Why Is David Brooks Wrong About Why People Admire Donald Trump?

Brooks On Why People Admire Trump

David Brooks, a pundit who also writes for the New York Times, who is a former conservative who later in his career transitioned to being a moderate, has a new article today in the Atlantic magazine, entitled "Why Do So Many People Think That Trump Is Good?" that is also an engagement with the life work of philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre, who recently passed in May at the age of 94.

MacIntyre argued that from at least the time of the classical period, communities ("a dense network of faily, tribe, city, and nation") created duties and expectations about how to live your life and act morally according to your social role ("soldier, farmers, merchants" and mothers), which people generally accepted and made it their life's work to live up to as well as you could. Judaism, Christianity and Islam tweaked these duties and expectations to give greater weight to compassion and humility, but through the Middle Ages maintained the same social structure in which morality and your duties in life were societally imposed. The wars of religion at the end of the Middle Ages convinced people that maybe religion was not the best thing to organize societies upon and in reaction to that came the Enlightenment period of the 18th century centered upon reason and science, and relegated morality to a matter of individual choice.

MacIntyre argued that this produced a decline in shared morality, although Brooks himself would put this moment in the mid-1960s. The narrative continues with Nietzsche famously saying that "God is dead" because we'd killed him and made ourselves our own gods. In this narrative, Hilter, Lenin, and Mao fill that moral vacuum with narcissism, fanaticism, and authoritarianism, "and the cure turned out to be worse than the disease."

At this point it becomes less clear whether it is MacIntyre or Brooks talking. But the two solutions to a moral vacuum that Brooks presents are coercion or manipulation. Either coerce others to believe what you believe, e.g., with corporate DEI, or manipulate people with the kind of lies and sleaze that Trump and Fox News are known for utilizing. The battle of these methods in the 1980s and 1990s "looks like a golden age of peace and tranquility compared to today", Brooks argues, because in the last thirty years people have sought righteousness instead through their political identities and politics permeates everything.

Without a firm universal ground in "the virtues that are practical tools for leading a good life: honesty, fidelity, compassion, other-centeredness", "People are rendered anxious and fragile" and without a moral foundation, they "fall apart when setbacks come."

He sees Trump as a man "who doesn't even try to speak the language of morality", doesn't care about weakening "our shared moral norms" with his example, speaks a language of preference "I want" and a language of power "I have the leverage", and a language of self, of gains of acquisition, of benefitting himself, instead.

Brooks argues, within the framework of MacIntyre's philosophy that Trump is "just an exaggerated version of the kind of person modern society was designed to create." He also argues (inaccurately, in my view) that if Trump was on their team, most Democrats would like him too, and that you're lying to yourself if you deny it.

Brooks argues that pluralism is the answer to to resolving the tension created by incommensurate values, but that we need to recalibrate it to make people "more willing to sacrifice some freedom of autonomy for the sake of the larger community" and to provide rigorous moral education to the next generation (which sounds a lot like the coercion he condemned earlier in his argument).

Why Is Brooks Wrong?

I don't think this rings true, and find better answers in psychology and economics than in philosophy, which I've always considered something of a dead end and historical curiosity that recalls long since superseded proto-science, than something of real value today as anything more than intellectual history.

In my view, Trump, a psychopath rich in "dark triad" traits, is an archetypical figure familiar to observers of politics and public affairs and history since classical times, if not earlier, who is a constant threat to every organization from families to empires. There is nothing novel or surprising about him, himself. 

Demagogues were something that the Founders of the United States, at the pinnacle of the Enlightenment, worried about. Democracy and the Bill of Rights were their answer to the narcissistic mad kings and equally dark leaders of established religions with whom they were very familiar, both from the 18th century world and from the history that they knew from the classical era through the Middle Ages. The Founders were familiar with Roman Emperor Nero. Machiavelli in "The Prince" wrote about how dark triad tactics might be advisable to a leader seeking to gain power for his people. They were intimately familiar with the tyrants of British history, right up through King George. The believed that people whose rights were guarded by law would not vote for such scoundrels. Lest we forget, George R. R. Martin, in his Game of Thrones series, a fantasy series that draws heavily on the War of the Roses, history that was much more fresh in the minds of the Founders, reminds us of what that was like and why it is best avoided.

It wasn't a bad plan. 

The Constitution adopted in 1789 lasted without an insurmountable constitutional crisis for 72 years, when Civil War broke out. After the crisis over slavery that manifested in the Civil War was overcome in 4 years of brutal deadly fighting (that still leave the nation deeply divided) was over, followed a 12 year Reconstruction period, and in turn followed by 77 years or so of de jure segregation but a fragile peace. We then went on to have another 70 years or so of the constitution working more or less as intended. 

We are in the midst of another constitutional crisis now, which their plan may or may not be good enough to overcome. 

The United States of America, including its 13 years before the current constitution was adopted, is 249 years old, making it the oldest fully non-hereditary democratic governmental regimes still in existence on the scale of a large nation. But the Founders, as one of the first countries to have a full fledged democratic Republic at a large national scale, lacked the historical experience or foresight to plan for every potential eventuality and their plan is now clearly not the optimal design, although it may be that our Republic's woes are such that no formal constitution would have been sufficient to prevent them.

The times and places in history where tyrants arose also doesn't match up. MacIntyre's framework suggests that we should have seen a breakdown in a sense of duty and morality in the Enlightenment. But we didn't see this happen across the board. Yes, the moral divide in the U.S. may be traceable to the moral fight over slavery that emerged in the Enlightenment. But, this was not a general, individualized loss of community norms, it was a divide that arose between two coherent and vital cultures, that of the slaveholding South on one side, and of the abolitionist North on the other, sustained, as much as anything, by the perceived economic needs of each region, with clergy serving of cheerleaders of each side and framing these economic imperatives with moral justifications.

Why did we get Hitler in Weimar Germany, and Lenin in Russia, while France, England, and the United States were not similarly afflicted?

