Trump’s Agenda of Hate

People without college degrees die about eight years sooner than people with four-year degrees.

Women with only a high school diploma or less are about five times as likely to have children out of wedlock as women with a college degree.

People with only high school diplomas or less are much more likely to say they have no close friends. They are more likely to live in towns where social capital is collapsing and the young are fleeing.

And by the sixth grade kids from poor families are performing at a level four grades behind kids from rich ones.

All of those points come from a weekend piece by New York Times columnist David Brooks. In his column, Brooks asks the obvious question: if Trump got elected with the support of blue collar voters, what’s he doing for them?

Brooks’ answer is that he’s doing nothing. Instead, Trump and Elon Musk, elites themselves, are pursuing a vendetta against liberal elites. He points out that the agencies and programs that Trump and Musk are going after are ones favored by urban liberals: DEI, university research, USAID, etc.

Brooks is one of my favorite writers and I usually agree with him. I don’t completely disagree with him on this one. But I do think he’s making the same mistake that Thomas Frank made in his influential (among Democrats) 2004 book What’s the Matter With Kansas? Frank’s argument was that Republicans were using social issues, like abortion, to blind blue collar voters to their “real” interests, which he defined as economic.

What I think Frank missed was the idea that those “phony” issues were more important to voters than the economic ones. I also think he misunderstood even the economic concerns of blue collar voters. They may like government spending on their behalf, but they don’t want to feel as if they’re getting a hand out. They want to believe they’re earning everything they get. Their resentment does not flow up to rich folks; it flows down to those who are lower on the economic ladder who they feel are where they are because they don’t work as hard as they do.

So Trump is, in fact, pursuing an agenda which, at best, does nothing for the economic situation of his base voters and may actually end up hurting them. His tariffs on steal, for example, might create some industry jobs, but the higher prices that result will hurt a lot more people.

But rather than being hoodwinked by this, I think most blue collar voters see the cultural issues as more important. They see Trump sticking it to the liberal elites and they applaud. It might not do anything for their substantive situation, but it’s deeply emotionally satisfying to see the people who have condescended to you and preached at you and told you that your own views and values are racist, misogynistic, transphobic — not to mention bad sounding “isms” and “ics” you’ve never heard of — get what’s coming to them.

I have hope that Trump’s signature chaos and erratic behavior will remind persuadable voters why they tossed him from office the last time. But those persuadable voters are mostly independents. Blue collar voters will never leave his side because the enemy of their enemy is their friend.

It is, in fact, a tragic story. A real populist movement would do something to address the real needs of people who have been left behind by trade and technology. You could, for example, slash the number of jobs in government that require a college degree, strengthen vocational training especially in the trades, expand Obamacare, expand Pell Grants, do everything you could to improve public schools and eliminate “right-to-work” laws — just for starters.

But none of that is on Trump’s agenda. Instead, he’s pursuing what’s really at the heart of populism, whether that bitter wind blows from the right or left. He’s found someone to blame and he’s giving his voters what they want even more than real improvement in their lives: real pain for the people they hate.

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