The Opinions - David Brooks: Maybe Bernie Sanders Is Right

Episode Date: November 13, 2024

The biggest divide in America today is not about race or gender, the Times Opinion columnist David Brooks argues. In this episode, he explains how the “diploma divide” can help us understand Donald Trump’s overwhelming support from working-class Americans and what Democrats can do to win them back.Thoughts? Email us at [e-mail]. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

This is The Opinions, a show that brings you a mix of voices from New York Times opinion. You've heard the news. Here's what to make of it. My name is David Brooks. I'm a columnist at the New York Times. About half the time I write about politics. And then the happier half of the time, I write about everything else, like culture, sociology, neuroscience, emotions. I write about politics because it really matters, but my heart's in the culture. I think one of the things that's happening in our era is that politics is no longer organized, rich versus poor and ethnicity is becoming less important as a predictor of how you vote and how you think.

And now you'd have to say the chief divide in America is between those with college degrees and those with high school degrees, the diploma divide. And Donald Trump has managed to build a multiracial working class majority around the interests of the working class and against the interest of the educated class. Let me try to explain how we got to this point. I would say for the last 40 years, we've been living in the information age. And during that age, both Republicans and Democrats, while disagreeing with each other on many things, shared a basic understanding of what American society was about, that we were entering an age, a post-industrial age, we had to prepare people for jobs of the future, and that the college-educated class was really going to be in the commanding heights of society.

So we built our trade policy to ship manufacturing jobs overseas so we could focus on information age jobs. We had an immigration policy that gave those of us in the educated class access to cheap labor, but for those less skilled, they suddenly faced new labor competition. We tried to shift to green energy while neglecting the idea and the beliefs of people who work in manufacturing or transport or any other sectors that need fossil fuels. The diploma divide doesn't only govern our politics indicating who somebody's going to vote for. It governs our society. And so we have this deep social chasms between those who have college degrees and those who don't.

People with high school degrees die sooner than people with college degrees. People with high school degrees are much more likely to be obese. They're more likely to die of opioid addictions. They're much more likely to say they have no close personal friends. So our society is not just divided by economics. It's divided by a whole series of structural things that go into the very belly of how people live. over the last 30, 40 years, there's just been this giant sucking sound, which has accorded respect and recognition to people who are good at academic things and has taken status and recognition away from people who are good at, you know, fixing a refrigerator or fixing an H-FAC system or who work with their hands. And this really punishment of those who are suddenly denied status, denied recognition by society is acutely painful.

and they don't like it and they wanted to do something about it, so they elected Donald Trump. And now we're entering another era, an era driven by people who are demanding recognition and respect. I travel a lot. I probably went to maybe 30, 35 states in the maybe six months leading up to the election. And I think what I noticed was the gap between those places where college-educated and affluent people can create and those places left behind. The storefronts are shabbier. The strip malls are often half-end. empty. There may be a dollar general store or something like that. I went to a church in Tennessee, which was a Christian nationalist church, and the pastor was filled with aggression and suspicion about the judasers who are betraying us. He said he had been accused of embezzlement by somebody

in the congregation. He called Kamala Harris Satanic. On his Twitter feed, he called her a whore. And so you get this not only personal bitterness and retribution against people within the congregation, but also the same sense of embattlement and aggrieved aggression against basically the Democratic Party. And the irony is that, you know, the Democratic Party is built for one thing, is to address inequality. And Democrats looked out at society and saw a lot of inequalities, racial inequalities, gender inequality, discrimination against LGBTQ people. But they miss the central inequality that really marks American society now, which is academic inequality, which merges with class inequality.

And so they allow Donald Trump, who took over the Republican Party, which we do not associate with the working class, to turn it into a multiracial working class party. my belief is that Trump is the wrong answer to the right question. That is to say, of all the many Trump supporters, I don't agree with them, but I get where they're coming from. Many of them have had bad jobs for 20 or 30 years. They might have good jobs, but they've seen their community go into decline. They feel themselves and their values dismissed on the national scene. And so I get where they're coming from.

I have total sympathy for Trump supporters. Let's face it, when over the last. last 20 years or 30 years when we've had basically a leadership class dominated by people who went to elite universities, you would think it would make society better run. We've got all these smart people running things. And yet we've had the war in Iraq. We've had the financial crisis. We've had seemingly one failure of leadership after another. And people take a look and say, this is the wrong way to run a society. If the Democrats can't appeal to working class voters, they're going to lose just because there are a lot more voters without a college degree than there are

voters with a college degree. And so they have to do a bunch of things. One is stop blaming voters for their own preferences. Now, I don't doubt that at some level, racism and sexism and other bigotries played some role in this election. But if the Democrats decide that the reason Harris lost because of racism and sexism, they're basically calling the electorate racist and sexist, I just don't think it's a good way to win voters. The second thing that has to happen is that people in the educated class have to get out of the blue bubbles and actually come to understand what working class voters think like, what they are like, have to show them some understanding and respect. But third, there has to be a shift in policy. And here, I'm a little uncomfortable.

I don't agree with what I'm about to say, but I think it may be necessary. So I'm a moderate who really did not like the policies that Bernie Sanders proposes. And yet the one thing he got right was disruption, disrupt the system. I'm arguing against my own viewpoint here, but it could be in order to win working class votes in an era of high distrust, the Democrats have to do a lot of things that Bernie Sanders said they should do. And I certainly have several friends who were pro Bernie and then became pro-Trump because they just wanted disruption. And so those two versions of populism, maybe it's time they vie it against each time. other. The Democrats need to find someone who can appeal to working class voters. And the person who

obviously leaps to mind is John Federman. He's a guy who has won in Pennsylvania. The state Democrats need to win by violating, especially recently, all sorts of progressive orthodoxies. And so he's a guy who's culturally and in the level of values, I think much closer to the median voter in this country than nominating the next person from an elite school and elite law school. I remain pretty optimistic about America. You know, we go through periods of turmoil. We go through periods where people get discussed with established power, where a passionate generation comes on the scene, where groups that were marginalized demand to be included. And this happened in the 1770s during the American Revolution. It happened in the 1830s in the age of Andrew Jackson, happened in the 1890s during the second

Industrial Revolution, and it happened in the 1960s with all the turmoil assassinations and bombings of that era. And the news from history is that we get over it. We go through these moments of turmoil in which we shake everything up, but humans are ingenious and the culture heals. And so what happens is after a few years of this period of turmoil, the culture shifts, people's values adapt, and we create a new consensus. And I'm highly confident we're going to do that now. The short-term problem is doing it while Donald Trump is in charge. And I'm I don't particularly worry about fascism from Donald Trump. I don't think he's that organized.

I worry about chaos and incompetence. As we do some fundamental rethinking, there has to be a rallying effort to preserve parts of government that work, the civil service, the Treasury, the Federal Reserve, and to preserve what's really valuable in the American system against the chaotic wills of Donald Trump. If you like this show, follow it on Spotify, Apple, or wherever you get your podcasts.

This show is produced by Derek Arthur, Sophia Alvarez Boyd, Vichaca, Fiby Lett, Christina Samuelski, and Jillian Weinberger. It's edited by Kari Pitkin, Alison Bruzek, and Annie Rose Strasser. Engineering, mixing, and original music by Isaac Jones, Sonia Herrero,

Pat McCusker, Carol Saburo, and Afim Shapiro. Additional music by Amin Sohota. The fact check team is Kate Sinclair, Mary Marge Locker, and Michelle Harris. Audience Strategy by Shannon Busta, Christina Samuelski, and Adrian Rivera. The executive producer of Times Opinion Audio is Annie Rose Dresser.