Donald Trump’s campaign is about a lot of things, but his pledge to build “a big, fat, beautiful wall,” which Mexico is going to pay for, is indisputably its centerpiece. Trump is outlandish and offensive and yet far from the first political figure to paint the US-Mexico border as the unsecured font of criminal danger and existential dread. Voices on the right wing have long spoken of an invasion bringing crime and, especially after 9/11, terrorism. The political potency of “the border” is clear: We in reality have two land borders, but those words rarely evoke Canada.

Immigration moderates from both major parties have certainly used softer language but mostly sought to co-opt or outflank the right wing rather than to rebut them. In the 1990s, President Bill Clinton dramatically increased the size of the Border Patrol, which continued to balloon under Presidents Bush and Obama. As of 2015, the Border Patrol was staffed by more than 20,000 agents, up from just over 4,000 in 1992. There are hundreds of miles of fencing that wall off Mexico, and the roads of the American Southwest are occupied by checkpoints where normal constitutional rights against search and seizure do not apply.

I spoke to US Rep. Beto O’Rourke, who represents the El Paso, Texas, district where he grew up, about the fantastical role the border plays in American politics and the reality of the binational communities where millions of people make their home. This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

Daniel Denvir

The border is everywhere in the American political imagination and usually invoked alongside ominous adjectives like “porous” or “violent.” Obviously with Trump, it has become the stuff that nightmares are made of.

But El Paso is a pretty great city. Can you tell me about this disjuncture between the imagined border and the real border?

Beto O'Rourke

What Trump is saying about the border is nothing new. He’s just far more effective at this, and has raised the level of hysteria and anxiety and fear far higher than anyone’s been able to do before. But we found a 1981 edition of the El Paso Herald-Post that warns of a Libyan hit squad operating in Juárez. There, of course, was no Libyan terrorist organization operating in Juárez. Just like there’s no ISIS group in Juárez, which has been erroneously reported recently. Just like there’s no al-Qaeda operatives crossing through the border, which had been rumored after 9/11.

It turns out that — and this is confirmed by the director of the National Counterterrorism Center, the Director of the FBI, Secretary of Homeland Security — that never, at any time, has a terrorist or terrorist organization or terrorist plot used our border with Mexico to attack this country, or even to attempt to attack this country. The border has become the point where we project our fears, our anxieties, and also our solutions to those fears and anxieties.

So we’re scared about not just Mexicans, as Trump has said — who are “criminals and rapists” — but we’re scared about ISIS coming across, we’re scared about al-Qaeda. And so the solution is to build a 50-foot wall, and it makes enormous, intuitive sense to a lot of people who don’t understand that part of the world.

The reality is that the US-Mexico border has never been safer than it is today, in every way that you can measure. In 2000, there were 1.6 million northbound apprehensions. Last year, including the child refugees, families fleeing violence in the northern triangle of Central America, there were 330,000 apprehensions. The typical agent in the El Paso Border Patrol sector made six apprehensions for the entire year. So the border itself is as safe as it’s ever been.

The US side of the border — cities like El Paso, San Diego, Laredo, Brownsville — are far safer than the average American city in the interior of the US. So in every way that you can measure, those fears are unfounded.

And the last thing I want to tell you, Dan, is that it’s clear to me that we are the safest city in America not in spite of our proximity to Mexico, and the fact that a quarter of our population was born in another country, but precisely because of that. These immigrants in our community, documented and otherwise, are making our communities stronger and safer, are contributing to the good things that are happening, and are a big part of our success. Those are the myths, and that is the reality.

Daniel Denvir

To clarify on the border crossings and apprehensions: The research I’ve read says that the decline in unauthorized crossings is related more to bigger economic push-and-pull factors rather than being a result of the huge growth in the Border Patrol and other militarization measures.

Beto O’Rourke

Correct. I’m glad you asked it. Study after study has shown the reversal in Mexican migration to a point where it’s not net zero, it’s actually a net loss. More Mexican nationals are going south from the US than are coming north, owed more to economic conditions in our two countries than to border security measures like walls, doubling the size of the Border Patrol, the drones that are flying overhead.

We really are at a point — no, actually we’re past the point — of diminishing returns. We’re spending about 19 and half billion dollars a year, and we’re searching for things for Border Patrol agents to do because there just are not the people to apprehend that you had back in 2000, when you had a very different economic dynamic.

There is a net decrease in the number of Mexicans and more migrants from countries like El Salvador, Honduras, and Guatemala. A lot of them are not just migrants here, they’re asylees or applying for refugee status. They’re coming from Central America, and they’re not in any way attempting to evade apprehension. They are literally coming to our ports of entry and turning themselves in, seeking somebody in a Customs and Border Protection or Border Patrol uniform to request help.

