I’ve avoided post-mortems on the US election disaster for two reasons.
First, they are useless as a guide to the future. The next US election, if there is one [1], will be a referendum on the Trump regime. Campaign strategies that might have gained the Democrats a few percentage points in November 2024 won’t be at all relevant in 2026 or 2028, let alone in the aftermath of a regime collapse further in the future.
Second, by focusing on the marginal shifts between 2020 (or even 2012) and 2024, these post-mortems miss the crucial fact that the divisions in US politics have been more or less constant[2] for the last 30 years, as this graph from the Pew Foundation shows.
Throughout this period the Republican Party has been competitive only because, it has received the consistent support of 60 per cent of white men.
Of course, that wouldn’t be enough without some votes from non-whites and women. But there is no group other than white men where the Republicans have had a reliable majority over the past 30 years.
More precisely the Republicans represent, and depend on, angry white men. I first heard the term “angry white men” in relation to the 1994 mid-term election when the proto-Trump Newt Gingrich led the Republicans to their first House of Representatives majority in 40 years. The 1994 outcome was the culmination of Nixon’s Southern strategy, bringing Southern whites, angry about their loss of social dominance in the Civil Rights ere, into the Republican camp.
All that has really happened since then is that white American men, fuelled by a steady diet of Fox News and talk radio, have got angrier and angrier. This was concealed, for a while, by the fact that the Republican party establishment had sufficient control over nomination processes to ensure that most candidates were relative moderates. But over time that control has eroded, and the establishment itself has been taken over by angry white men, predominantly Southerners.
What are angry white men angry about? Lots of the discussion focuses on economic disappointments. But there are plenty of high-income Republican. The Republican affiliation of white men has remained constant through boom and bust, recovery and contraction. There has been a shift of support between more educated (now less Republican) and less educated (more Republican) white men, reflecting the increasingly stupid content of the anger diet, but there is no shortage of college-educated consumers and purveyors of white male anger.
Angry white men are overwhelmingly Christian (non-Christian white men mostly support the Democrats, and it used to be argued that they were deeply concerned about a variety of moral and ethical issues, mostly around sex and gender. But Trump has trashed all of their supposed values, notably including principled opposition to abortion, without losing any support. They are still vociferously bigoted against trans people, but really, any target will do.
Political success is going to make angry white men even angrier. By silencing their opponents they can, in the immortal words of the New York Times Editorial Board acquire “the right to speak their minds and voice their opinions in public without fear of being shamed”, but they will still be shunned, and know that they are being derided behind their backs.
Perhaps if the Democrats had been a bit luckier or cleverer in 2024, another four years might have been enough to change things, but there’s no point in regretting that now. Perhaps Trump’s rule will be so chaotic as to bring the whole enterprise crashing down around him. Or, perhaps, this shrinking minority of the population will continue to hold the vast majority of positions of power indefinitely into the future, relying on increasingly stringent repression to secure their hold.
Is there a solution to the problem of angry white men? If there is, I can’t see it, except for the eternal fact that all things must pass.
fn1. Of course, the forms of an election will be observed, as they are almost everywhere in the world. But if the press is tightly controlled, the police and army under political directions political opponents silenced or jailed, the rituals of an election don’t imply the possibility of a change of government.
fn2. The only notable trend is the increase in Republican suppport among Hispanics. This is a complicated topic, which I don’t propose to discuss here. Please, no comments on this, or on short term changes between 2020 and 2024/
John Quiggin 
I don’t have insights into this group, for the most part. I had been trying to decide, is the Maga more about the economy, or about immigration? (It’s possible to make a distinction between the primary voters of today, v 30 years ago. How have they changed? I ask because I think many of the general election GOP voters went along without much enthusiasm. Though, that party has often been said to have better discipline.)
And for the primary folks, I’d have to guess it’s really the immigration. (Unless it was the inflation. No one here understands that the president doesn’t control it. And, the tv or radio news do not explain this. This one thing could change in the future, I suppose. But on the third hand, one’s perceptions of the economy are biased by politics, too. So, it’s circular I guess.)
However, I wonder now, maybe it is really about anger at women. As you may know, we have a lot of loneliness here, lower rates of marriage, and iirc, the labor participation for men is low too. So I wonder if this is all really about that – no matter what people say it is about.
