Mr. Brooks, by working class, rural Americans, I presume you mean, the white working class, rural Americans. You don't state it, but a sixth sense tells me you imply a certain group. That's being a bit out of touch with the makeup of the actual working class of today, isn't it?
But if you truly are talking about the white working class, then history tells us about strange complicities between the disenfranchised white working class and the rise of fascistic tendencies in the polity.
111
"Right now, we have a one-size-fits-all education system. Everybody should go to college."
Maybe not everybody should go to college but everybody should have access to enough education to allow them to participate as equal members of a self governing society. Republicans /conservatives are fond of advocating for vocational training. This may be a good thing if we wish to create another generation of people who are satisfied saying 'well I am not a scientist but those folks at Exxon sure seem real smart'. Different levels of academic expectations may have been acceptable in apartheid era South Africa but it should not be acceptable in a color blind self governing democracy.
39
David - "All in the Family," "Taxi," and "Cheers" are set in New York, Boston, and New York, respectively.
24
Poor David Brooks. He wouldn't know a working class person if he bumped into him. The "working class" that goes for Trump goes for him on the basis of its valuing their white skin over everything else in their lives. Healthcare? Education? good wages? Nope. White identity rules.
87
First, define working class. My cleaning lady and her car mechanic husband consider themselves middle class. Are they correct??
20
What garbage.
"We" college educated people didn't build this economy. Capitalism run amok and its constant worship of ever-growing shareholder return did. Technology did. Backwards looking and slow-moving policy did.
In my lifetime, debt went from something that should be avoided at all costs to something you should use at all costs. In my lifetime, color TVs and air conditioners transformed from luxury items into objects necessary for human life. When I was younger, freedom meant being responsible for your own actions; the more responsible you were, the greater your freedom. Now you're only "free" if you can do and say whatever crosses your mind.
I'm exactly your age, Mr. Brooks.
Stop laying the blame at the feet of the "college educated elite" and start looking at the people who hold the real levers of power. They're easy to spot on the decks of their yachts.
153
Too much common sense in this article for the GOP and well healed DEMs to understand.
17
Mr. Brooks,
If I wanted to know what to do to further the interests of the American middle class worker, I certainly would not ask a lifelong Republican like you. Your party has done nothing for the American worker for decades, other than oppose most of its interests on an ongoing basis. Trying to repeal Obamacare, and then lying about being committed to protecting people with pre-existing conditions. Passing a tax cut for corporations and the rich, and then lying about it being for the middle class. And then appealing to their racism (Obama wasn't born in this country; an immigrant invasion is coming) to scare their low information voters into voting for their lies. Disgusting.
132
Nice try, Dave. While you site lots of interesting facts, you fail to mention that the GOP has done everything in its power for 40 years to crush the working class via “right to work” laws, union busting, being against minimum wage, etc. Is the blame really shared by all us elites, democratic and republican alike?
103
I have a law dgree and went to the same college as your daughter and I voted straight Republican which, here in CA, is an empty gesture. The dems showed their true, malignant, colors in the Kavanaugh hearing. Outrageous. I cringe to think of Kamala, Corey, Pocahontas or any of those phonies being president. A Harvard grad houseguest agrees -- so don't paint us as uneducated.
11
America's three richest men conttol as much wealt as does 50% of Amercans.
26
Mr. Brooks fails to say that many of Trump supporters actually like Trump's hateful rhetoric, racism, bullying, lying, and gaslighting as do members of the Republican party. They sit complicit when they could act to help less fortunate Americans. They have no interest in making America great for anyone but themselves.
87
Trump supporting workers don't want to move to where the jobs are. That's un-American. We've always been a nation who packed up and followed the work. Trump workers want to be their boorish, sexually harassing selves in the workplace, like the president. That's against the law. It will be awhile but these folks will be looked back on as causing among the most disgraceful periods in our history.
33
Since Mr. Brooks didn't elaborate on worker co-ops, this should give you a better idea of how they operate:
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/13/opinion/sunday/chee-gig-economy-guild-union.html?action=click&module=Associated&pgtype=Article®ion=Footer&contentCollection=Loose%20Ends
4
BINGO! “ Only 37% of Tax-payers experts their children to do better then them now.” Those same working class Americans see the porous borders as a big part of the reason for this, and blame the “Do-Nothing Democrats “ for refusing to cooperate with the President and Build That Wall! Keeping our jobs here at a fair wage for our citizens and “ documented” immigrants who have come here with clean bills of health, education and proper documentation....Is that asking to much, Nancy? Bernie? Chuck?
10
Cool, another article blaming educated people for the nations problems.
51
Is there anything more nauseating than the condescension of politically correct upper middle classers to people who work hard for $30,000?
28
I read "working class" here as white working class. I got no problem with that. But I think it's time for the white working class to realize that training themselves via vocational and apprenticeship programs, and cleaning themselves up by not doing drugs/alcohol, and seeking out opportunity, even if it means leaving your home town, is the path to a better future. What the white working class used to say to the black underclass: pull yourself up by your bootstraps. Stop blaming immigration for your troubles.
76
Excellent article!
7
I am the working class, and Trump is the biggest eyesore in American history. I get my news from false news outlets like the Times, so I know that Trump is doing the opposite of making America Great Again, he is fattening the wallets of the 1 % and is the Great American Train Wreck
44
Thank you, Mr. Brooks. You finally have written a piece that I totally agree with.
5
Recently, David, you wrote a column about somewheres and anywheres.
Full disclosure: I am a proud anywhere. I wouldn't have it any other way and my life would have been considerably diminished and poorer were I not an anywhere.
So, I must say to somewheres: why do you think the world owes you a job where you were born and raised? Why do you act as though the world is arrayed against you? Did you sit up in school, take notes, pay attention, make good grades? Did you see successful people and say to yourself, I must do that, too?
These are the very same people who say 'lazy, shiftless, [n-word].' To which I say: I have zero sympathy for you and certainly no empathy. Your problems are your own. After all, you're straight, white, male and conservative.
Thought you guys were on top?
36
It was inefficiency that created the American economic juggarnaught...it was never efficiency. Inefficiency meant millions of middle class jobs...that meant consumption...that meant more jobs. Efficiency is driving out the ability to consume. Efficiency is wiping out having a desire to work...because you get money to consume things. Now you only get enough money to live on...and wonder why you work when others seem to be just as well off as you are...and they don’t work.
5
I believe that the "working class" you refer to is trying to tell us that they like Trump because he is white, racist, misogynist, and xenophobic- just like they are.
33
>
You know Brooks, Black people have been short-changed throughout history far more than the white working class, yet they mustered up enough morality NOT to take to an autocrat like a duck takes to water.
63
Do you mean rural white people? Say so.
17
This is just absolutely blind, beyond blind. What Trump voters are trying to tell us is very, very simple: they like Trump.
This is not about the "working class" telling us of their angst. This is Trump supporters telling us that they believe people with dark skin are to blame for all their problems, and Muslims, and Hispanics. This is Trump supporters telling us they hate blacks, Jews, women, and gay people.
If you can't hear what they're saying you simply are not listening.
51
Butt out, Mr. Brooks. Let the workers make a difference in their own lives. These "workers" have no less intellect than the "us" to which you refer, and can manage their own affairs quite well once, they are clued into the game. Workers were able to win over Kings, potentates, Czars and pompous intellectuals worldwide in earlier centuries, and they will rise again. Perhaps they already have.
5
Who is "us"?
4
It's not "It's the economy, stupid!". It's "It's the UNIONS, stupids!" In spite of a few more (low-paying) jobs available, working people are being slammed by corporate greed (including the healthcare industry). They need somebody on their side and it AIN'T the Republicans. WAKE UP!
27
Mr. Brooks hits the nail on the head. The other issue that bothers and confuses the majority is healthcare. And healthcare will only get worse. The Republicans want no publicly funded healthcare (except for the pharma industry); and the Democrats actually have a workable solution that is derided as "socialist."
When and if people realize the priorities of each side and how it would affect THEM this (including me) will not change. The overlooked will be manipulated and rock between almost revolution and almost revolution. The overlooked are cocked to fire!
We have a wave of change going on, but can't politicians work to soften these issues and FIX the healthcare and bring back the dignity of work. First, Independent Contractors should be reigned back.......
2
David, there are plenty of available jobs for these high-school-educated / college-drop-out males as nurses, nursing aides, home health aides, etc.
Wait, what's that you say? Doing the brutally hard work of attending to the physical and emotional needs of the elderly and infirm would make these working class men feel less manly? Oh no! Alas! Well, I'll tell you, changing bedpans and wiping feces from the rear ends of infirm hospital patients, which I did nights while I was in grad school, didn't make me feel particularly womanly, to be honest. But I did it anyway, because I needed to support myself.
We have plenty of jobs for those members of society who aren't immature narcissists. Train for them.
39
Mr Brooks, you have a few ideas, but these days everyone is writing a book. The truth is, these problems are far more complex for any one political party to solve. We all need to solve them, all of us together, because we are dealing with entrenched fears such as racism, anti-Semitism, and ignorance. We are dealing with a dangerous President and political party that is beholden to him.
An example: my brother, who wanted to be a rock star once, barely finished high school. He was sent to two trade schools but upon completion decided he didn't like these trades. He got married and started a family and found religion. He also found Rush Limbaugh and the Drudge Report. He stopped listening to mainstream news. He became more involved with his wife's family, who were Republicans, than our parents family, who were Democrats and Independents. So when Trump came along, my brother was primed to buy into the White man as victim that Trump espoused. After that, my brother, who finally got a regular paying job during the weeks of Trumps inauguration, gave the new president all the credit. It was illogical of course. But my brother, who hated Obama, couldn't give him one iota of credit.
19
This article is not only factually wrong, it is an apology for Trumpism. I participated in the elections in one suburb. I saw high earning white people vote amost exclusively for the GOP, almost all staunch supporters of Donald Trump. Data indicates that the majority of support for Trump comes from white above average income families, white small business people, the South, white evangelicals,... Racism is the most common thread among Trump supporters. We should not have any illusions about anyone that votes for the GOP candidates. These are the same people that brought us the Southern Strategy - using racism to regain political power. These candidates know full well that Trump spews hate and racial, gender, national and almost every other type of intolerance to further his reactionary ultra-right political agenda. Those that previously refused to acknowledge the class system, now use it as an excuse for racism. Trump and the GOP have not done a thing nor have any plans to help the working class, white or otherwise.
37
The European model of vocational education requires a real safety net for those going into lower paying job types - healthcare, in particular.
Academic tracking will not work in the US. It will be branded racist and discriminatory, and rejected.
European solutions are for countries that are ethnically homogeneous, generous with benefits and with progressive tax systems that can support them.
The serious problem is that the working rural class is over-represented in American politics. The system has failed them, and they themselves have failed. But they have too much political power.
15
Wow.
These comments are eye opening.
I thought that most of the socially liberal people, really did want working people to have a decent life.
But now that establishment columnists finally start positing that economic insecurity and dislocation of the working class needs to be addressed, a huge percentage of commenters are really objecting.
Lots of comments here, basically saying to working class people: "Hey, if you are not willing to abandon your family, community, culture, way of life, familial safety net, stay single, move to a big city, take some low paying, low productivity job, share a tiny rental with a bunch of strangers you don't know or trust, commute long hours to part time jobs without guaranteed hours? Then, the heck with you. We can find a bunch of single immigrants whose situation was so bad, that they *will* take that deal."
I knew that Democratic *pols* didn't really care - pretending to be the traditional supporters of the working class. But now I see that the percentage of Third Way, "heck with blue collar workers who expect a living wage" people, is much higher than I ever realized.
I am sure that you don't care any more about immigrants than you do about the working class *citizens* - that you continually disparage. When working men and women of color demand living wages, I am sure you find them just as "deplorable".
Thus the violent negative reaction to Bernie Sanders. Not because he couldn't succeed. But because you were afraid he *would*.
13
Here's the spit take on today's David Brooks column: "But what good is that growth if it means that a thick slice of America is discarded for efficiency reasons?"
The thick slice of America that was taken away wasn't discarded. It was given to the 1%. Not just once, either: over and over. As productivity increased, the gains stopped being given to American workers starting in the 1970s. A simple Google search will give you the graph.
We'll note here that when NAFTA was crafted, Labor was not at the table. Provisions to protect those who were going to lose as creative destruction overtook the workplace were also not on the table. If NAFTA and other trade agreements protected the inevitable losers, we wouldn't be having this conversation.
16
Cass's 'worker co-ops'. I'll have to find out more. From Brook's sketchy description a 'co-op' sounds a lot like a trade union. In ancient times they were called Craft Guilds. Carpenters, Musicians, Plumbers, and others have a union hall. Employers hire out of the hall. The trade union assists with training, represent and negotiate for the members. I'll be interested to learn about 'worker co-ops'. Thanks
4
I spent the last two years holding on until the 2018 midterms when everything would be set right again after Americans saw what a disaster Trump was and voted out Republicans in a blue wave. Instead, the Republicans added to their Senate seat total. I've been forced to conclude that many Americans are not rational, to the point where they don't care how much they hurt themselves, their children and our world so long as their side is "winning." The common man and woman used to have common sense, but that's all gone now. They will continue to listen to the Fox fantasy network, build their castles in the sky and enshrine their prejudices. Their is no hope for them, and possibly none for the rest of us.
17
"Working-class voters tried to send a message in 2016, and they are still trying to send it. The crucial question is whether America’s leaders will listen and respond."
This is another piece trying to decipher the Trumpists as economically depressed folks who have no choice but to turn to a bigoted, self-centered, amoral person as their savior. Give me a break! The Dems have tried to address the issue of the income gaps between rich and poor while the GOP passes huge tax cuts for the wealthy. It is the Dems that advocate health care for all while the GOP has tried to repeal the ACA over 50 times and it is Republican controlled state legislatures that refuse to extend Medicaid to the needy, even though the Federal government will pick up 90% of the cost.
What motivates the right (speaking broadly) is their total rejection of diversity and all it implies: acceptance of people of different races, cultures, sexual preferences and religions. Just look at the difference in candidates. Dems have nominated and elected a Muslim, a transgender person, a gay governor and people of various ethnicities. The GOP's representatives are almost uniformly white. A white America is what Trump and his supporters believe will make MAGA, not wonkish social programs ginned up by Phd wannabees. The demographics are turning in favor of the Dems; their day is coming.
16
Dear David,
It's clear to me now that you, and arguably the rest of the punditry universe, don't actually know anyone in the "working class". If they did, this "understanding" of their narrative and "what 'they' need", would include the realization that most of what average America thinks they know is based on lies.
Sincerely,
An Actual Member of the "Working Class"
13
Produce more??? We already substantially overproduce almost everything we can consume.
What we need to do is distribute better. The Kochs, Gates, Scaifes, DeVosses, and Buffets of the world don't need to have all the stuff. Share some with the rest of us.
We need to stop redistributing wealth upward. We need to share in the benefits of radically accelerating innovation.
16
The beltway isolated and obsessed Brooks' continues to lump all "elites", both Republican and Democratic into one group that is oblivious or neglectful of the needs of working class Americans. Sorry, David, this one is firmly on the backs of your Republucan Party and it's worship of the free market as the invisible hand that supposedly serves the common good. What, exactly, David, has the free market done to lift up the working class and reduce economic inequality over the past three decades? And how many Republicans voted against extending healthcare and the minimum wage, and for high tech job training programs targeted in coal country, for example, all which were unnanamously supported by Democrats in Congress. And, by the way, I have a hard time using the word "elites" to describe any member of a numerically inferior White Nationalist organization such as the GOP. Your mythological cultural and political paradigm has sailed Mr. Brooks. You're on the wrong team and the wrong side of history. Expect more rejection to come in 2020.
9
Well, once you had a fairly decent system, the New Deal. But that got carved up as the US got brought and sold by wealthy parasites who treat the US and it’s democracy as a rubber stamp for greater profits and rapaciously prey on the lower classes. Maybe if unions had a bit more power, huh? But no, the CEOs whinged and of course their voices are more important (and profitable!).
One point though - sure, you can choose the base, atavistic instincts of race, skin, nationality or religion as one option to help yourself. The other is co-operative, inclusive, moral and kind, where you help others who in turn help you. It’s called socialism in it’s pure form, except the US is taught from a young age to fear and hate it, while being inculcated into the ideology of money = meaning, poorer people = failures and profit > human beings.
4
I hear all that you are saying about helping the white working class. I agree with all of the proposals. What I want to know is how in the world anyone in the white working class ever thought the Republican party cared one whit about them? The Republicans have been union busting, education busting, and poverty shaming for decades. Or is it just a coincidence that they left the Democratic party when the Dems were no longer the party of whites first?
15
Good luck with that David. It all sounds strangely European, and you know how that goes over --unfortunately.
The message I heard in the 2016 election was "Lock her up."
7
Brooks is giving the working class who keep voting for Republicans way too much credit.
They don't vote for Republicans because of jobs, because Republican policies don't actually create more jobs (nor jobs that pay a living wage). They believe the lies; but they don't care that their own lives don't see any actual results.
They don't really vote for Republicans because they care about healthcare. f they actually cared, they would have voted to expand Medicare years ago when the ACA was passed; but they didn't, because it was offered by a Black Democrat.
I agree that America needs to offer young people an option for vocational training that leads to decent-paying blue-collar jobs; but don't Republicans scream that raising the minimum wage actually destroys jobs? Yet they still vote for Republicans.
In other words, these people don't think enough about what their votes does for (actually against) themselves!
All they care about is the Republican hyperbolic lies about:
- gun control
- abortion
- gay marriage
- invasion by immigrants
- winning against those evil, unpatriotic, elitist, Socialist Liberals who live in coastal blue states.
And when you dig deeper, most of their beliefs are rooted in racism and misogyny.
Ironically, the Dems are the ones who want to fund schools better, so that they can actually teach vocational tracks. The Dems want to fund the safety net, to help blue collar workers when they face hard times. But they hate us to much to understand this.
20
The crux of the problem is the ability to change to meet the demands of a new work environment that constantly demands more mental than physical work. Education is key inasmuch as the "man" (Latin for 'hand') of manufacturing is being replaced by robots and computers. These changes have been happening gradually for more than 40 years. Read Joseph Schumpeter's work on "Creative Destruction".
3
College is a failed model for widespread education and success. College for all is an even bigger failure because many employers then use not having the degree as a tool to keep wages lower for those who don't.
First, this: the six year graduation rate across all non-elite (highly selective) colleges is terrible. I haven't seen the stats in recent years, but not long ago they indicated that in most colleges fewer than 50% manage to finish in SIX YEARS of trying to complete a four yr. degree. A degree delayed means the person struggling along does not get the boost at the earliest point to get the maximum advantage.
Most people, I am willing to bet, work in fields different than their degree certification or in something only tangentially related. My daughter Britt is not atypical: she got a degree in psychology and works in selling/marketing technology services. Surely, her degree might play some small role in her success, but certainly not one that is critical.
Instead of being a combination of enlightenment and career preparation, the degree is merely a ticket of admission being considered for most jobs. What a graduate actually knows and can put to work from college is, in most cases, rather minimal. Showing up, how to write and research are worthy goals which could easily be taught in two yrs.
We need new methods to certify people as excellent and qualified. For many, a four yr. degree is a waste of time, but one that employers require anyway.
11
We all want the same things; the problem is that some want (indeed believe they must have) too much of it.
8
Couldn't agree more re college vs. vocational track. Such a successful model in France where I lived as a kid and an adult. And the best part was that either choice was well respected.
11
I think the notion that it is “the white working class” that elected Trump is too simplistic. Many many Trump supporters, found at his rallies and among his voters, would be called “middle class” by occupation and by income. The average income of Trump’s voters was higher than Hillary’s and way higher than Bernie’s. That many (not all) white “rust belt” workers with low-skilled or unstable employment went for Trump does not mean that they are the majority of his supporters. This meme derives its strength from the punditry’s (and other very well-off people’s) isolation from people outside their own stratum. One could as easily write that “the white middle class” in the mid-west and southern regions elected Trump. It would be as accurate, or more so. Factors include whiteness, religion, gender, and where you live. Blaming working class people is convenient (it’s the “other” to the most privileged) and condescending (David...)
13
Consumption of products does not concern itself with the creation or need of the product produced for the consumers welfare benefit or needs- more a bottom line.
Are we educating for employment or are we educating for educating? or both? Is the education system broken? Programs of unrealistic goals are more the issue, created by those who know best and have gone to college to study this; What is education for the people?
The actual needs for peoples are not economic, yet have been created, installed, & instilled as if they are the necessary and are only needs and benefits for successful living by the people and members of our society.
This reliance on economics creates most of the systems issues and concerns of the people who belong and want changes, hence the voting by not only democrats but by republicans,working class, wanting health care reforms higher wages . These are the needs, wants, desires, benefits the people and members of our society want from our government.
Labor reforms are not the answer applicable for today's system failures. That era has come to a closing chapter, and a new era is beginning, yet politicians writers ect are holding on to what worked yesterday, instead of seeking new benefits for all members of our society. It's not consumption or creating something new to consume...but creating something that benefits for all the peoples in life, liberties, health, well being.
Are our priorities conflicting perspectives for solutions?
I am a recent transplant from the liberal Upper West Side (where I grew up) to a conservative Republican Midwestern suburb. The overrriding sentiment is: "We don't like Trump, but we don't like the liberals more." Why? Because there is absolutely a sense here that liberals, urban and coastal, are pushing their realities and agenda on them, at the expense of ignoring the pressing issues that affect the local economy and community. Most people are not anti-immigrant as much as it feels as it does not concern them here. It is not like Queens here where diversity is a visible, daily front and center issue. It feels completely irrelevant - it is homogeous, white and a tight-knit traditional community. Now that I am here, I see how provincial both liberals back in NYC and conservatives here - there are two truths to this whole thing - and the whole "you're wrong/I'm right" will not get us anywhere as a country.
18
I graduated from Oak Park River Forest High School in 1969. We were tracked academically and segregated for non-academic classes by gender. One of my homeroom teachers taught lower academic track students. He alleged even in 1969 that kids were placed where they were because of economic class rather than their academic potential.
A few years ago, we had tile installed in our house by an Eastern European immigrant who is now an American citizen. He makes a good living and is happy with his life here. But when he was a teenager, his dreams of becoming a doctor were denied him because of his social class. He was put into the trades instead of taking the academic track he wanted to take. After stints as a migrant farm worker in Europe, scary escapes from human trafficking situations, he met an American woman of his ethnic background in Europe, married her, and ended up in the US. He speaks 5 or 6 languages, and is a super-intelligent guy. I asked him why he didn't consider studying to be a doctor in the US. He said it was just too late and he could make a good living replacing flooring. I have no problem with providing alternatives to college for students. I do worry that students will not really be allowed to choose what professional options they want, and that well-intentioned adults will track kids from lower economic levels or from families of color into non-academic pursuits.
16
@me
I worked in a lower middle class public high school.
How did the guidance counselors decide whether the borderline college vs. vocational track students would go to college?
Social class.
If you were a white kid with married parents you could be flunking chemistry and getting an A in home building tech and absolutely loving working on a house for Habitat for Humanity, and the counselor would insist that you had to go to college.
If you were a non white kid living with Mom and Uncle Bob and flunking chemistry, your guidance counselor would tell your teacher you weren’t going to make it.
2
Putting "work, and the dignity of work, at the center of our culture and concern" should be the goal, and that is what labor unions have attempted to do. Abraham Lincoln essentially made the same point many years ago when he said: "Labor is the superior of capital, and deserves much the higher consideration." Unfortunately, the Party of Lincoln, once known as the Republican Party, gives a priority of capital over labor, and has militantly done so since opposing FDR and the New Deal. That is the source of the problem: giving priority to capital rather than labor.
13
David Brooks, I have always loved your willingness to grapple with questions of moral authority. But another question you need to be asking, equally crucial, is this: What are women still trying to tell us? And how can we make a difference in their lives? For the past two years, women have poured into the streets, run for office, and bravely told their stories, over and over, about how they survived sexual assault, lower pay and harassment in the workplace.
10
Such a well written and thoughtful piece, this is the keystone for us, and unless we consider this perspective and value it we will be stuck in Trumpland perpetually in the Senate, with turtlehead and his courts blocking democracy at every turn.
2
Brooks is out of touch if he thinks vocational schools are "mostly rejected" here.
The U.S. Department of Education reports that more than 16 million students are enrolled in vocational and trade schools.
We need to pay for these students' educations. It will benefit everyone.
9
I think Mr. Brooks is doing what many in power do, which is to blame the "educated" class for the condition of the "working" class.
But nobody in the "educated" class is responsible for corporations like Wal-Mart and Amazon paying such low wages that Billions - with a capital B - in food stamps and other government services must be utilized by their workers in order for those workers to survive.
If Mr. Brooks wants work, and the dignity of work, to be at the center of our culture, then those who employ must step up and make what work they offer worthy of the term. Wal-Mart can afford to spend billions more so their workers can earn a living wage, and other corporations like Amazon certainly have the means to do so as well...especially in these times of record corporate profits.
Instead, however, they force their employees into shabby work environments...and force them onto the public rolls - which only takes away their dignity...and makes the rest of us pay for those corporations' profits.
Writers who fail to blame the people who really have the means to make work available, and dignified, do a grave disservice to the country and to its workers...that redirection of blame plays into the hands of the wealthy and powerful, leaving workers to enjoy the insecurities of the status quo and dooming any substantive change that might actually help workers.
27
Yes! My problem with this piece is Brooks’ omission of the key variable, concentration of capital in corporate entities and the richest 1%. It’s not the coastal elites who are to blame. Brooks falls victim to the right-wing myths and stereotypes, and perpetuates them by blaming the messengers.
5
I won't be politically correct in my response to this column about the "working class". I have hired American born workers and immigrants for a variety of remodeling jobs on my house. The immigrants show up and apply themselves with a sense of pride in their work. The American workers sometimes don't show up and don't call to say they can't make it.
12
Contrary to what Brooks writes, from my college educated "sliver" I deeply feel the urgency to contribute to a culture and economy that is NOT about me.
That means joining the resistance, supporting social causes, paying taxes, and generally realizing we are all one people.
The fact that Brooks feels that he isn't in this group is telling.
16
'That’s because American life still feels like carnage to many.'
The paradox is that the real problem of the working class is not unemployment or low wages. It is the lack of purchasing power that comes from an economy where you have to pay out-of-pocket, and dearly, for such essentials as an education to insure your children's future, health care to save your very life, high housing prices to house your family, etc... What the working class needs is social programs, the same social programs that they have been told favor the immigrants and minorities. They are stuck between a culture of entitlement that rightly tells them that their children deserve better, and a system that tells them that 'others' benefit from social goods, and not them. If the US had better public education, health care, housing that all could afford, then much of this resentment would vanish. The US once did have that, 50 years ago. Back then these essentials of life were affordable. But these entitlements were gutted by rapacious GOP politicians who prevented the working class from 'keeping up'. The working class is victim of a con game. First the GOP prevents the welfare state from taking care of them, then it tells them the welfare state does not work for them, and then that they should be angry about it. A nice con.
20
Vocational, non-college education should be available to all. The track system, which many of us of a certain age had when we were in high school, faded away because the tracking had to be done by someone who “encouraged” or “discouraged” a particular track for an individual student. In the typical suburban school where the bias is toward pre-college, the first programs to go when budget cuts are “required” were the wood shop, metal shop, print shop, auto mechanics, graphic design, drafting, home economics, business education, etc. that were the staples of the vocational tracks. Every student, whether college bound or not, should have som exposure to these skills. All should also be exposed to a rigorous traditional academic program. If so, a student by sophomore year in high school will have the benefit of som experience for making life choices. All of this is expensive, of course, and our militaristic society is unlike to make the resources available.
7
As one that is far from an academic, I am a good mechanic therefore college was not for me. I was able to apply my talent as a mechanic to become an aircraft electrician in the AF. After discharge I was able to be employed as an aircraft electrician receiving equal pay due to the structure of the pay scale to be a journeyman electrician.
We will always need plumbers, electricians, auto mechanics, heating/ac workers as well as the many other jobs that require some skill but does need a college degree.
We are the real backbone of society since without us all the college educated people would find it difficult to function in their daily lives. Yes we are valuable. Unfortunate there are times we are looked down on, but wait till they need us to repair their cars, fix their leaks, unclog their toilets, fix their climate control and so on.
The school system does need to stop pushing kids to college just to make their district/state look good as they compete to see who has the most college grads. Stand by people, you need us.
12
As a retired working stiff (carpenter) it's amusing to read all this intellectual discussion of the problem, when it's obvious that an infrastructure bill about the size of the recent tax cut would fix a lot of it in no more time than it would take to pick shovel ready projects and fund them.
Even a gig economy needs physical infrastructure.
