The Democratic Party in the United States has lost touch with the white working class because of its support for globalised trade and leftist politics, and that class has quit to support Donald Trump, academic Larry Donnelly has said.
Quoting his late father, the University of Galway Boston-born academic told the Patrick MacGill Summer School in Glenties, Co Donegal, that the Democratic Party used to be a party “for the ordinary people, the people who work with their hands for a living and live pay cheque to pay cheque”.
“Now I look at Democrats and can barely find anyone I can identify with or agree with. All I see is a bunch of crazy lefties,” Mr Donnelly remembered his father saying in 2017 as he mourned the rise of Mr Trump to the White House.
Meanwhile, Mr Trump has followed Pat Buchanan’s 1992 declaration that Republicans had to reach out to the “conservatives of the heart, who don’t read Adam Smith or Edmund Burke but who revere traditional values and don’t like the way America is changing”.
[ America’s ‘most Irish county’: a Republican stronghold in fluxOpens in new window ]
The Republican Party, said Mr Donnelly, is “now the party of the white working class in America. It is making huge gains among the fastest-growing voter bloc in the United States, Latinos. It is also making inroads with Asian Americans and, remarkably, black men.
“It retains the loyalty of very many wealthy Americans, primarily because of tax policy, and evangelical Christians and practising Catholics due to its stance on abortion and other cultural issues,” he told the summer school.
“This has all happened even though Mr Trump has never delivered for working people, and that is “one of the extraordinary contradictions about Donald Trump and Donald Trump’s appeal.
“If you look at who he’s accomplished anything for, it is for the wealthiest Americans and for social conservatives,” Mr Donnelly told the final session of the annual Glenties summer school.
“What Donald Trump did in his campaign and continues to do is he speaks to working-class people. He speaks to them. People lampooned and laughed when they saw Hulk Hogan, for instance, who’s a cultural icon in the United States.
[ How the US’s most Irish-American counties voted in the 2016 and 2020 electionsOpens in new window ]
They saw him “rip off his jersey and say the Trumpamaniacs are coming for you. At a certain level, he’s connecting with an awful lot of Americans who felt that buttoned-up, tied-up politicians never spoke their language”, Mr Donnelly said.
“So, no, he [Trump] hasn’t delivered for them in any respect in any meaningful way, but he has spoken to them,” he said. “I think that some of them know that he’s not going to be able to do a huge amount for them, but at least he’s trying to connect with them.”
Meanwhile, the Democrats’ embrace of the North American Free Trade Agreement in the 1990s under Bill Clinton was regarded as “a grave betrayal by many in the labour movement”, while its stand on social issues is “anathema to vast swathes of America”.
The Democrats’ success in recent decades “has arguably been down, in large part, to two extraordinary individuals, Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, at the top of the ticket, and a reaction to the chaos of the first Trump presidency”.
“Democrats may be the beneficiary of that again in 2028,” he said, adding the Democrats has “some very strong, capable politicians” such as Michigan governor Gretchen Whitmer and California governor Gavin Newsom.
Former RTÉ US correspondent Carole Coleman emphasised the importance of the evangelical movement to Mr Trump and the Republican Party, which offers a sense of belonging to members.
“You went to church, you got your redemption, you were born again, you got your friends there, you got your coffee and doughnuts there,” she said. “You’re told you’re being protected, you’re part of our club, we have a common enemy here.”
- Sign up for push alerts and have the best news, analysis and comment delivered directly to your phone
- Join The Irish Times on WhatsApp and stay up to date
- Listen to our Inside Politics podcast for the best political chat and analysis
