Marilynne Robinson ponders the role of U.S. war losses in relation to resentful voters and the rise of Trump

Pulitzer-prize winning novelist Marilynne Robinson published this piece in the New York Review of Books earlier this summer (publication date shows July 18, 2024, but it appeared online weeks before that--certainly well before Biden decided not to seek a second term).  I'm revisiting the piece now because I think it's really important--really insightful-- in relation to this election season.  The headline is an opaque "Agreeing to Our Harm."  The subhead is a telling "We ignore at our peril the rage that animates Trump voters and threatens Biden’s chances this fall."  In it, Robinson links working-class discontent to the fact that what we might think of as left-behind communities (and she does use that term) are the ones that have supplied most of the soldiers who've been killed in the Iraq and Afghan engagements in the past few decades.   

Here are some salient excerpts: 

[T]here is a baffled cynicism abroad in the country, a sense that we will and must fail at everything except adding wealth to wealth and influencing other countries to their harm. We have the war in Gaza to remind us how suddenly horror can descend on a region, how a provocation can unleash utter disaster, and how the contending pathologies of a few men can destroy lives by the scores of thousands.

A profound alienation has set in, regularly expressed on both sides in contempt—contempt for Trumpists and those who vote with them on one side, and on the other side Trump and his allies’ contemptuous rejection of the entire project we have called America. In contemporary parlance this rejection is called conservatism.

* * * 

More than 4,400 American military personnel died in the Iraq War. Say their average age was twenty-five and their life expectancy was seventy-five years. Then our civilization was deprived of some 220,000 years of productive life—soldiers are healthy and competent people in the vast majority of cases. I am not speaking here of economic loss—our tendency to bring this measure to bear on virtually everything is a disheartening and destructive habit. I am speaking of everything they might have done to enjoy and enhance life, charming us, dazzling us, simply sustaining us in the course of finding occupations and rearing families. The death toll among Iraqis was vastly higher, and a calculation of the cost to civilization of the kind I have made here would be proportionately more unfathomable.

But my subject is the rage and rejection that have emerged in America, threatening to displace politics, therefore democracy, and to supplant them with a figure whose rage and resentment excite an extreme loyalty, and disloyalty, a sort of black mass of patriotism, a business of inverted words and symbols where the idea of the sacred is turned against itself. I will suggest that one great reason for this rage is a gross maldistribution of the burdens and consequences of our wars. If I am right that this inequity has some part in the anger that has inflamed our public life, in order to vindicate democracy we must acknowledge it and try to put it right.

It is taken to be true that the Trump phenomenon reflects the feeling in a large part of the population that they are “left behind.” This view is obviously too smug to deserve the acceptance it enjoys. Why does this movement have no vision of a future, beyond the incarceration of whomever Trump chooses to vilify? Why have its members proposed no reforms to narrow the economic divide? Why is there no response to the ambitious investments President Biden has made, designed to stimulate the economies of struggling areas? A “populism” whose lieutenants have an impressive number of Yale Law degrees and whose idol is a Manhattan moneyman is not to be understood as a flaring up of aggrieved self-interest. 

* * * 

I will suggest that, in the very fact of making no sense, the movement has enormous meaning. Something has enraged a great manyAmericans, and a democracy worthy of the name should make a serious effort to understand what it is. The pocketbook metric we apply to everything is not sufficiently respectful to be of use.

When I calculated the loss of lives America suffered in the Iraq War, I might have implied that this immense loss was suffered by us all, and in a sense it was. But in a deeper sense it fell disproportionately on a part of the population described in other contexts as men without college degrees, men without higher education or training. And their families, and their communities. They accepted the inducements the military offers and were caught up in a war of frivolous choice. Many of them killed and died. Like the rest of us, on religious and other grounds they can be assumed to be deeply reluctant to take human lives. Their own deaths, without need or purpose, would be profoundly bitter for everyone who loved them.  These fine young people entrusted their lives to authority they assumed would not make casual use of them, and when all was said and done, no one was prosecuted.

It is true that these men without college degrees often vote for Republicans. The Presidents Bush are seen in retrospect as exemplars of political civility, and perhaps they would be a little embarrassed by the crude thing their party has become. It is hard to imagine a purer example of privilege than father-son  presidencies. Still, the Tea Party found a home for its “populism” there and opened the way for the kind of postpolitical disruptiveness now so strongly associated with the Republicans. Among their masses there is a disillusionment verging on nihilism that experiences itself as patriotic. 

* * * 

And now we all talk about an elite, elitism. It is a meaningful issue, despite and because of the general pointlessness of the rhetoric that surrounds it. Billionaires and their offspring can be excused from this disfavored category if they are conspicuously crass or ignorant. Insofar as the potent term is securely linked to any group, it is associated with the highly educated and their institutions and with people whose politics are liberal. There is nothing more American, historically, than education. It has had a glorious development in this country, starting in the seventeenth century. It has been thought of as something good in itself, an enhancement of life for those inclined toward it and with the means to pursue it. Unfortunately, perhaps, it has also been proved to have many practical benefits. Its dimensions as a cultural presence have been shrunk to accommodate that irksome metric—education is, materially speaking, a sound investment. It confers many benefits and advantages, including even increased longevity.

* * * 

If elitism is a thing that is deplored in academe itself, this looks like a fig leaf on the foolish and discreditable rise in the cost of higher education. This hostility to the universities traces back to the social polarization that associated them with privilege and immunity rather than with the humane value of learning for its own sake. Because of the system of student  deferments, universities became associated with draft dodging. To the degree that they had ever conferred social advantage, this was compounded by the immunity they offered from the stark claim the government was making on the lives of the population as a whole. They were largely and appropriately centers of resistance to the war, an opposition that could not entirely mitigate the appearance, or the reality, that some lives were being treated as having more value than others. The struggles for minority rights and women’s rights should have taught us that an inequity is also an insult, and that a sting can persist long after a law has been repealed.

