The Greatest Divide of All

And how Donald Trump exposed it. My view from the Hill.

Wall Street Journal’s Peggy Noonan recently delved into the subject of the growing divide between wealthy and poor, emphasis mine:

“. . .[T]he top [is] detaching itself from the bottom, feeling little loyalty to it or affiliation with it. It is a theme I see working its way throughout the West’s power centers. At its heart it is not only a detachment from, but a lack of interest in, the lives of your countrymen, of those who are not at the table, and who understand that they’ve been abandoned by their leaders’ selfishness and mad virtue-signaling.

On Wall Street, where they used to make statesmen, they now barely make citizens. CEOs are consumed with short-term thinking, stock prices, quarterly profits. They don’t really believe that they have to be involved with “America” now; they see their job as thinking globally and meeting shareholder expectations.

In Silicon Valley the idea of “the national interest” is not much discussed. They adhere to higher, more abstract, more global values. They’re not about America, they’re about . . . well, I suppose they’d say the future.

In Hollywood the wealthy protect their own children from cultural decay, from the sick images they create for all the screens, but they don’t mind if poor, un-parented children from broken-up families get those messages and, in the way of things, act on them down the road.

From what I’ve seen of those in power in business and politics now, the people of your country are not your countrymen, they’re aliens whose bizarre emotions you must attempt occasionally to anticipate and manage.”

Ms. Noonan wrote President Reagan’s speeches in the 1980s and now writes for the Wall Street Journal. Her observations about the elite are firsthand; she’s been a regular in the corridors of power for over three decades. If she says this is happening, it’s happening.

The widest divide in America today is not along lines of race, politics or education. It’s not geographic.

It’s class.

And it helps explain much of what’s happened in 2016.

The 2016 GOP Primary Was a Class Struggle

This page shows the support bases of Republican candidates. It’s important that the information comes from when Kasich, Cruz and Rubio were still in the race, as once they left, Trump consolidated their support, distorting the picture of his original base. We can see who brought Trump to the nomination, not who flocked to him after their original choices were eliminated, or simply out of unconditional hatred for Hillary Clinton.

The two halves of the GOP were embodied in the four candidates: Trump and Cruz on one side, Kasich and Rubio on the other.

• Trump’s support: less educated, lower income, heavily rural.
• Ted Cruz: slightly more educated, a touch wealthier, still heavily rural. Much closer to Trump than the other two.
• Rubio: heavily college grads, higher income, mostly urban.
• Kasich: practically identical to Rubio.

Epitomizing the upscale/downscale split in the Republican Party is the result of the smallest primary contest: Washington, D.C. The few Republicans in D.C. are mostly federal employees, specifically on Capitol Hill working for Republican Senators and Representatives.

If you want to take the pulse of the Republican “Establishment,” look at how D.C. voted in the Republican primary.

Rubio won with 37% of the vote, Kasich was next with 35%. Then Trump at 14%, Cruz 12%.

Almost the exact opposite of how the GOP primary played out nationwide.

The D.C. Disconnect

A big reason Trump and Tea Party voters so despise the Rubio-Kasich half of the GOP is they think it’s become too cozy with the Democrats. Having worked on Capitol Hill, I can attest — there’s much partisan intermingling.

Despite disagreements, I made Democratic friends; they don’t have cooties. It’s a far cry from Starks and Lannisters in the American King’s Landing.

Many voters resent this; to them, being friends with Democrats makes you a traitor, compromises your integrity. But in D.C., you can’t help it. Everyone’s alike and has much in common.

Most on the Hill are upper-middle to upper class and college-educated. Many get financial assistance from parents. Unpaid interns, and new staffers making $17,000 a year after taxes, cannot afford on their own $1,500+ a month rent, student loans, and a social life.

For many twenty-something Hill interns and employees, life in the Capitol is a gift from mom and dad. It was for me. And I don’t consider my family rich, either. But it’s all relative to what the average American family, which makes $52,000 a year, can afford. You’re probably a lot richer than you realize, too.

Most Americans are effectively excluded from working for the government absent a financial sponsor. It’s the rich ruling the rest.

And D.C. is growing ever more detached from the rest of the country: surrounding the capital are five of the nation’s six wealthiest counties by median income. They’re inhabited by federal employees and contractors as well as those who make up the massive news media edifice.

Educated professionals gravitate to Beltway lobbying firms, non-profits, law firms and other by-products of the $4 trillion-a-year federal government.

Everyone wants a piece of that pie, a seat at the table. Thus, Senator Mike Enzi (R-WY) once commented about Washington:

“If you’re not at the table, you’re on the menu.”

