The Democrats lost the white working class. The Republicans exploited them. Can Clinton win them back?
The basement of a
hotel on Capitol Hill. A meeting room with beige walls and headachy
light, cavernous enough to accommodate three hundred occupants but
empty, except for Hillary Clinton. She sat at a small round table with a
cloth draped to the carpet. Her eyes were narrower than
usual—fatigue—and she wore a knee-length dress jacket of steel-blue
leather, buttoned to the lapels; its metallic shine gave an impression
of armor, as if she’d just descended from the battlefield to take a
breather in this underground hideout. Politics, at times so thrilling,
is generally a dismal business, and Clinton’s acceptance of this is key
to her power. She’s the officer who keeps on marching in mud.
I
sat down across from her. With only a few weeks left until the
election, I wanted to ask her about the voters she’s had the most
trouble winning. Why were so many downwardly mobile white Americans
supporting Donald Trump?
“It’s
‘Pox on both your houses,’ ” Clinton said. “It was certainly a rejection
of every other Republican running. So pick the guy who’s the outsider,
pick the guy who’s giving you an explanation—in my view, a trumped-up
one, not convincing—but, nevertheless, people are hungry for that.”
Voters needed a narrative for their lives, she said, including someone
to blame for what had gone wrong. “Donald Trump came up with a fairly
simple, easily understood, and to some extent satisfying story. And I
think we Democrats have not provided as clear a message about how we see
the economy as we need to.” She continued, “We need to get back to
claiming the economic mantle—that we are the ones who create the jobs,
who provide the support that is needed to get more fairness into the
economy.”
Clinton has given a lot
of thought to economic policy. She wants to use tax incentives and other
enticements to nudge corporations into focussing less on share price
and more on “long-term investments,” in research, equipment, and
workers. She said, “We have come to heavily favor the financial markets
over the otherwise productive markets,” including manufacturing, “which
have been pushed to a narrower place within the over-all economy while
an enormous amount of intelligence, effort, and dollars went into
spinning transactions.” As she plunged into the details, her eyes
widened, her color rose, and her finger occasionally gave the table a
thump for emphasis. “I want to really marry the public and the private
sector,” she said. Her ideas are progressive but incrementalist: raise
the federal minimum wage to twelve dollars an hour, but not fifteen;
support free trade, as long as workers’ rights are protected and
corporations aren’t allowed to evade regulations.
The
thumps got harder when Clinton turned to the Democratic Party. In her
acceptance speech at the Philadelphia Convention, she said, “Americans
are willing to work—and work hard. But right now an awful lot of people
feel there is less and less respect for the work they do. And less
respect for them, period. Democrats, we are the party of working people,
but we haven’t done a good enough job showing we get what you’re going
through.” One didn’t often hear that thought from Democratic
politicians, and I asked Clinton what she had meant by it.
“We
have been fighting out elections in general on a lot of noneconomic
issues over the past thirty years,” she said—social issues, welfare,
crime, war. “Sometimes we win, sometimes we lose, but we haven’t had a
coherent, compelling economic case that needs to be made in order to lay
down a foundation on which to both conduct politics and do policy.”
In
the nineties, President Bill Clinton embraced globalization as the
overarching solution to the country’s problems—the “bridge to the
twenty-first century.” But the new century defied the optimistic
predictions of élites, and during this election, in a nationalistic
backlash, many Americans—along with citizens of other Western
democracies—have rebelled. “I think we haven’t organized ourselves for
the twenty-first-century globalization,” Hillary admitted. America had
wrongly ceded manufacturing to other countries, she said, and allowed
trade deals to hurt workers.
Clinton
has been in politics throughout these decades of economic stagnation
and inequality, of political Balkanization, of weakening faith in
American institutions and leaders. During this period, her party lost
its working-class base. It’s one of history’s anomalies that she could
soon be in a position to prove that politics still works—that it can
better the lives of Americans, including those who despise Clinton and
her kind.
A few years ago, on a rural highway south of Tampa, I saw a metal warehouse with a sign that said “american dream welding + fabrication.”
Broken vehicles and busted equipment were scattered around the yard.
The place looked sun-beaten and dilapidated. When I pulled up, the owner
eased himself down from a front-end loader, hobbled over, and leaned
against a pole. He was in his fifties, with a heavy red face,
dishevelled hair, and a bushy mustache going from strawberry blond to
white. He wore a blue short-sleeved shirt torn at the tails and shorts
that exposed swollen legs. He had powerful forearms, but his body was
visibly turning against him. The corners of his mouth sloped downward,
in an expression poised between self-mockery and disgust at the world.
It was a face that invited human exchange—a saving grace in a ruined
landscape.
His
name was Mark Frisbie. When he was younger, a girlfriend had asked him,
“Are you the Frisbee from Wham-O?” Frisbie retorted, “Sure, that’s why I
live in a trailer with no front porch and drive a pickup instead of a
Porsche.” At the age of fifteen, Frisbie began working for a
farm-equipment manufacturer; he stayed for three decades, until he
launched American Dream. He went into business to please his father, he
said—“Then the bastard died on me.” After spotting the metal warehouse,
Frisbie agreed to buy it, for two hundred and fifty thousand dollars.
The next day, the woman who owned it got a call from a man in Georgia
offering four hundred and fifty thousand. But she and Frisbie had
already shaken on the deal, and she wouldn’t back out.
“Barter and a handshake used to mean something,” he said. “Not anymore.”
It
was the depth of the recession, and Frisbie’s customers had grown
scarce, demanding, and unreliable. He was down from half a dozen
employees to himself and his stepson, William Zipperer. (Frisbie had
five children.) The government was killing him with regulations, and one
law had required him to build a fence around his repair yard.
Politicians did nothing to help him. “They all steal,” he said. “They’re
just in it for themselves.” The house behind his shop was a drug den.
His wife had lost her day-care center to bank foreclosure. Frisbie had
spent four days at a local hospital for back and chest pain, running up a
sixty-thousand-dollar bill. The doctor was Arab or Indian, and his
accented English was barely intelligible to Frisbie, but he picked up on
an accusation that he was shopping around for pain prescriptions.
Mexicans were moving in; Frisbie and his wife wanted to move out. As we
talked, two Latinos were stuccoing a gas station across the highway.
Immigrants, politicians, banks,
criminals, the economy, medical bills. You heard Frisbie’s complaints
all over the country, especially in small towns and rural areas. I soon
forgot about Frisbie, but the rise of Donald Trump got me thinking about
him again. When I called American Dream and asked Frisbie which
Presidential candidate he was supporting, he said, “Do they have that
line for ‘None of the above’?” He had lost the house that had been in
his family for generations, and he and his wife had been forced to live
in his shop for several years, until they moved into a retirement
trailer park. His health had grown worse—he was strapped to an oxygen
tank—but he didn’t trust Clinton’s promises to improve health care. As
for Trump, his mockery of the disabled offended Frisbie. “To make fun of
somebody like he did, on national TV!” he said. “And when they asked
him what he’s ever done for the country, and he said, ‘I built a
hotel’—how many jobs has he done for the U.S. that he hasn’t outsourced
to people from other places?” He went on, “I don’t see where we’re
going, or how either of them is going to benefit us in the economy.”
The
nineteenth-century term for someone like Frisbie was “workingman.” In
the mid-twentieth century, it was “blue collar.” During the Nixon years,
people like him embodied the “silent majority”—seen by admirers as
hardworking, patriotic, and self-reliant, and by detractors as
narrow-minded, jingoistic, and bigoted. In the wake of the culture wars
of the seventies and eighties, some downscale whites embraced the slur
“redneck” as a badge of honor. (Not just in the South: they kicked ass
in my California high school, too, showing off the ring worn into the
back pocket of their jeans by cans of snuff.) In “White Trash: The
400-Year Untold History of Class in America,” the historian Nancy
Isenberg writes, “More than a reaction to progressive changes in race
relations, this shift was spurred on by a larger fascination with
identity politics.” Being a redneck “implied that class took on the
traits (and allure) of an ethnic heritage, which in turn reflected the
modern desire to measure class as merely a cultural phenomenon.”