So people need to know this, and I think that will allay many of the unfounded fears stirred up in this latest effort by Trump — but that also again have been sown for literally decades, unfortunately. We have our work cut out for us, and actually, talking to you is part of that, in terms of making sure people know the truth.

Daniel Denvir

In fact, the research I’ve seen shows that border militarization can actually backfire in the sense that many people in the past may have come over to the US for a little while and then returned home to Mexico decided to stay.

Beto O’Rourke

And not just Mexico: El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras. Yeah, there was almost a seasonal cycle where there was an unofficial guest worker program, for lack of a better phrase, whereby people would come to the United States for a season to work in the agriculture industry, for example, and then for Christmas go back to their country of origin, stay there for a few months or even a year, and then come back to the US and work in the informal economy.

With the growing militarization of the border, it’s been much harder to do that. It’s actually had the perverse effect of locking people into the US who otherwise would have gone back to their country of origin. So, good point: The unintended consequences of this are pretty serious.

There’s one sensational story, but important nonetheless, related to this, going back about 20 years, that kind of shows you the logical conclusion of this kind of thinking: the tragic death of Esequiel Hernández, a lifelong US citizen, while herding his family’s flock of goats on their property, which was near the US-Mexico border in Redford, Texas. The Clinton administration had deployed military service members to help quote-unquote “secure” the border, and one of them mistakenly, tragically, shot him and killed him.

It’s not just a waste of taxpayer resources; it is that militarization in border communities makes life harder for the people who live along the US-Mexico border. And I’ll tell you this on the real security front: When you are focused on where a problem is not — and again, there have been literally zero terrorists on the southern border — you take your eye off where the problem has proven to be in the past, whether that’s the northern border where terrorists have attempted to cross into the US, or our international airports, or — tougher for us to deal with but maybe more important — our own US citizens who use terror as a means of trying to accomplish their goals. And so focusing on and spending this exorbitant amount of money on the border reduces our ability to meet the threat where it really exists.

Daniel Denvir

You make the important point that for all of Trump’s extremism, maligning the border as this source of danger is nothing new. Politicians from both major parties, including President Obama, buy into this idea of pledging to secure the border and that by implication the border is not secure. Do you agree that the blame can go around beyond the right-wing fringe?

Beto O’Rourke

Yeah, the right-wing fringe shares the burden of the blame if you have folks like Steve King out of Iowa who for years before Trump’s candidacy was conflating Mexican migration with murder and criminal activity in this country, even though when you look at the data and the facts, immigrants commit crimes at a far lower level than do native-born US citizens.

To the point you’re making, I remember watching the president’s speech on his immigration policies, and one of the things that he stressed is, look, first we’re going to secure the border. And I think that maybe he — I’m certain he must really have believed that if he said that. Perhaps people feel like that is the politically necessary thing to say in order to gain Republican support to move forward with other things that we truly need to do, like immigration reform.

But it only adds to the impression the average American has that the border is out of control, that it’s lawless, that it’s a security concern that must be contained — a complete departure from reality. And not just reality in terms of my impression of life in El Paso, but literally the observable, objective factual existence of the border in any way you want to look at it, any way you want measure it.

And for those who say, well, look maybe these bad things haven’t happened yet, but I’m certain that they’re gonna at some point try to do this — people can rest assured that at this point we’re spending 19 and a half, almost 20 billion dollars a year. We’ve doubled the size of the Border Patrol in the last 10 years. We have aerostat blimps. We’re now flying drones. The Republicans in the House proposed setting up forward-operating bases on the border. We’ve never been more vigilant against the potential of a threat there.

But I gotta tell ya, and I think this may be the spirit of your question, I think there’s something to the fact that the northern border with Canada is where you have had terrorists try to infiltrate this country, almost successfully, but our fears are consistently and historically projected on the southern border.

I think that’s because at the southern border, this country meets the rest of the world. It doesn’t necessarily look like the majority of this country. It doesn’t speak the language the majority of this country speaks and is the source of people who are not like us.

So I can wring my hands and pull my hair and gnash my teeth, or I can try to do a better job. A lot of this is on us, those who live on the US-Mexico border, of sharing the reality of it, of how extraordinarily beautiful it is, how warm it is, how safe it is, and what an amazing treasure this is. I mean, it’s just fucking beautiful to have 3 million people from two different countries speaking two different languages, two cultures, all together in this one binational metroplex.

And it is an engine for economic growth and job creation. About 6 million US jobs are connected to US-Mexico trade that happens at our land points of entry on the border. And demographically, the border describes the future of the country. This is what the country will look like increasingly, and what it will look like is an incredibly safe place that is successful, and those things that are most important in terms of where you want to raise a family, your quality of life, and your ability to be successful.

