Trump’s Americans

The president’s coalition emerges from centuries-old ethnic and cultural dynamics.

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Donald Trump is not an “Old Stock” American. His mother, Mary Anne MacLeod, was born into a Gaelic-speaking family in Scotland’s Outer Hebrides in 1912, and emigrated to the United States in the 1930s. His father, Fred Trump, was the son of German immigrants from the Palatinate in southwestern Germany who settled in New York City after 1900. Genealogically, Donald Trump is a scion of the Ellis Island wave of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Yet, culturally, Trump is entirely an American figure, the heir to disparate traditions rooted in Anglo-America dating back to the Founding synthesized with the tastes and mores of the new Americans of the turn of the 20th century. A child of the “Outer Boroughs”—namely Queens—Trump refashioned himself as a creature of Manhattan in the 1980’s, before mutating into a “Florida Man” in his term as president. In the last 20 years, the cosmopolitan and corporate urban Trump, whose eponymous Tower stands at the heart of America’s largest city, has pivoted in a protean fashion to become a tribune of the plebs of the hinterlands; in a 2017 rally in the southern Appalachian city of Huntsville, Alabama, Trump even asserted, “I understand the people of Alabama. I feel like I’m from Alabama, frankly.” 

Over the last decade there has been extensive psychoanalysis of the life of Trump, and how it has influenced the man he is today. But to understand Trump, you also have to understand America in its various epochs, from the world as recorded in the first census in 1790, the cultural ferment of the 1960s and 1970s, and the “greed is good” Manhattan of the 1980s. In an America that is riven by negative polarization, both the right and the left attempt to frame our division according to preferred narratives. For the left today it is a battle between privileged whites and oppressed people of color and their allies. For the right, it is patriotism and family set against globalism and degeneracy. But underneath these stark dichotomies lurks a superstructure to American political polarization.

For presentist Americans, anything much before the 1960s is difficult to recall, but much of the cultural furniture which makes the U.S. distinct and diverse was already present at the Founding, as 13 original colonies became one nation. Articulated most cogently a generation ago by David Hackett Fischer in Albion’s Seed, America’s original folkways—brought over by British settlers centuries before the more publicized Ellis Island stream—had already sown the seeds of discord. 

Furthest north, there were the New England Yankees who arrived in the early 17th century as Puritan refugees. Long the most fecund of America’s ethno-cultural groups, they spilled over into upstate New York and the northern Midwest in the early 19th century and planted colonies as far away as Oregon. Known for their thrift, communitarian spirit, and textual analysis of scripture, Yankees have dominated American academia and other culture-producing industries from the beginning. 

Further south along the Atlantic coast were the ports of New Amsterdam and Philadelphia. Albion’s Seed puts the spotlight on the Quakers of Philadelphia, religious nonconformists that created a culture of pacifism, pluralism, and industry in early Pennsylvania. But many of the same values applied to the erstwhile Dutch New Amsterdam, which became New York with the English acquisition of 1664. These Mid-Atlantic Americans have much in common with Yankees due to geographic proximity, but they usually chafe at the moralistic self-righteousness and social activism of their neighbors. While Yankee culture was relatively homogeneous, Puritan and English, the Mid-Atlantic prefigured America’s later ethno-religious diversity. Mid-Atlantic Americans valorized business success, glorifying the great merchant princes of the early republic. 

Further down the eastern seaboard, beginning in Virginia’s Chesapeake region and extending south to the lowland Carolinas, America saw the emergence of a system of social organization and economic production dominated by slavery, separating blacks from whites. The whites of the lowland South were split between a gentry elite descended from the English nobility and the non-slaveholding majority whose ancestors were often indentured servants. The lowland aristocracy prized honor and service, and dominated the early republic’s political and military leadership, from George Washington down to Robert E. Lee.

The final of Fisher’s folkways were those of the British of the borderlands between Scotland, England and Ireland, exemplified by the mass migration of the Scots-Irish that began in the middle of the 18th century. Disembarking in Philadelphia, these Protestants of mixed Anglo-Saxon, Celtic, and Scandinavian provenance pushed deep into the interior of 18th century America, expanding southward along the spine of the Appalachian mountains. While the three other folkways faced the Atlantic and were deeply involved in trade, the borderers looked west to America’s vast productive interior. Their elites, the “Backcountry Ascendancy” from which President Andrew Jackson emerged, resembled the lowland planter elite in their sense of honor, but affected a more rough-hewn and populist facade that would be useful in the age of democracy. These borderers had long and deep contact with the natives of North America during the republic’s formative years, reinforcing an aggressive and militaristic bent; in 2004 Senator James Webb titled a cultural biography of these people Born Fighting. The borderers initially had a deeply ambivalent relationship with lowlanders of the South. The creation of West Virginia illustrates Unionist sentiment during the Civil War, when the planter elites were spearheading secession.