Today,
Frisbie is part of the “white working class.” At first, the term sounds
more neutral than its predecessors—a category suitable for pollsters
and economists (who generally define “working class” as lacking a
college degree). But the phrase is vexing. The blunt racial modifier,
buried or implied in earlier versions, declares itself up front. Without
the adjective “white,” the term is meaningless as a predictor of group
thinking and behavior; but without the noun “working class” it misses
the other key demographic. “White working class” mixes race and class
into a volatile compound, privilege and disadvantage crammed into a
single phrase.
“Working class,”
meanwhile, has become a euphemism. It once suggested productivity and
sturdiness. Now it means downwardly mobile, poor, even pathological. A
significant part of the W.W.C. has succumbed to the ills that used to be
associated with the black urban “underclass”: intergenerational
poverty, welfare, debt, bankruptcy, out-of-wedlock births, trash
entertainment, addiction, jail, social distrust, political cynicism, bad
health, unhappiness, early death. The heartland towns that abandoned
the Democrats in the eighties to bask in Ronald Reagan’s morning
sunlight; the communities that Sarah Palin, on a 2008 campaign stop in
Greensboro, North Carolina, called “the best of America . . . the real
America”—those places were hollowing out, and politicians didn’t seem to
notice. A great inversion occurred. The dangerous, depraved cities
gradually became safe for clean-living professional families who happily
paid thousands of dollars to prep their kids for the
gifted-and-talented test, while the region surrounding Greensboro lost
tobacco, textiles, and furniture-making, in a rapid collapse around the
turn of the millennium, so that Oxycontin and disability and home
invasions had taken root by the time Palin saluted those towns, in
remarks that were a generation out of date.
J.
D. Vance, a son of Appalachia and the Rust Belt, managed to escape this
crisis—he served with the Marines in Iraq, went to college at Ohio
State, then attended Yale Law School, forty years after the Clintons
went there. He now works in a venture-capital firm. This kind of
ascendance, once not so remarkable, now seems urgently in need of the
honest accounting that Vance provides in his new memoir, “Hillbilly
Elegy.” It’s a kind of “Black Boy” of the W.W.C. Vance grew up with a
turbulent mother who became addicted to painkillers and bounced from one
man to another, giving and receiving abuse. The life he describes is
not just materially deprived but culturally isolated and
self-destructive. When he meets people with “TV accents,” he feels a
deep estrangement. Reading “Hillbilly Elegy,” I understood why, on trips
to regions like North Carolina’s Piedmont, I sometimes felt that I’d
travelled farther from New York than if I’d gone to West Africa or the
Middle East. Vance is tender but unsparing toward his world. “Sometimes I
view members of the élite with an almost primal scorn,” he writes. “But
I have to give it to them: Their children are happier and healthier,
their divorce rates lower, their church attendance higher, their lives
longer. These people are beating us at our own damned game.” Vance
points out that polls show members of the white working class to be the
most pessimistic people in the country.
Americans
like Mark Frisbie have no foundation to stand on; they’re unorganized,
unheard, unspoken for. They sink alone. The institutions of a healthy
democracy—government, corporation, school, bank, union, church, civic
group, media organization—feel remote and false, geared for the benefit
of those who run them. And no institution is guiltier of this
abandonment than the political parties.
So
it shouldn’t have come as a complete surprise when millions of
Americans were suddenly drawn to a crass strongman who tossed out
fraudulent promises and gave institutions and élites the middle finger.
The fact that so many informed, sophisticated Americans failed to see
Donald Trump coming, and then kept writing him off, is itself a sign of a
democracy in which no center holds. Most of his critics are too
reasonable to fathom his fury-driven campaign. Many don’t know a single
Trump supporter. But to fight Trump you have to understand his appeal.
Trump’s
core voters are revealed by poll after poll to be members of the W.W.C.
His campaign has made them a self-conscious identity group. They’re one
among many factions in the country today—their mutual suspicions
flaring, the boundaries between them hardening. A disaster on this scale
belongs to no single set of Americans, and it will play out long after
the November election, regardless of the outcome. Trump represents the
whole country’s failure.
For
most of the twentieth century, the identities of the major political
parties were clear: Republicans spoke for those who wanted to get ahead,
and Democrats spoke for those who wanted a fair shake. Whatever the
vagaries and hypocrisies of a given period or politician, these were the
terms by which the parties understood and advertised themselves: the
interests of business on one side, workers on the other. The lineup held
as late as 1968, and it’s still evident in “Miami and the Siege of
Chicago,” Norman Mailer’s brilliant report on the party conventions of
that lunatic year. Here’s Richard Nixon, back from the political dead,
greeting Republican delegates in Miami Beach: “a parade of wives and
children and men who owned hardware stores or were druggists, or first
teller in the bank, proprietor of a haberdashery or principal of a
small-town high school, local lawyer, retired doctor, a widow on a tidy
income, her minister and fellow-delegate, minor executives from minor
corporations, men who owned their farms . . . out to pay homage to their
own true candidate, the representative of their conservative orderly
heart.”
Mailer’s Democrats are
personified in the brutal proletarian jowls of Mayor Richard Daley, and
in the flesh and the smell of the Chicago stockyards. The country’s
political parties were corrupt, they were élitist, yet they still
represented distinct and organized interests (unions, chambers of
commerce) through traditional hierarchies (the Daley machine, the
Republican county apparatus). The Democratic Party, however, was about
to tear itself apart over Vietnam.
In
Chicago, the Party establishment voted down a peace plank and turned
back the popular antiwar candidacies of Senators Eugene McCarthy and
George McGovern. The Convention’s nominee, Vice-President Hubert
Humphrey, had strong support from labor but hadn’t entered a single
primary. This was what a rigged system looked like. The sham
democracy and the chaos in Chicago led to the creation of the
McGovern-Fraser Commission, which reformed the Democrats’ nominating
process, weakening the Party bosses and strengthening women, minorities,
young people, and single-issue activists. In Thomas Frank’s recent
book, “Listen, Liberal,” he describes the result: “The McGovern
Commission reforms seemed to be populist, but their effect was to
replace one group of party insiders with another—in this case, to
replace leaders of workers’ organizations with affluent professionals.”
This shift made a certain historical
sense. The A.F.L.-C.I.O. was a sclerotic politburo, on the wrong side of
the Vietnam War. The class rhetoric of the New Deal sounded out of
date, and the problems it addressed appeared to have been solved by the
wide prosperity of the postwar years. A different set of issues mattered
to younger Democrats: the rights of disenfranchised groups, the
environment, government corruption, militarism. In 1971, Fred Dutton, a
member of the McGovern Commission, published a book called “Changing
Sources of Power,” which hailed young college-educated idealists as the
future of the Party. Pocketbook issues would give way to concerns about
quality of life. Called the New Politics, this set of priorities
emphasized personal morality over class interest. The activists who had
been cheated by the Daley machine in Chicago in 1968 became the insiders
at the 1972 Democratic Convention in Miami Beach, which nominated
McGovern. Many union members, feeling devalued by the Party, voted for
Nixon, contributing to his landslide victory.
McGovern’s
campaign manager was a young Yale-educated lawyer named Gary Hart, who
had assigned the campaign’s Texas effort to a Yale law student named
Bill Clinton. Clinton’s new girlfriend from Yale, Hillary Rodham, joined
him that summer in San Antonio. Hart and Clinton embodied the
transition that their party was undergoing. Education had lifted both
men from working-class, small-town backgrounds: Hart labored on the
Kansas railroads as a boy; Clinton came from a dirt-poor Arkansas
watermelon patch called Hope. The McGovern rout left its young foot
soldiers with two options: restore the Party’s working-class identity or
move on to a future where educated professionals might compose a
Democratic majority. Hart and Clinton followed the second path. Hart
emerged as the leader of the tech-minded “Atari Democrats,” in the
eighties; Clinton, the bright hope of Southern moderates, became the
chairman of the Democratic Leadership Council, a position that he used
as a launchpad for the Presidency in 1992.