That’s our challenge: telling that factual story in a compelling way. Unfortunately, the most compelling thing to us as humans are things that scare the shit out of us. So when you say this is a source of rapists or terrorists or criminals, you don’t have to say a whole bunch more to get people. To tell them, well, there were only 300,000 apprehensions last year — that’s factually correct; it tells a story. But we’ve got to work on the emotional appeal of the border. And the positives are much more difficult to stir people up with than these false claims that make us really anxious.

Daniel Denvir

El Paso and Ciudad Juárez for a long time were true sister cities. And many still have family members on the other side of the border and work on the other side. But for years, border militarization has made living a cross-border life increasingly difficult. Can you tell me about how these national security state policies decided in Washington impact life on the ground in El Paso and Juárez?

Beto O’Rourke

At a minimum, the increasing militarization of the border and almost exclusive focus on the security dynamic creates inconveniences for people who live on one side of the border, work on the other or go to school on the other side, or visit family or friends, or just really live life in what is in many ways a true binational community, two halves of one community that happen to be in different countries. Last year there were 32 million documented crossings between El Paso and Juárez.

Daniel Denvir

Wow.

Beto O’Rourke

And that gives you an idea of the volume of traffic and just how much a city those two communities really are — just one large, truly metropolitan city. And that’s despite how hard it is to cross sometimes. Crossing back into El Paso, you may wait 15 minutes one day. The next day, you may wait three hours. And there’s sometimes little rhyme or reason to the wait times and how many Customs and Border Protection inspection booths at the bridges are open. You may be in a car, you may be crossing by foot or bicycle, you may be on a bus, you may be driving a tractor-trailer full of ladders. That unpredictability is at a minimum an inconvenience and at a maximum has resulted in some truly horrific outcomes.

On the mild end of the spectrum, right after the Boston Marathon bombings, the country’s national security response was to scrutinize student visa holders regardless of where they are and what threats they had historically posed. Six thousand students at the University of Texas at El Paso are Mexican nationals who live in Ciudad Juárez, so they wake up in their home in Juárez, eat breakfast, drink a cup of coffee, get on their bike or drive in a car, ride a bus, cross the border, and attend the University of Texas at El Paso. In kind of a throwback to better days in our state, Texas had the vision to treat Mexican nationals the same as Texas residents for in-state tuition purposes. So it’s a really good deal. It’s something I’m really proud of that Texas did, probably something that Texas wouldn’t do again today if it had the chance.

So all these students who are part of our community, after the connection between the Tsarnaev brothers and the student visa is made, receive additional scrutiny; they’re delayed, in some cases, hours when they go through secondary and tertiary questioning. And in one really egregious case, a student was handcuffed to the bench in the interrogation room, and I actually received a call from the president of the University of Texas at El Paso who never calls me for anything and says hey, you need to look into this. This is absolutely out of control. That’s on the mild side of it.

The most egregious case recently that I can think of is the woman, the US citizen, who was searched for drugs at the port of entry.

She’s crossing back into El Paso, and she’s suspected of having drugs, so she’s separated from the line and taken into secondary for questioning. She says she does not have any drugs, so they then do a pat-down search. They, then, on the bridge, I believe do a strip search, find no drugs. This is where it gets really horrifying. They then, against her will, transport her to a hospital in El Paso called University Medical Center that is, as the crow flies, probably three, four miles from entrance to the United States in El Paso, Texas, USA — and then chain her to a hospital bed and explore her vaginal and anal cavities.

Daniel Denvir

Jesus.

Beto O’Rourke

Medical professionals perform the search with Border Patrol in the room watching. Then they don’t find any drugs. Then they force her — against her will — to perform an X-ray. No drugs are found. She’s ultimately released and then sent a bill for the procedure by University Medical Center.

She has since settled with University Medical Center for many multiples of [the bill]. But she was effectively raped. And what’s important for people to know who aren’t from the border is that you don’t necessarily need to have probable cause. Many of your constitutional protections against unreasonable search and seizure are essentially suspended at the border.

And the border is not just the physical, international boundary line that you and I might think of when we hear the word “border.” The border extends for miles, for legal purposes to do things like those that were done to this woman, into the interior. So when she was in that hospital room, chained to the bed, essentially being raped looking for drugs that she didn’t have, she was at the border, and her rights were suspended. She didn’t have access to a lawyer. No Miranda warnings. Nothing. So that gives you the spectrum. From a student being harassed, detained, handcuffed, missing their final exams, humiliated in front of other bridge customers to a woman who went through one of the most horrifying experiences that I can imagine.

