How the collapse of communities gave us Trump

This was a sentiment I encountered at every Trump rally I attended in 2015 and 2016.

“When I was a kid,” 80-year-old Bob Garrett told me in Rock Hill, S.C., during the 2016 election, “it was really great to be an American, and it’s just disintegrated over the years. … It’s not the same America.”

This sense of alienation from one’s own country turned out to be one of the best predictors of Trump support.

Compared to other white, working-class Americans, Trump’s working-class supporters were 3.5 times more likely to feel like a stranger in their own land, a survey by pollster PRRI found. That’s an extraordinary correlation, stronger than almost any other indicator PRRI could find. Even support for deporting illegal immigrants was less correlated with Trump support.

It tells us something not just about Trump supporters, but about what ails so much of working-class America.

While some old guys in MAGA hats complaining about cultural changes may have meant something like “too much rap music on TV” or “women don’t know their place,” there were also plenty more valid reasons to lament cultural shifts.

Marriage, for instance, is retreating in the working class. Americans are increasingly segregated by income and education. And the working class is increasingly falling away from church and organized religion.

So all those liberal critics who said Trump’s election was more about culture than economics? They were right. More precisely, though, Trump support was about cultural alienation. People turned to him to fill a void left by the erosion of civil society.

Trump’s base

“Trumpism,” commentator Alex Wagner suggested after noticing how Trump rallies resembled religious revivals, could be “endowing certain Americans with a sense of solidarity and support that were once found in institutions like the church (or marriage).”

This is clear when we focus on the early GOP primaries to sort out who was Trump’s early core support.

In one poll taken midprimaries, when Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, was the last viable challenger, Trump led among GOP voters by a margin of 37 to 31. But among GOP voters who were “civically disengaged,” Trump led 50 to 24.

“Outside of your family,” the Center for the Study of Elections and Democracy asked people in 2016, “who would you turn to first if you needed help with” child care, finances, a ride to an appointment, advice on raising a family, and other matters for which people often turn to their neighbors, their church community, or other institutions that play an intimate role in their lives.

(Washington Examiner)

Maybe you rely on a next-door neighbor for a ride, but for life advice you turn to a church friend. Maybe you turn to work colleagues for financial advice. For some matters, people replied, “I just rely on myself.”

Trump voters, as compared to Cruz voters, or supporters of Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., or former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, answered, “I just rely on myself” the most.

The center also asked a few questions about social and family life and used the responses to group voters into two categories: socially connected and not socially connected. Trump voters were significantly less socially connected.

There’s plenty more data like this, charting loneliness and social disconnection to Trump’s early core support.

Community strength depends directly on trust. When people like Robert Putnam talk about “social capital,” a big part of it is how much you can trust others and how much trust other people put in you. When asked, “Would you say that most of the time people try to be helpful, or that they are mostly just looking out for themselves?” Trump’s core group of supporters, according to pollster Emily Ekins, was most likely by far to say, “People are looking out for themselves.”

Cultural commentator Emma Green described Trump’s base, and the Trump-era base of the Republican Party, as “voters who are becoming more disillusioned with and detached from political and communal life.”

The Iowa caucuses tell this story in a microcosm. Penn State has created an index of social capital, counting churches and neighborhood groups, measuring volunteering and voting. A low social capital score in an Iowa county was a decent predictor of Trump support.

Trump’s best large county in the caucuses, Pottawattamie, had the lowest scores on measures of civil society of any large county in Iowa and is known instead for its neon-lighted casinos erected to bring in out-of-state gamblers. Trump’s best small county, Fremont, is notable mostly for church closures and the shuttering of its largest employer in early 2016. It also ranks at the very bottom of the state in Penn State’s index.

Meanwhile, Trump’s worst counties in the caucuses were the counties with the strongest church communities, Sioux and Winnebago, and the counties in the top 1 percent of educational attainment nationwide, Story and Johnson. In short, Trump did poorly in the places with the strongest social cohesion.

The pattern held in a separate social capital index, created in 2018 by the office of Sen. Mike Lee, R-Utah. Of the 10 lowest-ranking counties, Trump won eight, losing the other two by less than a percentage point. Of the 10 counties with the highest social capital score on this index, Trump won only one.

Outside of Iowa, Trump’s best places in those early primaries, places like Buchanan County, Va., and Fayette County, Pa., also looked similarly vacant.

People in places

This data helps explain a discrepancy among various polls and studies trying to define and explain the Trump base. Some studies seemed to prove Trump voters were perfectly well off. Others concluded that economic distress really did drive Trump support.

What distinguished these two classes of studies? The studies that found no or little connection between economic woe and Trump support were polls of individuals. Those finding that economic woe predicted Trump support were studies of places.

As a Washington Post headline aptly put it: “Places That Backed Trump Skewed Poor; Voters Who Backed Trump Skewed Wealthier.” It was suffering places more than suffering people who backed Trump.

The story of how we got Trump, then, is the story of the collapse of community. This is also the story behind our opioid plague, our labor-force dropouts, our retreat from marriage, and our growing inequality.

The core Trump voters weren’t the people dying of opioids, obviously. They weren’t even necessarily the unhealthy ones. They weren’t necessarily the people drawing disability payments or dropping out of the workforce. Trump’s core voters were these people’s neighbors.

Trump’s win, specifically his wins in the early primaries, is best explained by his support in places where communities are in disarray.