Hitler is the clearest example. Germany's defeat in World War I, the harsh terms of the Treaty of Versailles, hyperinflation, and economic collapse, radicalized many Germans, making them crave an authoritarian strong man to save them, and causing them to abandon the luxuries of caring for their fellow man whom they saw as their competitors, or as a drag on their society's ability to overcome the malaise that they faced.

Similar economic forces drive American politics today. After a couple of decades of remarkable shared prosperity, economic growth, which make the liberalism and the care for their fellow man of the Civil Rights movement possible, ceased to be shared starting sometime around the early 1970s. Since then, mostly educated, urban elites have captured almost all of the economy's economic growth for a half century, while less educated folk in rural areas and small towns have seen their economic prospects stagnate. The Civil Rights movement improved the economic lot of non-whites and women. New immigration laws welcomed foreigners. Free trade allowed manufacturing to be offshored to markets with lower wages, fewer labor protections, and weaker environmental laws. The U.S. de-industrialized and the Rust Belt came into being. Free trade rules, environmental rules, protections for unions, automation, birth control and abortion have, in their view, destroyed an economy fueled by domestic manufacturing and fossil fuels, in which men received good pay that made them heads of their families.

Half a century later, counties that vote blue have more than double the per capita GDP of those that vote red. Red America has captured almost none of the economic growth of the last half century, while Blue America is more prosperous than almost any other place on Earth. Prosperous Blue America extended its inclusive shared affluence mindset to allow the LGBT community to live publicly and in dignity, and to make it safe to be openly secular. 

Straight white Christian men in Red America without much education have seen every other demographic but them improve their lot in the last fifty years, while they have seen almost no improvement in their real wages, increased unemployment, and an inability to maintain stable and solid marriages and families. In relative terms, they seem themselves, and the rural and small town communities that they live in, as the losers, and see the economy as a zero sum game in which non-whites, foreigners, and women have taken what was theirs, and in which atheists and gays have ripped apart the moral framework that held their parents and grandparents families together. They want to throw out everything that they see as having driven their half century of eroded status with no end in sight, and return to the days when their relative status was vastly greater, no matter how unfair that may seem to everyone else. 

They are so frustrated over this sustained defeat that they are willing to turn to an indiscriminate authoritarian who breaks the rules that they see as having held them back, and are even willing to resort to violence, to get it. Their concerns about good character and process values and fair play have dissolved in the face of falling life expectancies, deaths of despair, regular unemployment, disability from the manual work that they are qualified to do with the economy doesn't need anymore to same extent, and their inability to hold onto wives and children that really arises not from an immoral society but from their own failures of economic providers. Faced with their conditions, they want to burn the system down and start over from new foundations that elevate their relative socio-economic standing.

Not everyone who votes for Trump has experienced this, and not everyone in red counties and red states has supported him. Some have supported Republicans simply out of thoughtless, long ingrained habit, or because they think that they are among the rich who will benefit from tax cuts. But peer pressure from enough people who matter in their little small town and rural communities, and in the working class underworld of Blue America, have made their political views (stripped of any reasoning behind them) normative in their communities, won over their wives, and caused religious congregation to which these men have been drawn because they are saying what these men want to hear to thrive and reinforce these men's views.

What we see today is more a product of capitalism, appropriately regulated but with only modest redistribution, doing what it does naturally: increasing GDP as fast as it can, while leaving the productive better off than the less productive who are worse off. But capitalism has done its thing to an extent greater than the political system is willing to bear, bringing us to a breaking point. 

It's worse in the U.S. because we have done less to cushion the blow for those who are less productive either by finding them places in the new economy or redistributing wealth and creating a stronger social safety net (in part, because racism has left the U.S. with a weaker sense of solidarity). But the same pressures are present in Europe, with somewhat different targets to fit local changes over the last half century, and are strongest in the places that are economically struggling.

Democrats Are Predominantly More Correct Than Republicans

The main sin that the Democrats have committed is not taking seriously enough the grievances of the working class, especially working class white Christian men, who have not shared in the improvement in relative or absolute prosperity that much of the rest of the nation has enjoyed, and who are lashing out at people they see as competitors or as people undermining morality, when neither of these things is the real problem. 

Despite adopting many policies that substantively benefit Red America more than their own base, they didn't go quite far enough, and left this constituency economically struggling, and equally importantly, feeling like they didn't matter and were neglected.

Progressives gets this and have tried to secure radical economic reforms to address this problem, so they don't have to resort to the injustices towards innocents that Trump has inflamed his supporters to think they want. But progressives do not make up a majority of the American public, and the bigger tent necessary to secure the majorities needed to reach a position of power where change can be enacted, and a constitutional framework and political system that tends to create gridlock and too strongly defends the status quo, has thwarted their efforts to secure more than incremental change, which has not been enough. Sometimes the frustration of progressives over their insufficient clout and numbers to achieve the full measure of their goals in a system that already makes it too hard to do so, when they rightfully believe that their proposals are urgently needed to keep far right tendencies at bay and secure economic justice, even boil over into claims that Democrats are no different than Republicans, since both are controlled by big business, despite the fact that this just undermines their own cause.

Contrary to Brooks' assertion, Democrats wouldn't fall for a Trump. They aren't desperate in the way that the MAGA Republican base is, and so they are happy to purge people like him from their ranks when they are caught. The Democratic Party isn't full of criminals, and is much less corrupt than the Republican Party which has had vastly more criminals and is now openly corrupt. 

Democrats and progressives are right that a manufacturing based fossil fuel economy isn't coming back, and that even if manufacturing did come back that 21st century manufacturing is so automated and skill intensive for most jobs, and so unproductive and low paying for others, that it wouldn't restore the economy and related societal consequences that flowed from it anyway.

Democrats are right that the rich aren't taxed enough, although they are mistaken that unions are a leading cause of the shared prosperity benefits that came from a tight labor market, rather than a symptom of that tight labor market that more efficiently utilized economic power that workers already had.

The Democratic effort to create working class clean economy jobs was the right idea, but was too little, too late.

Republicans are wrong in thinking that putting the Ten Commandments in schools, embracing religion, restricting abortion and birth control, making it legally harder to divorce, and squashing gay rights and transgender rights will restore morality and strengthen working class families.

