Mailbag: Mythical class resentments

Plus: Medicare for All, Reconstruction that works, and good movies with bad politics

I didn’t write a dedicated 100 Days of Trump post, but I’m struck by the extent that conditional on him failing to gut American democracy, he has actually accomplished strikingly little so far. He has, yes, done a lot of stuff. He’s made a lot of news. But basically no legislation has passed. Even on a signature issue like immigration, there are no steps being taken to create an enduring policy change. DOGE hasn’t really cut much spending.

Which is not to say that Trump’s term has been inconsequential.

But the authoritarian portents aren’t a sideshow to a dramatic burst of policymaking — they are, in fact, all there is. He’s trying, with limited but real success, to get every institution in America to believe he’s willing and able to harm them through various abuses of power and that therefore his will should be done, whether or not he’s able to get any new laws passed. This only works as a mode of policymaking if somehow the regular partisan alternation in power comes to an end.

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Adam: I’ve seen a lot of data that suggests that the working class resents the college educated professional managerial class more than the billionaire class. Assuming that’s true, why don’t the Democrats attack the professional managerial class more often?

I’d be curious what data you’ve seen on that. What I’ve seen is that many working class people like to vote for Republicans rather than Democrats, and some people interpret this failure of progressive anti-plutocrat politics as reflecting class resentment of educated professionals. But I don’t really think that’s correct. One of my hottest takes is that I believe the main reason that people who vote Republican do so is because they align with the Republican Party on public policy questions that are important to them. For example, many cross-pressured voters who picked Barack Obama over Mitt Romney, despite worries that liberals are too soft on crime and immigration, were reassured by Donald Trump’s promises to protection Social Security and Medicare and upset by Democrats post-2012 leftward moves on immigration and crime.

In general, I think liberals just badly underrate the role of sincere disagreement about moral values.

I was thinking about this recently, because last week I watched a focus group of ticket-splitting voters, one of whom was talking about the problem of homelessness in his community. The,n this week while I was in Tennessee, I heard a local NPR segment about the problem of homelessness in the Nashville area. As constructed by the NPR reporter and her interlocutor, a social service provider, the problem of homelessness is that the people experiencing homelessness have a low quality of life. It is unpleasant to be homeless, and obtaining social services is difficult because the state and federal government put a lot of administrative burdens in the way. The people in question need housing, but also need assistance with various other problems, and the overall contour of the issue is that we need to be kinder and more generous.

The focus group guy had a completely different construction of this. To him, the problem was that homeless people were physically present near his house, and he did not like that. He thinks they’re gross and that they commit crimes, and he wants someone to make them go away.

I think we can all comprehend both these frames, both humane concern for the problems facing the people sleeping on the street and also normie annoyance they are at times nuisances. The humanitarian frame is much more conventional among social service workers, among academics, among journalists, and therefore among Democratic Party politicians who care about what those people think and whose staffs see those people as their peers. But I think the normie annoyance frame is much more common among the actual population. This isn’t class resentment of professionals, though, it’s simply disagreeing with a worldview that’s common among professionals.

David: Are there any movies/books that have changed your politics at all? Or any whose politics you disagree with but find it compelling anyway?