George Mason University Professors Try to Explain Trump's Victory

By Buzz McClain and Damian Cristodero

President-elect Donald Trump “removed the mute button” that generally silenced the white working class, a group that believes it has been marginalized in earning power and political efficacy, a George Mason University professor said.

“They feel outnumbered as actual minorities grow in influence and power,” said Justin Gest, author of the now-prescient The New Minority: White Working Class Politics in an Age of Immigration and Inequality. “They perceive discrimination. Marginality is a powerful sense of loss.”

Gest is an Assistant Professor of Public Policy at George Mason University's Schar School of Policy and Government in Arlington.

When they object to that loss of status, they are often branded as racist, and the conversation is stopped, Gest said.

“Racism is the label that makes them silent,” he said. “They needed a leader who spoke for them. He removed the mute button.”

For minorities in the United States, Trump bashing their communities is troubling.

“I can only imagine that many Latinos feel despair this morning that the limbo their community has been in for nearly two decades will not change, working in a nation that clearly needs and benefits from immigrant labor, but having no clear path to citizenship,” said Mason professor Debra Lattanzi Shutika, an expert in transnational migration and who wrote the book Beyond the Borderlands: Migration and Belonging in the United States and Mexico.

Lattanzi Shutika is an Associate Professor in the Folklore Studies Program in the Department of English at George Mason University.

“This likely means that in a best case scenario, nothing changes and we continue to have a dysfunctional immigration system,” Shutika continued. “At worst, Mr. Trump will follow through on his promise to begin a mass deportation.”

“The white working class is unorganized, but Trump [organized it],” Gest added. “They see a man defining their interests. He tapped into an enormous resource of power that has been left behind for the last 40 or 50 years.”

PHOTO of Donald Trump Image via Gage Skidmore