20
I grew up in a small steel town in Western Pa. I moved out of town even as I watched the steel mills and mines built by my father's and grandfather's generations fade away. I knew that those jobs were fading because of decisions made by money managers and others at the high end of life. Our town and hundreds of others that offered safe, stable living no longer had a reason to exist, in their reasoning.
David Brooks and the author that he quotes, Oren Cass, are absolutely spot on that we must apply smart thinking about work for the millions affected.
Apprenticeships, better vocational options, as well as tapping into trends such as the Maker Movement are straightforward methods of bringing meaning and even excitement into the lives of millions that seem to be still left behind. I can only hope that Democrats and non-elitist Republicans, Independents and others take note.
1
Tell me more about this Maker movement?
What the rural working class is trying to tell us is they've been duped by Fox News/Trump propaganda into voting against their own economic interests (again), mainly to Make America White Again and enrich the top 1%.
What would an agenda to help the working class look like? Well, a lot like the Liberal agenda:
1. Higher taxes on the rich and corporations, to help cover everyone under Medicare for All and pay for college or trade school.
2. Higher minimum wage.
3. Expanded trade and immigration, to maximize wealth overall. We should be filling those 7 million job openings.
4. Removing the cap on the payroll tax, to cover 70% of the Social Security shortfall for the next 75 years.
That would do wonders for the working class, if only they'd put aside their prejudice and turn off Fox News and Trump.
26
Why can’t we allow our kids to pursue BOTH an apprenticeship AND academics?
I know a wonderful, university-graduated poet who is also a skilled electrician; a baker who also has a graduate degree; a lawyer who became a massage therapist; and a former house painter who also went to college and business school and now works as a leader in finance.
18
Mr Brooks: In the context of your piece, tuition free college or advanced vocational education makes a lot of sense. Instead we have a large educated class weighed down with student debt, and another large group of young Americans not getting any advanced education at all. Once again, Bernie Sanders is right.
14
I have no problem with the sentiments of this piece.
" It’s time to pass labor market reforms that will make life decent for everybody."
But, in reality, GOP will only give the poor a tiny percentage of what they give themselves. The recent tax cut is a perfect example. They simply cannot be trusted with the care of the majority of people do their proclivity to only look out for themselves.
13
Welcome to the Democratic Party, David. What took you so damn long?
10
"The same red states that elected conservatives also approved initiatives — in Arkansas and Missouri — to raise the minimum wage."
The Democrats work to raise the minimum wage. The Republicans oppose it; in fact some Republicans even say that there should not be a minimum wage,
So, why do workers vote for Republicans? If they simply turned off Fox Hate and paid attention to how their Republican "representatives" vote compared to how Democratic representatives vote, they would (if racism is not the motivation) vote for Democratic representatives
A better time to advocate for the policies Brooks mention would have been during the 2016 campaign---oh, someone was proposing such pro-worker policies but how would anyone email email email know?
https://www.hillaryclinton.com/issues/workforce-and-skills/
https://www.hillaryclinton.com/issues/an-economy-that-works-for-everyone/
https://www.hillaryclinton.com/issues/jobs/
https://www.hillaryclinton.com/issues/labor/
7
Re “Let students, starting in high school, decide whether they want to be on an apprenticeship track or an academic track”
Mr. Brooks, the average 14 year-old (ninth grader), and even many, many 17 and 18 yr-olds, lack the knowledge base and brain-development-dependent ability to exercise sound judgement to exercise the kind of informed consent (for lack of a better term) necessary and appropriate to such an important and life-determining choice.
Heck, we don’t expect or allow minors to vote, to enlist in the military, to serve on juries, to enter into most forms of contracts, to choose whether or not to infuse their bodies with alcohol or tobacco or other smoke, etc. And those under 16 are not considered mature enough to choose where or with whom to live, whether or not to continue schooling, or to drive alone at night.
Let’s not encourage our children into needless role-foreclosure at such a vulnerable stage of their development.
3
Totally disagree. I don't want the school "tracking" kids. But, too many kids find school to be like prison because they are being taught what they have zero interest in.
Better to let them learn to read and write and do math as part of a construction or mechanic or medical tech or cosmetology program.
This doesn't mean they can and wont go to college. It means they will be engaged and productive and involve and may need to take a coupe remedial classes if they decide college is for them.
2
Recently needed an electrician, the man I got doesn't have college debt, owns his own home and a boat and his company pays his medical dental etc. The company he works for is always looking for apprentices but very few of those who start stay with it. According to this man they say "you work too hard" and are gone in a week.
5
In the construction industry, working-class American citizens are routinely undercut or forced out by cheap ‘illegal’ labor....and building contractors who pay their American workers a living wage can’t compete with the lower job bids submitted by contractors who hire said cheap illegal labor.
4
To satisfy the country's wide range of ambition and ability in the face of automation, I can think of only one long term solution: Pyramids.
2
I work in higher education. I do agree with the premise that society generally devalues the trades. However, there are many other issues that have blue collar Americans reeling. Let’s start with the elephant in the room: white fear of being overmatched. My father was a racist who raised my brothers to be racists. They had no ambition and assumed that jobs were waiting for them. They felt entitled due to their whiteness and when confronted with people of color in positions of power, they lost their minds. Then there is the evil system of capitalism. It ensures that our environment is polluted, our foods are substandard and our prisons and healthcare are publicly traded. Everything is about privatization and the premise that government can’t do anything right. Of course it can’t due to being hobbled. The game is fixed. Finally, our public schools are horrid and higher education, even for trades, is very expensive. I regularly spend some of my professional time hearing from businesses that they cannot find workers with the most basic skills, making them untrainable. They are asking us to teach adults 7th grade math and reading comprehension before they spend any time or money training them for a job. Even the military is not able to find recruits who can read, write, are well nourished and are not on drugs. It is simplistic to assume that our problems are simply related to perceptions when there are so many real barriers and no government will to move us forward.
15
Perhaps less time teaching poetry or French and more time teaching how to run a Bobcat or a backhoe. (If you don't know what a Bobcat is, you're part of the problem.)
Not just for vocational track kids, but for all kids. Then maybe those who end up at Harvard will still remember a bit about how the other world works.
4
Are any Republican politicians saying anything like this? This is far more likely to come from Democrats.
5
I feel like the last thing these people want is the intellectual class telling them what to do. This is why despite being pro healthcare, despite being pro public education, despite being pro safety net, the democrat's message is lost on them as some coastal smarty pants telling them he (or god forbid she) knows better than they do what's good for them.
Sadly the alternative they've embraced is anti-intellectual -- guns, bigotry and the fear mongering that feeds the cycle. The rest of the right's platform (the part that serves elites) is just an unfortunate side effect.
8
Sounds like Cass has some good ideas. But if the (mostly white) working class Trump voters think the GOP is more likely to bring about those kind of changes than the democrats, they are far more deluded than I thought.
5
The republican party manipulates the white working class by pandering to cultural identity issues. They've been doing this for decades with civil rights, and they are doing it now with Trump's hateful message of anti immigrant, anti science, anti elite, and anti woman. And unfortunately it works. The working class repeatedly votes against its own self interest by favoring the party that wants to gut the affordable care act and cut taxes on the highest earners. I remember when the republican supply siders used to say that low income individuals of color should solve their own problem by moving to better job markets and by getting more skills through education. Not totally unreasonable, but I don't see the republicans giving out that tough love to the white working class.
8
I suspect that David Brooks (and many of the people who recommend starting students early on in different educational tracks) went to segregated high schools where everyone was on the academic track. I went to a different sort of school: an integrated high school with a high level of internal segregation. White kids went on the academic track; black kids went on the vocational track. If you were black and wanted to be on the academic track, you had to be on the lower rungs of that track unless you were extremely smart. Meanwhile any white child no matter how smart or not was assumed to be "college material." That's why that sort of tracking was eliminated.
6
Mr. Brooks continues to show us his true colors. By continuing to write this kind of opinion piece he continues to divide us. We are a better country than this and we need to come together to prove it. STOP the NEGATIVE RHETORIC!
1
I strenuously disagree with this comment. We have ignored the working people and they had expected to be able to sleep thru high school waiting for a job where they'd get started on a career. Both sides contributed to the problem. Google "Joe Bageant" to find some insight on this problem.
1
David Brooks, in his extravagant. praise of Oren Cass' The Once and Future Worker, somehow forgets to mention that Cass (of the right-wing Manhattan Institute) is a friend to workers in exactly the same way Avik Roy (Manhattan Institute) is a friend to the sick. Not.
Cass has spent a career pretending that giant corporations are eager to make their employes happy--if only those employes would stop being so demanding, abandon their unions and accept an impotent role in a workers' co-op designed by their bosses.
His favorite hobby horse is separating students into the vocational and college tracks as early as possible--can anyone think of a better way to create a permanent, frozen working class? Can anyone think of a better form of coercion & control of successive generations? (And does anyone doubt that the vocational track will be populated mostly by people of color?)
Would it be impolite to point out that before Oren Cass became an "expert" on labor, he worked for Bain Capital? Would it impolite to point out that before David Brooks came to the NYT, he worked for the National Review. Would it be impolite to point out that conservative "thinkers" are even more ignorant on what's good for the working class than liberal "thinkers?"
If so, forgive me for being impolite.
13
What working class folks are telling us is that integrety and truth no longer have value. Being entertained and going to the big show when the "guy who talks like me" comes to town is worth it. I am tired of "conservatives" like Mr. Brooks ignoring and denying the ugly side of Trump, his Republican supporters and the impact their choices have on our Democracy. Add to that Republicans lies, dog whistles , racist demonizing of minorities, demonizing of identified "enemies" of the state and those who would dare challenge any impropriety, refusal to stop the NRA from killing thousands of innocent people for profit and power, dogma in service of manipulation, abandonment of the middle and lower classes by denying them real service as leaders, bowing to a leader who literally provably lies and distorts a with every statement he makes, ALL in service to themselves and Big Money. All pretense has been dropped as indicated by a willingness to openly lie, support un American actions by the POTUS that they have told the country are their core values. Your analysis is not complete until you get honest and include these facts that are facilitating our slide into authoritarianism by the Republican party. I will add, stolen SCOTUS, blatant obstruction in the Mueller, destruction of integrity in the government by those who are sworn servants to the people, corruption, emolument violations, etc etc etc.......). I say that your analysis of the working people of this country is empty.
5
David Brooks recommends that the US follow European educational and employment practices. While these have very attractive features, one of their drwbacks is that they lock people into career paths, beginning at young ages. They thereby do not accommodate the possibility that people will change.
The US is justly famed for giving people second, and even third chances. If we adopt the employment models Mr. Brooks favors, we must also build in flexibility, to enable people to live productive and satisfying lives as they mature and change.
4
Economic and social security for the majority of the "working" blue and white collar populations was always absent and only became reality after World War II in a few systems in first World countries (e.g., North America, Western Europe, Japan and Australia) . However, once global trade and production became the norm in the 1990ies -with billions lifted out of great poverty in the developing world- the blue and white collar working classes in the developed economies also began to face the competition from a global labor force and production market but with workers' rights largely absent in the developing countries. Rather than helping the workers of these less developed countries gain similar rights corporations and employers of the developed first World economies chose the path of limiting their own workers' rights and this has contributed to a return of greater economic and social inequalities in first World countries both for blue collar workers and white collar workers. It is very conceivable that we are reverting to pre WW2 economic instabilities and inequalities for the majority of all "Western" labor markets. But does it have to be a global zero sum game or can it be a win win for all of mankind? With 7,5 billion people one would project that there are enough gifted and altruistic women and men alive today to provide universally beneficial global solutions. I have hope that our children are more enlightened and altruistic than the status quo.
3
The working-class employment problems are real. Many of the solutions noted are successful in Europe and, therefore, will be resisted by the Republicans in Congress. The Republicans would rather keep their constituents angry to stay in power.
3
I haven’t read Cass’ book, but A few points come to mind:
- capitalism is all about optimizing profit, which is a very individualistic, short-term orientation. As people cannot adapt or move as fast as markets or money, pure capitalism can create a path of destruction for many. If we want a sustainable capitalist system, we either have to figure out how to help people adapt more effectively or support those it leaves behind or, most likely, pursue a hybrid
- David continues to place blame on the ‘educated class’. I feel this is a gross oversimplification and basically wrong. Corporate leaders (a very narrow set of people) have been pushing a profit-first agenda for their companies and themselves at the expense of any of society’s other people and goals. The educated class simply as done a better job at adapting.
Republicans have all too willingly supported the narrow profit agenda, using the campaign financing bazooka of the citizens united decision. Paradoxically, blue collar America has enabled the agenda with their shift to republican.
It’d be fascinating to see the relationship between citizens united and unskilled worker distress. If we wish to change things to a more worker supportive world, perhaps an amendment to overturn this ruling would be a good place to start.
5
The ills that Brooks discusses goes back at least to the Kennedy era. In his book "Excellence", Cabinet member John Gardner wrote how Americans, to our detriment, were valuing intellectual excellence over excellence in trade and other occupations. He commented (I paraphrase, here) that if we persist in valuing excellence in philosopy over excellence in plumbing, neither our theories nor our toilets will hold water.
"Excellence" is timely in 2018.
2
It seems to me that we are experience the end result of the Reagan republican experiment. The minimum wage has not kept up with inflation, education has become underfunded and unaffordable, tax cuts increased the gap between the rich and ppor, but most of all health care is too expensive an not accessible to many.
Perhaps America needs to look at northern European countries for answers, where taxes are higher but people have a better safety net, access to education that provides job skills, and affordable health care accessible by all.
9
Trump is supposed to be the champion of working class America.The first thing he did was engage ina trade war which put their livelihoods at risk.Farmers are not getting a good price for their soybeans and some factories are having to close because they cannot import the parts they need. Obama put thousands of auto workers back to work after the recession when the Republicans were ready to let the auto industry go.Democrats listen to the working class, those who are asking for at least 15 dollars an hour minimum wageThey listen and act and do not enact a tax giveaway to the rich.
7
To talk about working class voters when you mean white working class voters and not reference that is beyond odd. It ignores millions of working class voters who are people of color and have very different views than white working class voters. They may face the same economic issues but their concerns and votes are different. Democrats got the votes of working class people of all groups, though the majority of one group went with GOP. If you want to address that group be specific. If you are talking generally, where are the working class people of color? Do better.
12
Here are some good ideas from some historic heroes. The blame game, finding victims, admiring predators and trying to be like them, none of it helps.
Jesus: Love your neighbor as yourself. Do unto others as you would have them do until you.
Martin Luther King Jr.: “There have always been those who argued that the end justifies the means, that the means really aren’t important. But we will never have peace in the world until men everywhere recognize that ends are not cut off from means, because the means represent the ideal in the making, and the end in process, and ultimately you can’t reach good ends through evil means, because the means represent the seed and the end represents the tree.”
Gandhi: "respect, understanding, acceptance and appreciation" etc. etc. https://www.google.com/search?q=gandhi+quotes+about+love
2
I like this article a great deal. I would add one more suggestion I would like to see PBS offer a program that becomes part of the evening news, like "Nightly Business Report." Perhaps the time slot devoted to 'NBR" could drop one night or two so we are all better informed about "worker" business - thus, the "Nightly Worker Report or "NWR." Items such as health care, wages, growth industries for employment, job training opportunities, and other issues relevant to workers and their unions could be discussed. For too long they have been left out of the dialogue and, the rest of us unfortunately are minimally informed.
5
Nice that he wrote a nice book but policy makers still prefer business needs over peoples needs. If businesses cared about people as much as profits they would provide livings wages, job training related to their products ,etc.--It's not complicated. We know what all people need ( to feel a part of something and productive and safe ). People are not greedy but corporations are when they maximize profits for shareholders rather than act responsibly towards everyone in the nation--What IS complicated is getting people to do the right thing and that takes LEADERSHIP which involves being a good teacher and pointing people in the direction of the Golden rule---
5
These ideas are crucially important in restoring respect for each other, and for what it takes to live and work in a culture riddled with surface images and presentations. I was lucky through 20 years as a newspaper feature writer to spend time with -- and to learn from and write about -- what we referred to as "trades people," or as blue collar workers." Each of them taught me how little I knew about what it took (and takes) to do honest and good work that goes unnoticed. I didn't understand then, and don't now, why we can't reward the most crucial work (consider health care and nursing home and child providers and waste collectors, not less agricultural and food service workers and retail staff and house-cleaners and those in childcare and eldercare) with pay that provides a decent wage and benefits and, beyond that, with a shared respect. At any moment, as I've learned, we can lose our jobs and income and status and face a life without status or security. We can provide both to everyone around us by looking more closely at how they make a living and understanding what they need to live and thrive.
5
David, Democrats DO listen to the working class, and the fact that their solutions don't resonate is due in part to the fact that Republicans, particularly starting with Gingrich have been resolute in attempting to thwart them, and in part due to the false narrative Republicans have been making for years as to the wonders of the market in creating widely shared prosperity - blaming welfare for poverty, as if there was none before the advent of the Great Society, and other countries with greater safety nets haven't successfully reduced poverty.
One of the things Democrats understand, is that rising healthcare costs are making up a larger and larger percentage of working people's incomes. You talk about wanting to provide a supportive environment for people to work, yet refuse to support a healthcare bill that was designed to bend the cost curve and give people healthcare security.
And what exactly do you mean by helping people produce more? Markets disproportionately reward people who produce good profits for investors, or provide services of value to wealthy people, not people who provide services to marginal populations, not people who help to produce happy, well adjusted children who are less likely to commit crimes as they grow older.
Our healthcare system is so expensive and yet leaves many out because Medicare payments subsidize drug developments, and top quality ERs in teaching hospitals are good for the wealthy as well as the uninsured. Low tech care OTOH is not.
5
I have worked in industry, taught at universities and in high schools in the US. I now teach internationally. I totally agree with this article. Vocational programs have been cut from schools and most of these programs have shifted to be offered at community colleges. The problem is that the student must graduate from high school first while taking the traditional university track courses.
I come from a blue collar background and I feel that there should be pride in alternative education such as electricians, plumbers, carpenters etc. Most parents do not want to even consider these options for their child even if university is not a practical option for their child. There is not only a shortage of laborers, there is also a class difference which leads to issues that we see today.
The blue collar workers do feel ignored for a reason so they turn to anyone who tries to speak to them. It’s strange for me to see these workers classified as racist etc. ; the people who support Trump.
It scares me to see what is happening in my country and also around the world. The populist rise also occurred before WWI. Part of this is due to economic differences between the top elite and the working class.
2
I applaud David Brooks and Orin Cass for pointing to the neglected working class. But it is not (primarily) a matter pf worker cooperatives and other feel-good measures that are needed. What is needed are good jobs and higher wages. It is not for the sake of "efficiency" that these are missing, but that employers have long tried to squeeze every last bit of productivity from worker's returns to maximize their own profit, and they are ALLOWED to do so. Republicans as always, have supported this effort, and Democrats are too busy with minority social rights to care about this gross inequality- one of the three highest rates among civilized countries.
3
Before Cass, Karl Marx wrote about it in the Communist Manifesto. The bourgeois (the professional class) helps the capital owners find the cheapest way to produce goods, if necessary globally. And the workers don't see any profits.
3
I’m a lifelong Democrat and a member of three unions for most of my working life, and I have rarely if ever wholey endorsed a column by Mr. Brooks. But in this case I making an exception I wholeheartedly agree with everything he says in this column.
3
The rural white voters economic complaints revolve around policies put in place by previous Republican administrations, i.e. tax policy tailored to help the 1%, education cuts, union busting, and health care which is either unaffordable or unavailable. Trump will do nothing to address these problems, and they seem to understand that.
White nationalism has infected rural American, and like any virus, it must run its course.
5
What message did blue collar workers send by voting GOP? I don't remember the last time that party did anything economically for that segment of the population. I think their votes were motivated by other factors, the same as always.
12
I went to a 'technical' (vocational) high school. The school had multiple curriculum tracks - Music, Home Ec (this would be food services today), Science (college prep), Nursing, Design & Drafting, Electrical, Art, etc. Many of the grads went directly to work (One I know in a symphony no less) or automotive repair. Not every vocational HS is teaching children how to work in a factory. One thing I loved about my school was how focused and motivated the kids were - few discipline problems bc if you messed up you could be sent back to your neighborhood school.
3
The only message sent to DC was who we voted for. The fact that DC doesn't get it only suggests that we did a bad job picking people. There are plenty of people, both left and right, that are interested in pragmatic solutions. We just need to elect them.
2
Brooks makes the point that Democrats should heed: The political future belongs to the party that attends to the needs of the working class.
Trump faked concern for the working class, but even that insincere attention was so appreciated by the ignored working class that the working class of the upper Midwest made Trump president.
Brooks's support for affordable trade and technical schools, worker owned co-ops, in general, grass roots ownership of production are ideas straight out of platform of the Democratic Socialists of America. "Centrist" Democrats have ignored that grass roots. (Remember Chuck Schumer's boast that for every inner city working class vote Hillary loses, she gains 2 conservative suburbs vote. Didn't happen.)
Who would have thought that Brooks would embrace the core values of the Democratic Socialists of America. Now if the Democratic Party as a whole can do that, they'll win the working class and win elections.
4
Mr. Brooks hits the nail on its head here - neither of the two parties has really given any indication that they have heard the outcry of the great bulk of the middle class, who now see fewer and fewer opportunities to get sufficient income from the work they have been trained for and grown up doing, to provide a decent life for themselves and their families.
5
Even if everyone had a full time job with benefits, it won't matter until the rent comes down . Wouldn't hurt to make buying and selling a house less costly either.
1
Yes, but the GOP is not interested in that. They are only interested in solidifying/reclaiming/protecting the advantages of the privileged and that must be done at the expense of the people you (David) say need support. Dems have not been particularly good in this area, either, but they at least have championed policies to help these folks when things go bad: safety nets, health care for all, etc.
7
Thank you for this article. It's about time. The democrats (i am one) have no understanding of what it's like to be a guy or gal who can do something with their hands, but for that very reason, can't stand to sit at a classroom desk for another four years after high school.
Those people are supposed to be the ones the democratic party stands for, but the 'core elitists' on the coast (I am one, but grew up in Detroit, worked in a stamping plant, so I know the other side), want them to pay more taxes so the 'smart ones' can go to college for free.
I voted for Bernie, but it's time the party did exactly what this book seems to be saying.
4
From the inception of Donald Trump’s campaign for the GOP nomination, many wondered why a candidate that threatened & acted in his outrageous manner retained the support of such a large segment of voters. That many Trump supporters were older white males who were obviously anxious, frustrated & angry to the point of nihilist rage was an early accepted assessment but opinions differed regarding the root causes of this anxiety, frustration & resulting rage.
A very plausible explanation of these root causes is that loss or denial (or fear of impending loss or denial) of a cherished status is a common feature of these angry nihilist urges. This explains why (a) these urges exist across the spectrum of economic or social classes, & (b) many consumed by these urges welcome rather than are put off by Trump's outrageous manner & actions (i.e. Trump "shares" & channels their anger at the status quo; a status quo they see to be penalizing themselves unjustly).
This phenomena is not unique to the US but appears to be a growing distemper of our times across advanced modern societies.
The challenge (& it's multifaceted, complex & difficult to adequately address) is to find positive, productive ways to resolve the root causes of this mass nihilism before it causes too much chaos & harm.
1
David, you use the term "small-government Republicans." Could you please write an piece explaining what that means exactly. Something like listing the specific parts of government they'd like to shrink.
I feel it's a term often thrown around that has no specific basis in reality, but is used often by pundits without explanation as one of the things they favor.
Please elaborate.
6
Basic education and vocational training are the only way non academically oriented people will become successful. I taught forever and learned almost everyone can learn basic skills. The most difficult students were those with borderline cognitive abilities. I taught them simple math and how to decode,but I couldn't teach them to make sound judgements.
2
What's not mentioned in this column is another weight around the necks of older gig workers: the raising of the age at which we can get full Social Security. I'm in the group that has to wait until I'm 66.5 for full benefits. I'm 61 years, 2 months and 16 days old.
I will be applying asap: May 24, 2019. And I will *still* have to work. I'd still have to work even if I were to receive full SS benefits. But maybe I won't be sweating bullets every month about paying the bills. Maybe I could go see a movie once in a while.
There are fewer and fewer gigs for oldsters like me, regardless that I've earned a college degree (and more), that I have 45 years of experience in three major fields, that I have to keep lowering my prices to compete. It'd also be so much better for the younger folks behind me if I—and others like me—could retire completely.
5
So, two years into his presidency, and what has Trump done for them? If they are still angry, frustrated and dispossessed after two years of unitary government, why the continued support for a government that has handed out tax breaks for the wealthy and gutted health care for the less fortunate? I am tired of being told we need to better understand those who support this administration, when they don't (or won't) see that very little about the president's policies favor their own self-interests.
12
As Voltaire stated, 'The comfort of the rich depends upon an abundant supply of the poor'. True three centuries ago...true today.
6
". It’s time to pass labor market reforms that will make life decent for everybody."
No kidding! Welcome to the 1900s, David Brooks, and Samuel Gompers. Or to the 1940s and Henry Wallace, Walter Reuther and the NLRB of 1935!
Keep studying. It looks good on you!
5
David is lauding a book that builds a new paradigm for an old problem because it reduces his culpability by redefining the power structure and twisting the truth to fit a narrative. Sadly it is not the educated versus the working class - it is still those that own the business versus those that create the product.
"But what good is that growth if it means that a thick slice of America is discarded for efficiency reasons?" Efficiency is not the reason - greed is the reason. Greed makes employers look for the cheapest way to create products holding no loyalty to the people creating the products. And who made out with all the profits of that efficiency - why the 10%. And who made sure those profits stayed with the 10%? The Republicans who David has championed his whole life.
6
This is one of the best columns you've written in a long time.
My high school graduate son is taking a gap yr and working for an NPO w "Special Need" adults. He is interested in the neurosciences so he is also getting credit to put him on a healthcare/neuroscience background.
Eventually, he'll get to college (He has a $100k grant from Stanford to do so bc of the yrs I worked there). Nonetheless, he'll go when he is ready to enjoy it and have a sense of direction.
2
I don't disagree with some of these prescriptions. They are at least worth debate. For example, the idea of academic tracking is an interesting one. The problem with this statement though, "Let students, starting in high school, decide whether they want to be on an apprenticeship track or an academic track." is that in the countries that practice tracking, the students don't decide, the schools do. That means more state control over opportunity, which is decidedly unAmerican. Good luck getting the Republican base to endorse that.
Co-ops are also a liberal idea. It's interesting that what the working class needs may in fact be Democratic policy. If only the working class knew who really got them into this mess!
By the way, I'm all for immigration reform. This is clearly one area that the Dems need to move right on. If everyone got over their silly biases and looked at immigration in terms of what is best for the economy, as opposed to their party's politics, the issue could be resolved quickly.
2
"Working class?" Is this the first time David Brooks has used the phrase? Does this mean that class structure exists in this wonderful exceptional nation of ours? In fact Mr. Brooks rarely soils his pretty hands with such dirty concepts. The opposite of "working class" is "ruling class" not "college educated class" (which is not a class). After all the hand wringing about the fear of foreigners, now it turns out the "working class" has a real identity and a real beef. Congrats DB. Better later than never.
1
Before writing this piece, David Brooks should have tried living off the pay of a high school graduate semi-skilled worker (in a typical worker’s home, with a typical worker’s transportation), and doing that job, for six months. His eyes and probably his mind would then be opened.
Living paycheck to paycheck is not easy, and most of these working-class folks do exactly that--with little or no health insurance and no 401K, no significant savings. It take steely determination to save money on a working-class salary, especially since the employer now sees the worker as an item in the expense column, to be lessened over time. Big unions don’t represent most of these people, having been hunted nearly to extinction by lawyers for the employer and Conservative, Tea-Party, Republicans.
There are other solutions. The Democrats have many of these in their playbook. Please stop whining about lives of which you have little to no knowledge.
5
Trump's white base is telling us that they are racist, xenophobic, and misogynist, and scared of losing their unmerited white entitlements. The credible studies confirm that. They also tell us that David's economic working class motivations were not as important for this crowd. Trump's base was relatively well off. Their per capita annual income was $10 thousand higher than the average Clinton or Sanders voter. The economic working class story is largely a myth.
8
Good ideas.
Why do I suspect that tracking, which absolutely should be done, will be denounced as racist?
These are the same people who continue to vote for Republicans that starve their educational systems including vocational schools. Many Trump supporters have beliefs such as racism and isolationist xenophobia and believe crazy conspiracy theories and alternative facts and they wonder why they don’t get any respect. They are choosing to keep their own selves down by continuing to vote Republican and are now fully embracing a con-man game show host who spews ugly bigotry and lies. Don’t blame the Democrats -- we’ve been trying to reach them but they won’t turn off Fox News.