* * *  

A population more likely to provide troops for the military would have a livelier awareness of the fact that they are deployed all over the world, in places that are or at any time might become very dangerous. This might yield a different definition of globalism. On the other side, that regrettable gift for forgetting is a factor, forgetfulness of the weight of this burden.  

Cross-posted to Legal Ruralism.   

Maine Democrat Jared Golden doubles down in opposition to student loan forgiveness

The Portland Press-Herald (Maine) reported last week on U.S. Congressman Jared Golden's provocative statement opposing student loan forgiveness.  Golden, a Democrat, is a three-term incumbent from the state's second district, which leans Republican and includes vast rural areas.  Golden's career and politically pragmatic stances are discussed in three prior posts, which also provide more information on the demographics and economics of his congressional district.  

Golden's mid-August Tweet responded to a report from the Maine Beacon that Golden, a Marine veteran who served in Iraq and Afghanistan, had received a donation from Sallie Mae after he was one of two Democrats who joined Republicans in May to oppose Biden's student-loan relief program.  (The other was fellow leader of the "yellow-dog coalition," Marie Gluesenkamp Perez, of southwestern Washington State).  Golden's Tweet led with 

I've always held the opinion that working class Mainers shouldn't foot the bill for someone else's choices. Once again, radical leftist elites prove they don't understand Maine.

It then included this text:   

Sadly, this is what the radical leftist elites are learning about "democracy" these days:  silence and destroy anyone who disagrees with your views or goals.  I stand by my vote and my opposition to forking out $10,000 to people who freely chose to attend college.  They were privileged to have the opportunity, andmany left college well-situted to make six figure salaries for life.  The Twitterati can keep bemoaning their privileged status and demanding handouts all they want, but as far as I’m concerned if they want free money for college, they can join the Marines and serve the country like I, and so many others, have in the past and many more will in the future. If they want a career and hard skills without college debt, they should join a union and enter an apprenticeship. But if they choose to attend college, they can pay back their loans just like working-class people pay back home mortgages, car loans, and many other expenses that people choose to take out loans for.

Golden's statement provoked lots of strong reaction on X, formerly known as Twitter.  One of those responding was Tiffany Bond, an independent who has twice challenged Golden in the past.  Bond broached the matter of the implications of Golden's position for rural Maine, writing:  

What the hell is wrong with you, Jared?  Rural Maine will have no dentists, doctors, lawyers, teachers or anyone requiring a professional education. You don’t understand rural Maine.

The Maine People’s Alliance account responded  “Really? I’m not sure the ‘Twitterati’ are the ones not understanding Maine right now.”

Academics responded, too.  History professor Heather Cox Richardson wrote, 

Heavens!  Did you really write this or have you been hacked?!? You always seemed a centrist voie of reason that represented your Maine district well.  What's with this "radical leftist elitists"?!? 

And University of Maine political science professor Amy Fried posted a few responses:

This language is divisive and nasty.  There is a real debate to be had about helping people go to and graduate college and if there are benefits to be gleaned by the whole society.  You've done nothing to contribute to that.  Just awful.  Don't think of running statewide, ever. 

An account holder called bre kidman's awkward blue check wrote: 

Yikes, bub.

Did you draw the short straw on making the cringe statement to get that Sallie Mae money for the team? You know college educated Mainers aren't making 6 figure salaries.

JS there are classier ways to quit Congress than slamming your constituents when they're down.

Then, from the same account: 

Also, real quick math question: how much money did Maine voters spend getting you elected to a job with a low six-figure salary?

The tone of Golden's statement--though not the substance--is in sharp contrast to the statement of another "rural" politician, former Montana Governor Steve Bullock who wrote in a New York Times op-ed in December, 2021: 

To overcome these obstacles [facing the Democratic party in rural America], Democrats need to show up, listen, and respect voters in rural America by finding common ground instead of talking down to them. Eliminating student loans isn’t a top-of-mind matter for the two-thirds of Americans lacking a college degree. Being told that climate change is the most critical issue our nation faces rings hollow if you’re struggling to make it to the end of the month.

Note that Bullock held himself out as representing what rural voters generally think, which is not necessarily the same as saying he would side with them on either student loan relief or climate change policies.  That is, we do not know what he thinks or what side he would land on faced with policies to ameliorate student debt or climate change.  What is clear is that Bullock's tone is more conciliatory than Golden's, that it leaves room for nuance and discussion.  Bullock's op-ed criticizes his fellow Democrats who are urbancentric in not thinking about rural concerns, but he does not call his fellow Democrats "radical leftist elites."  That's a pretty big difference.  

I blogged about Bullock's op-ed and the response to it in this post.

In any event, I'm curious to see how Golden's stance on student loan relief plays out when he's up for re-election next year.  I suspect there are rural and working-class Mainers on both sides of this issue.  For example, those trying to earn degrees or who are concerned about the cost of their children's educational aspirations may not agree with Golden. 

Cross-posted to Legal Ruralism and First Gen Course Blog.  

Community college grads can outearn their "elite university peers"

Teresa Watanable reported last week for the Los Angeles Times under the headline, "The most lucrative majors? Some community college grads can outearn their elite university peers."  An excerpt follows: 

While UC and top private campuses are flooded with applications, students' post-graduation earnings can be as much — or more — with degrees from the more accessible California State University or California Community Colleges, depending on the field, data analyzing California institutions showed.

Among computer engineering majors, for instance, San Jose State graduates earn a median $127,047 four years after graduation. That’s nearly the same as UCLA’s $128,131 and more than USC's $115,102, as well as seven other UC campuses that offer the major, which combines software development with hardware design. Cal State graduates in that field from Chico, Long Beach, Fresno, Fullerton, Sacramento, San Francisco and San Luis Obispo earn more than $90,000 annually. 

