Who is to blame for the iron grip Donald Trump retains on Republican voters? According to one New York Times opinion columnist, it’s not the GOP leaders who spent Trump’s entire presidency treating him like the second coming of Christ. It’s not the party infrastructure that has continued to support the thrice-indicted con man. It’s not the right-wing media outlets that dutifully disseminate his lies.
No, David Brooks writes—it’s us.
Addressing an audience of left-leaning, upwardly mobile college graduates, Brooks submits that American systems of meritocracy, which place a high value on academic credentials, have sapped cultural non-elites of power, consigned most of the country to a multigenerational cycle of low earnings and undereducation, and alienated those without college degrees by encouraging the use of “words like ‘problematic,’ ‘cisgender,’ ‘Latinx,’ and ‘intersectional.’ ”
All this has cultivated an emerging population of Americans who “conclude that they are under economic, political, cultural, and moral assault” and, for some reason, turn to the billionaire, politically malleable, Ivy League–educated, utterly amoral Trump to lead their counterassault against the professional class.
In short, Brooks writes, “we anti-Trumpers are not the eternal good guys. In fact, we’re the bad guys.” The 2024 election already feels like the 2020 cycle risen from the dead. Could we at least put these tired myths about Trump’s rise to rest?
Brooks is not wrong that certain economic conditions and changing cultural norms have contributed to a growing sense of disaffected resentment among Americans without college degrees, who make up a large and growing share of Trump’s base. And it is no earth-shattering revelation that the way the world has changed in recent decades—or the way (mostly white) people perceive it to be changing, thanks to a right-wing media ecosystem that subsists on panic—has predisposed voters to flock to the candidate who best stokes that resentment.
But Brooks does not explain how exactly Democrats, liberals, or college-educated Americans—“we anti-Trumpers,” in his words—are responsible for the social and economic woes of Trump’s supporters. He disregards the good reasons why “we anti-Trumpers” have embraced a policy agenda that is kinder to, say, immigrants and trans people than has the opposition. And in a truly astounding omission, Brooks ignores a fact that threatens to derail his entire thesis: Trump and the GOP are fanatically committed to sustaining the systems of economic inequality and social immobility that Brooks blames for Trump’s rise. “We anti-Trumpers” are the ones backing policies that would mitigate it.
Part of the problem with Brooks’ argument is that he lumps conservatives and liberals together in his pile of the college-educated elite. He claims that the roots of anti-elite Trumpism began with college deferments that protected the children of privilege from the Vietnam draft, and grew after “authorities imposed busing on working-class areas in Boston, but not on the upscale communities like Wellesley where they themselves lived.” Were these injustices the work of anti-Trumpers? Conservative elites got as many, if not more, college deferments as liberal ones did. (Trump himself received four.) And though liberal attempts to integrate schools may have been unevenly applied along class lines—and, incidentally, vehemently opposed by Joe Biden—it is hard to argue that the segregationist alternative proposed by conservatives would have left Americans better off.
Likewise, anti-Trumpers are not responsible for the whole of globalization, and even less so for the underregulation of corporations and the financial sector that has led to the decimation of the middle class. The mass exploitation of labor and offshoring of jobs that have left former boomtowns in the dust and workers without living-wage jobs and adequate workplace protections—remind me, did Democrats do that?
Brooks also fails to acknowledge that, by and large, to whatever degree the anti-Trump agenda has offended the cultural sensibilities of some less-educated white Americans, it has been a side effect of long-overdue attempts to make other people’s lives better. Advancing transgender rights and protections should be a default pillar of any political platform concerned with human rights, even if it means sometimes having to use the word cisgender. Yes, some people may first encounter that term in college, but online cultural discourse now spans class divides, and one does not need any sort of degree to know, love, or be a trans person. People who suggest that the material concerns of trans people ought to be exchanged for the abstract fears of those who would enforce punitive gender norms have no business claiming the authority to separate the “good guys” from the “bad guys.”
Here’s another tell that Brooks’ analysis is missing a few key angles of the Trump phenomenon: The only time Brooks mentions race is within a quote from a political scientist that he immediately rebuts. The people without college degrees who are turning to Trump have something very important in common beyond their educational background—they are overwhelmingly white. And even as Trump made some gains with people of color and Hispanic voters between 2016 and 2020—particularly Hispanic people without college degrees—the vast majority continued to vote against Trump, whether or not they attended college. Among Black voters, a college degree has made virtually no difference in whether a person has supported Trump or the Democrat opposing him.
This helps to explain why these white people who purportedly resent society’s elite have rallied around a candidate who is obsessed with credentials and the trappings of elitism. While president, to defend himself against the charge that he is “uncivil,” Trump said, “You know, people don’t understand. I went to an Ivy League college. I was a nice student. I did very well. I’m a very intelligent person.” He also brought up his privileged pedigree during his first presidential campaign, telling rallygoers in South Carolina, “I’m very highly educated.” If anti-Trumpers are the ones making non-college-educated Americans feel bad about their lack of education by equating a fancy degree with civility, I have yet to see the receipts.
