Donald Trump’s rage-driven candidacy is just the beginning

Whatever happens on Tuesday, the savaging of American political discourse seen in this election cycle is not going away. The growth of conspiracy theories, the dire warnings of a “rigged” election, the sharp resurgence of racial politics, the persistent dislike voters have for both Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton, even among some who intend to vote for them, and indeed, the sight of Trump merrily plumbing the depths of narcissistic and abusive rhetoric while Clinton is assailed and disliked for her politician’s inauthenticity and dishonesty – all these may be the new normal for American elections in the foreseeable future.

Here’s what we know. The forking of American society into mutually unintelligible political subcultures, an unintelligibility that has turned debate across the chasm into howls of indignation and contempt, has been gradually intensifying. For the better part of four decades now, Americans are increasingly living mostly among the like-minded, befriending and marrying mostly among the like-minded, and, worst of all, hearing mostly the like-minded.

“As Americans have moved over the past three decades, they have clustered in communities of sameness, among people with similar ways of life, beliefs, and, in the end, politics,” noted journalist Bill Bishop in his influential 2008 book “The Big Sort: Why the Clustering of Like-Minded America is Tearing Us Apart.”

Election strategists and pollsters can make America appear more diverse than it is with their talk of “battleground” states that “lean” to one side but could go either way. These are electoral realities, perhaps, but not social ones. Real people don’t live in states, they live in communities. Drill down in election data to the county level and the evidence of a dividing America becomes unavoidable. Bishop found that counties are growing steadily more lopsided in their voting patterns. Whereas just 20% of Americans lived in a county that was won by more than a 20-point margin in 1976, by 2004 that figure had risen to nearly half, or 48%. By 2004, that is, half of Americans were in “landslide counties,” where political minorities were minorities indeed.

The causes for this change are many: mobility is easier for some – as many as five percent of Americans move to a different county each year – but harder for others, with the better-educated and better-skilled heavily favored on that score. The fast-moving concentration of those with high-earning skills in America’s immense metropolises has helped create a growing wage and cost-of-living gap in those areas that keeps low-income and less well-educated Americans out of these bastions of opportunity.

Average income in the big cities now far outstrips the national average – and thus even farther outstrips incomes in those parts of rural America where Trump lawn signs proliferate. “Per capita income in the District of Columbia has gone from 29 percent above the United States average in 1980 to 68 percent in 2013; in the Bay Area, from 50 percent above to 88 percent; in New York City, from 80 percent above to 172 percent,” Alex MacGillis noted recently in a New York Times op-ed.

Studies in this election cycle show that the better educated, and therefore usually the more optimistic and welcoming of change – and thus more liberal – are voting in ever-growing numbers for the left. Those left behind in areas of relative economic stagnation, areas labeled, sometimes fondly but often disdainfully, “the rust belt” or “middle America,” are increasingly voting for the right.

Race is a profoundly important factor in this voting behavior, but the feeling among many on the right of a runaway opportunity gap may be even more important. Polls by reputable firms in the last few weeks suggest that Trump may be the first Republican presidential candidate since World War II who will fail to win a majority of college-educated whites. That is, education, its correlated social conditions and the opportunities that result from it, may be more important than race alone in understanding the new American divide.

But this gap in economic opportunity is only one wrinkle in “the big sort.” Eight years ago, Bishop cited countless unconscious choices as driving a great deal of the phenomenon. Across the country, Americans on the move chose their new neighborhoods using seemingly apolitical factors – rent prices, schools, green lawns, quiet streets – and discovered afterward that even the softest of these social and cultural choices had the effect of self-selecting for political affinity.

And the sorting has only accelerated with the spread of internet access. With ever larger numbers of Americans getting more and more of their news from social media, political discourse has increasingly been at the mercy of prejudice-affirming computer algorithms. Social media companies like Facebook and Twitter depend on users coming back for more, so they track users’ interactions and the content they consume in order to better deliver more of the same in each user’s feed. These algorithms have the effect of confirming, perpetuating and intensifying one’s political views.

Such online echo chambers are not a marginal phenomenon. Fully 65% of American adults were using social media sites regularly by 2015, a Pew study that year reported, ten times the figure a decade earlier, and the growth probably hasn’t ebbed in 2016. Asked by Pew earlier this year about the tone and quality of their online political encounters, 64% of social media users said online debates led them to believe they had less in common politically with people from the other side of the aisle than they had assumed. Just 29% said the opposite.

Physically living among people who disagree with you breeds moderation and empathy. A Pew study in April found that Republicans “with few or no Democratic friends are twice as likely to rate Democrats very coldly than are Republicans with at least some Democratic friends (62% vs. 30%).”