Daniel Denvir

That is utterly heartbreaking. It’s a disgusting, horrifying story. So many of these measures are put in place because of the sense of this danger posed by Mexico, and drug violence obviously has been horrible in Mexico.

But for all of our stigmatizing of Mexico, Americans rarely acknowledge our responsibility for driving that violence on a systematic level. It’s American guns flooding south that are often used in a conflict that to a large degree is over drug trafficking routes to reach drug consumers in the United States. It seems like for all of the complaining that Americans do about Mexico’s bad influence, Mexico would have a really good case to make the inverse argument.

Beto O’Rourke

Right. I don’t know if I could say it any better than you just did, but we’re the world’s largest market for illegal drugs and Mexico has the extreme misfortune to be our neighbor to the south, the country through which the vast majority of those drugs either originate or transit. And when you have that extraordinary demand, the extreme “visionary policies” that accompany it focused almost exclusively on interdiction, and viewing this as primarily a criminal issue creates such a premium for those drugs that kids in Juárez are literally willing to kill or be killed to get those drugs in the United States.

So, yes, the culpability is very clear, and it largely rests with us, with the United States, and yet it is very convenient, politically, to blame it on Mexico, and to try to push the solution to the problem on them and other originating and transiting countries when it’s really with us. It’s the demand.

Daniel Denvir

Violence is way, way down in Juárez from the really catastrophic rate it was at for a few years, though obviously the city has a lot of serious problems. Americans used to frequently cross the border for a margarita or a burrito down the Avenida Juárez. Now they very, very rarely do so. Does El Paso have a role to play in helping Juárez revive its image and tourism industry, and the sort of more casual cross-border traffic that used to be in place?

Beto O’Rourke

Yeah. Yes, we do, and just part of who I am as a lifelong El Pasoan, I am in Juárez frequently. Go there with my family, take friends, visit with friends over there, and then, also just part of my job I visit maquilas, visit with their political leadership, and in doing so make the case that, one, they’re part of our community, and my job responsibilities extend to Juárez in that regard. And two, it’s very safe for me to do this and I don’t, as the consulate in Juárez has asked me to do, I never notify them. I don’t have a detail. All that stuff is silly and absolutely unnecessary. It is far safer than it was when it was the deadliest city in the world. Importantly, and you pointed this out, it is not as safe as it needs to be and as it should be.

Daniel Denvir

When I was last in El Paso, I found it heartbreaking how many people, often Hispanic, told me that it had been years and years since they had last visited Juárez. Do you hear that a lot?

Beto O’Rourke

I do. In fact, we every year help put on this US-Mexico summit, and we try to bring together big leaders and thinkers from both countries, in El Paso and in Juárez, to discuss the issues of the day. One of the things that we added to that these last two years is a binational 10K run. Starts in downtown El Paso, crosses the Stanton Street–Avenida Lerdo bridge into Juárez. Then you run through Juárez and run through the downtown, go past the cathedral and the mission that’s almost 350 years old, and end at the international line at the Paso del Norte bridge coming back into El Paso.

And the first year, a thousand people ran it. This year, a similar number. And I can’t tell you how many people at the finish line as we’re talking, say, “Man, I’m so glad you guys are doing this run. This is the first time I’ve been to Juárez in five years, 10 years, 15 years, and now I’m going back.” It just ends the national mythmaking about how dangerous it is. Maybe unconsciously or maybe consciously, and it takes an experience like that in some cases to realize there’s nothing for me to be afraid of. It’s okay. So, yeah, I think that’s something we have to work on. We’re going to continue to push things like that that give people an opportunity to spend some time in Juárez.

Daniel Denvir

Okay, last question. What do you say to people who say burritos aren’t real Mexican food?

Beto O’Rourke

I don’t know. I didn’t know that that was a question. I was born and raised in El Paso. We have by far the best Mexican food anywhere. You know, in New Mexico, you get a lot of cheese on everything, a lot of green chiles. In San Antonio, you get something, kind of a Tex-Mex, something altogether different. El Paso really has the best, by far, not draped in cheese, not drowned in sauce. All the flavors come out. The food stands on its own, and burritos are part of that. Yeah. They’re real Mexican food.

Daniel Denvir is a Providence, Rhode Island-based journalist who writes about criminal justice, the war on drugs, politics, and immigration.

The role of sex and gender in this election extends beyond Donald Trump’s personal history and the media’s excessive scrutiny of Hillary Clinton’s voice. Trump’s ethno-nationalist populism reflects anxieties over the changing role of women and men in society against a backdrop of harrowing economic crisis and demographic change that will soon make the United States a majority-minority country.

