White working class Americans no longer align with the Democratic Party. Neither do they trust the old Republican Party establishment. These two realities hit Democrats and Republicans back in 2015 and both sides have been trying ever since to fathom the causes of this historical rapture.
Some of the hypotheses going around include: it’s just the product of populism; the new economic order is not working for noncollege workers; working class people are consumed by the culture wars; they don’t feel respected; There is a kernel of truth in all these explanations, but each one of them and even all together leave out longer brewing developments in American society which can offer a more convincing explanation.
I found the traces to an alternative explanation while I was reading Poverty, By America by Princeton University sociology professor Matthew Desmond.* The gist of this explanation is this: Starting in the late 1960s, the costs of social reform in America fell predominantly on white working class Americans. In the mid-sixties, Lyndon Johnson’s pathbreaking legislation reaffirmed equality in civil rights, voting rights, and housing. Along with the Supreme Court decision on Brown v. Board of Education (1954), these laws aimed at ending segregation and restoring equal rights to all Americans in order to achieve social and economic integration.
How well, however, did these social reforms play out in reality? As Desmond writes, less privileged urban and rural white Americans were practically asked to bear the consequences, that is, consequences their fellow more privileged and affluent white Americans were not willing to put up with.
Desmond recounts events that we all, more or less, know. Following the desegregation of public schools, affluent white families abandoned them for private secular and parochial schools. The better off decamped to the suburbs where they could control school boards and zoning commissions. In all major cities public schools were left to educate Black kids and the kids of poorer white families. Given how public schools are funded, the withdrawal of better situated families along with their tax dollars and political influence left public schools underfunded and underperforming.
Although the Fair Housing Act of 1968 removed discrimination on the basis of race, municipal and zoning authorities found indirect methods to keep out minorities of color and poor white families. The most effective measure was to restrict the construction of multifamily dwellings and affordable housing in general. This way public schools, parks, pools, and other public amenities in affluent suburbs and exclusive neighbors were redlined for the use only of those who could pass the test of inclusiveness.
As these reforms were taking hold, white voters in general started to develop a hostile attitude toward taxes dedicated to the goal of social integration and services to underprivileged Americans. But white revolt against taxes had an unintended consequence. The quality of public goods and services deteriorated but not to the same degree for all. Less affluent whites residing in cities and less prosperous places had to content with crumbling schools and parks, while locally raised revenue in affluent suburbs ensured first-rate public facilities for those lucky enough to afford living there. As Desmond writes a home mortgage was no longer a financing tool. Instead, it became a ticket to buying an investment whose value was secured by scarcity thanks to zoning laws, and enjoying public safety, good schools, and securing admission to a good college. Thus, Desmond writes, opportunities for social mobility were commodified.
In the early 1970s, incomes also started to diverge between noncollege and college educated workers. The economic globalization and the growth of internet in the 1990s caused a further deterioration of the economic fortunes of less privileged Americans as jobs shifted from the agricultural and industrial heartland of America to cities, which became hubs of innovation, profitable businesses, and prosperity. But thriving cities also became increasingly expensive in housing. That also kept poor and less affluent families out of the places where opportunities for better living were created.
As the cosmopolitan outlook and ideas of educated elites and professionals drove them away from the interests of their fellow citizens who were less equipped to survive in the new world order, working class Americans felt the sting of abandonment. Cosmopolitanism viewed the rise of foreign peoples out of poverty thanks to global trade as a sign of human progress but it failed to take notice of the social decline and human suffering following the collapse of previously mighty industrial centers in America. As another Princeton economist, Angus Deaton, reminds us in his book Economics in America, the new order, so favorable to educated Americans, came at the cost of alcoholism, drug abuse, and deaths of despair among working class, and predominantly white, Americans. Ironically, Deaton notes, the burden of defending the new order fell disproportionately on those who benefited the least. In 2015, only 8% of the enlisted troops, mostly drawn from inner cities and rural areas, had a college degree.
Working class Americans eventually realized how little control and choices they had. They were told what opportunities were open to them, in what economic order to make a living, what technologies to adopt, what wars to fight, and what was politically acceptable speech. No wonder they came to distrust the symbols and power centers of the elites: meritocracy, universities, science, the press, electoral politics. Even to doubt their patriotism.
Although white working-class people are distrustful of both conservative and liberal elites, they seem to really loathe the latter. The reason is very plain. Liberals were those who campaigned and pushed for the social reforms that would bring equality and integration. But when they finally succeeded, they were the ones to retreat from the consequences of integration. When Black Americans moved out of the South in the Great Migration of the 20th century, they flocked in predominantly liberal cities. As a result, that’s where the integration project was mostly going to take place. The record shows affluent whites were not prepared for that.
Can we be optimistic about improving social cohesion and solidarity in America? I am not sure, but I think that to heal the rift between working class and educated elites it is the latter that need to take the first and most decisive steps.
*Matthew Desmond writes about poverty having lived it himself and having lived with poor people. His book Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City won the Pulitzer Prize.
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