Michael Massing
The strong ratings of the first episode of the revived Roseanne set off an avalanche of commentary. On MSNBC’s Morning Joe, for instance, John Podhoretz, a columnist for the New York Post, called the show’s successa “wakeup call for Hollywood.” Given how well it had done in Middle America, he said, the lesson was clear: for those who serve underserved Donald Trump voters, there are “riches to be reaped.”
Anand Giridharadas, a Brooklyn-based writer and MSNBC analyst, saw a broader truth: “Working-class white people may claim to be against identity politics, but they actually crave identity politics.” They want to be “seen and witnessed” in the same way that women and people of color do. With its glimpses of Maxwell House coffee and kitchen towels stitched with football logos, the show made an effort to pay respect to the details “of a certain demographic’s life.”
But, Giridharadas added: “I hope these people realize other people want to be respected.” He hoped as well that it was not only demagogues like Donald Trump or conspiracy theorists like Roseanne who can speak to these people but also “smart, thoughtful, future-oriented political leaders” who could “elevate them” to “a better place instead of making them hate people and try to shut down the postwar global order.”
On and on the discussion went. Jim Messina, a political consultant who worked in the Obama White House, cautioned against getting too excited, for the cities in which Roseanne did well included very blue Chicago. “We’re in an age of microcasting, and she did really well with her demographic, but it doesn’t mean we’re suddenly talking about political genius.”
The viewers of network tv make up 'a shrinking audience that's increasingly confined to a certain demographic'
Donny Deutsch, an ad executive, agreed that the show’s success wasn’t all that surprising, since the “demo” that watches broadcast television is “more red state, lower income, lower education”; when a program is aired that appeals to that group, the numbers will always be higher. According to journalist John Heilemann, the viewers of network TV make up “a shrinking audience that’s increasingly confined to a certain demographic.”
Overall, the conversation, with its references to “a certain demographic” and “these people,” had a strangely disembodied and abstract air, as if describing the exotic inhabitants of a remote land. And in a way that was the case. Most of the discussants live and work in the Acela corridor, removed both geographically and materially from the lives of those on whom they were so confidently pronouncing. Tellingly, no one from the demographic in question was present to comment.
The Morning Joe crew, in turn, is part of another demographic that has become prominent in the world of the media, the academy, think tanks, and consultants: experts without expertise. Its members expound on gun culture without knowing anyone who actually owns one; opine on evangelical America without knowing any evangelicals; assess the impact of free trade without having met anyone whose job has moved to Mexico. And their lack of expertise has become all the more glaring in the age of Trump.
Take the field of history. Last April, Rick Perlstein, a prominent chronicler of modern American conservatism, offered a remarkable apologia in the pages of the New York Times Magazine. Until 8 November 2016, he wrote, historians of American politics “shared a rough consensus” about the rise of modern conservatism. Year zero was 1955, when William F Buckley Jr started National Review.
Excommunicating John Birchers, antisemites, and supporters of Ayn Rand’s hyper-individualism, Buckley forged the diverse strands of conservative thinking into a coherent ideology that eventually came to dominate American politics. Perlstein acknowledged that he himself had helped forge this narrative. Then along came Donald Trump, and conservative intellectuals quickly embraced a man “who exploited the same brutish energies that Buckley had supposedly banished.”
In short, “the professional guardians of America’s past” had “made a mistake,” advancing a sanitized narrative of the American right in which the “bloodcurdling” aspects of the conservative tradition were played down. The main reason, Perlstein wrote, is that “historians of conservatism, like historians in general, tend to be liberal, and are prone to liberalism’s traditions of politesse.”
In the future, historians of conservatism would have to recover the darker parts of its tradition – its “political surrealists and intellectual embarrassments, its con artists and tribunes of white rage.” It “will not be a pleasant story,” but “if these historians are to construct new arguments to make sense of Trump, the first step may be to risk being impolite.”
But is politeness really the problem? In his analysis, Perlstein did not mention the economic anxiety and social dislocation that helped feed the populist anger that contributed to Trump’s victory. I fear that Perlstein – contrite over his part in laundering the conservative past – is now veering in the opposite direction and fastening on its dirtiest elements. The real problem, I think, is that most of those historians constructed their narratives from within the confines of their studies, remote from on-the-ground realities.
Urbanists have faced a similar reckoning. In 2002, Richard Florida, a professor at the University of Toronto, came out with The Rise of the Creative Class. The creative class consisted of writers, designers, financiers, academics, artists, musicians, technology workers, and entrepreneurs, who, congregating in cities, turned them into “hothouses of innovation.” The resulting surge in growth, Florida maintained, benefited not only the third of the population that qualifies as creative (ie making a living with their brains) but also the remaining blue-collar and service workers (who rely on their bodies).
