Thomas Edsall on class and how Democrats might pry America away from Trump

Thomas Edsall writes frequently for the New York Times, and his columns are always worth reading.  Here's an excerpt from the one last Sunday, which touches on rural and small-town America in his quotes from scholars who are looking at issues of the day (emphasis mine). 

Jennifer L. Hochschild, a professor of government at Harvard, wrote by email that she certainly sees threats, “but I am not at all sure right now how deeply I think they undermine American democracy. If the Civil War (or more relevantly here, 1859-60) is the end of one continuum of threat, I don’t think we are close to that yet.”

At the same time, she cautioned,

the Democratic Party over the past few decades has gotten into the position of appearing to oppose and scorn widely cherished institutions — conventional nuclear family, religion, patriotism, capitalism, wealth, norms of masculinity and femininity, then saying “vote for me.” Doesn’t sound like a winning strategy to me, especially given the evident failure to find a solution to growing inequality and the hollowing out of a lot of rural and small-town communities. I endorse most or all of those Democratic positions, but the combination of cultural superiority and economic fecklessness is really problematic.

In other words, Hochschild is attending to inequities across regions.  The column continues:  

Sean Westwood, a political scientist at Dartmouth, is broadly cynical about the motives of members of both political parties.

“The finger pointing and sanctimony on the left is hardly earned,” Westwood replied to my emailed inquiries. Not only is there a long history of Democratic gerrymanders and dangerous assertions of executive power, he continued, but Democrats “can claim virtually no credit for upholding the outcome of the election. Courageous Republican officials affirmed the true vote in Arizona and Georgia and the Republican vice president certified the outcome before Congress.”

The “true problem,” Westwood wrote,

is that both parties are willing to undermine democratic norms for short-term policy gains. This is not a behavior that came from nowhere — the American public is to blame. We reward politicians who attack election outcomes, who present the opposition as subhuman and who avoid meaningful compromise.

Westwood, however, does agree with Skocpol and Galston’s critique of the Democratic left:

If the Democratic Party wants to challenge Republicans they need to move to the center and attempt to peel away centrist Republicans. Endorsing divisive policies and elevating divisive leaders only serves to make the Democrats less appealing to the very voters they need to sway to win.

Then there is this from Westwood that references the culture wars (again, emphasis mine).   

The Democrats, in Westwood’s view,

must return to being a party of the people and not woke-chasing elites who don’t understand that canceling comedians does not help struggling Americans feed their children. When it comes to financial policy Democrats are far better at protecting the poor, but this advantage is lost to unnecessary culture wars. Democrats need to stop wasting their time on cancel culture or they risk canceling themselves to those who live in the heart of this country.

Cross-posted to Legal Ruralism.  

On issues of race/ethnicity and rurality in the California Redistricting Process

The Sacramento Bee reports today on the latest from California's independent re-districting commission, specifically about a newly drawn U.S. Congressional district that stretches from just south of San Francisco, down through part of Silicon Valley, along parts of the central coast, and inland to the rural reaches of San Luis Obispo County.  Here's an excerpt from Gillian Brassil's story focusing what's wrong with a district like this one, a Democrat-heavy area that would likely be held by incumbent Rep. Jimmy Panetta of Carmel Valley, in Monterey County.  

Paul Mitchell, a redistricting expert, said that the size and shape of the district aren’t what pose a problem, rather the distribution of wealth, endorsements and political structure that would make it difficult for a representative from San Luis Obispo County to run against someone from Silicon Valley. 

He drew an analogy: If a sliver of downtown Sacramento were connected to disparate rural areas, candidates from outside the state’s capital would stand little chance against someone who has the financial and political support of people in the metropolitan hub.

“Somebody from Yolo County isn’t going to beat somebody from Sacramento in a congressional race. That’s the problem, I think, with this new ‘ribbon of shame’ that they’re talking about,” Mitchell said. “It’s not the size that I think is problematic. It’s the fact that it has a finger going into Atherton and Menlo Park and the Apple headquarters.” 

“Ribbon of shame” was former Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s nickname for a 2000s-era congressional district that stretched from Oxnard to the bottom of Monterey County. Maps sliced it out the last time California underwent redistricting in 2010. The phrase resurfaced among analysts to describe the San Luis Obispo to South San Francisco stretch.