Hillary’s
background was different. She had grown up outside Chicago, in a
middle-class family. Her father, a staunch conservative just this side
of the John Birch Society, owned a small drapery business. Her mother
taught her the Methodist creed: “Do all the good you can, for all the
people you can, in all the ways you can, as long as ever you can.”
Hillary changed from Goldwater Girl to liberal activist in the crucible
of the sixties, but she remained true to her origins. Sara Ehrman, one
of Hillary’s co-workers in Texas in the summer of 1972, described
Clinton to her biographer Carl Bernstein as a “progressive Christian in
that she believed in litigation to do good, and to correct injustices.”
Clinton had “a kind of spiritual high-mindedness . . . a kind of fervor,
and self-justification that God is on her side.” Hillary went town to
town in South Texas, registering Hispanic voters, her Bible in hand. For
her, politics had to conform to an idea of virtue. Bill, the natural,
didn’t ask if he was on God’s side—politics was all about people.
Neither
of them had a carefully worked-out ideology. Their political philosophy
came down to two words: “public service.” Bill and Hillary moved to
Arkansas in 1974, and got married the following year. They were policy
wonks, and by focussing on incremental reforms—in education, rural
health care, children’s welfare—they thrived politically in Arkansas,
where they spent the two decades after McGovern’s defeat. They muted
some of the most divisive social issues, compromised on others, and
mashed together idealism with business-friendly ideas for economic
growth. Old-fashioned Democratic class politics was foreign to them,
even though Bill sometimes sounded like an Ozark populist. Hillary was
the more passionate liberal, and from the beginning she was a tough
fighter.
When she took the lead on her husband’s most important
initiative as governor—raising the state’s abysmal educational
standards—she made an adversary of the teachers’ union. Instead of
speaking for the working class, the Clintons spoke about equipping
workers to rise into the professional class. Their presumption was that
all Americans could be like them.
In
the eighties, the decade of conservative ascendancy, the Clintons’
brand of politics seemed to provide the ingredients of a Democratic
revival. But, to some, the couple’s mixture of uplifting rhetoric and
ideological elusiveness suggested untrammelled ambition and hidden
agendas—anything but public service. Bill and Hillary became the objects
of a deep suspicion, which they’ve never been able to shake. To the
left, the Clintons were sellouts; to the right, they were spies,
sneaking across partisan lines to steal ideas and rhetoric that advanced
their McGovernite revolution. Because Hillary’s politics have always
been joined to an idea of virtue, and because she is a woman, the
suspicions about her have been the greater, even on the left. The Times Magazine notoriously mocked her as “Saint Hillary.”
Bill
Clinton campaigned for President in 1992 as a populist champion of the
struggling middle class, but—confronted with deficits, a recalcitrant
bond market, and Wall Street-friendly economic advisers—he governed as a
moderate Republican. His first budget was long on deficit reduction and
short on investments in workers. He passed the Family and Medical Leave
Act, and he raised the minimum wage, but other proposals, such as
spending on job training, ran into Republican resistance and Clinton’s
own determination to balance the budget. In late 1993, over the
objections of his union supporters, he pushed through Congress the North
American Free Trade Agreement, which had been negotiated by his
predecessor, George H. W. Bush. When I asked Hillary Clinton what her
views on nafta had been, she said, “I don’t know that I
was particularly focussed on it, that’s not what I was working on. I was
working on health care.” Some people who knew her at the time say that
she privately opposed the deal, but in public she remained loyal to her
husband’s Administration. She officially turned against nafta only in 2007, when she first ran for President.
Bill
Clinton’s Presidency was so lacking in history-making events, yet so
crowded with the embarrassing minutiae of scandalmongering, that it was
easy to miss the great change that those years meant for the country and
the Democratic Party. Clinton turned sharply toward deregulation,
embracing the free-market ideas of his Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin
and the chairman of the Federal Reserve Alan Greenspan. The results
appeared to be spectacular. Here is Clinton’s version, in his final
State of the Union Message, in 2000: “We are fortunate to be alive at
this moment in history.
Never before has our nation enjoyed, at once, so
much prosperity and social progress with so little internal crisis and
so few external threats.” The country had more jobs, higher wages,
faster growth, bigger surpluses; it had replaced “outmoded ideologies”
with dazzling technology. The longest peacetime expansion in history had
practically abolished the business cycle. Economic conflict was
obsolete. Education was the answer to all problems of social class. (His
laundry list of proposals to Congress included more money for Internet
access in schools and funds to help poor kids take college-test-prep
courses.) “My fellow-Americans,” the President announced. “We have
crossed the bridge we built to the twenty-first century.”
In
our conversation, Hillary Clinton spoke of the limits of an
“educationalist” mind-set, which she called a “peculiar form of
élitism.” Educationalists, she noted, say they “want to lift everybody
up”—they “don’t want to tell anybody that they can’t go as high as their
ambition will take them.” The problem was that “we’re going to have a
lot of jobs in this economy” that require blue-collar skills, not B.A.s.
“We need to do something that is really important, and this is to just
go right after the denigration of jobs and skills that are not
college-connected.” A four-year degree isn’t for everyone, she said;
vocational education should be brought back to high schools.
Yet
“educationalist élitism” describes the Democratic thinking that took
root during her husband’s Presidency. When I asked her if this had
helped drive working-class Americans away from the Democratic Party, she
hedged. “I don’t really know the answer to that,” she said. “I don’t
think it is really useful to focus just on the nineties, because really
the nineties was an outlier.”
In
April, 2000, President Clinton hosted a celebration called the White
House Conference on the New Economy. The phenomenal productivity of the
New Economy was powered by the goods and services created by the rising
young professional class—I.T. engineers, bankers, financial analysts,
lawyers, designers, management consultants. Bill Gates was a panelist,
and Greenspan gave an address. Introducing the assembly, President
Clinton was euphoric. “I believe the computer and the Internet give us a
chance to move more people out of poverty more quickly than at any time
in all of human history,” he said. The spirit of the time was a heady
concoction of high purpose and self-congratulation—a secular brand of
Calvinism, with the state of inward grace revealed outwardly by an Ivy
League degree, Silicon Valley stock options, and a White House
invitation. Meritocracy had become the creed of Clinton’s party.
This
spirit followed Bill and Hillary out of the White House. The conflation
of virtue and success guided the family foundation they created, the
celebrity-studded charity events they hosted, their mammoth speaking
fees, their promiscuous fund-raising.
In
1999, Thomas Friedman published “The Lexus and the Olive Tree:
Understanding Globalization.” The book described globalization as
supplanting the Cold War system, but, unlike the Cold War, globalization
was a product of technological advances and blind economic forces, not
government policies. Friedman’s approach was descriptive, but he kept
slipping into ethics and metaphysics: the new world he described turned
out to be both inevitable and for the best. His tone was that of a
vaguely threatening evangelist: globalization was a bullet train without
an engineer, and anyone who didn’t board right away would be
left behind or flattened by it. The job of government was to explain the
merits of globalization to citizens while softening its short-term
blows, with a light cushion of social welfare and job-retraining
programs, until its lasting benefits became available to everyone (right
around the time the Internet was ending global poverty). Rejecting
globalization was like rejecting the sunrise. Only the shortsighted, the
stupid, the coddled, and the unprepared would turn against it.
Resistance, Friedman predicted, would come mainly from people in poor
countries—bureaucrats attached to their perks and tribes wedded to their
local traditions (the olive tree of the title). The book’s heroes were
entrepreneurs, financiers, and technologists, hopping airports between
New York, San Francisco, London, Hong Kong. “The Lexus and the Olive
Tree” was “Das Kapital” for meritocrats.
