‘The economy’, the ideational, whiteness and re-election of Donald Trump

Jessica Eastland-Underwood - Early Career Researcher, University of Warwick

Race and racism are frustrating concepts, which are often oversimplified as the consequence of ‘a set of prejudices against racialised people.’ As a consequence, the decline of more overt expressions of racial prejudice has led to a rising popular belief that racism is no longer a significant problem.

Some scholars insist that political economists must assert the materiality of race. Certainly, political economists are well-placed the enumerate these ‘wages of whiteness’, which includes everything from house prices to credit worthiness to taxation to mortgages to total accumulated wealth. These are material advantages in the US alone, even as we know that varieties of colonialism have generated different raced capitalist regimes globally.

However, this emphasis on the materiality of racial practices risks crystalising the analytical division with the ideational into a false binary. Racial regimes like white supremacy are the product of multi-faceted relationships between doctrine, practices and resources. Racialised economic practices are only possible with conceptions of property that could include human beings, imaginations of populated land as terra nullius, and ideological understandings of markets as neutral arbiters even when they are composed of people with racial prejudice.

With this, it’s worth returning to the number one issue that motivated Trump voters: the economy. Despite the efforts by economists to discredit Trump’s economic platform, the voters in swing states had more trust in Trump’s ability to handle the economy by comparison to Harris. The principal material factor is clear: rising prices of goods.

This isn’t race... is it?

Political economists are not simply qualified to identify the material, but also the social origins and implications of economic language, like ‘the economy’ as a discursive object. According to Tim Mitchell, the conception of ‘the economy’ that we’re familiar with today is relatively new and as much the product of ‘values, representations, communications, meanings’ as a material totality.

Early intellectual understandings of ‘the economy’ was given meaning almost exclusively by white, Euro-American, cis gender, male, economic and political elite in the nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. This was not an accident, but the outcome of discriminatory practices that excluded marginalised communities from institutions of economic epistemic authority. It was from this context that we inherited common sense understandings of ‘the economy’ (e.g. GDP, employment, interest rates, consumer prices). These understandings, however, intuitively frame centuries of white supremacy—a racial regime where those racialised as white profited from violence and plundering of group-differentiated people—as incidental, or even irrelevant, to the ‘normal’ features of the total economic system.

How is this esoteric etymological history of ‘the economy’ relevant to the motivations of Trump voters? In my research, I found that expressions of ‘the economy’ might be superficially described as employment, businesses, or even ‘introductory economics’ in everyday political argumentation—on social media, in community centres or even in a barber shop. However, when I conducted interviews with those aligned with white identity politics, participants added to these ‘normal’ understandings of ‘the economy’ disparaging assumptions about benefit recipients, antisemitic conspiracy theories, and dehumanising language about undocumented migrants and queer-identifying people. That is, ‘the economy’ was not simply a term to describe a total system of production, consumption and distribution; it is also a signifier that represents their vision of humanity, where wealthy, Christian, native-born, heteronormative, cis gender white Americans are the most deserving of material rewards. ‘The economy’ still communicates many meanings of the oppressive social context in which the term originated.

This white identity ideational understanding of ‘the economy’ casts Trump’s campaign in a different light. The now infamous ‘eating cats and dogs’ comment was an extension social media myths about Haitian migrants, whose rapid arrival into the city of Springfield both provided a much needed boost to the labour market while also putting strain on housing, schools and other public services. However, Trump capitalises on racist tropes while simultaneous providing a simple solution to inflation: mass deportation. Trump’s own words tell us that the groups most likely to be impacted by this ‘economic plan’ are Black Haitian, East-Asian, and LatinX people living in the US.

Were those casting their ballot voting for the racist-tropes meaning of ‘the economy’? Or the promise-of-lower-grocery-prices meaning of ‘the economy’? This is the magic of ‘the economy’—it could be either (or indeed, both). Regardless, every Trump voter had to make an important compromise: a willingness to risk the possibility of racialised harms with the hope that their own individual economic circumstances might improve. For example, one interviewee Lori was not an enthusiastic Trump supporter, but was willing to turn a blind eye to racialised harms against migrant workers if it meant cheaper gas and more jobs for American citizens.

And so when voters told pollsters that they voted for Trump because of ‘the economy’, were they really voting for GDP? Or inflation? Or trade policy? Or were they voting for an understanding of ‘the economy’ as the tacit promise that their proximity to whiteness might give them specific material benefits? The answer is we don’t really know, because the pollsters take the meaning of ‘the economy’ as given. The rhetorical power of ‘the economy’, then, is that other subjective meanings—including racial animus—are obscured behind the legitimate mask of ‘the economy’, which is often assumed to mean more materially determinate issues such as prices, wages, etc. The responsibility of political economists, then, is not to naturalise ‘the economy’—and in the case of the American election, point merely to inflation. Instead, we can also provide the historical context for why the ‘normal’ understandings of ‘the economy’ reproduces human hierarchies and structures of oppression.