Nevertheless She Persisted

In her weekly column at the Wall Street Journal Peggy Noonan succinctly summarizes Hillary Clinton’s persistent error and the quandary in which Democrats find themselves:

“If you look at the map of the United States,” she said, “there’s all that red in the middle where Trump won. I win the coasts. . . . But what the map doesn’t show you is that I won the places that represent two-thirds of America’s gross domestic product. So I won the places that are optimistic, diverse, dynamic, moving forward.” Mr. Trump’s campaign “was looking backwards. You know, you didn’t like black people getting rights, you don’t like women getting jobs, you don’t wanna see that Indian-American succeeding more than you are.”

Why did 52% of white women support Mr. Trump? Because the Democratic Party doesn’t do well with white men and married white women. “Part of that is an identification with the Republican Party, and a sort of ongoing pressure to vote the way that your husband, your boss, your son, whoever, believes you should.” James Comey announced that he had reopened the investigation of her State Department emails, and “white women who were going to vote for me, and frankly standing up to the men in their lives and the men in their workplaces, were being told, ‘She’s going to jail. You don’t want to vote for her.’ ”

So, to recap: Trump supporters were racist, narrow and ignorant, and Trump women are not tough and modern but fearful, cowering and easily led. They live in a big mass of red in the middle (like an ugly wound, or an inflammation!) while we have the coasts—better real estate. And better people.

The point of her column is that Ms. Clinton and others who hold her views are clinging bitterly to a “Deliverance” view of America beyond the urban megalopolises. I think she’s got the wrong movie. More like The Hills Have Eyes. Or maybe Wrong Turn.

However, let me provide an alternative explanation to the one proposed by Ms. Clinton to why big cities are prospering. They’re being highly subsidized and the calculations of government subsidy generally don’t capture the actual value of those subsidies. The interstate highway system subsidizes major cities. Intellectual property law subsidizes big cities. Banking laws subsidize big cities. Uncontrolled imports of hard goods while controlling the provision of services subsidizes cities. Concentrating federal government offices in Washington, DC and its environs subsidizes the East Coast megalopolis.

Then there are the direct subsidies. In the wake of 9/11 New York City received between $20 billion and $50 billion in direct subsidies from government at various levels. Then there are the huge infusions of cash the big, mostly New York-located banks received during the financial crisis. That New York is prospering from all of these subsidies is not surprising what would be surprising is if it didn’t.

Not all major cities are flourishing. Chicago is not. Philadelphia is not. Baltimore is not. St. Louis is not. That effectively refutes the urban/rural dichotomy being proposed. What should be more closely examined is subsidized vs. unsubsidized. In today’s economy what is subsidized flourishes while what is not struggles.

20 comments… add one
  • TastyBits Link

    Not all major cities are flourishing. Chicago is not. Philadelphia is not. Baltimore is not. St. Louis is not. That effectively refutes the urban/rural dichotomy being proposed. […]

    These cities have something in common. There are a lot of poor people and a lot of them have dark skin. If there is one thing a progressive hates more than a racist, it is being around poor dark skinned people.

  • Andy Link

    Urban/Rural is no longer a useful dividing line. The places that are growing most rapidly aren’t urban cores, but the suburbs and exurbs around them.

    BTW Dave, as we researched places to settle down I noticed that Chicago suburbs rate very highly for places to raise a family:

    https://www.niche.com/places-to-live/search/best-places-for-families/

  • steve Link

    1) There really aren’t that many people on the left who view people the way Noonan says everyone on the left does. Having grown up in the Midwest and working in Trump country, I would guess the percentage is about the same as people in those areas sneer at look down upon people who live in big cities. Granted, it is a heck of a lot easier to knock down a straw man.

    2) We went around on this before. Until we have real data I am not sure who actually gets subsidized the most. Drive through coal country. Without federal spending the place completely dies off. The rate of drug and alcohol addiction is very high. Do you have any idea how hard it is for me to find people to give them money in exchange for work?

    3) Yup, the Dems have been guilty of ignoring the working class, but is it even remotely possible to believe that the GOP has been better? They want to believe Trump, and he is apparently a convincing liar to some people, but if you live in the NE you know he is a con man.

    Steve

  • Until we have real data I am not sure who actually gets subsidized the most.

    Are you suggesting that dropping $50 billion on NYC had no effect? Or that NYC would just have absorbed the collapse of Citibank and Goldman Sachs? No one will ever include those in tallies of subsidies to big cities but that’s what they were.

    The federal government didn’t drop that kind of money on any small town or rural country however reckoned, whether per capita (that would be $2,500 per person) by GDP per capita or any other way.

    The real world requires that we make real decisions without real data all of the time. And if you ignore enough real data you can arrive at any conclusion you care to.

  • Andy Link

    “Granted, it is a heck of a lot easier to knock down a straw man.”