3
How about government as employer of last resort, so we don't have periods of mass unemployment, and there's always a job available for anyone who wants one (at a livable minimum wage). https://www.amazon.com/Understanding-Modern-Money-Employment-Stability/dp/1845429419
Historians, economists and sociologists will point to the period from 1945 to 1965 as being the high water mark of the American middle and working classes as well as being an aberration in America’s social and economic history.
Beginning with the desegregation wars, then the voting rights and civil rights wars many, if not most, white middle/working class voters would consistently vote against their own best economic interests. They continue to do so fifty years later with the same results.
Ignorance can be alleviated by education. There is no known alleviation for stupidity.
1
funny stating everything in the article I do not see why working class people would support the Republican party. The intellectual analysis by Mr Brooks leave out several major factors. Take the intellectual arguments out of the equation, Trump is a tough talking winner in the eyes of many working class white Americans. a person who says what they like to hear. Sound bites about people not like themselves being the reason American is not succeeding. I.e. MAGA. Secondly God, Guns, and Gays Republicans like the first two and hat the latter. So do a lot of white Christian Americans. You don't have to run a campaing on facts, Trump proved that when winning the white house. Insult and demean the opposition, lie, lie and lie, then tell everyone how great you are. It is a Professional wrestling mentality. But then again Trump appeared there as a character named Donald Trump.
1
Your euphemistic “working class voter” is the very voter who is most disenfranchised by the party he or she votes for (Republican) that in turn propagates the lie that it is illegals who are taking their jobs. The reality is that corporate out-sourcing overseas and automation is the real bogeyman. But that reality doesn’t generate votes, now does it?
1
I tried wringing my hands as I read this piece. Then I tried empathy, sympathy , then "there go I but for the grace of God"
Nothing worked, conclusion - I cannot feel for these people.
Im 63, I have gone through 6 recessions in my working life, I have teetered on the edge of personal bankruptcy due to the economy, there have been divorces and bad financial decisions.
But here I am house paid off, some savings, and enough money in investments to retire on.
Its been hard, it was no cakewalk, and get ready for it - "It is never easy" - for my generation the last 30 generations, and hopefully the next 30 generations.
That's life
There is nothing special about this blue collar generation. We dont "owe them" anything, they have to figure it out.
I suggest a trade school. learn a trade it always pays and very often you can be your own boss.
Please no whingeing, that is something Trump does, he plays the victim.
5
This is still a country that still is a society were the economic expectation for men (providers-breadwinners) vastly under delivers for them. If men can't find work that allows them to at least fulfill the roles expected on them why should the care to participate? Marriage, family and their sense of self-worth isn't just a statistic it's their hope for a normal American life. They don't see much of that hope anymore.
2
One of David Brooks' best columns in a long time.
I wonder if he appreciates the changes that would be necessary to cure this situation - like huge tax increases on the well to do, more public services starting with universal healthcare and so on. In short, everything that the Republican party is opposed to.
2
"But what good is that growth if it means that a thick slice of America is discarded for efficiency reasons?"
Ah... What blasphemy for a capitalist! Isn's this what capitalists and republicans have championed the most. Let the markets lead all policy to ensure survival of the fittest without wanting to invest a penny in re-education, re-training, unemployment support, and refusing to provide a safety net of any kind?
3
But the missing piece is why this leads to votes for Republicans. You can certainly make a case that liberal elites are running over the working class, but the Republican elites, like Mr. Trump, are there with them pressing the accelerator even harder. If Mr. Trump were actually an alternative, then it would make sense, but Trump is a native of the swamp.
2
these are all great ideas. the problem is that the very people they are designed to help are the ones voting for republicans which reject them. until these under or inappropriately educated voters realize that republicans are using their angst in order to redistribute wealth from the bottom up, and are purposely keeping them under educated so they can be more easily manipulated nothing is going to change for them.
I'm a college-educated worker with a good job and benefits. And I agree with this article, too. All our fellow citizens deserve decent jobs they can live on and be proud of doing. Democrats need to focus on that.
@E:
If helping the people that are the focus of this article means that my lungs must absorb particulate matter from burning coal, paying higher prices for the products I buy resulting from tariffs, paying higher taxes (not all of us got a tax cut), and foisting the bill for the huge deficit on my children and grand children I'm not getting on this train.
3
Thank you David for your thoughts as always.
Regarding Mr. Cass's book, I did that, and still doing that regarding a vocation.
I was lucky enough to go to a vocational type college (F.I.T in NYC in the mid 70"s) where I was able to study commercial studio photography. I've been a working professional photographer ever since.
1
This makes sense to me. But it doesn't explain why such voters support Republicans, who are less likely than Democrats, to take the kinds of actions suggested here.
1
The Democratic wing of the Democratic party (as opposed to the Clinton, "centrist" Wall Street wing) should be, and to some degree is, concentrating on the problem Mr. Brooks identifies. But I don't have any sympathy for people who are mean, bigoted, or stupid enough to vote for Donald Trump.
3
As a blue collar kid in the 1960's, my parents stressed the importance of getting a college degree. Their bias had less to do with cultural or class issues, but their belief that the vast majority of blue collar jobs would be automated or otherwise engineered out of existence. Yes, there would still be a need for skilled craft workers, but the demand for plumbers, electricians and specialized welders would not accommodate the supply. Robots would render assembly lines obsolete. My father, who was a railroad man, saw the efficiency of less high tech ideas like container ships take their toll on dock workers.
Even the media of the era looked optimistically to the day when the elimination of factory work would free us up to pursue our passions, while working only a few hours a week.
That age has yet to fully arrive, but the handwriting on the wall remains. It isn't hard to imagine a day when we'll watch an interview with the last living semi driver, or surgeon. David Brooks may choose to romanticize the skilled blue collar class of the future, but as the fictional Hagrid said, "There’s a storm coming, Harry. And we all best be ready when she does."
4
I don't think the working class is homogeneous. There was massive turnout from voters in both parties- which included working and all classes. And the parties both had very different messages. Politics is local and Republicans in NY are more liberal than Republicans in many states, and Democrats in North Dakota, I suspect are more conservative than Democrats in many other places.
What we all want, are politicians who listen to us and represent us and that is what has been missing for a long time.
1
I just had a service tech here to work on my furnace. He said he'll retire soon and there really isn't going to be anyone to take his place. Many doing the same work are older and thinking of retirement, too. Seems today's blue collar worker doesn't want to be on call for nights, holidays and weekends-no matter the wage. Who is going to fix this?
5
As a retired educator I agree there should be other options than aiming to send 100% of high school graduates to college. In my time college was affordable and mostly of the “liberal arts” mentality. Most everyone in my college took a wide range of core courses in history, philosophy, science, art, sociology, psychology, economics, math, literature, foreign languages and comparative theology. There was a job fair right before graduation and my friends and I were offered jobs in business, banking, public utilities, hospitals, foundations, libraries, communications, journalism, etc. Back then a well-rounded liberal arts graduate was considered a prized hire. No more.
Today college is job prep, not the widen-your-horizon, expand your general knowledge, become more literate, grow up, inform yourself about other people, places and times kind of vibe which I experienced. And it is way too expensive. It is patently absurd to mortgage one’s future to attend college. People paying off student debts the size of mortgages, delaying marriage, children and home ownership into their late thirties or forties is not a healthy paradigm for society.
I fully support any programs which can offer high school curriculum options for students who see themselves in skilled professions that do not necessarily require a college degree. The sticky wicket is this: making sure that students choose this option for themselves and are not directed away from their preference due to the color of their skin.
4
I have learned from watching my my friend's daughter, who is is finishing high school in England, that there are a lot of serious disadvantages to the vocational track approach. The main disadvantage is that it pigeonholes people at the age of 16 and forces them to choose the direction of their life at time when they have absolutely no life experience or perspective, and when should be exploring options.
My friend's daughter, although an accomplished artist and a lover of literature, has been forced to decide that she wants to be a computer programmer, and from the age of 16 took only 3 classes: math, further math, and computer science. This is efficient but a waste of the human potential.
6
It seems the economic problems never change, and that's saying something. I know as many college-educated baby boomers who were forced into early retirement as I do rural white people who were forced into early retirement. I know as many software engineers losing their jobs to immigrants as I do other Americans who have lost their jobs to technology. The world of work is global, more high tech than before, and the cost of living has never been so high. It's time to stop believing that one group or another is doing better than others.
3
The market determines what the going rate is for our services. In a town of 20,000 people with 5,000 physical fitness trainers, most trainers will have to work in other industries if they want to pay their bills. The trainers who refuse to accept the economic realities of their vocation will experience economic hardship. This is part of Trump's base. What doesn't help is that Capital has a nationality. Capital mobility causes plenty of mischief in our overly globalized world, but it’s a myth that capital has been denationalized into free-floating ether. Money always belongs to somebody, and those somebodies have passports and home addresses. It matters who’s in charge, and the answer is never “nobody.” Rural America voted for Trump because they view as changing careers a non starter even if the market provides better alternatives for their offering. The options are retraining, relocating and changing industries or blaming the low cost producer of unfair competition. Trump stokes bigotry and racism when they happen to be from another country.
1
You can’t solve this problem or anything else until the USA comes to the realization that it is not 1960 and that we can’t spend a trillion dollars maintaining a military empire. We can spend untold billions in foreign aid either. Listen to the politicians and their priorities are what’s happening in Somalia or Afghanistan. I wish that they would concentrate instead on education, healthcare and our infrastructure.
1
The article fails to deal with the question of why Trump chose to focus on the caravan that was about to sends hoards of illegal immigrants invading our southern border even though they were 1000 miles away, or why it was necessary to send 15,000 U.S. military troops to defend our sovereignty even though illegal immigration was at a 40 year low when Obama took office. It was done because it obviously appeals to the most base instincts of protecting white supremacy. And Brooks is right on at least one thing. If embracing bigotry is the way to appeal to Trump's base, I am not listening.
2
Hillary talked about these problems but the working class did not like her style. She was open to ideas but wanted changes made within the existing establishment. The working class did not trust the existing establishment and decided to go with somebody whose specialty was giving it the finger. Unfortunately, that is just about all they will get from him, and it enables them to forget their problems but not solve them.
Bernie talked about these problems and thought the necessary changes could not be made without major modifications to the existing establishment. So the establishment of both parties rejected him.
Our labor market is structured by various sorts of competition. Government and labor unions have been losing their ability to have a major voice in the competition, and investors have been winning against those who get their income from hourly, weekly, or monthly paychecks.
The only way for meaningful labor market reforms to occur is if government picks current losers to win more and current winners to lose some of what they have won. Otherwise growth in the economy (the answer the establishment adopted to avoid this class struggle) will, as it has done, only supply more for the winners to win.
Since the current winners are at least national, one way they win is to play local governments against each other. So it will have to be Uncle Sam that takes sides in the class struggle to tilt the playing field in directions it does not tilt now.
2
“What if people’s ability to produce matters more than how much they can consume?” Cass asks.
Matters to whom? When the consumables we are talking about are food, medicine and shelter, I think it is perfectly reasonable to be focused on those things.
For me, the debate about healthcare reform was highly instructive. While Democratic proposals were designed to make healthcare more affordable for sick people, Republicans were all about making health insurance more affordable for healthy people (by making it more costly for sick people) and less costly for taxpayers. They pretended that people would be better off negotiating with their healthcare providers as individuals, rather than having the power of an insurance company behind them, received support from both the people who resent having to pay more for insurance AND the physicians who don't want to lose their clout in negotiating their salaries, people who resent paying taxes and people who resent cuts to their Medicare, people who don't like penalties for preexisting conditions but also don't want to be forced to buy insurance. In short, they pretended that people could have their cake and eat it too.
In short, Republicans made many arguments in bad faith, and to my dismay, almost everyone on the Republican side kept quiet about it.
If thoughtful conservatives want to gain the trust of liberals, how about distancing themselves from the lies that were told by their party about the ACA? Where are the apologies?
5
@DebbieR Don't hold your breath! You'd like reading works by Kenneth Arrow and the transitivity principle. Brooklyn sends Brookline love on a rainy Friday.
There are no industrialized country in the world that governs by small government, low tax, low regulation policies. Because, when that happens, big business takes over and focuses only on the welfare of the powerful. Economy eventually fails because the consumer/middle class disappears. Then the majority of the people eventually become unhappy. Then either they take control of the government, or we get banana republics.
So, Mr. Brooks, how can a country achieve these things you seem to be so intrigued with, by small government principles? I know, tax cuts for the rich. Because when that happens, all the things on your wish list magically occur.
4
Don't you think it might be better for the working class to ask what the rest of the world is trying to tell them? Become better educated, don't be so attached to place, find a better way to manage your pain than opioid prescriptions, pay better attention to the women and children in your life, find something better to be interested in than gun culture, experiment with self-reflection.
9
@John Grabowski, thank you. Perfectly said. And the perfect rebuttal to Brooks.
1
@John Grabowski
And join a union.
In reply to Patricia of New York City: Walter Reuther and the UAW were among Reverend King’s most important allies. No one who knows labor history would accuse the UAW of such misdeeds.
3
Having young teens who really have little clue what they want to do in life make decisions in high school that determine their life's work is just a really bad idea.
5
Pearls clutched tightly in hand, Brooks throws the blame for the working-class white anger at "America's leaders" and "the college-educated."
So I guess both sides, but mostly liberals.
In fact, the economic challenges facing working class Americans are largely Republican innovations.
- Opposition to minimum wages that provide a living wage
- Union-busting and right-to-work laws
- Tax cuts for billionaires followed by cuts to social programs and education, which precludes any big thinking or experimentation of the type that Brooks espouses
- Ludicrous anti-competitive non-compete agreements that limit working class ability to find new jobs
Off-shoring of jobs and facilitation of big box retail destruction of main streets are more or less bipartisan affairs, but probably made easier by Republican deregulation regimes.
And then Republicans get Fox News to run 24/7 propaganda programming not only blaming all the problems on Democrats, immigrants, people of color, and "PC culture." Fox News demonizes these people and, together with the President of the United States, incites violence against these "enemies."
9
Our countries policies are not geared for creating jobs or opportunities for the working class, and the working class is their own worst enemy. Our policies are aimed at concentrating more and more of the wealth and opportunities into the hands of those that have already won.
The republicans have sold the working class on the ridiculous idea that tax cuts will give them opportunity. The republican party has successfully equated (in the minds of too many working class voters), taxes with theft, and investment in public goods such education and infrastructure, with waste and socialism. They have successfully blamed any problems on immigrants and liberals.
Want to make change -- change the incentives. Currently, social security and medicare and healthcare are paid as direct payroll burden -- added to the cost of each employee. Cover those items with broad based taxes instead of making them the cost of each employee, and employment goes up. Quit tax incentivizing capital investment (with special tax breaks) over investment in labor. Quit pretending that contractors feeding at the public trough are the private sector and somehow superior to the hard working employees directly hired by the government. A giant corporate tax break was passed but the dividend and capital gains rates were not increase.
There is lots of room to change policies to align incentives with what is desired. The working class is its own worst enemy. It keeps voting for fake promises.
2
These are very interesting recommendations. What do you suppose the odds are that Republicans can wean themselves off of their current political crack binge -- based on stoking cultural hatred and slashing taxes to benefit their oligarchical patrons -- in time to implement them before the next election?
How would you weigh the chances of Republicans implementing any of these solutions in the near future as opposed to, say, Democrats?
5
My critique of Mr. Brooks rather superficial article is as follows:
If this is "a country in which only 37 percent of adults expect children to be better off financially than they are." Why is that? Yet, "millions of new jobs are through “alternative work arrangements,” - read minimum wage and no health care. How did this happen? Is it possible it was through the systematically pro-business policies of the GOP?
2. He states, "Working-class voters tried to send a message in 2016, and they are still trying to send it. The crucial question is whether America’s leaders will listen and respond." Which American leaders? Republican leaders? The real mystery is why do poorer white male Republicans consistently vote against their economic self interest? Is it that they are such simpletons that they are easily distracted by wedge issues (Race, religion, and sexual identity), that they cannot see the woods for the trees?
3
Mr. Brooks, this is ridiculous. How is it possible to write an article about the future of employment without mentioning automation? The plain fact of the matter is that in the 21st century, if you can't do something useful better and cheaper than a robot, then your prospects are grim. Apply all the band-aids you like, change the workplace culture, revise the education system -- it's not going to matter. When robots are on the brink of eliminating human pizza delivery drivers -- well the list of things you actually need people to do is getting pretty short.
It's going to take something a lot more radical than anything suggested here to ensure that "working" class people can earn a decent living. In fact, perhaps the very concept of "earning" a living is going to have to be rethought. But none of the lame duck measures discussed in this article is going to make the least bit of difference.
2
@curious...When robots start replacing bureaucrats, administrators, economists and jurinalists, then we'll see some reactions from the political establishment. Until then, the "working class" can eat pet food.
1
I love how Mr. Brooks makes it the fault of "the educated class" rather than "the capital class". That collection of plutocrats that has been finding ways to line their pockets while making working class people's lives worse. It's not actors, college professors and urban dwellers that have led us to this point. It's the 1% that David Brooks so zealously defends who are responsible.
8
Spot on, sir....
Why do these people keep themselves purposefully under educated? Why should I care that these people keep voting for politicians who do not have their well being in mind?
Want a better life? Get a better education.
3
@W...Student loan debt is more than $1.6 Trillion and climbing. Millions of people bought a better education rather than a home. Is that a better life? Well, maybe for the higher educational financial complex.
When I worked in US Customs in 1970s, I administered a law which allowed US goods to be exported for assembly in nearby plants in Mexico and the duty was only on the labor costs when returned. The export of manufacturing jobs continued and now the entire product is made in another country. This has been going on for a half-century and any intelligent government (like those in Europe) would start schools to retrain workers, offer incentives to manufacturers, etc. Not the good old USA, home of "free enterprise" and a total disregard of working people. As my dad always said: you can be smart or you can be stupid, but stupid is harder.
1
These are not the working class.Republicans control the senate and White House because of undemocratic laws that give Wyoming[Pop.500,000]the same number of senators as California[Pop. 40,ooo,ooo].Don't be fooled.
1
Um, how, exactly, does voting red help these folks?
This column names zero ways it helps them, and I can think of none?
1
I keep hearing that we need to listen more to the disenfranchised working class. They do have very legitimate concerns and grievances that need to be addressed. Everything is getting more expensive and their wages are not going up. That's a legitimate issue that needs to be addressed.
But to deduce from this that it is necessary to listen to them more, is exactly the wrong conclusion in my opinion. These folks are easily manipulated by fear and demagoguery into believing anything, into voting against their own interests, and -most problematic of all - into taking out their frustrations on innocent minorities (illegal immigrants, jews, gays, intellectuals, you name it) that have absolutely nothing to do with their problems.
We've seen exactly where this leads when exploited by a skilled, ruthless leader: in Nazi Germany, in the Russian communist revolution, in Rwanda, etc.
Their concerns have to be addressed, but listening to them will not get us closer to solving these issues, without also doing something about the active spread of misinformation by facebook, fox news, right wing talk radio, etc.
5
"We build a broken system and then ask people to try to fit into the system instead of tailoring a system around people’s actual needs."
Sounds a lot like neo-liberalism...spreading like a cancer all over the planet and fast becoming the only game in town.
Brooks does not mention income inequality - perhaps because he is part of the 1%?
The piece is filled with cliche and stereotypes.
2
Let's see now. Who's kids are dying by the thousands in our raging drug epidemic? Where are those drugs coming from? The Democrats are taking a flippant attitude towards the middle/lower class issue of our time. Block party, anyone?
1
I'm so tired of David Brooks and his admonishments to us all about how we're not doing it right. One of his great suggestions is to go back to tracking. Tracking was, and is, one of the most harmful and racist educational methodologies known to the United States educational system.
What he's really saying is that we don't make white people who don't have any education (and have no interest in getting one) feel good enough about themselves. I guess we're supposed to applaud their refusal to embrace anyone who isn't like them, i.e., white, racist, gun-toting, "Christian," etc.
Stop it David. Read the posts here (or somewhere) by people who grew up in white, uneducated communities, and quit admonishing people for trying to make this country a place where those who care enough, can make a future we can feel proud of.
2
An absolutely excellent piece! Let's learn how to run an educational system that is concerned with everyones' education and personal success. And by 'success' I mean the fact and feeling that they are learning to be a productive, contributing member of society. Other countries do it, so can we.
1
Mr. Brooks, I'm sad to say, that the Southern ragamuffin under-employed man child is forever lost. They made bad choices because they were learned to be stupid in poor schools with badly written textbooks from ignorant, poorly educated teachers. Nothing to be done.
Reactionary republicans are never going to address the working class. They're all about the capitalist elite and how to nurture it. Demos could place sticks and carrots in law that slow down quick off shoring of mfg and jobs. Not sure what else is available. Extending Medicare/Medicaid and free or subsidized college could help working class. Trump like Hitler is a dangerous form of populism. Hitler increased employment for his "volks" but the bill that came due was horrific. Afraid Brooks is still part of the problem on this how to help the working class.
1
I don't care how left out someone feels or what their job/economic situation is. Nothing justifies voting for Trump any more than Depression era Germans were justified in voting for Hitler and the Nazis. Voting for Trump is political blasphemy: the unforgiveable offense.
3
You're overthinking this, David. It's actually pretty simple. They're telling us that they watch Fox News and believe every stupid thing Sean and Tucker and Laura tell them. The only way things will get better is when that 2X4 hits them upside the head and they realize that absolutely nothing Trump and the Republicans have done made their lives better.
6
It is easy to see when the change occurred. In the 90s a spin off from Cheers was about two PhD‘s called Frasier.
2
Completely eliminated from your commentary is any mention of parenting.
Effective parenting entails planning and respect for maximizing childrens potential NOT just having babies in homes that are living from paycheck to paycheck - Where Parents with little or no respect for the challenges facing their children have no concept or ability of mentoring (planning navigation through today's economy.)
Education and training are available! Parents need to make parenting their number one priority -AND if they can't? -_Don't have children -get an abortion if necessary.
Personal responsibility is no longer mentioned by the conservatives who in essence -ironically -Are the ones asking for either handouts and instant solutions - (let's prop up dying industries -like coal) OR supporting a president and his ilke who are absent any ideas except ranting about nationalism.
Their are plenty of progressive ideas about education and the future of work -Look at Hillary Clinton's for openers.
It takes a Village!
4
I would like to hear more about worker co-ops. They sound like a potentially very productive idea.
2
I just turned 54. I live in Iowa and we are unfortunately a red state now. People my age are angry. Very few of us with college degrees ever moved up as far as we should have because the baby boomers wouldn't retire and now we are too old. One of my friends-a special ed teacher with 25 years of experience-has had her position eliminated in 3 school districts to be replaced with a cheaper entry level teacher. My friends who did physically demanding work at factories/etc. are falling apart and can't image working until 67. We all have retirement plans and savings but without employer-provided insurance it will all be gobbled up. Age discrimination is rampant everywhere. Even commentators here bemoan the lack of unqualified young people to fill their jobs. What about us "old people?" Bet you don't consider us at all. Look who are working at service jobs and fast food-retirees who can't make it. I never expected a free ride, but my dad worked 90 hours a week so I could have a better standard of living than I grew up with. I don't, and I never will. I'm also not going to employer provided insurance if I retire early and a generous pension.
8
@Sarah A
You are one of the baby boomer you are complaining about not retiring. Baby boomers are those people born worldwide between 1946 and 1964.
I knew/fell this a long time ago, but both parties either don't understand or more likely prefer simpler, ideological solutions. Unlike rosy historians, am not so sure we are going to survive. Both parties just want to win at all cost while we working class are left flapping in the wind.
3
When the crowds at Trump's rallies chant "Lock her up" or "CNN sucks," are they motivated by the economic realities of their lives or by something else? That's a rhetorical question. I think David has a blind spot when it comes to the reasons white, working-class voters, rural voters and a majority of white women are so enthusiastic about Trump.
6
Mr. Brooks leaves out one major factor in how the working class has been undervalued and stymied: healthcare. As a small woodworking business owner, the biggest obstacle to success was the inability to get affordable health care for myself and my employees, despite our college degrees. It was damn near impossible to compete with large companies with big pockets and better health plans. Most of the civilized world does not have to worry about securing health care...only in America.
724
Yes, the working class, which includes me, is getting screwed. Why they keep voting Republican is beyond me. Don't they realize that corporate America, which is primarily Republican, doesn't really want them anymore? It's the C-suite, with its slavish devotion to stockholders, that is dismantling employee pensions, turning professional jobs into contract jobs and/or algorithms that robots can execute, and sending jobs overseas where labor is dirt cheap. Americans need to wake up and realize that corporations care about one thing only--shareholders. The real irony here is that Republicans decided corporations are "citizens" while we workers are called "labor".
8
@JCR And don't forget those citizens religious freedoms trump your rights at every turn.
Here is a message to all the wealthy, over-educated white males out there: Just quit with your "blue collar romance."
Is it an accident that your ideal, bygone eras center around 70s and 80s TV shows like Cheers or All in the Family, that depict big-hearted, hard-working, decent white folks, who now have somehow "lost" the standard of living and comfort they are entitled to? It's no wonder Trump might appeal.
And, really, whose kids do you think will "choose" to be pitched unto vocational tracks? Not those of Princeton grads. Of course, when those who are better suited for manual labor are out of the way, that will leave more room for Mr. Brooks to ponder what "we" can do for "them."
2
I think the People of Color Working Class is trying to tell us something, too.
343
@P Gabel
I would be curious to see a party breakdown of working class votes for whites versus non-whites. Trump's push at the end had nothing to do with economic issues, its main emphasis was on the Central American caravan. It appears to me that those racial issues are what influence working class white voters even more than issues that might even improve their economic well-being.
14
@P Gabel
And I think the Sane Working Class have a ew pointers as well.
4
The only solution I see for the future of The United States of American is if American Conservatism, which has been so dominant legislatively since Reagen, and mostly responsible for today’s working class carnage, will reform itself.
American Conservatism dominates the media and the minds of half of Americans with it’s toxic and totally unproductive message of carnage, hatred and anti-liberalism. Until they soften their positions on tax policies, gun control, universal health care and the role of government in this country, very little will change, and we will continue sliding into catastrophy.
3
@CarolinaJoe And for the sake of this opinion piece, their nearly 50 year effort since the Powell memorandum in concert with the US Chamber of Commerce consciously declared war on the value of labor in the United States. We remain the only country that has imbued corporations with human rights with no responsibilities to the societies that allow those corporations to exist. Further, we also accept the ridiculous Friedman construct that the only responsibility of the corporation is to maximize shareholder wealth. Whatever happened to the classical construct embodied in the corporate Johnson & Johnson creed? Or standard business teachings pre 1980's of customers, employees, and communities recognizing that if those stakeholders are served the owners are generally ensured of maximizing their wealth. We've simply accepted the anger and racism of older whites and their ignorant, often meth/opioid addicted off spring that for them everyone is dead in the short run so why not act out on your hate?
Time to discard the terms "working class", "middle class", "educated class", along with a lot of other labels for people that only serve to bias and distract us from actual problem solving.
3
Republicans since Reagan have been cutting taxes for the wealthy.
Cutting social programs for everyone else.
Working hard to get rid of unions.
Working hard to divide us with dog-whistle politics of "welfare queens" and States rights.
Working hare to divide us with abortion.
Working hard to divide us with the NRA.
Working hard to divide us with same sex equality.
And all those years, Brooks ignored those things while he supported the Republican Party.
And now he says Democrats need to find a solution.
10
I was once a great fan of David Brooks. I wanted to heal the divisions between the right and left. There were good people on both sides. We could disagree without being disagreeable. David and I are having trouble making that case any more. Our arguments are dissolving and the ground beneath us is shifting. Every day the differences between the reds and the blues are coming into sharper focus.
It had to come to this. Since the day that Mitch McConnell said that money is speech and speech is money, it became inevitable that the line of disagreement would fall, not on what is expedient, or smart, but what is simply moral and decent. The Republican Party is now a coalition of ignorant dupes at its base led by a collection of ruthless thieves. The thieves could care less about immigration or jobs or rural communities. They are using their base to propel their leadership into positions of influence. With enough money they can buy representation, legislation, propaganda and power. With power they can steal more money. Their base just stands behind them and hoots and hollers as their meager savings are stolen and their enviable political system is lost. They are trading their most precious birth right for the false promise of racial, ethnic and gender superiority. They are being played.