My prior post on this topic is here.   

Postscript:  The final maps, published a few days before Christmas, are here.  A Wall Street Journal editorial on the topic doesn't mention rural issues, but it criticizing California's "racial gerrymandering" as reflected in the final redistricting is here.  An excerpt follows:  

The map-makers apparently tried to achieve something like proportional representation by race, drawing 18 majority-Hispanic districts and 18 majority white districts, according to the Princeton data. That roughly tracks both groups’ total share of the adult population. One district is majority Asian and the rest have no majority group.

This outcome is being touted as a victory by ethnic activists, but it means that voters are being assigned electoral districts based in part on race or ethnicity. The idea is that voters of a particular race should be grouped together to increase their collective voting power. 

* * * 

But it has the effect of amplifying identity politics, including white identity politics. When jurisdictions are carved along ethnic lines, politicians in both parties have less need to build multiethnic coalitions.

Cross-posted to Legal Ruralism.  

On bell hooks' compassion for poor whites

Gloria Jean Watkins, better known by her pen name, bell hooks, died this morning.  She was a prolific scholar known for her poetry, as well as her work on race, gender, class, capitalism and place.  

hooks ended her career at Berea College, in Berea, Kentucky, and while I thought of her as a Kentuckian, I didn't necessarily think of her as rural.  Still, this line from a bell hooks tribute in the New York Times caught my eye:

bell hooks was the pen name of Gloria Jean Watkins, who was born on Sept. 25, 1952, in Hopkinsville, Ky., [population 31,000] a small city in the southwestern part of the state not far from the Tennessee border.

Though her childhood in the semirural South exposed her to vicious examples of white supremacy, her tight-knit Black community in Hopkinsville showed her the possibility of resistance from the margins, of finding community among the oppressed and drawing power from those connections — a theme to which she would return frequently in her work.

Her father, Veodis Watkins, was a postal worker, and her mother, Rosa Bell (Oldham) Watkins, was a homemaker.

I've long found it interesting that hooks/Watkins chose to live out the final years of her career at Berea College, also in nonmetro Kentucky.  I don't mean that in a bad way.  I think it shows an attachment to place, not a lack of ambition.  

I've also always found noteworthy hooks' thoughts on class in particular her compassion for poor whites.  Here's an excerpt from her book Where We Stand:  Class Matters (2000):   

Most folks who comment on class acknowledge that poverty is seen as having a black face, but they rarely point to the fact that this representation has been created and sustained by the mass media ... The hidden face[s] of poverty in the United States are  the untold stories of millions of poor white people.  Undue media focus on poor nonwhites deflects attention away from the reality of white poverty. (p. 116-17)

A relatively recent bell hooks interview that proved controversial--at least with my students at UC Davis School of Law--is here.  What I see as the most provocative quote follows: 

For so many years in the feminist movement, women were saying that gender is the only aspect of identity that really matters, that domination only came into the world because of rape. Then we had so many race-oriented folks who were saying, “Race is the most important thing. We don’t even need to be talking about class or gender.” So for me, that phrase always reminds me of a global context, of the context of class, of empire, of capitalism, of racism and of patriarchy. Those things are all linked — an interlocking system.

Cross-posted to Legal Ruralism.  

Bradley Jackson of "The Morning Show" as country mouse--or is it country bear?

I just started watching "The Morning Show" (Apple+) last week and was soon struck by the country mouse-city mouse dynamic the creators set up between Alex Levy, played by Jennifer Anniston, and Bradley Jackson, played by Reese Witherspoon.  Bradley is the new morning co-anchor, joining Alex, after her former co-anchor, a man, is deposed for sexual harassment in the era of MeToo.  

There are so many important themes in this show--not least the patriarchy, sexually predatory behavior by men, and--ultimately--women's empowerment.  Here, I want to pick up on two other themes that jump out--two themes that happen to be my pet issues:  rurality and class.  Bradley Jackson represents the rural kid from West Virginia--brusque, direct, rough around the edges even when she is gussied up in the fine New York duds the network provides her (she prefers pants to dresses, thank you very much).  She was raised working class.  Bradley is the country mouse foil to Alex Levy's super polished, conniving, and inwardly angst-ridden/falling apart city mouse. 