Republicans are wrong in thinking that economics is a zero sum game, in which gains for non-whites, women, educated people, and immigrants, and imports leave white native born men without higher education, their communities, and the U.S. economy, generally, worse off.

Republicans are wrong in thinking that taxes and government spending are bad for the economy or bad for them. They are particularly wrong in thinking that reducing social safety net spending which disproportionately benefits them, will leave them better off, or that tax cuts for the wealthy, big businesses, and people with high incomes weaken the economy or leave them worse off. They have also forgotten (or never knew) that the era they seek to return to "when America was great" was characterized by high taxes and lots of government spending (as well as a very militant union movement).

Republicans are wrong in thinking that they don't benefit from the world order that foreign aid spending and our historical military alliances supported, and are a waste of money, and in thinking about military strength purely in terms of U.S. military might standing alone when wars are almost always won by the side with the most allies and "soft power."

But It Takes More Than Facts And Logic To Change Minds

Of course, as we've learned very painfully, mere facts and logic are enough enough to change political views, and in particular, are not enough to change the political views of a base that holds those views precisely because it has not prospered in an economy based upon knowledge and intellectual ability, and has had wealthy, amoral elites manipulate the information that has been imparted to them.

People's political identities are fundamentally social and are deeply shaped by economics and the information, however untrue it may be, that they have chosen to listen to when forming their world views (something that is itself influenced by their economic circumstances, as well as their ancestral culture).

You have to quash fountains of disinformation and fact resistance that have been gradually taking hold for decades. You have to either get people to admit that they have been conned, or find a way for people to change their political views that allows them to deny that this has happened. You have to make their views uncomfortable for them to hold in their own personal lives, but must do so in circumstances where converting from them is less painful than retreating into their denial with likeminded victims of the con. You have to be able to show them in terms that they understand and believe that your proposals are better than MAGA's and to back that up with an ability to produce tangible results for them. You have to address their needs and hardships, and not merely show that the other side is worse.

Those are tall orders, and it isn't clear that Democrats are up to the challenge. 

Democrats best hope is really that the Republicans, at a time when they are undeniably in complete control, are making the lives of the MAGA base tangibly worse, or convince the MAGA base that this is imminently about to happen, and to undermine any hope that they have that burning everything down will lead to a future that leaves them better off in relative terms, if not in absolute terms. Trump and his allies, as they attempt to govern in a purely ideological manner, are their own worst enemies here.

The GOP's hold on Congress is tenuous. In 2026, flipping 4 seats out of a 53 GOP seats would flip the Senate, and flipping 3 seats out of 220 GOP seats in the House (and reclaiming three currently vacant democratic seats in vacancy elections) would flip the House. Trump is the least popular President since Trump, and many of his particular policies, including his recently passed budget, are wildly unpopular with voters. The public is no fan of Congress and a lot of Republicans in Congress have voted for measures that are unpopular with the people who elected them (even though the final budget bill retreated from many of Trump's demands) and will actively hurt the people who elected them. Some of the gerrymandering that influenced the results of the 2024 election will also be remedied in 2026. Elon Musk's proposal to create a new "American Party", even if it wasn't terribly successful, would split the conservative vote in a way that could benefit Democrats immensely. The U.S. Supreme Court has also never had less popular support in the history of modern polling, and conservative voters no longer need to support Trump and the GOP to keep in that way (or to have their tax cuts for corporations and the rich made permanent).

It is unlikely that Republicans will hold both Houses of Congress in the 2026 election. They will probably lose control of the House and at least lose ground in the Senate, barring a major escalation in the steps that Trump has tried to take to erode democracy in the last sixteen months, with lukewarm but significant support from the Supreme Court's conservative supermajority which has significantly impaired the ability of other federal courts to restrain Trump.

Time will tell how it turns out in the midst of the constant political chaos and societal unrest that Trump have actively stoked.

Left leaning forces don't have to keep MAGA's dictatorial power grab at bay forever. The MAGA base is in demographic decline. The Democratic base is growing. If the left can endure this crisis and thwart full on totalitarianism until Trump is dead and his MAGA agenda has been discredited by its own failures severely enough, for enough years, the crisis will be overcome and the Republic can be saved. It may be bruised, battered, and irrevocably harmed in many ways, but it would not be beyond all saving. 

But history is also not without precedents, like Iran, Afghanistan, and North Korea, where progress is dramatically reversed when totalitarians succeed, and this backward state continues for forty years or more with minimal progress. And, unlike the case of people subject to the Axis regimes in World War II, no other country or alliance will be coming to rescue us, because we are too big and too militarily mighty. Another civil war might save us if that happens, but that would be a horrible price to pay.

Poem Of The Day

My battle cry when I was in English class in high school. I eventually transferred to another class. 

Up! up! my Friend, and quit your books;

Or surely you’ll grow double:

Up! up! my Friend, and clear your looks;

Why all this toil and trouble?

The sun above the mountain’s head,

A freshening lustre mellow

Through all the long green fields has spread,

His first sweet evening yellow.

Books! ’tis a dull and endless strife:

Come, hear the woodland linnet,

How sweet his music! on my life,

There’s more of wisdom in it.

And hark! how blithe the throstle sings!

He, too, is no mean preacher:

Come forth into the light of things,

Let Nature be your teacher.

She has a world of ready wealth,

Our minds and hearts to bless—

Spontaneous wisdom breathed by health,

Truth breathed by cheerfulness.

One impulse from a vernal wood

May teach you more of man,

Of moral evil and of good,

Than all the sages can.

Sweet is the lore which Nature brings;

Our meddling intellect

Mis-shapes the beauteous forms of things:—

We murder to dissect.

Enough of Science and of Art;

Close up those barren leaves;

Come forth, and bring with you a heart

That watches and receives.

Got that? “…bring with you a heart

That watches and receives."

- William Wordsworth, "The Tables Turned"

Epistemology Has Consequences

Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.

- Francois Marie Arouet de Voltaire.

About 50 million American adults (a third of U.S. voters, this may be an under estimate because it omits non-voters who share similar beliefs) readily believe all manner of things that are deeply disconnected from reality and are simply aren't true in a provable manner.