5
Clever how David Brooks never wants to admit that (1) women have outpaced men, especially white men with a high school education or below, in getting the necessary education and training for a changing economy, (2) many, if not most, working class men lost their jobs because Wall Street demanded greater quarterly profits from corporations, who shipped jobs overseas, and (3) the Obama administration requested the GOP Congress to fund training programs and community college education access that would allow these men to gain jobs in advance manufacturing and other growth industrial sectors. The GOP Congress repeatedly said no. Need we forget that the Obama administration passed the ACA, AKA Obamacare, so that working class families can afford healthcare.
Mr. Brooks has been writing same column, about white working class men since the 2008 Great Recession. He never seems to get it right.
8
I believe anybody that works for a living is part of the working class. Some do muscle work and so do head work.
Nothing stays the same. The world keeps spinning, the economy of 1955 is long gone, and it is not coming back. Our schools do not teach this. They do not tell students that they may be faced with several job changes in their lifetimes and that they need to be able to hit the ground with their feet running.
I work in adult education although a good number of my students are high school age young adults. I tell them the world is not a kind place for those without skills and education, whether it is tech school education or a college education. I tell them they are not just competing with the student sitting next to them, but with students all over the world, and somebody else will get the education and training that is needed if they are not willing to put in the work necessary, and yes, a lot of being educated is work, persistence, and determination. Find something that interests you, looks like it has opportunities, and go after it with all your heart.
I agree that many American workers are angry and they are being left behind economically. Believing in some charlatan that fills their heads with scapegoats, hatred, and lies is not going to fix their lives.
So, when is the GOP going to tell these folks that they are being used. This time, there really is a hoax, and the hoax is that help is coming to the American workers from Donald Trump and the GOP.
4
For once I agree with Mr. Brooks--mostly. What he's basically saying is that the working class wants Democrats, because Democrats have been talking about all these reforms for years now. But the white working class won't vote for Democrats because the Dems want to help brown people, too, and not just white people. So the working class is cutting off their nose to spite their face. I don't know what's to be done about that.
6
Wait, I'm working class, live in the city but I'm educated, with loans, and dragged myself and my kid outta poverty. Trump does not speak for me, and further, i don't buy the notion that Trump supporters voted because of jobs. I really believe their votes were powered by hate and bigotry. Real working class folks evolve, don't look for someone to blame.
Further, as a high school and college student, I had the choice of tract and I worked an internship. So, this stuff is already here. Didn't Trump's voters go to school, learn about the world beyond their patch of ground. This column, as you can tell, made me angry. I'm tired of strong, big white guys (and women) telling me that they've been cheated. The Declaration of Independence says the "right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness", not a job. What a bunch of babies. If I had to evolve, and still must, to be viable in the world, why, then, can't they do it too.
7
I don't care what they think. I make money through Robotic Process Automation, so basically putting these people out of a job.
1
Good old Brooks. He doesn't mean that the government should do anything for anybody. Create a co-op of workers to help each other. Sounds like a union, to me. The reason that we haven't embraced tech schools is that we have a private sector rip-off education system that wants people to pay through the nose for a nothing education. And, hey, your on your own competing with every other worker with the same poor training. Which is exactly what business wants. Get the workers against each other and then you have everything you want. This is trumpland.
1
The ‘working class’ is increasingly undocumented immigrants. The union movement was originally begun to help people like them.
I can't tell you how grateful I am to see Mr Brooks discussing such an important and crucial issue. It is my opinion that this underlying economic strife is a key contributor to the social discord we've seen these last years. It has become clear to most (if not all) of us working for an hourly wage that to this point globalization and the infamous "supply chain" were an end-around of labor on the part of capitalists. This economic philosophy has left whole communities in dire straights for years. And since the great recession we've seen that the only ones who have been bailed out are those who already had enough to get by, leaving those in dire straights lagging further behind. Both political parties were guilty of perpetrating this arbitrary economic selectivity with little or no thought of the damage it would cause to communities. I'm sure it would be much easier to just call all of these people racists and bigots and what have you for not inclusively circling their wagons to fight for their very existence, but that argument discounts or disregards entirely the desperation of their situation and the complete lack regard from anyone who could do anything about it. It doesn't seem reasonable to ask people to look out for others when they themselves aren't being looked after even when they're calling for help. Perhaps its just me but as I see it fixing our economic situation seems crucial to the task of making America kind again.
@Erik, when you say "Both political parties were guilty of perpetrating this arbitrary economic selectivity with little or no thought of the damage it would cause to communities ", makes me wonder if you completely slept through the Obama years.
President Obama and the minority Dems in the House and Senate argued incessantly for programs and policies to help working class people. They were of course told "NO" by the majority party. They were lectured on the benefits of austerity, and how folks just had to pull themselves up by their own bootstraps.
You are making a false equivalency argument with that statement that is baldly false.
1
What they are telling us is they don't want to move to where the jobs are, they don't want to train for the jobs and they don't want to put in the work if it means the best they get is a "gig" here and there. The service industry is crying for workers. We're not talking burger flippers. We need HVAC techs, electricians, truck drivers, floor installers, boiler operators...go down the endless list. I'm 100% with Heidi. The work ethic of the few applicants you get is just not there, retirees are taking the knowledge with them and the youth who could be stepping into those jobs want keyboards and clean hands. We've created a culture where working with your hands is beneath dignity while we build more and more sophisticated systems that need hands and intelligence behind them to keep them running. How's that going to work...?
5
@RT1 The line in your post about "a gig here and there" is a pretty important part of the equation. When there isn't any job stability, even if the pay is a bit above minimum wage earners, in the end you are left with an unsteady cash flow, and an uncertain future. I speak as someone that has worked in a freelance industry for almost 40 years now.
1
We used to have a paper mill just on the edge of town. It was a major economic engine supplying liner board for packaging, and lots of good paying jobs for men and women in our valley.
Because it is an energy intensive industry, there was a constant battle over emissions from its stacks poisoning our air, so we demanded scrubbers witch were decried as too expensive.
During the economic collapse o 07-08 the bottom fell out, and the mill closed. Industry did not need the liner board, but the stack clean up was still needed.
Placing blame for the closure of the mill is impossible, was it fat cats on Wall Street? Or enviros who don't want their air and water to be poisoned? Or the workers who felt they deserved great pay for the hours they worked? Or Chinese paper mills undercutting the market? Or all of the above?
And who could have fixed all of the issues that made the mill close down? It was too complicated to keep the mill here, and the complications we faced were repeated over and over again through out America.
The economic impact was a severe blow to our community, not just in jobs, but in supply chains and the service industries that kept the mill operational.
As in our valley, the national debate is more complicated than trump or his supporters are willing to admit. It is beyond stupid to take a blow it all up attitude toward the issue, and blame immigrants for the mess that is mostly homegrown.
Racism wont get Missoula or our nation out of the mess we created.
4
I started to share my thoughts, but found so many articulate shared thoughts already in the comments section that I erased my own. David needs to go out undercover and find out what the real world (state university/community college grads) is like rather than his life of privilege (the Yale/Harvard/elite university grads). He would be in for a shock.
3
The reason Donald Trump ran another "American carnage" campaign is because he's a negative, nasty guy who loves us-against-them rallies. What, in Donald Trump's life would enable him to empathize with unemployed high school educated workers? They're angry, he's angry. That's what they have in common.
The suggestions in this piece are fine, but any plan that provides financial support while people are training or are unemployed will be resisted or blocked by Republicans. The idea is to pull yourself up by your bootstraps without any support from taxpayers.
Lastly, it may be that societal shifts are now so massive that not much can be done by either party to replace jobs lost to automation and outsourcing. By the time you learn a skill, it's either obsolete or someone else is willing to do the work for pennies.
2
So much to unpack and dismantle here.
First off, surveys have repeatedly shown that white working-class workers voted for Trump not out of economic insecurity, but due primarily to racial animus, which Trump aggravated and took advantage of. So stop excusing these voters for their own petty bigotries by trying to wrap it in some grand morality-free scheme.
Second, the fact that American workers have no bargaining power, and therefore have seen all their productivity gains go to shareholders, is exactly what the Reagan revolution and trickle-down economics was all about, which you have espoused repeatedly over the decades. The use of offshoring, deliberate erosion of the social safety net, dismantling of public and private sector unions, and upper bracket tax cuts, have all been highly deliberate steps in a plan to favor capital over labor. And now labor is upset, and you're looking for an excuse other than your own deep culpability.
So stop pretending this isn't exactly what you planned to happen. Or perhaps you didn't plan for the bad parts, but you clearly ignored them or used them as part of the scheme to distract the very people you were disenfranchising. These were all features, not bugs.
Own it.
1
"We in the college-educated sliver..."
With great cowardice and partisanship, David Brooks again tries to conflate class with ideology. It is not the college-educated sliver that has opposed more education funding, and more public investment, which are the only ways this situation will improve, particularly in poorly developed economic regions. It has squarely been the GOP, the GOP that Mr. Brooks has in the end supported and given cover to over and over again, even while he blasts Trump from one corner of his mouth. Also notice that hardly a mention goes to income inequality and the far too low wages in our economy for the bottom 50% of the labor market, which again are the real problems that need to be solved. So deep hypocracy and willfull blindness, coupled with an engrained partisan lens on everything, is making even moderate GOPers into public fools. Where was the GOP initiative to get infrastructure passed? Why is the GOP not leading on public/private partnerships to solve these problems? (Note that I generally consider myself a supporter of Mr. Brooks.)
1
So dynamic education and worker protections....sounds about right. I'd believe you claim that this is what the 'working class is trying to tell us', but all I heard leading up to the mid-term elections was how a column of dangerous migrants were coming to kill me and my family.
2
More dishonesty from good Republican Party man Brooks. Trump ran “a different kind of campaign”? Brooks dutifully fails to mention that his “different” campaign as entirely composed of blatant lies, racist dog-whistles and fear-mongering. He then goes on to suggest a return to pre-industrial apprenticeships, the dream of the Republican elite as a way to finish destroying the middle class and keep the 99% in their place. If only Brooks had any morals or concern for anyone outside of his party’s owners.
2
Agreed Mr. Brooks, the white working class is trying to tell us something. What they are trying to tell us is that it has only been a mere 155 years since the Emancipation Proclamation and only 54 years since Jim Crow laws were abolished. It has only been 98 years that women gained the right to vote with the 19th amendment. What they are trying to tell us is that they are still racist and sexist. What Trump has been very effectively telling them is that racism and sexism are acceptable. They were not ignored by the left. They have for years voted against their own economic self-interest and bought the concept of trickle-down economics while the left has been trying to offer them ways to pull themselves out of poverty. A lot has been made of the Populist Trump phenomenon being a result of them being ignored by the left. They haven’t been ignored, they just haven’t listened. Instead they have embraced the policy of fear of the other and blame. Meanwhile, many in the press have been trumpeting this idea that they have a right to be angry with the left because they have been ignored. Hogwash.
3
Once again, as Noam Chomsky has been pointing out for decades now: "What is important in the present context is the contribution of the harshest critics (within the mainstream) to reinforcing the system of indoctrination, of which they themselves are victims—as is the norm for the educated classes, who are typically the most profoundly indoctrinated and in a deep sense the most ignorant group, the victims as well as the purveyors of the doctrines of faith."
. . . which means that the old saying, "ignorance is bliss," is in fact true—surely no one would deny that David Brooks leads a life quite filled with bliss; and David Brooks himself is quite pleased to share his complete bliss with the rest of the world. That his bliss comes from his ignorance is completely lost on him, as it must be for the most deeply indoctrinated—indeed, as he's long conveyed it to us all, his life is a lofty, quasi-religious experience.
2
Apprenticeship for what exactly?
And yet, the disaffected flock to Trump, the ultimate and consummate conman selling the same old trickle-down snake oil. I like some of the solutions you mention, like labor cooperatives (aka unions?). They sound to me very much like solutions coming from the Social Democrat Party. I wonder when the disaffected Trump acolytes will wake up and drop their tribal knee jerk antipathy to "socialist" solutions to their problems. I'll tell you this; I don't expect it at all. They are enthralled by Fox News and therefore have themselves to blame. Ignorance is fixed by investigation but stupidity stubbornly persists despite all attempts to educate it away.
2
How "we" can make it better is to rescind the tax breaks for corporations and the uber rich, raise the cap on Social Security tax, give Medicare for All and get this abomination of a president OUT.
We'll still let David Brooks write silly columns to remind ourselves that free speech covers small thinkers, too.
1
"We now spend more than $20,000 a year in means-tested government spending per person in poverty. And yet the average poverty rate for 2000 to 2015 was higher than it was for 1970 to 1985."
Your statistics include Medicaid, as you know. Health care costs per person have risen dramatically faster than average inflation. In addition, a larger portion of Americans are in nursing homes funded by Medicaid.
If you were intellectually honest you would narrow means-tested spending to include only working age adults in poverty. But that wouldn't support your thesis. So...fake news is everywhere, including in columns by esteemed NYT writers.
3
Why did people vote for Trump and his fellow Republican? I, as a college-educated carpenter can tell you why those I know voted for him. Because they feel they've been ignored, disapproved of, considered to be gorillas with a wrench, ignorant, bigoted Archie Bunkers. There are many kinds of intelligences. Those who excel in intellectual pursuits have one of those kinds. Those who invented those things that made American a hugely successful nation many times had another kind.....the same kind that many of the brilliant blue collar people I know have. I can say I have met one genius in my entire life. He was a carpenter who never even went to high school. Democrats so often can be such snobs, and if they keep it up they can expect to have people like Trump who does an "up yours!" to these snobs. Yes, I read the Atlantic and the New Yorker, and I just finished the Iliad and the Odyssey. There are people who want to call me an architect, but actually I am a carpenter, a craftsman trained for years in Japan. Need I remind the reader that all the national treasures of the world were made and DESIGNED by skilled craftsmen and women. The cathedrals of Europe, the temples of Japan and China, the Taj Mahal, Greek temples......were not designed by architects; they were designed by stone masons and carpenters. Dems should wake up, and quit it! Make a point of knowing who cuts your grass, washes and fixes your car, who repairs your house, and you might be astounded.
@LB Dems should wake up? Do you think that Trump, or any of the Senate, actually know who cuts their grass, repairs their house, or fixes their car?
1
@LB, dude, I am a highly educated working class Auto Body repair tech who read the Iliad and the Odyssey, Marx`s Capital , and Dostoyevsky`s Brothers Karamozov in high school, amongst many other classics. And I am fervently against trump policies and trumpublican obtuseness, and republican head in the sand whataboutism.
I know whose side of the bread gets buttered and ever since the Reagan revolution, it has not been the working mans.
If you are just now getting around to Homer, I say fine, but it is you that needs to work on your awareness.
2
I live in Trump country and I agree with this piece.
91
This does not explain why people who have been disenfranchised or lost their jobs think things will get better by voting for the very people who did it to them.
2
I am happy to learn that Brooks now recognizes the problems created by the policies he once advocated. Good for him! Bad for him: he seems not to realize he is writing about white folk and not all folk. Other readers have similar comments.
Co-ops are not conservative but an old progressive idea and I am happy to see Brooks promoting them.
I am also understanding the anger some readers are expressing about these white voters. But the liberal in me says we still need to care about them. There must be policy solutions that will help all Americans. Medicaid expansion is one; there must be other ideas out there.
4
Economic Freedom and self determination also requires responsibility to support the greater society. This social contract has been completely abandoned in American corporate culture. Trump is the figurehead for all of this. His art of deal is the same deal corporate America has made with the American worker; I win you lose.
I agree with much of what Mr. Brooks says. I wonder, though, whether Mr. Brooks understands that the only way to address the economic issues of the working class is to, umm, address those issues. Head on. With policies that are expressly geared to taxing greed, mandating economic fairness, protecting consumers, restricting Wall Street rapaciousness, and reducing economic inequality. Warren and Sanders kind of stuff, whether they are the names at the top of the ticket or not. Not milquetoast Clintonite centrism designed to reassure the privileged that they will not have to do their part, and thank you for your donation check very much.
There are two places I part company with Mr. Brooks:
1. He is underestimating the extent to which racism trumps (so to speak) economics. Andrew Gillum and Stacey Abrams know a little about that.
2. Brooks' statement that economic policies should focus more on enabling the poor to produce more than consume more is just a jargoned up version of the tired trope that poor people are lazy. Tell that to the people juggling two or three low wage jobs to just barely put food on the table. Wage inequality has been rising since the 1970's precisely because people on the low end are being paid less and less of the value of what they already produce.
2
David, it isn't just working class people who are entangled in the gig economy. It's a lot of us college-educated folks, too. I have a lot of the same problems the people you're talking about do, sometimes including lack of respect or unwillingness to hire me due to age. This doesn't translate into supporting the president, whose liabilities are too well known to bother describing yet again. You have to share his mindset to support him, and I don't.
There are some merits to the systems you describe where people decide as teenagers which path they will take, vocational or academic. There are drawbacks, too, one being simply that age 14 is pretty early to be making such huge decisions, and opportunities can be truncated too soon. If the decision were encountered at the same time that people apply to college, it would make a lot more sense.
2
Interesting ideas. But it's mainly Republicans who put these practices into place. This whole MBA strategy that whatever's good for GM or Ford or Google is good for everyone else has been misplaced from the start. Business succeeded in getting Clinton, a moderate Democrat, to gut policies that had they be kept in place would have more than likely prevented the 2008 economic meltdown. Don't blame welfare for the poor. The Republicans would never have favored any of the ideas Cast puts forth in is book.
Relative deprivation of the white working class described by Mr Brooks could be substantially addressed by pro-labor laws and regulations, government financed technical and community colleges, college loan reforms, taxes on the wealthy and on capital, and renewal and repair of our decreipt national infrastructure. Indeed, most elected Democrats, and most Americans support these measures and yet nothing happens because aggrieved white males continue to vote Republican. Why is that? Some clues are to be found in the psychological testing of today's republicans: those who score highly on measures of authoritarian personality; and/or social dominance; and/or prejudice; and/or relative deprivation; and/or score low on intergroup social contact - are very likely to be white male MAGA hat wearing Trump supporters.
3
Why does Mr. Brooks write as though white Republicans comprise the entire working class? Is he unaware that people of color also work blue collar jobs? They, by the way, did not vote for Trump or Republicans, in 2016 or 2018. Did Mr. Brooks omit them from this essay because their voting patterns blow up his premise, or is it that white working class people are the people who actually matter in this discussion? (By the way, the family at the center of "The Wonder Years" was middle class, not working class. The father in the show had a job ib middle management.)
3
For the love of god, David, walk next door to Krugman's office and ask to borrow a quarter so you can buy a clue. White working class (which is apparently the only working class you recognize) did not send anything like the message you have imagined. Also, the GOP turnout was not terribly impressive, nor did formerly Democratic voters switch to supporting Republicans. In terms of popular vote, Democrats destroyed Republicans. Except for gerrymandering and voter suppression, the massive House swing would have been a deluge. In the Senate, the extreme disproportionality of the Senate (which is 1000s of time more disproportionate than at the founding) gave the GOP Senate gains even though they were trounced in the popular vote. That it is a problem for our democracy and for the Democratic Party, but it doesn't remotely resemble the fairy tale you are telling.
5
We live in a situation where workers of one ethnicity are not able to get past their biases to understand that they have much in common with workers of other ethnicities. As unions have been mostly decimated, there is no longer a ready forum to explore common ground and join for negotiating one's share of (yes) profits. Workers of all ethnicities have less leverage if they are less skilled, and they have not banded together to have bargaining power. Many are even beginning to believe that the wealthy class has the best interests of the worker at heart. Our tax policies are turning regressive. $billion lottery? that's a regressive tax scheme. Medicare and Social Security are under threat, although a sensible policy would be to raise the base compensation limits. And a great ominous train has left the station: the cumulative impact of the 2017 tax bills with $trillions in reductions favoring the highest earners and the wealthiest segments of the population. Lower income workers in many states are voting against their own interests.
1
Bravo!
If either party follows this format they will dominate politics for the next few decades, and will deserve to.
We desperately need to reform high school and post-high school education to create the technical/trade opportunities that workers and the economy need, rather than the miserable, elitist offer we've been making for generations: "college or McDonalds." The kids in shop class have a lot to contribute if they were invested in rather than scoffed at.
Yes, labor unions could learn a lot from the European ones which evolved out of the old guild structures, and so could our employers who rely on those workers.
I am struck by the fact that so many red staters who voted for Trump and tax cuts, also voted for more healthcare spending and a higher minimum wage. This is not the Tea Party.
It is a large, not terribly ideological slice of the electorate, and you don't have to be "right" or "left" to want these things. These same voters could surely be convinced to support cutting unnecessary defense spending and taxing the rich at a higher rate, if they're not already on board with that.
Democrats are you listening? Embrace these people - yes, along with minorities, LGBTQ, women, etc. They are not in competition. This is how you will win again.
4
@Livonian
Time to update your info.
Democrats have been doing this for years already. That's precisely one of the reasons why there was a blue wave to start with.
Or do you think that the 40,000 American lives that Obamacare saves a year (= soon half a million American lives) don't include a massive amount of white males ... ?
Or that saving the US auto industry would miraculously benefit minorities alone?
Of that Warren's Consumer Finance Protection Bureau, which shifted millions from Wall Street banks to ordinary citizens already, somehow skipped white workers ... ?
And so on and so forth ...
As to the Tea Party: they never opposed real healthcare and social security. They just noticed that they will have to force GOP governments to respect these things if they want them, rather than imagining that they'd care about it spontaneously ...
1
@Ana Luisa
The Democrats were co-opted by the Republicans during the Clinton era. Yes, indeed I prefer their current policies to the GOP's. But they amount to merely mitigating the on-going damage, rather then offering the New Deal that would re-invigorate the American middle class, and the Democratic Party.
We need, for instance, a wholesale redesign of how we train people for work, as the article mentions. Instead, the Democrats offer "job retraining" lip service to out of work sixth generation coal miners, while making "free college" the focus of their campaigns. It's silly.
Where is the boldness?
So you want to elevate blue-collar work in the USA. Great! How can this happen when so much of the total blue-collar work (like manufacturing things aimed at a consumer economy) are made overseas by workers who cost a lot less to corporations, in countries that care a lot less about safety, the environment, etc? This is the most obvious problem with the "labor market."
2
Corporations are chartered by states to benefit the people of the state.
Originally corporations were expected to benefit all stakeholders. They were to provide benefits to the community, the state, the country, the customers the employees, and the shareholders. That is still the case in Europe.
But in the U.S., the shareholders have managed to redefine the law and the culture so that only shareholders are supposed to benefit from the corporations, and anything that doesn't directly support ever growing profits is seen as stealing from the shareholders.
On top of that the shareholders have gotten the Supreme Court to treat their corporations (many not even based on the U.S.) as "people,"'pseudo-citizens with all of the rights of a human but none of the responsibilities. Corporations don't go to jury duty or go to prison when they commit a crime. Corporations shouldn't be citizens of the state that chartered them any more than you can be your own father.
But wait, there's more. Shareholders have also gotten our? representatives to give them lower tax rates and their corporations lower tax rates, besides being able to deduct most of their expenses, in full which citizens that work for a living can't do.
The result is that corporations and he mega rich 1% that own 75% of their shares get to manipulate markets and governments to take exponential increases in worker productivity, and instead of investing it back in workers, communities, states, etc., bet it on derivatives.
4
“What if people’s ability to produce matters more than how much they can consume?” Cass asks.
Parse "produce" for me - does it mean volunteer work, does it mean engaging in a barter economy (service- or product- oriented), does it mean something 'arts'-oriented?
There are many useful areas of engagement that our traditional economy does not recognize or seriously undervalues.
1
I agree with a lot of what you say here. Both parties have ignored the negative effect that their economic policies have had on workers in America over the last 30 years.
Workers are justified in being angry and frustrated at having so little influence on the policies that have lost their jobs and stagnated their wages.
If Democrats want to be relevant again, they must start listening to and responding with real passion for defending the interests of American workers.
It also makes sense that many workers respond to Donald Trump - he sees them and speaks to them directly, while other Republicans and Democrats don't.
But support for Trump is about a lot more than economics. It's about a right wing electorate that has been fed a relentless diet of bigotry, fear-mongering, lies, and spite for decades.
There's a reason that Trump brought Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity with him to rallies - it's their language he speaks and the agenda of their bosses and their movement that he serves when he is not serving himself.
That agenda has many goals, but one method - to squash liberalism in order to attain them.
Donald Trump's illiberal zero-sum game has finally opened the eyes of the rest of the country where liberal values are held, to what America could so easily become if liberalism dies.
Donald Trump is not the leader that workers need in order to see their needs met; he has plunged this country into a battle for its soul, and such battles consume all else.
2
@Teg Laer
“It also makes sense that many workers respond to Donald Trump - he sees them and speaks to them directly, while other Republicans and Democrats don't.”
What does that mean, Teg? What I hear when Trump speaks is word salad, tossed together with hateseed dressing and grudge croutons. He notoriously speaks to them as if they were simple minded. It’s been claimed that his supporters don’t take him literally, but instead take him seriously. What then, are they hearing him say? David Frum in his 2017 book “Trumpocracy” suggests that what his white male devotees hear in his reality show rambling is him endlessly whining about being unloved and unappreciated and that that’s what they identify with and are capitivated by. If so, it’s a tragic state of affairs that working class white men identify with the endless and petty grievances of a woe-is me billionaire who’s talking down to them as if to children, who before occupying the White House lived in splendor in a fool’s gold NY tower.
Worker cooperatives are vital life-line to keep communities from becoming ghost towns when the plant that employed half the inhabitants close down to ship the jobs to the next developing country all to save labor costs.
Instead of handing out tax cuts to already-rich people and burning the so far burned $4T in overseas wars, we could use a fraction of that to help communities to provide jobs that keep skills in tact and address climate change.
The issue is there is no will. These very same poor people that keep calling the college educated elites that out of touch keep electing elites who are out of touch with their needs.
3
So, Mr. Brooks, what are you going to do to promote these ideas among the Republican constituency beyond this one opinion piece? These are all ideas that Liberals and Social Democrats believe in. That's not surprising because the same ideas have been common practice among countries that neoclassical economists in this country would claim are socialist countries.
4
The decline of the working class has been directly related to the decline of union representation, "right to work laws", and trade agreements that make it cheaper to pay someone elsewhere and then transport the product here rather than produce it here.
The decline of the working class has been directly related to worker insecurity promoted by Dr. Greenspan, and financial deregulation, and the raiding of the pension plans.
It is hard for me to understand how someone as knowledgeable as Dr. Brooks can reconcile considering himself a Republican, a party mostly responsible for union decline, labor insecurity, and shaming of public education; and at the same time advocate education for the working class.
It's like saying: if you study hard, at least the 1-10% of you that are lucky or intelligent enough to deserve a better job will. The other 90-99% that don't move up the social ladder - well, they shouldn't anyway.
5
Working class "carnage " is probably a large factor but working class passivity and hatred of the other is perhaps a larger factor. Trump can easily sense which is the more important at his rallies where gratuitous insults and threats of arbitrary imprisonment or physical harm are the biggest hits. He doesn't seem to spend much time on jobs policy but I must admit I have long ago stopped listening so I may be wrong about that. His foreign trade policy has apparently led to fewer jobs. For those who might want to fact check Mr. Brooks on this just sit down with a timer and paper and pen to record how much time he spends on each subject. Be sure to attribute applause and pause time to the preceding statement.
2
For starters, when one has a country that has the highest incarceration rate in the world, the worst income disparity of any of the western industrialized nations, a healthcare system that Americans have been haggling about without resolution since Harry Truman was President, a military/industrial complex that continues to fight senseless and never-ending wars that drain the treasury at the expense of everything else, a third world infrastructure, a trillion and a half dollar student loan deficit while at the same time money is lavished upon the wealthy in tax cuts instead of spent on the needs of the ALL of the citizens, any wonder why the working/middle class is in trouble and angry? Clearly, these are the individuals most negatively affected by all of these insane policies and it has to change.
While Brooks speaks generalizations and rhetoric, the only people actually discussing these issues on a regular basis are Progressive democrats, NOT Corporate democrats and certainly not Republicans and since they are actually operating from the grass roots, that is why the progressive ranks are growing and several got elected for the first time in these mid-term elections, especially women.
In this case, the future bodes well for those politicians that actually wish to do something about all of this, however, considering America is a two-party duopoly that is primarily funded by lobbyists, it will take some time.
6
@Deus I wish someone like you were writing speeches for the Democrats. We need to know how lost this country has become. One of the key points is money in politics. No sensible country allows elections to be never-ending and uncontrolled money to flow.
Mr. Brooks, you make lots of good points, but I am not buying your central theme. While I'm sure lots of Trump voters have economic concerns, the central theme of Trump's campaign this fall (and in 2015) was "Fear and Loathing of the Other". It was a campaign based on hate, and tied into economics only to the degree that economics is loosely tied to class.