As Bishop explained, “mixed company moderates; like-minded company polarizes. Heterogeneous communities restrain group excesses; homogeneous communities march toward extremes.”

Except on the internet, it seems. For most Americans, engaging online – that faceless, empathy-draining, and increasingly ubiquitous arena of American political debates – reinforces the polarization.

The results of these pressures are stark: “In each party, the share with a highly negative view of the opposing party has more than doubled since 1994,” a 2014 study by Pew showed. Pew followed that up with the April study, and the trend was unchanged. “Our study of polarization in 2014 found that a major element of partisan polarization ‘has been growing contempt that many Republicans and Democrats have for the opposing party.’ Since then, levels of mutual contempt have grown, and ‘many’ has become ‘most.'”

For the first time since the question started being asked in 1994, majorities in both parties (Republicans 58%, Democrats 55%), have a “very unfavorable” view of the other side – a jump of 26 points among Republicans and 18 points among Democrats since just 2008. Fully 45% of Republicans and 41% of Democrats now view the other side’s policies as “so misguided that they threaten the nation’s well-being,” a jump of eight and ten points respectively in just two years.

Helplessness

There is a unifying theme to these polarizing pressures. Mobility, the shift in opportunity toward globalized industries, the spread of the internet – all these things represent greater choice, economic openness, a kind of runaway meritocracy celebrated by the successful but which has left in disarray those who are less able to participate.

This does not exactly mean that rural America is poor. Gallup researchers, delving into survey data for 125,000 American adults interviewed on the subject, have found that Trump’s “supporters are less educated and more likely to work in blue-collar occupations, but they earn relatively high household incomes and are no less likely to be unemployed or exposed to competition through trade or immigration.”

They are not necessarily poor, and they did not necessarily lose their jobs to the sorts of troubles Trump has dwelt on in his campaign — free trade agreements, immigration, and the like.

“On the other hand,” the researchers continued, “living in racially isolated communities with worse health outcomes, lower social mobility, less social capital, greater reliance on social security income and less reliance on capital income, predicts higher levels of Trump support.”

This is not ultimately an election about economic experiences – not that economic troubles aren’t real, but only that they do not correlate sufficiently to voting patterns to be a complete explanation – but rather about anxieties of culture and identity. It isn’t poverty or physical dispossession that drives support for Trump’s iconoclasm, but rather a sustained, long-simmering narrative of political and cultural dispossession. Non-interaction has fostered alienation from fellow Americans at a time when immense, distant institutions have gained ever greater influence over the lives of ordinary Americans.

This is an election that reflects anxiety about the sheer scale of the American body politic, about a strong federal government too big to really be answerable to ordinary Americans, while also too concerned with urban liberal worries to actually solve the problems perceived by the rest of America.

Governments, major banks, liberal “elites” – a term that can sometimes stretch to encompass many tens of millions of Americans, including poor and struggling immigrant communities – exist beyond the ken or oversight of most Americans. When Trump speaks of a “rigged” election and vast conspiracies, his approving listeners are not stupid. There are very real and even reasonable political anxieties that give such talk, even at its most absurd, its political resonance.

If Washington fails to do its duty – or appears to fail, at least – what is left but to rail and rage against the system as a whole?

The sense of runaway scale is key to these apprehensions. The 2017 fiscal year is expected to show a US federal debt of $19.5 trillion, or some 106% of America’s entire GDP, a burden unseen since the aftermath of World War II. The latest spike in that public debt came under presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama, who spent trillions bailing out the American banking and insurance industries after the 2008-9 financial collapse. Nuance and complexity are politically irrelevant here. Hundreds of millions of Americans experienced a simple story in those years, one in which gargantuan banks and “too-big-to-fail” insurance companies were seen to squander or irresponsibly leverage trillions, only to be rescued by taxpayers, while none in Washington seemed able to foresee, prevent or punish anyone for the ensuing collapse, nor even clearly explain what went wrong.

What can an ordinary American do when faced with such forces? And if Washington fails to do its duty – or appears to fail, at least – what is left but to rail and rage against the system as a whole?

Politics break down when participants in a polity come to believe politics can no longer solve their problems. Political institutions are ultimately constructed by the human imagination, and that places a hard, unavoidable limit on their capacity to scale up. They cannot grow larger than the imagination of their constituents – not, that is, without risking catastrophic collapse at the inevitable growth in alienation. It is no accident that support for Trump (or a few months ago, Bernie Sanders) is often compared to the Brexit vote, in which many Britons reacted not to any nuanced consideration of the advantages and disadvantages of Britain’s financial and political position as an EU member state, but to a perceived loss of agency and self-control to distant, unresponsive and ultimately irresponsible political elites. They voted against a political structure they could not see, could not meaningfully comprehend, and so could not trust with power over their lives.

