A lifetime ago—on June 14, 2015, for example—people who worked in politics and elections thought that they understood with a fair sense of certainty how elections and politics worked. Politics, sort of like physics, had immutable laws, rather like gravity. Demography seemed to be one of them. On the left, John Judis and Ruy Teixeira had written a book saying that the increase in numbers of darker-skinned citizens would over time tilt electoral power toward the Democrats, while on the right, Henry Olsen was honing his theory that the Republican party was and would be moved in perpetuity by the ideological struggles among social conserv-atives, secular conservatives, somewhat conservatives, and moderates who made up its four factions. But that was then. Donald Trump entered the Republican primary contest the next day, these definitions ceased to wield their old power, and the world as we knew it dissolved.
As for ideology, Trump’s campaign tore through, broke up, and scrambled Olsen’s “four faces,” splitting each one into pro and con factions. As for ethnic bloc voting, Trump’s tirades and his speech, plus his inherent appeal to racist white elements, did unite most of the nonwhites against him. But white voters themselves refused to behave as a bloc, and instead found themselves split down the middle, driven by his controversial person and programs into divergent and opposing parts. Region meant nothing, as people north and south, east and west showed the same divisions. Religion, which had been a critical factor since the culture wars had begun 40 years earlier, ceased to be a meaningful predictor, as Trump split the faithful into quarreling factions. What mattered—the one thing that did matter—was a college diploma, a symbol of import that stands at one moment for different and critical things: for social as well as financial security, for entree into the class from which leaders are chosen, for comfort and ease in the knowledge economy, and for having the wherewithal to withstand the domestic upheavals the collapse of the old social mores has brought.
Olsen, a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, has called this our first “European” election, as it resembles contests in Europe in which working-class parties oppose establishment forces. But it might also be called the Charles Murray election, after the American Enterprise Institute scholar whose 2012 book Coming Apart gave voice to his fear that in the past 50 years the United States has been separating into two countries, distinct and unequal, one containing those enriched by the emerging knowledge economy and the other those betrayed by it. The current disruption is proving his case.
This split in the country was a long time in coming, and its causes go back many years. Nonwhites in America have mostly seen their living standards improving, whites with degrees know the world is their oyster, but the white working class is the one group that has lived for some time with a strong sense of slippage, of life moving backward, and more and more out of control. It thinks (or is told) of a time in the past when factories boomed and cities and towns were built up around them, when men from abroad, or from the farms or the slums, could find jobs in them that would last them a lifetime, on which they bought homes and raised families, and later retired on adequate pensions that took care of the specter of want. For decades, the economy grew by 3 percent a year or more, personal income rose steadily, and people got used to the upward trajectory. Then all of it came to a halt.
“The turning point was 1973, the year that hourly wages, which had steadily risen for thirty years, began to stagnate or even fall,” Ross Douthat and Reihan Salam wrote in their 2008 book Grand New Party. “There was a recession, but the problem ran deeper. . . . Globalization began to hurt American manufacturing as jobs slipped away overseas, rising immigration rates following the 1964 reform, created a glut of low wage labor; and skill-biased technological change meant that the market for employment privileged education over hard work.” From that time on, economic news in this country would focus on stories of plants shutting down and large corporations hiring outside of this country or moving their plants overseas. Automation let manufacturers do more with fewer people. When the recovery came in the ’80s and ’90s, it boosted the financial and technological sectors, but the manufacturing jobs never really came back. While the working class slipped, the Internet and computer technology created a new world of high-tech jobs and a new class of those adept in the information economy, which became bigger, more broadly based, and richer than any in history. “Real income for the bottom quartile of American families fell after 1970,” Murray tells us in Coming Apart. “The poor didn’t actually get poorer . . . but they didn’t improve their position much, either. Real family income for families in the middle was flat. Just about all of the benefits of economic growth from 1970 to 2010 went to people in the upper half of the income distribution.”
By 2008, Douthat and Salam would write that the working class of our day was “defined less by income or wealth than by education—by the lack of a college degree and the cultural capital associated with it.” Those so deprived were “enduring a slow-burning crisis . . . of insecurity and immobility, not poverty,” which was in some ways worse than material privation itself. And it had started to feel to the working class that the government was going out of its way to pursue policies that helped out those who already had money, while adding to the problems of those like themselves.