The Democratic party does need to do a much better job helping the workers of America, as surely the republicans will not. And Democrats can surely pick up plenty of votes from appreciative workers and worker's families. But the central tenant of the democrats must be the repudiation of hate, of class warfare, and of divisiveness. Obama showed us how to take the high road. We all need to follow.
3
The "high road" didn't work for these people. BHO was interested in globalism and had little to no real world experience. The democrats offered more of the same in 2016 so they went for DJT, some because they are racists, but many because the democrats offered more DACA, more immigration, more illegals and nothing for them. Not everyone who doesn't want to continue to see the u.s. population continue to balloon 2-3 million per year, driven by immigration is a racist. Some are the only true environmentalists.
A very valuable column. i hope lots of policy makers read this.
Thanks!
2
Wow David, you really are beginning to sound like a democratic socialist. And that’s a good thing. When we stop attacking and begin including, when we present solutions and reason over fear and lies, great things begin.
2
More like the white working class is too stuck in racism to join the majority of Americans in support of the party that is trying to move the county forward.
2
Perhaps the white working class voters are starting to understand what they gave up in order to scratch their racist itch by voting for the Republican Party. The Party broke their unions, which gave them a better shot a piece of the pie, polluted their water, defunded their schools, and unleashed the banks who foreclosed on their homes. But the Republicans did make them feel good by attacking African Americans and minorities. The white working class, having been conned out of their piece of the American pie, are doubling down by voting for the con artist in the White House who has successfully shoved through a tax cut for the rich, and is trying to take away their healthcare; all in the name of working class whites. Incidentally, the apprenticeship programs you seek used to be provided by corporate America, but were cut to give more to the shareholder class. This didn't happen in other industrialized nations, look at Germany.
Sorry sucker, look in the mirror if you want to know who is to blame.
3
David Brooks' so-called "working class" supports an amoral, narcissistic, violent, ignorant, bigoted, corrupt, authoritarian white supremacist who flouts the Constitution and the rule of law, and a Republican Party that happily enables his crimes and his brutality.
These are not victims. These are bad people. It really is that simple.
What is the "working class" trying to tell us? I literally could not care less about them.
3
The thing I agree with this article is that we focus too much on GDP. The rise of GDP only benefits Wall Street and the top 5%. The problem is complicated:
1. CEOs only focus in short term earnings, not the long term well being on the companies. They don’t treat employees as humans; they treated them as capitals.
2. Our economy is controlled by Wall Street which has no interest in employment. They care only about the short-term profits. CEOs do everything they can to please Wall Street. They like Facebook which does not require heavy capital investments. We can never have companies like Samsung which employs hundreds of thousands with a profit margin of less than 10%.
3. Politicians don’t care either. They care whether they can be elected in the next cycle. That is why we lower the taxes for the rich. Yes, we have good employment figures now. But the future generation will pay for it.
4. Lower-middle class Americans are brain-washed that we have an “American Dream”. White Americans’ suicide rate is higher than 80 per 100,000, 2 times higher than most developed countries and 4 times higher than the rate for the black. Why, false expectation. That is the reason for the rise of white nationalists. That was the reasons for the rise of Nazi. That is the reason they want to go back to the good old days. Sorry, you can’t. The world is different now, a lot more competitive than before.
4
Perhaps the white working class voters are starting to understand what they gave up in order to scratch their racist itch by voting for the Republican Party. The Party broke their unions, which gave them a better shot a piece of the pie, polluted their water, defunded their schools, and unleashed the banks who foreclosed on their homes. But the Republicans did make them feel good by attacking African Americans and minorities. The white working class, having been conned out of their piece of the American pie, are doubling down by voting for the con artist in the White House who has successfully shoved through a tax cut for the rich, and is trying to take away their healthcare; all in the name of working class whites. Incidentally, the apprenticeship programs you seek used to be provided by corporate America, but were cut to give more to the shareholder class. This didn't happen in other industrialized nations, look at Germany.
Sorry sucker, look in the mirror if you want to know who is to blame.
It seems that you are supporting some very socialist programs - working together for the common good - how unrepublican.
2
One of our best columns.
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Bravo, David, right on!
2
Ah, the Brooks Friday column. David reads a book. David understands everything about the topic. David writes a column.
1
Dull. Ineffectual. Dilute. Pointless. It's time for Brooks to sharpen his viewpoint, to make his voice important and needful, to attempt harshness. Bland generalities are simply not helpful.
I'm completely dumbfounded by anyone from the Right suggesting that Democrats have ignored the working class. It reminds me of when Dan Quayle criticized the Family Leave Act by stating that it doesn't cover companies with less than 50 employees, as if Republicans would ever go there.
It is only with a wink and a nod that anyone can seriously suggest that Trump's attention to the working man is of any significance. The tax cut was an "elite" give away. He has ignored necessary infrastructure spending, which would employ workers and provide mush need improvements to industry infrastructure. No, Trump fictional "attention" paid workers is largely, like everything else, an attempt to create divisions pitting people against one another.
I must say the way Republicans come up with labels for minority intolerance is remarkable. First they bastardized "liberal," and now they suggest that these "elites" are to blame with their love of minorities and immigrants.
Please, Mr. Brooks, give me some factual support for the notion that Trump has made policy that increases workers wages.
3
So Mr Brooks, keep encouraging your GOP to continue lowering taxes on the wealthy, while reducing social services - then these mindless Trump voters (bigoted losers? Deplorables? Pick your choice) will root even louder for Trump. American exceptionalism at its finest!
3
Trump has no intention of making life better for his red meat voters. He wants to keep them stupid and angry. They voted for him two years ago and lapped up his hate and fear this time. That’s the brand new U.S. problem: citizens knowingly voting for a trouble-maker.
6
So in other words, the old Republican Party is dead. What you have now is a bunch of racist middle class whites who want the same things Democrats are offering but won’t vote for a Democrat because they are in the “ White” Party. These folks are voting to pass Democratic initiatives because they want what Democratic ideas but just don’t want to be part of that Party. Something smells rotten in Denmark. Hope Mr. Brooks is at least an Independent now.
1
"Us & Them" thinking sounds so arrogant.Disappointing, David Brooks.
2
If we have built a career on supporting greedy, ethnophobic Republicans, what we need to is focus in Democrats.
3
Yet another column from a supposedly enlightened republican blaming it all on the "elites" who are out of touch with the heartland. As if republican politicians ever gave a damn about the heartland aside from how many votes they could count on. Recall that whenever Democrats brought up income inequality, republicans screamed about "class warfare". Now apparently the social and economic destruction brought on by Milton Friedman-Ronald Reagan style capitalism is all the fault of those sneering liberals living on the coasts.
2
“We?” You mean “we Republicans,” don’t you? Democrats have been trying to help the working class for decades, and for decades you Republicans have fought for the privileges of the rich. Nice that you’re finally noticing the results, but a little self-knowledge wouldn’t hurt.
3
Brooks, have you finally become a real liberal?
However, did you know that labor unions have always had apprenticeship programs?
But unions became a bugaboo to the oligarchs because union wages do bite into the profits of these corporations. The same corporations that have bought and sold so many politicians, especially those in your (former?) party.
Those same corporations have deemed paying decent wages as an "inefficiency". That is where the problems begin for working class people. And F(alse)ox not news is where the problem festers as it repeats the oligarchs' lies and propaganda.
This column was a lot better than I expected it to be. But I still think Brooks could do better if he actually talked to some working class people.
David Brooks, if you are correct, then why the hell have the Republicans given the most elite and wealthy college-educated Americans the biggest tax breaks? This is hypocritical.
2
I loved art. In 8th grade I chose to do art as an elective. The GC called me into his office to persuade me to take business instead. "The smart kids take business or computers and we like to put the slower kids in classes like art and shop and send them to BOCES." He even had a conference with my Mom when I insisted. Lots of us "college material" students wanted to take fun vocational classes but they would schedule physics and math and chemistry opposite the vocational classes so you couldn't take both.
Our "educators" socially engineered this split in our society. Being the best and brightest craftsman or artist or machinist was the same as "not achieving your potential" because the vocational programs- instead of being intellectually challenging and cutting edge in development were dumbed down to serve as an alternative education for those who didn't have the academic skills to prep for college. They weren't teaching real vocations the way a guild or apprenticeship would- it was just a place to dump kids who would end up digging glorified ditches as far as the teachers were concerned.
Our teachers taught us to scorn the skilled trades and downplayed the importance of unions and labor laws and made us believe that the private sector was where we wanted to be because that's where all the money was.
Then they elected Reagan and outsourced and offshored and downsized all the jobs we'd studied for.
5
I believe that using the term 'working class' is archaic and not helpful for finding solutions to many of the economic and political problems we find facing us today. The term 'working class' can mean any number of things to different people. I would even argue that most of Americans are in the working class with the exception of maybe 5 percent... no matter what our education levels happens to be.
We need to find meaningful labels that redefine segments of our society based on cultural norms and ideological leanings in order to aid us in at least understanding, if not agreeing with each other.
As I recall, most of the research from the 2016 election found that Trump voters were comprised mostly of Americans who lived in homogeneous communities with little exposure to those who did not think like they think. Income and educational levels had little to do with the voting pattern.
Our current predicament has less to do with the old meaning of 'working class' and most to do about where we live and what we deem our values to be.
1
In my mind, I keep coming up with thinking that the problem is the unnecessary amount of personal profits some capitalists, the ones who do not care about fair pay and do not care about the needs of others, amass.
I think that wages should be raised. I also think that poverty should be eliminated in America.
All of us, having decent-enough sufficient incomes, all will provide stimulus for the economy.
And, for rich and poor, there ought to be public education about personal/family budget management. Most people do not watch what they spend; and those who have lots of money just keep spending and spending.
1
Excellent column. It never fails to amaze me how ill-informed the “enlightened” coastal elites really are. The vast majority of Trump voters are neither ignorant nor racist. They are disenfranchised. Big difference. And they were sold out and forgotten by the very same people who now condescendingly dub them ignorant.
1
@Chris Gotta disagree. Trump voters I know of are well-paid sales execs and business owners. Including my wife's ex-employer, who owns a footwear company in the midwest whose shoes are 100% made in China. They wanted to see Obamacare killed, immigration stopped and tax cuts flowing. When you make $300 to $400k a year, those tax cuts make sense. At the low-income level you're not even seeing Happy Meal money from that $1.6 Trillion in tax cuts. Same old GOP blah-blah, wrapped in a new, hardened package.
3
Yup. Elite media keeps putting them down. Calling them uneducated. Worse. But. Those darned deplorables just keep voting.
1
Worker coops? Are you sure you're not a Communist? Newsflash: this is not a Republican type of idea. Maybe you should rethink your position on the political spectrum.
2
Like Brooks would know what the working class thinks.
4
It is painful to read this, written by someone who has know so little so long. Mr. Deregulatory Let's Bomb 'Em Brooks takes some culpability, but not enough, for creating his GOP party and the centrist Dems who serve them.
David, when you call this group "the working class," you're really referring to the white working class. Say so. As written, you're suggesting that this white working class is the default. And that's hugely insulting to people of color at this same economic level. I expect better from a NYT columnist.
4
Thanks father Dave but we have heard the endless laments of working men for decades. The problem is they and evidently you, think they are the only ones that matter. We are sick of hearing about these whiny old men. Maybe you could concentrate on the people who society abuses, like women and people of color, and quit giving the best paid, always first to be hired subset of society attention for such pathetic behavior. The white working class males hate and abuse the rest of us and we don't really care what they want anymore, capiche?
2
These people want Midnight In America. Well God bless their hearts
I got, it we just need to pander to the white working class and tell them what they want to hear just like the Republicans do. Guns are great, minorities are taking your country and our party will save you from the "other". Oh and at the same time government is terrible and awful even though it's protecting you from things you don't like and guaranteeing you a job in a dead industry.
3
It's that ugly "P" word that's the problem. Call it Profit or call it Pie; it still comes down to how you slice it. Right now the pieces are not so proportional.
2
Sorry, but the people who voted Republican still show us how many people are foolish enough to believe in the lies dumped on them daily by Trump and his toadies at Fox UnNews.
There used to be a number of sayings about once burned twice shy, well it seems there are still plenty of people who haven't figured that out yet.
2
I couldn't agree more but I don't see a solution because Democrats don't seem to be able to listen. It does matter if someone's reason for wanting immigration limited is legitimately economic or not. They have a right to an opinion but Democrats immediately call them racist or stupid. Nether label garners many votes.
"Working-class voters tried to send a message in 2016, and they are still trying to send it."
Yeah, but that message is "we demand herrenvolk democracy," so the answer is no. No from the Democrats because such a society is racist and evil, no from Republicans because they sneer at the wants and needs of anyone who isn't rich.
Ever since Obama took office, every time Democrats help poor white Americans, or even try to, those poor whites spit in their faces and proclaim that as long as black Americans get the same help, they won't take it. Then they vote for Republicans who hurt their economic interests instead, but hurt black Americans' even worse. You can't talk about class in America without talking about race.
1
Phlueeze, David. You can check it out at your local (or your own mahogany and leather draped library: What’s the Matter With Kansas?”
Democratic socialism. How enlightened (and delightful), David! You and Jen Rubin must be drinking from the same water fountain.
1
We abandoned tracking because our society was too racist not to push minority students into the vocational track and white students into the college track regardless of ability. You can't fix the current system without first fixing the racism that caused the old one to be rejected.
The ol' "economic anxiety" farce. I'm surprised, but not surprised, that Mr. Brooks still believes that carnage is the reason for our woes. It may be a contributing factor, but it is realized in a petty and false narrative about blacks and browns invading their shores, raping their wives, and taking their jobs. Even writing the words gives me pause... putting them to paper is cringeworthy. And yet our president and his party campaign on it and shout it at the tops of their lungs.
David, you don't define "working class", just as Bret Stephens yesterday didn't define "other America".
The MAGA-hatted, Trump sweatshirt-wearing guys in the photo accompanying your piece online (with an iPhone in one guy's back pocket) spent a nice little chunk of change for that gear. So they've got jobs, and some disposable income.
The people I know of who voted for Trump are sales execs and business owners. Their issues were Obamacare (kill it) and immigration (stop it).
Not to say we couldn't use an apprenticeship program and those other ideas, but the Trump base isn't just truck drivers and factory hands.
Lastly, my daughter is a carpenter here in the Bay Area. Hard to make plans with her because in addition to her M-F job, she does side-work on the weekends. With her own savings, and a home loan program for low-income folks from the City of Oakland, she bought a house several years ago.
Government can and should make a difference in people's lives with smart programs like that one.
5
Congrats Con Brooks you have yet again proved H. L. Mencken's observetion..."For every complex problem there is a solution that is pure, simple and WRONG."
As usual with Brooks, his analysis is very shallow. Sure, it would be nice to have the once-called "working class" - now the non-working class - have access to vocational training; however, they actually do have it. It is called Community College or technical schools where those who can become trained as nursing assistants or auto mechanics; however, there is a price tag attached that keeps many people away. Even at that, how many people are interested in the few types of employment offered?
The bigger problems stem not from average people who are dismissive of the needs of the unemployed but from the privileging of corporations over people. We are no longer referred to as "citizens"; no, we are "consumers", little economic units to be plundered by the lords of commerce. Those same forces have told us for forty or more years that people lacking good paying jobs are "lazy" and don't want to work. If they weren't, they would be rolling in money and working on Wall Street. Poppycock! It isn't people with a college degree - who are also hanging on by their insecure fingernails - who created the present situation, it is the "C" suite that owns a rigged, corrupt political class. Fix that first and see how things change.
Brooks, you are out of your depth so frequently that I really don't know why are still working as a columnist. Please stick to the theme you know best: Catholics and their many afflictions. They probably adore your facile, Pollyanna musings.
1
You conveniently neglect things like the tax cut, the continuing threat to Social Security and Medicare/Medicaid, the overwhelmingly voiced concern for affordable health care; you say you are concerned about people, but your argument advances only ideas, Republican ideas. You frontload your essay with propaganda this time and place the blurred facts at the conclusion and as usual, there's a huge leap from your premise to your conclusion. You are out of touch, Mr. Brooks; all of your op/eds are intellectual exercises in mental gymnastics to spin conservative ideals. You've ceased the intellectual pursuit of issues and devolved into a sophist spin doctor.
1
What the working class is still trying to tell us is that they don't like Blacks, Mexicans, Muslims and women taking their jobs.
4
Overall, good piece – kudos...
Several things...
“...For the last several decades, American economic policy has been pinioned on one goal: expanding G.D.P...
Actually, David – been watching our international trade balance and the labor participation rate, too...Not great stories...
While on this – qtrly GDP growth rate's been completely corrupted, in the short term...Have watched the qtrly #’s get bent, folded, spindled, and mutilated for more than a decade from one qtr to the next – to ensure no two consecutive qtrs of contraction, unless the place is on fire...
Back to your piece...
“...What if people’s ability to produce matters more than how much they can consume...
(incidentally, what’s next for the Progressive punditry – discovering indoor plumbing matters more than how much beer one’s chugged in the past two hours...)
Cass’s point is it – we convert people into systemic societal net-negative entities, and aggregate them the way a large company aggregates its workforce...A company anchors local economic prosperity – the poverty-bloc is exploited to anchor a congressional district, supporting an unending stream of Bernie’s and Beto’s who’re going to solve all of the country’s problems by taking money from Amazon and its workers...
And giving it to other groups and to people who don’t work – for the sheer metastable anarchistic joy of it...
PS
For clarity, all for private-sector unions that ensure a fair-share for workers - while sustaining the enterprise...
"This is still a country in which nearly 20 percent of prime-age American men are not working full time."
Clearly, you had a point to make, and you lazily looked for numbers to support your point. Even if they're not even close. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, in 2016 (the latest year for which they have these numbers), 13.4% of men (not "nearly 20%") don't work full time. These numbers have moved 2 points from the early 90s, and are actually moving down in the last few years. This does not support your hypothesis.
Even more damning to your argument, the 2017 unemployment rates for black men over 25 is 68% higher than it is for their white equivalents (https://www.bls.gov/web/empsit/cpsee_e16.htm). So a significant portion of these underemployed men are of color and are not voting for Trump.
Please use numbers responsibly.
"https://www.bls.gov/opub/ted/2017/percentage-of-employed-women-working-full-time-little-changed-over-past-5-decades.htm"
You are clearly getting your numbers from some convenient
1
I guarantee you David Brooks has never left the beltway and his overpaid speaking engagements to be among the working class.
2
Mr. Brooks, you have at last listened to me. You have become an egalitarian social democrat. As they say in the Netherlands, goed gedaan jongen.
1
Can we please retire the term "working class"? is there anyone here including David Brooks that isn't working, and yet Mr Brooks isn't referring to himself, is he? How about something more factually precise like "middle income" instead? Sloppy terminology promotes sloppy thinking, including bigotry and elitism.
Because nobody knows more about the working class than that emblem of all things blue collar... David Brooks. Get out of here.
1
Mr. Brooks:
Make sure you send a copy of your column today to Ms. Betsy DeVoss. Perhaps she'll digest it if she isn't too busy visiting Charter Schools or whatever it is that occupies her time these days.
1
Brooks using cultural Marxist propaganda tags--"working class"? So exactly who is not in the "working class"--police, military, doctors, wine merchants, bread shop owners et al.?
1
I live just down the road from a place, where the local state representative touts the "Biblical Basis for War" and supports Mussolini-style fascism. He's reliably been re-elected once again. And the people here vote 70-30 for Trump rubber-stamp congressional Republicans. They prefer pills over college, shown by off-the-charts opioid overdoses.
In 1932, the American people--oppressed and economically vanquished--chose Franklin Delano Roosevelt. The rest of the world chose Mussolini and fascists like him. It concluded with the near end of civilization.
And so now the left-behind chose the opposite of FDR. And I'm supposed to worry about buying them off with better jobs they don't want, because they've resigned themselves to hating Guatemalans and Hondurans and demonize the Chinese, while they shop at Walmart? College isn't what those people need. They need to finish high school.
I'm tired of watching holocaust documentaries, and then hearing Trump send rah-rah codes to neo nazis and white supremacists, while the "masses" in the hinterland stand by and say nothing, just like the Germans did with Hitler.
Economics isn't the problem, Brooks. It's how we are going to avoid World War Three. Choosing FDR was genius. This is suicide.
2
"co-ops, drawing on more successful models used in several European nations, could represent workers in negotiations, train and retrain workers ... and build a safety net for periods of unemployment..."
A forward-looking idea. It would help curb executive excesses and increase firms' productivity while adding value to workers' skill set.
When Sears was successful and thriving, a salesman could retire from Sears with the equivalent in today's dollars of about $1 million in Sears stock. Bonuses were generous and pegged to longevity, not salary or job title. Now all of that money goes to shareholders. No wonder people are angry.
Show me how to fix that cultural shift? I'm waiting....
1
I am 72 years old. when I was 21 in 1968 I took a job as an aeronautical engineer at a large company in then rural CT. As part of the job training we where to work for 6 weeks in the manufacturing area to ensure that what we designed could be in fact produced by the aerospace workers. It seemed like a good idea in theory. However it did not take long to realize that the aerospace workers, who had been on strike a number of times, where not especially helpful or willing to communicate with this new class of engineers. I thought in these young years of my life, that these production workers resented us and where very conservative in their approach to life. Yet they strongly supported their unions which help provide them with better wages and other perks that they could not do on their on. It is something that I continued to see during my working life. Conservative workers who depended on a socialist institution as unions. I believe this problem has expanded over the years and has been ignored by Democrats as the country has moved to the right and more nationalistic. There needs to be a realignment in politics if these workers are ever to be brought back into the party of the workers and not just the elite.
@Climatedoc
As far as I remember (I am 68), democratic message has always been pro-working class on economic issues. In other areas they diverged on gun control, abortion and racial issues. Since I don’t see Democratic Party to compromise on those “other” issues, simply because those issues are essential for our future, the only compromise could come from these confused workers many of whom support GOP on false promises of economic stability.
Dear David Brooks,
The working class should not be seen as a monolith but a diverse political and social community within the electorate. The white working class, without a college degree, seems to get the majority of media attention which tends to skew the working class in a way that does not represent all of the working class. African American, Hispanic, Asian, etc. all contribute to the term working class. David, I enjoy your commentary very much but please be clear and specific about who you are referring to.
Thanks, Monica
1
When are all the pundits going to realize that many, many people who voted for Trump in 2016 and in the recent elections are very educated and of the so called "professional classes." These generalizations about which sector of the population is voting for the Republications are way off base. I, in fact, know six highly educated and professional women who while socially liberal cannot stand the economic policies of the left. They may not lfind President Trump's demeanor to their liking but they dislike the priorities and attitude of the left even more.
I love David Brooks and think he is one of the smartest opinion writers around. But, on this one he lost me because he was all over the place. Let me just say this... my grandfather was a moderately successful farmer (meaning he was able to feed his family of 8), got up at 4:00 every morning and worked until he dropped. My dad was a naturally gifted mechanic and made a good living after WWII. I am a successful technology consultant / software engineer. My point is this: Things change rapidly, all the time, at an ever accelerating pace. Nobody will be able to come up with a master plan how to pull unemployed, under-educated folks out of unemployment, especially in rural areas. But what we and the government can do is to provide the best education possible. The GI bill provided millions of soldiers with education and advancement opportunities after WWII. In the 50s, 60s, and 70s the US was the beacon of higher education. The key to long term, sustainable growth and good jobs is an excellent education system. The Chinese, the Indians, folks in Singapore, all realize that. With that, many problems will go away. Without it, no government policy will be sustainable. We can look to other places to get inspiration, but ultimately the US needs to realize what will provide a long term path to good jobs, and that's a better education system.
2
Some would say this sounds like a plea for better meddling. They would urge that the free market decide. But there is no free market. The wilderness ain't coming back. If you don't garden America then monocultures of invasive species will take over. Those are the options: curate it or let it go to weeds. Pristine wilderness isn't on the table.
1
You almost got me, David Brooks. But then I read the excerpt on Amazon from this book you are touting.
He admits that the long held Republican mantra of "trickle down" economics hasn't helped these communities.
But he reiterates the same tired lines that nothing Democrats have pushed for will do any good. He says that unions numbers have dwindled because they want to be small elite clubs. ?! Umm. I am so sure the constant steady pressure for decades to destroy unions had nothing to do with their small numbers today.
He says that our environment must be sacrificed for industry. Actually, the largest industry across much of the heartland has been agriculture. And the policies and deliberate choices we have made in that industry have been the source of massive consolidation of wealth as well as the devastating environmental consequence of industrial agriculture. Remember "Get big or get out."? Well, here is where that has led us.
I suspect this book is "conservatism" trying to recast itself as "compassionate" once again.
I may read it through. But I think I'll wait for it to show up at the public library.
1
How?
Helping the poor consume more? You mean like food to eat? You are completely out of touch. That money is the subsidy we all pay to corporations that exploit and abuse workers. I think you should get a job.
1
It's racism. It's xenophobia.
Gee whiz, David, NOW you want us to treat the working class with compassion and concern? Why now? I mean, we've been conditioned by the media and Hollywood to sneer at them and tsk-tsk at how not-enlightened they are about pretty much everything. Racist, knuckle-dragging, homophobic, ignorant, brutal, yet sometimes hilarious in their stupidity. Probably Klan. Certainly gun-brandishing theocratic fascists. The message was that the only way forward was to crush them as toss them aside, as they were mere speedbumps on the progressive road to a glorious future. Hillary, that genius of inclusive politics, famously gave full voice to this view with her dismissive "deplorables" comment. Pretty much what she, and you, have been thinking all along. Nope, you've got a long row to hoe here. Good luck digging out from under it all.
@George
And you think you are writing satire. I grew up with these people. Your description is accurate.
Mr Brooks seems to think that the working class voters "keep sending a message" asking for labor market reform and better conditions and compensation for their work by .... get this .... voting for Republicans.
Because they are mad at the "college-educated elite?"
So they vote for the party of the uber-wealthy oligarchs???
Almost fell off my chair.
I guess he really thinks they are stupid.
2
"The Republicans who flooded to the polls weren’t college-educated suburbanites."
Really? I know many who are. This constant dismissive that only those with less than college education vote for Trump is one of the reasons you fail to accept a large part of the population who are college educated vote for Trump.
As you want to dismiss people with lesser education as not being worthy it's no wonder your identity politics gets kicked in the rear end.
trump's message was and has been, hate, fear-mongering, racist bigotry and flat out lying. The problem with Red America they need to turn off trump's 24/7 hate, fear-mongering, racist bigotry, propaganda machine!
Hegemony. They’ll vote for taking away their own healthcare, getting slaughtered by guns at country music venues, propagation of Nazi hate-mongering bigotry, evaporation of their own fossil fuel-based jobs while destroying the air and water they breathe and drink, the list goes on and on. And why? Because of some 1950’s blue collar idealism valorized in TV shows that is going to MAGA? No. It’s because they’re the ignorant mass that can be led around by their noses to do the bidding of the aristocrat class. The “Blue Collar” is actually Debord’s Spectacle, enslaving and hypnotizing the mass to bring society backward to some regressed state found in the Dark Ages.
1
Here we go again. David read another book, so now he's an expert preaching to the rest of us. He doesn't even get how insulting his use of phrases like "we in the educated class" are to others.
Based on my own background, demographers would place me in the "educated class," but I certainly wouldn't run around saying or writing "we in the educated class." Talk about pomposity! Geez!
Once again I ask, why is David Brooks still taking up space in the NYT? If you want someone who can actually reach people, you've got the wrong person.
White working class, Mr. Brooks. As if people of color are not also working class people who vote. You -- and the editors at the Times -- should know better. I am white, and angered by the continued promotion of this narrative. It's dehumanizing and shameful.
And, of course, the Times resident fantasist never even mentions race, and the gap between white and non whites, Not even important enough to note in passing.
You can't make this stuff up.
David, let me introduce a guy you should meet, Paul Krugman. What the rural population is telling us is that the rest of us can go to h...!
The fact that 16% of the population elects 50% of the Senate is telling you something that disrupts your tired story. The country isn't in trouble because the working class is under-represented - it's in trouble because the GOP panders to their racism and parochialism and then steps on them. The poor saps never catch on.
Some of what you correctly want (but pretend not to kknow how to get), such as better education, costs money. The GOP is adamantly opposed to educating people equitably with federal funds - let property taxes do the job.
The issues you repeatedly trivialize were dealt with after WWII in Western European social democracies - we should copy them, but the GOP would rather shoot us all.
4
These people are the MINORITY
2
Poor David and his forgotten white racist misogynistic people. They're trying to tell us they're in pain because we not so politely point out their collective flaws. They celebrate their own stupidity, revel in their racism, but over all they are afraid. Their way of life is threatened by the equality of others. I cannot wait until they all die of natural causes so we can get on with the business of making America great again.
