Trump's Muslim Derangement Syndrome won't matter to his voters: Column

Once again, Donald Trump’s outrages — this time a proposed ban on Muslims entering the U.S. — have left the pundits sputtering: Why don’t his supporters abandon him?

Again and again, they ask: Why don’t his supporters care about Trump’s contradictions and his insanity? Why don’t they care about his careless use of facts? Why don’t they care that his candidacy could torpedo Republican tickets around the country?

I think I know why Trump persists as the champion of many: Because his primary supporters, white males with only a high school degree, are furious and they have a right to be mad. This is not about embracing Trump’s platform; it’s about embracing his rage.

I first came across this group while researching a book about boys falling behind. What surprised me in the research were the depressing data about white boys coming from blue-collar families. They weren’t making it to college. They weren’t getting decent jobs. They weren’t getting married.  Who wants to marry a non-bread winner?

Most of all, they were invisible. Everyone knows about troubled inner-city minority males. But these guys, living in rural Maine, Missouri and Oregon? Nobody seemed to care.

At least, that’s how it looked when I wrapped up the research.

Today, they are suddenly visible — at Trump rallies. More than half of his supporters are blue-collar voters, who continue to puzzle political experts.

This is a group that has been sinking fast for years, and only recently has the decline become visible with fresh data on surprisingly high death rates from suicide, substance abuse and alcoholic liver disease.

Just as troubling are the pessimistic attitudes about the future we see among this group: African Americans might have a higher unemployment rate, but they have rosier views about the future than whites.

Political pundits confused about this group need to look in non-political places, especially schools. Other than African-American boys (who for decades have been shunted into special education classes at alarming rates, dooming their futures), no other group in our society has been so neglected by our school systems as blue-collar white males.

This group has served as unwitting guinea pigs in a massive economic development called college-is-the-new-high school. Put simply, thousands of jobs that once didn’t require a college degree now essentially do, in part because it’s a predictor that new hires will have the minimal social and organizational skills sought by employers, even in low-skill jobs.

In years past, few clerk jobs required a college degree; today, clerk, teller or executive secretary positions that don't demand a bachelor's degree are the exception. In my book, I profiled a car rental company that hired only college graduates to perform tasks that clearly involved no post-high school study. Why? Because it could.

Most blue-collar boys never got that message. Nor did their teachers, who allowed them to fall far behind in basic literacy skills, the currency of any post-high school study or job training.

For my book research I profiled Maine, looking at places such as Millinocket, where thousands of males dependent on the paper mills suddenly found themselves out of jobs. Maine development officials correctly saw the need to steer young men into college, but their success rate was limited.

I visited the University of Maine-Farmington, where two-thirds of the student population was female. It was odd walking around downtown, where every shop appeared to be oriented to women. On campus, all the college leaders were female. Men were a bit of an asterisk.

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Why didn’t more men end up in Maine colleges? That’s what the reporting staff at the Portland Press Herald wanted to know. In a lengthy series headlined, "Boys in Jeopardy in School,” the reporters laid out steep gender gaps in K-12 schools: Twice as many boys in special education, and wide gender gaps in reading and writing that expanded as students grew older.

In short, Maine was preparing its girls for college, but not the boys. Even the males who appeared in freshman college classes were prone to washing out, in part because they lacked the literacy skills needed to hang in.

And Maine is no outlier. I saw the same in California state universities and elsewhere.

From an economic perspective, the high school-only males, the men you see at the Trump rallies, have been “walking against the wind” since the 1970s, says Anthony Carnevale from Georgetown’s Center on Education and the Workforce. “I think these people are in a sense dispossessed both in cultural and economic terms, and they are angry. I understand their anger.”

The source of the anger is measurable: In 1970, white males with a college degree earned 44% more than their high school-only equivalents. By 1990 that grew to 76%, and by 2014 that rose to 88%, according to the Georgetown center's analysis of data from the Current Population Survey.

Again, the anger is understandable. Trump’s own anger, his disregard for authority, his love of profanity, his scorn for “political correctness” — those are perfect conduits for outrage. In Trump, many white blue-collar men have found someone who is obviously not their own but rages like their own. Do we blame Trump for demagoguing them? Or do we blame the schools that continue to fail them?

Richard Whitmire, an Emerson Collective fellow, is the author of several education books and a member of Paste BN's Board of Contributors.

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