Trump's Tribalism, a Sign of Our Times

With less than a month to go before Iowa caucus goers cast the first actual votes in presidential nomination race, Republican leaders and donors disagree over how to stop the candidacy of Donald Trump -- or whether anyone should even try.

They may not have much choice. Sure, Trump offers a walking example of how savvy about business doesn't necessarily mean you know much about anything else. He displays a hopelessly erratic temperament, a breathtaking ignorance about public affairs and an unsettling zest for authoritarianism.

But as damaging as his radical insult-dog rhetoric can be to the Grand Old Party's outreach efforts, he's the closest thing the GOP has to a strong leader these days.

Nipping at his heels, Texas Sen. Ted Cruz comes off to many as Trump without the charm. The freshman senator made a name for himself early by trampling over traditional Senate courtesies and customs to make himself hated by his colleagues, even in his own party.

I think a Trump presidency would be a disaster. But there also is a bright side to the uncertainty his bizarre campaign has brought: Unpredictability is how we know that, at least, we are not Cuba or some other autocracy in which election outcomes are a foregone conclusion.

Instead, I think we should look closely at what the Trump phenomenon is telling us. Polls and focus groups indicate the GOP, which has denounced "class warfare" tactics by Democrats since at least the Ronald Reagan '80s, is wrestling with an internal class war of its own.

Trump leads the Republican pack among women and higher-income voters, but he leads by much more among less educated, lower-income white men.

For example, in a Quinnipiac University poll days before Christmas, Democratic frontrunner Hillary Clinton beat Trump in a head-to-head decision by college-educated voters (57 percent to 33 percent). Yet Trump scored a statistical tie (43 percent to 42 percent) against Clinton among voters without a college degree.

Similar results were shown for Cruz, who scored a little better than Trump among non-college voters than Trump (46 to 40 percent) did.

A Pew Research Center analysis in October and a later New York Times/CBS poll similarly found Trump leading the Republican pack among women and higher-income voters but far more among less educated, lower-income white men.

Grant Trump this much: He seems to have a better idea than his party's elites do of what their working-class and lower-middle-class base desperately wants to hear. They need to beat his balderdash with better ideas.

Sure, maybe he's a "counterfeit conservative," as his critics on the right charge, noting his past support for Clinton when she was a New York senator. But Trump was a savvy enough tactician to recognize a huge -- or, in Trumpspeak, "yuge" -- enthusiasm gap in the GOP rank and file, especially, it turns out, among working-class to lower-middle-class voters.

Workers with no more schooling than high school have taken it on the chin since the 1950s with job losses, wage stagnation and other crises, partly because of policies favored by GOP elites.

Small wonder, then, that Trump-licans express the deepest resentments about elites from both parties who send jobs overseas and welcome more immigrants in to keep wages low.

It offers these embattled Americans little solace to be told that immigrants and free-trade policies in the long run bring more jobs, consumers and taxpayers to the American economy than they take away. As the economist John Maynard Keynes famously pointed out, in the long run, we're all dead.

More often, we see or hear blue-collar GOP voters looking at the changes American life has undergone since the 1950s and seeing a much gloomier picture than my fellow African-Americans, for example, see.

Looking back, I can see signs of this Trump-ready sentiment rising in polls after President Barack Obama's election. For the first time, they showed black Americans feeling more optimistic about their futures than white Americans did. More recent polls show that racial-ethnic optimism gap persists.

That's sad, but not unique in our diverse country's experience. As the great civil rights leader Whitney Young used to say, we all may have come to America on different ships, "but we're in the same boat now." Our future will be decided by how well we can row together.

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(E-mail Clarence Page at cpage@tribune.com.)