A bestseller, Florida’s book had a huge influence on urban planners not only in America but throughout the world, prompting them to devise policies to attract the skilled and hip. Florida devised a bohemian index, a gay index, and a diversity index to rank cities according to the percentage of creative people living in them. While noting the possible downsides of the influx of talent, such as rising housing prices and gentrification, he treated them as incidental to the new industries and jobs boom that would result.
It hasn’t quite worked out that way. While some big cities have thrived, the accompanying problems – soaring real estate prices, widening income gaps, the disappearance of middle-class neighborhoods – have made them playpens of the rich. And the idea that creative types want to live only in dense cities has proved inaccurate.
Last year, Jed Kolko, an economist at the University of California at Berkeley, drew on 2016 Census Bureau population estimates for counties and US Postal Service estimates of occupied housing units to calculate the average density of tracts from 2010 to 2016. From this, he concluded that the much-publicized return to the cities is mostly an urban legend. “Contrary to perception,” he wrotein a New York Times column, “the nation is continuing to become more suburban, and at an accelerating pace. The prevailing pattern is growing out, not up,” though with some exceptions.
‘Most of the discussants live and work in the Acela corridor, removed both geographically and materially from the lives of those on whom they were so confidently pronouncing.’
As Kolko observed, urban planners tend to live in the handful of metropolitan areas that are becoming more dense. “Those who write about, advocate for and choose to live in cities really do see more urbanization around them. But their cities are the exceptions.” In other words, urbanists like Florida may have been unduly influenced by their surroundings.
Florida himself, citing Kolko’s findings, wrote a piece for the Times stating that “the urban revival is over” (as the headline put it). “The much ballyhooed new age of the city might be giving way to a great urban stall-out,” he wrote (without acknowledging that he himself had helped lead the ballyhooing).
“Despite the hype” about innovations “intended to cram more people into less space,” he wrote, “many Americans still want space. They want to live in detached suburban homes, or in an apartment with enough square footage and access to outdoor space that it feels like one.” In his earlier writings, Florida largely overlooked those many Americans.
On top of it all, Florida, living amid other incubating types, seemed oblivious to how inherently elitist the idea of a “creative class” is and how policies based on it were bound to cause resentment among the less gifted. In an article last year for Politico, he described how on election night 2016 he and his wife hosted a viewing party in his Toronto home and how crushed he was by Trump’s victory. Call it the revenge of the non-creative.
As the cases of both historians and urban planners show, specialists founder when they are cut off from the broader population. Spending too much time among their own, they become isolated from alternative perspectives that can both test their preconceptions and broaden their outlooks.
The problem, however, is not limited to geographic separation. Last October, Harper’s ran dispatches from 13 writers on “local politics in the age of Trump.” Among them was Marilynne Robinson, reporting from Iowa City, Iowa, where she has long been based. Robinson spent much of her piece lambasting the Republicans who run the state. As in the country as a whole, she wrote, the Republican governor and the Republican-controlled legislature create “problems where they need not exist.”
Given the party’s current nature, she went on, it could surprise no one that “Republican domination has produced the kind of lawmaking that brands itself as populist and foregrounds supposedly populist reforms” – fireworks for all, guns everywhere, bans on cities and counties seeking to raise the minimum wage.
Such policies were “consistent with the agenda of a national movement” heavily influenced by “outside money” and “strikingly at odds with the situation in Iowa.” Those policies “reflect an ideology” rather than “any engagement with the state itself” or “the particulars of its life or culture.”
Yet that ideology seems very much in line with the state’s life and culture. In 2016, Trump took 51.8% of Iowa’s vote to Hillary Clinton’s 42.2%. Eight years earlier, Barack Obama had defeated John McCain by 53.9% to 44.4%. That’s a swing to the right of nearly 20% points in just eight years. Both houses of the state legislature, which not long ago were evenly divided between the two main parties, now have lopsided Republican majorities. How has this happened? What are the underlying forces at work? Unfortunately, Robinson did not address these questions. Nor did she quote any actual Iowans.
I was especially disappointed that she did not consider the role of religion in the state. Robinson is a committed Congregationalist and Calvinist who has written extensively about Christianity in America. Iowa has a large evangelical population. What is the connection between their beliefs and the state’s rightward turn? Given that evangelicals constitute one of Trump’s main bases, what is it that attracts them to him? Answering such questions requires diligent in-the-field reporting, including in-depth conversations with people in the pews. Few of the experts writing about American evangelicalism, however, bother to talk with them.
On Morning Joe, the support of evangelicals for Trump is a perennial topic of conversation and a source of exasperation. “How can evangelicals support Trump?” Joe Scarborough asked one day last fall after yet another Trump travesty. Willie Geist, his sidekick, said something about protecting religious liberty. “But how do they continue to support him now?” Scarborough persisted. “I don’t know,” Geist said with a shrug, refreshingly acknowledging the limits of his expertise.
Michael Massing is a frequent contributor to The New York Review of Books and the author most recently of Fatal Discord: Erasmus, Luther, and the Fight for the Western Mind
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