The Constitution deposits all “executive” authority in the president – not “legislative”, nor “judicial”, just “executive”. Sally, “execute” means to carry out and enforce the law. You, as an appointee, are an agent of the president. Your job is to assist the president, not be the president.
The man that put you in your position is no longer president. He’s a private citizen with a golf bag. Join him on the links.
Sally, your “conscience” is really a bunch of opinions. The guy with your opinions isn’t around. Another guy with different opinions was elected. For peace of mind, please, go join the howler monkeys in the lefty firmament. You’ll be happier … and so will the rest of us.
Understanding the 2016 election requires something more involved than a 140-character tweet or an abbreviated Facebook post. Much has been written about the white working class in the lead up and aftermath to the Trump victory. The video is an AEI panel discussion with J.D. Vance and Charles Murray on the topic from October of 2016. First, watch the conversation and then read the essay below it.
Our politics seems increasingly disjointed as many see the electorate as disparate victims’ groups. Some call it “identity politics”. A semi-official status as “victim” normally follows an intense period of political activism. The process was evident for unionized workers, all sorts of hyphenated Americans, and gays (now to be added to the “hyphenated” category). Did the 2016 election cycle insert the “white working class” to the list? Can it claim addition to the growing list of the “oppressed”?
Indeed, something significant has been happening to the white working class; something ignored by the culturally powerful. It’s a story of the isolation and ignorance of the culturally influential from the everyday lives of average working Americans. It’s a story of the negative impacts of an insular elite’s popular causes on people outside the elite redoubts, in a place I call “middle-America”.
Middle-America is an entity culturally, economically, and geographically defined. Culturally, middle-Americans are least likely to experience haute couture and an Ivy League setting. Dining preferences ranges from a good steakhouse to a bar/grill to fast-food. Economically, they occupy the rungs hovering around the poverty line to blue collar, wage-earning incomes. Geographically, they reside in areas conducive to their livelihoods. They increasingly have been weeded out of the now expensive coastal enclaves and gentrified, trendy inner-city neighborhoods. More and more they are identified with the vast stretch between the Appalachians and the West’s Coast and Cascade Ranges.
Middle America is a swath of the country in distress. Socially, many middle-Americans are mirroring the experience of the African-American underclass. Marriage rates are down; illegitimacy is up. Church attendance is down; social pathologies like drug use and crime are up. Unstable families more and more characterize life for many children. Educational attainment is stunted. Workforce participation by males is in decline. The upshot is an evisceration of human capital that will be handed down to the next generation. (1) (2)
Factors like the decline of private-sector unions aren’t the cause as some claim. The decay of these unions is a symptom, like all the rest, of a broader blue collar malaise.
These conditions are far removed from the cultural and economic elect. They congregate in particular aesthetically pleasing nodes on the west coast and in places like Vail, Co. They dominate financial and media centers and the surrounding neighborhoods, and college-centered communities. Their children predominantly experience stable, intact families. While church attendance is increasingly rare, values of hard work associated with formal education are stressed. The backstop of strong families gives them a leg up in a world they’ll increasingly dominate.
Today, the two slices of America rarely intersect. In the past, as recounted in the works of Charles Murray and Robert Putnam, they did. It was common for the wealthy to rub elbows with workers and the poor. Residential districts weren’t far apart and frequently shared the same schools, stores, and churches.
“Deindustrialization” has shattered this unity. Some factories, the mainstay of some communities, have closed as economic weight gravitated to centers of financial services, technology, and higher education. An outlook, distinct and secluded, has developed within each group. (2) (4)
Beliefs, as a consequence of isolation, begin to take hold among the two slices of the population. Of particular note are the ideological obsessions and prejudices of the emerging upper class. J.D. Vance makes reference to the slights of “hillbillies” and “rednecks” as acceptable language in conversation among so-called sophisticates.
Environmentalism has come to replace Christianity as a focus of near worship among cultural and upper class elites. (5) It may be speculation but the attraction of the ideology probably has much to do with aesthetic cleanliness and neatness, just taking the form of environmental purity – thus the love affair with recycling, climate change, almost anything labeled “sustainable”, biodiversity, the preservation ethic for public lands, etc.