Many today still complain of the signing of NAFTA, the North American Free Trade Agreement, by Bill Clinton with the help of congressional Republicans, which was opposed by the unions and brought new competition from Mexico. But nothing has had the impact of China’s rise as a manufacturing power over the past generation. “Japan’s import wave . . . challenged a limited group of advanced manufacturing industries, largely autos, steel, and consumer electronics,” wrote Bob Davis and Jon Hilsenrath in the Wall Street Journal in August. “China’s low-cost imports swept the entire U.S., squeezing producers of electronics in San Jose, Calif., sporting goods in Orange County, Calif., jewelry in Providence, R.I., shoes in West Plains, Mo.” In particular, furniture made in China took a bludgeon to the small town of Hickory, North Carolina, known until recently as the “Furniture Capital of the World,” which once supplied jobs for thousand in the neighboring area. Rising imports drove plants out of business, erased thousands of jobs, drove unemployment from under 2 percent in 2000 to over 15 percent 10 years later, and cut manufacturing employment in surrounding Catawba County in half.
The reaction to this came quickly. “In the 2000s, congressional districts where competition from Chinese imports was rapidly increasing became more politically polarized,” they reported, as “strident” candidates began to replace more moderate ones. In the Republican primaries in 2016, Trump carried 89 of the 100 counties most affected by competition from China, among them Catawba, where he won 44 percent of the ballots cast in a field of 12. Trump’s promise of a giant “up yours” to the powers that be struck a giant-sized chord with the part of the populace that had good reason to feel itself victimized by its so-called public servants.
Class, which had never played the role in America’s supposedly classless society that it did in European politics, seems now to be coming to the fore. For years, the Republican party has sought a way to gain the lasting allegiance of white, working-class voters who, since the old Democratic coalition began to implode in the late 1960s, have been restlessly moving back and forth between the two parties, going in big at times for the GOP, as with Richard M. Nixon and then Ronald Reagan, but moving back to the Democrats again during the eras of Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton. The case for bringing them in was clear: It would lead to a solid majority status. But there was a flaw in the bargain that Trump seemed to offer: While he looked to have a lock on the blue-collar cohort, he could have been designed in a lab by a crack team of experts to drive educated white voters insane.
Never since 1952 (when polling began on this subject) have Republicans failed to carry this cohort, but Trump is now losing it, in numbers sufficient to cost him the race. In 2012, Mitt Romney beat Barack Obama by 14 points among college-educated white voters. Four years earlier, John McCain beat Obama by 4 points with these same voters, and George W. Bush beat Al Gore by 9 points in the knife-edge election of 2000. By contrast, Hillary Clinton has been leading Trump among white college graduates by spreads of between 9 and 25 points.
Never before have swings like this happened, but a lot of things are now happening that were never imagined before. Never before have we had such a large part of the country mired in depression while so many others are thriving. Never before has a nominee of one major party shocked and repelled so many people, while convincing others he is the one man who hears them and feels for them, and may be their last hope on earth. All the old metrics have gone out the window, and the only things that matter are the apprehensions and passions of three major groups: the nonwhites, who fear and hate Trump because of his attacks on Muslim and Mexican immigrants, and his backing by David Duke, white supremacists, and other members of the hate-based community; the college-grad whites, who hate him for the reasons above and fear his instability, ignorance, and fondness for tyrants; and the blue-collar whites, who have seen their living standards and chances of upward mobility decline.
Owing to this, the way the critical swing states will swing this cycle may well rest on the size of each of these groups, and the way that the first and the second combine. Regardless of the ratio of Rs to Ds in the population, Clinton will fare poorly in Rust Belt states with declining economies and few younger voters, and better in states which do not. “Trump tends to do better in states with low shares of both college-educated whites and minorities,” William Galston writes in the Wall Street Journal. “Ohio and Iowa meet both tests; despite below-average shares of college-educated voters, Pennsylvania, Florida and Nevada do not.” Georgia and Arizona “have above-average shares of college-educated voters, which helps explain why Mrs. Clinton is surprisingly competitive in these traditionally red states.” Trump’s best showing in a traditional swing state has been in Iowa, which is 92 percent white, has a large percentage of noncollege graduates, and is one of the few states in which the party’s political establishment has given the nominee its wholehearted support. By contrast, Virginia and Colorado, with their college graduates, high-tech corridors, and nonwhite populations, moved fairly quickly into the Clinton camp. Florida is (and has been) dead-even, as its eclectic mixture of old and new industries, and nonwhites along with aging retirees from the Rust Belt, tend to cancel out one another.