Some of these things include the false belief that there was massive election fraud in 2020 that caused Trump to lose an election that he actually won, the belief that climate change is false, the belief that COVID-19 is a hoax or is on a par with the flu, the belief that mass gatherings without masks or social distancing or vaccines does not spread a dangerous disease, the belief that information from sources such as mainstream media sources, medical experts, and higher educational institutions is completely unreliable, the belief that evolution is bunk while Young Earth Creationism is real, belief in QAnon Conspiracy theories, etc.

People are entitled to their own opinions and have different interests, but they aren't entitled to their own facts. A world where a third of the electorate has grossly inaccurate views about reality and facts is deeply dangerous to democracy and to the future of the United States. There is plenty of room for disagreement left in a world where we are fighting about values and which true facts are most important without having to have disagreements over things that are objectively true and provable. The fact that someone says that it is raining on a sunny day, doesn't make the actual state of the weather a matter of opinion.

The roots of our current predicament are buried in the Second Great Awakening in U.S. history, in the early 19th century, and associated concepts like Christian Fundamentalism and Biblical Literalism. These religious movements and concepts put the Bible at the apex of authority in determining the truth about the world.

One of the first places that the implications of this manifested in the U.S. political and legal system was in the First Amendment freedom of religion court battles over teaching evolution in schools, for example, in the Scopes Monkey Trial in 1925, since this well established scientific concept was at odds with a literal reading of the Book of Genesis in the Bible.

Creationism isn't a product of lack of information. One might have reasonably suspect that this was the source at some point, but the ubiquity of the Internet and progress in K-12 science instruction over the last few decades has pretty much definitively ruled that out as a cause.

Every middle school and high school biology class discusses evolution and other forms of science which are inconsistent with creationism, and even if they didn't, ideas inconsistent with creationism (in its less sophisticated young Earth variety that is the naive interpretation of the Book of Genesis in the Bible) are deeply embedded in mainstream popular culture and unavoidable.

Instead, Young Earth Creationism is the product of a deliberate decision to prioritize Biblical Literalism as a source of accurate knowledge about the world over science, the K-PhD educational establishment, mainstream media, and so on.

The philosophical choices that adherence to creationism (and other aspects of Biblical literalism) requires someone to make in their epistemology is the gateway and lynch pin to all of the other things that a large segment of Americans on the right, especially Evangelical Christians, believe that are grossly at odds with science and observational evidence.

Once you make a choice that science, educators, the mainstream media, the government and should be disregarded because they contradict a literal reading of the Bible, the constraints that prevent the rest of us (including hard core European political conservatives who adhere to non-literalist forms of Christianity) are gone. Therefore, pseudo-science, actual fake news, and mood affiliation can swoop in to fill the vacuum when some highly authoritative figure within the movement (like a televangelist or former President Trump) who is a source of knowledge below the Bible but above reliable mainstream sources, endorses these ideas.

This is why this subset of perhaps 50 million Americans are profoundly more vulnerable to the "Big Lie" than the rest of us.

When I say "deprogramming" in my previous post at this blog, that prompted some active commentary, something which I view as a top priority in the post-Trump era, the main issue I am getting at is trying to get these folks to recognize that the way that their epistemology priorities the reliability of sources of information is broken.

There is more than one way to do that, which basically boil down to various strategies for coping with cognitive dissonance. 

Devout mainstream Christians often decide that there are domains in which Biblical and religious authority is paramount, and there are other domains in which secular sources are paramount (evolutionary scientist Stephen Jay Gould called these domains "magisteria"). 

Some people deconvert or change religions, which is one of the reasons for mass secularization in Europe and the United States in the last century or so (sooner in Europe by a couple of generations, at least, than in the United States, in part, due to the division between church and state in the United States that left people discontented with the established religions in European countries with more choices and left the church with less pressure to avoid tensions with secular authorities).

Some people convince themselves there secular sources are fake as descriptions of reality but that pretending they are real to be able to function in the world is a bit like honoring the rules of nature that apply in a video game or to understand a fantasy novel, knowing full well that video games and fantasy novels don't describe reality. 

But the prospects for American if a large share of those 50 million people don't do something to address the fact that they are participating in making decisions for all of us in a democratic society based upon a worldview that is deeply disconnected from reality are dire.

How Do We Get People To Reconnect To Reality?

David Brooks is spot on in his analysis of "The rotting of the Republican mind."

In a recent Monmouth University survey, 77% of Donald Trump's backers said Joe Biden had won the presidential election because of fraud. Many of these same people think climate change is not real. Many of these same people believe they don’t need to listen to scientific experts on how to prevent the spread of the coronavirus.

We live in a country in epistemological crisis, in which much of the Republican Party has become detached from reality.

Moreover, this is not just an American problem. All around the world, rising right-wing populist parties are floating on oceans of misinformation and falsehood.

What is going on?

Many people point to the internet — the way it funnels people into information silos, the way it abets the spread of misinformation. I mostly reject this view. Why would the internet have corrupted Republicans so much more than Democrats, the global right more than the global left?

. . . 

Over the past decades, the information age has created a lot more people who make their living working with ideas, who are professional members of this epistemic process. The information economy has increasingly rewarded them with money and status. It has increasingly concentrated them in ever more prosperous metro areas.

While these cities have been prospering, places where fewer people have college degrees have been spiraling down: flatter incomes, decimated families, dissolved communities. In 1972, people without college degrees were nearly as happy as those with college degrees. Now those without a degree are far more unhappy about their lives.

People need a secure order to feel safe. Deprived of that, people legitimately feel cynicism and distrust, alienation and anomie. This precarity has created, in nation after nation, intense populist backlashes against the highly educated folks who have migrated to the cities and accrued significant economic, cultural and political power. Will Wilkinson of the Niskanen Center calls this the “Density Divide.” It is a bitter cultural and political cold war.

In the fervor of this enmity, millions of people have come to detest those who populate the epistemic regime, who are so distant, who appear to have it so easy, who have such different values, who can be so condescending. Millions not only distrust everything the “fake news” people say but also the so-called rules they use to say them.

