“These Are Our People Now”: Performative Masculinity and the Emergence of the GOP as a Working-Class Party.

Until the late 1960s, blue-collar Americans voted to the left of the political spectrum almost by default. While Democrats stood for the interests of labor, the Republican Party was considered the political arm of plutocrats and business elites. But in the present-day political landscape, the GOP has paradoxically established itself as both, the party of capital and that of the working class. Numerous observers have interrogated why large portions of wage-earning Americans have been consistently voting against their own best interests by supporting conservative agendas like cuts to social security, tax breaks for the rich, and anti-union legislation. As a culmination of this contradictory phenomenon, real estate tycoon Donald Trump has emerged as an identification figure for working-class America, especially appealing to the demographic of non-college-educated white men who overwhelmingly voted Republican in both the 2016 and the 2020 presidential elections. And while Trump has been known to don a hard hat and imitate shoveling motions at MAGA rallies to the cheers of his working-class supporters, politicians with actual working-class roots and distinct pro-labor agendas – Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez come to mind – are viewed with hostility by many lower-class Americans. This paper explores this ideological divide with a specific focus on gendered political symbolism. It argues that, counter to a common narrative, Trump’s emergence as a “blue-collar billionaire” is not a sudden swerve of history but the continuation of a decades-long conservative strategy. In fact, casting liberal advocacy for increased government support and gender and racial equality as an assault on traditional American masculinity has been a conservative staple since the times of Richard Nixon. “[T]hese are our people now,” Nixon’s adviser Pat Buchanan famously said about working-class voters in the wake of the conservative presidential campaign of 1968, which successfully channeled cultural anxieties over changing social norms into a narrative of American manhood under threat. Ironically, among the Democrat leaders who were habitually derided as “wimps” were decorated war veterans like George McGovern and John Kerry. Meanwhile, the Republican candidates offered up as representatives of rugged American manhood often came from elite backgrounds, like George W. Bush, or were mere performers of male mythology, like Ronald Reagan. In today’s GOP, gendered symbolism remains a key instrument for political mobilization and polarization. When Trump mocks Biden’s social distancing as cowardly “hiding in the basement,” show-wrestles faux opponents to the ground, or assures the world that he does not have a small penis, he enacts the signifiers of unapologetically confrontational masculinity designed to appeal to working-class men who feel adrift in the tide of rapidly changing gender norms and economic realities. By specifically investigating the messaging in Republican presidential campaigns from the late 1960s to the present, this paper outlines how the GOP reinvented itself as a blue-collar party by appealing to working-class sensibilities and emotional identities, even as it routinely undercut workers’ concrete material interests.