In Episodes 4 and 5, which I watched tonight, Bradley reveals--in her first appearance as co-anchor of the show--that she had an abortion when she was 15. Here, she brushes right up against being white trash. And while the abortion and the matter-of-fact way she discloses it are controversial and thus shake network executives, they also generate a younger following for the show.  The disclosure also inspires college students in Mississippi to stand up against state abortion regulations.  To them, Bradley is a hero.  Critical issues of generational difference and generational conflict are thus surfaced.  

Also notable is how the show's creators give Bradley the "Pretty Woman" treatment--putting her in posh clothing, including a private shopping spree at Barney's over the weekend before she begins her gig.  They do not, however, ask her to eliminate the slight twang with which she speaks.  

Another interesting scene is when The Morning Show "cleans up" Bradley's mom in West Virginia to bring her on air--reading from cue cards--to talk about what a great kid Bradley was growing up.  In fact, Bradley and her mom were frequently in intense conflict, and it is this ruse by The Morning Show's producers that causes Bradley to burst out and disclose a more honest portrait of her life in the Mountain State, including her teenage abortion.  

In another scene, Bradley is talking on air about a young adult author and says "ya"--as in "y'all"--rather than "Y", "A," as this term gets pronounced, with the letters articulated separately.  She handles it well, repeating "ya" in realization--or is it poking fun at herself?--and then saying it the way said by people in the know, upper class folks. 

I'm looking forward to more rural-urban differentiation in future episodes.  I'd also love to see some commentary on these issues, but so far, I've found only this piece offering a nod to Bradley's Appalachian roots.  (Oh, and there's this ad for the West Virginia hoodie Bradley/Reese wears in an episode of the show).  

Cross posted to Legal Ruralism.  

Is an orientation to work and self-sufficiency making Democrats' domestic policies unpopular?

National Public Radio reported a few days ago on new poll that shows Democrats not getting credit for their assistance to low-income families.  Kelsey Snell and Domenico Montanaro report, with some excerpts following, including this part I want to highlight the most, but which doesn't show up in the transcript.  It's a quote from a Republican voter in Oklahoma who got the child tax credit for his kids but says it didn't help it all.  In that regard, he represents one in five voters who responded to the survey.  Curious, because it's hard to imagine how a cash infusion couldn't help "at all." 

Perhaps more importantly, that respondent--whose race is not specified--doesn't think it's good for government to give money to people.  Here's his quote (transcribed by me):  

Long term, it's a problem because you need a better choice.  What you're doing when you actually give these people that Band Aid is you're making them dependent on that Band Aid.

This reflects a long-standing attitude of Americans who value work--the idea of work.  These folks expect all people to work because they work--even if the fruits of their labor don't truly meet their economic need.  This is reflected most prominently in Jennifer Sherman's book, Those who Work, Those who Don't:  Poverty, Morality and Family in Rural America, and I've written about it here and here.  

What follows is an excerpt from the story's transcript with more context on the poll on which they're reporting:   

Democrats say the child tax credit has a particularly large impact on low-income families for whom the additional funds have been crucial. A recent study from Columbia University found that those monthly payments kept 3.6 million children out of poverty in October.

In the NPR/Marist survey, almost 6 in 10 eligible households said they received the child tax credit. But the 59% of eligible respondents is far below the number of families that the government expects should be getting funds. The IRS estimated earlier this year that the families of 88% of children in the U.S. would be eligible for the payments and said in September that 35 million families received them.

The disconnect between the government figures and respondents' answers is a perception and credit problem for Biden and Democrats.

Even among those who did recall receiving the tax credit, two-thirds said it only helped a little and 1 in 5 said it didn't help at all.
Biden's perception problem

For the president, there were further signs that voters don't give him credit for the policies of his own administration.

When it came to those direct payments, respondents gave Democrats in Congress a plurality of the credit for getting them to people (40%), while 17%, credited Republicans — even though zero congressional Republicans voted for the March relief bill.