In a state like Ohio, Trump’s hopes lie in places like Youngstown, a blue-collar post-industrial city in the eastern part of the state, where Democrats outnumber Republicans by five or six to one in most primary seasons. But this year saw the number of ballots split 50-50 in the primaries, as about one-third of the Democrats crossed over to cast their ballots for Trump. “A strong majority of likely Ohio voters . . . are skeptical of trade deals” such as those signed by Bill Clinton, Bloomberg News reported September 14. “More than a third of poll participants . . . say either they or someone in their household has been unemployed because of layoffs or company closings during the past decade, or looked for work but been unable to find a job.”
Emphatically, this is not the usual battle between the establishment and movement conservatives that has gone on for 50 years, nor does it resemble the Tea Party mobilization, in response to Obama’s expansion-of-government schemes. As the Washington Post‘s Dan Balz wrote in March, “Trump and so-called Trumpism represent an amalgam of long-festering economic, cultural and racial dissatisfaction among a swath of left-out Americans who do not fit easily into the ideological pigeonholes of red and blue, right and left. . . . a broader manifestation of the uneven impact of globalization on a significant segment of the population, a rejection . . . [of those whom voters] see as having failed to listen to or respond to their plight.” He quotes Henry Olsen as saying the party had asked for the trouble it got. It ignored the needs and complaints of its blue-collar voters to focus on things that its upper class wanted, such as budget-cutting in the form of entitlements, and tax cuts for the wealthy, which would lead to investments in business, which in theory would then lead to jobs. But the working class had come to rely on entitlements to help it cope with rough patches, and the jobs created with all of these tax cuts often weren’t ones it could fill. The party—both of the parties, which explains Trump’s pull on Democrats in states like Ohio—had created a huge market opening that Trump filled and that threatens both parties, Republicans with the loss of an election that seemed theirs for the taking only a year ago, and Democrats with the fear that Trump’s appeal to some of “their” voters in key states in the Rust Belt could cost them a third White House term.
What might have happened differently if (a) more conventional leaders had expressed some concern for this working-class angst (or some knowledge of it) even a few years earlier; or (b) if the spokesman who had latched onto the cause were someone other than Trump? One of the reasons that this didn’t occur is the critical fact that Murray addressed in Coming Apart, which is that the upper-middle and lower-middle classes have grown so far apart in all their experiences—they no longer live in the same neighborhoods, or go to the same schools, or even watch the same TV shows—that the first (which includes politicians, bureaucrats, and the journalists who report on them) literally had no idea what the second was suffering. Another was that the moment Trump burst on the scene, he set off a torrent of disgust and revulsion based not so much on what he was saying as on the kind of person he was.
The irony—and the tragedy—of this particular moment is that while his rise was fueled by a genuine problem, that problem and any discussion of what should be done with it was shoved off the stage by his outsized persona, by the devotion and violence he provoked from so many, the outsized approbation he received from so many nefarious elements, and the concern he aroused in so many millions that apart from his stance on the issues, he was an ignorant, undisciplined, and in many ways bad man, whose judgment on anything was not to be trusted.
It was the confluence of these unexpected, unforeseen, and unprecedented events—a crippling depression that hit an ignored part of the population and a reviled nominee of one of the two mainline parties—that created a storm that blew through and away all of the prior party alignments, setting them down in different formations and places. As Balz writes, old battles “pitted familiar wings against one another: moderates vs. conservatives; the business wing vs. the evangelical wing”; and many expected this situation to go on forever. It didn’t.
What does this say about laws of politics? That political laws don’t exist. That new coalitions grow up around unforeseen events and leaders and alter when they do. And nobody knows what comes next.
Noemie Emery is a contributing editor to The Weekly Standard and a columnist for the Washington Examiner.