“It really pays to look at outcomes and not be blinded by the brand name,” said Martin Van Der Werf of Georgetown University’s Center on Education and the Workforce. “The best brand name doesn’t necessarily mean it’s going to result in the highest life earnings.”

Itzkowitz said Cal State is a particularly good deal. The CSU annual base tuition is only $5,742, compared with $13,752 at UC and $66,640 at USC, although such variables as financial aid and housing costs affect the actual out-of-pocket expenses. Even if Cal State increases tuition, which some officials are proposing to address a $1.5-billion budget gap, the price would still be thousands lower than UC.

“The CSU system itself has really been shown as a pillar of producing economic mobility for students,” he said. “It enrolls a more economically diverse student body. And it also has been shown to produce strong economic outcomes for lower and moderate-income students. They're really at the top of the list of affordability and outcomes.”

Center for Working Class Politics on the most successful Democratic Party candidates

David Leonhardt writes in today's New York Times newsletter under the headline, "How Democrats can Win Workers" and the subhead, "Teachers, Not Lawyers."  Here's an excerpt:  

About 60 percent of U.S. voters do not have a four-year college degree, and they live disproportionately in swing states. As a result, these voters — often described as the American working class — are crucial to winning elections. Yet many of them are deeply skeptical of today’s Democratic Party.

Republicans retook control of the House last year by winning most districts with below-median incomes. In nearly 20 Western and Southern states, Democrats are virtually shut out of statewide offices largely because of their weakness among the white working class. Since 2018, the party has also lost ground with Black, Asian and especially Latino voters.

Unless the party improves its standing with blue-collar voters, “there’s no way for progressive Democrats to advance their agenda in the Senate,” according to a study that the Center for Working-Class Politics, a left-leaning research group, released this morning.

The class inversion of American politics — with most professionals supporting Democrats and more working-class people backing Republicans — is one of the most consequential developments in American life (and, as regular readers know, a continuing theme of this newsletter).

Today, I’ll be writing about what Democrats might do about the problem, focusing on a new YouGov poll, conducted as part of the Center for Working-Class Politics study. In an upcoming newsletter, I’ll examine the issue from a conservative perspective and specifically how Republicans might alter their economic agenda to better serve their new working-class base.

A key point is that even modest shifts in the working-class vote can decide elections. If President Biden wins 50 percent of the non-college vote next year, he will almost certainly be re-elected. If he wins only 45 percent, he will probably lose.

Profspring: Folks with well-educated parents dominate academia

Andrew Van Dam writes for the Washington Post under the headline, "People from elite backgrounds increasingly dominate academia, data shows." The subhead is "First-generation academics were always rare. Now they're vanishing."

To understand critical issues facing the U.S. economy — soaring inflation, worker shortages and perhaps a looming recession — researchers must understand human behavior. They need to know how everyday Americans will react when pump prices double or shelves go bare.

That’s why it’s somewhat alarming to learn that academia in general — and economics in particular — has quietly become the province of an insular elite, a group likely to have had little exposure to the travails of America’s vast middle class.

In 1970, just 1 in 5 U.S.-born PhD graduates in economics had a parent with a graduate degree. Now? Two-thirds of them do, according to a new analysis from the Peterson Institute for International Economics. The trends are similar for other fields (and for foreign-born students), but economics is off the charts. 

The new analysis comes from Anna Stansbury of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and University of Michigan graduate student Robert Schultz, who got their hands on detailed data on U.S. PhD recipients going back more than 50 years.

* * * 

To an outsider, the long path to a professorship can seem frustratingly opaque, particularly in economics. PhD programs tend to require a hidden curriculum of classes in subjects such as mathematics that are not technically required for economics majors. If you discover economics late in your college career and don’t have expert guidance, it might already be too late to get on the PhD track. Similar hidden hurdles lurk in the job market and academic publishing.

* * *

Stansbury said she also wonders if courses like Econ 101 might put off students from low-income backgrounds. “I also worry that some of the terminology that’s used, like ‘unskilled’ or ‘low ability’ to describe people who are in low-paid jobs or with little formal education, is offensive,” Stansbury said. “And I can see that this would be disproportionately so to people who are coming from backgrounds where these words are describing family members and friends.”

This study is one of the first to describe academia’s struggles with economic diversity, but its racial diversity issues have been well documented.

A literary depiction of the geography of the class culture wars: Groundskeeping by Lee Cole

I've been listening to Groundskeeping, by Lee Cole, which the New York Times reviewed in March.  I was intrigued by the socioeconomic class aspect of the review, set in that fateful election year 2016.  Here's what Hamilton Cain wrote in that NYT review, referring to Cole, the author, and Owen, the novel's protagonist:  

If economic class is the third rail of American life, then [author] Cole eases his hand out, gently, to touch it, his realism a meld of Richard Russo and Anne Tyler by way of Sally Rooney. Despite [protagonist] Owen’s modest upbringing, he’s a striver with scant chill. He’s liberal in his politics and passionate about Walt Whitman and Modigliani, stoking a sense of curiosity and discipline not always associated with his demographic.

And here's a quote from the novel, excerpted in Cain's review, that illustrates the role of place and culture in it.

“I explained that Cracker Barrel was cheap, and they were working-class people without a lot of money who nonetheless wanted the experience of a family outing,” Owen notes. “They loved the food and the décor not because they had bad taste, but because it was familiar to them. They’d grown up on actual farms, milking cows and pulling the suckers from actual tobacco. They’d eaten stewed apples and turnip greens and ham hock, and the tools on the walls had been the tools their fathers used, in a time that was not, at least in Kentucky, some distant yesteryear. It was recent and vivid, and the ache of its passing away therefore still present, like a phantom limb.” 