People in this precarious state are going to demand stories that will both explain their distrust back to them and also enclose them within a safe community of believers. The evangelists of distrust, from Trump to Alex Jones to the followers of QAnon, rose up to give them those stories and provide that community. Paradoxically, conspiracy theories have become the most effective community bonding mechanisms of the 21st century.

For those awash in anxiety and alienation, who feel that everything is spinning out of control, conspiracy theories are extremely effective emotional tools. For those in low-status groups, they provide a sense of superiority: I possess important information most people do not have. For those who feel powerless, they provide agency: I have the power to reject “experts” and expose hidden cabals. As Cass Sunstein of Harvard Law School points out, they provide liberation: If I imagine my foes are completely malevolent, then I can use any tactic I want.

Under Trump, the Republican identity is defined not by a set of policy beliefs but by a paranoid mindset. He and his media allies simply ignore the rules of the epistemic regime and have set up a rival trolling regime. The internet is an ideal medium for untested information to get around traditional gatekeepers, but it is an accelerant of the paranoia, not its source. Distrust and precarity, caused by economic, cultural and spiritual threat, are the source.

What to do? 

You can’t argue people out of paranoia. If you try to point out factual errors, you only entrench false belief. The only solution is to reduce the distrust and anxiety that is the seedbed of this thinking.

That can only be done first by contact, reducing the social chasm between the members of the epistemic regime and those who feel so alienated from it. And second, it can be done by policy, by making life more secure for those without a college degree.

Rebuilding trust is, obviously, the work of a generation.

The conclusion that the roots of the “reality disconnect” involve alienation from an “information economy” elite in urban areas with different values and much greater prosperity that is culturally different is spot on. 

He’s also correct that economic measures that would alleviate that economic distress would start to end that alienation and put everyone on the same page.

The World Values Survey is consistent with the same conclusion. 

It is in the interests of the GOP, as the conservative party in the U.S. two party system, to have people feel scarcity, uncertainty, alienation, and fear. Those are the conditions that tend to make people more conservative politically and socially. So, there is a strong political incentive for conservatives to encourage the continuation of those conditions and attitudes. Prosperity, predictability, trust and security makes people liberal and that hurts the GOP.

Few conservative pundits, scholars and politicians would admit that or articulate it that way. But the politicians, at least, know it instinctively. It explains, for example, GOP opposition to programs like Medicaid Expansion that cost states nothing and provide lots of material economic benefit to the GOP base in those states if adopted.

If Republicans backed programs that made working class voters more economically secure and well off, those voters would start voting for liberals and become Democrats (absent another trade of positions on the left-right spectrum between the two major U.S. parties like the one seen in the second half of the 20th century).

A paper from a newly formed, conservative leaning think tank called The Center for the Study of Partisanship and Ideology, concludes that tax and welfare state policies oriented towards that working class wouldn't help it much politically in a paper entitled The National Populist Illusion: Why Culture, Not Economics, Drives American Politics:

During the Trump presidency, some of the most interesting and innovative thinking on the center right has come from writers and politicians sometimes called “national populists.” This group challenges Republican orthodoxy on questions of economics and suggests that a new policy agenda, focused more on working-class concerns, could realign the U.S. electorate.  

We consider the plausibility of their claims, examining the relevant scholarly literature and recent trends among voters.

The data show that most voters who supported Trump were overwhelmingly driven by cultural rather than economic concerns. This implies that the national populist vision is unlikely to provide major electoral gains for the Republican Party. Trump’s popularity among his supporters suffered very little due to his governing mostly as a conventional Republican politician, and those of his party who have adopted more redistributive voting patterns in Congress in recent years have not realized resulting gains at the ballot box. In fact, the American public gave Trump higher marks on the economy than any other major issue, contradicting the claim that more free market economic policies create an electoral cost. 

We also note that continuity with previous trends, rather than electoral realignment, was the norm in recent election cycles, meaning that the idea that there has been a major shift towards Republicans becoming the “working class party” is mostly a myth. 

Republican success in the future will depend on the party speaking to the cultural, rather than economic, concerns of its voters, whether symbolically or in more tangible terms. This can mean championing issues that Republicans have ignored in recent years like opposition to affirmative action, in addition to facilitating the kind of backlash politics towards cultural liberalism among non-white voters that has worked so well among whites in recent decades. Economic policies that seek to address working-class concerns but hinder overall growth can alienate both voters and donors for little gain.

While the paper’s reasoning isn’t as straightforward as it could be, and I would disagree with details of their conclusions, the conclusion that economic policies that seek to address working-class concerns won't help the Republican Party is probably right. 

The "idea that there has been a major shift towards Republicans becoming the “working class party”", however, is not a myth. The charts below illustrates it the dramatic changes in the 2000 and 2016 election that remained unchanged in 2020:

(Source for second chart).

The notion that Republican voters actually know or care if its economic policies would hinder overall growth is likewise absurd. The protectionist agenda advanced by Trump, for example, demonstrable and clearly hindered overall economic growth but did not shake the Republican base's support for their party as the authors of the paper themselves note. 

Republican and Democratic analysts agree that Trump support was driven by social and cultural issues (to be less euphemistic, by racism), not by economics.

UPDATE Another perspective via Politico:

I am a sixth-generation native of Dunn County in rural west-central Wisconsin, a rolling landscape of forested ridges and farmed valleys, tied together by twisting roads and meandering rivers. My ancestors came here 150 years ago and farmed 6 miles south of where my wife and I currently raise our family. With a population of 45,000, Dunn County is a swing county in a swing state: The county went for Barack Obama in 2008 and again in 2012, then for Donald Trump in 2016.

After Trump’s election, I was one of those people who stepped off the sidelines. . . . As a longtime political independent, I decided to join a political party for the first time in my life, and by 2019, I became chair of the Dunn County Democratic Party. It turned out many others here felt the way I did about Trump. . . .

