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@REPLYADDR Norm Chomsky <X@gmail.com>
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Donald Trump seems to get indicted on a weekly basis. Yet he is utterly
dominating his Republican rivals in the polls, and he is tied with Joe
Biden in the general election surveys. Trump`s poll numbers are
stronger against Biden now than at any time in 2020.
What`s going on here? Why is this guy still politically viable, after
all he`s done?
We anti-Trumpers often tell a story to explain that. It was
encapsulated in a quote the University of North Carolina political
scientist Marc Hetherington gave to my colleague Thomas B. Edsall
recently: "Republicans see a world changing around them uncomfortably
fast, and they want it to slow down, maybe even take a step backward.
But if you are a person of color, a woman who values gender equality or
an L.G.B.T. person, would you want to go back to 1963? I doubt it."
In this story, we anti-Trumpers are the good guys, the forces of
progress and enlightenment. The Trumpers are reactionary bigots and
authoritarians. Many Republicans support Trump no matter what,
according to this story, because at the end of the day, he`s still the
bigot in chief, the embodiment of their resentments and that`s what
matters to them most.
I partly agree with this story, but it`s also a monument to elite
self-satisfaction.
So let me try another story on you. I ask you to try on a vantage point
in which we anti-Trumpers are not the eternal good guys. In fact, we`re
the bad guys.
This story begins in the 1960s, when high school grads had to go off to
fight in Vietnam but the children of the educated class got college
deferments. It continues in the 1970s, when the authorities imposed
busing on working-class areas in Boston but not on the upscale
communities like Wellesley where they themselves lived.
The ideal that we`re all in this together was replaced with the reality
that the educated class lives in a world up here and everybody else is
forced into a world down there. Members of our class are always
publicly speaking out for the marginalized, but somehow we always end
up building systems that serve ourselves.
The most important of those systems is the modern meritocracy. We built
an entire social order that sorts and excludes people on the basis of
the quality that we possess most: academic achievement. Highly educated
parents go to elite schools, marry each other, work at high-paying
professional jobs and pour enormous resources into our children, who
get into the same elite schools, marry each other and pass their
exclusive class privileges down from generation to generation.
Daniel Markovits summarized years of research in his book "The
Meritocracy Trap": "Today, middle-class children lose out to the rich
children at school, and middle-class adults lose out to elite graduates
at work. Meritocracy blocks the middle class from opportunity. Then it
blames those who lose a competition for income and status that, even
when everyone plays by the rules, only the rich can win."
The meritocracy isn`t only a system of exclusion; it`s an ethos. During
his presidency, Barack Obama used the word "smart" in the context of
his policies over 900 times. The implication was that anybody who
disagreed with his policies (and perhaps didn`t go to Harvard Law) must
be stupid.
Over the last decades, we`ve taken over whole professions and locked
everybody else out. When I began my journalism career in Chicago in the
1980s, there were still some old crusty working-class guys around the
newsroom. Now we`re not only a college-dominated profession; we`re an
elite-college-dominated profession. Only 0.8 percent of college
students graduate from the super-elite 12 schools (the Ivy League
colleges, plus Stanford, M.I.T., Duke and the University of Chicago). A
2018 study found that more than 50 percent of the staff writers at the
beloved New York Times and The Wall Street Journal attended one of the
29 most elite universities in the nation.
Writing in Compact magazine, Michael Lind observes that the upper-
middle-class job market looks like a candelabrum: "Those who manage to
squeeze through the stem of a few prestigious colleges and universities
in their youth can then branch out to fill leadership positions in
almost every vocation."
Or, as Markovits puts it, "elite graduates monopolize the best jobs and
at the same time invent new technologies that privilege superskilled
workers, making the best jobs better and all other jobs worse."
Members of our class also segregate ourselves into a few booming metro
areas: San Francisco, D.C., Austin and so on. In 2020, Biden won only
500 or so counties, but together they are responsible for 71 percent of
the American economy. Trump won over 2,500 counties, responsible for
only 29 percent. Once we find our cliques, we don`t get out much. In
the book "Social Class in the 21st Century," the sociologist Mike
Savage and his co-researchers found that the members of the highly
educated class tend to be the most insular, measured by how often we
have contact with those who have jobs unlike our own.
Credit...Mark Peterson/Redux, for The New York Times
Armed with all kinds of economic, cultural and political power, we
support policies that help ourselves. Free trade makes the products we
buy cheaper, and our jobs are unlikely to be moved to China. Open
immigration makes our service staff cheaper, but new, less-educated
immigrants aren`t likely to put downward pressure on our wages.
Like all elites, we use language and mores as tools to recognize one
another and exclude others. Using words like "problematic,"
"cisgender," "Latinx" and "intersectional" is a sure sign that you`ve
got cultural capital coming out of your ears. Meanwhile, members of the
less-educated classes have to walk on eggshells because they never know
when we`ve changed the usage rules so that something that was sayable
five years ago now gets you fired.
We also change the moral norms in ways that suit ourselves, never mind
the cost to others. For example, there used to be a norm that
discouraged people from having children outside marriage, but that got
washed away during our period of cultural dominance, as we eroded norms
that seemed judgmental or that might inhibit individual freedom.
After this social norm was eroded, a funny thing happened. Members of
our class still overwhelmingly married and had children within wedlock.
People without our resources, unsupported by social norms, were less
able to do that. As Adrian Wooldridge points out in his magisterial
2021 book, "The Aristocracy of Talent," "Sixty percent of births to
women with only a high school certificate occur out of wedlock,
compared with only 10 percent to women with a university degree." That
matters, he continues, because "the rate of single parenting is the
most significant predictor of social immobility in the country."
Does this mean that I think the people in my class are vicious and
evil? No. Most of us are earnest, kind and public-spirited. But we take
for granted and benefit from systems that have become oppressive. Elite
institutions have become so politically progressive in part because the
people in them want to feel good about themselves as they take part in
systems that exclude and reject.
It`s easy to understand why people in less-educated classes would
conclude that they are under economic, political, cultural and moral
assault -- and why they`ve rallied around Trump as their best warrior
against the educated class. He understood that it`s not the
entrepreneurs who seem most threatening to workers; it`s the
professional class. Trump understood that there was great demand for a
leader who would stick his thumb in our eyes on a daily basis and
reject the whole epistemic regime that we rode in on.
If distrustful populism is your basic worldview, the Trump indictments
seem like just another skirmish in the class war between the
professionals and the workers, another assault by a bunch of coastal
lawyers who want to take down the man who most aggressively stands up
to them. Of course, the indictments don`t cause Trump supporters to
abandon him. They cause them to become more fiercely loyal. That`s the
polling story of the last six months.
Are Trump supporters right that the indictments are just a political
witch hunt? Of course not. As a card-carrying member of my class, I
still basically trust the legal system and the neutral arbiters of
justice. Trump is a monster in the way we`ve all been saying for years
and deserves to go to prison.
But there`s a larger context here. As the sociologist E. Digby Baltzell
wrote decades ago, "History is a graveyard of classes which have
preferred caste privileges to leadership." That is the destiny our
class is now flirting with. We can condemn the Trumpian populists until
the cows come home, but the real question is: When will we stop
behaving in ways that make Trumpism inevitable?
David Brooks has been a columnist with The Times since 2003. He is the
author of "The Road to Character" and, most recently, "The Second
Mountain." @nytdavidbrooks
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