The same percentage — just 17% — felt Biden was most responsible for sending the cash.

* * *

While the numbers are a sign of a deeply polarized society, there's also evidence of lackluster feelings for the president among even people in his own party.

For example, in the survey, while 76% of Republicans strongly disapproved of the job Biden is doing, only 38% of Democrats strongly approved.

* * *

Democrats have spent months repeating the message that their legislation will not add to the deficit or worsen inflation. In an address from the White House in October, Biden called the plans fiscally responsible policies to help the country grow.

"They don't add a single penny to the deficit," he said. "And they don't raise taxes on anyone making less than $400,000 a year. In fact, they reduce the deficit."

Overall, 61% of respondents said things in the country are going in the wrong direction. That's a significant drop from back in July, when .Biden was saying the U.S. was on the cusp of independence from the pandemic. Americans then were split but more optimistic than they are now on the direction of the country.

Cross-posted to Legal Ruralism. 

White trash in Percival Everett's new novel, The Trees

The novel, The Trees, out next week, was featured on National Public Radio this morning, and author Percival Everett's discussion with NPR host Scott Simon intrigued me because it implicated both rurality and, more prominently, race and whiteness.  Here's an excerpt from the interview: 

Special detectives Ed Morgan and Jim Davis are the big-city heat from Hattiesburg. They're with the Mississippi Bureau of Investigation, and they're in the small town of Money to investigate the murder of two men in the back room of the same shotgun-style house - one, a white man who's disfigured in a way so gruesome we can't tell you without a trigger warning, if you please; the other, a Black man, seems to just walk out of the morgue.

Simon observes near the end of the interview:

SIMON: I've got to ask you. I enjoyed the book a lot. So many of the white Southerners in this book are not just bigots. They're obese. They're dumb. They smell, as you write, memorably, of one, of excrement - and you don't say excrement - Aqua Velva and pimento cheese, which is an awfully clever phrase. And with no apologies made for white bigots, are you stereotyping white Southerners?

EVERETT: Welcome to club. Yeah.

(LAUGHTER)

EVERETT: I am, in fact. How does it feel? That's my question. Yes, I'm not fair in this novel. It's not a novel about fairness. In fact, after I wrote the first page, my admission to my wife was, well, I'm not being fair, and I'm not going to do anything about it.

This left me wanting to know more, and then I found this by Christian Lorentzen on Book Forum.  I'll just excerpt a short quote here from the commentary titled "Hillbilly Effigy": 

Not much present in The Trees are white liberals or leftists. The novel isn’t about them (us), unless perhaps it’s meant to flatter them with a vision of their redneck white-trash cousins getting a comeuppance at the hands of cunning and ruthless Black assassins (spoiler: the Black corpse is not the real killer, nor is it a ghost) and their Asian counterparts, avenging their own victims of lynching. Everett has had his go at white liberals elsewhere, most notably in Erasure, his satire of the publishing industry and the Quality Lit Biz. The Trees is looser and more freewheeling than that novel, Everett’s masterpiece.

Prior to that is this, also touching on class and whiteness:

Most of the white characters in this novel are guilty: even if they are merely the descendants of the perpetrators of lynchings, they are unrepentant racists (or “know-nothing, pre–Civil War, inbred peckerwoods,” as one character puts it), frequent users of the N-word (with the hard r), stealers of livestock, or members of a pathetically diminished Ku Klux Klan. The racists are present all the way up the chain of American power.

Cross-posted to Legal Ruralism. 

Is "class" about culture or economics?

Here is an interesting exchange about that question from "The Argument" podcast with Jane Coaston, interviewing Matt Taibbi and Michelle Cottle of the New York Times Editorial Board.  The topic of this issue, "Is Fox News Really All that Powerful?," dated June 30, 2021.  The first comment is from journalist Taibbi.  

If you ask what is Fox, who do they represent? They represent a lot of people, but apart from that, you can’t really say they’re backing a major swath of the institutional power in this country as you might have 20 years ago, or during the Bush years, when Fox News was what you watch to see what the people who are getting us into the war in Iraq were thinking. That’s not so much the case anymore.

I think there’s been a shift in terms of the political picture in this country, and it’s very much expressed by, for me, the censorship issue.