Furthermore, a formally educated elite has a predilection for the rule of “experts”, a foundational tenet of progressivism. Environmentalism’s prescriptions lend themselves to the rule of “experts”. Of course, the “experts” tend to be themselves.
The consequences of these views being translated into policy for those outside the elite enclaves is profound. Yet, these effects aren’t maturely appreciated by this class of self-anointed “betters”. For the elites, the forests are in essence parks that are to be treated as recreational preserves for the REI-crowd. For a blue collar worker, the woods represent jobs and the stuff that fills a Home Depot. Different perceptions, but it’s the REI-crowd who has magnified influence beyond their numbers.
The whole gamut of environmentalism’s causes has deleterious effects on working people and their communities. Their safety-net is threatened as tax revenues decline. Jobs disappear, only to be replaced by unemployment checks and part-time work. Communities watch the housing stock deteriorate and store fronts board up.
Why? One possible answer can be directed at the policy prescriptions whose origins lie in the perceptions of a particular, insular cultural elite.
The elite’s response to anyone harmed is a galling condescension and social engineering. Opposition is ridiculed. People experiencing the negative fallout will be directed into the “proper” behaviors and “proper” occupations. Their children will be directed into the “proper” thoughts. The near totalitarian dimensions of the outlook is obvious.
The political dimensions are equally obvious. The blue along the coasts, and in the urban and college islands, corresponds with the cultural elite (map above). The red is everyone else. The Trump movement was a revolt, a revolt of middle-America against the condescension and effrontery of a cultural claque residing in “blue” America.
It will be interesting as the Democrats try to reshuffle their ideological deck to make it more appealing to blue collars. I’m reminded, though, of the adage about lipstick on a pig.
RogerG
Sources:
(1) Losing Ground, Charles Murray
(2) Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010, Charles Murray
(3) Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis, J.D. Vance
(4) Our Kids: The American Dream in Crisis, Robert D. Putnam
(5) “Diversity in Environmental Organizations”, Sierra Club, 9/9/14, http://www.sierraclub.org/planet/2014/09/diversity-environmental-organizations
I support Trump with reservations. I opposed him in the primaries but voted for him, with reluctance, in the general. I retain my doubts. My observations aren’t those of a Trump zealot nor those of the rabid left. Clearly put, his election was a gathering of middle-America in opposition to the growing ascendancy of an insular, self-anointed elite.
By “middle-America”, I mean those people not graced with membership in one of the fashionable victims’ groups. It’s “middle” also geographically. As a glance at the election map indicates, Trump’s success was founded on a citizenry not privileged with residence on the trendy coasts, nor in a densely-packed urban agglomerate, nor a college cocoon.
If America is divided, the growing gulf lies between the insular places of swank values and their pet issues and the aspiring social middle scattered in “flyover country”.
Those outside the bubbles aren’t enamored by the chic but smothering outlook of the “beautiful people”. Inside the bubbles, lefty progressivism is the catechism.
The “Lefty” part of the reigning dogma in the blue archipelagos is a single-minded belief in the Marxist dictum of material conditions being all-determining in human relations. Thus the lefty fixation on equalizing material conditions, and almost everything else. Surprise, that requires mammoth government.
The alliance of the left with government is a natural one. The left needs power to transform people and society. They need a cadre of enforcers and self-proclaimed “experts” to meddle into lives and shape a new society. It’s what Obama and the Democrats tried to do while constrained by the limits of republican government.
Those of the left are totally oblivious of the Orwellian trap depicted in Animal Farm. Painted on the side of the barn is the pigs’ new maxim, “All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.” In the Soviet Union it was called the “nomenklatura”. In America, today, it’s called the administrative state. It’s a metastasizing power base increasingly shielded from democratic accountability.
The “progressive” element is the conviction that government is the most important agency for the achievement of a person’s highest potential. For progressives, power is ensconced in a self-anointed class of elites – those so-called “experts”. In reality, their grasp on wisdom is highly suspect. Many are corrupted by progressive ideology and excessive self-confidence. It’s the reason that “climate change” fits so neatly into their platform.
