TL;DR: ___________________________________________ The "myth of the 'temporarily embarrassed millionaire'" is not "a class-blind public". When Steinbeck said "I guess the trouble was that we didn't have any self-admitted proletarians. Everyone was a temporarily embarrassed capitalist. Maybe the Communists so closely questioned by the investigation committees were a danger to America, but the ones I knew—at least they claimed to be Communists—couldn't have disrupted a Sunday-school picnic. Besides they were too busy fighting among themselves." He was pointing out that nobody in America sees themselves as poor. My understanding is that this is common in former English colonies: while England is class-conscious, English colonies were established as places where scrappy young adventurers could rise above class to get them to come toil under horrific conditions. "Land of opportunity" means, effectively, you can rise above your station which sets the country up in an aspirational frame of mind. Not that the British are immune. What Piketty and Nancy Isenberg and many other academics have pointed out is that the American poor doesn't fully recognize themselves as poor so long as there's someone worse off than them. The Democratic project of the 20th century - equality and social projects - drove many poor whites to the Republicans because while white folk might have been a little better off, colored folk were a lot better off which ended up as a net loss of socioeconomic status. How did he do it? Piston conjectures.
"Except for the field organizers of strikes, who were pretty tough monkeys and devoted, most of the so-called Communists I met were middle-class, middle-aged people playing a game of dreams. I remember a woman in easy circumstances saying to another even more affluent: 'After the revolution even we will have more, won't we, dear?' Then there was another lover of proletarians who used to raise hell with Sunday picknickers on her property.
I don't think that's right. One of the more compelling arguments I've heard for why the rural poor voted for Trump is that, even though they thought he was a boorish sociopath, he at least acknowledged that things weren't all hunky doory. What you have to remember is that the election wasn't just "pick whoever you want," it was "pick which of these two people you want." And so when you have a candidate (in Clinton) whom the right has hated for years, and whose platform was basically "I'll keep things going as well as they have been," large parts of the country didn't have any idea what she was talking about. Just like with people on the left, it's often a case of choosing the candidate who at least pays lip service to what you believe. In the case of Trump, he at least appeared to acknowledge that things weren't great economically. So when your choice is someone who doesn't even admit there's a problem and someone dumb who does, it starts to make a little more sense. This is all the more true when you look at how basically every center-left politician in the western world got creamed in the same timeframe, whether it was by the populist right or the populist left. The other thing to remember IMO is that the election came down to the Democrats losing as much as or more than Trump won. I saw some numbers not that long ago showing that if you combined the number of votes for Trump with the number of eligible voters who didn't show up, and it was over 60% of the electorate. On the other hand, what I think the research cited by Jacobin misses is the disconnect between what people say and what they do. In the abstract, most I'm sure do want to help the poor. But when it comes to their actually paying for it, that's a horse of a different color. Moreover, there's been a lot of very effective propoganda supporting the idea that too much wealth redistribution leads to everyone being worse off (even if this is demonstrably untrue), at least in small part due to leftover cultural viruses from the Cold War. I think it's also the case that often times blind party loyalty will win out at election time, no matter how much people may complain about their party's candidate in the meantime. After all, at least they're not the other guy.