Sexist Dogwhistles in the 2016 Election

“They’re closing down the textile mill across the railroad tracks
Foreman says these jobs are going, boys, and they ain’t coming back
To your hometown” The Boss.

In 2016, the racist dogwhistles of previous Republican campaigns became bullhorns. Remember the old days, when Republicans used code to let their fellow racists — particularly but not exclusively in the South — know that they were assuming the mantle of the party of white supremacy (shared, before the Civil Rights Act and the Southern Strategy, with southern Democrats)? When Reagan gave a 1980 campaign speech on “states’ rights” in Philadelphia, Mississippi? When a Republican PAC ran the “tough on crime” Willie Horton ad on behalf of George H.W. Bush (referred to now by so many Democrats as if he were an “honorable” Republican)? When Jesse Helms ran his “white hands” ad (written and produced by now-playing-respectable-on-TV-Alex Castellanos, don’t forget)? Trump is the logical conclusion to a process that began as soon as Obama was elected — a process of peeling off any layers of subtlety or coding and making Republican racism more and more explicit, starting with birtherism and “you lie!” and progressing until Republican elected officials were comparing the Obamas to apes and suggesting they should return to Africa.

But even as the cloaks and hoods fell away to reveal the naked racism lurking among Republicans at least since Nixon, the Trump campaign was creating a new dogwhistle, a whole new set of codes meant to signal to a particular audience that they understood their concerns and were on their side against a group that had been getting uppity of late. Where the old racist dogwhistle signaled a shared concern over holding on to white privilege, the new one is a sexist dogwhistle, and it’s all about threats to — or a need to reinstate — male privilege.

It may seem odd to suggest that there was anything coded or dogwhistle-y about the sexism of the 2016 campaign. After all, Trump’s misogyny, complete with his own recorded words saying you “have to treat women like shit” and “grab ’em by the pussy,” could not have been more explicit. But in a way, the blatantly anti-woman words (and alleged actions) of the Republican candidate and now President have provided cover for a more insidious kind of sexism. After all, it was only too easy for Republican elected officials to distance themselves from the explicit stuff. They were shocked! Horrified! Disgusted! Why, they had mothers and wives and daughters, don’t you know, so that kind of language was abhorrent to them!

But the dogwhistle sexism of the 2016 campaign is dangerous because, as long as it continues unrecognized, it is being repeated and sometimes amplified by a presumably clueless media and even by some presumably well-meaning Democrats.

So — of what does this dogwhistle sexim consist?

We can see it most clearly in Trump’s promise to “bring back” good jobs and the supposedly greater attention he paid to working class voters than Hillary Clinton did (or, he also implied, than Barack Obama had over the previous 8 years). The key to both of these points is to ask, “What does he mean by a good job?” and “Who does he (or the media reporting on this) consider to constitute the working class?” The job, clearly, is in a factory of some kind, preferably located in the upper Midwest. It involves making something big out of something hard. Think cars or air conditioners; think steel. Nothing small like microchips, or soft like clothing. And the person we’re supposed to see working in that factory is white (of course), native-born, high school-educated, married, and, crucially, male. A nice, beefy guy with a strong regional accent and a heart of gold, preferably named Joe.

It’s a dogwhistle about bringing back not any jobs, but specifically male jobs, and not just any male jobs, but masculine, macho, muscular male jobs. Jobs that don’t need no stinkin’ college degree. The kind of jobs that will make you feel like a man again. The kind of jobs for men that, on the bright side, supported their families, but on the not-always-so-bright side also kept women in their place.

This dogwhistle works so well because it is based on a view of the working class that is consciously or unconsciously shared by much of the media. It is an image of blue-collar (itself a gendered term, after all) workers that renders women and their role in the workplace invisible. Sure, working-class women have jobs, these people know that. But when the media talk about “the working class” as a block of voters, they are talking about workers who are men. They conceive of the women of that social class only as they relate to those men — as their wives, as members of the households being “supported” by those manly jobs, and never as workers in the public and political space who might want or deserve rights or dignity or good jobs themselves. Just as Donald Trump can’t imagine a Black congressman who doesn’t represent a crime-ridden, burned-out shell of an inner-city district, he can’t imagine a “good” job as anything other than a job for a man.

