Far be it from a recovering ex-#NeverTrump pundit to proffer advice to our 45th president, but our leader-in-waiting could do a lot worse than to call up the American Enterprise Institute and invite Charles Murray to tea. Murray is the man who in his 2012 classic Coming Apart put a name to the great aching sore that has made Trump our president—the fact that for the past thirty years we have become two countries, separate and unequal, divided between those who have profited from the new age of globalization, automation, de-industrialization, and the knowledge economy and those who have not; between Belmont, whose residents have college degrees at a minimum that lead to interesting jobs in non-strenuous fields like science, the arts, and communications and that buy them nice houses in pleasant communities; and Fishtown, whose inhabitants are losing their low-skilled and low-paying jobs as factories close, labor is outsourced, and vast floods of imported products menace such jobs as remain. While all this went on, it was all but unnoticed by three administrations, three presidents, and two major parties, partly because, as Murray insists, the American social classes have become so stratified and so remote from each other that most people in Belmont (who include all politicians, aides, assistants, government workers and journalists) may have no idea Fishtown exists.
If you are in politics, on the left or the right, you and everyone you know in your work is a bona fide member of the knowledge economy, with skills readily transferable to many forms of employment, and miles away, in place and in circumstance, from the factory worker whose job has been downsized, and has no other place he can go. Trump is the first politician who ever referenced Fishtown, and it was Fishtown that made him, Fishtown that stood by him in many vicissitudes, and Fishtown that elected him on the 8th of November, little Fishtowns in states all over the country, standing together as the numbers accumulated, and the red tide moved on to the West. Fishtown has made him president, so he should reward Fishtown by making Fishtown his personal cause. Call Charles Murray, make him your czar, get in the best young Republican senators (such as Tim Scott, who once lived in Fishtown, himself.) Try to find methods to bridge the divide between Fishtown and Belmont, which, as Murray warned, is threatening to dissolve the common culture that defines what it is to be an American, and replace it instead with a rigid class structure. Do this, Mr. President, and you might have a legacy. Fishtown made you, Mr. President. You should now make Fishtown your own.
