A barn in Trump Country.
A barn in Trump Country. KIT LEONG/SHUTTERSTOCK.COM

CNN has a story about a white man who attended 45 Trump rallies, voted for Trump, and only realized he voted for a fraud when the cuts in Trumpcare were revealed. One of those cuts concerned treatment for drug addiction. The Trump voter is a father whose son died from a drug overdose. He believes that the provision for drug addiction in Obamacare would have saved his son's life.

But what did this man see in the wealthy New Yorker with a history of failed businesses and a successful reality TV show in the first place? How could he even compare Trump to Obama or even Clinton, who would have continued and possibly made real improvements to Obamacare? He mostly saw Trump's skin color and his sex; and he mostly saw these things because, rally after rally, Trump made a lot of noise about them. This is what Trump told his voters: Whiteness and maleness had been eclipsed by "identity politics" (which really should be called civil rights), and this had negative economic consequences for this group of Americans. The solution was to make white males great again.

That was Trump's entire platform, and millions voted for it.

We are now learning that millions of these voters are at risk of losing health care programs that he and the GOP plan to cut. This and much more will be the price of their racism.



What can we city people learn from the heavy price that rural racism and sexism is in the process of paying? We must first conclude that if racism is proving to be costly for rural voters, it must also be costly for urban voters. And though many urban whites voted for Obama, and could easily see the "content of his character" beyond his African name and skin color, racism is still a serious problem in cities around the country. There is a social cost for racist policing, rental policies, and school funding. The same goes with sexism and Clinton. Hate, in all its forms, is not cheap.

And so we see what urban economics comes down to. It's not nonsense about supply and demand, or making markets more efficient or business friendly. It is the recognition and distribution of the actual cost-benefits provided by robust social services, health services, transportation services, and rational lawmaking policing and housing. This is not socialism; it is the political economy of cosmopolitanism.