In his most recent op-ed at the Boston Globe Niall Ferguson reminds us of those two distilled and contrasting communities, Fishtown and Belmont:
On the one hand there is a “cognitive elite,†who are educated together at universities like Harvard and Yale, then marry each other, work together, and live together in the same exclusive neighborhoods.
Concentrated in “super zipcodes†such as Beverly Hills, Santa Monica, Malibu, Manhattan, and Boston, these people are politically more liberal than the national average, as well as much richer and more inclined to eat quinoa salads.
On the other side of this social chasm is a new lower class: white Americans with nothing more than a high school diploma, if that. They eat Chick-fil-A, not quinoa. In a masterstroke of exposition, Murray vividly localized his argument by imagining two emblematic communities: Belmont, where everyone has at least one university degree, and Fishtown, where no one has any.
By one reckoning Donald Trump is running for president as the tribune of Fishtown. I think that’s a phantasm.
However, whoever is elected president Fishtown’s problems will remain. These include:
Since 2005, according to a new report by McKinsey, more than four fifths of population (81 percent) have had flat or falling incomes. The white lower class is in the grip of an epidemic of ill health and premature death.
consequences of
Family breakdown, loss of employment, crime, declining “social capital 
and these have been exacerbated by policy.
Welcoming the residents of Fishtown into Belmont isn’t a workable alternative but it’s been the beacon for three consecutive presidential administrations. Even if 100% of the people had university degrees (absurd on the face of it), that wouldn’t mean that maids, nannies, gardeners, grocery store cashiers, bank clerks, and the millions of other people who work in poorly compensated white or blue collar jobs will sudddenly become highly compensated knowledge workers. It means they’ll be maids, nannies, gardeners, etc. with college degrees, disappointed that the degree wasn’t accompanied with what they thought were the trappings of the degree.
… and these have been exacerbated by policy.
More than merely exacerbated by policy, but much of it is driven by policy. And then people’s noses are rubbed in it.
But I would like to point something out:
The bottom 81% isn’t the white lower class. That’s damned near everyone.
I’d also point out that “educational attainment” is a kind of bullshit that hides much. My analytical skills far surpass the President’s despite my mere bachelor’s degree versus his lofty whatever the fuck he got from Harvard Law. But then mathematics demands actual ability, while bullshit just requires that people want to believe whatever shit you’re selling. He isn’t capable of understanding most of the numbers he occasionally bandies about. This makes him little different from most of the people in politics and “journalism”. What he does have is fuck-all better connections than anyone like me could ever have. Money and connections are all it’s about any more.
And people are starting to realize it’s only about money and connections, and that everything else they’ve been taught is BS put forth by people looking to exploit them. Trump is riot by the voters (and so was Sanders, to an extent), and neither are likely to be the last.
Ellipses, I’m reading that paragraph differently, perhaps because I think that the recent study making the rounds about declining health and rising mortality was specifically about middle-aged whites. More of a non-sequitur unless I’m mis-remembering.
re policy: I recently re-read a paper on the changes immigration had brought to Carp town, a city of about 6,000 people about 45 minutes from me, home to a meatpacking plant that employs about 2,000.
Cargill bought the plant from Oscar Meyer in 1987 and cut wages by 25%, with starting salaries going from $8.75 per hour to $6.50. “This drop in wages made the jobs less attractive for most white skilled workers. By the early 1990s, the company’s turnover rate reached close to 100 percent. The plant shifted to trans-local and transnational recruitment among a cheaper, more desperate labor force.” It sent recruiters to both sides of the Mexican border. From 1990 to 2000, foreign born residents increased by 3500%. Schools went from 0% to 30% non-English speakers. (Paper doesn’t go into housing costs dynamics, but reading between the lines, when wages were cut people began moving away, and with the average home selling for $40,000 to $50,000, about half of Mexican workers became homeowners, but likely at a discount, to the detriment of schools funded primarily by property taxes in Illinois.) The effect of remittances is that whatever multiplier effect from jobs is being redirected to Mexico.
In the late 1990s, a Mexican shot and killed a white man and fled to Mexico, leading to the burning of a cross in a public space, burning to the ground the Mexican tavern where the shooting took place, and a march by the KKK. Mexico briefly detained but refused to extradite the killer. Meanwhile, INS made some noise that they might be interested in the plant, whose Mexican workers were rumored to be mostly using fraudulent papers.
The plant switched tactics and used the diversity visa program to recruit Francophone Africans to start replacing jobs held by Latinos. They were settled across the river from Carp town for fear of ethnic communal violence. (The diversity visa program appears to be dedicated to the proposition that every ethnic community in the world should be represented in the Great American melting pot, regardless of skills, family connections or humanitarian concerns)
Once there were Americans doing jobs that Belmont needed, but didn’t want to do itself, but because capital needed 25% wage cuts for Belmont 401ks and public pensions, government policy helped import a more desperate labor force to Carp town. Unfortunately, the new labor force isn’t fully invested in Carp town and expects to move-on, but somewhere in this great world of wonders there are even more desperate people waiting to make someone’s dreams come true.
Fishtown, that’s me. Lured by good pay and a Teamsters pension in 1979 I worked the kind of hours you would not believe anyway if I told you. Too many of us lived too long and the pensions are wiped out. So who fucking cares? Not the taxpayers ( oh that’s right, I paid taxes for 47 years. My wife cares, but she’s not gay or transgendered so fuck her.
I just saw that Hotbody Obama sent a plane with 400 million dollars in various currencies to Iran as a downpayment for the release of four American hostages. Priorities. If he hangs around, I’ll cast my vote for Trump just to upset that applecart that works for everyone but me. And yes, I know we DIE, yes DIE. Parting shot @ connected elites.