By Nate Hochman
Thursday, September 30, 2021
Since disaffected white voters in
Middle America first flocked to the person of Donald Trump on the 2016 campaign
trail, an entire cottage industry of think-pieces, op-eds, and explainers has
sought to “debunk” the popular conception of the MAGA-hat voter base as a
dispossessed or marginalized demographic. The argument goes something like
this: Trump’s “working-class-fueled
victory that many journalists imagined” is a myth — actually, “many Trump
voters” live in “reasonably good” economic circumstances. His electorate was “driven by fear
of losing status, not economic anxiety” — in fact, “it wasn’t the
economy, but racism and xenophobia that explained Trump’s rise.” They weren’t the forgotten men and women that the former president
appealed to in his inauguration speech; they were just bigots.
The latest example of this is Patrick
Wyman’s essay “American
Gentry,” published in the Atlantic last
week. According to Wyman, America’s “gentry” class is the regional
“salt-of-the-earth millionaires who see themselves as local leaders in business
and politics,” but they are “distinct from the highest levels of a regime’s
political and economic elite.” This gentry is where power actually resides in
the United States. They are a “local elite” composed primarily of
entrepreneurs, franchise owners, manufacturing or agribusiness executives, and
other well-to-do local leaders whose wealth and prestige are inextricably tied
to areas that “don’t figure prominently in the country’s popular imagination or
its political narratives.” But despite its geographical obscurity, the gentry
class “stands at the apex of the social order throughout huge swaths of the
country,” he says. “It shapes our economic and political world thanks to its
resources and comparatively large numbers, yet it’s practically invisible to
the popular eye.”
Trump’s election, as always, lies in the
not-too-distant background of this analysis. Wyman begins his essay by
referencing pro-Trump boat
parades as a prime example of the gentry
class, which — unlike the coastal elite — supported Trump in large numbers.
“These were the people who, remembering or inventing their tradition of
dominance over their towns and cities, flocked to Make America Great Again,” he
writes. Much of that sociological account may be true, but it also raises the
question: How can a class that “stands at the apex of the social order” also be
so dispossessed as to “flock to Make America Great Again,” motivated primarily
by a nostalgia for their lost “tradition of dominance”?
The truth is that the gentry’s relative
wealth — the main metric that elite progressives use to tell the story of Trump
voters and their supposed privilege — has little bearing on their actual power
in 21st- century America. A combination of neoliberal economics and aggressive
cultural liberalism over the past four decades has led to increased
centralization of cultural, economic, and political power in dense urban areas.
Financialization, for instance, has rewarded paper-pushers in the managerial
class at the expense of brick-and-mortar business owners outside of New York,
Chicago, and a handful of other cities. And the credentialed bureaucrats who
have benefited the most from this arrangement have wielded their new power to
advance a cultural understanding that is actively hostile to the
traditionalist, Christian, and primarily white population in the vast American
middle — even as they sternly lecture that population about its “privilege.”
If wealth alone were the best measurement
of political power in contemporary America, then Asians, especially those of Indian and Taiwanese descent, as well as some
Arabic and African immigrant groups, would be far more privileged than whites.
Confronted with that point, progressives like Wyman would probably protest that
the mechanisms that uphold and reproduce social privilege are more complex than
numerical measurements such as household income. In more than one sense, they
would be right: Political, cultural, and technological trends have at least as
much to do with a group’s status in society as wealth does.
Wyman tries to circumvent that point by
arguing that the wealth of these elites “derives not from their salary — this
is what separates them from even extremely prosperous members of the
professional-managerial class, such as doctors and lawyers — but from their
ownership of assets.” Those assets, he argues, can give them a
“stranglehold” over what gets done in some regions of the country. But the
places in Middle America where those assets are owned and operated are quickly
becoming obsolete: While they may continue to be profitable for the foreseeable
future, their broader influence on the national stage continues to diminish
rapidly. The power of these Middle American “elites” is dying alongside the
communities where they reside.
