Crisis of a Nation Divided

The panel of experts who parsed the new survey data at the Brookings Institution on Tuesday morning took care to remind us in the audience that we weren’t ourselves a representative collage of real Americans. They’re folks most of us will only ever encounter in data sets.

“If the answer to the future is to lean in without listening we will eventually see a violent revolt that will shock everyone in this room the way ‘Leave’ shocked Britain,” Henry Olsen of the Ethics and Public Policy Center cautioned.

Olsen also cited Lord Ashcroft polling in coordination with Britain’s decision to leave the European Union, a poll that found a majority of “Leave” voters considered social liberalism, feminism and the Internet “forces for ill.” Every force for ill Olsen listed kicked off a ripple of nervous laughter, carrying that uncomfortable question, Who the hell are these people? Olsen answered, “They are the same sort of people who are voting Trump: the lower educated, the less economically well off, the people who are outside of the urban areas.”

While stragglers found their seats, I idly eavesdropped on a woman name-dropping her connections on the Clinton transition team and dishing about down ballot races in Michigan. The same woman cackled to her seatmate when the candidate attribute “cares about people like you” came up in a survey question. 35 percent of likely Clinton voters and only 25 percent of Trump supporters think their candidate cares. Even more tellingly, according to PRRI CEO and author ofThe End of White Christian America Robert P. Jones, a 39 percent plurality feels neither understands the problems people like them face.

The American Enterprise Institute’s Karlyn Bowman connected the dots, “Poll after poll show that Americans believe our economic system is rigged in favor of the wealthiest Americans,” she said. Seventy-three percent in a recent U.Va. poll, she pointed out, and a majority in a new Marketplace survey responded that “the economy was rigged for the rich, for politicians, for the media, for banks and bank executives and corporations.” And likewise, in PRRI’s new poll 57 percent of all Americans agreed that politics and elections are controlled by people with money and corporations and that their vote doesn’t matter. “Cynicism about our politics isn’t new but the sense of powerlessness is pervasive and extends across many many areas of American life,” Bowman said.

We may be ideologically segregated as a nation in just about every way possible: by party, by faith, by race, by sex, by class. But we can be flexible: Newly, in the age of Trump, white evangelicals have gone from being the least likely group in 2011 to the most likely group in 2016 to agree with the statement, “an elected official who commits an immoral act in their personal life can still behave ethically and fulfill their duties in their public and professional life.”

But this so-called evangelical flip is the same old party-first story we’ve heard before. Bowman apologized for violating local P.C. mores before she recalled that surveyed feminists’ responses to the same question flipped the same way in the late Clinton years. Bowman also tied growing voter fraud fears to a long term trend, quoting Pew polls from eight and twelve years ago—both show a shrinking faith every vote will be cast and counted accurately.

Bringing the powerless back into the fold after the election should be a foremost priority, said the columnist E.J. Dionne. And uniting the downtrodden might be a good start. Because “deindustrialization has hit both African Americans in the inner city hard and working class whites in communities all over the country hard,” the next president may want to “address those problems in tandem,” Dionne said. “If in fact Clinton wins the election one of my hopes is that she addresses both of these at the same time and very consciously.”

And to be more precise, Hillary Clinton should go to Appalachia after she wins the election— according to a Trump voter re-enfranchisement plot Dionne and David Brooks batted around during a podcast. And before Hillary heads for the hills, she might consider the Trump-crazed mountain people have yet to crawl out from under well-meaning native son Carl D. Perkins’s crippling entitlements. The War on Poverty still wages, and killing coal didn’t help matters much.

Although, “the Trump voter is not necessarily a person from Appalachia,” journalist Perry Bacon, who joined Tuesday’s panel, corrected: “In South Carolina the median Trump supporter had a household income of $72,000, while the median Clinton supporter had a median income of $39,000.” It’s an off-kilter counter to the proposal—because only a small part of South Carolina qualifies as Appalachia. (There’s a reason they call it the low country.)

Of those cross-sectional Americans who had their values surveyed, “A majority (55 percent) of Republicans believe that because things are so off track in America, we need a leader willing to break some rules to set things right, while a nearly identical number of Democrats (57 percent) disagree.” This division, Jones said, “fits very well with this portrait of Americans who see a very non-responsive political system.” They are, Olsen added, “a segment that we don’t come in contact with except through the data.” They’re “excluded from normal processes and from society, and will endorse extreme measures to ensure that they get a part of that society.”