Because he conducted his research between 1967 and 1972, he implicitly answers one of the persistent questions about Trump’s white proletariat: How much of their aggrievement with the Democratic Party and liberalism itself can be ascribed to materialist causes, meaning primarily the demise of industry and the explosion of income inequality? By such measures, the men in LeMasters’s book inhabited a markedly healthier economy. During the years of his fieldwork, the top 1 percent of the population took a 3 to 4 percent share of the nation’s cumulative income—about one-third of what it is now. Union membership, though already declining from its high point of 33 percent of the work force, stood in the high 20s—compared to barely 10 percent now.
So reading Blue-Collar Aristocrats in 2019 is like solving an equation by removing one of its variables: materialism. What remains are the cultural factors felt and acted upon by LeMasters’s men then and the Trump base now. And the echoes of those voices from the Club Tavern a half-century ago are nothing short of eerie. Though LeMasters’s academic specialty was the sociology of marriage, a subject he does treat at length in the book, his acute ears tuned in to the troubling mixture of nostalgia and nihilism that animates the Trump movement today.
LeMasters writes, “All of America’s leaders are white-collar: economic, political, religious, even labor . . . Who, then, can win and retain the respect and loyalty of the blue-collar elite?”
“The puzzle about the cynicism of these men,” LeMasters writes, “at least to this observer, arises from the fact that they have actually done quite well in American society: they are at the top of the blue-collar world and most of them, when questioned, admit that they are well-paid for their work. Very few of them report harassment or mistreatment on the job. Most of these men survived World War II without serious injury and a majority actually ‘believed’ in the war . . .
“Why, then, should these men be so cynical? One can understand fatalism and cynicism at the lower-class level, the Americans at the bottom of the socio-economic system. But the men in this study occupy a very nice spot in the system, and one might expect them to be less gloomy in their outlook on life.”
Gloomy is not even quite the right word for the mood that LeMasters captures. His men bristle with rage and contempt—for women, for blacks, for gays, for anti-war protestors, for white-collar workers, and even for the very union leaders whose efforts have won comfortable pay and working conditions for the rank-and-file. Except for the bar’s bowling and billiards teams, the men of the Oasis resist joining anything; churchgoing and community service are for their wives. They cast votes less for a candidate they admire than for either the one they hate less or the one, Richard Nixon at this time and Donald Trump now, who gives fullest vent to their own class resentment.
Class in Blue-Collar Aristocrats is, for that matter, a concept only tenuously attached to income. To be working-class in this book is not to be materially struggling; it is to have a steady paycheck, a package of fringe benefits, a boat and snowmobile for leisure fun. And when the wives perceive themselves as being middle-class, LeMasters intuits that they are referring less to a certain dollar figure for household income than to holding aspirational ideas about, for example, having their children go to college and a professional rather than into a manual trade.