Long before Donald Trump seized his spurious, self-canceling political moment as the imagined defender and champion of the “hardworking Americans” maligned as “deplorables” and “garbage” by out-of-touch, elitist Democrats such as Hillary Clinton and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, we have grappled as a nation with the complexities and contradictions of the relationship between “class” and “race,” and between “working class” and “white trash.” The Precarious Position of the Working Class American From the late 1970s through the early 1990s, the collapse of the… Read more