1
Nice read. I will leave at at that because I don't expect the typical reader of the NY Times to understand this viewpoint.
Enough! The white working class is telling us that they are racist misogynists blaming everyone but themselves for their situation and gloming on to the petulant playground bully in the WH because he validates every one of their bad instincts.
No more of these pieces please.
2
Read this article, Mr. Brooks. Tribalism called out for what it really is: https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2018/11/racism-not-tribalism/575173/?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=atlantic-daily-newsletter&utm_content=20181108&silverid-ref=MzEwMTkwMTU3NzE2S0
Good luck selling solutions from the developed world to the Nationalist-in-Chief and his lackeys in the Administration and Congress.
1
David, you are a nut.
The reason those "working class" white rural "americans" vote republican is because they have been fed fine-tuned propaganda from their televised pulpits and cheer-leader political pundits.
And surprise, surprise, they repeat the talking points they have been fed for the last 30 years.
But something happens when you get past the meanless drivel the republican establishment has been peddling; when you get to the point of actual coming up with solutions to problems, almost everyone of those "red americans" believe in the Liberal solutions (such as Health Insurance for those with pre-existing conditions).
David, you and your religious extremist friends created this mess; a cult of religious zealots stirred into a mob; don't expect those of us that have been behaving like adults, to feel any obligation to listen to their blind chants of hatred.
Ignorance by choice, is the very defination of stupidity.
1
So long as you use “working class” as a synonym for a subgroup of the population that is monolithically white, you slander the rest of the work force and make it difficult to take anything else you say very seriously.
Thank you David Brooks
When dudes in MAGA hats start beating the "elite" to death with baseball bats, will you finally cop to your irresponsible framing of these issues, Mr. Brooks?
Based on the photo, the ‘working class’ apparently consists of white men. Brooks should write about something he knows something about. And that amounts to nothing.
This is a good piece by Brooks.
Proving his point, queue the "lowlife knuckle draggers have no one to blame but themselves" comments.
Gee, you’d think from the way the media portrays the ‘working class’ that people of color don’t work.
Check yourself, NYT.
You mean the WHITE working class, Mr. Brooks. Frankly, it is pointless to even have this conversation until you deal with your party’s racism.
1
We do not have a one-size-fits-all education system.
The worst David Brooks columns are those like this one in which he has read a book, abstracts a few observations from his reading, and then inaccurately paints the country with them in broad brushstrokes.
Please address the Republican racist dog whistles in your next column. Are you intentionally missing the point?
1
Really sir, what would you know about the working person.
Unemployment figures have been rejiggered every administration, work an hour and your full time and on and on. The killing of unions for the bid’ness Boys because they are close to the evangelical God of Mammon!
The U.S. educational system where the word socialism is a perjorative and yet the banking system is socialism for oligarchs or the old keep your socialist hands off my SOCiAL Security!
Man, this Is grade on common sense!
Must be the water!
1
Blah, blah, blah....frankly I am sick of the working class white people wanting everyone else to help them. In the obit section of the Times today we read about Devah Pager and her amazing dissertation on race and job inequality. Her research showed that a white man with a felony conviction was more likely to be offered a job than a black man with no convictions. If you are a white man in America you don't need help from immigrants, minorities, or women. Put your big boy pants on and get a job or two; also, get an education and stop whining.
2
Let them make their OWN difference by not voting for people who will harm.
Really. Enough of these fools.
1
Who is "we in the educated class"? Don't members of the working class read the NY Times?? Maybe 'our' problem starts here.
David Brooks writing about what the working class wants is laughable. It reminds me of when he smugly recounted that time when his token working class friend felt uncomfortable in a sandwich shop that served such exotic foods as proscuitto and capicola. Give me a break. Brooks is about as far removed from the working class as anyone can possibly get.
NY Times--please find someone who actually has insights worth reading.
Unions for all....."right to work" laws are typical right wing bait and switch....thanks Trump!!!!!!
And we (college-educated sliver of Dems and Progressives) are not for these reforms? Isn't the Working Families Party a subset of us? I am so tired of being made to feel guilty and callous for having (worked very hard since I was 10 years old to pay for) an education, an education that I (and my brothers) have used in public service and non-profit work. I see people as people and don't give a damn about other folks' education and am all for voc ed. But every tradesman I know says that younger folks (mostly white where I live) don't want to go into the trades (many of which, BTW, pay very well). You must be more honest here, DB - you are talking about WHITE working class men (maybe some white working class women). Many of them are angry, bitter Trump supporters who translate their fear and anger into racism, sexism and xenophobia. There's no connection between those immoral values and anti-elite sentiments or the flaws of us "educated elite". And the former are a way bigger problem.
1
Two men in my neighborhood own small businesses and are extremely successful. One is a contractor who specializes in restoration and the other owns a company that cleans up polluted sites. Neither went to college. Both owners are desperate to hire young people who they can train for high-paying jobs in their companies. Both are willing to offer partnership opportunities to good workers. As hard as they look, they cannot find kids who want to work and/or stay off drugs. They have both described hiring people who don't show up after a few days on the job or who want to take a break every half hour. But their biggest problem is finding someone who can pass a drug test. Both of these men talk at length about how drug use is epidemic among young men who don't go to college. I've heard much ancedotal evidence from friends in the Philadelphia area, metropolitan NYC, upstate New York, and New England that there are jobs out there for people who want to work and don't use drugs. But it seems that a lot of people are lazy and high.
2
When black Americans are addicted to crack, they're criminals with mandatry minimum sentences. When white people are addicted to opioids, it's a medical problem. When people of color commit mass killings, it's terrorism. When white people commit masskillings, it's a mental heatlth issue. When black Americans suffer poverty, it's their fault for being lazy and dependent on public welfare. When white Americans suffer poverty ("working class," even though they don't work any more), it's our fault for not attending to their needs for financial security.
I've had enough of these double standards. These people were the core of the Reagan Revolution voters. They made their bed, and let them now lie in it.
1101
@Aditya
That says it all. Thank you.
46
@Aditya Yes, and there is no one in media who more often applies a double standard than David Brooks. The economic policies he complains about in this column are the very policies he supported when the business (Bush) wing of the GOP was running the country. When politicians he favored implemented those policies, he had no problem with them. When Trump implements them, he suddenly discovers how unfair and injurious they are. Does he really think he's fooling anyone?
65
@Aditya
I'm a white 54 year old male and while I agree with your assessment of double standards wholeheartedly, I disagree that doing nothing is some form of sweet revenge. That would only serve to further polarize the races, classes and country. Nothing good comes out of that. These folks can't help themselves, so let's take the high road and try policies that can help them, but apply them and the standards to ALL Americans.
56
For me, Oren Cass hits the nail squarely on the head with the right instrument, the pen, now digital but with words that reflect the world I see.
Yes, white. yes worker, first apprentice ship weaving in a textile mill; then apprentice loom mechanic. Then Korea and so like most I knew, I went to join up. I got a lot of technical education in the military, could have stayed but by then had learned that I could compete with college educated people, so I left the USAF and went to college. Now with several degrees, couple of earned doctorates and good life teaching and consulting, retired.
Of the things that many of my family did, work was always at the core of things. Few probably know that the Agriculture Department had too give out seeds for gardens to entice people into the food stamp programs. People want meaningful work more than handouts. Many I know depend on such programs and vote their interest but none of them would resist giving up the handouts for a good hand up. We need more than one size education for all and Cass has many ideas worth trying. The educated political class has missed the elephant in the room; people want the dignity of self help and independence more than handouts and platitudes.
A stable healthy middle class, especially for non college educated, should be the first order of business for any nation...period. That provides the core of social and economic stability. My dad was part of the post WWII manufacturing golden era when men with only a high school education could get a job that bought a modest house, car, mom could stay at home if she chose, and weekends off. Growing up, it all provided a wonderful life for my sister and I. Now, that scenario, especially its longevity and stability, is much more rare. Globalization, automation, the gig economy, 28 hr./week service workers with no benefits, etc etc. Great care must now be taken to chose a career that can’t/won’t be outsourced or automated. College debt choking new graduates. The bottom line is that developed countries that focus on social stability, tax provided health care and higher ed, etc. have much happier populations. Call it “socialism” but there are lots of happy socialists out there. According to the World Economic Forum, in 2018, Scandinavian countries are “happiest”, with Finland at the top. The US is way down at #18. The UK is #19. Canada is way up at #7. However, in per-capita use of anti-depressants, the US is #1. Yes, America is a great nation, but read the fine print.
3
"We build a broken system and then ask people to try to fit into the system instead of tailoring a system around people’s actual needs."
This is what is called, Bad Design.
How about trying to actually design a system that works?
Stop lecturing us about people who don’t want to learn anything.
4
Enough pandering to these uneducated racists. Members of the so-called working class to which you refer, which YOUR democracy-hating, democracy-fearing, vote-suppressing, racist, gerrymandering-manipulating, fascist Republican Party has done so much to destroy ever since the era of Nixon, have had every opportunity over the past several decades to take action to better their situation in life. It's called voting. Many of them have consistently fallen for the lies and coded, feel-good propaganda of the fascist Republicans (Nixon's "Law and order"; Reagan's "Morning in America"; Trump's "Make America great again") and have voted for hurting their fellow citizens and hurting themselves, but as we keep hearing from devoted supporters of the current corrupt-to-the-core, reckless American Führer, they will stand by their man, his destructive regime, and their party even if its policies and actions profoundly harm them and their families. Why? Because they are all united in their hatred and racism. It's the tie that binds them, along with their fear of losing their white-people privileges and power. There is a civil war playing out in the USA right now between those who believe in and support democracy and those who do not. Anyone who supports Trump and his fascists is NOT on the side of what's left of American democracy.
2
I completely disagree with your thesis. Politics and the government have failed these blue collar workers by permitting companies to take their manufacturing jobs overseas to labor markets that are less expensive to employ workers. Look at Germany, their manufacturing base has been largely intact over roughly 30 years through controls used by their government on German companies. Less corporate greed. Look at the German constraints on real estate inflation, as well. This alone helps working class families survive by being able to afford to buy a modest home without inflated markups in price. Which is vastly different than here in America.
The USA government failed these workers. The Republican politicians (and Democrats too), always beholding to their corporate donors, are the ones who have turned their backs on the American working class decades ago by permitting the exporting of jobs.
The Germans got it right. Corporate greed here won, not the American worker. And now, there is hell to pay. No way back. Just anger.
4
The insufferably pompous Brooks, he of "the educated class" who has never held a real job in his life, has no more basis for bloviating about the "working class" than I do about quantum physics. Good Goddess, NYT, we've read Brooks' drivel long enough. Send him back to Canada. Please!
2
@Miss Anne Thrope
He left Canada before he was four years old. It is highly unlikely he would fit in anymore.
The ultimate achieve for conservatives in the 19th century was of course the Irish Starvation.
25% of the Irish population was culled and the Irish food export economy boomed while one million working class (peasants) starved to death and one million more were sold into the hell holes of the newly industrialized cities of the world. There was no famine in Ireland 1845-1850 there was a shortage of potatoes.
One hundred and twenty years earlier Swift had published
A Modest Proposal For preventing the Children of Poor People From being a Burthen to Their Parents or Country, and For making them Beneficial to the Publick, ...
Publication date: 1729
The potato blight happened all over Europe but the landlords of Ireland realized the opportunity of ridding Ireland of economic dead weight.
I don't see much of a difference.
From the moment Reagan tore the solar panels off the White House a large portion of America became Irish Peasants subsisting on potatoes and with the promise of potatoes forever. America's peasants are too expensive to maintain and the conservatives will continue to feed them till a blight comes along and gives them an excuse to cull the herd.
But of course capitalism gives us lots and lots of potatoes until it gives us none.
2
If you had read Hillary’s election mandate this is exactly the promises she ran on - not welfare but training for new jobs. Instead the voters you are emotionally referring to voted for an idiot. And yet they again turn out in thousands- not because of what you say are the reasons but because they have been beguiled by the most corrupt immoral party of the world - Republicans and their orange boy.
4
I do not think that the blame rests upon the “the college-educated sliver have built a culture, an economy and a political system” so much as the smaller sliver of industry titans that wanted the fruit of business tax laws such as capital gains.
The tax code was changed to reward short term stock price gains and options for company officers (and stock fund managers), rather than the slower payday of stock dividends that had been the order of the day for decades.
Management that made decisions based on long term growth, which included paying, educating and promoting their employees, were forced out. Tightening the short term screws to deliver high Short term gains, for the stock market and executives’ stock sales, has been the game plan for twenty years now.
This six-months-out strategy has hallowed out both our corporations and the workforce.
1
Mr. Brooks, Your GOP had two years of full authority and power to pass labor market reforms that will make life decent for everybody. Instead you gave a $ tax cut to $ donors. You're talking to the hand.
1
Let's also not punish Asian Americans, like we did Jews, for having high IQs. The 80% of 13 year old Asian children, mostly poor and lower middle class, who make up Stuyvesant h/s and Bx Science high school, and 5 years olds in Hunter are not there because of test prep. They are 4 yo and 12 years old when they take these tests for goodness sake. They are there because of high IQ. The silence is deafening when this issue comes up with liberals.
Again someone who did not grow up in and knows nothing about the working class gives a lecture. And again that lecture is a another book review that would earn at best a B- in any sociology course I taught (cherry picking instead of critical evaluation as usual). Brooks if you cannot produce columns with any original ideas why not look for a new job. Oh by the way I am working class and worked my fanny off earned a Ph.D. and had a highly successful career. Most of my many siblings did not earn a college degree but worked hard and even when treated unfairly by major corporations they worked for moved up and stayed in middle class. They did not whine and complain. But whining and complaining is all these white working class Trump voters can do. It is always minorities or immigrants taking their jobs. They whine, whine, whine, whine even after Trump won they still are unhappy and blame the very party that really wants to help them.
3
Wrong again,. David....
They came out because stumpy has empowered negativity as a legitimate reaction to our inevitable flaws...
Anger, hate, and blame don't get the job done, but stumpy's genius is in misleading the minions into believing it will.
Please, don't blame US ! The truly hard-working Americans who are trying to bring change, positive change, to a nation.
Are we idealistic? Of course, we're Americans.
Are we destined to fall short? Of course, it's the nature of Democracy.
But are we allowed to turn destructive?
Absolutely not. It is the anti-thesis of our methods and our means.... and the tool of vile, mendacious, power-sucking oligarchs.
How dare you blame us ? How dare you blame Democracy ?
How dare you, David, again...
2
I am in the working class Mr Brooks describes. That I own a business with my wife that we started 40 years ago doesn't change the underlying facts. I am a tradesman, we are architectural woodworkers, Google it for a revealing over simplification of what it means to do what I and my 13 employees do. I completed one year of college before circumstances put me on the path I have since been on. I agree it would be helpful if we had a better prepared workforce that didn't mind lifting 90 pound sheets of MDF, unloading trucks full of material and carefully loading our under-valued finished product on to trucks, who knew day one which end of a screw driver was the business end. That is not going to happen before the 2020 election and it will never happen as long as rural, uneducated America keeps voting for empty shirts to represent them. Yes, Democrats will make progress by speaking to these issues but my employees and I need better policies and better results NOW. When Richard Nixon launched the "Southern Strategy and Ronald Reagan declared government the problem, the long slide into our current political dystopia began. That's about when we started our business, when health care was personal and affordable, when labor and craftsmanship were honorable, when turning a wrench, running wire, our turning out a fine piece of woodwork paid a living wage. It took forty years to wreck that, it will take a lot longer and cost a fortune to restore it. I'm not holding my breath.
4
I've grown tired and depressed "listening" to and trying to understand Trump Country. They only want to be told lies by a con man that their jobs and F-150s will all be there. God knows us "elites" aren't any picnic, but we still believe in our country and are not ready to burn the barn down. Perhaps it's time they look in the mirror for once and ask themselves, "did we really do the right thing?"
1
I typically dislike Brooks, because a lot of what he espouses is the old hateful 50s garbage of white Christianity and fake family values. However, he almost got something right this time. I say almost because assuming the GOP or Trump will do anything with regards to the issues he presents here is lunacy. It is in fact republicans who have devalued labor, who hate labor, and who hate education of any type, whether a trade education or an academic one. And while many deluded people did vote for Trump for the reason Brooks proposes, the problem is that both the GOP and the DFL really serve the industrial masters and won't do anything about the situation.
So, Brooks can pretend that the Dems are the problem, and they certainly are not helping, but his GOP are the ones who are overtly anti labor, anti education and anti higher wages. The dems on the other hand are weak and can be forced to do what they can be shamed in to. Look how fast they switch on gay marriage. The GOP are unchangeable and the DFL are malleable.
Personally I think it's fine to vote GOP if your a masochist, but if the GOP continues to be a viable political party the weak and amorphous DFL will always tend towards the center in an attempt to appeal to the majority. In which case labor will always get screwed.
1
Again, Brooks turns to Books for his academic advice. All of Brooks's "ideas" are already functioning in the capital markets; there is no need for his socialist-type cooperatives that suck the wages from laborers without providing commensurate benefits. These are old, stale ideas that should stay on the bookshelf.
1
Best Brook's column I've read or seen in months. Yes, Trump is everything people say he is and that's a problem. But he is a result of our symptoms. For decades our culture has evolved and left half our citizens in its wake. I'm a college grad with an advance degree, but back in the 60's when going to college was the optimal "track" and vocational ed became a "bad choice," I bemoaned the minimization of vocational ed in high school and an alternate form education. The everyone for college mantra neglected the idea that vocational ed and a general liberal arts education can go hand-hand when properly applied. I've seen it so at a local vocational ed school. Right-to-Work states made the elimination of labor unions possible. Labor unions assured workers of decent wages. Chasing lower labor costs overseas or interstate produces the same result for businesses who don't give a damn for their employees. Is it time for a change in our educational priorities and a the formulation for an industrial policy?
We used to make things in this country. Globalization has turned out exactly as predicted. A race to the bottom. We have exported our formerly good jobs overseas where they became crappy, unsafe, environmentally unfriendly jobs and imported poor people to do our scut work at poverty wages. This is not a formula for long term, sustainable success. The Germans make things. The Japanese make things and both countries have a middle class. We have an economy based on burgers and software and even the software people often work in a "gig" economy. No security or benefits. Frankly, if I have to pay a buck more for a tee shirt made by an American with a decent job, that's a small price to pay.
2
I can take Brooks or leave him. Sometimes he bangs on a drum but I can't follow the rhythm, like when he says the problem with America is we no longer share a national story. But here, he's onto something. We need to do something to our corporate culture that FORCES companies to share profits with employees, be it through stocks, bonuses, or straight profit sharing, but it will not happen before campaign finance reform.
Disdain for education makes absolutely no sense to me. Realistically, most of us will be gainfully employed for only one third of our lives. How do we fill and fund the other two thirds?
1
I am a retired college professor, and this is one of the few columns by Mr. Brooks that I actually agree with. One exception is the bashing of labor unions, the system that build the middle class, but since I know little of worker co-ops and how they would replace unions, I will just leave it at that.
Clearly (and I speak from experience) not every HS graduate should go to college, and a number who are there do not belong there; they would be better served in a trade school or being an apprentice. Our system needs to recognize that and build a system that takes those folks into account. So (and this is very rare), right on, Mr. Brooks.
1
The truth is that most of the problems with employment are business created. Period. Business sent work to China to maximize profits. Business chooses to automate to save money. Business stifles salaries and cuts benefits to make more money.
Business has one goal - maximize profits. While profit was always the goal of business, and rightly so, it is now paramount. The reason is to satisfy the investor class. Keeping investors happy has become almost as important as having a good product. And growth must be continuous.
People then expect government to fix these problems while the rich investors and business are constant trying to strangle government so they can, you guessed it, maximize profits.
Any attempt to change this situation is met with a blizzard of advertisements telling how great business really is, a gaggle of lobbyists pushing more money at legislators to stymy any change, and bought and paid for legislators who spin, lie, and twist the truth to confuse the electorate and protect their benefactors.
1
After 50 years of systematic assault on labor unions, and the corresponding plunge in labor’s share of the economic pie, we’re now invited to consider labor co-ops. Give me a break, Mr Brooks!
1
Thanks David! All Americans deserve a good life and that means steady jobs which pay enough to finance that good life.
Democrats, and coastal Republicans, look at the population, and the subset of the population that votes in a binary fashion. People are either urban or rural, educated or not educated, racial minorities or white.
Ten percent of the population lives in rural areas. Yet the news reports that the rural-urban divide in the country has deepened. Democrats have convinced them selves that they are 90% of the population, and the 10% minority has taken over.
Dark Democrat money has claimed victory over white, well educated suburban women with false 30 second spots talking about the misogyny of Republicans. But even in NY's Long Island didn't flip any seats, and didn't flip any seats in suburban Memphis, either. They flipped seats in urban California and New Jersey, that they call suburbs but have population density greater than urban areas in non-coastal states.
We are not an urban/rural nation. We are a nation of huge cities surrounded by "suburbs" that are urban, surrounded by "suburbs" that are semi urban, surrounded by "suburbs" that are suburban, surrounded by "suburbs" that are semi rural, surrounded by rural areas. Then we have large cities with similar rings of population, medium sized cities, small cities, all with rings of population density.
Nationwide, as people have higher education, are older, have higher incomes tend to have voter turnout. They tend to vote Republican.
1
@ebmem http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2018/11/08/the-2018-midterm-vote-divisions-by-race-gender-education/ Yes, people that have higher education and incomes tend to have higher voter turnout. Tending to vote Republican? nope.
1
It’s amazing what being without a political party can do for honesty. It’s like deciding not to run for re-election – you are free to say whatever you want. Since his Republican Party was hijacked by the raccoon-eyed bandit, Brooks seems positively born-again. Free at last, free at last! I have sinned, but now I see the light!
I had to read the column twice to see if I was missing something – but the sage of conservatism, preacher of individualism over the collective is now sounding downright (dare I say it?) …socialist. Yes! Button-downed David Brooks is manning the barricade and waving a banner: “PEOPLE OVER PROFIT!”
He says: “For the last several decades, American economic policy has been pinioned on one goal: expanding G.D.P…but what good is that growth if it means that a thick slice of America is discarded for efficiency reasons?” Hello David – this is what progressives have been saying for forever: the real profit that an economy must generate is social profit, not just financial profit. To be precise: economic policy has been focused on stockholder wealth which steals GDP profit for the top of the economic hierarchy. It’s called capitalism.
Brooks talks about “co-ops.” Co-ops are an arrangement where its members are also owners – how socialist can you get?
He talks about “the dignity of work” – Marx would be proud!
“It’s time to pass labor market reforms that will make life decent for everybody.” Wow! Soon Brooks will be singing the “The International”!
2
Here's what most workers AND college-educated employees (except for Brooks and some other GOP elites, apparently) know today: NOT every form of "production" provides "dignity".
Teaching, for instance, is supposed to be a laudable job. The GOP labor law system, however, forces them to take on a second job, thereby destroying any sense of dignity still left.
Working for a big corporation used to provide some "dignity" too. Today, it strongly increases your risk of getting a depression or a burnout. Why? Because CEOs only work for their shareholders, NOT for the good of the company, let alone to allow employees to work in a meaningful way.
And of course, if you can still make ends meet but have a manufacturing job, society sees you as "too stupid" to do something better, so that doesn't provide a lot of "dignity" either.
Conclusion: the GOP idea that working itself provides "dignity" is totally false. Only working in HUMAN conditions increases your sense of dignity. In all other conditions, it slowly kills you and your sense of self-esteem.
What we need is bills that MASSIVELY reduce the influence of the wealthiest and Wall Street on DC and labor conditions, BOTH for blue-collar and white-collar workers.
If not, tensions will only increase, and with them racism, violence, hatred and division.
Trying to make people proud to do unworthy, repetitive jobs worked fine for CEOs, but is no solution for sustainable workers' dignity at all.
Cultivating racism isn't either.
3
Yeah, I always turn to David Brooks when I want to learn more about the working class.
4
"Working-class voters tried to send a message in 2016, and they are still trying to send it. The crucial question is whether America’s leaders will listen and respond."
Well, they are sending it to the wrong people, and they're voting for the very party that wants them to remain impoverished, because they don't want to pay American workers American wages. Why is this so hard to understand?
The Republicans are the party of business, they're in the pockets of corporate America, and corporate America wants to avoid American workers and wages at all costs.
I'll state the obvious: If you want a better life, economically, vote for Democrats, not Republicans.
Stupid is as stupid does America.
2
Why do you not include working class Black and Latino men and women in your assessment? Many of whom came out in droves for Democrats. Your argument is a race-based one. White men came out for carnage-stye Republicanism, not ALL working class men, not ALL working class women. In fact many working class groups overwhelmingly rejected it. I, and so many women I know, are just so exhausted with white working class men being excused for their racism and sexism because of their poor economic outlook, while Black and Latino working class men and women, who have a much worse economic picture, are held to a different standard, or ignored all together. You don't have to race bait, and you don't have to cheers over beers when a supreme court justice that appalled many, many women in this country gets confirmed. You don't have to become an apologist for the rise of hate crimes and the far right that fuels them. We simply don't have to keep looking for excuses for that behavior, no matter the reasons. Yes, let's focus on working class men and women - ALL of them. They are being left behind. But stop apologizing for what is simply inexcusable behavior. And stop erasing Black and Latino working men and women of color from this conversation. While you are at it, stop erasing college educated women as well. We make far less than our male counterparts and we have been disgustingly harassed for daring to educate ourselves since Trump emerged.
3
What 'working class'...… Millions and millions of hard-working Americans are working hard, and they love America, and they loathe stumpy.... Are they not 'working class'?
I suspect David doesn't consider them 'working class
Does one have to be an ignorant, whining malcontent to qualify?
I absolutely reject that misdirection.... absolutely.
I am working class.... and I will work hard to protect my country from the likes of stumpy, the haters, and the easily misled.
3
"Working-class voters tried to send a message in 2016, and they are still trying to send it."
So what we have here is a failure to communicate? It's too bad that there isn't some kind of union of the working class that would help them to communicate as well as the corporate lobbyists do. But we couldn't allow that, could we? It sounds like collective bargaining straight out of Socialism. And all the corporate interests tell me that Socialism is bad.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
1
So why does this sub section of republicans vote for tax cuts for the wealthy and less regulations so corporations can do more without their labor, or support anti union policy. Are they stupid, ill informed? Do they really believe the job creators will do anything but take their money and move on. You decry government giving them money, but capitalism obviously is not providing for them. So what is the solution David? Government bad, Capitalism bad, blow up the world and vote for Trump?
2
Brooks has been wrong so often and so substantially that his opinion is no longer something to take seriously.
2
Brooks is missing the key ingredient that motivates education and upward mobility. It is hope and optimism for one's ability and future. It is instilled at a very early age via ones parents and schools. Single parent homes that are struggling to make ends meet are a huge deterrent to the development of hope and self worth in children.
We need to put more income in low income households with children and we need to put more money in schools so they can help build the confidence young people need to go forward.
3
As someone who works for a living, who lives on a rural farm, and who reads the New York Times, I am disgusted that Mr. Brooks draws a distinction between "the Working Class" and "Us (New York Times readers)".
3
I'm white. I was raised working class in a rural environment. My family would not dream of voting for a man like Trump, because they are intelligent and decent people. Plenty of people struggle financially without losing their humanity.
There's no question that this country can and should do much better in terms of providing opportunity, but what the people who voted for Trump are trying to tell us is that they like Trump. They're okay with attacks on the free press. They're fine with misogyny and racism. Those creepy rallies are exciting to them.
1005
@A. Mark
I think Trump is totally unqualified to be President, but I do not think that, *as a group*, the people who voted for him did so because they like him. I don't think the GOP members of the Senate like him, but he is giving them what the Democrats did not. Dave Brooks is speaking to us Democrats and those Republicans who care about our country, and I hope that in January, those leading the House consider his points carefully. Our country can advance, and actually *finally* become great, only if ALL the people advance socially, economically and politically.
22
@A. Mark You are white. you were raised working class, AND you read the New York Times, a newspaper which I find quite frustrating.
You repeat "Trump is a misogynist" as if it is a mantra which requires no proof. But Trump is far from being a misogynist, even his first, divorced wife Ivana likes him, as does his daughter Ivanka. Our ambassador to the UN is a woman, daughter of immigrants and not white.
Your reality does not come from looking at facts. It comes from what the New York Times tells you. They sing the song and you sing the refrain.
Oh well...
7
@Eric Holzman But what exactly is he giving them? The giant tax cut benefitted the wealthy and corporations. It's now resulting in a massive deficit, which will require cuts to SS, Medicare and Medicaid. The trade war seems to be doing more damage than helping. Sure, he's relaxed some regulations but will that really make a difference in peoples' lives? Will it really raise wages? We've already seen what sitting on mountains of cash has resulted in. What exactly do you want? My guess is that what people _hear_ sounds good and seems to be enough, that is until they look around and wonder why they don't have more savings, a better retirement fund, they're not happier, etc. But hey, as long as the rhetoric sounds good and gets you fired up.