Cain's review tells us that the protagonist grew up in "a dot of a town" in western Kentucky.  In fact, there is not a lot of rural in this book--unless one believes, as I tend to do, that rural culture moves to town when rural folks move to the city.  This novel seems to support that thesis.  Or maybe it's more accurate to say this novel illustrates why "rural" is often conflated with "working-class white" in contemporary political discussions.  

The rural culture associated with the flyover states is alive and well, it seems, in places like Louisville, where the novel is set.  That's evident in this conversation between the two primary characters.  One is  Owen, who aspires to be a writer but for now is working as a groundskeeper at a posh Louisville university; that job permits him to enroll free of charge in a class, and he's studying creative writing.  The other is Alma, a professional writer who is writer in residence at the university, an immigrant from Bosnia.  You see here how her parents' attitudes toward education differed dramatically from that of the parents of Owen.     

You'll be able to tell who is who in this dialogue, which occurs at a juncture where they are becoming romantically interested in each other:    

As we walked on, she pulled the sleeves of her sweatshirt over her fists and crossed her arms, shivering a little. Did you go to Princeton? I said.

Yep.

How was that?

She thought about the question a few moments. It was wonderful in a lot of ways, and also evil in a lot of ways. Going there as an immigrant is different than going as a legacy from some old-money family.

Was that where you always wanted to go?

I got into Dartmouth and Penn, too. I might’ve gone to Harvard, but they wait-listed me.

I didn’t ask where you got in, I asked where you wanted to go.

It’s hard to differentiate what you want from what your parents want at that age, you know?

I nodded as if I understood what she meant from experience, but I had no idea. When I was eighteen, all of my energy had been spent maintaining a clear border between what I wanted and what my parents wanted, defending its sovereignty against constant incursion.

No state schools?

She laughed.

Yeah, right.

So it was Ivy League or nothing?

Not even, she said. Cornell is a joke. Stanford would’ve been all right. I would’ve been okay with Stanford.

I can’t tell if you’re being serious.

Why would I not be serious?

There was a finality to her response that made it seem like she’d rather talk about something else.

I always wanted to go to a highfalutin school, I said.

She smiled skeptically. Now you’re just playing it up. You don’t really say “highfalutin.”

I just did, didn’t I?

So what happened, why didn’t you go to a highfalutin school?

I explained to her that I’d wanted to go to a good school when I was young, but by the time I finished high school, my grades weren’t good enough, and anyhow, my parents wouldn’t have been able to afford the out-of-state tuition. I ended up at the University of Kentucky, barely managing to graduate with a degree in English.

Didn’t anyone tell you that you were capable of more?

My parents didn’t want me to go off and become a coastal elite. If they’d had their druthers, I’d have gone to Murray State, an hour from their house.

Their druthers?

Yeah, you’ve never heard that? No, she said, laughing. That’s definitely going on the list. 

When do I get to see this list? 

When the time is right, she said. So what’s wrong with being a coastal elite? 

Nothing, as far as I’m concerned. To them, it’s the worst thing you could be. I’ve wanted to be a coastal elite my whole life.

She looked at me as if she both pitied me and found me adorable—a look I was getting used to.

(pp. 87-89) Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group. Kindle Edition (emphasis mine)

Cross-posted to Legal Ruralism.  

Pollster Stanley Greenberg on appealing to working-class voters across race

Greenberg writes under the headline, "Democrats, Speak to Working Class Discontent."  My favorite thing about this piece for The American Prospect is Greenberg's focus on coalition-building among working-class folks, across racial and ethnic lines.  Here's an excerpt: 

Today, the Democrats’ working-class problem isn’t limited to white workers. The party is also losing support from working-class Blacks and Hispanics—a daunting 12 points off their margin since 2016, according to Ruy Teixeira.

* * *

After studying working-class voters for nearly four decades, I believe the trajectory can be shifted or reversed. But there is no room for error. There is no room for fools. There is no time for strategists who look down on or rule out voters who fail a purist civics test. There is also no room for sensibilities that keep us from clearly understanding our options.

* * *  

The emergence of Barack Obama signaled a shift in Democratic appeals. During the 2008 primary, Obama became the “change candidate” because of his early opposition to the Iraq War, not because he spoke to working-class discontent. At the Democratic Convention four years earlier, Obama had told a unifying story as an African American who saw only one United States of America, not separate Americas divided by race and partisanship. In focus groups before the 2008 convention, I was surprised by how many white workers were open to what would be the first African American president. Many of them would have scored high on any “racial resentment” scale, but they were not blaming Blacks for their current condition. They were blaming high-paid CEOs for outsourcing American jobs, and they were blaming NAFTA. Many decided Obama was different from other Black leaders and might govern for the whole country, not just work for “his own people.”  (emphasis mine).

If you govern for the whole country, you know that two-thirds of all registered voters never graduated from a four-year college. Well before the financial crash in 2008, they were angry. Employment in manufacturing had plummeted after 2000 from almost 18 million to 14 million jobs. Innovations in technology and structural changes in the economy were raising worker productivity, but the top 1 percent and then the top .01 percent were seizing all the gains in income.

During the 2008 campaign, James Carville and I, as heads of Democracy Corps, and John Podesta, the director of the Center for American Progress, convened a monthly meeting at my house in Washington to help fashion a Democratic strategy. Among the attendees was David Axelrod, Obama’s campaign chief. We created an “economy project” whose polling showed what should have been obvious. The Democrats’ most powerful message called for an end to trickle-down economics and a focus on creating American jobs and a government that worked for the middle class again.

But despite a deepening economic crisis, Obama didn’t talk much about the economy in his 2008 campaign. Under the banner “Change We Can Believe In,” he promised to get beyond “the bitterness” that “consumed Washington” to make health care affordable, cut middle-class taxes, and “bring our troops home.”