In fact, even within these
increasingly alienated swaths of America, the relatively conservative class of
small-business owners and local philanthropists is being crowded out by
economic centralization. Powerful coast-dwelling investors and multinational
corporations are ruthlessly hollowing out regional cultural identities and
traditions even as they corrode local economies. “Corporations and hedge funds
now own most local and regional newspapers,” writes the left-wing blogger Daniel G. Jennings. “Today’s newspaper
publisher is a corporate apparatchik whose major role is cost cutting.” That’s
not all: “The investor class is even coming for agriculture. . . . Bill Gates
and his ex-wife Melinda are America’s largest owners of farmland. The Gates
family owned 242,000 acres
of farmland in July 2021.” On top
of that, Chinese investors now own 192,00 acres
of American farmland — so much so “that there is now
political pressure to stop the practice,” Jennings writes.
So how does power work in modern America?
As Declan Leary
points out in the American Conservative, it’s not to the benefit of the so-called American gentry:
Politically,
it is virtually indisputable that the vast majority of power is currently
vested in the federal government, far removed not just from Americans’ concerns
but their influence as well — including even the gentry outside Washington.
Economically, power is disproportionately held by multinational organizations —
including both highly visible, public-facing ones like Amazon, Walmart, and
Apple, as well as less headline-friendly institutions like big banks and
holding companies. Culturally, everything lies in the hands of a few Hollywood
giants, the Big Five book publishers, and the handful of tech companies that
dominate the digital space.
Wealthy or not, rural and exurban America
is alienated from the places where most of the nation’s important decisions are
made. These urban centers are full of the financially affluent, but that is not
what truly makes them the elite. The primary source of their power is their
control of American identity — the narratives, symbols,
cultural shibboleths and taboos, and social arrangements that define our
self-understanding and the structure of our shared political life. A New
York Times writer may not be able to buy a multimillion-dollar house in
Palm Beach, but he is infinitely more able to imprint in the halls of American
power his vision of how the world should be. A well-placed federal bureaucrat
may not have immediate access to the capital to build a successful construction
company in Little Rock, Ark., or Lubbock, Texas, but he can shape the
conditions in which others do so.
It is proximity to these
organs of central power — not wealth or control of assets in small-town Idaho
or rural Nebraska — that is the basis of status and privilege. The “forgotten
men and women” that Trump spoke to and inspired were not necessarily poor,
though many of them were. Rather, they had been left out of or actively
excluded from the political and cultural center of their own country. Their
role in our shared civic life was implicitly viewed as less legitimate than
that of their urban counterparts. They no longer had a place in the stories
that we told about ourselves as a nation, except as the butt of late-night comedy jokes or as a general representation of stupidity and backwardness
in popular culture and mainstream
media. It’s no wonder that white working-class
voters who told pollsters that “I often feel like a stranger in my own
land” were 3.5 times
more likely to vote for Trump than those who did not have that feeling.
The repeated efforts to reframe Trump
voters as denizens of privilege reads as a desperate bid by progressives to
avoid self-critical introspection. If the true elites are the
Trump base rather than the progressives who control the universities, Big
Business, corporate media, the culture industry, the nonprofit sector, the
federal bureaucracy, and almost every other center of power in modern American
society, then coastal progressives need not admit the uncomfortable truth —
uncomfortable in a culture that prizes victimhood above all else — that they are
the ones who hold the reins of power. Today’s aristoi is
all noblesse and no oblige: “An outsider pose is
appealing because it allows powerful people to distance themselves from the
consequences of their decisions,” writes Sam
Goldman in the New York Times. “When things go well, they are happy to take credit. When they go
badly, it’s useful to blame an incompetent, hostile establishment for thwarting
their good intentions or visionary plans.”
What Goldman does not mention — but is at
least as important — is that progressive elites’ refusal to acknowledge their
own privilege also allows them to mock and denigrate their embattled fellow
citizens under the pretense of “punching up.” The insistence that red America
is privileged provides the pretext for the relentless assault on its symbols,
traditions, and way of life. But that’s no way to govern a nation. Until our
leaders recognize that, the possibility of peaceful coexistence in this big,
beautiful country of ours will continue to elude us all.
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