an economic, cultural, and political threat to white workers, their living standards, and the republic itself. Uniting with Democrats and independent antimonopoly parties, workers and their organizations formed the base of a cross-class anti-Chinese movement that, by the 1880s, eroded Republicans’ support for Chinese labor migrants and won severe legal restrictions against them. Organized labor, especially the American Federation of Labor and its leadership, played a key role, lobbying Congress to refine and extend Chinese exclusion and erect similar barriers against other Asian migrants, including Japanese and Filipinos. Anti-Chinese labor advocates also influenced and coordinated with parallel pro-exclusion movements abroad, leading a global white working-class reaction to the Chinese labor diaspora across parts of Asia, Africa, and the Americas. In many ways, anti-Asian working-class nativism prefigured early-20th-century measures placing unprecedented constraints on white European migration. Yet organized labor barely opposed the demise of anti-Chinese and national-quota restrictions during World War II and the Cold War, as diplomatic demands, economic expansion, and a changing international system weakened domestic political support for exclusion.

scholarly journals Varieties of White working-class identity: Implications for social attitudes and political preferences

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Eric Knowles ◽  
Monica McDermott ◽  
Jennifer Richeson
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
The United States ◽  
Social Attitudes ◽  
Class Conflict ◽  
Class Identity ◽  
Political Preferences ◽  
The Poor ◽  
Qualitative Work ◽  
White Working Class ◽  
Nationally Representative

The manner in which working-class Whites in the United States exercise their considerable political power is guided by their views on immigration and race. We argue that this group’s political and social attitudes are rooted largely in their perceptions of their own position in the socioeconomic hierarchy. Our analysis reveals that White working-class identity is far from monolithic—and thus predicts immigration and racial attitudes in complex ways. Our previous qualitative work uncovered three types of identity: Working Class Patriots, who valorize responsibility, embrace national identity, and disparage the poor; Class Conflict Aware Whites, who regard social class as a structural phenomenon and attribute elitist attitudes to the middle and upper classes; and Working Class Connected Whites, who embrace working-class identity, sympathize with the poor, and feel disrespected by the middle and upper classes. This article reports a quantitative confirmation of these identity types in a nationally-representative survey of working-class Whites. We also reproduce associations, seen in our previous research, between class identities and attitudes regarding immigration and race, such that Class Conflict Aware and Working Class Connected Whites are considerably more progressive on immigration and race than are Working Class Patriots. Implications for electoral politics and race relations are discussed.

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