Cross-posted (with additional excerpts about rural voters) to Legal Ruralism.  

Joe Biden as elite and/or elitist? That's the GOP's new "party line"

That's the line Republicans are pushing these days, as outlined in this Washington Post story by Toluse Olorunnipa, "Republicans lob accusations of elitism at ‘Middle Class Joe’ — a sign of the upended politics of populism."  Here's an excerpt:

President-elect Joe Biden, a state-college graduate who was once the poorest man in the U.S. Senate, is facing accusations of elitism from Republicans after defeating a billionaire incumbent with an Ivy League degree — a sign of how the politics of populism have been upended and redefined by President Trump.

In recent days, Republican lawmakers have sought to describe Biden’s early Cabinet selections as well-heeled and well-pedigreed but out of touch with the kinds of problems facing everyday Americans.

After Biden won the presidency in part by claiming a larger share of college-educated suburban voters, some of his GOP foes see his early moves as an opportunity to brand him as an elitist president catering to the nation’s coastal professionals at the expense of its heartland laborers. The burgeoning dynamic underscores how the battle over populism is likely to animate the nation’s politics even after Trump leaves the White House and is replaced by a man who has called himself “Middle Class Joe.”

As my mom would say, surely "this is the pot calling the kettle black."  

How higher ed helped flip five states (and other economic spins) on the 2020 election

Here's today's story from the Chronicle of Higher Education, by Audrey Williams June and Jaquelyn Elias: 

Higher education has increasingly become a marker of partisan identification. Among white voters especially, a college degree has come to be seen as predictive of voting patterns. And counties with flagship institutions in them have increasingly swung toward Democrats in presidential elections.

What did the presence of a college in a county say about how that county voted in 2020?

To answer that question, we zeroed in on Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin — the five states that moved from Donald J. Trump in 2016 to Joseph R. Biden Jr. in 2020, and looked at what happened in the counties that had colleges in them. Here’s what we found.

Trump won most of these counties.

In those five states, 136 counties include four-year public or private nonprofit colleges that have at least 100 students and, in normal years, in-person classes. Trump carried 87 of them, while Biden took 49, according to unofficial results.

This is but one bit of class-based analysis I've seen so far on the 2020 election.   

Here's a story by Benjamin Fearnow for Newsweek, "Trump Counties Make Up Just 29 Percent of U.S. Economic Output, 2020 Election Study Shows."  This story, too, focuses on the link between class and political affiliation.  Here's an excerpt: 

Counties won by Democratic President-elect Joe Biden make up 70 percent of all U.S. economic output—or gross domestic product (GDP)—a new post-election study finds.

Biden has repeated the phrase "there are no blue states or red states, just the United States" in several appeals to President Donald Trump's voters since being named President-elect Saturday. But the more than 75.6 million votes Biden won in the 2020 election led him to victory in nearly all of the country's top 100 most powerful local economies. Meanwhile, Trump voter counties make up less than one-third of the country's economic output, a Brookings Institution study said. The president's unsuccessful re-election bid hinged on his touting of the pre-pandemic economy. But his railing against urban areas as "crime infested" rather than centers of American wealth only allowed him to amass more rural county voters.

"Trump's losing base of 2,497 counties represents just 29% of the economy," the post-election analysis co-authors found.

Finally, here's a piece from the New York Times Upshot, "Election Showed a Wider Red-Blue Economic Divide."  Jed Kolko reports.  Here's the lede:  

Local voting patterns in the presidential election showed a narrowing of several traditional divides. Preliminary vote totals indicate that the partisan gap of urban versus suburban places shrank, along with the traditional Democratic advantage in heavily Hispanic counties. Whites and nonwhites are now in somewhat greater alignment in how they vote.

That makes the resilience of the economic divide all the more striking. In fact, the gap between red and blue counties in their education levels, household incomes and projected long-term job growth did not just persist; it widened.  

And here's a paragraph that hints more at the salience of both education and geography, in particular the exurbs--or certain types of them. 

More educated places, which leaned strongly blue to begin with, voted even more Democratic in 2020 than they did in 2016. Highly educated Republican-leaning counties, like Williamson County near Nashville and Forsyth County near Atlanta, have become rarer with each recent election.

Read the full story for more.   

The Washington Post ran this shortly after the election, "How independents, Latino voters and Catholics shifted from 2016 and swung states for Biden and Trump."  The story is by Chris Alcantara, Leslie Shapiro, Emily Guskin, Scott Clement and Brittany Renee Mayes.  I was intrigued by this graphic screenshot below) in particular, because it sums up so much about the incomes of voters for the respective candidates, and how those of differing income levels moved in some different directions in 2020, compared to 2016.  In particular, it shows that people with incomes over $100,000 moved into Trump's camp by 7 points and those with incomes between $50K and $99K, the income group that supported Trump by the widest margin in 2016, moved to Biden by 11 points: 

Meanwhile, the New York Times reports that "Counties that experienced more job losses during the first wave of the pandemic voted for Biden."  Here's an excerpt:

The counties won by President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr. experienced worse job losses, on average, during the initial wave of pandemic layoffs than the counties where President Trump was strongest in his bid for re-election.

After the worst of the downturn in April, many of the most affected red counties recovered far more swiftly than blue counties did. By September, as unemployment fell nearly everywhere, blue counties were more likely to have higher unemployment rates.

Cross-posted to Legal Ruralism.  

The working class and coronavirus (Part II): Pandemic throws inequality into sharp relief

I've been trying to write a nicely composed post on this topic for weeks now, but I'm giving up and providing just headlines, links, and brief excerpts, with featured stories arranged in chronological order. 