[G]ood organizing was not enough to win Dunn County. In November, Trump voters turned out in force, even stronger than they had in 2016. Despite all the work we did as Democrats, there were more Trump yard signs than four years ago; more flags in support of the president flew from more flagpoles and pickup trucks. It wasn’t just Dunn County. Roughly two-thirds of rural voters across the country cast their ballots for Trump. Any election results map you look at offers a bleak visualization of the political divide between rural and urban voters: a sea of red dotted with islands of blue.

Why did Trump do so well with rural voters? 

From my experience, it’s not because local Democrats failed to organize in rural areas. Instead, after conversations with dozens of voters, neighbors, friends and family members in Dunn County, I’ve come to believe it is because the national Democratic Party has not offered rural voters a clear vision that speaks to their lived experiences. The pain and struggle in my community is real, yet rural people do not feel it is taken seriously by the Democratic Party.

My fear is that Democrats will continue to blame rural voters for the red-sea electoral map and dismiss these voters as backward. But my hope is for Democrats to listen to and learn from the experiences of rural people.

The signs of desperation are everywhere in communities like mine. A landscape of collapsed barns and crumbling roads. Main Streets with empty storefronts. The distant stare of depression in your neighbor’s eyes. If you live here, it is impossible to ignore the depletion.

Rural people want to share in America’s prosperity, but the economic divide between rural and urban America has widened. Small-business growth has slowed in rural communities since the Great Recession, and it has only worsened with Covid-19. As capital overwhelmingly flows to metro areas, the small-town economy increasingly is dominated by large corporations: low-wage retailers like Dollar General or agribusiness firms that have no connection to the community.

The source of our wealth is in the things we grow. But today, those things get shipped off into a vast global supply chain, where profits are siphoned off and little remains for us to save or invest. Farmers’ share of every retail food dollar has fallen from about 50 percent in 1952 to 15 percent today. Corporations control more and more of the agriculture business—from the seed and fertilizer farmers buy to the grain, milk and meat they sell—sucking out profits instead of giving farmers a fair price or a fair shot at the market. Every day, small farmers are squeezed: They can either expand their operations and take on more debt in an attempt to produce more, or close their business entirely because of chronically low commodity prices.

The digital divide is also real: About 28 percent of rural Wisconsinites lack high-speed internet, which stifles rural economic growth. Working from home or starting a new business is next to impossible in today’s economy without high-speed internet. Kids can’t learn from home without it either.

Rural health care is a disaster. At least 176 rural hospitals have closed since 2005, the majority of them in the past 10 years; it’s generally not profitable for hospitals to operate in low-population areas. Wisconsin has not been hit as badly as other states, but those hospitals that remain open in rural parts of the state are scaling back services and struggling to retain doctors. In my own county, there are zero ICU beds, even as Covid infection rates surge. Our profit-based health care system is failing rural people.

Rural people in Wisconsin are dying by suicide at rates higher than folks in suburban and urban parts of the state. This is not just a matter of poor mental health services—many rural counties lack a single practicing psychiatrist. It is also about an inescapable feeling of failure and an overwhelming sense that there is no future here.

The sad thing is none of this is an accident. It is the result of decades of policy decisions—by Republicans and Democrats—that deplete our communities.

Rural voters appreciated Obama’s repeated campaign promises to challenge the rise of agribusiness monopolies. But as president, he allowed for the continued consolidation of corporate power in the food system. His Department of Agriculture balked when it came time to enforce anti-monopoly rules such as those in the Packers and Stockyard Act, and failed to enforce Country of Origin Labeling, which would have allowed independent farmers and ranchers to better compete within the consolidated meat industry. The Obama Justice Department and Federal Trade Commission presided over a series of corporate mergers in the food and agriculture sectors, including the Kraft-Heinz and JBS-Cargill mergers. Taken together, these moves signaled that his administration did not have the backs of family farmers.

This is a large part of why Trump won Dunn County decisively in 2016 and in 2020. I have spoken with supporters of the president who were well aware of his shortcomings or admitted to disliking his leadership style, but who nonetheless believed he was willing to stand up to “elitist” Democrats and fight for citizens like them. For years, rural people have heard they are voting “against their own self-interest” when they elect Republicans, or that they vote the “wrong way” because they are uneducated. These are arrogant and damaging messages that are not easily forgotten. The reality, as I saw in my conversations with voters this year, is that many rural people have lost trust in the Democratic Party.

It was not for a lack of effort that the Biden campaign was unable to connect with rural voters this year. In May, Biden convened a virtual “rural roundtable” in western Wisconsin to show the candidate listening to stakeholders about rural economic development, health care and the crisis in Wisconsin’s dairy industry, brought on by chronically low milk prices. Nor was it for a lack of policy proposals: The Biden campaign released an exhaustive “rural plan” for anyone to read. All of these political gestures, however, are filtered through the lens of what political scientist Katherine Cramer calls “rural consciousness”—including a perception that cities are where decisions are made, culture happens and resources flow, and that rural communities are not in control of their own futures. Even as a kid from Scranton, Pennsylvania, Biden was seen as a creature of an establishment that has marginalized rural communities for decades.

Trust is earned slowly. It can’t be earned back with campaign slogans or TV ads. When people feel left behind, they look for a way to make sense of what is happening to them. There is a story to be told about rural America, yet Democrats are not telling it. That leaves an opening for other stories to be told to fill the vacuum—stories that villainize and divide us along racial, geographic and partisan lines. That is the story Trump told, but it’s the wrong one. The real story is that rural people feel our way of life is being sold off. We see the wealth of our sweat and soil being sent away to enrich executives, investors and shareholders. 

For Democrats to start telling a story that resonates, they need to show a willingness to fight for rural people, and not just by proposing a “rural plan” or showing up on a farm for a photo op. Rural people understand economic power and the grip it has on lawmakers. We know reform won’t be easy. A big step forward for Democrats would be to champion antitrust enforcement and challenge the anticompetitive practices of the gigantic agribusiness firms that squeeze our communities. In his rural plan, Biden pledged to “strengthen antitrust enforcement,” but the term doesn’t appear until the 35th bullet point. For rural voters, antitrust enforcement is a top priority, and it should be coupled with policies to manage oversupply in commodity markets, so farmers can get a fair price. Another step forward would be an ambitious federal plan, in the spirit of the New Deal’s Rural Electrification Act, to bring high-speed internet to every corner of America.