As Stephanie Coontz argues, the upheavals are all interrelated. Economic precarity promotes the scapegoating of women and people of color while the divergent fortunes of poor and affluent families foster distrust and anger over the rising stature of women. Coontz, a longtime observer of changing gender relations through a political economic lens, teaches history and family studies at the Evergreen State College. She is the author of multiple books, including A Strange Stirring: The Feminine Mystique and American Women at the Dawn of the 1960s, Marriage, a History, and The Way We Never Were.

I spoke to Coontz about economic precarity and gender and why many think Trump is the person, or, more specifically, the man, for the job. The interview has been edited for clarity and length.

Daniel Denvir

There’s a big debate over whether economic misery or racism is fueling support for Trump. But many, myself very much included, have failed to take stock of the gender components at play beyond the fact that women seem more likely than men to be put off by Trump’s slurs. What’s the bigger gender context here?

Stephanie Coontz

Well, you know, all of these things are tremendously intertwined. Certainly, when you look at the extent to which the white male votes for Trump are concentrated in the South, you have to understand that he has tapped into a long preexisting current of racism. But that kind of racism gets exacerbated when people feel that they’re falling behind and it looks like they’re losing things that have been promised to them as entitlements.

This is not just white entitlement, which was taken for granted for 200 years, but male breadwinner family entitlement, which was a very recent acquisition for the white working class. And you’re getting a lot of people here that certainly are not the family values people who supported Cruz and Rubio but for whom the ability to maintain a male breadwinner family was a hard-won gain established in the postwar era that has been slipping away for the past 40 years.

Daniel Denvir

That explains why working-class men are drawn to Trump. But he also has support from plenty of women. Why?

Stephanie Coontz

So what attracts women to this? Most women do not like to be sexually harassed. Most women now say that they ought to get equal pay for equal work. But the fact remains that women who have the fewest opportunities to compete successfully in the labor market are the ones who are much more likely to support the policies and values that reward a traditional division of labor in the household.

Women with more social, economic, or educational capital are much more likely to support the activities of women making their own way in the world, to be proud when they see powerful women who stand up or who are getting ahead of men in any way, and they’re also much more open to supporting social policies that reward individual initiative even if they know that it’s not always rewarded equally.

Women with less economic or personal autonomy are often drawn to a culture of family values that emphasizes men’s responsibility to look after women. Women who have a shot at achieving or competing on their own emphasize equality, supporting the kind of policies that make it possible for them to move up in their jobs and combine work and family.

Women who want to be protected in the private sphere or need to be protected in the private sphere tend to emphasize the need to protect and privilege women’s special capacities for nurturing. I think it’s a big factor in the debates over contraception and sexuality and abortion. The flip side of women having all these freedoms from male control, they believe, is that it actually threatens women’s entitlement to male protection.

Daniel Denvir  

You mention this at a very interesting time because Phyllis Schlafly just died and that was very much her message: that the Equal Rights Amendment was going to strip women of their right to male protection and male economic support. Is this a longstanding strain that Trump’s tapping into?

Stephanie Coontz

Oh, yes, I think so. People have interviewed anti-abortion activists. And many times, they have expressed the idea that this just gives men all the more power over women. That it makes it easier for a man to refuse to marry a woman that he may have slept with and gotten knocked up.

When my son was in a Louisiana public hospital — amid all the cutbacks in public services that Bobby Jindal prevailed over — I had several opportunities to get into long conversations with Trump supporters. The few women that I talked with, they certainly were not the pious people who expected to be or had been virgins until marriage. But they still held very strongly to the idea that they needed marriage, and that men should take responsibility and step up to the plate.

And so they saw a lot of these high-achieving women as giving men permission to be total individualists and not to step up if they need to get married, and also that these women are taking jobs that should go to men with families to support. I don’t think the profane attacks that some women make and proudly allow their sons to make on Hillary Clinton are driven by exactly the same contempt for women that that you see in some men’s remarks, but by this hatred of elite women who seem to be taking jobs from their men and saying to men: Women don’t need your help, women can do it on their own.   

Daniel Denvir

Is that anger at elite women reflective of a situation where economic and gender anxieties are intermingling?

Stephanie Coontz

This has been a longstanding tradition. Queens have been vilified as women for eating the wrong thing or wearing the wrong clothes or being too standoffish rather than as partners in class oppression. Through history there is this extraordinary anger against elites that is often channeled through sexism. Even left-wingers often equate the worst excesses of the elite that they attack with the behavior of elite females. So that’s certainly part of it.

But for whole sectors of the population, these traditional racial and sexual prejudices, which can lie dormant at other times, have become intertwined with the collapse of a small-town way of life in which everyone was supposed to know their place but there was also enough intermixing of classes that white working people had more leverage with business owners and local officials. Government was corrupt but more accessible to you if you knew somebody, and in small towns you didn’t have to be Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton to know somebody.

