The Age of Trump
A few elections ago, I heard a white working class Pat Buchanan supporter say “…the Democrats represent blacks, the Republicans represent rich people, who represents me?” I was worried about this at the time because it seemed only a matter of time till the chickens came home to roost in the form of rightwing white identity politics. The Tea Party was the first iteration of this impulse. In the 2016 election, a billionaire caudillo arrived peddling something new in American politics: white working class Chavismo. The tribalism that has come to pervade American politics has now reached its tragic culmination.
All politics is local. The elites of the Bos-Wash corridor and Silicon Valley lost touch with the concerns of the white blue collar workers that are given voice in so many Bruce Springsteen ballads. The cognitive elite, composed largely of technocratic Ivy Leaguers, dismissed the plight of globalization’s losers as the unfortunate outcome of irresistible and generally progressive economic forces. Blue collar Americans residing in fly-over country were supposed to take one for the team. The dramatic growth of income inequality was not the coastal elite’s problem. The fact that American blue collar workers experienced massive downward mobility as they were forced to compete with a billion plus impoverished Asian workers for unskilled and semiskilled jobs was not their problem either. In this last election, American workers have made it their problem. This is why Trump carried the Rust Belt, much to the surprise of pollsters and pundits.
By 2016, the Democrats had largely abandoned their traditional economic class based politics for the “identity” politics of victimized subgroups. “Intersectionality” and similar buzzwords replaced the “kitchen table” issues that had previously concerned a large swath of the white working class. Race, class and gender, the holy trinity of the academic left, was the focus of the Democratic leadership, although gender and race were greatly highlighted at the expense of class. This had been particularly evident in the Obama administration. The core of the Democratic coalition going back to the New Deal was the unionized white blue collar worker. Now there is no Democratic party worth discussing beyond big cities and the coasts. The current Democratic party is focused on identity based interest groups combined with white collar, college educated people who have managerial jobs, soft hands and 401Ks: it is now a coalition of minority groups allied with the “winners” in the globalized information based economy.
The American electorate is unfamiliar with Davos. Sand Hill Road in Silicon Valley is a very atypical place, alien to the Americans who drive pick up trucks and change their own oil. The values of San Francisco are not those of Akron or Grand Rapids or Janesville or Scranton. Wall Street and Main Street have different priorities. It is testimony to the state of American political life that this even needs mentioning. In an important new book, Hillbilly Elegy, J.D. Vance shows persuasively how the transformation of work in America has generated a pervasive hopelessness among the least educated inhabitants of white America. Trump was notorious for saying, “I love poorly educated people”. They loved him right back, especially given the ill-disguised contempt they received from the political elites of both parties. They may not have much education, but they aren’t stupid and they are fiercely proud. The white working class Trumpistas know perfectly well that Trump lacks even the rudiments of moral decency. If they can’t share the wealth, they will share the pain. If elites make them suffer, they will make sure elites suffer too.
Charles Murray, in Coming Apart shows that culture matters at least as much as economics, and that the decline of stabilizing institutions like family and community has reached dangerous levels among the white working class. The erosion of the values that made individuals productive citizens has eviscerated the life chances of the bottom half of white America. Standards of behavior have been declining for decades among the least affluent parts of the white population: the work ethic and social cohesion that marked earlier working class neighborhoods is largely gone. Instead, anomie prevails. The growth of predatory payday loan operations in declining neighborhoods is symptomatic of the breakdown of the informal social networks that used to reduce the dangers of working class life. Simultaneously, the thinning out of civil society, (churches, little league, scouting, labor unions, volunteer groups like the Red Cross, etc; the “Bowling Alone” phenomenon) is linked to a marked increase in social pathologies like drug addiction, semi-permanent unemployment, and petty criminality. It’s every man for himself in an environment marked by a pernicious social Darwinism. Many Americans are one paycheck from disaster.
Those that were paying attention could discern the desperation of those left behind by America’s globalized, technologically dynamic economy. Angus Deacon, a Nobel Prize winner in economics, and Ann Case, a professor at Princeton, recently produced a paper showing that only one American demographic, white male non-college graduates, actually has a rising mortality rate. The principal cause is a 330% increase in “suicide by alcohol and opiate poisoning.” There is a genuine crisis in the white working class, which the Democratic party, traditionally the advocate of American workers, has consistently ignored. The real as opposed to the symbolic issues of the dispossessed were consistently marginalized. For all her talk of “working families”, Hillary Clinton could not convince important segments of the high school educated working class that she understood their plight. They were more interested in survival than in the Supreme Court or gun control or greenhouse gases or Putin’s intervention in Syria.