Jane Coaston

Michelle, what do you think Matt is getting right and wrong about this intersection of power. In my view, wealthy people tend to support whatever will keep them wealthy.

Michelle Cottle

I don’t think you can lump everything together. And I don’t think it works just as purely an economic proposition, especially because populism in this country may have economic roots, but the way it plays out in politics is not economic. It’s kind of ethnonationalist. What Trump was pitching was not an economic populism, that’s not where his policy —

Matt Taibbi

That’s not true.

Michelle Cottle

— that’s not where his policies went. What he was doing had a certain economic flair to it. But when you look at what really motivates people, it was the immigration issue. It was the, they’re coming for your kids issue. It’s — they’re destroying the American way of life issue. So it gets beyond economics pretty quickly.

Jane Coaston

And I would say — I wrote a piece a while back that, essentially, Trump ran as one thing and governed as another thing, and ran as kind of someone who could be all things to all people type of candidate, and then governed basically as Mitch McConnell.

Matt Taibbi

Well, I covered Trump’s campaign, so I was at his speeches. And it’s absolutely not true that there was no economic component to his address in 2016. It was a huge part of the picture. Obviously, race and immigration were central issues for Trump. There is absolutely no doubt about that. And he played on some of the worst instincts of the electorate.

But there were enormous similarities between the Trump movement and, for instance, the Bernie Sanders movement. And I heard people who I interviewed over and over and over again responding to all kinds of things in Trump’s message. I heard Trump argue against the antitrust exemption for health insurance companies. I heard him going after the press. The elitist press was a huge part of his presentation.

Michelle Cottle

That’s not economics. We’re talking economics —

Matt Taibbi

It’s a class issue.

Michelle Cottle

No, no, we’re not talking about class and culture, because the cosmopolitan —

Matt Taibbi

I’m talking about class.

Michelle Cottle

Well, we were talking about economics, and that’s different. His pitch in 2016, as Jane points out, was not how he governed, and it’s not how he ran in 2020. So he pretty quickly discovered that the key to maintaining his popularity wasn’t to actually provide a huge tax cut for the struggling people. It was to tell them that the immigrants were coming for their jobs.

Were working-class white and rural folks responsible for the Capitol riots last week?

Over the past four years, rural voters have drawn enormous attention--and enormous responsibility--for the presidency of Donald Trump.  Ditto working-class whites, people like coal miners, for example.  Now, however, in the wake of the January 6 attack on the Capitol, the media are waking up to the fact that many of the insurrectionists were neither rural nor low-income.  Indeed, the media are waking up to a fact I've been trying to draw attention to for some time:  lots of rich folks voted for Trump, and they were prominent among the folks who led the raid on the Capitol last week.  We're learning more and more about them because (1) they are starting to be arrested and (2) the dead among them are being identified. 

This story from the Los Angeles Times provides a good overview of who the rioters were.  The headline is "A broad cross section of Trump supporters stormed the Capitol, arrests show. Now what?," and Kevin Rector, Chris Megerian and Anna M. Phillips report.   Here's an excerpt:  

The reality of the Jan. 6 attack, captured in affidavits and court filings in dozens of criminal cases, is that the crowd included not just fringe radicals but also a broad cross section of President Trump’s supporters — people with office jobs, kids and mortgages, and otherwise respectable public reputations.

Among those identified and charged with crimes by law enforcement as participating in the insurrection were municipal employees, former members of the military, social media influencers, police officers and a school therapist. Also charged were a data analytics company’s chief executive and a two-time Olympic gold medalist swimmer from USC.

They came from across the country. A West Virginia state delegate livestreamed himself alongside the rioters. Houston Police Chief Art Acevedo said one of his officers — who resigned Thursday — had “penetrated” the Capitol building and was expected to face federal charges soon. Two Virginia police officers have been charged with violent entry and disorderly conduct on Capitol grounds.

Law enforcement officials are alarmed by the varied backgrounds of the pro-Trump intruders and say it can be difficult to prevent attacks and uncover dangerous motives when extremists hide behind the veneer of normality.