And so I do think that you’re seeing a tremendous fury at this sense that a whole set of political and economic arrangements that were never totally in your favor but could sometimes be manipulated — by your race, your gendered behavior or just your neighbors — has now been lost and it’s very disorienting to people.     

Daniel Denvir 

Paul Krugman wrote that that Trump “Represents little more than the rage of white men over a changing nation,” which seems both partly true and somewhat unfair. It seems like the correct analysis would land somewhere along being able to say that white men’s privileged position needs to end but that the state of affairs for working people in general, white men included, is a problem. 

Stephanie Coontz

I think it’s absolutely true that as whites and as males a lot of the most vociferous and vicious supporters of Trump have an unjustified sense of entitlement that they should get first pick on jobs, wages, and promotions. But their sense that they’ve been screwed over is not unjustified, as those jobs have gotten more insecure, real wages for less-educated men have fallen by 30 percent since 1979, and benefits have been systematically taken back.

And they understand, even when they blame Mexicans and immigrants, they actually understand that corporations have screwed them over, that politicians have screwed them over, that businessmen have not been fair to them. And so I think what happens here is just the general sense of “I am absolutely powerless against these bigger forces and I have to look to someone who is more powerful than they are — and in the meanwhile vent my anger on people over whom I am more powerful.”

I was very struck by the female supporter who said Trump is like the bully you want to beat up on the other bully. There is longstanding social science evidence that people with fewer resources, educational or economic, tend to look heroes — or villains even— to stand up for them. Somebody they think has some kind of power that they don’t have.

The exception is when you have a union. The one time that you don’t see that in action, at least so much, is when an area is unionized. Then, because workers have some kind of collective power, they’re not so likely to turn toward some authoritarian demagogue. They can actually imagine going up against the boss in their own collective power rather than finding somebody else to go up against the boss or someone else to throw under the wheels of the bus.

Daniel Denvir

It seems to me that what’s at work in a lot of senses is: What sort of institutional frameworks are in place that help people make sense of and interpret their reality?

Stephanie Coontz

Yes. What institutional and organization tools can we develop or mobilize so people feel that they have some place they can take their grievances other than to a strongman, or some place to vent their frustrations other than taking them out on some scapegoat? And I do think that liberal elites, by failing to link class injustices to racial and gender ones, often fail to offer an alternative to the demagogues.

Sometimes I’ll go into a place where liberals are talking about these issues in terms of diversity or inclusion or compassion. All of which can come across as privileged people telling unprivileged people that they shouldn’t complain because other people have it worse. I actually had some of the white low-income people I talked to in Louisiana ask me “where’s the inclusion for us?”; “I don’t see any compassion for us.” 

I don’t think that’s the primary cause of their rage. And I have no illusions about how hard it will be to combat America’s deeply engrained racism. But I think that failing to develop better ways of finding common ground gives a little more fuel to the people who would like to stoke that rage and use it for their personal or political agendas. 

Daniel Denvir

To what degree is there a sort of zero-sum game at play between women’s economic gains coming at the expense of men, and people of color’s economic gains coming at the expense of whites, and to what degree is that really just a way that things have been politically framed?

Stephanie Coontz

Well the fact is, it wasn’t women who have been gutting the unions and cutting wages, and in light of the job and wage losses men have experienced in their traditional jobs, if it weren’t for the gains that women have made, there would be many more poor families than there are. Men in families have really benefited from women’s access to work. There’s new research out that shows that when a woman earns more than her husband, that no longer raises the risk of divorce. And the risk has fallen the most among families where the men are low-to-moderate income earners. It’s the highest-earning men most invested in their identity as high earners (the Trumps, in other words) who are most threatened by a wife who earns more.

But when you get to the really poor areas, you get a couple of other things happening. First of all, many men can’t find stable relationships because they don’t earn enough to be a good bet as husband material and/or because women can earn just enough not to have to put up with bad behavior. But when low-income couples do marry and have kids, they really need two incomes but they often can’t afford child care.

The highest proportion of stay at home mothers in this country of any group — the only group where a majority of them are stay at home — is among women married to men in the bottom 25 percent of the earnings distribution. This is very typical of the South in the low-income areas that Trump is talking to. These women don’t have enough education or opportunity to earn wages that can pay for child care and transportation and work clothes. So this is the one place where you get a lot of stay at home wives — or wives who do take jobs but they are crappy jobs that pay low wages and don’t have family-friendly policies, so they’d prefer not to be working.