    I think it’s probably a bit of a straw man when applied to “the left” but then there are always exceptions with any large, amorphous group. I do think it’s completely accurate, however, when applied to Clinton and the many elites who share her views.

  • PD Shaw Link

    Odd times when Dave mentions a horror movie that I cannot recall (Wrong Turn) and having looked it up, I cannot believe he’s actually seen.

    I can recall when I first moved to New Orleans for school and I met a number of people called “New Yorkers” at the introductions party. The first thing I noticed was that a number of them had just learned to drive in their 20s. Fascinating. The other thing that stood out was the route they had taken btw/ NY and NO was quite circuitous — many went from I-10 to I-95, hugging the coasts. Why? Because the mental map showed the direct route was through Deliverance country.

  • PD Shaw Link

    In addition to Andy’s point about urban vs. rural being simplistic, I’ll also point out that in the New York metro, Trump performed better than Romney, and Clinton performed worse than Obama.

    https://www.citylab.com/equity/2016/12/where-metro-areas-swung-for-trump-and-clinton/509633/

    Clinton still racked up a lot of votes there, but Trump’s gains appear to have been in the metropolitan areas, particularly in the Rust belt.

  • Modulo Myself Link

    As if coastal cities are only composed of people who grew up in these cities. They’re not. I have a friend who grew up in a mill-town in SC with working class parents. Now she’s on tenure-track at NYU. Her portrayal of where she grew up is of a very limited place filled with racist evangelical Christians. Is she wrong? Because for Penny Noonan–who apparently grew up in Brooklyn–she knows nothing about where she’s from.

  • PD Shaw Link

    Correction: from I-95 to I-10.

  • Odd times when Dave mentions a horror movie that I cannot recall (Wrong Turn) and having looked it up, I cannot believe he’s actually seen.

    I contain multitudes.

  • Modulo Myself Link

    Also, Deliverance was written by James Dickey. He’s no New Yorker.

  • Andy Link

    PD,

    Reminds me of this Top Gear segment:

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pKcJ-0bAHB4

  • Andy Link

    I’ve always traveled a lot and have lived in many different parts of the country, in both rural and urban areas. I’m currently traveling fulltime. I’ve spent a lot of time in the American hinterlands as well as the coasts.

    Invariably, I find that that vast majority of people are nice, pleasant and hardworking. Very few come close to matching the various descriptions that some attribute to people they don’t know and have never met.

    This whole thing reminds me of another story from a few years back:

    https://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/02/21/san-francisco-man-in-mass_n_168797.html

  • steve Link

    “Are you suggesting that dropping $50 billion on NYC had no effect?”

    Are you suggesting that every city had $50 billion dropped on it?

    “many went from I-10 to I-95, hugging the coasts. Why? Because the mental map showed the direct route was through Deliverance country.”

    Really? They told you that? I would have guessed that for New Yorkers interstate driving was just easier, and who wants to miss South of the Border? Might even be faster, especially since that was probably before Google Maps.

    Steve

  • Are you suggesting that every city had $50 billion dropped on it?

    The cities that are thriving did. It took many forms. The Bay Area is thriving in large part due to intellectual property law. That’s part of the secret of Seattle’s success, too. Add to that the exemption from sales tax granted to web commerce that granted a competitive edge over brick and mortar stores. Boston had massive defense contracts.

    Why not level the playing field? Eliminate agricultural subsidies, intellectual property law, legal protections afforded to some individuals and organizations, and all of the rest of the vast panoply of subsidies. Or, alternatively, subsidize everything. Import restrictions, export subsidies, barriers to entry for most jobs, etc.

    That might give an even break to Detroit, Gary, and Youngstown.

  • Guarneri Link

    Hillary who?

  • PD Shaw Link

    @steve, they didn’t really tell me anything. I just found myself with a group of New Yorkers sharing their travel stories with each other. Multiple people referenced Deliverance as a sort of short-hand for their decisionmaking criteria.

    And it wasn’t staying on the interstates that was peculiar (to me), it was avoiding direct interstate routes, like those going through Atlanta or Knoxville.

    A friend in that circle would say her main memory of me from that evening was that I was the only person she met who didn’t have a place to live yet.

  • steve Link

    PD- I think I have spent, and continue to spend, enough time in each of those worlds that I discount most of that stuff. When the little old ladies and men in mining country tell me they would never go to NYC since they think they are all muggers there, I don’t really think they believe that.

    Steve

  • Gray Shambler Link

    They’re not all muggers, but the muggers know you’re from out of town.

  • PD Shaw Link

    @steve, the conversation was light and self-deprecating, and a few years later the reference point might been “My Cousin Vinny.” Still, they drove the legs of the triangle, and not the hypotenuse. I doubt they ever did that again.

Leave a Comment