If you are
dismayed by Trumpism, don’t kid yourself that it will fade away if Donald Trump
fails to win the Republican nomination. Trumpism is an expression of the legitimate anger that
many Americans feel about the course that the country has taken, and its
appearance was predictable. It is the endgame of a process that has been going
on for a half-century: America’s divestment of its historic national identity.
For the eminent
political scientist Samuel Huntington, writing in his last book, “Who Are We?” (2004),
two components of that national identity stand out. One is our Anglo-Protestant
heritage, which has inevitably faded in an America that is now home to many
cultural and religious traditions. The other is the very idea of America,
something unique to us. As the historian Richard Hofstadter once said, “It has
been our fate as a nation not to have ideologies but to be one.”
What does this
ideology—Huntington called it the “American creed”—consist of? Its three core
values may be summarized as egalitarianism, liberty and individualism. From
these flow other familiar aspects of the national creed that observers have
long identified: equality before the law, equality of opportunity, freedom of
speech and association, self-reliance, limited government, free-market
economics, decentralized and devolved political authority.
As recently as 1960, the creed was our national consensus. Running that
year for the Democratic nomination, candidates like John F. Kennedy, Lyndon B.
Johnson and Hubert Humphrey genuinely embraced the creed, differing from
Republicans only in how its elements should be realized.
Today, the creed
has lost its authority and its substance. What happened? Many of the dynamics
of the reversal can be found in developments across the whole of American
society: in the emergence of a new upper class and a new lower class, and in
the plight of the working class caught in between.
In my 2012 book “Coming
Apart,” I discussed these new classes at length. The new upper class
consists of the people who shape the country’s economy, politics and culture.
The new lower class consists of people who have dropped out of some of the most
basic institutions of American civic culture, especially work and marriage.
Both of these new classes have repudiated the American creed in practice,
whatever lip service they may still pay to it. Trumpism is the voice of a
beleaguered working class telling us that it too is falling away.
Historically, one of the most widely acknowledged aspects
of American exceptionalism was our lack of class consciousness. Even Marx and
Engels recognized it. This was egalitarianism American style. Yes, America had
rich people and poor people, but that didn’t mean that the rich were better
than anyone else.
Successful
Americans stubbornly refused to accept the mantle of an upper class, typically
presenting themselves to their fellow countrymen as regular guys. And they
usually were, in the sense that most of them had grown up in modest
circumstances, or even in poverty, and carried the habits and standards of
their youths into their successful later lives.
America also
retained a high degree of social and cultural heterogeneity in its communities.
Tocqueville wrote of America in the 1830s as a place where “the more opulent
citizens take great care not to stand aloof from the people.” That continued
well into the 20th century, even in America’s elite neighborhoods. In the 1960
census, the median income along Philadelphia’s Main Line was just $90,000 in
today’s dollars. In Boston’s Brookline, it was $75,000; on New York’s Upper
East Side, just $60,000. At a typical dinner party in those neighborhoods, many
guests would have had no more than a high-school diploma.
In the years since, the new upper class has evolved a
distinctive culture. For a half-century, America’s elite universities have drawn the
most talented people from all over the country, socialized them and often
married them off to each other. Brains have become radically more valuable in
the marketplace. In 2016, a dinner party in those same elite neighborhoods
consists almost wholly of people with college degrees, even advanced degrees.
They are much more uniformly affluent. The current median family incomes for
the Main Line, Brookline and the Upper East Side are about $150,000, $151,000
and $203,000, respectively.
And the
conversation at that dinner party is likely to be completely unlike the
conversations at get-togethers in mainstream America. The members of the new
upper class are seldom attracted to the films, TV shows and music that are most
popular in mainstream America. They have a distinctive culture in the food they
eat, the way they take care of their health, their child-rearing practices, the
vacations they take, the books they read, the websites they visit and their
taste in beer. You name it, the new upper class has its own way of doing it.
Another characteristic of the new upper class—and something
new under the American sun—is their easy acceptance of being members of an
upper class and their condescension toward ordinary Americans. Try using “redneck”
in a conversation with your highly educated friends and see if it triggers any
of the nervousness that accompanies other ethnic slurs. Refer to “flyover
country” and consider the implications when no one asks, “What does that mean?”
Or I can send you to chat with a friend in Washington, D.C., who bought a
weekend place in West Virginia. He will tell you about the contempt for his new
neighbors that he has encountered in the elite precincts of the nation’s
capital.
For its part, mainstream America is fully aware of this
condescension and contempt and is understandably irritated by it. American
egalitarianism is on its last legs.
While the new
upper class was seceding from the mainstream, a new lower class was emerging
from within the white working class, and it has played a key role in creating
the environment in which Trumpism has flourished.
Work and
marriage have been central to American civic culture since the founding, and
this held true for the white working class into the 1960s. Almost all of the
adult men were working or looking for work, and almost all of them were
married.
Then things
started to change. For white working-class men in their 30s and 40s—what should
be the prime decades for working and raising a family—participation in the
labor force dropped from 96% in 1968 to 79% in 2015. Over that same period, the
portion of these men who were married dropped from 86% to 52%. (The numbers for
nonwhite working-class males show declines as well, though not as steep and not
as continuous.)
These are
stunning changes, and they are visible across the country. In today’s average
white working-class neighborhood, about one out of five men in the prime of
life isn’t even looking for work; they are living off girlfriends, siblings or
parents, on disability, or else subsisting on off-the-books or criminal income.