Even though objectively we can say they’d be so much better off if we could get child care centers up and increase the degree of unionization, for some of those people, two-earner families seem like a tremendous threat. The two-earner families seem to be outbidding them for everything from goods in the supermarket to houses that are near decent schools. And so you can see how you get this ambivalence about working women.       

Daniel Denvir

Is there also a sense in which the rise of two-earner households has papered over, at least on the surface, the real economic crisis that people are in?  

Stephanie Coontz

Well, I think that it has raised gender tensions that can in fact distract from the real economic sources of the problems. First of all, you have so many married-couple houses where really the wife can hardly afford to work and so they are looking for tax policies that allow her to stay home. They look resentfully at the influx of educated career women who are increasing the earning power of these middle-class families and increasing the social distance between them.

Or you have two-earner families that are just scraping by and they see some women — for the first time — moving way up the earnings ladder. So when they hear feminists talk about the glass ceiling, they don’t see that as the main issue. Then at the same time you also have at an even poorer level a situation where women’s earning power is just enough to make them very cautious about marrying a man who might not have earning power or might lose his job.

So, you’re getting the kind of gender hostility that tends to mount in any impoverished community where there are these kinds of tensions. Where the man is thinking, “what does this woman want from me? She’s only after me for my money.” And the woman is thinking, “huh, you know, boy, if I let him into my house, he’ll probably start stealing my money or using it for something else.”

So you’ve got this interpersonal mistrust that is in so many ways a product of increasing economic inequality, the collapse of anything like a social safety net, and the lack of any kind of fairness in access to schools and public facilities and even safe water.

So you can see how some people can become so demoralized that instead of demanding change from these seemingly untouchable powers, like the corporations that move somewhere else or the government that is now no longer your neighbor of a neighbor, you start blaming it on these dual-earner families and these middle-income families and these uppity women and these men who don’t know how to do a hard day’s labor. You think to yourself, “when I do a hard day’s labor, I still don’t get rewarded for it.”

My husband and I live on a very small farm here and I am continually reminded of the tremendous disparity between what people who work with their hands are paid and what people who manipulate technology or push paper are paid. When the guy comes out to slaughter our cow, he gets $70. For driving all the way out there, with all that special equipment and all the training that allows him to kill it, skin it, and hang it up and prepare it to go to the butcher who will do the final cut, he gets, like, nothing. People who put their feet up on a Wall Street desk for 10 minutes to take a little break from schmoozing with clients make that much money in that 10 minutes.      

Daniel Denvir

There’s an interesting dynamic between the gendering of service sector jobs as feminine and factory work as masculine. The rise of the service sector and the decline of manufacturing seem to have collided in unsettling way when it comes to gender norms.

Stephanie Coontz

Oh yes. It would be one thing that if you were paid as many union guys used to be —my husband used to work in the airlines, and when Northwest was the airline these were union jobs, people who unloaded baggage made as much as people who pushed paper across desks — not the CEOs, of course. But they had good, solid jobs. You made double time on overtime days. You had work protections. Why, you might have a certain amount of pride that you lifted things that were heavier than these desk jockeys did. But you didn’t have to have resentment. And in fact, you were sort of like, yeah, my muscles are hurting, maybe I’d like a job like that eventually.

But today, you get to a point where you’re getting paid just a minuscule amount while this guy who does no useful work that you can see, is getting much, much more. Then it’s easy for that to get folded in with old-fashioned notions of masculinity, thinking that I’m the real man here, these people aren’t real men. Trump plays to that a lot — “loser, weakling,” that sort of thing. Although God knows if he’s ever lifted a hammer the past 25 years.

Daniel Denvir

There’s a lot of nostalgia at work, for things both real and imagined, when it comes to economics, gender, and race right now. When historically does this pining for a Golden Age emerge?

Stephanie Coontz

I have spent my whole professional life battling nostalgia and showing how it deforms our understanding of our own history, our politics, and prospects for building a better future. But this particular nostalgia I’m a little sympathetic to. For hundreds of years, blue-collar workers, white, black, or whatever, had no social respect, no protections. They lived hand to mouth. They had the highest accident rates in the industrial world. There were no protections for them.

Blacks had higher unemployment rates and lower wages than whites, and they faced terrible discrimination. Unskilled white workers had it better than minorities, but they were a long way from being “privileged’ in the sense that most middle-class people understand that word. I can remember jokes of the ’60s, that people laughed at, about guys who put something in front on their face and hit themselves in the face when they were told to prove how strong they were. The butt of these jokes was always some white “Polack” or Irish construction worker. There was so little respect for industrial and manual workers, so little security for them.

After World War II, we got into a situation where the combination of new protections for workers, new regulations on banks, rising taxes for the rich and corporations, much more government investment in jobs and infrastructure, and our favored economic position in the world created for the first time a security and a sense of pride that you could be a male breadwinner.

