Over the past 20 years or so many of us social observer types have been writing about the horrific chasms separating the educated class (people with college degrees) from the working class (people without).
Some of these chasms involve basic health outcomes. People without college degrees die about eight years sooner than people with four-year degrees.
Some of the chasms involve family structure. Women with only a high school degree or less are about five times as likely to have children out of wedlock as women with a college degree.
Some of the chasms are sociological. People with only high school degrees 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.
Some of these chasms involve educational outcomes. By sixth grade, the children of poor families are performing four grade levels lower than the children of affluent families.
If America elected a populist as president, you would expect him to devote his administration to addressing these inequities, to boosting the destinies of working-class Americans. But that’s not what President Donald Trump is doing. He seems to have no plans to narrow the education chasms, the health outcome chasms or the family structure chasms. He has basically no plans to revive the communities that have been decimated by postindustrialization.
Why is that? The simplest answer is that Trump really seems not to give a crap about the working class. Trump is not a populist. He campaigns as a populist, but once he has power, he is the betrayer of populism.
What’s going on here is not a working-class revolt against the elites. All I see is one section of the educated elite going after another section of the educated elite. This is like a civil war in a fancy prep school in which the sleazy kids are going after the pretentious kids.
Look at who is running this administration. The president is an Ivy League-educated real estate developer. The vice president is an Ivy League-educated former venture capitalist. Elon Musk, the emperor of DOGE, is an Ivy League-educated billionaire.
Look at the programs this administration is going after. They’re not going after the programs where big budget savings can be realized — like the entitlement programs. They’re going after the programs where they think highly educated progressives work. They’re going after the foreign aid community, the scientific community, the NGO community, the universities, the Department of Education and the Kennedy Center.
Conservatives believe in constant and incremental change. Nihilists believe in sudden and chaotic disruption.
You might say that progressives had it coming. The moment they began shutting conservative and working-class voices out of their institutions, they were inviting a backlash, and now here it is.
But here’s the problem: As F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote in “The Great Gatsby,” rich people are careless. They break things. The members of the Trumpist elite think they’re going after the educated elites at USAID and the NIH, but you know who’s really going to pay the price? It’s the woman in Namibia who is going to die of AIDS because PEPFAR, the U.S. President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, has been eviscerated. It’s the child in Ohio who’s going to die of cancer because medical research was slowed. It’s the future citizens of America whose lives will be worse because their state institutions no longer function. It’s the working-class communities that will continue to languish because Trump ignores their main challenges and focuses instead on culture war distractions.