by Peter Wehner
Donald Trump ran for president in 2016 with no experience and no obvious qualifications for the job. Over the course of nearly a dozen presidential primary debates and countless interviews, speeches, and Twitter storms, Trump showed he was unsuited to be president. The former reality television show star proved himself to be a huckster and a con man, a peddler of conspiracy theories and a compulsive liar, vindictive and erratic, and staggeringly ignorant of the key political issues of the day. Often his answers amounted to a word salad—a confused mixture of seemingly random and repetitive phrases. I don’t make these claims out of political rancor; all of them are reasonable verdicts based on cold, hard facts.
What was alarming, though, was that none of this seemed to matter—and weirdly, some of it seemed to help him.
To many Trump voters, he was an agent of change, a “street fighter” who hits back against his critics many times harder than they hit him, a man who was “authentic” and not “politically correct.” To his core supporters Trump was a wrecking ball against the much-loathed “establishment,” or a man who would “drain the swamp.” His inexperience and sheer abnormality were seen as marks in his favor. He wasn’t part of the problem. He was an outsider—in his case, it was said, a successful businessman and deal maker—in a nation that perceived politics as broken.
How broken? A Washington Post–University of Maryland poll in 2017, the year Trump assumed office, revealed “a starkly pessimistic view of U.S. politics, widespread distrust of the nation’s political leaders and their ability to compromise, and an erosion of pride in the way democracy works in America.”1
Among the findings was that just 14 percent of Americans said they view the ethics and honesty of politicians as excellent or good. Seven in ten Americans said the nation’s politics have reached a dangerous low point, and a majority of those believe the situation is a “new normal” rather than temporary. The same number, seven in ten, said the nation’s political divisions are at least as deep as during the Vietnam War.
A Gallup poll the following year, 2018, found that fewer than half of those surveyed, 47 percent, said they are “extremely proud” to be an American, a record low. Fifteen years earlier the figure was 70 percent.2
“I’m old enough that I remember the Vietnam War,” Ed Evans, a sixty-seven-year-old lawyer in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, said in an interview with the Post. “With Vietnam, at least it was focused on one issue. Here, it’s all over the place. In some ways, this is deeply more troubling.”
“This country is a mess” is how Ellen Collins, an independent who is a retired data architect in Dayton, Ohio, put it. “There’s no civility. Friends are now enemies. These issues have made people angry.”3
Mutual contempt between Republicans and Democrats is rapidly rising, and sizable shares of both Democrats and Republicans say the other party stirs feelings of not just frustration but fear and anger.4
I’ve experienced this firsthand, as former colleagues as well as even close friends and relatives have not simply criticized my views of President Trump but argued that my anti-Trump stance is a product of seeking fortune and fame among the liberal intelligentsia. My politics wasn’t simply wrong, in other words; it was a manifestation of a character flaw.
“I can appreciate the reasons you possibly sold out to the D.C. cartel, Pete (survival and keeping groceries on the table are powerful motivators), but it still pains me to realize that someone I have admired for so long did so,” a distant relative I have always gotten along with wrote to me in 2017. “Why did you decide that you had to go with the prevailing winds in D.C. to preserve a career?”
At the same time, public trust in the government is near historic lows. Three-quarters of Americans believe it is a serious problem that the political system in Washington is not working well enough to produce solutions to the nation’s problems.5
So how did we get to this moment?
The answer is complicated, and as with any broad trend there are many contributing and converging factors. But four are worth emphasizing because they go a long way toward helping us understand where we are: (1) massive demographic and cultural changes, which many see as redefining what it means to be American; (2) long-term income stagnation for most workers, which provokes middle-class economic anxieties; (3) the ongoing polarization of our political parties at the cost of not solving America’s problems; and (4) the resulting loss of trust in the political class.
Let’s briefly explore each of them in order.
DEMOGRAPHIC DISRUPTION
The conventional analysis in the aftermath of Donald Trump’s improbable victory in 2016 is that it was primarily the result of economic anxieties among blue-collar, working-class whites. But recent studies indicate that something else, something more visceral, was also going on.
Many Trump voters—mostly male, white, and Christian—were driven by cultural anxiety, a fear of losing their status in society, and a longing to regain a sense of social dominance.
“It’s much more of a symbolic threat that people feel,” Diana C. Mutz, the author of the study and a political science and communications professor at the University of Pennsylvania, told the New York Times. “It’s not a threat to their own economic well-being; it’s a threat to their group’s dominance in our country over all.”6
Her study challenged the claim that economic anxiety was the main reason people voted for Trump, finding instead that social displacement played a large role. “It used to be a pretty good deal to be a white, Christian male in America, but things have changed and I think they do feel threatened,” Dr. Mutz said. She told the Times that Trump support was linked to a belief that high-status groups, such as whites, Christians, or men, faced more discrimination than low-status groups, like minorities, Muslims, or women.
