In 2016, as with most of the elections before hand, the ballot for the presidency was divided by racial, socioeconomic, gender, and religious lines. While rightfully focusing on deconstructing the effects of white supremacy and institutionalized discrimination in our country, the perception has been created that the Democratic party is ignoring impoverished white American’s who are stuck in poverty with very few ways to get out. This has enabled the Republican party to win elections by giving “white trash” attention. This is supported by the fact that Donald Trump won the white vote by a margin of twenty percent and lost the black vote by eighty percent and Hispanic vote by thirty six percent. For this reason, Many have referred to the result …show more content…
by Robert Dahl the authors theses work together to best explain the state of politics today. Dahl explains how the American Constitution created structure political inequalities that benefit the privileged minority and mistreat the less privileged minority. Isenberg’s anthropological analysis of the white lower class in America provides another level of history that undermines the historical perception that America is a classless society and shines a light on how poor whites have been marginalized since the foundation of the United States. These two arguments work together to show that the United States society has not only institutionalized oppression of racial, gender, and religious minorities, but also socioeconomically disadvantaged members of our society. The inability to heal class divisions in American society has created a chaotic political order in which political bases and people of different backgrounds are turned against each because they believe that social policy is a zero sum …show more content…
Isenberg explains that since the first colonies of America “Class divisions were firmly entrenched.” These divisions that Isenberg describe were among those with and without land (Isenberg, 28). Men like Richard Hakluyt treated white laborers during colonization as expendable and the wealthy benefited from the work of waste men, women, and children, of whom none could find any social mobility. As she continues that: “large land grants and land titles remained central to the American system of privilege” (Isenberg, 63). During the colonial era, the greatest privilege was wealth because it provided one wealth, liberty, and civic value. As colonial America was gaining its identity as a sovereign nation, Thomas Paine supported the establishment of a stable government to entrench the power of the wealthy landowners in his book Common Sense. “‘The property of no man is secure.’ Therefore, if the leadership class did not seize hold of the narrative, the broad appeal to political independence would be supplanted by an incendiary call for social leveling” (Isenberg, 79). Thomas Paine, one of the forefront philosophers and figures on independence from Britain justified independence by promoting the solidification of wealth for the few. This idea would be ever present in the