In September 2016, Hillary Clinton said that roughly half of Donald Trump's supporters belonged in a "basket of deplorables": racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic...1 She messed up, honestly, since her, and her party, were painting themselves as the adult/professional ones, while Trump was a child. Well, Trump won. But regardless, she was right. We let all kind of deplorables in and now conservatives are out. At least I am.
The distinction that matters here is between grievance-based and contempt-based political mobilization. Grievance-based coalitions are organized mainly around injuries, wages, jobs, healthcare access, regional decline, institutional failure. Contempt-based coalitions are organized mainly around hostility toward out-groups, their presence, their visibility, their advancement, their claim to belonging. Real political movements usually contain both motives. The question is not purity. The question is which motive supplies the coalition's hottest energy.
On the 2016 Trump coalition, the research is stronger than the public shorthand usually admits. Sides, Tesler, and Vavreck's Identity Crisis, along with work by Schaffner, MacWilliams, and Nteta, found that racial resentment, identity threat, and related status concerns were often stronger predictors of Trump support than personal economic distress2. That's a fancy way of saying that the republican party got all the trash in.
This is the republican party now. Not Reagan's party, not George H. W. Bush's. Not even George Bush II's, the one that gave a speech to calm down hate towards muslims after 9/11:
I get that the left exaggerates how bad Trump is, I do. I care about our republican party, the one that, although it won in 2024, it practically killed itself. I don't recognize any republican value any longer. Is this the party that Reagan led to advocate free market capitalism? The same that put all the tariffs in place? Or the ones that talks about de-naturalizing citizens, while Reagan gave speeches about how it is only in American that you can become American, while in France you will never be French.
Do you think McCain's speech defending Obama will ever happen again? From a Republican? I don't think so.
We left the trash get in and got inundated. We left the deplorables take over and now we're party-less. The Republican party is a shell, is dead. Democrats may be losing, but we're homeless. And once Trump is gone, we will all realize that we lost.
Clinton's September 9, 2016 fundraiser remarks did include an explicit qualification: she separated the "basket of deplorables" from another portion of Trump supporters whom she described as feeling left behind and wanting change. The point here is about the analytical content of the first category.
John Sides, Michael Tesler, and Lynn Vavreck, Identity Crisis (2018), and Brian Schaffner, Matthew MacWilliams, and Tatishe Nteta, "Understanding White Polarization in the 2016 Vote for President" (2018), both suppor that identity and resentment variables outperformed simple economic-anxiety accounts in explaining Trump support patterns.