It’s All in the Numbers

While most of the reaction I have seen in the major media outlets about the election results has expressed shock and dismay, more thoughtful commentary is beginning to trickle out. I think that David Brooks’s most recent New York Times column may be one of his best ever. He opens with a disposition on the trends of the last, say, 40 years:

We have entered a new political era. For the past 40 years or so, we lived in the information age. Those of us in the educated class decided, with some justification, that the postindustrial economy would be built by people like ourselves, so we tailored social policies to meet our needs.

Our education policy pushed people toward the course we followed — four-year colleges so that they would be qualified for the “jobs of the future.” Meanwhile, vocational training withered. We embraced a free trade policy that moved industrial jobs to low-cost countries overseas so that we could focus our energies on knowledge economy enterprises run by people with advanced degrees. The financial and consulting sector mushroomed while manufacturing employment shriveled.

Geography was deemed unimportant — if capital and high-skill labor wanted to cluster in Austin, San Francisco and Washington, it didn’t really matter what happened to all those other communities left behind. Immigration policies gave highly educated people access to low-wage labor while less-skilled workers faced new competition. We shifted toward green technologies favored by people who work in pixels, and we disfavored people in manufacturing and transportation whose livelihoods depend on fossil fuels.

I’ve been complaining about this for decades. Why? My answer is in the title of this post: it’s the numbers. The country with the largest proportion of college grads is Canada at 54% (Russia has the same percentage). The percentage of college grads in the U. S. is around 44% while 61% have “some college”.

I don’t conclude that all is well for 44% of Americans from that. I conclude that something between 15% and 30% of Americans don’t have jobs that actually require college degrees and are saddled with educational debt they will never be able to pay off. And as I’ve documented here in the past, an astonishing percentage of the “educated class” are employed by the government in one form or another. Not all by any means but a very large percentage.

Here’s the rub. There are more people with college degrees in India than there are people in the United States and they all speak English.

What it means is that the “knowledge economy” leaves 2/3s of Americans behind and bitterly unhappy with their lot. That’s no way to run a railroad.

Mr. Brooks goes on to describe exactly that situation:

Nine days before the elections, I visited a Christian nationalist church in Tennessee. The service was illuminated by genuine faith, it is true, but also a corrosive atmosphere of bitterness, aggression, betrayal. As the pastor went on about the Judases who seek to destroy us, the phrase “dark world” popped into my head — an image of a people who perceive themselves to be living under constant threat and in a culture of extreme distrust. These people, and many other Americans, weren’t interested in the politics of joy that Kamala Harris and the other law school grads were offering.

and

Many on the left focused on racial inequality, gender inequality and L.G.B.T.Q. inequality. I guess it’s hard to focus on class inequality when you went to a college with a multibillion-dollar endowment and do environmental greenwashing and diversity seminars for a major corporation.

concluding:

Donald Trump is a monstrous narcissist, but there’s something off about an educated class that looks in the mirror of society and sees only itself.

a very good turn of phrase and almost precisely my view.

Here’s Mr. Brooks’s summary of the election:

As the left veered toward identitarian performance art, Donald Trump jumped into the class war with both feet. His Queens-born resentment of the Manhattan elites dovetailed magically with the class animosity being felt by rural people across the country. His message was simple: These people have betrayed you, and they are morons to boot.

In 2024, he built the very thing the Democratic Party once tried to build — a multiracial, working-class majority. His support surged among Black and Hispanic workers. He recorded astonishing gains in places like New Jersey, the Bronx, Chicago, Dallas and Houston. According to the NBC exit polls he won a third of voters of color. He’s the first Republican to win a majority of the votes in 20 years.

which is remarkably similar to what Ruy Teixeira has been complaining about for some time.

He then declaims that the Democrats need to do some humble self-analysis:

Can the Democratic Party do this? Can the party of the universities, the affluent suburbs and the hipster urban cores do this? Well, Donald Trump hijacked a corporate party, which hardly seemed like a vehicle for proletarian revolt, and did exactly that. Those of us who condescend to Trump should feel humbled — he did something none of us could do.

Here’s his conclusion:

Trump is a sower of chaos, not fascism. Over the next few years, a plague of disorder will descend upon America, and maybe the world, shaking everything loose. If you hate polarization, just wait until we experience global disorder. But in chaos there’s opportunity for a new society and a new response to the Trumpian political, economic and psychological assault. These are the times that try people’s souls, and we’ll see what we are made of.