What rural voters want is a glimmer of hope that things will change. They want politicians who see a future for rural communities in which food production is localized, energy is cheap and clean, people have good jobs, soil is healthy, Main Street is bustling with small businesses, schools are vibrant and everyone can see a doctor if they need to. Here in Wisconsin, we can look back in our state’s rich history of progressive populism to a time when politicians like Bob LaFollette, our former governor and U.S. senator, understood that concentrated wealth and corporate power are a threat to people’s livelihoods. As president, Biden will have the chance to prove he understands this, too. Democrats can win rural Wisconsin again, but they’ll need to try.

I don't doubt that this account is truthful, sincere, and factually accurate. But I'm not convinced that it draws the right conclusions.

I've both highlighted and underlined the author's vision, which I think is widely shared in rural communities. I am almost certain that it won't happen.

The Inevitable Decline Of Rural America

The economic stagnation of rural America isn't just an evil plot of big agribusinesses that need to be tamed. It is more fundamental than that.

In almost every single decade since the first U.S. Census in 1790, the share of the U.S. work force engaged in agriculture has declined and the percentage of the population living in cities has increased. 

(Source)

The chart below (from here) shows the change in population in U.S. counties from 2010 to 2018 during which average population growth in the U.S. was 6%. 

Blue counties grew in population with the darkest blue counties growing by 20% or more in eight years, and the intermediate blue counties growing by at least 10% but less than 20% in eight years. Light blue counties are barely keeping up with, or falling behind, in their share of the nation's population. Red counties saw their populations fall, with the darkest red counties declining in population by 20% or more in eight years, and the intermediate blue counties declining in population by at least 10% but less than 20% in eight years.

Why is rural America depopulating?

Fundamentally, farms are just little factories. Technology has made farmers more productive, so fewer farmers can grow more farm products with the same amount of land. And farm productivity has soared (at the big farms that provide the lion's share of our food). There are lots of old farmers are running mostly small unproductive operations: 74% of farms produce just 3% of U.S. farm products on 31% of U.S. farm acreage and about 57% of all U.S. farm production comes from just 4% of U.S. farms on 19% of U.S. farm acreage.

(Source).

You have to be extremely productive to be competitive, and will see your income decline unless you can keep up with this productivity growth. You are directly competing in a national and oftentimes international marketplace against literally everyone else in the industry. And, increased productivity in the industry from technological advances (see also e.g. GPS guided self-driving tractors) means every generation somebody's children has to get out of farming and your small towns continue to depopulate a little bit more. 

With current farming technology as actually practiced in the United States about 10 acres of land (40,000 square meters) is used to produce food for each average person. Globally, we use about a third as much land to product the same amount of food as we did fifty years ago, and agricultural productivity per land area has increased steadily year in and year out.

This represents are remarkable improvement in agricultural productivity in the last half century or so. Between 1950 and 2000, during the so-called "second agricultural revolution of modern times", U.S. agricultural productivity rose fast, especially due to the development of new technologies. For example, the average amount of milk produced per cow increased from 5,314 pounds to 18,201 pounds per year (+242%), the average yield of corn rose from 39 bushels to 153 bushels per acre (+292%), and each farmer in 2000 produced on average 12 times as much farm output per hour worked as a farmer did in 1950. 

This isn't a new trend. The number of people employed in farming as a whole has declined every decade since the United States was established to less than 2% of the workforce today. In 1820, 72% of of U.S. workers were engaged in farm occupations; in 1840 it was 69%; in 1860 it was 59%, in 1880 it was 57%, in 1900 it was 38%, in 1920 it was 27%, in 1940 it was 17%, in 1960 it was 6%, in 1980 it was 3%, by 2000 it is a little over 2%. The actual number of people in farm occupations has declined from about 2.9 million in 1820 to 2.1 million in 2000. 

Fewer people are becoming farmers and as a result older farmers, often with small inefficient operations, are getting older:

In 1978, the percentage of farmers age 65 and over, and under age 35 were about the same, 16% or so each. By 2007, the percentage of farmers age 65 and over has nearly doubled to about 30%, and the percentage of farms aged under 35 has declined by about two-thirds to about 5%. The trend measured at five year intervals by the University of Iowa has been steady and unbroken since 1978 (and probably earlier). Just in the past five years [ed. from 2002 to 2007] the average age rose to 57 (from 55) and the ranks of the 75-and-up set increased by 20 percent from 2002 to 2007. The number of those younger than 25 has dropped by nearly a third.

There have been some bright spots for the agricultural industry. In the last decade or two (i.e. since the 2000 census) there has been a rare increase in the total number of farms as new organic farms and marijuana and hemp industry grows have started essentially new industries in parallel to the existing agriculture industry. But, those numbers aren't huge in the overall scheme of things and are often in urban or suburban locations. Metro Denver has more than 100 acres of indoor marijuana cultivation facilities providing more than half of the state's total marijuana crop, for example.

Populations in farm counties have steadily declined as well. For example, according to forecasts from the state demographer in Colorado (as of 2007), every rural front range county except Morgan (county seat Fort Morgan) and Logan (county seat Sterling) will see its share of the state's population decline in the census in 2010, 2020 and 2030. The same forecast applies to most of the San Luis Valley. Most of the state's growth is expected to occur in the I-25 corridor (although Denver, Jefferson County, Boulder and Arapahoe County, all home to many landlocked central cities and first ring suburbs, will also decline in their share of the state's population), and in countries with tourism and mining driven economies.

Fewer farmers leads to fewer people living in rural areas and lower population density. Lower population density means that the per capita cost of maintaining roads and bridges and telecommunications systems and hospitals and schools in a county increases. It means that rural communities consume less of everything. This means fewer retail sales and a reduced demand for services from doctors, teachers and more.

While there are economies of increased scale for almost every kind of business and non-profit or governmental service provider, the reverse is also true. The smaller the scale at which you try to operate a business or a non-profit or a governmental agency, the less efficient it becomes. So, while farms and agribusinesses are consolidating and becoming more efficient, the communities that serve them are becoming more strained and less efficient as they fall in population.