Earlier
this year, an economist named Branko Milanović published a book called
“Global Inequality: A New Approach for the Age of Globalization.” It’s a
progress report on the “system” that Friedman heralded. Milanović
analyzes global economic data from the past quarter century and
concludes that the world has become more equal—poor countries catching
up with rich ones—but that Western democracies have become less equal.
Globalization’s biggest winners are the new Asian middle and upper
classes, and the one-per-centers of the West: these groups have almost
doubled their real incomes since the late eighties. The biggest losers
are the American and European working and middle classes—until very
recently, their incomes hardly budged.
During
these years, resistance to globalization has migrated from anarchists
disrupting trade conferences to members of the vast middle classes of
the West. Many of them have become Trump supporters, Brexit voters,
constituents of Marine Le Pen and other European proto-fascists. After a
generation of globalization, they’re trying to derail the train.
One
of the participants at the 2000 White House conference, and one of
Friedman’s sources of wisdom in “The Lexus and the Olive Tree,” was
Clinton’s final Secretary of the Treasury, Lawrence Summers. At
Treasury, Summers helped design the crisis rescue of the newly
globalizing economies of Mexico, Russia, and South Korea. Summers and
his immediate predecessor, Robert Rubin, pushed free trade and financial
deregulation, and presided over the economic expansion of the Clinton
years. Time put their faces, along with Greenspan’s, on its cover, calling them “The Committee to Save the World.”
Just
as Summers received credit for the nineties boom, he took some blame
for the Great Recession. He had helped the Clinton Administration push
through the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act, which had walled off
commercial banking from investment banking. In 2000, he supported a law
regulating derivatives that many critics have called insufficient.
Summers has argued, convincingly, that the repeal of Glass-Steagall had
little bearing on the 2008 crisis for which it became a chief symbol.
Still, he strongly supported Wall Street deregulation, and he remains an
important figure in the Democratic Party’s alignment with the
professional class.
In July, I
went to see Summers at his vacation home in Massachusetts. When I
arrived, he had just pulled up—in a Lexus—after a morning of tennis. We
sat on a terrace overlooking Cape Cod Bay.
Summers described numerous
trips that he had made during his years at Treasury to review
antipoverty programs in Africa and Latin America, and in American inner
cities. “I don’t think I ever went to Akron, or Flint, or Toledo, or
Youngstown,” he admitted. To Democratic policymakers, poverty was
foreign or it was black. As for displaced white workers in the Rust
Belt, Summers said, “their problems weren’t heavily on our radar screen,
and they were mad that their problems weren’t.”
Summers still supports trade agreements, including nafta.
The problem, he said, is that few people understand the benefits: the
jobs created by exporting goods; trade’s role in strengthening other
economies, thereby reducing immigration flows from countries like
Mexico. The “popularization of politics,” he said, keeps leaders from
pursuing controversial but important policies. If the Marshall Plan had
been focus-grouped, it never would have happened. Globalization creates
what Summers called a “trilemma” among global integration, public goods
like environmental protection or high wages, and national sovereignty.
It’s become clear that Democratic élites, including him, underestimated
the power of nationalism, because they didn’t feel it strongly
themselves.
Summers described the
current Democratic Party as “a coalition of the cosmopolitan élite and
diversity.” The Republicans, he went on, combined “social conservatism
and an agenda of helping rich people.” These alignments left neither
party in synch with Americans like Mark Frisbie: “All these regular
people who thought they are kind of the soul of the country—they feel
like there was nobody who seemed to be thinking a lot about them.” In
2004, the political scientist Samuel Huntington published his final
book, “Who Are We? The Challenges to America’s National Identity.”
He
used the term “cosmopolitan élites” to describe Americans who are at
home in the fluid world of transnational corporations, dual citizenship,
blended identities, and multicultural education. Such people dominate
our universities, tech companies, publishers, nonprofits, entertainment
studios, and news media. They congregate in cities and on the coasts.
Lately, they have become particularly obsessed with the food they eat.
The locavore movement, whatever its benefits to health and agriculture,
is an inward-looking form of activism. When you visit a farm-to-table
restaurant and order the wild-nettle sformato for thirty
dollars, the line between social consciousness and self-gratification
disappears. Buying synthetic-nitrate-free lunch meat at Whole Foods is
also a way to isolate yourself from contamination by the packaged food
sold at Kmart and from the overweight, downwardly mobile people who shop
there. The people who buy food at Kmart know it.
Two
decades ago, the conservative social scientist Charles Murray co-wrote
“The Bell Curve,” which argued that inherited I.Q., ethnicity, and
professional success are strongly connected, thereby dooming government
efforts to educate poor Americans into the middle class. The book
generated great controversy, including charges of racism, and some of
its methodology was exposed as flawed.
In a more recent book, “Coming
Apart,” Murray focusses on the widening divide between a self-segregated
white upper class and an emerging white lower class. He concludes that
“the trends signify damage to the heart of American community and the
way in which the great majority of Americans pursue satisfying lives.”
Murray
lives in Burkittsville, Maryland, an hour and a quarter’s drive from
Washington, D.C. It’s a virtually all-white town where elements of the
working class have fallen on hard times. “The energy coming out of the
new lower class really only needed a voice, because they are so pissed
off at people like you and me,” he said. “We so obviously despise them,
we so obviously condescend to them—‘flyover country.’ The only slur you
can use at a dinner party and get away with is to call somebody a
redneck—that won’t give you any problems in Manhattan. And you can also
talk about evangelical Christians in the most disparaging terms—you will
get no pushback from that. They’re aware of this kind of condescension.
And they also haven’t been doing real well.”
A few years ago, I met a
seventy-year-old widow in southwestern Virginia named Lorna. She was a
retired schoolteacher, living on Social Security, and as we discussed
politics she insisted on her right to use mercury light bulbs, since Al
Gore lived in a mansion and used a private jet. Lorna suddenly exploded:
“I want to eat what I want to eat, and for them to tell me I can’t eat
French fries or Coca-Cola—no way! They want to tell me what to think. I
have thought for myself all my life.”
The
moral superiority of élites comes cheap. Recently, Murray has done
demographic research on “Super Zips”—the Zip Codes of the most
privileged residents of New York, Washington, San Francisco, and Los
Angeles. “Super Zips are integrated in only one way—Asians,” he said.
“Blacks and Latinos are about as scarce in the Super Zips as they were
in the nineteen-fifties.” Multiethnic America, with its tensions and
resentments, poses no problem for élites, who can buy their way out.
“This translates into a whole variety of liberal positions”—Murray
mentioned being pro-immigration and anti-school choice—“in which the
élite has not borne any of the costs.”
Perhaps
the first cosmopolitan élite in American history was Alexander
Hamilton: an immigrant, an urbanite, a friend of the rich, at home in
political, financial, and journalistic circles of power.
Hamilton
created the American system of public and private banking, and for two
centuries he was a hero to conservatives, while his archrival Thomas
Jefferson—founder of the Democratic Party—was taken as the champion of
the common man. “State a moral case to a ploughman and a professor,”
Jefferson once wrote. “The former will decide it as well, and often
better than the latter, because he has not been led astray by artificial
rules.” But Democrats now embrace Hamilton for his immigrant background
and his modern ideas of activist government. Meanwhile, the name of the
slave-owning, states’-rights champion Jefferson has been removed from
Democratic fund-raising dinners. The Hamilton who distrusted popular
democracy is now overlooked or accepted—after all, today’s cosmopolitan
élites similarly distrust the passions of their less educated
compatriots.
If there’s one
creative work that epitomizes the Obama Presidency, it’s the hip-hop
musical “Hamilton,” whose opening song was débuted by Lin-Manuel Miranda
in the East Room of the White House, in 2009, with the Obamas in
attendance. The show has been universally praised—Michelle Obama called
it the greatest work of art she’d ever seen, and Dick Cheney is a fan.
It succeeds on every level: the score playing in your mind when you wake
up; the brilliance of its lyrics; its boldness in giving
eighteenth-century history contemporary form and in casting people of
color who, during Hamilton’s time, were in bondage or invisible.
