Trump Supporters Are Responsible for Their Choices
On David Brooks’s attempt to get inside the MAGA mind.
AS A GENERAL RULE, I applaud people attempting to bridge divides in America. Extra points if you can look in the mirror and criticize your own side. So two cheers to the New York Times’s David Brooks for taking a stab at understanding Donald Trump’s popularity from the point of view of his supporters. Why not three cheers? Read on.
Brooks writes that most people in elite circles think of themselves as the forces of “progress and enlightenment” while viewing Trump fans as “reactionary bigots and authoritarians.” Perhaps to play Devil’s advocate, Brooks offers an alternative view. I think it’s a useful exercise even if some of Brooks’s arguments got my back up!
In this alternative view, the “anti-Trumpers,” he writes, are actually the bad guys who, through selfishness and arrogance, made Trump inevitable. Brooks employs “we” when discussing anti-Trumpers, though the origin of his critique stretches back to what at the time were called “limousine liberals.”
This story begins in the 1960s, when high school grads had to go off to fight in Vietnam but the children of the educated class got college deferments. It continues in the 1970s, when the authorities imposed busing on working-class areas in Boston but not on the upscale communities like Wellesley where they themselves lived.
There’s a lot to that, though it’s worth recalling that 75 percent of those who served in Vietnam were volunteers. Still, it’s true that college deferments advantaged the upper third of society, and Brooks could have added that liberals favored soft-on-crime policies that hurt minorities living in cities more than those who could afford a place in Wellesley.
Brooks is on shakier ground when he assails the whole meritocracy.
The most important of those systems is the modern meritocracy. We built an entire social order that sorts and excludes people on the basis of the quality that we possess most: academic achievement. Highly educated parents go to elite schools, marry each other, work at high-paying professional jobs and pour enormous resources into our children, who get into the same elite schools, marry each other and pass their exclusive class privileges down from generation to generation.
He cites a 2018 survey to the effect that more than 50 percent of the staff writers at his newspaper attended one of the 29 most elite universities in the nation.
Brooks is not alone in attributing vast importance to who does and does not attend Ivy League universities, but this emphasis is itself evidence of parochialism. A 2019 Pew analysis found that among 1,364 four-year colleges they studied, only 17 could be considered highly selective, meaning they accepted fewer than 10 percent of applicants. The overwhelming majority of college-going Americans attend less selective schools.
Well, says Brooks, they’re out of luck, because “elite graduates monopolize the best jobs and at the same time invent new technologies that privilege superskilled workers, making the best jobs better and all other jobs worse.”
Neither of those claims holds up. Graduates of elite colleges do fine, but so do graduates of lots of other schools. This country is rich in graduates of state schools, small religious colleges, and community colleges who are doing just fine and living their dreams. And they’re not settling for crumbs from the Ivy League table. They are among the most successful. Only about 10 percent of the Fortune 500 CEOs attended Ivy League colleges. For every Mark Zuckerberg who attended Harvard, there are probably a hundred graduates of less prestigious schools who are now millionaires. Car dealers, gas station owners, and building contractors make up the majority of the 140,000 Americans who earn more than $1.58 million a year. And some of those very successful businessmen put Trump flags on their boats and participate in flotillas.
So Ivy League graduates are not hoovering up all the good jobs, nor is it likely that the technologies they invent make “all other jobs worse.” Most jobs in the United States and the rest of the developed world used to be dirtier and less safe than they are today. Sometimes new inventions, like automated coal mining equipment, translate into fewer jobs, it’s true, but that doesn’t make those jobs worse. Computers, cell phones, and ATMs have made all of our jobs and lives much easier. Having GPS in your car means spending less time stuck in traffic (or, if you’re like me, lost) than would be the case without that invention. That doesn’t depend on your class. By the way, when the ATM was invented, it was widely assumed that it would cost bank tellers their jobs, but the opposite happened. Not everyone in America is happy at work (or in life), but a recent Conference Board poll found that 62.3 percent are satisfied with their jobs, the highest percentage in 36 years.
BROOKS, STILL SEEKING to describe the worldview of Trump-supporting populists, does have a fair point when he takes progressives to task for wielding what used to be called politically correct language as a weapon. They keep changing the names of things to demonstrate their bona fides. Brooks notes that elites know all the correct terminology, while “members of the less-educated classes have to walk on eggshells because they never know when we’ve changed the usage rules so that something that was sayable five years ago now gets you fired.” A recent example of this language switching is driving me crazy. Have you noticed that progressives now say “unhoused” instead of homeless? If there is any earthly reason for the change, I cannot detect it. It’s virtue signaling. I doubt if using the old term would get you fired, but it’s a thrown elbow by the cognoscenti.
Brooks argues that elites not only change language, but also mores. He writes:
We also change the moral norms in ways that suit ourselves, never mind the cost to others. For example, there used to be a norm that discouraged people from having children outside marriage, but that got washed away during our period of cultural dominance, as we eroded norms that seemed judgmental or that might inhibit individual freedom.
It’s true that eroding this norm was extremely unwise—not that elites were immune. Plenty of unhappy children of upper middle class and wealthy people can testify to the pain that fractured families inflict. Brooks continues:
After this social norm was eroded, a funny thing happened. Members of our class still overwhelmingly married and had children within wedlock. People without our resources, unsupported by social norms, were less able to do that.
This is a point that is too often lost. Social norms like the expectation of marriage before children are more important for those at the lower end of the socioeconomic spectrum than for those at the upper end. Money and power can smooth over many a misstep (ahem, Hunter Biden) that would fell a poorer person. One of the worst wrong turns we made as a society in the past fifty years was abandoning the norm of two-parent families.
Is it correct to argue, as Brooks (trying to channel Trump supporters) does, that this was essentially imposed upon the middle and lower class by elites? The data suggest something a little different to me. Divorce spiked in the 1970s and 1980s among all groups but the “funny thing” that happened was that social learning took place among the better-educated third of the population. So while divorce and single parenting continued to rise for those with less education, it plunged in the 1990s and after among the educated. Their failure, I would argue, was not so much experimenting with other lifestyles as failing to share what they had learned—that kids desperately need the stability of two parents. It’s not that elites were failing to practice what they preached; it was instead, as Charles Murray put it, their failure to preach what they practiced.
None of the organs of popular culture—entertainment, teen magazines, books, or movies, which are overwhelmingly produced by elites—stress the importance of marriage. That said, it isn’t fair to hold elites entirely responsible for the life decisions of the rest of society. Average people have agency too, and if you’ve fathered three kids out of wedlock and hardly make your child support payments, it’s no excuse to say elites made the rules.
The middle and lower classes in America are suffering disproportionately from fractured families. It looms behind the opioid crisis, the loneliness epidemic, low labor force participation rates for young men, and deaths of despair. It’s quite possible that feeling unattached and unnecessary—the kinds of feelings fatherless men often report—also fuels, at least in part, some political extremism.
It is wrong to lay all of the resentments and grievances of non-elites at the feet of progressive elites, but Brooks seems to be doing so to prod those on the left to reflect a bit more on their own role in our polarized culture. Both sides would profit from that. Contempt is a two-way street. Manhattanites may disdain conservatives in “flyover country,” but the good ol’ boys of Arkansas aren’t exactly overflowing with admiration and appreciation for liberals, either. And even if progressives were guilty as charged—let’s stipulate that they’ve hoarded all the great slots at universities for themselves and snagged all the Google jobs—it still wouldn’t justify the free choice of millions of Americans to support a mentally unstable, vicious, Constitution-shredding, would-be autocrat.