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