One of the earliest inequality stories by the national media was this one under the headline, "‘White-Collar Quarantine’ Over Virus Spotlights Class Divide, by Noam Scheiber, Nelson D. Schwartz and Tiffany Hsu, published on March 27, 2020 in the New York Times. Among the places featured was Brownsville, Texas, in the Rio Grande Valley. Here's an excerpt:

In some respects, the pandemic is an equalizer: It can afflict princes and paupers alike, and no one who hopes to stay healthy is exempt from the strictures of social distancing. But the American response to the virus is laying bare class divides that are often camouflaged — in access to health care, child care, education, living space, even internet bandwidth.

And across the country, there is a creeping consciousness that despite talk of national unity, not everyone is equal in times of emergency.

“This is a white-collar quarantine,” said Howard Barbanel, a Miami-based entrepreneur who owns a wine company. “Average working people are bagging and delivering goods, driving trucks, working for local government.”

Another early story focused on inequality played up the distinction between "essential workers" and the typically more privileged who are working from home.  "Location Data Says it All:  Staying Home During Coronavirus Is a Luxury."  Jennifer Jennifer Valentino-DeVries, Denise Lu and Gabriel J.X. Dance reported for the New York Times on April 3, 2020.  The lede follows:

It has been about two weeks since the Illinois governor ordered residents to stay at home, but nothing has changed about Adarra Benjamin’s responsibilities. She gets on a bus nearly every morning in Chicago, traveling 20 miles round trip some days to cook, clean and shop for her clients, who are older or have health problems that make such tasks difficult. 

Ms. Benjamin knows the dangers, but she needs her job, which pays about $13 an hour. She also cannot imagine leaving her clients to fend for themselves. “They’ve become my family,” she said. 

In cities across America, many lower-income workers continue to move around, while those who make more money are staying home and limiting their exposure to the coronavirus, according to smartphone location data analyzed by The New York Times.

Charles Blow, New York Times columnist, observed on April 5, 2020, that "Social Distancing is a Privilege."  There he writes:

People like to say that the coronavirus is no respecter of race, class or country, that the disease Covid-19 is mindless and will infect anybody it can. 

In theory, that is true. But, in practice, in the real world, this virus behaves like others, screeching like a heat-seeking missile toward the most vulnerable in society. And this happens not because it prefers them, but because they are more exposed, more fragile and more ill. 

What the vulnerable portion of society looks like varies from country to country, but in America, that vulnerability is highly intersected with race and poverty.

From April 9, an op-ed in the New York Times by Walter Scheidel was titled, "Why the Wealthy Fear Pandemics."  He writes of the aftermath of the Bubonic Plague:

Because of this “destructive plague which devastated nations and caused populations to vanish,” the Arab historian Ibn Khaldun wrote, “the entire inhabited world changed.” 

The wealthy found some of these changes alarming. In the words of an anonymous English chronicler, “Such a shortage of laborers ensued that the humble turned up their noses at employment, and could scarcely be persuaded to serve the eminent for triple wages.” Influential employers, such as large landowners, lobbied the English crown to pass the Ordinance of Laborers, which informed workers that they were “obliged to accept the employment offered” for the same measly wages as before.

But as successive waves of plague shrank the work force, hired hands and tenants “took no notice of the king’s command,” as the Augustinian clergyman Henry Knighton complained. “If anyone wanted to hire them he had to submit to their demands, for either his fruit and standing corn would be lost or he had to pander to the arrogance and greed of the workers.”

As a result of this shift in the balance between labor and capital, we now know, thanks to painstaking research by economic historians, that real incomes of unskilled workers doubled across much of Europe within a few decades.

This is sounding ominous for the wealthy, but only if government responds appropriately to what is happening.  Scheidel is a professor of history at Stanford University.

This data driven story is one that launched the "The America We Need" series on April 9, from the New York Times.  It was published on April 10, by David Leonhardt and Yaryna Serkez.  The headline is, "America Will Struggle after the Coronavirus.  These Charts Show Why."  Here's an excerpt:

Inequality didn’t cause the coronavirus crisis. But it is making the crisis much worse, having created an economy in which many Americans are struggling to get by, and are vulnerable to any interruption of work or income and any illness. 

On this page, we present dozens of ways to look at American life that together provide a more meaningful picture than G.D.P. There is reason to expect that many of these indicators are already beginning to look worse, as the country grapples with both a pandemic and a recession. Together, they also help show the areas in which Americans will struggle to recover from this crisis.

Jason DeParle of the New York Times reports on "The Coronavirus Class Divide:  Space and Privacy," on April 12, 2020.  The dateline is Robesonia, Pennsylvania, and the initial subject is Mark Stokes, a student at Kutztown University, who shares a house with 10 other people:

Housemates come and go to jobs in fast food and a chocolate factory, sharing a single shower. Dirty dishes crowd the kitchen that no one cleans. Lacking a bed, Mr. Stokes, a freshman at Kutztown University, sleeps on the floor in the room of a friend who took him in when the dorms closed.

No stranger to hardship, Mr. Stokes, who spent part of high school living in a car, worries that the crowded conditions will expose him to coronavirus. But like many poor Americans, he says the sanctioned solution — six feet of physical space — is a luxury he cannot afford.

DeParle quotes Stokes regarding his current living situation: 

It’s just so many people in the house and there’s nothing I can do about it — it’s not my house.  You can’t be six feet apart when you have to rely on other people’s space.

Stokes is sleeping on the floor of his friend's room in the house.  His friend sleeps on the bed with her child.  Stokes talks of sitting in his car to get some privacy, and also of reciting affirmations to calm himself. 

DeParle quotes Stefanie DeLuca, a sociologist at Johns Hopkins: 

The pandemic is a reminder that privacy is at a premium among the poor — hard to find and extremely valuable.  Living in crowded conditions not only increases the risk of infection but can also impose serious emotional and mental health costs. The ability to retreat into one’s own space is a way to cope with conflict, tension and anxiety.

