The median new house in the U.S. is now 50 percent larger than it was in 1980, even though the median income has grown only slightly in real terms. Houses are growing faster than incomes because of a process I call “expenditure cascades.”
.. A family at the median income level would reasonably aspire to send its children to schools of at least average quality. But to do that, it would have to buy or rent a house near the median of its city’s housing price distribution. And that’s become significantly harder to do.
.. “the inflation-adjusted cost of the average wedding in the U.S. was $31,000 in 2015, up from about $10,000 in 1980.”
.. Growing income inequality in the U.S. has meant that as those at the top are able bid up the price of valued goods like housing and access to good schools, those in lower groups have struggled to maintain their positions.
.. A September 2014 Demos study found that median white family wealth is $134,000. Among whites in the working class, however — the bottom 32.1 percent — the average net worth is $0.
.. For some of these men, there is a less talked-about sense of status displacement that stems from the surge of women, including wives, girlfriends and daughters, into the work force. This has served to focus attention on the erosion of the traditional male self-image as provider and protector.
.. Trump’s supporters — more than any other candidate’s — believe that society would benefit if “women adhere to traditional gender roles.”
.. For working class whites, Vandello wrote, the loss of their privileged status and loss of manufacturing jobs go to the
core of what it means to be a man in our culture — being the protector and provider.
.. the practice among liberal interest groups of
highlighting group differences, cultures, etc. has contributed to Trump’s appeal, especially given that white men are often blamed for being oppressive or the source of many of the issues being protested.
.. Of course respect for women and racial minorities isnot political correctness — it is just decency. But well-known excesses in the policing of speech have handed Trump a gift: he can rationalize despicable attitudes as honest reactions to political correctness. In this way he multiplies the effectiveness of his taboo-shattering campaign. Supporters don’t perceive him as merely publicizing their ugly private beliefs; they perceive him as speaking truth to power.
Revolt of the Masses
Life in, say, a coal valley was never a bouquet of roses.
What’s also been lost are the social institutions and cultural values that made it possible to have self-respect amid hardship — to say, “I may not make a lot of money, but people can count on me. I’m loyal, tough, hard-working, resilient and part of a good community.”
.. It’s a culture that celebrates people who are willing to fight to defend their honor. This is something that progressives never get about gun control. They see a debate about mass murder, but for many people guns are about a family’s ability to stand up for itself in a dangerous world.
.. It’s also a culture with a lot of collective pride. In my travels, you can’t go five minutes without having a conversation about a local sports team. Sports has become the binding religion, offering identity, value, and solidarity.
.. But the honor code has also been decimated by the culture of the modern meritocracy, which awards status to the individual who works with his mind, and devalues the class of people who work with their hands.
.. The sociologist Daniel Bell once argued that capitalism would undermine itself because it encouraged hedonistic short-term values for consumers while requiring self-disciplined long-term values in its workers. At least in one segment of society, Bell was absolutely correct.
.. There’s now a rift within the working class between mostly older people who are self disciplined, respectable and, often, bigoted, and parts of a younger cohort that are more disordered, less industrious, more celebrity-obsessed, but also more tolerant and open to the world.
.. Trump (and probably Brexit) voters are in the first group. They are not poor, making on average over $70,000 a year. But they perceive that their grandchildren’s world is quickly coming apart.
.. Their pain is indivisible: economic stress, community breakdown, ethnic bigotry and a loss of social status and self-worth. When people feel their world is vanishing, they are easy prey for fact-free magical thinking and demagogues who blame immigrants.
We need a better form of nationalism, a vision of patriotism that gives dignity to those who have been disrespected, emphasizes that we are one nation and is confident and open to the world.
Donald Trump and the Idea of the Rust Belt
But what dominated the map was a fist of red over the Great Lakes: Ohio, Michigan, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Iowa, and Pennsylvania. Set aside the hype and whimsy of Trump’s plan to conquer California, and this was the news: Trump will be running a Midwestern campaign.
.. And yet in Michigan—in most of the Midwest, really—the economy is doing O.K. Michigan, Wisconsin, Minnesota, and Iowa all have unemployment rates well below the national average of five per cent, and Ohio and Indiana are just a touch higher than average, at 5.2 per cent. Among Midwestern states, only Illinois’s unemployment is significantly higher than the national average, and when people talk about the decline of the Rust Belt no one really means Illinois.
.. It’s hard to know exactly how to get beyond the top-line statistics to understand how shaken people are by a recession, but one way is to examine economic instability. When Yale’s Jacob Hacker led a study that did so, no Midwestern state ranked among the places where instability was most acute. (Those were mostly in the South.) In Michigan especially, Hacker found, overall levels of economic instability were remarkably low.
.. A 2016 race between Clinton and Trump could devolve principally into a pitched battle for the Rust Belt,” the Washington Post’s Dan Balz predicted in March.
.. (those with family incomes between thirty thousand and seventy thousand dollars) in Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. They found that Trump does not even have the support among these voters that Mitt Romney had. The poll had him trailing Hillary Clinton by nine per cent.
.. Just after 9/11 David Foster Wallace presented the view of the world among churchgoers in Bloomington, Indiana: “There is what would strike many Americans as a bizarre absence of cynicism in the room.” It is exactly this long tradition of seeing the Midwest as decent and innocent—and therefore as moral—that supplies the Rust Belt story with its force.
The World Of The Trades
The young man said that’s fine, but that I should be aware of something important: that working in the trades will bring you face to face with “some of the foulest people you can imagine.” He said the idea of the noble blue-collar worker of ages past is largely a myth today. In his line of work, he said, he spends his day with men who have drug habits, are ex-cons (some of them), are pre-occupied with pornography, see women as whores, avoid child support payments, send a steady stream of filth out of their mouths, and so forth. He also said that some of them are decent all the same. The point, said the young man, is that if you are going to encourage your believing Christian child to take up the trades, you had better prepare them for the fact that they will be entering a world of degradation.
.. Without a doubt, though, I’ll take my place among the dysfunctional blue-collar culture than with the elitist progressive SJW culture. At least my coworkers respect me and don’t try to get me fired for not thinking like they do.