Hillary Clinton was an obviously flawed candidate. The taint of avarice, cronyism and corruption was ineradicable. “Its my turn” is not a good reason to be president. It is worth noting that she has never been a natural politician like Bill Clinton. She correctly made the strategic decision to steer her candidacy to the left to combat the populist socialism of Bernie Sanders. After securing the nomination she blundered by failing to triangulate back to the middle of American politics, underestimating the importance of the white working class in favor of an appeal to Sanders’ progressive milennials. She often came off as inauthentic, patronizing and effete, because she has always lacked the common touch that came so easily to her husband. Bill Clinton, who is a genuine product of the white working class, has always had far better political instincts than his wife, who is an icon of progressive middle class propriety.
“Black Lives Matter” was Hillary Clinton’s “Sister Soulja” moment. Politically correct, cold and calculating, she blew her crucial, once in a lifetime opportunity because her political instincts were never as acute as her husband’s. Bill Clinton would have stood his ground, knowing intuitively that rank and file white Democrats wanted reassurance that the party was not held hostage by radical minority movements and that their concerns would receive respectful consideration proportionate to their electoral importance. Hillary Clinton did not seize this opportunity. After a series of BLM demonstrations targeting the two Democratic frontrunners, Bernie Sanders made the obvious and innocuous claim that “All lives matter”. Abetted by a partisan media that were more interested in entertainment than information, a small but highly visible fringe element of America’s black population excoriated Senator Sanders for “insensitivity”, which is, as a matter of course to those who know the protocol, a prelude to America’s omnibus term of abuse for those who disagree with black radicals: racism. The intimation that Senator Sanders is a racist is preposterous, but Hillary Clinton and her handlers saw blood in the water. She moved to outflank Senator Sanders on the left as she had done on gun control.
Bernie quickly caved into pressures from BLM, apologizing profusely for his insensitivity and begging forgiveness. Hillary couldn’t stand the possibility of being seen as less sensitive than her opponent, (which in contemporary politics is regarded as the summum bonum), so she pandered to BLM ostentatiously, treating Sanders with a supercilious, maiden aunt, “more sensitive than thou” disapproval. When the white working class heard the Democrats distance themselves from the harmless proposition that “All lives matter”, bowing and scraping and apologizing for the alleged “racism” of what was at worst an innocuous truism, they felt disregarded and dismissed. They took this as an indication that the Democrats did not believe their lives mattered, that loud radical fringe groups mattered more than them.
The progressive Democrats’ scorched earth approach to the culture wars alienated much of the working class. The Left has won the culture wars, but they are often lacking in pragmatism and did not know when to stop. The moralistic condescension over transgender issues affronted the values of many residents of North Carolina, which Trump unexpectedly won. Many working class Democrats in North Carolina resented what they regarded as the normalizing of the abnormal and the lionizing of a miniscule percentage of the population that they regarded as mentally ill. Simultaneously, their values were calumniated. The grossly disproportionate Democratic focus on peripheral symbolic issues like transgenderism, which speaks to a tiny fraction of the population and is largely a solution in search of a problem, repulsed much of the white working class. The cast of RuPaul’s Drag Race accounts for relatively few votes. North Carolina is not Manhattan. As the leftist filmmaker Michael Moore put it, Trumpism is the disrespected white working class giving the middle finger to arrogant elites.
Ask yourself, how many people in North Carolina have read Foucault and are interested in “queer theory”, compared to the number of factory workers anxious about making ends meet on eleven dollars an hour or the number of waitresses who have been shocked by a the suicide of a neighbor whose mortgage was foreclosed or the number of farmers who are worried about a friend whose son is hooked on prescription painkillers. It appears that white working class North Carolinians saw the cultural concerns of the national Democratic party as defining deviancy down coupled with a worse than indifferent attitude toward a large and downwardly mobile segment of the population: rural and small town America. If we replace transgender issues with the question of normalizing relations with Cuba, then mutatis mutandis it can be seen how the Democrats lost Florida. It is a mistake to take “Hispanics” as forming a monolithic bloc. Cubans are not Mexicans are not Puerto Ricans are not El Salvadorans. An unexpectedly large Trump turnout in South Florida’s Cuban community combined with a larger than usual turnout in the rural, Republican, panhandle turned the state to Trump. Moreover, it is worth remembering that Trump, the archetypical crass, arrogant, plutocratic New Yorker who doesn’t know one end of a cow from the other, won Iowa. Iowa. People who work in cornfields voted for the candidate who made billions in urban real estate. Inside the beltway types who are now in denial and looking for someone to blame must look to themselves, not the hoi polloi.