This is a deeply reported and powerful story that also features a recovering heroin addict living in a one-room trailer, along with several family members, in Oklahoma and several homeless folks living together on Whidbey Island, Washington.  I highly recommend the entire story.

From Patricia Cohen of the New York Times on April 16, 2020, "Struggling in a Good Economy, and Now Struggling in a Crisis."  Here's the lede:

An indelible image from the Great Depression features a well-dressed family seated with their dog in a comfy car, smiling down from an oversize billboard on weary souls standing in line at a relief agency. “World’s highest standard of living,” the billboard boasts, followed by a tagline: “There’s no way like the American Way.” 

The economic shutdown caused by the coronavirus pandemic has suddenly hurled the country back to that dislocating moment captured in 1937 by the photographer Margaret Bourke-White. In the updated 2020 version, lines of cars stretch for miles to pick up groceries from a food pantry; jobless workers spend days trying to file for unemployment benefits; renters and homeowners plead with landlords and mortgage bankers for extensions; and outside hospitals, ill patients line up overnight to wait for virus testing.

Damon Winter, a photographer on assignment to the Opinion section of the New York Times, contributed this photo essay (text also by Winter), which was published o April 20, 2020.  It's titled "The Great American Divide" and features photos from central New York, Ithaca (home to Cornell) and Syracuse.  This is part of the New York Times "The America We Need" series.

This April 23, 2020  New York Times Upshot piece is framed in terms of "Who Has Enough Cash to get through the Coronavirus Crisis?"  Alissa Quart and Yaryna Serkez report that just 47% of Americans say they have enough savings to get through three months of unemployment:

Even before Covid-19, many Americans were living check to check, because of the costs of housing and child care, student debt payments, medical bills and the rest. Despite the cheery insistence of people like President Trump and personal finance gurus, the economic growth of the last decade had not brought wealth or security to most Americans. Fewer than half of American adults — just 47 percent — say that they have enough emergency funds to cover three months of expenses, according to a survey conducted this month by the Pew Research Center. 

In the coronavirus’s wake, those without savings may also be losing their jobs, leaving them with little to support their families other than the CARES Act relief from the government, help from charitable groups or GoFundMe or Venmo tip jar campaigns. This won’t be enough to save many families from ruin.

Lastly, here's a story from The Economist on April 27, 2020, which offers a global perspective on how the coronavirus is aggravating inequality.  It's one of a number of stories I've seen that highlights the likelihood of dramatic food shortages around the world. The headline is "Closing schools for covid-19 does lifelong harm and widens inequality," and it contrasts quarantined kids in Amsterdam and Paris with those in Dakar.

The working class and coronavirus (Part I): Higher education

Uneven access to higher education has been a persistent theme in media coverage since colleges and universities began to close down a month ago and, in so doing, sending their students "home," whatever that means.  This phenomenon is closely related to a long-time theme of my research and a personal obsession:  access to higher education and what keeps low-income students from achieving it.  And let me be clear at the outset:  while this blog generally focuses on working-class whites, this post is about the wider working class.   

There is so much to say on this topic, so I'm primarily going to collect sources, beginning with some early stories about what was happening with the elite higher education sector.  The first story that crossed my radar screen was this one by the Harvard Crimson published on March 11, 2020.  An excerpt follows:

Dean of the College Rakesh Khurana wrote to Barton and more than 6,000 other undergraduates on Tuesday morning that campus would not reopen after spring break, which stretches from March 14 to 22. 

Within hours, the email sent students scrambling to pack up all their belongings and make plans to vacate. But Barton and others say it hit one group of undergraduates particularly hard: first-generation and low-income students, many of whom depend upon Harvard for food, housing, and stability. 

“They've been evicted from their stability, they've been evicted from their homes, they’ve been evicted from their ability to live comfortably and safely,” Barton, who is an FGLI [First Generation Low Income] student, said. “There's already enough concern, and now they're concerned about being able to get home and have stable housing and food.” 

Some students must ship or store their on-campus belongings without financial support from Harvard. Others who planned to stay on campus must now book unexpected flights home and accrue additional costs. And those who rely on term-time employment must confront additional financial concerns as they lose their primary sources of income. 

Nicholas T. “Nick” Wyville ’20 called the College’s announcement “outrageous,” adding that he believes it will weigh most heavily on him and his fellow FGLI students. 

“Harvard prides itself on having a massive student body that is a large percentage on financial aid,” Wyville said. “I think that they forget that those are the same students who often come from home situations that are uncomfortable.” 

This Harvard Crimson story is rare in that it does mention rural folks and their relative lack of access to technology, especially broadband: 

Wyville — who hails from Anniston, Ala. — said online courses are not feasible for him and some of his peers from rural or low-income areas, where many homes do not have internet access. 

“It's not as if we can just like up and go to the library or the coffee shop every day,” he said.

Even before that Crimson story came this, on March 9,  from the Washington Post.  The headline was "Amherst College switches to online learning, as universities nationally scramble to respond to covid-19 outbreak."  Susan Svrluga and Nick Anderson report:

The announcement was a dramatic stroke from a small but nationally renowned school: A growing number of colleges and universities have announced temporary shifts to virtual classes in recent days in response to the uncertainty and rapid pace of changes with the covid-19 outbreak. Amherst took especially decisive action.

They quote Amherst president Biddy Martin:

We know that many people will travel widely during spring break, no matter how hard we try to discourage it.  The risk of having hundreds of people return from their travels to the campus is too great. The best time to act in ways that slow the spread of the virus is now. Let me make our decisions clear.