How much power do EU officials in Brussels actually have over the average Briton? How badly has Washington actually mistreated rural or small-town white America? These questions are fundamental to determining whether there is a gap between perception and reality – or, since there is always a gap, how large it might be. But they are secondary to the point being made here, which is that the underlying rationale behind this rebellion against the sheer scale of national institutions is coherent and reasonable.

That these national institutions sit in the left-leaning metropolises and are mostly dominated by the mores and cultural assumptions of metropolitan elites – on abortion, religion, gay marriage and countless other issues – only adds to the moral urgency of this alienation.

Safe harbors

Trump is not the first American politician to take full advantage of this growing divide.

Bishop relates a telling conversation with Republican pollster Matthew Dowd in 2005, just weeks after Dowd helped forge the successful campaign strategy that got George W. Bush reelected. The strategy, put simply, was to appeal to an increasingly self-conscious Republican base.

“Dowd saw that American communities were ‘becoming very homogeneous.’ He believed that to a large degree, this clustering was defensive, the general reaction to a society, a country, and a world that were largely beyond an individual’s control or understanding,” Bishop explains.

This sense of unmooring was cultural and social, not simply economic. “For generations, people had used their clubs, their trust in a national government, and long-established religious denominations to make sense of the world. But those old institutions no longer provided a safe harbor. ‘What I think has happened,’ Dowd told me early in 2005, ‘is the general anxiety the country feels is building. We’re no longer anchored.'”

“No kidding,” Bishop opines. “Unsurpassed prosperity had set people free – free to think, speak, move, and drift. Unsurpassed prosperity had enriched Americans – and it had loosened long-established social moorings. Americans were scrambling to find a secure place, to make a secure place….it became incumbent on him or her to create an identity. Most Americans have done that by seeking out (or perhaps just gravitating toward) those who share their lifeworlds – made up of old, fundamental differences such as race, class, gender, and age, but also, now more than ever, personal tastes, beliefs, styles, opinions, and values.”

This insight is not merely that of Bishop the journalist. It drove the thinking of Dowd the Republican campaign strategist. This hunger for an anchoring social identity caused Americans to join “communities, churches, and political parties in a manner that was almost tribal,” Bishop argues, and quotes Dowd’s assessment that “people were having a tendency to pick a team, and that team was having an effect up and down the ballot.”

By several measures, members of Congress have grown more partisan in recent years, and legislative activity more gridlocked.

It is easy to pin the blame for the rancor and abusive tone of the election on Donald Trump. But Trump’s rhetoric, with “rapist” immigrants and a nation closed to Muslims, represents not a break with the American political tradition, but a not-very-great hump in the prevailing upward trend-line of political stridency and delegitimation. That trend is driven by deep-seated cultural forces that will not evaporate even if Trump loses badly at the ballot box.

Big lies, little lies

In the harsh light of that profound estrangement, Trump’s political resilience is suddenly explicable. His bull-in-a-china-shop swagger fulfills a craving for authenticity in a world that increasingly appears to be dominated by remote and reckless elites, and that seems to deliver little more than prepackaged marionettes as candidates.

One of the hard facts of modern politics is its broad and deep reliance on political craftsmanship. Republican candidates in recent years have been saddled with a primary process that increasingly looks like a beauty pageant of candidates whose top priority is to carefully calibrate and filter their words and actions in order to resonate with certain voting bases without giving other voters cause to turn away. Trump, like Sanders on the left, is in part a rebellion against such ersatz politics, a rebuke of the gutting of political authenticity.

It was no accident that throughout the Republican primaries earlier this year, Trump’s opponents could muster no consistent, convincing moral indignation at his abuse, resorting instead to frail, artificial bluster that wholly failed to match the rowdy original.

Trump was a birther, demanded to wall off Mexico, threatened to dump NATO allies, to keep Muslims out of America. These views all “evolved” and gained some measure of nuance over the course of the campaign, but haven’t lost their essential premise or the urgency with which they were uttered. To many Republicans, their sheer audacity and impracticability may rob them of their policy relevance, but infuses them with authenticity.

Hillary Clinton’s lies about emails are small, and therefore tactical and artificial. Trump’s lies are big, and therefore stem from the heart. This may sound like faint praise for the Republican candidate, but to a population that feels abused by political prevaricators, it is music to the ears.

