The 2016 election was fought over esteem distribution, not class economics.

Evidence

Trump’s movement succeeded because it tapped into a giant swath of angry people who felt a loss of status. While much was made about his victory as an uprising of the white working class, his most devoted support came from the ranks of wealthy heartland business owners—the self-made petite bourgeoisie who built small empires through car dealerships, fast-food franchises, and pool-cleaning businesses. Like Trump, they were discontented that their economic success had not translated into higher cultural standing. The 2016 election was less a straightforward class war between rich and poor and more a culture war over the distribution of esteem. It played out through the lens of taste: Multicultural, meritocratic coastal liberals, with their slender physiques, Priuses, IPAs, and pan-seared Wagyu steaks, were pitted against heartland small business owners and white working-class voters driving Ford F-150s, drinking bland pilsners, and ordering well-done steaks. Adam Gopnik captured this dynamic: Trump appealed to “a social class [that] sees its perceived displacement as the result of a double conspiracy of outsiders and élitists…. They look down on us and they have no right to look down on us.” — W. David Marx, Blank Space, 432

Categorization

• XREF: Echoes taste-as-status theory (Bourdieu) central to this book’s whole project, and its ‘omnivore monoculture’ thesis: taste signals here still bifurcate along ideological lines, a leftover rupture.
• SEED: Angle for rebutting Marx: maybe the divide he describes here is the same status-signaling battle mapped onto consumption choices—both sides still taste-signal, just in opposing registers.
• QUESTION: Is status-loss grievance of wealthy small-business owners distinct in kind from the white working class’s, and does distinguishing them matter for Marx’s claim about a class-marker-free era?