The New York Post story about a Dallas real estate agent who flew a private plane to the riot has gotten a fair amount of attention.   Note that the framing by Jennifer Taub, who re-tweeted the story, implies that Trump voters are homogeneous by highlighting the topic of socioeconomic class based on one very rich rioter.  That is, she questions the economic anxiety or economic distress of all Trump voters by noting that this Trump-inspired rioter is under no economic distress.  

What follows are some Tweets that further illustrate the point that these were not just--and perhaps not even primarily--working class white voters.   

Here are two other stories about relatively affluent folks who participated in the Capitol riots, this one about a CEO from suburban Chicago and this one about a man who owns a carwash in suburban Georgia.  Finally, here's one by Connor Sheets for Pro Publica about a rioter from Huntsville, Alabama who appears to have been living a middle-class existence; he died of a heart attack during the events in Washington, DC.  

Some nevertheless blame working-class white and rural voters, while others see the Capitol riots as vindication of sorts for the working-class and rural folks who've been widely blamed for Trump's presidency.  Here, I respond to a journalist who is ignoring some important facts about poverty on the day after the riot. Interestingly, she grew up and now again lives in the same county as the Gravette, Arkansas man widely photographed with his feet up in Nancy Pelosi's office, the one now in federal custody; however, she went away for an Ivy League education and is now back working as a reporter for Facing South.  Generally, I am a fan of her work, but her argument that there is no "economic anxiety" is an unhelpful one that will alienate many who are, in fact, suffering economic distress:  

Screenshot taken January 7, 2021

Here's more of that unhelpful framing, which I've not yet responded to, from Amy Siskind, who leads The New Agenda.

Screenshot taken January 15, 2021

Siskind went down this path after the Charlottesville riots, too, suggesting that event proved racism on the part of Trump supporters, to the exclusion of economic anxiety.  I wrote about the problem with that framing here.  What's lost in that framing, obviously, is that not all folks who voted for Trump--not nearly all of them--marched in Charlottesville or on the Capitol last week.  It also has the very unfortunate effect of dismissing the economic pain of many Americans who voted for Trump, just as journalist Olivia Paschal does. 

Here are some more Tweets (along my responses to some of them): 

Screenshots from January 8, 2021

Sarah Smarsh is the author of Heartland:  A Memoir of Working Hard and Being Broke in the Richest Country on Earth.  

Screenshot from January 14, 2021

Screenshots from January 12, 2021

Finally, here's a screenshot of data I've shared frequently in recent years; it's from the 2016 exit polls, broken down by income.  It shows that it is, in fact, those who might be called the "petit bourgeoisie," those who've gotten a leg up on the poor folks around them, who are most likely to oppose social safety net programs and support Trump.

Cross-posted to Legal Ruralism.  

On "Hillbilly Elegy," the film, and cultural and geographical divides in the United States

I published this today in The Conversation, about the new Ron Howard/Netflix film, "Hillbilly Elegy," based on J.D. Vance's book by the same name.  Here's an excerpt:

I admit to delight when I read professional critics trashing the film, which is based on J.D. Vance’s widely praised memoir detailing his dramatic class migration from a midsize city in Ohio to the hallowed halls of Yale Law School. I was expecting the worst based on my dislike of the book, and these reviews confirmed my expectations.

But once I saw the film, I felt it had been harshly judged by the chattering classes – the folks who write the reviews and seek to create meaning for the rest of us. In fact, the film is an earnest depiction of the most dramatic parts of the book: a lower-middle-class family caught in the throes of addiction. 

Everyday viewers seem to find the film enjoyable enough – it has solid audience reviews on IMDB and Rotten Tomatoes.

So why the big gap between the critical response and audience reaction? Could it be yet another sign of the country’s steadily growing class divide?

I want to be clear that I didn't see the film depicting rural in any sustained or meaningful way.  Middletown, Ohio, Vance's home town is not rural by any measure.  Indeed, it's not even technically Appalachian.  But about the first 10 minutes of the film take place in Jackson, Kentucky, the Vance Family's ancestral home.  That's Vance's real claim to "hillbilliness," and I don't dispute that a certain hillbilly culture followed his family into the Rust Belt.  

Cross-posted 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.  

