A thoughtful piece, but because I'm wasting time this evening rather than doing the backlog of things I ought to be doing, let me pick up on a few points.
In lieu of such coverage, media makers cast the white working class as a monolith and imply an old, treacherous story convenient to capitalism: that the poor are dangerous idiots.
There are dangerous idiots in every class of society (as Trump proves for the wealthy). But as there are more poor, there are more poor dangerous idiots - and in politics there is strength in numbers.
Spare, too, the condescending argument that disaffected Democrats who joined Republican ranks in recent decades are “voting against their own best interests,” undemocratic in its implication that a large swath of America isn’t mentally fit to cast a ballot.
Eh, this isn't quite right. From some it may be undemocratic. From others it is a call to arms for better education - that a better educated electorate is self-evidently a good thing. Here I mean "education" in the sense of awareness and knowledge rather than credentialism or possession of certain degrees. A person with a high school certificate but a familiarity with what each party stands for and some idea of how the voting system works is inherently a better educated voter, able to cast a more informed ballot, than somebody with postgraduate qualifications who unthinkingly votes for the same party their family's voted for since 1901 while parroting the generic slogans they were raised to repeat. I work with one colossal idiot, a holder of a PhD, whose vote is as utterly uninformed and ignorant as they come. I would not trust her to select an appropriate person to slice a cake.
A recent print-edition New York Times cutline described a Kentucky man:
“Mitch Hedges, who farms cattle and welds coal-mining equipment. He expects to lose his job in six months, but does not support Mr Trump, who he says is ‘an idiot.’”
This made me cheer for the rare spotlight on a member of the white working class who doesn’t support Trump. It also made me laugh – one can’t “farm cattle”. One farms crops, and one raises livestock. It’s sometimes hard for a journalist who has done both to take the New York Times seriously.
I may be a pedant, but what a silly and petty point. The journalist could easily be from a working class background - but one in an inner city ghetto, or a sprawling suburban slum, or a mining town ravaged by pollution. I grew up literally around the corner from a paddock of cows, born to a father from a rural service town and a mother from a family of orchardists and industrial labourers. To "farm cattle" did not leap out at me as incorrect (though admittedly I would have written "raises/rears cattle" had I been the author of the quote in question). Ignorance of agricultural or pastoral terminology does not mean one is not of the working classes; just that one is not from a specific form of community.
Also, the author's generalisation of journalists as detached from the working classes is surprising from one railing against such laziness. I cannot speak about the US, but journalism in Australia and New Zealand has been filled by people of all classes, and I would expect that to be true of any Western democracy.