No amount of anti-trust enforcement or government regulation can change that reality. Rural America will relentlessly decline in population in the short to medium term future no matter what policy makers try to do about it.

Most rural small towns don't have much of a future.

Main street in most of America's small towns isn't coming back. Instead, most of those small towns will end up like the towns where my parents grew up: Felch, Michigan and Dola, Ohio. Those towns are now included in lists of American ghost towns. 

Rural Education Is Expensive

The schools in those communities will never be vibrant and full of children again. One by one, they will close, because young people have had to move to the cities and suburbs of America since the rural economy of America doesn't need as many people anymore because it is more efficient, and there are fewer and fewer children in these communities that need schools. And, the per child cost of educating kids has soared because the schools with too few children are inefficient. It costs two or three times as much non-local subsidy per student to offer a public K-12 education in a rural area as it does in a city partly due to cost and partially due to local inability to pay, despite an overall lower quality educational product is some important respects. 

While it is a small example, small towns tied to the agricultural industry have depopulated so greatly that few rural school districts can field full sized football teams any more because their schools are too small. Similarly, most rural school districts in Colorado have already resorted to teaching classes only four days a week. And, they pay their teachers less than teachers in urban districts, which means that they often can lure the best new teachers in the state to their schools.

Yet shrinking rural communities don't have the money to pay the higher cost per child to educated children there, leading to a vicious cycle in which even young people with school aged children who might have have been able to find work in rural areas decline it, because their children can't get good educations there. 

Rural Health Care Problems Aren't Just A Matter Of Financing It

Declining populations in rural areas mean that they can support fewer doctors, so older rural doctors aren't replaced when they retire. And, even when doctors are needed, doctors often don't want to live in these communities because they don't offer the kind of life for them and their families that they would like to live. 

Why work in a community with lousy schools, decaying roads, no hospitals, no high speed internet access, few peers to interact with, little high culture, few opportunities to shop at high end stores? 

Even if you are paid very well and housing costs are modest, the money isn't worth much if you can't buy much with it because no many other people live there and those that do aren't very affluent. In contrast, if you live in a city or suburb, your high compensation as a high end medical professional can be translated into a better quality of life.

And, unless you can serve enough patients, you aren't paid very well. A rural community with a declining population may still be able to support a doctor specializing in internal medicine with a primary care practice, but simply doesn't have enough work for a brain surgeon or a radiologist to have one of their own.

But for a massive influx of medical professionals from abroad year after year since the 1960s (when my inlaws joined that flow from Korea) brain draining the rest of the world, rural medical care would have collapsed decades ago for reasons like this.

Providing rural medical care is not easy and it isn't simply a matter of financing as many rural health care agendas suggest. 

Modern medical care needs economies of scale to be provided in a manner that isn't grossly expensive beyond the level it is in urban areas manyfold. 

In the hey day of small town America doctors came in two flavors (surgeons and non-surgeons), med schools were producing twice as many doctors per capita, and there was one kind of nurse who was less highly trained/skilled than an LPN but a bit more highly trained/skilled than a CNA, and a doctor's equipment other than an examining table could be carried in a large bag, or at least a steamboat trunk. 

Now, standard quality medical care for a whole community requires a team of at least a couple of dozen professionals with highly varied specialties, multiple rooms full of specialized and expensive medical equipment (like MRIs, X-ray machines, CAT scanners, oxygen and nitrogen on tap, endless monitors, UV-rooms, ICU equipment and facilities with special ventilation considerations, sterilizers, etc.), pharmacies with hundreds of kinds of medicines and compounding equipment to make custom blends, and so on, which can't be cost effectively provided to a community of much less than multiple hundreds of thousands of people. 

For older middle age and senior populations that are common in rural areas there is really no workable way to provide urban quality health care close to home. It would be far cheaper to subsidize what it costs to relocate them to places with decent health care in the same standard of living they had in rural areas (which as a bonus also makes it possible to have more family support since their children can't make economically in rural areas), than to bring health care to them. Modern medical care can do miracles that old town country doctors couldn't dream of (my dad survived more than a decade after being diagnosed with Stage 4 Pancreatic cancer after being treated at Mayo Clinic). And, everyone should have access to that. But what makes that possible is armies of specialized medical professionals and lots of expensive gear.

Hard Truths

The hard truth is that most of rural America will gradually decline in population no matter who is in Washington. Rural American can deny that reality and fail trying, or it can try to come to terms with its inevitable downsizing. Government intervention can delay the inevitable a little, at great expense, but that only prolongs the suffering.

Old people are stubborn and not inclined to change their ways to relocate to new homes and new careers late in life, especially if they own farms or small business that they've invested their life's savings in and spent most of their working lives trying to keep going that they can't take with them. 

Retirees in rural communities benefit from low housing costs and incomes that aren't dependent upon a local community that provides employment for them. But even they pay a cost in declining healthcare access by insisting on continuing to live in rural communities that can support a health care system large and specialized enough to meet their needs. And the lack of work in rural communities that no longer need as many workers and inferior schools mean that their children have moved away and can't live in the same communities as their parents which makes it harder for those children to support them.

The humane thing to do is to subsidize the process of downsizing rural communities by helping people who are no longer needed in these local economies relocate to communities that are stable or growing, because until that has run its course, these communities will continue to relentlessly decline. But that isn't what people who live in rural communities want to hear, any more than someone suffering from gangrene wants to hear that their leg needs to be amputated to save their life.

Reapportionment and Redistricting

Red states will gain seats in Congress at the expense of blue states in the reapportionment mandated by the 2020 census. 

But that masks what will happen within most of our fifty states during the redistricting process that follows. 

In almost every single one of those states, the political clout of more urban and more Democratic leaning counties will grow, and the political clout of more rural and more Republican leaning counties will fall.

Gerrymandering can try to cushion the blow a little, but the legal reality that every legislative district must have approximately the same population means that gerrymandering can only do so much, particularly because many red states are already nearly maximally gerrymandered already.