Miranda’s “Hamilton” suggests that the real heirs to the American
Revolution are not Tea Partiers waving “Don’t Tread on Me” flags but
black and Latino Americans and immigrants.
Miranda’s
triumph is itself a coalition of the cosmopolitan élite and diversity.
The Hamilton that theatregoers are paying scalpers’ prices to see is a
progressive, not the father of Wall Street. Meanwhile, far from
Broadway, Jefferson’s ploughmen are lining up at Trump rallies.
“Hamilton”
coincided with an important turn in American politics. Occupy Wall
Street had come and gone, and while the ninety-nine and the one per cent
didn’t disappear, black and white came to the fore. There was a growing
recognition that a historic President had cleared barriers at the top
but not at the bottom—that the Obama years had brought little change in
the systemic inequities facing the black and the poor. This
disappointment, along with shocking videos of police killings of unarmed
black men, produced a new level of activism not seen in American
streets and popular culture since the late sixties.
Nelini
Stamp, a New Yorker in her twenties, of black and Latino parentage, was
an organizer at Occupy. In 2012, the fatal shooting of Trayvon Martin
jolted her consciousness, and the acquittal of his killer outraged her.
She grew up on Staten Island, just a few blocks from where, in 2014,
Eric Garner was suffocated by a police officer. “We have to talk about
black folks,” Stamp told me. “Class will always be at the center of my
politics, but if I’m not centering black folks at the same time then I’m
not going to get free. We’re not going to change things. We can have
this populist argument all we want, but if we don’t repair the sins of
the past—we could have a bunch of reforms, but if we’re still being
killed it’s going to become white economic populism if we don’t have the
race stuff together.”
Stamp is both
a millennial and a student of the nineteen-thirties—a “Hamilton” fan
who works with the labor movement. Her ideal, she said, would be to see
“white working-class people standing beside black folks, saying, ‘Your struggle is my struggle.’ That’s my dream!”
This
year, Stamp’s dream seems as distant as ever, with Trump inciting his
working-class followers to use violence against black protesters, and
with students on élite campuses issuing sweeping denunciations of white
privilege. All whites are unequal, but some are more unequal than
others. In “Hillbilly Elegy,” J. D. Vance writes, “I may be white, but I
do not identify with the wasps of the Northeast.
Instead, I identify with the millions of working-class white Americans
of Scots-Irish descent who have no college degree.”
For
Democrats, the politics of race and class are fraught. If you focus
insistently on class, as Bernie Sanders did at the start of the
campaign, you risk seeming to be concerned only with whites. Focus
insistently on race, and the Party risks being seen as a factional
coalition without universal appeal—the fate of the Democratic Party in
the seventies and eighties. The new racial politics puts Democrats like
Clinton in the middle of this dilemma.
The
voices of black protest today challenge the optimistic narrative of the
civil-rights movement—the idea, widespread at the time of Obama’s
election, of incremental progress and expanding opportunity in an
increasingly multiracial society. (“Rosa sat so Martin could walk so
Obama could run so we can all fly.”) Many activists are turning back to
earlier history for explanations—thus the outpouring of films, novels,
essays, poetry, pop music, and scholarly work about slavery and Jim
Crow, as if to say, “Not so fast.” The Black Lives Matter movement
reflects this mood. It has achieved reforms, but it was conceived not as
a reformist movement but as a collective expression of grief and anger,
a demand for restitution of wrongs that go back centuries and whose
effects remain ubiquitous. It tends to see American society not as
increasingly mixed and fluid but as a set of permanent hierarchies, like
a caste system.
A
new consensus has replaced the more sanguine civil-rights view. It’s
attuned to deep structures and symbols, rather than to policies and
progress. Ta-Nehisi Coates’s best-selling and much praised book,
“Between the World and Me,” is now required reading for many college
freshmen. His idea of history is static, and deeply pessimistic: “The
plunder of black life was drilled into this country in its infancy and
reinforced across its history, so that plunder has become an heirloom,
an intelligence, a sentience, a default setting to which, likely to the
end of our days, we must invariably return.” Coates’s writing in
“Between the World and Me” has a stance and a rhetorical sweep that make
the give-and-take of politics seem almost impossible. Somewhere between
this jeremiad and the naïve idea of inevitable progress lies the
complicated truth.
If racial
injustice is considered to be monolithic and unchanging—omitting the
context of individual actions, white and black—the political response
tends to be equally rigid: genuflection or rejection.
Clinton’s
constituency surely includes many voters who would welcome a nuanced
discussion of race—one that addresses, for example, both drug-sentencing
reform and urban crime. But identity politics breaks down the
distinction between an idea and the person articulating it, so that
before speaking up one has to ask: Does my identity give me the right to
say this? Could my identity be the focus of a Twitter backlash? This
atmosphere makes honest conversation very hard, and gives a demagogue
like Trump the aura of being a truthteller. The “authenticity” that his
followers so admire is factually wrong and morally repulsive. But when
people of good will are afraid to air legitimate arguments the
illegitimate kind gains power.
I recently spoke with the social
scientist Glenn Loury, who teaches at Brown University. As he sees it,
if race becomes an irreducible category in politics, rather than being
incorporated into universal claims of justice, it’s a weapon that can be
picked up and used by anyone. “Better watch out,” he said.
“I don’t
know how you live by the identity-politics sword and don’t die by it.”
Its logic lumps everyone—including soon-to-be-minority whites—into an
interest group. One person’s nationalism intensifies tribal feelings in
others, in what feels like a zero-sum game. “I really don’t know how you
ask white people not to be white in the world we’re creating,”
Loury said. “How are there not white interests in a world where there
are these other interests?” He continued, “My answer is that we not lose
sight of the goal of racially transcendent humanism being the American
bedrock. It’s the abandonment of this goal that I’m objecting to.”
Loury
pointed out that the new racial politics actually asks little of
sympathetic whites: a confession, a reading assignment. Last August,
Black Lives Matter activists met with Hillary Clinton backstage at a
town hall on drug abuse, in New Hampshire. In a rare moment of candor
and passion, Clinton made the case for pragmatism and, above all,
legislation. As a camera filmed the exchange, one activist, Julius
Jones, spoke of “the anti-blackness current that is America’s first
drug,” adding, “America’s first drug is free black labor and turning
black bodies into profit.” Jones told Clinton that America’s fundamental
problems can’t be solved until someone in her position tells white
Americans the truth about the country’s founding sins. The activists
wanted Clinton to apologize.
She
replied, “There has to be a reckoning—I agree with that. But I also
think there has to be some positive vision and plan that you can move
people toward.” She asked Black Lives Matter for a policy agenda, along
the lines of the civil-rights movement.
Jones wasn’t buying it: “If you don’t tell black people what we need to do, then we won’t tell you all what you need to do.”
“I’m not telling you,” Clinton said. “I’m just telling you to tell me.”
Jones
replied, “What I mean to say is that this is, and always has been, a
white problem of violence. It’s not—there’s not much that we can do to
stop the violence against us.”
As
the conversation ended, Clinton said, “Yeah, well, respectfully, if that
is your position, then I will talk only to white people about how we
are going to deal with the very real problems. . . . I don’t believe you
change hearts. I believe you change laws, you change allocation of
resources, you change the way systems operate. You’re not going to
change every heart.”
When I asked
Clinton about the politics of race and class, she said, “It can’t be
either-or.” She listed recent advances made by locked-out groups,
including black people but also women, gays, and transgender people.
“But we also need to have an economic message”—her tone said, Come on, folks!—“with
an economic set of policies that we can repeatedly talk about and make
the case that they will improve the lives of Americans.” It was
important to speak to people’s anxieties about identity, to address
“systemic racism,” Clinton said. “But it’s also the case that a vast
group of Americans have economic anxiety, and if they think we are only
talking about issues that they are not personally connected to, then
it’s understandable that they would say, ‘There’s nothing there for
me.’ ”
While the
Democrats were becoming the party of rising professionals and
diversity, the Republicans were finding fruitful hunting grounds
elsewhere. The Southern states turned Republican after 1964, when
President Lyndon Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act. West Virginia,
however—with a smaller black population than the Deep South, and heavy
unionization—retained a strong Democratic character into the nineties.