"White Trash" in Bill Bryson's The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid

This excerpt, from Bill Bryson's 2007 memoir of his 1950s childhood in Des Moines, Iowa, is one of the best depictions I've read of "white trash," though it doesn't actually use that term.  Note the "white trash" hailed from either Arkansas or Alabama, southern places essentially indistinguishable from each other and associated with such hoi polloi.  

The only real danger in life was the Butter Boys. The Butters were a family or large interbred, indeterminately numerous individuals who lived seasonally in a collection of shanty homes in an area of perpetual wooded gloom known as the Bottoms along the swampy margins of the Raccoon River. Nearly every spring the Bottoms would flood and the Butters would go back to Arkansas or Alabama or wherever it was they came from.

In between times they would menace us. Their specialty was to torment any children smaller than them, which was all children. The Butters were big to begin with but because they were held back year after year, they were much, much larger than any child in their class. By sixth grade some of them were too big to pass through doors. They were ugly, too, and real dumb. They ate squirrels.

Generally the best option was to have some small child that you could offer as a sacrifice. Lumpy Kowalski was ideal for this as he was indifferent to pain and fear, and would never tell on you because he couldn't, or possibly just didn't, speak. (It was never clear which.)Also, the Butters were certain to be grossed out by his dirty pants, so they would merely paw him for a bit and then withdraw with pained, confused faces.  

The worst outcome was to be caught on your own by one or more of the Butter boys. Once when I was about ten I was nabbed by Buddy Butter, who was in my grade but at least seven years older. He dragged me under a big pine tree and pinned me to the ground on my back and told me he was going to keep me there all night long.

I waited for what seemed a decent interval and then said, “Why are you doing this to me?”

“Because I can,” he answered, but pronounced it “kin.” Then he made a kind of glutinous, appreciative, snot-clearing noise, which was what passed in the Butter universe for laughter.

“But you'll have to stay here all night, too,” I pointed out. “It'll be just as boring for you.”

“Don't care,” he replied, sharp as anything, and was quiet a longtime before adding: “Besides I can do this.” And he treated me to the hanging-spit trick—the one where the person on top slowly suspends a gob of spit and lets it hang there by a thread, trembling gently, and either sucks it back in if the victim surrenders or lets it fall, some-times inadvertently. It wasn't even like spit—at least not like human spit. It was more like the sort of thing a giant insect would regurgitate onto its forelimbs and rub onto its antennae. It was a mossy green with little streaks of red blood in it and, unless my memory is playing tricks, two very small gray feathers protruding at the sides. It was so big and shiny that I could see my reflection in it, distorted, as in an M.C. Escher drawing. I knew that if any part of it touched my face, it would sizzle hotly and leave a disfiguring scar.

In fact, he sucked the gob back in and got off me. “Well, you let that be a lesson to you, you little skunk pussy, Poontang sissy,” he said.

‘Two days later the soaking spring rains came and put all the Butters on their tar-paper roofs, where they were rescued one by one by men in small boats. A thousand children stood on the banks above and cheered.

‘What they didn’t realize was that the storm clouds that carried all that refreshing rain had been guided across the skies by the powerful X-ray vision of the modest superhero of the prairies, the small but perfectly proportioned Thunderbolt Kid.

In case you didn't figure it out, Bryson referred to his childhood self as the Thunderbolt Kid. 

Cross-posted to Legal Ruralism.

Including working-class whites in stories about failures of the coronavirus economy

Two in the New York Times caught my attention in the last few days.  The first was this one, really a photo essay, by Brenda Ann Kenneally, documenting food insecurity, from New York to California.  It features two families, primarily, one black and one white, and the headline is, "America at Hunger's Edge."   It reminded me of this 2013 story out of Dyersburg, Tennessee, in which Sheryl Gay Stolberg showed both black and white families relying on food stamps. 

The other story is Eduardo Porter's feature on service workers, who have been badly hurt by the coronavirus shutdown.  It's "The Service Economy Meltdown."

As I have written in my scholarly work, it's important that the media depict poverty of all colors.  Conflating poverty and low-income/precarity struggles with blackness is bad for economically struggling folks of all races and ethnicities--including non-Hispanic whites.