You could make things better for your wife and your children than your father had been able to make for you and his father for him. Every cohort of men from 1947 right up to the early ’70s could count on earning more at age 25 to 35 than his father had earned at that age in real wages. By our standards, the houses they lived in were smaller, but we’re social animals. We compare ourselves to where we came from.

I’ve interviewed women about this, women who lived through this and who often had very unhappy marriages, and I would ask, “why didn’t you leave?” And they’d say, “well, how could I do that? I had it so much better than my mom did, so much better than my grandma did. I should be grateful.” So there was a feeling of gratitude, of pride. And when young antiwar activists started marching in the street and turning flags upside down there was this sense of resentment — now that I’ve got a piece of the flag, why are you suddenly spitting on it? — that I can understand.

Back in the 1950s and 1960s, a white or a male with a high school education earned more than a black or a woman with a college education. When that white working-class security started to go away in the 1980s particularly, it was easy to just be enraged and not know what had done it or who had taken it away.

Unfortunately, what a well-orchestrated propaganda campaign managed to do was to convince people that the source of that prosperity had been their patriotic values and their own hard work, which demagogues contrasted to new immigrants speaking different languages and women, blacks, or other minorities pushing them aside. And to the extent that liberals didn’t ever want to talk about the class dynamics of working-class loss, they made it be very easy for demagogues to raise that argument.     

Very often my students will come into my class and they’ll talk about unpacking white male privilege. Now, I believe there are tremendous amounts of white male privilege and of minority and female disadvantage. But it’s hard for a white college student to tell a guy whose wages have been cut three times in the last 10 years, who has fewer benefits than you do, who can’t imagine his kids doing better than he did the way he was able to do better than his grandfather that he is privileged. Privilege is not what he sees when he looks in the mirror in the morning.

Sometimes you can get him to see that he had advantages that he no longer has, and then you have to be able to explain that those racial and gender advantages were not the real source of his better life then. Because what really helped him then was government investment in jobs, a more progressive tax system, better regulation of corporations and banks, and union jobs.

If we restored those protections to working people and gave all working people access to them we’d be better off. Convincing a lot of these people of the need for this kind of solidarity isn’t easy, but you’re certainly not gonna get it if what they think they hear is “they wanna take away the last little leverage I have, calling it a privilege, and give it to someone else.” You have to be much more class conscious than our political and cultural leaders have been to make the case for solidarity to them.

Daniel Denvir

What did you make of the gender dynamics of the Democratic primary? Young women went for Bernie Sanders in overwhelming numbers, which really bothered a lot of older women who supported Hillary Clinton. And there was a lot of suggestion or just assertion that support for Sanders was driven by sexism.

Stephanie Coontz

I certainly could see that there was a stupid subset of Sanders’s supporters who, you know, were stupid little boys. But the vast majority of Sanders supporters were very conscious that Sanders supported and supports women’s rights. And so I think that sexism did not account for his support even though some of his supporters were sexist.

In terms of the gender divide between older and younger women, I’m sympathetic to both sides, having myself grown up in a time period when a woman could be laughed out of classroom if she expressed ambition to be a president, a secretary of state, a governor, an athlete — as opposed to, you know, a film star or a nurse. Back in those days the legal definition of rape was forcible intercourse with someone other than your wife. There were quotas on women in schools, all male clubs, and women who worked had to turn to the “help wanted, female” pages, where the jobs were almost all for “perky” receptionists and “pretty” secretaries. Most states had Head and Master laws that gave men the final say over many family matters.

So, for women who had any experience with that and then went through the tremendous hostility they initially received in the early days of the women’s liberation movement, you can see why they would be tremendously excited at the idea that a woman would take on this new job.

But for the younger ones of course, they’ve seen women in the extremely powerful positions, they have made tremendous legal, economic, and social gains. They know that sexism still exists. But I think many of them are also conscious of the other inequities like race and class and don’t feel that being a woman is sufficient for a job description.

That’s the place we’d all eventually like to get to, I think. But what you had in the primaries was a divide between those women who were thinking about the excitement of having a woman in the White House and those who were attracted to Bernie Sanders’s critique of people, male or female, too cozy with the establishment. I suspect most of the latter will now allow themselves to embrace the kind of novel sense that, “wow, there is something important about there being a female first president.”

But I think Clinton has enough political baggage, and is just tone-deaf enough about class, that she’s lucky to be running against the one guy who is managing to offend minorities, women, economic elites, and increasingly, I think, a lot of the “little guys” he claims to defend but has in fact been screwing over for years.

Daniel Denvir is a Providence, Rhode Island-based journalist who writes about criminal justice, the war on drugs, politics, and immigration.