Zach Beauchamp finally accepts the "economic anxiety" theory of Trump

After eight years of criticism, Zach has quietly pivoted to endorsing the socialist class-analysis of Trumpism.

Zach Beauchamp, 11/2016:

Studies from the GOP primary, and pre-election polls, found high racial resentment was a far better predictor of a voter’s likelihood of supporting Trump than any economic variable…it suggests that the push among some liberals, like Bernie Sanders, to respond to this election with a “populist” economic message may not be the right approach.

Zach Beauchamp, 10/2017:

What unites far-right politicians and their supporters, on both sides of the Atlantic, is a set of regressive attitudes toward difference. Racism, Islamophobia, and xenophobia — and not economic anxiety — are their calling cards.

Zach Beauchamp, 10/2018:

There is tremendous evidence that Trump voters were motivated by racial resentment (as well as hostile sexism), and very little evidence that economic stress had anything to do with it.

Zach Beauchamp, 11/2018:

This isn’t a class divide in the traditional sense; there are plenty of relatively high-income whites without college degrees (think of a successful, self-employed plumber). Rather, the “diploma gap” tracked measures of racism and racial resentment more than anything else.

I could go on like this but the gist should be clear. Since 2016, Zach Beachamp has been on a crusade to accomplish two objectives: first, to conflate concerns by the Sanders left about the role of class in electing Trump with a claim that Trump was backed by the working class. And second, to downplay any role that class might have played in electing Trump to the point of repeatedly suggesting that it had no role whatsoever. Again, all you have to do is read the above articles, which are just a sampling of his endless repetition of these claims.

I bring this up to contrast it all with Zach’s new take today in Vox:

Rather, Trump’s biggest fans could be found among “the elite of the left-behind,” meaning people “who were doing well within a region that was not.”

It’s an observation that cuts against the prevailing theory of Trumpism: that he is the tribune of the left-behind and impoverished white people suffering due to globalization. It is also one that is backed by hard data.

Let’s be clear about what’s happened here. From the start, the left take was exactly the one that Zach is coming around to now: Trump was the candidate of boat-dealers. I made this clear quite early on in 2017 as it became obvious that liberal pundits were misrepresenting the left position on this:

why all of the focus on Trump voters who are poor? After all, the standard economic analysis of fascism doesn’t focus on poverty – at least, not the analysis maintained by most leftists and mainstream historians. Just a few months ago, Lance Selfa put it quite plainly in Jacobin: “[I]f you look closely at who actually voted for Trump, you’ll soon realize that his supporters look a lot more like the middle class than the working class.”

At the same time, socialists stressed that the working class was still the base of the Democrats, which is why it was so unconscionable for Dems to leave them behind:

If you look at voter income, you’ll see that Democrats were overwhelmingly preferred by the poor and rejected by the rich.

So now, after nearly eight years of knocking down the “Trump voters are poor” strawman which he attributed to the left, Zach Beauchamp is now beginning to discover that economics did play a role in support for Trump, and it was in fact precisely the role that socialists have recognized all along.

I don’t expect Beauchamp or any of his colleagues to acknowledge this shift, so this is more a commentary on the intellectual impunity of our pundit class than anything else. If Zach were in academia, colleagues would expect him to account for a shift this dramatic and acknowledge that his critics had it right from the beginning. But the media has increasingly become a place where you can try to claim the prestige of an academic without facing any of the intellectual rigors that they face. And that’s how you get writers like Beauchamp: a dilettante in matters of political economy who will nevertheless continue to get paid to post whatever new theory catches his interest.