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.