Another study, this one a survey by the Public Religion Research Institute and The Atlantic, found that “fears about immigrants and cultural displacement were more powerful factors than economic concerns in predicting support for Trump among white working-class voters.”7
The data on white working-class Americans are striking: nearly two-thirds of white working-class Americans believe America’s culture and way of life have deteriorated since the 1950s; nearly half say that “things have changed so much that I often feel like a stranger in my own country”; nearly seven in ten believe the American way of life needs to be protected from foreign influence; and nearly seven in ten white working-class Americans believe the US is in danger of losing its culture and identity.
The scale of these shifts is enormous. Earlier in this decade, and for the first time in American history, people who say they are “white” and “Christian” constituted less than 50 percent of the population in America. White Christians are now a minority. Students of color now make up a majority of public school pupils. Almost 40 percent of the population is nonwhite, double what it was in 1980. Meanwhile, the foreign-born population in the United States—13.7 percent of the total population—has reached its highest share since 1910. (In 1970, the foreign-born population was less than 5 percent.)8
We’ve seen equally dramatic changes in the arenas of culture, family, and human sexuality. The share of American adults who have never married is at an all-time high. Half of adults are married today, compared to 72 percent in 1960.9 Two-parent households are in decline (from 88 percent in 1960 to 69 percent today),10 and 40 percent of all births are to unwed mothers.11 Nearly half of two-parent households have a mother and father who both work.12 Gay marriage, which not that many years ago was considered unthinkable, is today the law of the land and has widespread public support. That issue is now settled in the minds of most Americans; the next boundary has to do with transgender rights.
For many Americans, these changes have been deeply unsettling.
To focus on a subgroup with which I am quite familiar: in the span of a generation, evangelical Christians have gone from seeing themselves as a “moral majority” to an embattled minority. I have talked to evang
elical authors, academics, college presidents, and nonprofit leaders about this; they describe reactions among Christians ranging from angry combativeness to disillusioned withdrawal.
John Inazu, the author of Confident Pluralism: Surviving and Thriving Through Deep Difference, told me he has seen in some circles “an insecurity caused by a rapidly lost social position,” leading some to a “growing bitterness and despair.”13
A consequence of all of this is that the factions of our politics, the subgroups contending for their separate causes, have all become more philosophically and culturally uniform, widening the differences between groups and making it nearly impossible to find common ground. Essentially what is happening is that those who are comfortable with demographic and cultural changes are identifying as Democrats while those who are uncomfortable with those changes are identifying as Republicans—and never the twain shall meet.14
And this is important to recognize: these differences are over issues that many people are particularly impassioned about. They are fundamental differences over the deepest questions. The result is that our politics is inflamed. Those on the right view their opponents as intent on destroying America as they conceive of it; those on the left view their opponents as benighted, bigoted, and cruel.
It’s an explosive mix.
ECONOMIC ANXIETIES AND THE MIDDLE CLASS
Changes in demography provide only one piece of the puzzle, however. Economics is another.
As I write this, America is experiencing quite a long period of growth—we’re closing in on the longest economic expansion in modern US history—combined with low unemployment, low inflation, and low interest rates. Confidence in the economy is rising a decade after a savage recession. A 2018 report issued by the Federal Reserve Board found that nearly three-quarters of adults said they were either doing okay or living comfortably, over 10 percentage points more than in the first survey in 2013.15
At the same time, growth in both GDP (gross domestic product) and wages has been low by historical standards. Real GDP growth in the twenty-first century has been significantly below what it was during the latter half of the twentieth century,16 while over the course of the past two decades, under both Republican and Democratic rule, median household income has been essentially flat. This stagnation, lasting over the course of an entire generation, is without parallel in postwar America.17 Many Americans feel as if they’ve been either spinning their wheels or sliding backward.
The political commentator Ron Brownstein, in analyzing data about the attitudes of Americans spanning the years just prior to the 2016 election, concluded, “The overall message is of pervasive, entrenched vulnerability—a sense that many financial milestones once assumed as cornerstones of middle-class life are now beyond reach for all but the rich.”18
That anxious mood of Americans, very much including the American middle class, is not simply a problem of morale. It has been rooted, at least in part, in real circumstances and actual struggles.
Since 2000, the middle class has shrunk in size and fallen backward in income and wealth. For most American workers, real wages—that is, after inflation is taken into account—have been flat or even falling for decades, regardless of whether the economy was adding or subtracting jobs.
At the same time, we’ve seen health-care costs skyrocket while the cost of going to college has consistently risen faster than inflation.19 Middle-class Americans are working longer hours than they did in the late 1970s—on average more than two hundred more hours per year—even as they’re losing ground.