Trump’s core supporters were, with their votes, largely casting a vote that America was not currently great, and that the American dream was dead. By this, what they mostly meant was that the path to the good life had been shut down. And while they probably wouldn’t have said it this way, they saw things this bleakly because of what was most immediately surrounding them: communities that had lost the connective tissue that ties individuals together and is indispensable for raising a family and getting ahead.

This alienation had a political dimension, as well.

Political alienation

I saw my first sign reading “The Silent Majority for Trump” at an early Trump rally in Rock Hill, S.C. The claim to be part of “the silent majority” is a clear cry that one feels disenfranchised, one feels stripped of a political voice.

Some liberal critics will respond, Yes, old white men no longer run the show, and that makes them bitter. This isn’t totally false, but if we sneer too much about the white guys who lost their privilege, we miss that there is a real poverty here when it comes to cultural connection and the political life.

“People like me don’t have a say in what government does” is a bleak sentiment in a democracy. Trump’s core supporters were the most likely to strongly agree with this statement. A full 25 percent of Trump’s core supporters in one study by pollster Ekins “strongly agreed” with that dour sentiment, compared to less than 15 percent of those who got behind Trump only later, in the general election.

Trump tapped into that sentiment. He suggested that, in the past, the other side hadn’t simply won but that the system had been rigged. The other side had cheated. So when Trump peddled conspiracy theories about former President Barack Obama, when he attacked both parties as cliques of insiders serving foreign elites, when he declared the media an enemy of the people, and when he launched his other attacks on the crucial institutions of democracy, it resonated with the feeling of political alienation. Something illegitimate had happened, according to this view, robbing the people of their rightful power. (Of course, the #Resistance and former President George W. Bush’s critics similarly banged this “illegitimacy” drum during Republican administrations.)

While Trump’s most ungrounded and conspiratorial campaign themes tapped into disenfranchisement, so did his most important and insightful argument during the Republican primary: The GOP no longer represented its base but instead had come to be the tool of powerful special interests. Trump argued that most Washington politicians advanced the interests of the lobbyists, and he was largely correct. The Republican Party, ostensibly representing half the country, was really a lever of power wielded by a small group of insiders.

The elites of both parties long favored more immigration, free trade, and more military adventurism. The more populist, less internationalist positions were common throughout the country, but not in Washington. In this sense, Trump was right that the political system wasn’t really representing the people.

Ironically, after the talk of a “silent majority,” Trump ended up winning the White House with a minority of the vote, only 46.4 percent of the popular vote, losing to Clinton by more than 2 million votes. Trump’s talk of fraud and conspiracies against the majority were almost all fable, and destructive ones at that. But that this talk worked should tell us how Americans feel about their political system.

The missing middle layer

In truth, the disenfranchisement people have felt is not really a matter of the federal government being taken away from them — Washington was always too distant, always too large for any individual or a family to have meaningful sway. Modern disenfranchisement was really the disappearance and erosion of the layers of society where an individual and a family can make a difference.

But once that middle layer of society is gone for long enough, many people, especially those most affected by its absence, can no longer imagine it or see its value. Instead, knowing in their heart that they are political animals made to shape the world around them, they look to the most visible level of politics because it’s the one that is still there and not fading, and imagine that it’s at that level that they’re supposed to live their potential as political animals.

The contradiction is that strengthening the central government often exacerbates the root problem by further eroding civil society. A more powerful central government harms local governments and voluntary organizations by crowding them out, by regulating them out of business, by demanding ideological conformity, but also in another important way that much of progressivism and Trump both embody: by stealing people’s attention and affection from the community.

Since the chaotic 2000 elections and the 9/11 attacks, Americans have spent more and more of their attention on national politics. Elections for the House of Representative, for the Senate, and even for governor have become increasingly nationalized. Wave elections, in which one party sweeps races across the country, used to happen now and then, but in most years, the hundreds of different local shifts in politics tended to cancel one another out on the national level. Now, wave elections are the norm.

We had waves in 2006, 2008, 2010, 2014, and 2018 — that’s five out of seven. The nonwave years of 2012 and 2016 were the exceptions.

As national politics steals the spotlight, people’s affections and allegiances swing away from their communities or parishes or towns or counties and toward their political party or ideology. The Trump era has shown clearly how this drives polarization, thus weakening the ties that bind and bolstering the things that divide us. It’s not so much that ideology and partisanship divide people against their neighbors (increasingly, members of the public cluster geographically by ideology anyway). It’s mostly that national politics take people’s attention away from their communities, thus weakening communities and civil society.

“The new nationalism that imbues a large swath of current Republican sentiments has little use for subsidiarity and federalism,” AEI scholar Ryan Streeter wrote in early 2018. “From the Tea Party election of 2010 to the election of Donald Trump as President in 2016, Republicans have been sending people to Washington with hopes of solving big national problems.”

Politics seems more fractious than normal in the 2010s. Alienation and the shift of political attention from the local to the nation help explain that fracture. On a national level, political debates will inherently be less human — you just don’t know the people a county away. They will also inherently be more frustrating, with too many people fighting over too few levers of power.

Local institutions of civil society allow for more pluralism, more voice, and a more human-level politics. Centralized politics raise the stakes and make ordinary people feel powerless. It’s a vicious circle in which alienation begets alienation.

Timothy P. Carney is the commentary editor at the Washington Examiner and author of Alienated America: Why Some Places Thrive While Others Crumble, from which this essay is adapted.