But West Virginia hasn’t voted for a Democratic Presidential candidate
since Bill Clinton, in 1996. Al Gore’s surprising failure there in 2000
was an overlooked factor in his narrow Electoral College loss, and a
harbinger of the future. Something changed that couldn’t be attributed
just to the politics of race. Culturally, the Republican Party was
getting closer to the working class.
To
some liberal analysts, this crossover practically violated a law of
nature—why did less affluent white Americans keep voting against their
own interests? During the 2008 campaign, Barack Obama spoke to an
audience of donors in San Francisco, and analyzed the phenomenon as a
reaction to economic decline: “They get bitter, they cling to guns or
religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant
sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their
frustrations.” It’s hard to remember that, in 2008, the key constituents
of his opponent for the Democratic nomination, Hillary Clinton, were
working-class whites; indeed, her only hope of winning the nomination
lay in such states as West Virginia, Kentucky, and Ohio. Clinton pounced
on Obama’s speech, calling it “élitist.”
She
was right. Obama was expressing a widespread liberal attitude toward
Republican-voting workers—that is, he didn’t take them seriously. Guns
and religion, as much as jobs and incomes, are the authentic interest of millions of Americans. Trade and immigration have
failed to make their lives better, and, arguably, left them worse off.
And if the Democratic Party was no longer on their side—if government
programs kept failing to improve their lives—why not vote for the party
that at least took them seriously?
Thomas
Frank told me recently, “When the traditional party of working-class
concerns walks away from those concerns, even when they just do it
rhetorically, it provides an enormous opening for the Republicans to
address those concerns, even if they do it rhetorically, too.” The
culture wars became class wars, with Republicans in the novel position
of speaking for the have-nots who were white. The fact that Democrats
remained the party of activist government no longer won them automatic
loyalty.
As communities in Appalachia, the Rust Belt, and rural America
declined, attitudes toward government programs grew more hostile. J. D.
Vance describes working, at seventeen, as a cashier in an Ohio grocery
store. Some of his poor white customers gamed their food stamps to buy
beer and wine, while talking on cell phones that Vance couldn’t afford.
“Political scientists have spent millions of words trying to explain how
Appalachia and the South went from staunchly Democratic to staunchly
Republican in less than a generation,” he writes. “A big part of the
explanation lies in the fact that many in the white working class saw
precisely what I did, working at Dillman’s.”
In
2009, during the debate over the health-care bill, one protester at a
town-hall meeting shouted, “Keep your government hands off my Medicare!”
In 2012, the Times posted an interactive map of the country’s
“geography of government benefits.” The graphic showed that the areas
with the highest levels of welfare spending coincided with deep-red
America. During the Great Depression, the hard-pressed became the base
of support for the New Deal. Now many Americans who resent government
most are those who depend on it most, or who live and work among those
who do.
Since the eighties, the
Republican Party has been an unlikely coalition of downscale whites
(many of them evangelical Christians) and business interests, united by a
common dislike of the federal government. To conservative thinkers,
this alliance was more than a political convenience; it filled a moral
requirement. Irving Kristol, the father of neoconservatism, was an early
apostle of supply-side economics, but he also wrote numerous essays
about the need for a revival of religious faith, as a way of regulating
moral conduct in a liberal, secular world. For ordinary Americans,
traditional religion was a bulwark against the moral relativism of the
modern age. Kristol’s pieces in the Wall Street Journal
officiated at the unlikely wedding of business executives and
evangelical Christians in the church of conservatism—a role that perhaps
only a Jewish ex-Trotskyist could take on.
The
Republicans, long the boring party of Babbitt—Mailer’s druggists and
retired doctors—were infused with a powerful populist energy. Kristol
welcomed it. “This new populism is no kind of blind rebellion against
good constitutional government,” he wrote, in 1985. “It is rather an
effort to bring our governing élites to their senses. That is why so
many people—and I include myself—who would ordinarily worry about a
populist upsurge find themselves so sympathetic to this new populism.”
It was a fateful marriage. The new
conservative populism did not possess an “orderly heart.” It was riven
with destructive impulses. It fed on rage and the spectacle of pop
culture. But intellectuals like Kristol didn’t worry when media
demagogues—Limbaugh, Drudge, Breitbart, Coulter, Hannity—came on the
scene with all the viciousness of the nineteen-thirties radio broadcasts
of Father Coughlin. They didn’t worry when Republican officeholders
deployed every available weapon—investigation, impeachment, Supreme
Court majority, filibuster, government shutdown, conspiracy theories,
implied threats of violence—to destroy their political enemies. In 2007,
Kristol’s son, William, the editor of the Weekly Standard,
sailed to Juneau and met the governor of Alaska, Sarah Palin. Kristol
thought he’d found just what the Party needed to win the next election: a
telegenic product of the white working class, an authentic populist.
Throughout 2008, Kristol promoted Palin as the ideal running mate for
John McCain. When McCain selected her, Kristol exulted in the Times,
“A Wasilla Wal-Mart Mom a heartbeat away? I suspect most voters will
say, ‘No problem.’ And some—perhaps a decisive number—will say, ‘It’s
about time.’ ”
That fall, at a
diner in Glouster, Ohio, I sat down with a group of women who planned to
vote for Palin (and McCain, as an afterthought) because “she’d fit
right in with us.” Being a Wasilla Walmart Mom had become a
qualification for high office—for some, the main one. Palin even had a
pregnant, unwed teen-age daughter. Her campaign appearances turned
working-class whiteness into identity politics: she strutted onstage to
the beat of Gretchen Wilson’s “Redneck Woman.” In her proud ignorance,
unrestrained narcissism, and contempt for the “establishment,” Palin was
John the Baptist to the coming of Trump.
The
conservative marriage survived the embarrassment of Palin’s campaign,
which exposed her as someone more interested in getting on TV than in
governing. It rode the nihilistic anger of the Tea Party and the
paranoid rants of Glenn Beck. It benefitted from heavy spending by the
Koch brothers and ignored the barely disguised racism that some
Republican voters directed at the black family now occupying the White
House. When Trump and others began questioning President Obama’s birth
certificate, Party élites turned a blind eye; the rank and file, for
their part, fell in behind Mitt Romney, a Harvard-educated investor. The
persistence of this coalition required an immense amount of
self-deception on both sides. Romney, who belonged to a class that
greatly benefitted from cheap immigrant labor, had to pretend to be
outraged by the presence of undocumented workers. Lower-middle-class
Midwestern retirees who depended on Social Security had to ignore the
fact that the representatives they kept electing, like Paul Ryan, wanted
to slash their benefits. Veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan returned to
Indiana and Texas embittered at having lost their youth in unwinnable
wars, while conservative pundits like Kristol kept demanding new
ones—but their shared contempt for liberal élites kept them from
noticing the Republican Party’s internal conflicts. In this way, red
states and blue states—the color-coding scheme enshrined by the networks
on the night of the 2000 Presidential election—continued to define the
country’s polarization into mutually hateful camps.
The
inadequacy of this picture became clear to me in Obama’s first term.
During the Great Recession, I visited many hard-hit small towns, exurbs,
rural areas, and old industrial cities, and kept meeting Americans who
didn’t match the red-blue scheme. They might be white Southern country
people, but they hated corporations and big-box stores as well as the
federal government. They might have a law practice, but that didn’t stop
them from entertaining apocalyptic visions of armed citizens turning to
political violence. They followed the Tea Party, but, in their
hostility toward big banks, they sounded a little like Occupy Wall
Street, or vice versa. They were loose molecules unattached to party
hierarchies—more individualistic than the Democrats, more antibusiness
than the Republicans. What united them was a distrust of distant leaders
and institutions. They believed that the game was rigged for the
powerful and the connected, and that they and their children were
screwed.
