We hear a great deal of late about the so-called 'Trumpenleft' or 'Red-Brown alliance'. The terms were first coined by writers at Counterpunch, and refer to a segment of the left that is allegedly supportive of, or at least sympathetic to, Donald Trump. Tellingly, the label is typically flung at anyone who is deemed too critical of the Democratic Party, not critical enough of Trump, or who points out that Trump's populist-sounding campaign rhetoric resonated with certain segments of the working class- particularly when juxtaposed with Hillary Clinton's snide elitism. Polling data is marshaled by the anti-Trumpenleftists that supposedly shows that Trump voters are irredeemably racist and sexist and therefore not worth engaging with; furthermore, they are predominantly well-off members of the petty bourgeoisie. Leaving aside the many issues with over reliance on polling data, anyone who has done a shred of real-world socialist political work should know two very important facts: that the views of working class people, especially white working class people, are often contradictory, and that socialist work is by its nature transformative in a way that ordinary bourgeois politics is not.
A complex history of settler-colonialism, racism, class struggle, regional economic differences, and national-cultural chauvinism (both as recipient and victim), and oppression fueled apathy has left white workers with a hodgepodge of political views, some of which border on the absurd. We find anti-Arab racism and militarism coexisting with anti-war sentiments; 'social libertarians' who support social programs but oppose state regulation of industry; anti-tax/anti-corporate combinations (ironically, this is very close to a recognition of the class nature of the state). The lesson we ought to draw from this is that we must never 'write off' any section of the working class, no matter how backward or contradictory their views. The very contradictions we observe in workers' politics are indicative of how little value the bourgeoisie places on their support, not even bothering to propagandize to them properly (in contrast to careful cultivation of the petty bourgeois worldview). We should not join the bourgeoisie in its malign neglect, but do precisely the opposite: respectfully engage and educate wherever and whenever we can.
For the purposes of liberals and social democrats, who are primarily concerned with electioneering (i.e., marketing) on behalf of this or that candidate, broad demographic categories are useful. We see arguments put forward that the number of working class Trump voters who 'matter' amounts to less than two percent of the population, and so they may be safely ignored. From a marketing perspective, this may be true. However, in terms of the number of working people who are socialists with some grasp of socialist theory, this is a huge number. More to the point, the needs of our political work, particularly when we are politically weak as we are now, is by nature more focused, more concerned with ideological struggle, and directed toward building durable organizations with theoretically literate and highly motivated members. This is why we must make lived experience the guiding principle of our day to day political work and eschew shallow pollsterism.
