Who, really, is deplorable?
A half dozen people have sent me a link to an opinion article by David Brooks in the New York Times. They all said it was excellent and I should read it.
Brooks wrote:
This story begins in the 1960s, when high school grads had to go off to fight in Vietnam but the children of the educated class got college deferments. It continues in the 1970s, when the authorities imposed busing on working-class areas in Boston but not on the upscale communities like Wellesley where they themselves lived.
The ideal that we’re all in this together was replaced with the reality that the educated class lives in a world up here and everybody else is forced into a world down there.
He goes on to say that people in "our class," created resentment among those excluded from it. He includes himself among the fortunate, well-educated, and financially comfortable people who do well in the current economic and technology environment. The article drips with self-satisfaction, even as he writes about how toxic elitism is to progressive politics. Meritocracy created Trump, Brooks wrote, because it created Trump's populist base.
It’s easy to understand why people in less-educated classes would conclude that they are under economic, political, cultural and moral assault — and why they’ve rallied around Trump as their best warrior against the educated class.
Here is the article, with no paywall.
Jim Stodder was one of the many people who wrote to me after engaging with Brook's article. The conversation took a turn, saying that White working class estrangement from Democrats was really about racial resentment, not resentment against the professional class. Stodder is a college classmate. He later received a Ph.D. from Yale in economics. He taught international economics and securities regulation at Boston University, with recent research on how carbon taxes and rebates can be income equalizing. His website: www.jimstodder.com
Jim Stodder Guest Post
I would never deny that the majority of white Trump voters have been motivated by racism. But we need to account for the 11 to 13% of 2016 Trump voters who voted for Obama in 2012, depending on the survey, like this one. That's more than enough to have otherwise swung it for Hillary. Nor does Brooks deny the racist, sexist, and anti-immigrant hatred on the Trump side. His 'liberal persona' in this dialogue -- and his anti-Trump record -- begin with that presumption.
His point here is that the social costs of racial and immigrant integration were largely borne by the white working-class in the form of schools, crime, and job competition. Our elites congratulated themselves and were scarcely affected.
There's always been tension on the U.S. Left between class and race. It minimized race in the '30s, as shown by FDR's Dixiecrats and by Richard Wright and Ralph Ellison writing on the CPUSA. The New Left swung the other way, and our cultural left has largely forgotten class -- very much so in its mainstream corporate embodiment.
It's not fair that Joe Biden takes the blame for this. He's more working class 'adjacent' and done more to boost U.S. manufacturing than any President of my lifetime, But he may just be too old, too nice, and too surrounded by young meritocrats to break through.
Don't forget that income inequality has gotten much worse in our lifetimes. Getting white working class men to embrace racial or sexual equality was always going to be tough. But expecting them to accept a lower status while their real wages stay flat for a generation and high-paid manufacturing jobs disappear -- that's politically impossible.
Instead, they have voted for Vance, DeSantis, or Trump. Or succumbed to "deaths of despair" -- suicide fast or slow. If we're scornful of this pain, if they're just a "basket of deplorables", then we can kiss those Obama-to-Trump voters goodbye forever. Trump's never going to help them. But he sure knows how to sing their song. He even knows how to make our disapproving voices part of his chorus.
I liked the Brooks column and your follow is excellent.