The Closing of the Republican Mind

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/13/opinion/republicans-elites-trump.html

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The election of President Trump has coincided with a reaction among Republican voters against open-mindedness, open borders and an open society in general — not to mention a growing hostility to cognitive elites.

Take a recent survey showing a fundamental shift in the attitude of Republicans toward the value of higher education.

Between 2010 and 2017, the Pew Research Center asked voters whether colleges and universities have a positive or negative effect “on the way things are going in the country.”

From 2010 to 2015, solid majorities of Republicans and Democrats agreed that institutions of higher learning had a positive effect on America. In 2010, Republicans were 58-32 positive and Democrats 65-22. For Democrats, this pattern grew stronger over time, reaching 72-19 in the most recent polling in June.

That was not the case for Republicans, who flipped from positive to negative on college education.

In a survey that was conducted from Aug. 23 to Sept. 2, 2016 — a month after Trump accepted his party’s nomination — Republicans’ positive assessment of colleges and universities fell to 43 percent, while negative assessments rose to 45 percent. By June of this year, 58 percent of Republicans had a negative view of higher education and 36 percent a positive view.

Wariness toward homegrown cognitive elites now parallels suspicion of foreign-born entrepreneurs, including those who generate jobs and wealth for Americans.

On July 10, the Department of Homeland Security proposed the dismantling of a federal regulation that would have encouraged more entrepreneurs to build start-ups and to finance high-tech ventures in the United States.

The otherwise little noticed Homeland Security action on the International Entrepreneurship Rule infuriated the high-tech industry. Bobby Franklin, the president and C.E.O. of the National Venture Capital Association declared in a statement:

Gary Shapiro, the president and C.E.O. of the Consumer Technology Association, issued a similar statement:

Countless analyses have demonstrated that Trump won the election by combining support from traditional Republican voters with a surge in backing from constituencies that contemporary economic and cultural developments have left behind.

But Trump did not campaign against economic elites. Instead, he built a fire under animosity toward what has been called “the creative class” by Richard Florida, the demographer; the “plutonomy” by three analysts at Citigroup; and the “cosmopolitan class” by Robert Shiller, an economist at Yale.

In recent decades, this class has become increasingly influential in setting cultural standards and in shaping contemporary values. Its success has provoked deepening resentment, to say the least.

“The New Elite marry each other, combining their large incomes and genius genes, and then produce offspring who get the benefit of both,” Charles Murray, a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute and the author of “Coming Apart,” wrote in the Washington Post:

Chrystia Freeland, a journalist-turned-politician who is now Canada’s minister of foreign affairs, described this class during President Barack Obama’s first term as

Simon Kuper, in a May Financial Times essay, captured the sources of this resentment among the less well educated:

Trump, Kuper explains, labels this constituency

The reaction against this class, which found expression in the 2016 election, has proved deeply troubling in some quarters.

Richard Florida, in an email to me, was harsh in his assessment of consequences of the current anti-elite reaction:

In doing so, the United States threatens its status as “the most innovative, most knowledge driven, most powerful nation on earth,” according to Florida:

In a new book, “The Road to Somewhere,” David Goodhart, the head of demography, immigration and integration at Policy Exchange, a British think tank, describes the political divisions that emerged here and in the Brexit election in Britain. Both became struggles between what he calls “somewhere” people and “anywhere” people.

Anywhere folks, according to Goodhart, who is himself a member of the anywhere class (though writing from the perspective of the United Kingdom) “dominate our culture and society” armed with college and advanced degrees:

The anywhere voter values “autonomy, mobility and novelty” while giving much lower priority to group identity, tradition and patriotic expression. They view globalization, immigration, self-realization and meritocracy as positive concepts.

Somewhere voters, in Goodhart’s description, are

Most are neither bigots nor xenophobes, according to Goodhart, and they generally accept the liberalization of “attitudes to race, gender and sexuality,” but this acceptance has

One of the more interesting findings that came out of the 2016 election in the United States — a finding that reinforces Goodhart’s thesis — is that voters who never left, or remain close to, their hometowns tended to vote for Trump, while those who moved away were inclined to support Hillary Clinton.

Among voters for Clinton, 27 percent lived in their hometown and 43 percent lived 2 hours or more away from their hometown; among Trump supporters, 36 percent lived in their hometown and 37 percent lived 2 or more hours away.

James Stimson, a political scientist at the University of North Carolina, sent me his own critical assessment of this phenomenon:

Those who choose to leave such communities and find their fortune elsewhere are, in Stimson’s view,

Given that, Stimson says:

Stimson then poses another question: “Should the Democratic Party cater to these voters?” His answer is an unequivocal no:

While Stimson’s analysis is harsh — criticizing as it does many hardworking men and women whose loyalties to family, friend, community and church may supersede personal ambition — he captures a crucial element of contemporary politics. This is the potential of an angry electorate to provide a key base of support to a politician like Trump who capitalizes on resentment, intensifies racial and ethnic hostility and lies with abandon as a means to his ends.

While Trump pulled out an Electoral College victory by mobilizing resentful voters and turning out more traditional Republicans, there are significant questions about the continuing viability of his coalition.

William Frey, a demographer at Brookings who just published a paper “Census shows nonmetropolitan America is whiter, getting older, and losing population,” wrote in response to my email inquiry:

“I think that ‘somewhere people’ are a fast shrinking sliver of the American population.” As the economy changes, Frey argued,

If Democrats have one thing to be grateful for, it’s Trump’s failure to live up to his campaign promises on health care and taxes, at least so far.

In practice, Trump is going in the opposite direction, pressing for a radical alteration of health care policy that directly conflicts with the interests of millions of his supporters, and for legislation catering to the demands of the wealthiest Republicans for reduced tax burdens.

On Nov. 7, 2016, the day before the election, Trump declared:

As was widely pointed out during the ongoing Congressional debates over legislation to repeal and replace Obamacare, Trump promised at least five times during the campaign that he would not cut Medicaid. These promises included a tweet on May 7, 2015:

Democrats, then, have both demographic trends and Trump’s abandonment (for now) of the moderate and lower income wing of his coalition to boost their prospects in 2020 — and perhaps in the 2018 midterms. Even where Trump has begun to address the demands of his supporters — a reduction in unauthorized southwest border crossings — his success is due more to his anti-immigrant rhetoric than any substantive policy initiative.

American politics has become fluid and volatile. Income differences have been supplanted by cultural and social practices closely linked to levels of educational attainment. Political partisanship is now firmly linked to race, with whiteness defining one of the two major political parties. Religiosity has taken on new meaning — if one can call it that — with devout churchgoers supporting an avowed libertine. In that sense, both sides agree that morality has become a matter of personal discretion. Partisans impute evil to their adversaries, and the meritocratic elect have barred the gates.

Trump has intuitively exploited this chaos. He is not at the end of his string, not by a long shot. His life demonstrates his will to win. His vulnerabilities and his pathologies are also astoundingly clear. While his critics are convinced that Trump the chameleon is masquerading as the protector of the left behind, he has in fact tapped into vast anger over immigration, which has shot up over the past 50 years — and there is no good reason to believe that this anger will dissipate by 2020.

The question that remains is whether President Trump can continue to exploit the fissures he opened as candidate Trump. The answers history provides are not altogether reassuring.