Furthermore, “potential” is left nebulous – tailor-made for the accretion of power into the state. The state becomes isolated, unaccountable, and far removed from the vast middle of the country, where we find the sort of people who pay and receive little benefit.
Trump’s constituency is the real forgotten man and woman not so privileged by the adoring gaze of lefty progressives and their shock troops of “experts”. The real forgotten American is only a target for social engineering.
Funny thing about this isolated elite: they don’t know themselves to be so parochial. They’re completely unaware. Self-reflection isn’t one of their strengths. They were blinkered by an ideology – leftist progressivism – that was ever-present in their environs, and few other places. In the end, they were blindsided by an election.
Let me get this out of the way: I voted for Trump, probably for the same reason as many other voters. The election was a choice between a Republican and another Democrat promising to continue the leftward lurch of the country. My vote for Trump was a stopgap vote.
Yet, it is undeniable that Trump has twisted some on the right, especially at Fox News, into knots. Trump appears to have a conservative core, with a whole lot of inconsistencies and contradictions attached. At times, he is incoherent. At other times, he is a petulant boor … and incoherent. Still, the Trump adulation has turned some on the right into sycophantic apologists for everythingTrump. They have become what Trump is, seemingly unaware of the contradictions, hypocrisies, and buffoonery.
My favorite example is Sean Hannity. For years, before the rise of Trump, he proudly proclaimed, “I am a conservative, not a Republican”. He was a booster for everything Reagan. Today, he’s a mouthpiece for everything Trump.
In 1988, in the VP debate, Bentsen said to Quayle, “Senator, I served with Jack Kennedy. I knew Jack Kennedy. Jack Kennedy was a friend of mine. Senator, you’re no Jack Kennedy.” Well, Hannity, I knew Reagan. Trump is no Reagan!
Reagan was a free trader but had to make compromises in the reality of governing. Nothing new here. Reagan’s characteristic free trade bonafides were clear when he said in 1986, “Our trade policy rests firmly on the foundation of free and open markets. I recognize . . . the inescapable conclusion that all of history has taught: The freer the flow of world trade, the stronger the tides of human progress and peace among nations.” His protectionism in autos and electronics were adjustments to political realities.
Where’s Trump vis-a-vis Reagan and trade? In debate he said, “Because I did disagree with Ronald Reagan very strongly on trade. I disagreed with him. We should have been much tougher on trade even then. I’ve been waiting for years. Nobody does it right.” Trump’s egotism is boundless. Only he can do trade right.
And to do it right means “protectionism” – undoubtedly – even if Trump can’t bring himself to use the word. Neither can Hannity. As Trump goes, theTrumpkins mindlessly go. People like Hannity just kicked Reagan overboard to be replaced by their new infatuation – Trump.
Anything and any person not glowing in their praise of Trump will set off derision. Does anybody doubt Hannity’s many interviews of Trump to be softball? Megyn Kelly had the temerity to mention it alongside Clinton’s puff interviews. Hannity went ballistic on Megyn on Twitter, “@megynkelly u should be mad at @HillaryClinton Clearly you support her.” The love of Trump trumps network comradery.
Let’s leave aside Hannity and turn to Tucker Carlson. Trump mouths the AFL-CIO line on trade and jobs; Carlson pushes a question that would make any government-loving liberal economist beam in envy: “Will driverless cars soon put Americans out of work?” I know, I know. It’s just a question. But the line of questioning is Luddite. When did automation become the bete noire? I suspect the simple-minded influence of Trump. Take a look.
Trump thinks that free trade sacrifices jobs. It’s not a huge leap to think that automation does as well. The new economic catechism seems to demand government power to determine what to produce, how to produce, and who to sell it to. Socialism anyone? The Trump knot has become Gordian.
Lost in the Trump-love is the Reaganite fusion of free market economics, social traditionalism, and a masculine foreign policy. Prior to Trump, people on the right were aware that automation doesn’t produce a net loss of jobs any more than the invention of the automobile in the 30-40 years from the internal combustion engine to Henry Ford’s Model T. Smoot-Hawley left its own foul taste. Trump gives us the chance to repeat the lunacies, and the lemmings follow in his wake.