26
Respectfully, in this article you have ventured outside of your realm of expertise, the economics of labor markets, and consequently the piece appears pedantic and shallow. To wit:
(1) Erosion of the bargaining power of white working class: you and the conservative Oren Cass ignore the one tone guerilla in the room: the erosion of the bargaining power of workers, especially the White working class, thanks to the Republican assault on unions of all types and stripes, and the ascendance of ‘arbitration’ in property rights disputes which provides overwhelming advantage to the have vis-à-vis the have nots in property, wage and income disputes;
(2) Income inequality and the structural class-based oppression of the white working class: you and Mr. Cass ignore the fact that there is direct correlation between declining white working class labor participation rate, meager wage growth, declining ‘public goods provision’ for this social class, and the meteoric rise of wealth and income inequality, thanks in large measure to Republican/Trump tax cuts.
(3) You and Mr. Cass falsely argue that both Republicans and Democrats emphasize ‘consumption’, and that rather it should focus on growth in production. This too is false: workers’ productivity has consistently gone up in the last quarter century while wages are flat. Democrats have consistently supported spending to upgrade White working class' skills, while. Republicans use race to divert their attention.
5
Even when Mr. Brooks has something worth saying he manages to present it through a partisan lens. He does this in the first paragraph. Although there was a large Republican turn out, many of them voted Democratic for the first time in their lives. Because of the egregious gerrymandering and voter suppression efforts on the part of the GOP, the turn out for Democrats had to be much larger than that of Republicans for the house to flip. In FL and GA we are seeing in real time the dirty politics of GOP voter suppression and vote rigging play out. The screams of Rubio, and Scott would be comical if the they weren't so dangerous in their intent.
Much of what Mr. Brooks is praising about Cass's book sound very much part of the Democratic platform, in fact very much the direction the country was headed in before Trump. It is ironic that he is praising the idea of letting students starting in high school decide if they want and academic or apprenticeship track. That idea was actually promoted repeatedly by Barack Obama. One thing he is silent about is the cost and quality of education in this country. Maybe his college-educated sliver has built a culture, an economy and a political system all about themselves, but he should beware of generalizing that selfishness to the rest of us.
2
"We in the college-educated sliver have built a culture, an economy and a political system that are all about ourselves."
I'm sorry Mr. Brooks, but Obama, Hillary, Biden, I myself and SO many other college-educated Democrats clearly do NOT belong to that kind of culture, economy and political system ... !
Obamacare, the Recovery Act, the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau, student loan reform, higher wages, the saving of the US automobile industry and bringing back of manufacturing jobs to a pre-recession level, investing in re-training workers whose jobs got robotized, tax cuts for small businesses (the most important job creators in this country) ... all these things strongly helped blue-collar workers, AND where time and again rejected by YOUR party and your party alone.
THAT is probably why in 2016 only one fifth of America's workers voted for Donald Trump in the first place.
When will YOU start listening, rather than calling "brilliant" a book that apparently imagines that if you refuse to cut unemployment benefits after six months of unemployment during a Great Recession, you're promoting "consumption rather than production", whereas without those benefits those people can't even put food on the table... ?
The only thing that explains high GOP voter base turnout is the MASSIVE amount of fake news and racism that the GOP and its pundits have thrown at it - combined, of course, with bills that systematically reduce the income of blue-collar workers and increase anger
4
I see lots of those under-prepared and unemployed adults in my classrooms every semester. They are often suspicious of higher education, tend toward an entitlement "give me my grade" mindset, and many don't appear to value hard mental work. They tend to give up when assignments challenge them, and then they sometimes try to blame their professors for their personal academic failures. Some of the adult students in my online classes seem to expect a reward/grade for little to no effort on their part, and some of them present an oppositional, disrespectful attitude toward authority figures such as administrators and professors.
This is the reality of TN's college for all, our attempt to provide our own workers with essential skill sets to improve their employment and salary prospects. 2-year college in TN is virtually free, yet people still don't want to make the necessary effort to avail themselves of the opportunity for self-improvement. We can't drag them to school and force them to learn, nor can we make them appreciate the opportunity.
Some people don't WANT to improve their lots in life, some people just like to whine and moan for the sake of hearing their own woes. It's frustrating to be asked to understand these types of people because they don't really want to be understood. They just want to bring attention to the self-pity party.
Beanie
5
Thank you David Brooks. You seem to be the only columnist who truly thinks and presents ideas on how to change the country for better. I hope politicians read your column!
“ … nearly 20 percent of prime-age American men are not working full time.”
They are not earning enough to keep their families together. Mothers are not marrying the fathers of their children, seeing the father as just one more mouth to feed. Many of the unmarried couples who start out living together are separating within 5 years of having a child. Many working class married couples who are having trouble paying the bills are getting divorced. Their children are growing up in low-income, single parent families.
Many such families lack the time, money, and energy to make social bonds where they live. Some areas have such high percentages of these households that they lack the sense of being communities.
Americans who are not earning enough to keep their families and communities together do not want undocumented migrants to compete with them for jobs, affordable housing, and medical care. They are angry that undocumented immigrant children crowd their children’s schools and require a disproportionate share of resources.
American citizens who cannot earn enough to hold their families or communities together think our country should be helping them rather than aiding an ever-increasing number of illegal migrants.
3
The power structure in the United States has absolutely no interest in "making life decent for everybody." This is once again a winner-take-all country and that is certainly what's been happening for the past 40 years. Greed is the national religion. As for what the working class is telling us, it appears to be that two plus two equals five. They voted for a billionaire charlatan who views them as easily duped, and a political party which works only for corporations and the richest of the rich. And they believe that their problems are caused by people who are poorer and more powerless than themselves.
3
"What the Working Class Is Still Trying to Tell Us"
- Stop the unsustainably increasing of astronomical wealth for the very few by disabling the rest of us in order to do so. Who gave the few the right to extract astronomically more than their fair share from society?
This working stiff demands that my former boss pay me the $80,000+ in earnings he stole, and fired me after 22 years of profitable service in order to get away with it.
3
Thank you, thank you for this column. Please send it, along with a copy of Mr. Cass' book, to every democrat in congress and every member of the Democratic Dational Committee.
2
I had some problems with this piece. Mr. Brooks writes that the poor are given money - through various government assistance programs - so that they can consume more. In the 1960s and 1970s, I was raised poor in Queens, NY and my family was "on welfare". The money we received through the Aid to Families With Dependent Children program was used to pay our rent and keep us clothed. That statement is quite insulting and shows a lack of knowledge about the poor in this country. Mr. Brooks also writes that the "labor union model" is old and adversarial and suggests that it is outdated. Are you in a union Mr. Brooks? If so, you're lucky. If not, you've probably done pretty well for yourself without one - nice work if you can get it. Adversarial? Sure they are. They had to be and have to be. Far from perfect, labor unions have advanced the state of working people in this country considerably. You're a smart guy - I've read your column for a long time. But maybe you should spend some time hanging out with poor and working class people.
2
The issue that i have with this column, David, is that you and your GOP party that you have been all about for years, are the ones that have ignored and disenfranchised these people. The GOP was all about off-shoring and made it very tax friendly, like zero taxes owed to do that. Result? Massive job less. Give me a break.
2
Just the title of this feels patronizing, and implies a sort of arrogance. Are "we" going to swoop in and "make a difference" in the lives of these unfortunate people who are somehow uniquely unable to make a difference in their own lives? Does Brooks see working class Americans as passive children waiting for help?
2
Co-ops? Worker training? Care about the poor and less privileged? Not obsessing with GDP and actually care about the dignity of the people by ensuring they have access to meaningful jobs?
OMG David, all of this reeks of socialism! Are you sure you are a conservative thinker?
All kidding aside, your points are well taken, and my joke is meant to illustrate the problem we are having. We have been so much focused on how the government is the problem and never the solution that we never thought creatively about the problems we are having. As an affluent suburbanite coming from a blue collar background, I totally get why many people are angry. Of course, their cure - Trumpism - is bound to make their plight worse, but I can understand their feeling that elites did not pay attention to their need in a long time.
But if we could actually set tags aside and work on something like what you proposed, things would not be all resolved overnight, but we would start walking in the right direction. Unfortunately, I am not expecting this anytime soon. It is much more likely that the White House and the Senate will block anything along these lines, while any attempts by individual House members will be lost in the partisan cacophony that is likely to ensue.
The only hope is for a few states to show the way and save us from broken Washington.
Absolutely, David. Our system of education, from at least the 10th grade on, is ridiculous when it comes to actually helping MOST of our people to adequately prepare for the future. Their future. Is it any wonder, as our society continues to leave these folks behind, that they behave politically in a supportive fashion of some of our worse social behaviors and the promotion of leaders who are prepared to take advantage of their often hopeless circumstances, for personal gain. We have brought, and continue to bring, the fruits of this madness into our society. Into ALL of our lives. I just do not understand why decent people, of all parties, which I truly believe are the vast majority, don’t understand this. Failure to address this, IS, a slippery slope to Fascism, and away from Democracy. We are truly foolish if we don’t believe that it can happen here. Perhaps, that is what it will take for the apparent Silent Majority, to realize their folly. I pray, that if that’s the case, we will still have time to act. There is so much good in Our People. But, everyday, something else encourages us to become more and more marginalized, away from caring for each other, and falling further and further into a Bunker mentality that allows the shallow opportunists among us to do their worst. Fear, is a tremendous motivator, and given enough exposure to even the ‘possibility’ of fearful events, real or not, ALL of Us can fall victim to defensive reactions & behaviors to it.
1
Credit where credit is due: this is Mr. Brooks best piece since he endorsed gay marriage oh so many years ago.
As background to this, I would suggest:
The fact is the GOP never cared about the bottom half of the country. The Clinton-era Dems then turned themselves into Rockefeller Republicans as Gingrich and Co. pulled the GOP into the Upside Down. Non-college, Non-cosmo whites were barraged with red-baiting, race-baiting, gay-baiting, bible-thumping, gun-toting--you name it--type appeals, in order to con them into thinking the GOP was also on the side economically.
Meanwhile, the Dems kept pointing at GDP and jobs numbers, without thinking about the actual quality of any of those jobs, or the types of lives they led to. The people on Wall Street told them they were smart and good and sent them campaign donations, and that was good enough for them.
This would have been a bad dynamic without 9/11, the Iraq War, and/or the Great Recession. Throw in all three on top--well, here we are with Trump.
1
Great article -- as far as it goes. Co-ops! Vocational training as a viable choice! It appears Mr. Brooks has become a Republican Socialist.
Unfortunately what he does not see is that we in America have this ridiculous bias against jobs created by society itself as a whole, rather than by the market. If some necessary work can't be done for profit we believe, in all sincerity, that we cannot do it at all.
This is nonsense. There is plenty of work that needs to be done -- locally, and by real people rather than totally by machines:
- Infrastructure repair -- and then ongoing maintenance.
- Educating people young and old to to deal with the new forms of communication that, it turns out, are ever more susceptible to malicious distortions by bad actors domestic and foreign.
- Environmental restoration.
- Public transit, both urban and rural.
- One-on-one support of people with mental and emotional abilities that differ from the norm.
- Care for the injured, sick and old.
The list goes on and on. But these things cannot be done for a profit. We must do them as a society. And sorry, that means higher taxes.
The first step is to find out, honestly and scientifically, how much money is actually available for taxation. The second step is to have the political will to tax people who have lots of power and will resist taxation like crazy.
1
Sure there is a need for training for new jobs. I live in Florida when I look around who do I see doing construction, gardening, and farming? I see Latinos. I do not see white or black Americans.
When I read about the education of college entrants I see massive failures by the nations inner city public schools to graduate Black and Latinos Americans to be able to start college with college level courses, instead the colleges must provide remedial help to large numbers of these Americans.
When read about machine tool companies that need to educate applicants in math in order to go thru their apprentice programs I wonder what has happened to our schools and what has happened to our young generations who do not value an education.
What I hear however is a growing cry by the progressive left for everyone to receive a guaranteed income provided by the Federal Gov't. This is all so wrong
2
If you really cared about these people, the GOP wouldn't have spent the last 50 years obliterating unions.
2
A quote from the famous astronomer and popularizer of science Carl Sagan: "One of the saddest lessons of history is this: If we've been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle. ... It's simply too painful to acknowledge, even to ourselves, that we've been taken. Once you give a charlatan power over you, you almost never get it back. " At least a portion of the November 6 results can be explained by the truth of this observation.
2
What the working class is trying to tell us is that they are victims of massive right wing propaganda. There is no other way to explain their acceptance of Trump's thousands and thousands of lies and consider him to be on "their side". There is no other way to explain the working class acceptance of massive tax cuts for the wealthy at the expense of Medicare and Social Security. There is no other way to explain their rejection of unions and public services that are in their best interests.
The Fox/Breitbart Big Lie Broadcasting, owned and operated by the Murdochs and Mercers on behalf of the super-rich, feeds the anxieties and fears of the working class and they are telling us that they believe these lies first and foremost. Sad.
1
It is perhaps one of the most stunning displays of hubris for one of the man who has been among most vocal of the intelligentisa in supporting the party dedicated to destroying all support for the working class, to venture forth any opinion without even the slightest hint of contrition.
1
I swear if I have to read another article sympathizing with the “white working class” - who as far as I can tell spend most of their time blaming others for the fact that they can’t compete in the 21st century and whining about how they are somehow disadvantaged by “political correctness” - I’m gonna lose it.
It’s not about economics. It’s about entitlement (theirs), and racism (theirs). Now is their chance to find out if republican policies really will help. Best of luck to them.
2
Almost 30 years ago, I sat with my dad on our porch in Queens NY. There was one man on a telephone pole and another man laying fiber optic cable into our street. My dad pointed at the man on the pole and said he will be out of a job soon. He was right. There were no more telephone poles on our street.
Blue collar workers need to evolve their skills just as white collar workers have too. I had to reinvent myself three times. There are jobs that aren't coming back or the payscale decreases.
I am tired of hearing the woe is me story of people that continue to vote against their interests, obtain new skills, and evolve.
1
With the addition of the privileged Georgetown Prep boys Gorsuch and Kavanaugh to our already "corporations are people" Supreme Court, I'm sure they will find ways to make life better for working class Americans. I keep saying to my friends in the 1%...don't forget that almost every working and middle class American can still afford a pitchfork (made in China.)
2
Downtown Vancouver has an ugly correlation for workers. In many areas, the hourly cost to park a car exceeds BC’s minimum hourly wage.
This outrageous cost to park could be generalized to many of big North American cities. And maybe this could be the straw that breaks big city’s hold on a potentially mobile workforce. Surely that should incentivize businesses to shift to those lovely small towns. Just across the border, Bellingham, Mount Vernon in the state of Washington come to mind as destination locations.
Coupled with long, expensive commutes from perimeter towns with more affordable housing than downtown , corporate movement back to those towns, where street parking is free, , not $16.00, an hour, would make sense.
1
Republicans are doing everything possible to keep the "working class" uneducated, unhealthy and unsatisfied while creating bogeymen to distract them from the truth.
It's really hard to reach out and build bridges when the people on the other side are clutching automatic weapons and threatening to shoot you.
3
Very interesting editorial. I seem to recall a politician by the name of Barack Obama spending an awful lot of time talking about vocational schools and technical tracks within high schools, but no one else on Capitol Hill cared to take up that agenda (nor did I see many editorials by prominent pundits encouraging Republicans in Congress to get together with President Obama on that).
Also, enabling the poor to produce more rather than just helping them consume sounds like a great idea (and one that I remember Obama talking about), but it seems terribly free of specifics, at least in this piece. Maybe Cass goes deeper into how to make that happen, but it doesn’t seem like Mr. Brooks has any idea.
Finally, I think you’re being terribly naive by assuming those who voted for Republican Senate candidates are voting purely on their economic/employment situation. Plenty of exit polls showed Senators Donnelly, Heitkamp, and McCaskill were hurt by their votes against Brett Kavanaugh, which I find utterly disgraceful (there’s a backlash against women not wanting to be sexually assaulted? REALLY????). But beyond that, it’s also naive to think they are responding to Trump’s rhetoric on immigration purely out of concern for their wallets and jobs. It is undeniable that the results of this midterm were driven in part by xenophobia stoked by Trump’s and the GOP’s fear-mongering.
2
I disagree with the premise. Here in my suburban Texas neighborhood, many college educated white women voted for Cruz and are proudly Republican. In my neighborhood this has nothing to do with being working class or forgotten. It has everything to do with being a Fox News rube.
4
I think plenty of well-off suburbanites voted for Republican candidates.
2
So they vote for the policy measures that Democrats champion...expanded medicaid, living wage, yet they continue to respond to the rhetoric of divisiveness, victimization, and xenophobia. Just as they have always done, the white undereducated vote against their own self interest by supporting Republican candidates. The white working class is not trying to tell us anything...they are without logic and reason, they are simply reactionaries.
2
I have always been 'working class'. I like working with my hands and body but also with my mind. Working folks are some of the smartest people I know. Many know better than most how things work, machines, tools, buildings, the environment, Some educated idiots know nothing beyond their little niche in the corporate machine and are ignorant of the physical world all around them. Factory type jobs can be mind numbing too but also the pay may be good, at least it used to be.
Just because some of us don't want a job at a desk shuffling paper and going to meetings all day does not mean we don't keep on learning and thinking in our work.
I guess I just hate to see people put into classes and not seen as individuals.
I don't intend to be judgmental and if I come off that way I apologize.
2
Maybe folks don't want to do heavy labor and sweat, they just want high paying jobs, sitting in a chair, working a few hours per day, eating a lot and getting fat?
1
A Republican who is anti union is going to tell us how to help the "working class." Someone has to remind rich columnists they are one layoff away from joining the "working class." Brooks is reading the wrong book. He should read Ben Fountain's, Beautiful Country Burn Again: "The bravest, boldest, most bracing political book of the year" Bill Moyers.
When 20 people have more money than half the population combined you don't have a democracy, you have an oligarchy. For the country to survive and thrive, the American Dream has to be the lived reality of everyone , not just a few.
Not just a pretty fairytale we tell ourselves.
If you don't have any idea of the contribution unions made to the "working class" you should pick up a good book on the subject. You'll discover it was unions who turned the working class into the middle class. It was Republicans who turned it back again.
David, who except for the top 1% are not working class?
3
Yes Yes Yes. But I hope you will be able to keep your job. The powers that be hate also and you are putting yourself in there cross hairs.
If you are going to continue looking for big picture justice, please consider these assursions: coverage is not care; when reason fails, force is reasonable; Plato said shadow casters are shadow casters, not Beatific Broadcasters...
Thanks and keep up the good work!
Pretty sure Latinx, African American, Asian American, LGBTQ, people who have kids needing chemo, and suburban women WORKING CLASS voters were trying to tell us something Tuesday as well. Let's see, whom did I miss? Oh, yeah, the people in the photo at the top of David's article.
1
All of these are solutions that democrats have been advocating for years, but that Brooks and his republican "team" have routinely shot down. If Trump voters were acting rationally, they would clearly vote democratic. But they vote emotionally, buying into Trump's blame game and demonizing of minorities allegedly causing their pain. And, like Brooks, they swallow the Trump/republican demonizing of intelligence "elites"--the folks who have actually been trying to help!
2
Please don't say "the working class" when you are talking about the _white_ working class. The white working class is an important part of the American nation. But "the working class" also includes people of color, who voted Democratic in the recent election.
1
"Working-class voters tried to send a message in 2016, and they are still trying to send it. The crucial question is whether America’s leaders will listen and respond."
Yes, David. And your party has consistently opposed the American working class.
The Republican Party is anti-union, has done everything to enforce "right-to-work" laws, and has successfully turned much of the working class against its own will to organize.
It's not a matter of America’s leaders listening and responding. The working class cannot trust leaders subservient to a government run by big business.
Workers knew this when they began to form unions in the late nineteenth century, and they realized it even more in the 1930s, when bloody battles were fought between working people and the thugs, scabs, and cops mobilized by the capitalists.
Want to actually do something for American working people, David? Stop advocating for them to support politicians who are their class enemy. Get out of the Republican Party and start agitating for workers to form unions and to fight and strike for their rights.
All the rest is hypocrisy.
Remember when conservatives like Brooks used to say that even mentioning the working class was promoting “class warfare”, that concern for their material well-being was “materialistic,” and that government programs to reduce poverty were “morally hazardous” at best and vicious “socialism” at worst?
Oh yeah. Brooks and the others are still doing that!
You want to help people out of poverty? Don’t listen to David Brooks. Vote Democrat.
Interesting ideas, but I do not see where Trump voters are interested in ideas, or incremental change. To vote for and cling to a President so clearly criminal and uncaring is about wishing to turn back the clock, about protesting until we all feel anger, pain and violence. It’s a kind of indifference in place of community.
Most US manufacturing is now being done by robots. My first job out of college in '73 was in converting newspapers from labor-intensive 'hot type' to the direct-entry of text by reporters into computers which output far less costly 'cold type'. 1000's of Union workers lost their jobs because of that. The trend continues. Unfortunately, it is those of us who must be retrained, or who were always less skilled, who paid, and will pay the price of technological manufacturing. That we now have lots of low paying jobs is not because of the Mexicans, Chinese, Blacks, Jews or Democrats. As long as we fall for the lies and myths told by Trump & the Race Baiters we won't awaken to the truth, that the only way for an economy that relies on far less labor to still flourish, is for progressive policies to prevail. (People need to have money to spend.) Those "dumb-smart" college folk are NOT the enemy, they are FOR you. Autocratic reactionists such as Trump, McConnell, Hannity etc. think that you are gullible and won't catch on in time to preserve democracy. To them success is a zero sum game to be won by alpha males, that even more wealth should be channelled to the rich and powerful. It's time to get WOKE.
2
I think it’s time we stopped conflating red staters with tRump. They were voting stupid long before he came along. Whatever the Republican gain was this election, it only means that red staters’ index fingers don’t work next to Democratic candidates’ names. They’re ignorant and nothing is going to change that.
But the educated know what they should actually be worried about. Robotics and AI is coming to get everyone — including I believe democracy itself. A hundred years from now whatever the red state voters are bellyaching about will be left in the technological dust. Along with them.
1
David, please link to your sources. I’d like to know why you concluded turnout was up among high school educated Republicans. The NYT turnout story doesn’t mention this. It says turn out was up in counties with a high proportion college educated.
This is good David - more of this
Less of your defense of Nationalism as if to ignore the real meaning of the word in today’s definition vs your fantasy definition
Too bad the GOP and Dems have nothing of this reform in their purview
Instead everyone is focused on a dumb culture war where two sides are battling with irrelevant consequences to their economic outcomes.
Rural America unfortunately needs to depopulate down to the bare minimum to support an industrial agriculture, oil and gas, mining, or industrial base that will not grow over time.
The GOP thinks making stuff is the way out, which is not where the future rents are in the economy. If we want to look like rural China where the state has to support factories through price cycles or suffer massive unemployment, that’s the future. Tariffs are our handouts to that policy that us in the city are paying for to support a doomed policy.
The Dems have no coherent economic plan - if they did, they’d be the heroes in this stupid partisan battle because, we’ll we are in the 21st century and GOP thinks it’s 1950.
Too bad, we are doomed - there is nothing on the horizon that will help blue collar in rural communities. Blue collar in the cities, can still work in non-tradable fields and extract wealth from time-starved rich knowledge workers. That’s what immigrants have been doing and crowded out lazy second generation Americans - only takes one generation of Americanization to lose all motivation
1
"We build a broken system and then ask people to try to fit into the system instead of tailoring a system around people’s actual needs."
That sounds pretty communist to me. Where is the David Brooks we used to know?
Brooks' 'we' is a small sliver indeed. Even college graduates struggle, and do so under the weight of college loans. Most of the policies Mr Brooks supported have led here. He does get it right that the working class has had their livelihoods stripped away over the last 30 years, and they've largely given up on American institutions. Can't say I blame them.
I hear the same refrain from a lot of liberals, among whose member I used to count myself, that the working class is just racist and we shouldn't bother. Liberals, you better find a way, because when it comes down to it, liberals won't be winning any 2nd Civil War, in fact you'll be made short work of in relatively short time.
You can't eliminate 'racism' just like you can't eliminate narcissism or avarice. However people tend to get along better when they have some money in their pockets, and they don't wake up in the middle of the night worried about the future.
It often seems all liberals care about is their Stalinist lists, with the names of all the racists, misogynists, islamophobes, transphones, etc.,etc., and all the applause lines and pats on the back you get for saying the right thing. They think calling someone a 'racist' ends the conversation, I guess they also thing the person they're pointing their finger at will simply disappear and cease being an issue.
Way to go, David, ignoring the elephant watching TV on the living room couch.
If this were really about economics, •non-white• rural and working-class voters would back Trump. And Trump would be whipping up his crowds with stories about the million violent Canadian and European visa overstayers stealing their jobs and votes.
I do not see those things happening. What I do see is white nationalism becoming open and mainstream in Trump's America.
.
3
OMG David! Still with this argument. What directly affects the earnings of an individual more than any other single factor. Education. Would you care to guess the states where education spending is the lowest? You don't have to, here they are from the bottom up: Utah ($6953), Idaho ($7157), Arizona (7,613), Oklahoma ($8097), Mississippi ($8,702), North Carolina ($8792), Tennessee ($8,810), Florida ($8920), Nevada, Texas, South Dakota, Alabama ...etc. (source: http://www.governing.com/gov-data/education-data/state-education-spending-per-pupil-data.html)
What do these states have in common? Yes, that's right, virtually all have (or had) TWO Republican Senators. Guess which states are at the top: NY, CT, NJ, VT...etc.
Republicans don't believe in education. Period. And certainly not higher ed. And we're supposed to be surprised that these uneducated or minimally educated people (your "working class") continue to support Trump and the Republicans? Perhaps if they were better educated, they'd pull the wool from their eyes and see how their Republican representatives use cultural wedge issues to keep them from moving up in society.
3
We get it Mr. Brooks, what the incurious Trump Base is complaining about-loss of jobs, salaries, and whatever else Trump has led them to believe, what in most instances are lies, exagerrations or spins. Afterall, these things trump goes on and on about have been fact-checked by objective news sources.
And boy has he figured it out his best opportunity to get his messaging out is at those White House lawn gaggles where the press yells out questions, a format Trump loves because he doesn't allow anyone a followup to question his lies and exaggeration.
What i don't get is why the Press is affording Trump this opportunity to make them look so foolish?
1
"Working class Republicans" are not "the working class," David. Sorry 'bout that. You're confused. You should work on it some.
The people who voted for Trump are the same people who voted for Taft, and Nixon, and Reagan, and the Bushes: your own booboisie.
The soupcon at the margin are a couple of percent that poor little Trump has motivated with his hatred, and envy, and permission to be ill-mannered. In a field of 18 Republicans, many of them halfwits, some of them religious cranks, and one of them a Bush, the couple of percent Trump added to the party was enough to get him the nomination. Add a skewed Electorral College, and that was enough to get him the Presidency even though he lost the election.
Long story short, David: nothing you write is true.
1
And these disaffected workers continue to vote for Republican leaders who focus on the needs of corporations and the ultra-wealthy. I'm sick of being lectured on what working class voters were "trying to tell us" when they elected a racist, misogynist buffoon. They distrust government because the politicians they vote for are fundamentally disingenuous. And they loathe someone like Elizabeth Warren who is actually fighting on their behalf. They need to stop listening to Fox news and Rush Limbaugh and start voting for politicians who actually represent their best interest.
2
Let me get this, so the same voters that conservatives told us are mad at democrats and accusing the non whites and immigrants of laziness because they tap into social services are themselves lazy enough to not want to study and expect the government to help them with good jobs??
The forty-year vicious cycle continues. The unhappier working-class white people grow, the more they vote Republican. The more Republicans they elect, the unhappier they grow. Maybe the solution is not as complicated as it seems.
1
@Charles L.
As they say, the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result.
They're trying to say, where's my handout or pay raise?
And stop the immigration train already, both illegal AND legal.
Those voters (the only ones commentators seem to care about) told us that they care more about Trump's racist claims of scary brown people entering the country than they do about their own self interests.
David, you start with all the things white high-school-educated voters weren't--tax cutters, small government,... What they are is racist. That's why Republicans focused on immigration instead of economics.
That the white working class wants all these things makes perfect sense. That they believe Republicans will deliver them is totally dilusional.
3
Bosh. Brooks has little or nothing useful or even interesting to day on topics he knows something about (eg wf Buckley and the right wing). And he certainly has nothing illuminating to say about the working class, with whom he has little contact and less comprehension, except to find a way to ignore white racism.