The left-versus-right
division wasn’t entirely mistaken, but one could draw a new chart that
explained things differently and perhaps more accurately: up versus
down. Looked at this way, the élites on each side of the partisan divide
have more in common with one another than they do with voters down
below. A network-systems administrator, an oil-and-gas-company
vice-president, a journalist, and a dermatologist hire nannies from the
same countries, dine at the same Thai restaurants, travel abroad on the
same frequent-flier miles, and invest in the same emerging-markets index
funds. They might have different political views, but they share a
common interest in the existing global order. As Thomas Frank put it,
“The leadership of the two parties represents two classes. The G.O.P. is
a business élite; Democrats are a status élite, the professional class.
They fight over sectors important for the national future—Wall Street,
Big Pharma, energy, Silicon Valley. That is the contested terrain of
American politics. What about the vast majority of people?”
The
political upheaval of the past year has clarified that there are class
divides in both parties. Bernie Sanders posed a serious insurgent
challenge to Clinton, thundering in front of tens of thousands of ardent
supporters—all the while sounding like an aging academic who’d have
been lucky to attract a dozen listeners at the Socialist Scholars
Conference twenty-five years ago. Sanders spoke for different groups of
Americans who felt disenfranchised: young people with heavy college debt
and lousy career prospects, blue-collar workers who retained their
Democratic identity, progressives (many of them professionals) who found
Obama and Clinton too moderate. It was a limited and unwieldy
coalition, but it had far more energy than Clinton’s constituency.
Initially,
Clinton was caught off guard by the public’s anger at the political
establishment. She casually proposed her husband as a jobs czar in a
second Clinton Presidency, as if globalization hadn’t lost its shine.
One of her advisers told me that Hillary’s years in the State Department
had insulated her and her staff from the mood of ordinary Americans.
So, one could add, did her customary life of socializing with, giving
paid speeches to, and raising money from the ultra-rich, whose ranks the
Clinton family joined as private citizens. (From 2007 to last year,
Bill and Hillary earned a hundred and thirty-nine million dollars; in
2010, their daughter, Chelsea, married a hedge-fund manager.) In 2014,
in a speech to the investment firms Goldman Sachs and BlackRock, Hillary
Clinton described her solid middle-class upbringing and then admitted,
“Now, obviously, I’m kind of far removed, because of the life I’ve lived
and the economic, you know, fortunes that my husband and I now enjoy,
but I haven’t forgotten it.”
Clinton
was saying in private what she can’t or won’t in public. The e-mails
hacked from the account of her campaign manager, John Podesta, and
released by WikiLeaks, show her staff worrying over passages from her
paid speeches that, if made public, could allow her to be portrayed as
two-faced and overly friendly with corporate America. But when Clinton
told one audience, “You need both a public and a private position,” she
was describing what used to be considered normal politics—deploying
different strategies to get groups with varying interests behind a
policy. Before what Lawrence Summers called “the popularization of
politics,” Lyndon Johnson required a degree of deception to pass
civil-rights legislation. “It is unsavory, and it always has been that
way, but we usually get where we need to be,” Clinton told her audience.
“But if everybody’s watching, you know, all of the backroom discussions
and the deals, you know, then people get a little nervous, to say the
least.” Clinton would be comfortable and productive governing in back
rooms—she was known for her quiet bipartisan efforts in the Senate. But
Americans today, especially on the Trump right and the Sanders left,
won’t give politicians anything close to that kind of trust. Radical
transparency occasionally brings corruption to light, but it can also
make good governance harder.
Indefatigable
and protean, Clinton read the disaffected landscape and adapted in her
characteristic style—with a policy agenda. She endorsed profit-sharing
for employees and declared opposition to the Trans-Pacific Partnership.
She demanded stricter enforcement of trade rules that protect workers,
and called for more infrastructure spending and trust-busting. She
underscored her commitment to equal pay for women. Publicly, she
attacked the bloated salaries of the C.E.O.s with whom she privately
socializes and raises money.
I asked Clinton if Obama had made a
mistake in not prosecuting any Wall Street executives after the
financial crisis. She replied, “I think the failure to be able to bring
criminal cases, to hold people responsible, was one of the contributing
factors to a lot of the real frustration and anger that a lot of voters
feel. There is just nobody to blame. So if we can’t blame Company X or
C.E.O. Y, let’s blame immigrants. Right? We’ve got to blame
somebody—that’s human nature. We need a catharsis.” F.D.R. had done it
by denouncing bankers and other “economic royalists,” Clinton said, her
voice rising. “And by doing so he told a story.” She went on, “If you
don’t tell people what’s happening to them—not every story has villains,
but this story did—at least you could act the way that you know the
people in the country felt.”
After
defeating Sanders, Clinton tried to win over his supporters by letting
them write the Democratic Party platform. It is the farthest left of any
in recent memory—it effectively called for a new Glass-Steagall Act.
The internal class divide is less severe on the Democratic side. Even
Lawrence Summers embraces government activism to reverse inequality,
including infrastructure spending and progressive reform of the tax
code. But Democrats can no longer really claim to be the party of
working people—not white ones, anyway. Those voters, especially men,
have become the Republican base, and the Republican Party has
experienced the 2016 election as an agonizing schism, a hostile takeover
by its own rank and file. Conservative leaders had taken the base for
granted for so long that, when Trump burst into the race, in the summer
of 2015, they were confounded. Some scoffed at him, others patronized
him, but for months they didn’t take him seriously. He didn’t sound like
a conservative at all.
Charles
Murray is a small-government conservative and no Trump supporter (“He’s
just unfit to be President”), but some of his neighbors and friends are.
“My own personal political world has crumbled around me,” he said. “The
number of people who care about the things I care about is way smaller
than I thought a year ago. I had not really seen the great truth that
the Trump campaign revealed, that should have been obvious but wasn’t.”
The
great truth was that large numbers of Republican voters, especially
less educated ones, weren’t constitutional originalists, libertarian
free traders, members of the Federalist Society, or devout readers of
the Wall Street Journal editorial page. They actually wanted government to do more things that benefitted them
(as opposed to benefitting people they saw as undeserving). “The
Republicans held on to a very large part of this electorate for years
and years, even though those voters increasingly wonder whether
Republicans are doing anything for them,” Murray said. “So Trump comes
along, and people who were never ideologically committed to the things
I’m committed to splinter off.”
Party
leaders should have anticipated Trump’s rise—after all, he was created
in their laboratory, before he broke free and began to smash everything
in sight. The Republican Party hasn’t been truly conservative for
decades. Its most energized elements are not trying to restore stability
or preserve the status quo. Rather, they are driven by a sense of
violent opposition: against changes in color and culture that appear to
be sweeping away the country they once knew; against globalization,
which is as revolutionary and threatening as the political programs of
the Jacobins and the anarchists once were.
“Reactionaries
are not conservatives,” the political essayist Mark Lilla writes in his
new book, “The Shipwrecked Mind: On Political Reaction.” “They are, in
their way, just as radical as revolutionaries and just as firmly in the
grip of historical imaginings.” This is the meaning of Trump’s slogan,
“Make America Great Again.” Though the phrase invoked nostalgia for an
imagined past, it had nothing to do with tradition. It was a call to
sweep away the ruling order, including the Republican leadership. “The
betrayal of élites is the linchpin of every reactionary story,” Lilla
writes.
The Trump phenomenon,
which has onlookers in Europe and elsewhere agog at the latest American
folly, isn’t really exceptional at all. American politics in 2016 has
taken a big step toward politics in the rest of the world. The ebbing
tide of the white working and middle classes in America joins its
counterpart in Great Britain, the Brexit vote; Marine Le Pen’s Front
National, in France; and the Alternative für Deutschland party, which
has begun to threaten Angela Merkel’s centrist coalition in Germany. To
Russians, Trump sounds like his role model, President Vladimir Putin; to
Indians, Trump echoes the Hindu nationalism of Prime Minister Narendra
Modi. Even the radical nostalgia of Islamists around the Muslim world
bears more than a passing resemblance to the longing of Trump supporters
for an America purified and restored to an imagined glory. One way or
another, they all represent a reaction against modernity, with its
ceaseless anxiety and churn.
