Gentrified Democrats?

 The New York Times opinion page ran a piece yesterday charting what it describes as the "gentrification" of the Democratic Party. 

Over the last few generations—the piece observes—the two major political parties in the U.S. have essentially swapped positions—at least when it comes to their class valence. 

"Americans who lived in wealthier areas used to have mostly Republican representatives," the author notes. Today, the opposite is the case. 

He's not wrong. I recall Robert Lowell observing, in a mid-century poem, that in Boston's tony Back Bay neighborhood, even the man "scavenging filth" from dumpsters is a "young Republican." 

Nowadays—in the same neighborhood—you'd find just the reverse. If you scratch someone in even the oldest and fanciest brownstones—you are certain to find a Democrat instead. 

The statistics are indisputable on this point: Democrats have indeed become the party of the genteel and highly educated. 

The question, though, is why? 

The author's explanations on this point are less compelling than his observations. In essence, he argues that Democrats abandoned their traditional policies of economic populism around the time of Bill Clinton—and thereby ceded their natural demographic terrain to the Republicans. 

One has heard this argument before, of course. But it's not entirely easy to square it with recent history. 

Donald Trump, after all, has now run two presidencies on a flagrantly plutocratic and anti-popular platform. He has—twice, now—slashed taxes on the rich while threatening social programs for the poor and working class. 

He has also bent over backwards to award favors to rich cronies, at the expense of the rest of the nation. Look at his pardon earlier this week of a crypto bro previously convicted of money laundering—seemingly just because the man promoted Trump's own stable coin, thereby enriching his family. 

None of this, meanwhile, seems to have improved Trump's standing in rich areas, nor depressed it in impoverished ones. 

And it's not like the Democrats have shied away from populism in recent elections, meanwhile. The author of the NYT piece is even forced to concede that "Mr. Biden governed as the most pro-labor Democrat in a generation"—he just argues that a contingent of Democrats in Congress stymied much of his agenda in this regard. (Is that really how it happened? Or did a Republican-dominated Supreme Court not also have something to do with it?)

It's true Democrats have operated, in the Trump era, as the party of free trade—at least by comparison. Biden was actually pretty protectionist, as these things go—but he didn't impose anything like the chaos of Trump's global tariffs. So Trump has claimed the mantle of the most anti-trade president. 

But I would still argue that our current notion of tariffs as "populist" trade policy is misguided. Historically, the populist Democrats always opposed Whig and (later) Republican efforts to impose protectionist tariffs—largely because they operated as an indirect consumption tax that disproportionately burdened the working class, and because they were terrible for Americans farmers (as Trump's tariffs are now proving to be as well). 

If you set the two parties side-by-side, then—I still think across just about every measure, it's the Democrats who are pursuing pro-worker and pro-poor policies, whereas the Republicans are still the party of plutocracy (of the "mean paternalism" of the "elephant plutocrats" that Vachel Lindsay associated with the Republicans all the way back in the Populist era)—if not more so.

Something is happening in our politics, then, can't just be explained by the respective classes' mere economic self-interest—their "soup-logic and dumpling-reason," to borrow a phrase from Heine. 

What's happening here seems instead to reflect some larger cultural despair or rejection of liberal values on the part of Americans lacking a college education. 

It's possible that the techniques of crude demagoguery—slandering minorities and outsiders as "criminals"—ginning up baseless hysterias against various groups of "cultural heretics"—as H.L. Mencken would put it—are just still much more effective in our politics than many of us wanted to believe. 

It's possible that information flows have just totally broken down in this society, in such a way that accurate data about Donald Trump's actions or agenda simply never reach most people—at least not in a form they are prepared to believe. 

People follow Trump out of some atavistic impulse that is below the level of reason or cognition. They see him as a kind of messiah—the tyrannical father figure monopolizing resources, and lording it over the primitive brothers, that Freud thought was the earliest form of human society. 

The popular adulation of this man—I increasingly believe—is not something that can be debated or analyzed through the lens of traditional political science. 

What we're dealing with here is simply one of those periodic social pathologies or manias—like the Salem Witch Trials—that just have to be endured until they have run their course—until they have exhausted themselves through their own inner logic. 

Which they always do—let me be clear. And therein lies our only hope for salvation. 

I quote from the German playwright Lion Feuchtwanger—in the program to his play The Devil in Boston (Mussey/Maierhofer edition):

[T]he element in [the Salem Witch Trial] story that attracted me most, [...] was its conclusion. It seems to me that the collapse of Cotton Mather’s witch hunt is full of lessons and hope even for us. The masses allow themselves to be deceived, but not for long; as quickly as they have let themselves get intoxicated, just as quickly do they become sober again.

I found in the speaker for the masses, Judge Sewall, who simply and splendidly confesses his error, a strong representative of everything that we see as good and reassuring in the American people. And the victory of reason over delusion, this victory that puts an end to the drama of the American witch hunt, provided a welcome opportunity for me to depict my own deep belief in progress and reason.