Appalachian Americans are fiercely individualistic, but also value kinship. These traits predate the American republic, evolving on the lawless frontiers between Scotland and England. Appalachians least resemble the moralistic Yankee. But the uplanders have long had a more ambivalent relationship with the Americans of the coastal Mid-Atlantic. The upland penchant to fighting rather than trading makes them different from the people of the Mid-Atlantic, but Appalachian independence and individualism driven by personal self-interest aligns well with the early Mid-Atlantic capitalist ethos. In the 19th century New York City, geared toward profit, was always an awkward fit in the Yankee-dominated North. During the Civil War mayor Fernando Wood proposed secession from the Union so that it could continue to profit from the cotton trade.

Despite arguments that Trump is an American Franco, there is no need to lean upon European historical figures to contextualize him in our political history. Trump, his supporters and his enemies have all pointed to a resemblance to Andrew Jackson, who buried the aristocratic republic. Many of the personal attributes of the 45th president—his go-it-alone individualism, the focus on winning at all costs, and the weight he places on personal loyalty and family—allow him to fit easily into the Weltanschauung of America’s borderer-descended subcultures. Trump’s frankness may strike genteel Southerners or Yankee professors as vulgar, but his manner and intent would be intelligible to Appalachian Americans who appreciate “cussedness.”

Trump’s family also shows a propensity for cultural fluidity. Though his father’s parents were German Lutherans from the Rhineland, in America, the Trumps have had peripatetic religious journeys. His parents married in his mother’s Presbyterian Church, and the young Trump was raised partly in Norman Vincent Peale’s mainline Reformed congregation. Assimilation is a tendency one sees among Protestant Germans, who fit in seamlessly into Anglo-America’s diverse subcultures. Unlike German Catholics, who often remained separate due to their minority religious affiliation, German Protestants integrated well into Protestant Anglo-America. This was clear even in the 19th century. Carl Schurz was also Protestant from the Rhineland. Arriving from Germany around 1850, he served in the Civil War on the Union side, and by 1868 he was a Republican senator from Missouri. For all practical purposes, Schurz became a Midwestern Yankee within two decades.

Trump’s journey was different. He was of the nouveau riche, and money could not purchase Trump the grace and understatement necessary for the old Manhattan elite. Some attribute this to Trump’s personality, but people forget he is the son of a self-made man and a lower-middle-class immigrant. He grew up in Jamaica Estates, Queens. It was a wealthy district, but the surnames of young Trump’s classmates at Kew-Forest Elementary lean toward those of white ethnics: Germans, Jews, Irish, and Italians. Trump witnessed the dynamism of post–World War II New York City, and then the rapid shift to urban blight and crime in the 1970s as he came into his manhood. Though from a well-heeled German-Scottish background, he was culturally a white ethnic who employed many working-class people and understood their values. His first brush with fame in the 1980s coincided with a conservative reaction to the liberal excesses of the 1960s and 1970s, driven in large part by the realignment of white ethnic Democrats and their shift to Ronald Reagan.

White ethnic drift to the political right over the last two generations since Reagan’s 1980 victory has crystallized the liberal elite’s disdain for this thread of America’s diverse tapestry. In the late 1960s, blue-collar white ethnics were seen to be obstacles to the cultural revolution envisioned by the campus radicals, but the late 20th-century racialization of American society drove the full absorption of ethnic Americans into whiteness. 

This fifth folkway, forged in the 20th century, has varied relationships with the older traditions. Trump’s popularity with Red America and the American South reflects the shared manners of what was once the urban white working class and the backcountry whites of the interior: clannish, individualistic, and unapologetic. These are cultures that admire the rich, rather than those who accumulate wealth in an understated manner. The cultural valences are illustrated by the one part of Red America where Trump has been particularly unpopular: Utah and the Mormon diaspora. Mormon culture is a direct descendant of the Yankee world of Vermont and upstate New York, and despite contemporary political differences with their New England cousins, Mormons retain the same moralistic outlook. The unabashed distaste that the liberal professional-managerial elites have toward Trump and the MAGA movement also reflects the Yankee cultural dominance of the professions. Its visceral and almost atavistic character is similar to the jeremiads of Yankee ministers in the 19th century against the South with numerous moral defects.

Trump looks back to the 1980s as a Golden Age, but that America is gone. The new 21st-century America is no longer just black and white. There are large numbers of Americans whose ancestors arrived after 1965 from Latin America and Asia. But there has also been a reconfiguration of white America. The older genteel Southern elite has been absorbed by an ascendent borderer-folkway that is more in keeping with the demotic spirit of the modern world, from NASCAR to country music. Out of the diversity of the Mid-Atlantic has emerged a counterculture rooted in the melange of urban ethnic white America, diverse in religion, nationality, and class, but unified in their contempt for the Yankee elite and its public pieties. Trump, the electric celebrity and larger-than-life figure, channels the ethos of both unhyphenated Americans of the heartland and the forgotten Archie Bunkers of the coasts, pointing a path forward to a new 21st-century cultural and political alliance.

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