* * * 

It will be hard to give up, even temporarily, the close colloquy and individual attention that defines Amherst College.  ... Our goal is to keep members of our community as safe as we possibly can while ensuring that students can complete their coursework for the semester and the daily operations of the institution can continue.

The story reports on many other posh campuses, including Vanderbilt, Princeton, NYU, Columbia, Stanford shutting down early that week, well ahead of many other prestigious institutions and also some that are less so (e.g., University of Washington).

Next I saw this piece in the Washington Post on March 11 which, like the Crimson piece, made the point that these shut downs are a hardship on poor students who don't have much of a place to go--especially if scholarships are paying for their room and board. The piece is actually an op-ed by two Amherst students, and here's a salient quote:

These residential colleges are also undermining much of their own rationale for existing. They are meant to be havens for young people, home-like places with established routines and networks meant to foster learning. They are also sanctuaries for low-income and marginalized students who might not have stable homes to return to on short notice. Students without computers or broadband will be unable to access online courses once they begin. Perhaps worst of all, some international Amherst students may be unable to return to campus, when it eventually reopens, because of the Trump administration’s recently expanded travel ban.

To its credit, Amherst’s administration has set up a petition process for students to ask to stay on campus, and the student government is trying to reimburse some fees to help pay for travel. But the default is eviction. Communications from the school this week indicate that refunding the cost of room and board — but not tuition — is being considered.

Many similar stories have run in the last few weeks.  Here's one about the particular disappointment for first generation college graduates who won't get to have their live commencement ceremonies:

Administrators and college presidents are scrambling to figure out what to do about graduation this year. How can they acknowledge students' hard work and success, while still maintaining social distancing amid the outbreak of coronavirus? 

Many colleges across the country have outright cancelled graduations, others, such as Harvard and Miami University in Ohio, have scheduled virtual ceremonies. Some students have taken things into their own hands and created their own ceremonies — on a reconstructed campus — through Minecraft.

* * *

Celebrating graduation wasn't really about her, says Monica Ferrufino, who's finishing up at California State University, Los Angeles. It was really going to be for her parents. 

"When they cancelled graduation, it was exactly 60 days prior to our scheduled commencement," she explains. She knows that because her mother and father kept track, counting down the days, crossing each one off on their calendar. When she told them it was off, her mom cried. "My parents didn't get to finish high school," she says, "so for them, seeing their daughter graduating college was just beyond their dreams."

And finally, here's one from the New York Times early this week suggesting that college was the great "leveler" or "equalizer" before coronavirus.  Let me begin by challenging that starting proposition, which seems absurd in light of my own research into higher education access and books like Suzanne Mettler's.  Here's an excerpt from her 2014 editorial, "College, the Great Unleveler."

Something else began to happen around 1980. College graduation rates kept soaring for the affluent, but for those in the bottom half, a four-year degree is scarcely more attainable today than it was in the 1970s. And because some colleges actually hinder social mobility, what increasingly matters is not just whether you go to college but where. 

The demise of opportunity through higher education is, fundamentally, a political failure. Our landmark higher education policies have ceased to function effectively, and lawmakers — consumed by partisan polarization and plutocracy — have neglected to maintain and update them.

Ah, so elitism in the higher education sector is an extremely important part of the big story here.  And that reminds me of this important NYT story from nearly a decade ago.

But/and let's return to the New York Times story suggesting the contrary, that college is a great leveler.  Here's an excerpt, which is just a teaser to get you to read the rest of Nicholas Casey's story, which speaks to extreme socioeconomic (dis) advantage, race/ethnicity, (dis)ability and a range of other issues salient to an authentic intersectionality:

The political science class was called “Forced Migration and Refugees.” Students read accounts of migrants fleeing broken economies and seeking better futures, of life plans drastically altered and the political forces that made it all seem necessary. 

Then suddenly, the subject matter became personal: Haverford College shut down and evicted most students from the dormitories as the coronavirus spread through Pennsylvania. 

Like many college courses around the country, the class soldiered on. The syllabus was revised. The students reconvened on a videoconferencing app. 

But as each logged in, not everyone’s new reality looked the same. 

One student sat at a vacation home on the coast of Maine. Another struggled to keep her mother’s Puerto Rican food truck running while meat vanished from Florida grocery shelves. As one young woman’s father, a private equity executive, urged the family to decamp to a country where infections were falling, another student’s mother in Russia couldn’t afford the plane ticket to bring her daughter home.

Bottom line:  much as so many in the United States resist this reality, class matters profoundly with respect to higher education access, as with respect to everything else.  And it's consequences are enduring, far beyond the Zoom-enabled classroom.

Oh, and something I learned from Nicholas Casey's story is about the existence of Questbridge, which helps low-income students connect with elite colleges.  Don't think that service was around back in the day I was making college application decisions.

Here's a story from April 6 in the Washington Post about student attitudes toward the widespread move to pass-fail grading. 

Postscript from Politico on April 12, 2020:  "'We're on the edge of the precipice': How the pandemic could shatter college dreams," by Bianca Quilantan.

Postscript from the Daily Yonder on April 13, 2020.

Postscript from Anemona Hartocollis of the New York Times on April 15, 2020, "After Coronavirus, Colleges Worry:  Will Students Come Back?"

And from the Los Angles Times on April 16, 2020, a story about coronavirus's $558 million impact on the University of California system.

Postscript from the The Atlantic on April 24, 2020, "What if Colleges Don't Re-Open until 2021?," by Adam Harris.

Postscript from Christina Paxson, President of Brown University, "College Campuses Must Re-open in the Fall.  Here's How We Do It," a guest editorial in the New York Times.

Postscript from The New Yorker on April 28, 2020, "How the Coronavirus Pandemic Has Shattered the Myth of College in America," by Masha Gessen.

More to follow in this series on socioeconomic class and coronavirus.