Almost half aren’t married, with all the collateral social problems that go
with large numbers of unattached males.
In these
communities, about half the children are born to unmarried women, with all the
problems that go with growing up without fathers, especially for boys. Drugs
also have become a major problem, in small towns as well as in urban areas.
Consider how
these trends have affected life in working-class communities for everyone,
including those who are still playing by the old rules. They find themselves
working and raising their families in neighborhoods where the old civic culture
is gone—neighborhoods that are no longer friendly or pleasant or even safe.
These major
changes in American class structure were taking place alongside another sea
change: large-scale ideological defection from the principles of liberty and
individualism, two of the pillars of the American creed. This came about in
large measure because of the civil rights and feminist movements, both of which
began as classic invocations of the creed, rightly demanding that America make
good on its ideals for blacks and women.
But the success
of both movements soon produced policies that directly contradicted the creed.
Affirmative action demanded that people be treated as groups. Equality of
outcome trumped equality before the law. Group-based policies continued to
multiply, with ever more policies embracing ever more groups.
By the beginning of the 1980s, Democratic elites
overwhelmingly subscribed to an ideology in open conflict with liberty and
individualism as traditionally understood. This consolidated the Democratic
Party’s longtime popularity with ethnic minorities, single women and low-income
women, but it alienated another key Democratic constituency: the white working
class.
White
working-class males were the archetypal “Reagan Democrats” in the early 1980s
and are often described as the core of support for Mr. Trump. But the
grievances of this group are often misunderstood. It is a mistake to suggest
that they are lashing out irrationally against people who don’t look like
themselves. There are certainly elements of racism and xenophobia in Trumpism,
as I myself have discovered on Twitter and Facebook after writing critically
about Mr. Trump.
But the central
truth of Trumpism as a phenomenon is that the entire American working class has
legitimate reasons to be angry at the ruling class. During the past
half-century of economic growth, virtually none of the rewards have gone to the
working class. The economists can supply caveats and refinements to that
statement, but the bottom line is stark: The real family income of people in the bottom half of the
income distribution hasn’t increased since the late 1960s.
During the same half-century, American corporations
exported millions of manufacturing jobs, which were among the best-paying
working-class jobs. They were and are predominantly men’s jobs. In both 1968
and 2015, 70% of manufacturing jobs were held by males.
During the same half-century, the federal government
allowed the immigration, legal and illegal, of tens of millions of competitors
for the remaining working-class jobs. Apart from agriculture, many of those
jobs involve the construction trades or crafts. They too were and are
predominantly men’s jobs: 77% in 1968 and 84% in 2015.
Economists still
argue about the net effect of these events on the American job market. But for
someone living in a town where the big company has shut the factory and moved
the jobs to China, or for a roofer who has watched a contractor hire illegal
immigrants because they are cheaper, anger and frustration are rational.
Add to this the
fact that white working-class men are looked down upon by the elites and get
little validation in their own communities for being good providers, fathers
and spouses—and that life in their communities is falling apart. To top it off,
the party they have voted for in recent decades, the Republicans, hasn’t done a
damn thing to help them. Who wouldn’t be angry?
There is nothing
conservative about how they want to fix things. They want a now indifferent
government to act on their behalf, big time. If Bernie Sanders were passionate
about immigration, the rest of his ideology would have a lot more in common
with Trumpism than conservatism does.
As a political
matter, it is not a problem that Mr. Sanders doesn’t share the traditional
American meanings of liberty and individualism. Neither does Mr. Trump.
Neither, any longer, do many in the white working class. They have joined the
other defectors from the American creed.
Who continues to
embrace this creed in its entirety? Large portions of the middle class and
upper middle class (especially those who run small businesses), many people in
the corporate and financial worlds and much of the senior leadership of the
Republican Party. They remain principled upholders of the ideals of
egalitarianism, liberty and individualism.
And let’s not
forget moderate Democrats, the spiritual legatees of the New Deal. They may
advocate social democracy, but they are also unhappy about policies that treat
Americans as members of groups and staunch in their support of freedom of
speech, individual moral responsibility and the kind of egalitarianism that
Tocqueville was talking about. They still exist in large numbers, though mostly
in the political closet.
But these are
fragments of the population, not the national consensus that bound the U.S.
together for the first 175 years of the nation’s existence. And just as support
for the American creed has shrunk, so has its correspondence to daily life. Our
vaunted liberty is now constrained by thousands of petty restrictions that
touch almost anything we want to do, individualism is routinely ignored in
favor of group rights, and we have acquired an arrogant upper class.
Operationally as well as ideologically, the American creed is shattered.
Our national identity is not altogether lost. Americans still
have a vivid, distinctive national character in the eyes of the world.
Historically, America has done a far better job than any other country of
socializing people of many different ethnicities into displaying our national
character. We will still be identifiably American for some time to come.
There’s irony in
that. Much of the passion of Trumpism is directed against the threat to
America’s national identity from an influx of immigrants. But the immigrants I
actually encounter, of all ethnicities, typically come across as classically
American—cheerful, hardworking, optimistic, ambitious. Keeping our national
character seems to be the least of our problems.
Still, even that
character is ultimately rooted in the American creed. When faith in that
secular religion is held only by fragments of the American people, we will soon
be just another nation—a very powerful one, a very rich one, still called the
United States of America. But we will have detached ourselves from the bedrock
that has made us unique in the history of the world.