Brooks says rural voters went for Trump because they’ve been left behind by the economic engines of the cities. But rural counties almost always vote Republican for a wide variety of social, economic, and demographic reasons, and the racial element of Trump’s rise is particularly salient in the rural-urban political divide. Though rural America is becoming more racially diverse, rural areas are still disproportionately white, and urban areas are disproportionately populated by people of color. Rural voters may have legitimate economic concerns but, as white people, many were also drawn in by Trump’s drumbeat of racial grievances. One study looking at three cultural differences that contribute to the rural-urban political divide found that different rates of “racism denial”—disagreeing that white people benefit from baked-in social advantages—between urban and rural Americans appear “to explain about three-quarters of the urban-rural gap in voting for Trump,” far more so than gun ownership and evangelical Christianity.
As evidence of the way economic stagnation in certain places has boosted Trump’s appeal, Brooks points out that “in 2020, Biden won only 500 or so counties, but together they are responsible for 71 percent of the American economy. Trump won over 2,500 counties, responsible for only 29 percent.” Fair enough. But this line of reasoning edges perilously close to a classic logical fallacy often weaponized by the right to defend undemocratic institutions like the Electoral College and “prove” inflated claims of Trump’s popularity. (See: those red-saturated U.S. maps passed around by election deniers.)
Yes, Biden won fewer counties than Trump—because the counties he won were jampacked with people. Trump’s were jampacked with empty land, which is not entitled to the franchise. It stands to reason, then, that the Biden counties have a greater economic output; they are full of people, most of whom have jobs. That’s how the economy works. But urban poverty is still a reality in this country, even as major cities have undergone substantial gentrification in recent decades. The relative economic juice of American cities does not mean that everyone in Biden counties has a job, much less a well-paying job, much, much less any significant economic power.
Speaking of economic concerns: The way Brooks tells it, liberal, college-educated elites benefit from immigration making “our service staff” cheaper to hire, while being less likely to experience the negative effects of immigration on worker pay. But wealthy Americans—the ones more likely to be hiring workers or earning salaries rather than toiling for hourly wages—disproportionately support Trump. In 2020 Trump won voters with an income over $100,000 by a margin of 12 points. Biden won those who make less than $50,000 and those who make between $50,000 and $99,000 by similar margins.
In other words, Trump’s strongest base is not those white, undereducated people who have found themselves on the losing side of the American dream. In 2016, among white people without college degrees who supported Trump, almost 60 percent made more than the median American household income. That same year, 1 in 5 white Trump voters without a college degree reported a household income greater than $100,000.
As I read Brooks’ piece, I found myself wondering—because he stopped short of proposing any productive way forward—what does he want “we anti-Trumpers” to do? How can we right the wrongs we have perpetrated against Americans without college degrees? What possible solutions could we bring to bear on the problems he identifies?
Here are a few ideas: We could raise the federal minimum wage, which would undercut the ability of, as Brooks puts it, “less-educated immigrants … to put downward pressure on our wages.” We could pass universal health care, which, paid for by higher taxes on the ultrarich, would greatly reduce economic pressure on the working class. To end the era of single parenthood as “the most significant predictor of social immobility in the country,” as Brooks writes (quoting Adrian Wooldridge), we could establish universal day care, pass federal paid family leave, and bring back the COVID-19 pandemic–era child tax credit that cut child poverty in half, to its lowest level in history. We could make contraception and abortion care free and widely accessible. We could make college more affordable, through student loan forgiveness and beefed-up grant programs, so that more Americans could enter the realm of the elites without being consigned to a lifetime of mounting debt.
These, by the way, are the political priorities of anti-Trumpers.
Meanwhile, what are the Trumpers doing to earn the support of their anti-elite admirers? For the most part, they are working to expand the political and economic influence of wealthy elites. With the help of Sen. Joe Manchin, Republicans allowed the expanded child tax credit to expire, pushing 3.7 million children into poverty and shoring up barriers to the social mobility of single parents. They are busting the unions that would build power for the working class (including those blue-collar workers who supposedly projectile vomit whenever they hear the word Latinx). They have blocked bills that would use tax incentives to discourage companies from sending jobs overseas, and they have passed bills that reward offshoring. They have hysterically resisted proposals to forgive student loan debt. They oppose policies that would make single parenthood more affordable, while criminalizing abortion and mounting a war on contraception such that people are more likely to have an unwanted pregnancy, be forced to bear the medical costs of pregnancy and childbirth, and raise children they may not be able to afford.
Conservatives are the ones who have created the conditions that Brooks blames for Trump’s enduring popularity. Republicans, not left-leaning elites, are responsible for the majority of contemporary economic and social forces that have given rise to a resentful, despairing, minimally educated populace eager to hand the reins of the country to a criminal strongman. No amount of liberal capitulation or self-flagellation will change that.
"about" - Google News
August 07, 2023 at 04:50PM
https://ift.tt/C1kqyOx
Trump and the NYT: A recent David Brooks column buys into some extremely annoying myths about Donald Trump's ... - Slate
"about" - Google News
https://ift.tt/Ef3lgAq
Bagikan Berita Ini
0 Response to "Trump and the NYT: A recent David Brooks column buys into some extremely annoying myths about Donald Trump's ... - Slate"
Post a Comment