To the extent that the economy has been growing, its blessings have been asymmetrical, with real-wage growth (excluding benefits, largely health benefits) being zero or negative for the bottom 80 percent of the population since 2008, while about 85 percent of the stock market gains have flowed to the top 10 percent of the population.20 This has exacerbated income inequality, which began to rise in the late 1970s and has generally continued to widen under both Democratic and Republican presidents.
Meanwhile, the chances of moving up and down the income ladder are basically what they’ve been for decades—which is to say, they are very low. Today a child’s future depends on parental income more in America than it does in Canada or Europe. And the odds of escaping poverty are about half as high in the United States as in more mobile countries like Denmark.21
We shouldn’t underestimate the effects of immobility on our national psyche. Social mobility, after all, is central to how people in the United States interpret the America Dream. It has always been part of our self-conception, our self-understanding, and it’s being stripped away.
Complicating matters still further is that we are living through a period of enormous economic transformation and disruption, caused in part by huge advances in technology and automation of production. This allows businesses to do more with less, thus making greater and greater profits with fewer and fewer workers.
It’s often said that the American manufacturing sector is in decline, but in fact manufacturing is declining in terms of employment, not in terms of output or its share of the economy. The increasing efficiency of American manufacturing has come at the expense of lower-skilled workers. Jobs, including even higher-skilled jobs, are being outsourced to countries like China and India as the economy grows more globalized. Arguably the increased labor-market competition resulting from recent mass immigration puts downward pressure on wages for Americans with lower levels of education and skills, even as it reduces the cost of living for Americans higher up the income distribution.
So what does all of this have to do with the frustration and anger aimed at politicians? The answer is simple, probably too simple: a majority of middle-class adults put most of the blame squarely on the government for the economic difficulties they have faced, and people blame Congress more than any other institution.22
I say “too simple” because we have experienced historic shifts in the global economy over the last several decades that politicians did not cause and were often powerless to stop. The entrance of China and other Asian nations into the global economy brought more than a billion low-wage workers into direct competition with American workers in this century. There are intrinsic limitations on what politicians can (and should) do to stop globalization, automation, and advances in technology. The horse-and-buggy industry gave way to the automobile industry, which was a disruptive but unquestionably positive change.
We live in an increasingly high-skill economy, which means opportunities for lower-skill workers are dwindling. This requires political responses and government action that have not been forthcoming, but the changes themselves are not the fault of government.
For now, though, many Americans remain anxious and unnerved, worried about the long-term trajectory of the economy, and they believe the political and governing class has let them down.
POLARIZATION, DISTRUST, INVECTIVE
Moving from the realm of immense cultural change and long-term economic anxiety to the actual practice of politics, we find dysfunction rooted in polarization, the result of the Republican and Democratic Parties having become “more internally homogeneous and more ideologically distant from each other.”23 Many Americans are rightly upset because politics has become an arena for intensely heated and largely unproductive conflict. (If the conflict was heated but productive, it would at least be tolerable.)
Politics should be informed by principles and ideals and by a vision of the human good and the nature of society, but it must also answer to real needs and concerns. Many people feel, and with plenty of justification, that that’s not happening right now. They believe politics has become first and foremost an arena for insults, for abuse, for pettiness.
The long-term trends already discussed—ones that predate Donald Trump’s entry into politics but have been amplified by him—have brought us to this moment.
Today the two parties are ideologically purer, and farther apart, than at any time since the Reconstruction period followin
g the Civil War, according to Professors Jonathan Haidt and Sam Abrams. Liberal Republicans and conservative Democrats are nearly extinct. But what’s most notable is that Americans have also begun to sort themselves not just politically, but also in terms of lifestyle choices and interests, by geography and faith. We increasingly live in separate worlds, interacting less often, understanding one another less well.
The transformation of media has accelerated the silo-ization of America. There are now hundreds of partisan news sources—including cable news, blogs, the internet, and social media—we can turn to in order to convince ourselves that we’re right and righteous and the other side is not only wrong but criminal or evil.
“This proliferation of sources interacts with our most notorious problem in human cognition: the confirmation bias,” according to Haidt and Abrams.24 We seek out evidence to confirm what we already believe.
For his part, the journalist Jonathan Rauch argues that our severely fractured political system is plagued with a “chaos syndrome.” For decades we’ve demonized and disempowered political professionals and parties, he argues, leaving the system vulnerable to disorder and upheaval, with the current state of affairs just the latest symptom. As the influence of the “intermediaries” fades, he writes, “politicians, activists, and voters all become more individualistic and unaccountable. The system atomizes. Chaos becomes the new normal—both in campaigns and in the government itself.”25
In other words, ideological purification has given rise to political polarization, which in turn has led to an intensification in the animosity people of different parties have for one another. The result is gridlock and dysfunction, which has naturally instilled increasing frustration and impatience with the system as a whole. And the result of that is a greater willingness, even an eagerness, to embrace political leaders who will break the usual rules and shatter the usual restraints to get things done.