In order to appreciate the rage of the white working class in the last election, try a thought experiment. Imagine the case of a coal miner’s son outside Paducah who worked hard in some crappy backwoods high school and got a scholarship to the University of Kentucky or an unemployed sheet metal worker’s daughter from Youngstown who made the best of the underperforming local schools and got into Ohio State. They are the first in the family to get a higher education. These are deeply disadvantaged people who bucked the odds and are trying to make something of themselves. They are pursuing their version of the American Dream. At the start of their freshman year, they attend compulsory “sensitivity and diversity” gatherings run by the administrative enforcers of political correctness on campus. They are told peremptorily that they are racists imbued with “white privilege”. If they deny the reigning verities they are targeted for social ostracism and political reeducation by their bien pensant betters. To complete the now mandatory ritual self abasement, they are forced to atone for their sins by first publicly acknowledging, then publicly disowning, their “white privilege”, as it is identified by leftist campus apparatchiks who are professionally indignant.
When they visit home and inform their family that they are regarded by social justice warriors as “privileged” and that because of that, various racial set asides and preferences at school don’t apply to them, the family may well conclude that people with college degrees and secure jobs know nothing of their actual circumstances and prospects. When they tell their families about the demand for trigger warnings and safe spaces, the danger of microagressions and the inability of people like them to speak about commonplace beliefs that are nothing unusual off campus, the culture shock and resentment reverberates. Just because blue collar whites have few advantages does not mean they lack self respect or pride. Nor are they lacking in anger. When Trump reviled “political correctness” he struck a chord among a mass of marginalized, underprivileged, precariously employed whites. Their support of Trump was a scornful rebuke to those people who drive Priuses and shop at Whole Foods and blame the white underclass for far too much of what ails victimized minorities.
I must admit that I too have been guilty of refusal to listen to Trump supporters, viewing them as NASCAR watching troglodytes too benighted to be worth serious discussion. I gave up on them because I thought them impervious to reason. This was a bad mistake. Trump voters were so demonized that some of them were driven underground by the avalanche of contempt that buried those who refused to support the consensus candidate of America’s white collar, college educated elite. This is the only possible explanation for why the polls that showed Clinton comfortably ahead were consistently off by a few percent, undercounting Trump, particularly in the battleground states of the Rust Belt. The same phenomenon occurred during the Brexit vote. Our public discussion has become too bitter and vituperative when people feel constrained to hide their real opinions. Civility broke down and free speech was curtailed. I’m at fault here as much as anyone. If responsible politicians do not respond to the reasonable complaints of America’s white working class, irresponsible politicians will.
We do not have clean hands and we should have known better. The American elites who dismissed and disdained the demagogic orange messiah are at least as culpable as the resentful, desperate plebians who could not tell that his promises were as phony as his suntan. Trumpism is the cri de Coeur of Walmart shoppers whose Burger King paychecks are unable to cover the increased insurance premiums demanded by the “Affordable” Care Act. With unselfconscious irony, in the pursuit of “inclusion” elites have all but expelled blue collar white males from the Democratic party. But that is not all: Trump won white working class women who were more disgusted by Clinton than Trump. In the name of “diversity” elites have demanded lockstep ideological conformity. The traihson de clercs is all too real and we are now paying a heavy price.
Going forward, we will find out how robust America’s system of checks and balances is. One takeaway from this election is that multiculturalism has failed. We must recognize that Trumpism is the dialectical inverse, the doppleganger to the leftist identity politics so comfortably embraced by credentialed elites. We must reconnect with the reasonable, constructive center of American politics. I will be part of a loyal opposition attempting to, at the very least, freeze out the Alt-Right, racist, anti-semitic, nativist, fascist, white nationalist, neo-nazi, tin foil hat conspiranoia crowd that have been emboldened by Trump. I have a new appreciation of the virtues of limited government. I also have the advantage of low expectations. I will regard myself as successful if Trump turns out to be America’s Berlesconi rather than it’s Mussolini.
Pundits must get beyond the saccharine, self-justifying, self deception that Trump was elected by an unholy alliance of retirees and rednecks. We are all complicit in the triumph of Trump and it is time to face that fact. Highly advantaged Americans of both parties have replaced the old motto of “E Pluribus Unum” with “Where’s Mine?”. Somehow we lost sight of the Common Good and treated politics as a zero sum game. Finding general interests in a mutually beneficial political order is imperative. We must revive and pursue an idea of the Common Good if we are to have any chance of overcoming the tribalism and grievance mongering of contemporary politics. This is our last, best hope in the age of Trump.