A strong majority of Americans—across all races—believe that politicians have not been putting America first.
The Public Religion Research Institute’s 2017 American Values Survey found that 60 percent of Americans agree with the statement, “In the past, America’s leaders have been too focused on helping other nations at the expense of our own country.”
Former White House Chief Strategist Steve Bannon has been insisting that economic nationalism is the unifying force that will bring together Americans of all backgrounds and ethnicities, and the comprehensive study found that “roughly equal numbers of white (62%), black (60%), and Hispanic Americans (57%) agree that American leaders have been too focused on helping other nations in the past.” The survey also found that “no group shows stronger agreement that American leaders” have not been putting the country’s interests first than Republicans (78% agree), showing how much Trump’s economic nationalist campaign has transformed the GOP.
On Monday evening, Bannon spoke in Alabama about how economic nationalism will unify working-class Americans of all races and backgrounds. He said economic nationalism is about putting American workers “at the top of the heap, not the bottom of the heap with trade deals and illegal immigration.”
He spoke passionately about how economic nationalism, by restricting the ability of high-tech companies to import cheap foreign laborers who are not more qualified than American workers, will help more Hispanic and black American tech workers get great middle-class jobs and solve the huge diversity problem that Silicon Valley has been criticized for perpetuating. Bannon pointed out that in the first year of Trump’s presidency, the unemployment rates for black Americans and Hispanics have reached record lows.
Even though the GOP establishment foolishly hyped out-of-touch career politician Mitt Romney as someone who could expand the party’s reach, Trump did better with people of color in 2016 than Romney did in his failed 2012 presidential run. In addition, Trump won over white working-class Reagan Democrats in places like Michigan, Wisconsin, Ohio, and Pennsylvania who despised Romney’s brand of corporatist Republicanism so much they could not get themselves to vote for Romney even while holding their noses four years before. The Values Survey indicates that Trump’s “America First” economic nationalist message may have been a big reason why more people of color also supported Trump than Romney, whom many viewed as the face of the soulless globalist corporatist who sees working-class men and women as mere commodities.
The study also found that there is a “considerable educational divide” among whites on whether America’s leaders are putting America first. Seventy percent of whites without a college degree believe that America’s leaders are not putting the nation’s interests first. Whites with college degrees, though, are evenly split, with 48 percent agreeing with the above statement and 51 percent not believing that America’s leaders have been “too focused on helping other nations at the expense of our own country.”
“Economic nationalism is what this country was built on. The American system—we look after our own. We look after our citizen, we look after our manufacturing base,” Bannon said during a 60 Minutes interview earlier this year. “And guess what? This country’s going to be greater, more united, more powerful than it’s ever been. This is not astrophysics. And by the way, that’s every nationality, every race, every religion, every sexual preference.”
Bannon has been barnstorming the country making the case that economic nationalism appeals to working-class Americans of all backgrounds.
“Here’s what [economic nationalism] cares about—that you are a citizen of the greatest country on earth, the United States of America,” Bannon recently explained to those in the legacy media. “Economic nationalism doesn’t care about your race, your color, your ethnicity, your religion, or your sexual preference.”
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