The dogwhistle also works because it is responding to something real that has happened to the relative status of working class men and women over the past 40 years. Although Trump was also happy to stoke racial and anti-immigrant resentments, white men without college degrees have not actually become less advantaged in terms of employment or earnings relative to men of color in the same educational group over this period of time. Indeed, median wages of white men without college degrees, while stagnant, have held on better than those of Black and Hispanic men at the same educational level. The greatest relative loss in the lives of white working class men was much closer to home. There has been a substantial shift in their earnings and their likelihood of employment relative to white women in this educational group — the women who are most likely to be their wives, girlfriends, sisters, and daughters. White women’s median wage went from 63% of white men’s in 1979 to 81% in 2014, the largest increase of any group relative to white men (Wilson, 2016), and 40% of this change resulted from the decline in men’s wages rather than increases in women’s (Davis and Gould, 2015). The change in relative employment and earnings by sex, driven in part by the loss of family-wage, unionized jobs and the stagnation of wages among working-class men, is also occurring because of the increasing demand for workers in occupational categories that these women are most likely to fill — in health care, the service sector, and retail. And working class men, as a recent article in the New York Times pointed out, are quite resistant to the idea of becoming nurses (Miller, 2017). These trends in earnings show every sign of continuing, as women continue to outnumber men in the ranks of those who are “credentialing up” by getting associates and bachelors degrees — moving, for example, from health aides to LPNs to RNs.

If men responded to increases in their wives’ earnings — particularly increases that bring the women to a level at or above their own — with joy and relief at being freed from a burden, Trump would have nothing to appeal to with his dogwhistle. But — patriarchy. We have substantial evidence from research in sociology and behavioral economics that on average, men are quite displeased with the loss of status that comes with losing their role as sole or primary provider. Several studies, including my own, show that as women’s earnings increase relative to their male partners, they gain greater control over the management of money in the household and over purchasing decisions (Kenney 2006, 2008). Men don’t respond well to the loss of power that comes with diminished economic primacy. In married households in which the woman earns more, their husbands actually do less housework (Bittman, England, Sayer & Folbre 2003; Bertrand, Pan, & Kamenica, 2013) and are more likely to cheat (Munsch 2015). When a woman’s earnings are higher than her partner’s, there is a reduced likelihood that a couple will marry in the first place and an increased likelihood that the married ones will divorce (Bertrand, et al., 2013). We see this pattern playing out at the population level, where those with a college education or more (among whom male wages and employment have not stagnated in the same way) are increasingly likely to get (and stay) married relative to those with less education (e.g., Goldstein & Kenney, 2001; Stykes, Payne, & Gibbs, 2013).

The whole point of a dogwhistle in politics is that it sounds different (or makes any sound at all) to the group toward whom it is targeted, while not being heard or fully understood by others. The (mostly male) upper middle class political operatives, pundits and media types who have been puzzling over Trump’s success, particularly his success among white working-class voters who supported Obama in 2008 and 2012, have been tying themselves in knots trying to understand how the same people could have been not-racist enough to support the Black guy back then and racist enough to support the racial bigot this time. But if you’re an upper middle class guy who hasn’t faced an increasing existential threat to your masculine identity over the past 30–40 years, the dogwhistle doesn’t work on you. You hear Trump’s more blatant misogyny and consider it distasteful and inappropriate, because the men of your acquaintance don’t talk or behave that way, rather than hearing it as a welcome reassertion of male dominance. And you don’t hear the promises to bring back good jobs as having to do with gender at all. You think that’s all about outsourcing and trade policy.

What about the working class white women who voted for Trump? How could they overlook the treat-‘em-like-shit, grab-em-by-the-pussy sexism, and how are they hearing the dogwhistle? Two thoughts come to mind. The first is that working class women are more vulnerable to sexism in the workplace and sexual assault generally than upper middle class women. They are often in extremely powerless positions in which their job depends on their putting up with, or at least not confronting, inappropriate comments and behavior by powerful men. Think of waitresses, chambermaids, secretaries, and nurses. They are at risk both from their clients, customers, or patients and from the professional men who are their bosses. They have far less recourse to object and far fewer resources to fall back on if they lose their jobs. Over the course of a lifetime working in these jobs, they have met a lot of men like Donald Trump, and they have learned to deal with them by laughing them off, having a stock cute comeback phrase, and learning to dodge them or avoid ending up alone in a room with them. Remember also that amidst the recent attention to campus sexual assault, several writers produced evidence that women aged 18–22 who are not in college are more likely than college women to be assaulted, but we see no national movement to address their safety (Sinozich & Langton, 2014). For working class women, the kind of sexist behavior Trump exhibits is already normalized. It hasn’t disqualified their bosses from positions of power, it hasn’t gotten their customers kicked out of the restaurant or their patients told to seek care elsewhere. So why would it disqualify Trump for President? The second is feminism’s age-old “sleeping with the enemy” problem. Is it surprising that a person might feel more solidarity with the men she lives with, sleeps with, and has children with, than she does with women she doesn’t know, who are in completely different life circumstances than her own? If she hears a candidate’s message as offering to bring back good jobs for the men in her life, is she likely to object to that? It seems more likely that she’d be pretty happy to have her boyfriend or husband or ex-husband in a job and earning well. She and her kids need the money. She may not be hearing the part of the dogwhistle that offers her guy a return to dominance over her, but she sure wouldn’t mind if he would get off the couch and get back to work, because she’s been working her tail off in her fulltime job and going to school at night for her associates degree so she can get a promotion, and she’s exhausted.