Trump was carried to the Republican nomination by people who realize they’re on the menu. He was their message to the proverbial table; the gilded elite in the big cities with high-profile jobs — the shot-callers.

Disaffected voters, for Trump and Sanders alike, see the governing class — in D.C., Wall Street, Silicon Valley, Hollywood — as all the same; the Ds and Rs by their names are irrelevant. Populist rage transcends partisan politics.

Geography and Education are Secondary

It’s tempting to say the divide is by education level, or geographic. But this gets it backwards: being college-educated, with today’s soaring college costs, is largely an effect of your family’s income.

Yes, the educated make more money, but it’s a self-reinforcing cycle: make more, send your kids to college, your kids make more money, and so on. Sure, some kids rise from poor neighborhoods and broken homes to earn scholarships, but most people are in college simply because their families can afford it.

Same goes for living in a big city or a well-off suburb: it’s a result of your wealth, not the cause of it. It is ridiculously expensive to live in a place like New York, D.C., San Francisco, L.A. or Chicago.

Most who move to big cities do so only because their families are relatively well-off. Your parents can afford to send you to college so you can, in turn, work downtown and rent a place in a nice, trendy part of town.

Key word: nice. Cities are diverse, but the main difference between their many neighborhoods is income level. Urban ≠ affluent.

The difference between the Chicago’s South Side and North Side? Income. Millennial white yuppies live on the North Side, lower income minorities on the South Side.

All live in Chicago, yet in different worlds altogether.

To experience the urban-rural split, just hop on the outbound. Go beyond the suburbs and enter another world: flyover country, where our food comes from. We’ve all felt the difference momentarily while stopping for gas in West Virginia, or in “some podunk town in the middle of nowhere,” during trips from one wealthy enclave to another.

The interstates take us into the “other half’s” world, same as a wrong turn on the South Side of Chicago or South Central, L.A. Both flyover country and “the ‘hood” are as foreign to us as other countries.

The Racial Divide

Race is the toughest subject to discuss. We live in racially tense times, more so than even a few years ago:

Race remains a real divider, particularly between whites and nonwhites. The poverty rate among blacks and Hispanics is one in four compared to 10% of whites. Inequality abounds between white and nonwhite in statistics from incarceration rates, life expectancy and household net worth.

But then, what about Asian-Americans, seemingly the exceptions to the white-nonwhite divide?

Asian-Americans are much wealthier than the other nonwhite groups. They’re even wealthier than whites. They live longer on average, too.

Half of Asian-American adults have college degrees compared to 28% of the nation at large. Asians have the highest median income of all the races at over $70,000, the lowest divorce rate and the lowest crime rate of all races. On the flip side, in many fields, there is a “Bamboo Ceiling,” as Asians can generally get good jobs, but are not promoted to upper management posts at the same rate as white peers.

Despite the Bamboo Ceiling, there is a perception Asians have “made it,” and the numbers speak for themselves. In many key statistics, Asians exceed whites. Some say Asians have attained “whiteness,” implying blacks and Hispanics have not yet. At the very least, Asians make less clear idea of a white/nonwhite standard of living divide.

But “whiteness” isn’t the best way to describe Asian-Americans’ progress as a group. It has less to do with race than it does money: Asians have become wealthier on average, not “white.”

No race is homogenous. Some Asian sub-groups are less successful than Asians overall.

And the idea of an underclass of so-called “white trash” is over 500 years old. The name speaks for itself. It primarily describes those living in the grinding poverty of the “big white ghetto,” Appalachia. The term “white privilege” is certainly not describing Appalachians, who make less clear the standard of living divide between white and nonwhite.

The GOP primary was the white class-divide played out nationwide. The white divide goes back to Colonial aristocrats instigating, and arguably inventing, racial tensions between enslaved blacks and whites in indentured-servitude to keep them from uniting.

The racial divide is formidable in America, and there is much work to do to bridge it. With the nation set to become majority-minority in 2050, though, there’s really no choice but for Americans of all colors to figure out how to live together. But even by then the greatest divide will remain.

Think of the last time you had a close friend who was poor. It was probably during public high school, essentially the last point in life, for most of us, where people of all income groups coexisted together. Then, somewhere, your paths diverged. Maybe when you went to college, or when you graduated, perhaps when you moved out of your hometown. Maybe you simply stopped seeing each other.

Today, you have friends of different races, political affiliations and religious views, right?

But I’m willing to bet you’re all from the same general economic class.

