There’s no writing off Donald Trump in polarised white America
Niall Ferguson says the Republican presidential nominee has emerged as a champion of the disgruntled lower classes, who – though poorer and less educated than the nation’s elite – are legion
In his brilliant and prophetic 2011 book, Coming Apart, my friend Charles Murray identified the stark social division that is defining this year’s US presidential election. Murray’s book was unabashedly about “the state of white America”. The white population of the US, he argued, is more polarised than at any time in the past half century. On the one hand, there is a “cognitive elite”, who are educated at universities like Harvard and Yale, marry each other, work together and live in the same exclusive neighbourhoods. These people are politically more liberal than the national average, as well as much richer.
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. In a masterstroke of exposition, Murray vividly localised his argument by imagining two emblematic communities: Belmont, where everyone has at least one university degree, and Fishtown, where no one has any.
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Murray’s key point in Coming Apart was that four great social trends of the post-1960 period had hit Fishtown much harder than Belmont. The cognitive elite likes weddings. By contrast, a much larger proportion of adults in Fishtown either get divorced or never marry. In Belmont, everyone is a workaholic. But an amazing number of Fishtown white males cannot work because of illness or disability, or are unemployed. Belmont is pretty safe, whereas crime is chronic in Fishtown. Finally, religiosity has declined much more steeply in Fishtown.
As a consequence, the traditional bonds of civil society have atrophied in lower-class white America. There is less trust, less of what sociologist Robert Putnam calls “social capital”. And that, Murray concluded, is why the inhabitants of Fishtown are, by their own admission, so unhappy.
Fast forward five years. Murray’s disgruntled white lower class has now found its “voice” in Donald Trump. The declining, dangerous country that Trump described in his speech at the Republican National Convention in Cleveland was Fishtown writ large. Indeed, you could simply change the names. For Fishtown read Cleveland; for Belmont read Philadelphia, where the Democrats held their convention last week.