As long as the masculinity politics of Trump’s appeal to the white working class goes unheard, the media and some prominent Democrats will continue to bellow that Clinton lost because she didn’t focus enough on the needs of “the” working class. Let’s agree to set aside for the moment the real reasons for Clinton’s loss: James Comey, James Comey, James Comey, Russian hacking, the media’s insanely disproportionate coverage of every word uttered by Trump, and the inflammatory and inaccurate coverage of Clinton’s email server. What is wrong with the argument that Democrats can’t win unless they essentially copy Trump’s playbook for courting the working class? First, as others have observed, to argue that Democrats need both to pay more attention to the working class and to move away from “identity politics” (don’t talk about or to minorities and women so much!) reveals the bizarrely (and inaccurately) raced and gendered understanding in the media (and among some Independents from Vermont) of who currently constitutes the working class. They’re all picturing that white guy named Joe. But because of differences in who is entering this group (the younger the age group, the browner) and who is retiring (the older, the whiter), the prime-age working class is on track to become majority minority a good bit earlier than the population as a whole. Wilson (2016) projects the tipping point to be 2029 for workers between the ages of 25 and 54. Basing an entire electoral strategy on appealing to the votes of a group that is dwindling in numbers over a fairly short period of time doesn’t make a whole lot of sense.

Second, and more fundamentally, Democrats can’t (or at least shouldn’t) try to win back working class white men from Trump by blowing an equivalent sexist dogwhistle. From Nixon on, as Republicans blew the racist dogwhistle in campaign after campaign, sending their signals to the old Southern Democrats that the G.O.P. was now the party of white supremacy, Democrats for the most part didn’t try to come up with racist dogwhistles of their own to win those voters back. We now rightly condemn the times they did — the Sister Souljah and tough-on-crime messages. But once we understand the extent to which Trump voters were responding to a sexist dogwhistle — and the evidence suggests that attitudes about gender, and in particular voters’ degree of hostile sexism, were among the most predictive of voting for Trump (Schaffner, MacWilliamss, & Nteta, 2017) — we need to say, loud and clear, that’s not who we are and that’s not a strategy we can embrace.

What should we do instead? For one thing, we should be strongly and unapologetically pro-union. The kind of jobs that Trump is promising to bring back — those high-paying, blue-collar, he-man jobs that support a family — were historically union jobs. Only union jobs have offered working class workers the kinds of wages, benefits, and job protections implied by the Trump dogwhistle. And yet Republicans have been chipping away at the union movement from many different directions for a long time now, from supporting right-to-work laws to, more recently, going after public sector unions in Wisconsin and other states. At the same time, during the ascendancy of the Democratic Leadership Council, Democrats eager to appeal to business elites backed off from making support for the labor movement central to who we are. Then, as unionization shrunk with the combination of losses in manufacturing jobs and weakening of workers’ rights, the reduced numbers of Democratic union member as constituents gave them less weight in the party. But it makes no sense for working class voters — even the white male ones — to get the idea that Donald Trump is more on their side than the Democratic Party. His nominee for Secretary of Labor thinks the minimum wage is too high. His own hotels have fought unionization of their workers. And the Republicans in Congress have just introduced a national “right to work” bill to undermine unionization in the very Northern rust belt states that provided Trump’s winning margin from those working class whites.

Next, we need to learn how to make our case as the party that represents the real working class in this country. We need to reclaim the term and re-appropriate it to include Jose and Jodi and Joleen as well as Joe. We have to use the term working class when we are talking about women as workers in their own right, not just when we talk about them as the wives of factory workers. When we talk about working class jobs, we have to include nurses and chambermaids and janitors and dog catchers and clerks in city offices in our examples, not just auto workers in factories. And we have to call the media on their use of lazy stereotypes about what working class means. Allowing Trump and the media to define working class as white and male is part of what lets them say that Democrats have “abandoned” the working class. We are already the party that offers the policies real working class voters need most. We are the party of universal health care, the party of unions (although not as much as we should be), the party of child care and universal preschool, the party of equal pay for equal work, and the party of voting rights. We need to make the case for these policies as working class policies. In a partial defense of Clinton, it’s not a matter of her not knowing who these folks are or not caring about them. If you read up on her policy positions, this stuff is all there. But it’s about framing. It’s about winning the characterization of “working class” and making clear the match between our policies and how they serve the real working class.