A
generation ago, a Presidential contender like Trump wasn’t conceivable.
Jimmy Carter brought smiling populism to the White House, and Ronald
Reagan was derided as a Hollywood cowboy, but both of them had governing
experience and substantive ideas that they’d worked out during lengthy
public careers. But, as public trust in institutions eroded, celebrities
took their place, and the line between politics and entertainment began
to disappear. It shouldn’t be surprising that the most famous person in
politics is the former star of a reality TV show.
There’s
an ongoing battle among Trump’s opponents to define his supporters. Are
they having a hard time economically, or are they just racists? Do they
need to be listened to, or should they be condemned and written off?
Clinton, addressing a fund-raising dinner on Wall Street in September,
placed “half” of Trump’s supporters in what she called “the basket of
deplorables”—bigots of various types. The other half, she said, are
struggling and deserve empathy. Under criticism, she half-apologized,
saying that she had counted too many supporters as “deplorables.”
Accurate or not, her remarks rivalled Obama’s “guns and religion” and
Romney’s “forty-seven per cent” for unwise campaign condescension. All
three politicians thought that they were speaking among friends—that is,
in front of wealthy donors, the only setting on the campaign trail
where truth comes out.
In March, the Washington Post
reported that Trump voters were both more economically hard-pressed and
more racially biased than supporters of other Republican candidates.
But in September a Gallup-poll economist, Jonathan T. Rothwell, released
survey results that complicated the picture. Those voters with
favorable views of Trump are not, by and large, the poorest Americans;
nor are they personally affected by trade deals or cross-border
immigration. But they tend to be less educated, in poorer health, and
less confident in their children’s prospects—and they’re often residents
of nearly all-white neighborhoods. They’re more deficient in social
capital than in economic capital. The Gallup poll doesn’t indicate how
many Trump supporters are racists. Of course, there’s no way to
disentangle economic and cultural motives, to draw a clear map of the
stresses and resentments that animate the psyches of tens of millions of
people. Some Americans have shown themselves to be implacably bigoted,
but bias is not a fixed quality in most of us; it’s subject to
manipulation, and it can wax and wane with circumstances. A sense of
isolation and siege is unlikely to make anyone more tolerant.
In
one way, these calculations don’t matter. Anyone who votes for
Trump—including the Dartmouth-educated moderate Republican financial
adviser who wouldn’t dream of using racial code words but just can’t
stand Hillary Clinton—will have tried to put a dangerous and despicable
man in charge of the country. Trump is a national threat like no one
else who has come close to the Presidency. Win or lose, he has already
defined politics so far down that a shocking degree of hatred,
ignorance, and lies is becoming normal.
At the same time, it isn’t possible to
wait around for demography to turn millions of disenchanted Americans
into relics and expect to live in a decent country. This election has
told us that many Americans feel their way of life is disappearing.
Perhaps their lament is futile—the world is inexorably becoming Thomas
Friedman’s. Perhaps their nostalgia is misguided—multicultural America
is more free and equal than the republic of Hamilton and Jefferson.
Perhaps their feeling is immoral, implying ugly biases. But it shouldn’t
be dismissed. If nearly half of your compatriots feel deeply at odds
with the drift of things, it’s a matter of self-interest to try to
understand why. Nationalism is a force that élites always
underestimate—that’s been a lesson of the year’s seismic political
events, here and in Europe. It can be turned to good or ill, but it
never completely goes away.
It’s as real and abiding as an attachment to
family or to home. “Americanism, not globalism, will be our credo,”
Trump declared in his convention speech. In his hands, nationalism is a
loaded gun, aimed not just at foreigners but also at Americans who don’t
make the cut. But people are not wrong to want to live in cohesive
communities, to ask new arrivals to become part of the melting pot, and
to crave a degree of stability in a moral order based on values other
than just diversity and efficiency. A world of heirloom tomatoes and
self-driving cars isn’t the true and only Heaven.
Late
last year, President Obama sat down with his chief speechwriter, Cody
Keenan. Obama told Keenan that, during his final year in office, he
wanted to make an argument for American progress in the twenty-first
century. He called it “an ode to reason, rationality, humility, and
delayed gratification.” Throughout the year, in a kind of extended
farewell address, Obama has been speaking around the country about
tolerance, compromise, and our common humanity. He never states his
theme directly, but it’s the values of liberal democracy. He is reacting
to the unprecedented ugliness of Trump, but also to a larger sense that
liberal values are always fragile, always in need of renewal,
especially for a new generation with lowered expectations.
In
May, at Howard University’s commencement, the President condemned the
trend on college campuses of disinviting controversial speakers, and he
told the graduating class, “We must expand our moral imaginations to
understand and empathize with all people who are struggling, not just
black folks who are struggling—the refugee, the immigrant, the rural
poor, the transgender person, and, yes, the middle-aged white guy who
you may think has all the advantages, but over the last several decades
has seen his world upended by economic and cultural and technological
change, and feels powerless to stop it. You got to get in his head,
too.” In Dallas in July, at a memorial service for five murdered police
officers, Obama described how black people experience the
criminal-justice system in America, and said, “We can’t simply dismiss
it as a symptom of political correctness or reverse racism. To have your
experience denied like that, dismissed by those in authority, dismissed
perhaps even by your white friends and co-workers and fellow church
members again and again and again—it hurts. Surely we can see that, all
of us.”
Obama
is summoning Americans to a sense of national community based on values
that run deeper than race, class, and ideology. He’s urging them to
affirm the possibility of gradual change, and to resist the mind-set of
all or nothing, which runs especially hot this year. These speeches are,
in part, a confession of failure. “I’ve seen how inadequate words can
be in bringing about lasting change,” he said in Dallas. “I’ve seen how
inadequate my own words have been.” After all, Obama has been saying
things like this ever since he first attracted national attention, at
the Democratic Convention in 2004. He was elected President with a
similar message, though his time in office has burnished and chastened
it. Now, as he says goodbye, the country is more divided and angrier
than most Americans can remember.
More
and more, we live as tribes. It’s easier and more satisfying to hunker
down with your cohort on social media than to take up Obama’s challenge
and get in someone else’s head. What’s striking is the widespread
feeling that liberal values are no longer even valuable—a feeling shared
by many people who think of themselves as liberals.
Hillary
Clinton is a strange fit for this moment. She’s a lifelong
institutionalist at a time of bitter distrust in institutions, a
believer in gradual progress faced with violent impatience. She has
dozens of good ideas for making the country fairer, but bringing
Americans together to support the effort and believe in the results is
harder than ever. Clinton lacks Obama’s rhetorical power, his
philosophical reach. Her authority lies in her commitment to policy and
politics, her willingness to soldier on.
As
she ended our conversation in the hotel basement—she had to get to the
evening’s fund-raiser—I asked how she could hope to prevail as
President. She talked about reminding voters of “results,” and of
repeating a “consistent story.” Then, as if she found her own words
inadequate, she leaned forward and her voice grew intense. “If we don’t
get this right, what we’re seeing with Trump now will just be the
beginning,” she said. “Because when people feel that their government
has failed them and the economy isn’t working for them, they are ripe
for the kind of populist nationalist appeals that we’re hearing from
Trump.” She went on, “Look, there will always be the naysayers and
virulent haters on one side. And there will be the tone-deaf, unaware
people”—she seemed to mean élitists—“on the other side. I get all that.
But it really is important. And the Congress, I hope, will understand
this.
Because the games they have played on the Republican side brought
them Donald Trump. And if they continue to play those games their party
is going to be under tremendous pressure. But, more important than that,
our country will be under pressure.” I asked her if she
thought that, after the Trump explosion, Republican leaders were ready
to reckon with the damage. “I hope so,” she said. “I’m sure going to try
to have that conversation with them. Yeah, I am.”