It would be interesting if it weren’t sad, pathetic, and a bit scary. Would I tune in to this if it were a tv show? Oh also – it’s embarrassing.
I’m curious – how do the graphs look before 1994? Is that data available?
This essay is written, as are many others that try to address the same problem, on the assumption that the “angry white men” are unjustifiably angry about losing unearned privileges. No doubt there are such men–perhaps many such men. But, and I say this as a life-long progressive Democrat, the Democratic Party has been tone deaf to legitimate concerns that men, qua men, have–even white men. I strongly recommend that those wringing their hands about the Democrats’ problems with men–including younger men–read *How Democrats Can Win Back Men: Why Understanding Male Voters and Their Issues is Vital for Democratic Victory* by Mark Sutton (https://www.amazon.com/How-Democrats-Can-Back-Understanding/dp/B0D8CRPT6F). The Democratic Party appears to have fallen prey to zero-sum thinking about gender issues–as if addressing problems that men have (or, indeed, even acknowledging that these exist) somehow detracts from addressing issues confronting women. For those uncertain about what those men’s issues might be, in addition to Sutton’s book, I’d recommend Richard Reeves *Of Boys and Men: Why the Modern Male is Struggling, Why It Matters, and What to Do About It* (https://www.amazon.com/Boys-Men-Modern-Struggling-Matters/dp/B0B5FLB5X3). And, it’s worth a visit to the website of the International Council for Men and Boys (https://www.menandboys.net/) for an overview of some of these issues.
Thank you for the post John, I hope you as a White Man are not Angry about the election result.
Maybe, just maybe, there might be something in the fact that Trump made gains with white women, lantino’s (sans X) & black men.
There might also be something in that he won both the popular and the electoral college for the first time in a generation.
And the chickens of decades of post-modernist inspired policies come home to roost, expect more these kind of election results.
On first glance this “International Council for Men and Boys” looks like a collection of deplorables.
On a second glance it seems that this council quotes Pauline Hanson and Malcolm Roberts, thereby proving my first glance.
Angry white men should not be accommodated to, they need to step up.
MAGA is a delusion created by the deluded, it creates problems where none exist and then claims to be able to resolve those nonexistent problems.
Any and every claim by MAGA is false.
I don’t think that identity politics is a useful framework for political economy analysis. Analysis and mobilisation based solely on identity affirmation lead to superficial or newly unequal redistributions. Such redistributions always occur within the existing basic structures and relations of capitalist production. There is no essential change or challenge to the late stage capitalist (neoliberal, market fundamentalist) status quo. This has been the arc of late stage capitalism so far.
Capitalism has demonstrated its endless protean capacities by enlisting or subverting every leftist attempt to overthrow it. People dine out on capitalism or on their attempts to modify or critique it. Everyone has to eat and there is no way to eat outside the ubiquitous mega system of global capitalism. There was perhaps a juncture in human history when capitalism could have been overthrown by human purposive effort but that time is well past. The system is now a programmed mega-machine beyond our control and doomed to collapse.
It is time to prepare theory and practice for collapse survival (for as many as possible via collective effort) and for post-collapse redistribution and reconstitution. I am not aware of any theorists working on this as a conscious and comprehensive project. People seem to divide into economic, techno, or emergence optimists on the one side and individualist preppers or existential nihilists on the other. We are going to need realist redistributors and reconstructionists. Will we get that? Maybe. Maybe when people get desperate enough and options narrow enough to highlight the simplest and starkest choices.
Another thing that had me wondering if the Maga is really all about sex is, a long-time friend of mine who afaik has identified as a fervent libertarian lo these many years … turned out to be pro-life (!!) A secret pro-lifer. As in, I had never heard a single word about it come out of his mouth.
I haven’t yet mentioned to him that these two values don’t go together.
And I may not bother. We don’t talk politics much.
Smashing women’s rights has been one of Voldemort’s signal “achievements.” Maybe that explains some of the shift (which after all was not so large as it first seemed). Said friend actually named it to me as one of the promises kept.
It is all still upsetting, but maybe the impulses behind it aren’t as new as people think. (And btw Anonymous, I agree that much of the New Left messaging is totally annoying.)