Finally, we need to make sure we are exposing and fighting Trump’s fake pro-working class policies. First, Bruce was right (of course). Those jobs — the ones that paid a family-supporting living wage to those with a high school education or less — are going, boys, and they ain’t coming back. They’re certainly not coming back thanks to Donald Trump. Anyone with an understanding of the economy and the direction of U.S. manufacturing will tell you that Trump’s threats against companies that outsource jobs, his “deals” with companies like Carrier to keep jobs, his saber-rattling at Mexico and China, his withdrawal from trade deals — none of this is likely to make an appreciable improvement in the number of jobs for or the wages of non-college-educated white men. Indeed, such policies may be harmful for this group. We need to learn how to make this case clearly and simply, in terms that someone without a PhD in economics (or, more importantly, a college degree) can understand, so that when Trump policies are implemented and the jobs either don’t materialize or actually deteriorate, we can make draw direct lines from one to the other and make this clear to voters.

We also need to be prepared to fight Trump’s infrastructure plan. Already, a number of Democratic caucus members in Congress have eagerly pointed to infrastructure spending as an area in which they might be able to work with the Trump administration. After all, Democrats spent the eight years of the Obama administration arguing for more infrastructure spending — to get us out of the recession, provide jobs, rebuild crumbling public works of all kinds — only to be opposed by Mitch McConnell at every turn. So if the new President wants to invest in infrastructure, shouldn’t we jump for joy? Not so fast. First, there’s the objection that on closer examination, Trump’s plan, with its emphasis on public-private “partnerships,” is almost certainly more about enriching his business cronies than about helping workers or rebuilding public goods. Second, such a plan could well be used to gain or retain white working class votes in specific regions in 2020. In a recent The Weeds podcast, Klein, Yglesias, and Clift from Vox.com discussed a NBER working paper entitled “Highway to Hitler.” In the paper, Voigtlaender and Voth (2014) argue that highway construction was “highly effective [at] boosting popular support and helping to entrench the Nazi regime.” Unlike Obama’s infrastructure spending in the stimulus, which was directed largely toward “shovel ready” projects — mostly repairs or expansions of existing roads, bridges, etc., with relatively little that’s recognizably “his” now that the work is done — we can be sure that Trump infrastructure projects will be big and new and shiny and have his name all over them, so he can be sure to take electoral credit for whatever jobs are (temporarily) associated with them. Democrats can’t let ourselves be bamboozled into supporting this under pressure to show that we’re pro-“working class.” The money is for the rich developers, the jobs won’t last longer than they’re needed for the next election, and who wants a country littered with cheezy Trump-branded public projects?

Finally, there is this caution: When a populist, nationalist, authoritarian-minded candidate offers to restore his followers to dominance and manliness, but he can’t actually deliver the civilian jobs that would do so, what should we expect as a substitute? How about a nice war? There’s nothing manlier than a military uniform, and there’s nothing more dominant than kicking some Muslim or Chinese or Mexican ass. Trump — or at least Steve Bannon — may have a very different kind of good job in mind for these working class men than they realize.

[Note: I wrote this piece in February. Since then, there is new political science research out showing that men who earn less than their wives/partners were more likely to vote for Trump than men who earn as much or more than their wives or partners— confirming my thesis here! More on that in an upcoming piece.]

Citations

Bertrand, Pan, & Kamenica (2013). Gender identity and relative income within households. NBER Working Paper 19023.

Bittman, England, Sayer, & Folbre (2003). When does gender trump money? Bargaining and time in household work. American Journal of Sociology 109:186–214.

Davis & Gould (2015). Closing the pay gap and beyond: A comprehensive strategy for improving economic security for women and families. Economic Policy Institute.

Goldstein & Kenney (2001). Marriage delayed or marriage forgone? New cohort forecasts of first marriage for U.S. women. American Sociological Review 66(4): 506–19.

Kenney (2006). The power of the purse: Allocative systems and inequality in couple households. Gender & Society 20(3):354–81.

Kenney (2008). Father doesn’t know best? Parents’ control of money and children’s food insecurity. Journal of Marriage and Family 70(3): 654–69.

Miller (2017). Why men don’t want the jobs done mostly by women. New York Times January 14, 2017.

Munsch (2015). Her support, his support: Money, masculinity, and marital infidelity. American Sociological Review 80(3): 469–95.

Schaffner, MacWilliams, & Nteta (2017). Explaining white polarization in the 2016 vote for President: The sobering role of racism and sexism. Paper prepared for Conference on the U.S. Elections of 2016: Domestic and International Aspects. January 8–9, 2017, IDC Herzliya Campus.

Sinozich & Langton (2014). Rape and sexual assault victimization among college-age females, 1995–2013. Bureau of Justice Statistics Special Report, December 2014.

Stykes, Payne, & Gibbs (2014). First marriage rates in the U.S., 2012. NCFMR Family Profiles FP-14–08.

Voigtlaender & Voth (2014). Highway to Hitler. NBER Working Paper 20150.

Wilson (2016). People of color will be a majority off the American working class in 2032. Economic Policy Institute Report epi.org/108254.