The Cultural Divide

Cultural differences are significant, perhaps more so than race, politics, education and geography.

But class unites and divides people of all different cultures.

This is the border between the U.S. and Mexico:

The message is clear: stay on your side.

America’s Canadian border is much different: there isn’t one. No fence, no wall — nothing. It’s mostly wide open. No one ever calls for a wall to keep Canadians out. Why? Sure, the obvious answer is that they’re white and speak English, but the biggest reason is that not many Canadians enter America illegally.

There’s little reason for Canadians to sneak in: their quality of life is about equal to ours. Canadians ($51,000 GDP per capita) are five times wealthier than Mexicans ($10,300 GDP per capita). American GDP per capita is $53,000. This is why Mexicans have historically been the more likely of the two to illegally move to the U.S. Can you blame them? The chance to give your family a better life in America is hard to pass up. I’d do it, too.

Is part of the motivation for the Trump Mexican border wall racial? Yes, partly. Above race, it’s cultural—some Trump voters don’t like Mexicans speaking Spanish here. They see it as eroding American culture.

Above both race and culture, though, the main motivating belief behind the Trump Border Wall is that the people it would stop — whether brown, black, yellow or purple — are coming here to take American jobs. The American laborer fears immigrants are coming here to take his job, and take money from his family. Direct competition.

Putting bread on the table comes first; only then can someone worry about culture, or race.

Culture trumps race, but economics eclipses culture. People who want the Trump Wall think it will keep their jobs safe. Conversely, if illegal immigration doesn’t threaten your job, you don’t care as much about it. This is the disconnect between the American upper and lower classes. It’s why immigration was the issue to rip the Republican Party in half. Class divides are manifested in politics.

The class divide is global. Look at this walled community in Brazil:

And this stark divide, also in Brazil, the fifth most populous country on earth:

Do we build walls like these between ourselves and people with different political views or education levels? No. Are there physical walls within America separating people of different races? Only Eight Mile Wall in Detroit, largely a relic today.

But there are walls between rich and poor all over the world, America included. Because the economic divide trumps all.

Visit Tokyo and see for yourself how it feels like (a cleaner) New York City, despite the cultural/language divide. Then visit a poorer Southeast Asian country, like Indonesia, and truly feel the difference. Both Japan and Indonesia are culturally quite different from America. But only in Indonesia do you truly feel a world away. The difference is each nation’s wealth.

You’ll find Under Armour and Nike stores in Tokyo, along with Starbucks. Ralph Lauren and Apple have stores there, too. On the whole, the standard of living in Japan is quite close to America’s.

You may say Japan is “Westernized,” but Japan is simply wealthy. American businesses would not open in Japan if the Japanese couldn’t afford to shop there in the first place. Businesses don’t care about cultural compatibility, they care about sales.

Compare Dubai and Yemen. Culture shock for Western visitors will be mild in Dubai, but severe in war-torn Yemen, one of the poorest countries in the Middle East. Both Dubai and Sana’a are on the Arabian Peninsula, both have overwhelming Arab and Muslim majorities.

But one is rich and the other is poor.

Though culture is a major divider in the world, class is the one thing that can separate even entire civilizations.

Citizens of the World

A great part of working on Capitol Hill was meeting people from all over the world. Our office often worked with the Swedish Embassy, and my partner in crime as an intern, Chris, was from Sweden. We quickly became friends in large part because he spoke the language of the global upper-class: English. Growing up on opposite sides of the world was insignificant.

Chris came from a well-off family in a well-off nation. His family is wealthier than mine, but the point is there was virtually no cultural divide between us. What we had in common wasn’t just Western values but relative wealth.

No matter where you’re from, so long as you are in the global upper-class, you have a seat at the table. And almost daily, constituent callers from the home district would grumble over their Congressman’s phone being answered by a kid with a slight foreign accent.

Hoity-toity, rich internationalists in D.C. were rubbing off on their Congressman, and they let our office hear it. They were reacting against what they saw as the bubble-world of the intermingling global elite.

My intern buddy during the next stint in the Congressman’s office was Tebo, from Botswana. Tebo, like Chris, spoke perfect English. She went to college at Holyoke. There was little cultural difference between us. We both enjoyed The Economist, laughed at internet memes and liked going out with the office after work. We became friends as easily as anyone I grew up with.

Both Chris and Tebo fit in perfectly in Washington, D.C.

But how would they fare in the hills of West Virginia, or rural Mississippi — out in flyover country?

How well would they thrive outside of a major American urban center?

Would you or I fare any better?