Access to power over other racial groups is the preferred political currency of the white working class, according to a Guardian analysis. This group, particularly since the 1960s, has consistently aligned with rightwing conservatism, often at the expense of their own economic interests.
After three presidential elections where non-college-educated white voters overwhelmingly supported Donald Trump, pollsters now question if they will break with him. His approval ratings among this group dipped below 50% in 2026, down 14 points in 15 months, as their economic conditions have not improved under Trump 2.0.
The Historical Pattern of Racial Prioritization
The assumption that economic angst drives political loyalties for the white lower classes is historically misguided. As past politics reveal, the white working class has repeatedly prioritized racial power as their political priority, even when siding with conservatives has cost them economically.
Social scientist WEB Du Bois, in his work Black Reconstruction, explained that the racial order required by capitalism could only be maintained if white elites manipulated the white masses against class alliances with other races. Poor white farmers were convinced to side with wealthy landowners by posing newly enfranchised African Americans as a threat.
Reconstruction and the Psychological Wages of Whiteness
After the Civil War, President Andrew Johnson swiftly revoked promises of land and voting rights for Black freedmen. He sent federal troops to evict tens of thousands from 40-acre plots and remitted the land to former plantation owners and poor whites, whom he called "free, industrious and honest farmers."
Du Bois identified the "psychological wages of whiteness," where whites, regardless of poverty, were remunerated socially and politically through participation in Black subjugation. This included universal control over Black life across public and private spheres.
The Police State as Payout
The Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 incentivized whites to surveil and report suspected fugitives. Any white person could demand Black people produce manumission papers. This system, as Gautham Rao explains in White Power: Policing American Slavery, made white power and police power one and the same.
After emancipation, white patrolling persisted. For European immigrants in urban slums, enforcing the police state offered a ready-made means to whiteness and full social citizenship. Mob massacres, where law enforcement and white vigilantes cooperated, destroyed Black business districts, schools, and civic organizations.
Modern Parallels: The Maga Movement
Trump and his Maga acolytes drum rhetoric that Black people and immigrants have stolen what belongs to whites. They reward the white lower classes not with economic relief but with an invitation to self-deputize in a draconian police state. As of June 2026, 50 people have died in ICE custody, most with no criminal record, often due to anonymous tips from citizens.
Research shows it was social, demographic, and cultural status threat, not economic hardship, that sparked the white rage fueling Trump's rise. Non-college-educated white voters support dismantling DEI efforts in elite colleges where their children will likely never apply.
Frederick Douglass warned during Reconstruction that northern liberals were more concerned with peace across white classes than with Black rights. Today, white coastal elites repeatedly ask what the Democratic party should do to satisfy working-class Maga, ignoring what they have gained: the social and political currency of universal white dominance.