Zion

In an important sense, the left had its own veering away from canned politics with Barack Obama, the black man who told them not to fear progress. It is hard to exaggerate the extent to which Obama represents, even today, a narrative of authenticity to large swaths of Democratic voters.

For blacks, Latinos, immigrants and other marginalized groups, how can the current divide, cleaving so clearly to racial and social lines, be seen as something other than a cry against their inclusion in the American ethos?

This is partly – and perhaps more than partly – a function of race. As the renowned movie critic Roger Ebert wrote in 2003 in his review of Matrix Reloaded, it is no accident that most of the population of the last human city in that post-apocalyptic fantasy are black.

“I became aware, during the film, that a majority of the major characters were played by African Americans…. From what we can see of the extras, the population of Zion is largely black. It has become commonplace for science fiction epics to feature one or two African-American stars, but we’ve come a long way since Billy Dee Williams in ‘Return of the Jedi.’ The Wachowski brothers [who made the Matrix trilogy] use so many African Americans, I suspect…because to the white teenagers who are the primary audience for this movie, African-Americans embody a cool, a cachet, an authenticity.”

This authenticity touches on yet another aspect of the gap between conservative white America and the urban left. While Trump rails against the faceless institutions that are the stuff of conservative nightmares, Obama, campaigning hard in recent weeks for Hillary Clinton, has shored up a different message. The story of black Americans is in many ways a history of America’s failure, of the paradigmatic vulnerable group against which American ideals were tested and found wanting. In the end, their abuse was ended by the centralized national power, by Lincoln’s grim determination to hold and reform the South, by Kennedy’s deployment of the National Guard to Alabama, by the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the Supreme Court victories against segregation and voting restrictions – not by magnanimous local officials in rural America.

It is thus no mere political fetish that drives many blacks, among other minorities and Democrats generally, to view those same aloof national institutions that so vex Trump’s backers as not only trustworthy, but necessary guarantors of their safety. A very real history of brutalization underlies that gap.

In a September gathering of the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation, Obama reminded his audience of this difference in no uncertain terms. “So if I hear anybody saying their vote does not matter, that it doesn’t matter who we elect — read up on your history. It matters,” he said.

“We’ve got to get people to vote. In fact, if you want to give Michelle and me a good send-off…don’t just watch us walk off into the sunset now, get people registered to vote. If you care about our legacy, realize everything we stand for is at stake, all the progress we’ve made is at stake in this election. My name may not be on the ballot, but our progress is on the ballot, tolerance is on the ballot, democracy is on the ballot, justice is on the ballot. Good schools are on the ballot. Ending mass incarceration, that’s on the ballot right now. And there is one candidate who will advance those things, and there is another candidate whose defining principle, the central theme of his candidacy, is opposition to all that we’ve done.”

That’s more than an expression of partisanship, and more than mere electioneering. It is a rendering of the costs of acquiescing to the demands of Trump’s white America. For many blacks, Latinos, immigrants of various stripes and other marginalized or vulnerable groups, how can the current divide, cleaving so clearly to racial and social lines, be seen as something other than a cry against their inclusion in the American ethos?

It is important to understand the Republican angst that drives support for a candidate as perplexing as Trump. But it is no less important to grasp the deep historical memory that underlies the Democratic fear and disdain for Republican disaffection. Both clashing narratives stand on firm foundations, on real experiences and authentic anxieties; neither is likely to be argued away by the other.

The new animosity is a long time coming, yet in the broader sweep of American history, a sweep that includes Andrew Jackson, Bleeding Kansas, the Civil War, Reconstruction, desegregation, the vitriol surrounding Nixon, Vietnam, the impeachment of Bill Clinton – set against that deep backdrop, it is not, ultimately, all that new to the American experience. Americans have often taken their social and political divides to the edge, and sometimes even further. The American Founding Fathers conceived of their republic as a kind of ongoing political revolution, and the revolutionary zeal never entirely fades away, no matter how political divides are rearranged in each generation.

In this sense, the 2016 race, for all its schism, carries with it a grain of traditional American optimism. Each side believes it is out to save the country. In 2008, 77% of Obama voters told an NBC-Wall Street Journal poll that America was in a “state of decline” – and set out to rescue it. In 2016, a Washington Post-ABC poll found the same number, 77%, among Trump supporters saying America was “less great” than in the past – and set out to rescue it in their turn.

Blue America will not give up its cultural ambitions or ideals; red America will not suddenly acquiesce to the perceived excesses and recklessness of liberal elites. The current state of American narrow-minded factionalism is not about to get better any time soon. Maybe it isn’t supposed to.