"...we in the educated class..."
Hilarious. So now, David, you bear the cross of speaking for the educated class. Rather the mis-educated class as this article, perhaps more than any you have ever written, so clearly demonstrates. It also illustrates what gave us Donald Trump in the first place. The mis-educated class, those who rule both major parties in this country, would far prefer to have an economy based on handouts, charity, welfare and disability payments. For many Americans, the disability payment is the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow because they know in their gut that this country and the one percent who rules it has abandoned them. They are the folks ungraced by your superior education, an education that allows you to turn a blind eye to reality with such aplomb.
News flash: the "working class" (a.k.a. poor people) encompasses a lot more people than angry white men in rural areas who refuse to get with the times. Talking about us as if we are erases masses of unique experiences of people who vote in accordance with those experiences. Also, if you want to know what poor people in America want, stop writing lofty thinkpieces about us as if we're unruly children who need to be dealt with and actually listen to us. Better yet, feature us in your newspaper opinion sections. We aren't just a bunch of dumb yokels who have no idea that there's a better world for us out there; we're people with diverse voices who would love to be listened to instead of patronized by economists and Ivy League graduates who know nothing of our perspective.
Mr. Brooks,
Why is it that only White working-class Americans voted for Trump? Could it be endemic racism among that segment of the population? Hmmmmm ....
How does David Brooks knows what the working class is trying to tell us when he's a conservative flak from the upper elite class.
Trump is the avatar of the revolt of the deplorables. He has been elected to trample the elites by whatever means available. Every time the pundits tsk tsk about his ignorance, crudeness, obvious stupidity the deplorables relish his response. He has single handedly energized the revolt against the elitist certainty that he would have his comeupance.
Everytime a “liberal” judge rules against him the belief that the system is corrupted against them is reaffirmed.
The American political system iis completely corrupted by money but still free enough that a movement if like minded citizens can unleash a wrecking ball like Trump. He has accomplished much in a short time. His presser yesterday was an announcement of his intentions for the next two years. In short, bring it on.
Those Republican voters certainly did send a message -- racism, bigotry, and greed are indeed sweeping Red America.
There is simply NO WAY any person can vote for today's GOP without endorsing the hate and ugly ignorance that today's GOP so explicitly promoted.
Some of the “working class” message that David writes about has been nicely gift wrapped in racism and xenophobia by Trump and republicans.
Brooks...you're still a republican.Democrats are of the mind that when we lift up those who have less, we all profit.By not doing that W destroyed the middle class.Without the middle class, we are nothing and frankly David,so are you.
A broad based yet simple answer........"Dont take ANY of the working class for granted ......i.e. your water sewers,electricity,and transportation and eating out......are comforts supplied by reliable and conscientious people .....doing their best to earn a living........Consequently ,SHOW benevolence to these working men and women.....PAY THEM FAIRLY for their work......and dont ignore THEIR EXISTENCE or the changing and evolving needs of their occupations and daily lives.......They are far more essential and valuable to society than CEOs on Wall st or bank presidents.....whose self serving duties ,socially benefit a select few.
ALWAYS RESPECT the WORK involved in the "lowliest" occupation......for the person doing it ,is giving part of his lifetime, as a benefit......for those who cant or wont.......do it themselves !
The premisse of this op-ed is that working-class Americans just massively voted for Trump.
There are NO studies backing up such a claim. So this is merely Brooks imagining that Trump voters must be low-educated voters, and if there's a big GOP voter turnout even though the Trump administration is a disaster, it must be those low-educated voters who want to "send a message". Implied here is: an ignorant, wrong message, that "we" college-educated elites know to be wrong.
Then he goes on to claim that we should try to love those ignorant deplorables anyhow, and as a consequence take the fact seriously that unemployment is still high and try to do something about it.
In real life, however:
1. in 2016 only one fifth of America's 135 million people without a college degree voted for Trump. 4/5 refused to do so. And of those workers who voted, Trump only got a majority of the votes among white workers. The others were obviously too disgusted by his racism and lack of moral character to even think about voting for the GOP.
2. This week, the Rust belt went blue, whereas the overall number of people voting for the GOP was even lower than in 2016. So for the moment nothing indicates that workers were massively turning out to vote for Trump. Studies analyzing voting demographics will soon show whether they did or not.
3. It's obvious that white workers are more vulnerable to the GOP's racist, white nationalist fake news. Listening to them now means debunking those myths ... !
1
Well-put and thoughtful. But who's listening?
This is not your father’s Democratic Party. Leftists would rather rally and labor on behalf of illegal foreign migrants than working-class American citizens.
david brooks shouks tey actually speaking with a working class person of any race in any location in this country. i’m not sure he ever has.
"... This is still a country in which millions of new jobs are through “alternative work arrangements” like contracting or consulting — meaning no steady salary, no predictable hours and no security..."
Those darned Democrats that busted the unions, increased the power of corporations, allowed for "junk" contracts, non-competes, arbitration, etc.!
Oh, wait...
David, they 45 fans are just falsely aggrieve white lazy people, that want to live like in the 50s, but with the advantages of the 21st century.
This is excellent because correct or incorrect it makes serious proposals about the now Chronic Underclass and how to fix it. Interestingly enough the liberal democratic establishment fails to say a word about the problem.
--mike
What?????? The rich have stolen money from the rest of society for years through off shore accounts, a tax system that tortures the poor, and voter suppression that keeps the GOP in office. Fix these things and we help the working class. Most of the working class votes for Trump because of his racist, sexist and xenophobic scapegoating that helps the downtrodden feel better about themselves.
Cheers was set in Boston. Norm was an accountant. Frasier was a psychiatrist.
Other Emmy winners from the 70s and 80s: The Mary Tyler Moore Show and The Cosby Show.
You see what you want to see.
Saw Cass' pedigree. He was at Bain - Mitt Romney's LBO. Wonder how many working class Americans he made redundant when he hollowed out victim firms to provide dividend recapitalizations. A more appropriate book would be Winner Take All by Giridharadas.
"what the working class is still trying to tell us"
Good Heavens, My Canadian mind is in shock.
It would NEVER have occured to me that the United States, would not already have, all of the education models that Oren Cass's brilliant new book "the Once and Future Worker" has suggested. This is not the fault of millions of "the Working Class" but a Major fault, Crime almost of ignorant Governments, blind to such simple and successful Education Alternatives.
May the Democrat Congress, purchase multiple copies of Oren Cass's new book and get to Work. What a stunning omission by Education Departments.
Note, Americans who travel to Canada for business or pleasure will have their guns confiscated at our border, without apology.
Why do conservatives always view and promote work as something that feeds people’s egos? Over and over, these bizarre catchphrases, "dignity of work," "devalued work,” etc. It’s so tiresome and obnoxious! Grow up! Work is not about making you feel self-important. If that’s what motivates you, you need to recover from how you were brought up or something. Work is about survival, on a basic level, and it’s about personal fulfillment, in its most desirable form. I guess we know what motivates people like Brooks when it comes to work: their big fat egos. But a lot of us actually try to overcome our insecurities about how our jobs define our value as human beings, and these awful conservative values that embrace and celebrate insecurities about work are just plain repulsive.
It has become the fashion to stereotype blue collar workers as fat, lazy, bigoted, dumb, uneducated, or all of the above. Add in the mystic of a college degree and there we are.
1
It's not only blue collar, high school educated workers who feel like "carnage" in this economy, Mr. Brooks. Many of us graduate degreed white collar workers feel the same way, especially if we are working as adjuncts in higher ed, got downsized for daring to live past 45 and are now scrambling in that consulting economy you mentioned, or chose a career in public service or helping professions.
It hasn't been GDP that American economic policy has been pinned on; it's been profit, and channeling ever more of it to the top. The GOP and FOX have used every nasty trick in their arsenal to prevent the less educated from knowing this. Blame the immigrants, blame the unions, blame the minorities or the women, blame everybody but the boss who downsized you to squeeze a little more profit into his own pocket.
Everyone who isn't in the top 1% is working class now. Unfortunately, many don't realize it and continue to vote for fat cats who don't care about them.
Brooks should brace for the torrent of statistics (mostly coming from college academicians!) purporting to show that college graduates earn significantly more over their work-lives than do non-grads, and therefore college should be for everyone. These statistics have always been based on false assumptions and sampling. To be more accurate, one would have to take random samples of high school students--including top students--divide them in to 2 random groups, and send 1 group to college and one not--and then see how they do over 10, 20, 40 years. No doubt, the top students who weren't allowed to go to college will nevertheless do better than many poorer-performing students who went to college. Of course, such a study can't be conducted, but as long as we continue to adhere to the false narrative about the universal value of a college degree, it will be hard to "sell" alternate tracking modes for high school students.
Mr. Cass's book, from your description, appears to be an important work which we should all read. Unfortunately, 95% of the population will not and the news will not discuss these ideas. Instead, we have a President who does not read and constantly discourages people from believing the news. This does not encourage people to discover the pearls of your column. We have now wasted two years on political nonsense while continuing to pay 100 senators and 435 congressmen for utter dysfunction. Have we discussed policies to reimagine education? No, we have spent so much time and effort trying to degrade education for the lower income and the rural populations. Education should be supported not by property taxes that disproportionately benefit the wealthy but by state business taxes because the benefits accrue to those businesses. Amazon can sell books but the business would fail if there is no one who could read them. The people need to wake up and demand more of their elected officials. Those people who do not pay taxes should not rejoice when taxes are reduced which in turn reduces their education budgets. They should see it as the scam that it is.
1
One of the measures that needs attention is renewal of rural America. That is where so many of the "left behinds" live. Rural American small towns of 5,000 to 10,000 population, not well connected to the interstate highway system, and bereft of the industries that supported them is where cultural resentment has grown and thrived.
Add in globalization and a new digital economy and you have "knowledge workers" clustering in major metros where a resulting centrifugal force further drains the population of rural communities. America has too many towns that are too small to grow and to large to die.
A "Marshall Plan" for rural communities is needed. It would mean infrastructure improvements that would better connect small towns to the interstate system; thus improving their attractiveness to expanding businesses and industries. Economic incentives that would reward people for moving to small towns is another effort that could be tried.
The "two Americas" described by presidential candidate John Edwards back in 2004 still needs an intervention by the public and private sectors. It won't be easy or cheap; but, failure to do so will surely leave us a culturally and economically bifurcated nation with its democracy at great peril.
1
Marx was wrong on a lot of topics but he was right when he said that capitalism tends to turn the worker into a commodity and to drive the price down wherever possible. And the elites - you and I both live in Bethesda so that includes us -- have also ignored their needs and concerns. Kudos to technical training, works well in Germany.
1
Many good blue collar jobs in the US go unfilled because there aren't enough workers who can pass the drug tests.
1
Has David Brooks ever written the words "climate change," much less thought deeply about it?
I understand his fascination with mental and spiritual attributes, but as a social psychologist I regret his inkling that society is just a mind writ en masse.
Mind, as we all learn, is completely malleable. So that five fifths educational history Brooks and Cass describe -- that's what, exactly? The spectrum of human endowments laid bare? A policy failure? Plato (Republic) had a diagnosis that seems to evade modern thinkers.
Human civilization, society, culture, whatever you want to call it, is in the process of fragmentation -- socially, culturally, technically, economically. This is driven, basically, by the costs of complexity. Yet Brooks still believes in the programmatic policy ideas that will make it all simpler, better -- more principled, more local, more values driven.
And then, there's climate change.
Set aside the peculiarity that finding more work for more people is basically the GDP growth idea with happy paint. More growth, more people, more resource depletion, more climate change -- whither goest thou, traveler?
Certainly, there will be fascinating social variations along the way. But the main trend for humanity -- "the consequences brought by more of more" -- is starkly clear.
Which brings me back to my point: why is it David Brooks can't say "climate change"? Or understand that some social trends are entirely out of our control?
1
I always respect David Brooks' views, but this article of his is somewhat disappointing.
1) I would not point to European education system with academic and technical tracks as an example of success, because they are not. European countries have higher unemployment rates than the US, almost always.
2) If European "working class" feels or lives better than the US "working class", it is because European countries tend to pay "working class" or less skilled workers better and they provide better social safety nets (e.g., universal health care). This means that one way to solve the "working class" problems in the US is to give them a living wage and health care. Yes, things will get a bit more expensive and we may also need to pay a bit higher tax.
3) Unfortunately there are always some people sitting in the bottom x% in terms of income, ability, work ethic, attitude, ... Calling these people "working class" is sometimes misleading, and I bet that many "non-working class" people work way harder than "working class". However, I agree that we as a society should and must respect and help them. Unfortunately, by voting for Trump's GOP, some of the "working class" (yes, many of them have disproportionally larger voting power given where they reside, as Paul Krugman pointed out today) may not help solve their economic problems, and even the revenge may be ultimately at their own expense.
2
@RM
Any concrete example of a West-European country that has an unemployment rate that is higher than America's (real) unemployment rate ... ?
I don't see any.
Don't forget that most European countries don't exclude people who don't look for a job anymore from their statistics, and also don't throw them off unemployment benefits (and as a consequence statistics) after 6 months, as the GOP forced Obama to do since 2010 ...
1
Want to help the working class -- and everyone else? Raise taxes on the rich and on corporations to pay for infrastructure spending, investment capital to put into new green industry, expanded education, and needed social services. It's actually pretty simple.
3
1. The best chance to get a decent job/income is and remains having a college degree. As long as that's the case, ANY parent/politician should help young Americans get a college degree.
2. Western 21th century economies will only need MORE highly educated workers in the future, not less. Which is one more reason to encourage obtaining a college degree, especially if we want to remain competitive in the global economy.
3. The only way to get rid of racism, white nationalism and other immoral forms of political rhetoric and politics (clearly the main reason why the only demographic among working-class Americans who voted for Trump in 2016 was the white working class) is to give ALL Americans a world class education. That necessarily means NO job market oriented education until they're 18, and a STRONG investment in what allows them to become fully developed human beings and active citizens first, through high quality teaching in the humanities, science of religions, the scientific method (rather than merely results), critical thinking etc.
All the repetitive tasks will soon be taken over by robots. Humans will have the privilege to work on high-level, challenging, creative tasks, which require emotionally intelligent, happy adults.
Bills that finally distribute the produced wealth equally among all workers, and that allow them to go for meaningful jobs, which respect their family life and full human needs, are the future.
And it's clearly not the GOP that will write them.
2
The working class has been silenced by propaganda, mainly coming from the plutocrats and Republican party favorites - the oligarchs. It started with Reagan when he moved against the unions and gave corporations and wealthy elites large undeserved tax cuts. Republicans bet that these workers would vote them in against their own financial interests - which actually happened with right to work laws.
A more obvious and alarming move by elitists and corporations occurred when millions of good-paying American jobs were outsourced overseas to low-wage countries to increase corporate profits and benefit investors. In the meantime, workers suffered irreparable economic harm and still do to this day.
The rigged global economy, which benefited oligarchs worldwide, caused economic suffering to workers all over the world. If these losses could be calculated, it would evidence the greatest theft in the history of this country. If only workers could retrieve the economic losses suffered by this theft, the CEOs would be making 70 times the average workers' wages instead of 350 times the average workers' wages. And these corporations would be paying progressive tax rates in the realm of 45 percent.
As long as Republicans are in power, that will never happen. If Democrats take power it probably will happen and justice for the American workers will be served.
The #1 issue in America is that 1% of the people (the mega-rich) owns 99% of the wealth. All other discussions must proceed from this fundamental. If the majority of corporate jobs (manufacturing or service) were forced to share the proceeds & pay a respectable salary that affords a good standard of living then America would have a flourishing middle class. Be it known that "pure greed" drives the mega-rich - and they will never share the wealth without being forced to do so...
Case and point example-1: Consider the profit-sharing arrangement of the NFL. Although it's difficult for most of us to relate to player salaries - players are able to flourish because players UNITE (i.e. UNION) and insists the mega-rich owners share a percentage of the profits.
Case and point example-2: Consider the recent teacher strikes in several states. People UNITING together insisting on better pay & working conditions. School Boards were not hearing them individually. But UNITED we stand...
Also consider that UNIONS (Common Men Uniting) is what created the American middle class in the first place - coming out of the low pay, no benefits, 80 hour work week, slave-like factory conditions of the early 1900's.
So the question is what happen to the UNIONS?? Answer: Ronald Reagan and the Republican party busted the Air-Traffic controllers Union in the 1980's. American Unions have weakened ever since - not coincidentally, so has the American middle class.
5
David, how can you reform labor markets if you do not first reform the entire system and mindset in which they are operating?
For example, Cass talks about a worker's co-op.
Who will provide the funding to make this work David?
An Uber driver that has enough problems making payments on the ridiculous loans they had to take out in order to drive for Uber and then call themselves "an independent business"?
Talk about false imagery David, because all Uber does is migrate their cost of living onto those who can least afford it, just so they can call themselves "an independent business".
You know what I believe David; I believe those like you need to stop worshiping at the altar of Milton Friedman, the patron saint of the University of Chicago.
His form of free market capitalism and the theories behind them, have been an utter and complete failure, but those like you simply cannot come to terms with the magnitude of that failure.
The complete commoditization of humankind, including our behavior and how we choose to manipulate it, makes it absolutely impossible to create the kind of dignity you think you want.
Even the great libertarian economist, Friedrich Hayek, believed in a "guaranteed minimum income" or "universal living standard". In point of fact, Hayek defined it as an absolute necessity for a well functioning free market.
At least Hayek defines what a bottom is, whereas Friedman only thought about how high the top can go.
Where is the dignity in that David?
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Where does one begin... Oren Cass favors academic tracking. In an ideal world, yes, but testing and grading is so closely tied to socioeconomic status, especially as conservatives such as Brooks and Cass insist on selective charter schools and use of vouchers for private schools. So the effect would be to skim off high-potential students while training the rest to be worker drones.
Oren Cass favors a shift to labor "lite" that offloads costs of training away from corporations and toward the workers themselves. Thus more social engineering to minimize burden to the capitalist class.
Oren Cass worked on the Romney presidential campaign and also as a consultant to Bain & Co., "vulture capitalists" of 2012 fame. So spare us the condescending crocodile tears. What we have here reeks of 1930s Italy and Germany, elites tossing bones to labor while simultaneously riling them up in the service of corporatist goals.
I was born in1950 and attended private (Catholic) schools but many of my neighborhood friends were schooled in the Yonkers public school system. They had a number of choices when entering high school. Saunders Trade School prepared its students for works in the trades. Commerce High School would have been the choice for women who desired secretarial jobs. (My uncle, a hard taskmaster, taught Steno Class in that school.) For student of those schools, attending one of the "general" Yonkers high schools would not have prepared them as well for their intended jobs.
Itis trade schools like these that best prepare today's youth for the job market. What was once done could certainly be done again, perhaps using regional schools in the more rural areas. With education that prepares students of jobs of their choice, and collective bargaining that ensures appropriate worker benefits and wages, only those who willfully ignore available resources would suffer. Politicians should recognize this and begin a bipartisan discussion whose goal is to achieve those objectives.
Rural Americans and the working class. Has anyone really asked them what they want or expect of government? The focus seems to always be on our cities.
Figure out what these people want and maybe Democrats can win their affection.
For now they will vote Republican thinking the Republican agenda will make them happy. Once elected, most Republicans will ignore them.
@wihiker
I think that has been already asked and answered. They want the job they learned first out of HS, or the job Daddy or Gramps had (no matter they died at 45 from black lung or a wildcat blowout) and they want to be able to blame someone else for not taking advantage of job training offered, or not embracing new ideas for evolving fields. They'd rather have their hand held by an Administration that promises "clean coal jobs" (an oxymoron), more steel jobs here (no matter the market worldwide doesn't need the steel) produced, and point blame those coming "Invaders" who are taking the jobs they didn't want to do anyway.
We know what rural and middle class America wants, too bad it was either a killer or imaginary, even in the 50's.
Actions speak loudly. Republicans who have repeatedly given preferential tax treatment to capital gains show that they don't favor labor, and so don't favor the working class... If working class voters are trying to send a message, they picked the wrong messenger in 2016 and sent the wrong messengers to the Senate in 2018.
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Bravo Mr. Brooks! I haven’t read about European work co-ops but have for decades believed that student choice and guidance during high school should include a robust system of technical and vocational training options. It seems to me that public university community colleges could be an important component for helping to implement such a system.
This is what happens when you cover your eyes and years and chant "la la la la la" for 50 years. I went to high school in the fifties in Michigan. We were told then that automation would eventually replace the majority of manufacturing jobs. Likewise, it hasn't been a secret that fossil fuels are on their way out. I left Michigan when I graduated from college in 1972 (which I was able to get through with scholarships, part-time jobs and no loans or help from family because it was cheap) because we were in the midst of an oil crisis, the economy was in the toilet and there were no decent jobs to be had. At the same time, manufacturers were moving their plants to places where they could find cheap, non-union labor. First the South and then Mexico and Asia. It is not the educated elite who caused this. It lies at the feet of the corporate robber barons - the 1% - as it has throughout our history. And now we have a federal government owned and operated by that same swamp of robber barons, thanks to the Republican Party and their so-called leader.
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@CW I meant to write I went to high school in the sixties, not the fifties.
That $20,000 per year, per each person in poverty, goes directly into local economies within 30 days - or less. Business people are the winners. Let's not forget that as benefit reductions are considered by the Republican Senate.
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We had very regimented tracking when I was in junior high. Our class was divided into 12 academic groups, A-L. It was an impetus to strive to do well since no one wanted to lose status. It also enabled each student the ability to shine since students with similar academic abilities were grouped together. You didn't have the struggling competing with the gifted. I think this worked much better for self esteem. Our children didn't have such fine tuned tracking when in school. Our son struggled immensely with a curriculum that was too fast paced for his ability. He gave up in discouragement since he could never win against the academically gifted in his class. His self esteem suffered greatly. He had a defeatist attitude, believing he could never succeed. We tried to stress his many talents: his creative writing ability, his basic mathematical skills, his mechanical aptitude. I would continually tell him that many subjects required being blessed with a good memory, nothing more. But creative ability can't be taught, mechanical aptitude can't be taught but are instead inherent talents like artistic ability, sports ability and intuitive understanding of how things work. All of us have our strengths and weaknesses but it takes a very good teacher to discover where they lie and encourage those which allow us to flourish. Be they mechanical, academic or caregiving. We need to stress that all jobs have value. From bank president, to teacher, to mechanic, to those care for society.
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I'm a trades person contractor 40 plus years work for the wealthy often one very wealth man told me you can give all the money to all the people and we would have it back within a few years because we know how to use labor and work money so there you have it. Why would they want to change that. That thinking will have to be forces to make that change, unions would help for a voice that is why they got rid of them. People need security like single payer health care just to name one. Thing are so out of balance with the money on top the tax cut was a slap in the face. United we stand divided we are where we are hopefully Trumpies will wake up.
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I agree with others who say “working class” is not a descriptor that describes anything now. College graduates are having a very difficult time also. So many college degrees are worthless in terms of decent pay and benefits, financial independence. So it’s not about college or no college. The job I had in social services back in the seventies paid enough for my own apartment and a car. Forty years later that job classification pays so little and requires so much in terms of degree and caseload that it’s impossible, plain abusive. Not to mention that there is no real service to the community. Colleges are famous for only hiring part time professors with no benefits. etc. etc. Once a person turns fifty their job security disappears because they cost too much. Laid off. And what correlates to that is a rapidly rising suicide rate among people of that age group. Somebody needs to do some research on job requirements, conditions and pay to see what this situation really looks like. People are rightly enraged by this abuse, starting with colleges that don’t care about the future of their students. I suspect the opioid epidemic is about this as well, the hopelessness of it all. We need politicians and journalists who understand this. It’s not about education or job classification.
It's one of the great ironies of our time that Trump voters keep electing politicians whose policies only financially benefit urban, educated liberal voters. For all the extra money in my pocket, there's not nearly enough of it to pay for my daughter's education, fund a public transit system to get me out of traffic or provide housing for the homeless. If we had a true democracy where the popular vote actually mattered, I think Trumps voters would be pleasantly surprised to see that the urban liberal voter (aka the majority of the population) would actually vote for politicians that benefit them as well.
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@Fish
Fish- Nice try. As an urban liberal, none of the policies promoted by tRump assists me. In fact they go against my very core- Open coal mines, at the cost of the environment? Nope-not for me. Increased oil production by drilling offshore- again not on my watch.
No, the offending group benefiting from 45's misguided policy is either Him and his Family. Maybe the 1%.
I guess that fake news information projected can be attributed to our *really smart* president and his cast of paid accomplices in the WH & Fox news
@peter you totally miss the point of my comment. My point is that tax breaks put more money in my pocket (larger standard deduction) but do not help me in any meaningful way. And regardless of your own personal situation, it's undeniable that the large metro areas are all booming based on economic measures. However, those areas keep voting for the dems because those measures are not bringing true prosperity. Don't even get me started on the environment which I would pay anything to protect.
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@Fish Thanks for the clarification- I'm getting your point better.
I worked hard to put myself through two college degree programs while supporting myself, and don’t take kindly to being called “elite” or privileged.” And I’m saddened by the constant flogging that genuine education is subject to in our anti-intellectual culture. One should be able to read books and earn a living as a plumber without being subject to an identity crisis or derision from others. Please stop dumping on education as if it were a defect of character. And look more closely at the corporate forces working to dehumanize all classes and all fields of work. Downsizing has left many educated workers doing the jobs of multiple people with serious repercussions for their families, as well as their physical and mental health; even doctors are being transformed into drones. It’s not just manufacturing and industrial workers who have been devalued, though they bear the brunt of corporate animus. Educated people as a group never wanted this.
One more thing: “Some people” shouldn’t attend college? I think that’s true and that reforms are needed (bring back union apprenticeships!) but we need to be aware that the term “some people” can be used to refer to classes and races seen as inferior and therefore less deserving of education. In the current political climate, I’d worry about that. Mr. Brooks may not intend this meaning, but plenty of people do. “Some people” is a dog whistle.
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Two comments: (1) Whenever Brooks says working class, he means "white working class". If you go through the article and ask whether most working class people of color would hold the position he attributes to the "working class", you can see that he generalizations do not apply to workers of color. Why can't he just say that instead of pretending that he is talking about the working class as a whole? (2) Brooks says that having strong union representation is "uninteresting to most private sector unions". Really? If so, it's only because recent legislation has defanged unions and given management all of the power. Workers of all colors who want better wages can only get that by effective collective bargaining, and collective bargaining requires healthy unions. How do Brooks and Cass propose to turn large privately held corporations into worker coops, where employees actually own these companies?
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If we want to empower workers we have to stop voting for Republicans. Their tax breaks for the rich (like Walton family shareholders getting $1,000,000 per day on backs of Walmart workers earning $9 per hour) will not do the job. Republicans only drain the treasure of funds needed to invest in people: daycare, education including, yes, trade school, and healthcare. The only party making investments in people are Democrats.
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Pardon me, Mr. Brooks, but it has been Republicans who have fought Unions, workplace safety, environmental guidelines, etc and not to have you and them claim they are for the 'working man' is patently false. The appeal, managed by Trump, is to the residual anger and frustration of those who have chosen to be bypassed by a rapidly changing economy. I understand the pain of not working enough, but to stay in Eastern Kentucky, Southern Ohio or West Virginia as the coal industry withers and cry about jobs lost when the movement is clear, and the government, state and Federal, has slowly removed protections from work and reduced the leverage of unions is simply wrong.
The is a bit like claiming Scaramucci as an authority on blue collar lives; he dreams that Trump has a positive message to a demographic he things exists. It doesn't and Trump doesn't. Trump is appealing to base instincts and desires of people who resist opportunity, are broken by loss, and can't find a way forward.
The notion os education tracking, better known as career education is well known and well established. The education system in much of the US is so sclerotic it cannot find ways to adjust to new possibilities. Career education is a tremendous opportunity, as it was for many in prior generations.
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Isn't dangerous to gauge one's life by comparing it to the fictional characters of a television show, and if one does (as it appears to be the case), isn't one almost certain to be dissatisfied?
And is "the system" really broken? Public education exists through HS. One can argue that HS is not sufficient (and President Obama, I recall, proposed extending the public education opportunities to at least the community college level). Talk of "tracking" brings back memories of what I grew up hearing about East Germany and the Soviet Union, and who decides your "track"? To what extent is an individual responsible for his/her own fit within the economy?
What we see being played out is not a debate, but conflicting demands from constituencies over what lifestyle the federal government is obligated to provide its populace.
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I am a college educator and the hard truth is that many people cannot succeed in any kind of 4 year college program. In fact I would guess that more than half of 18 year olds living in this country have nothing to gain in a traditional 4 year college degree program. I see many students who do not have the foundation of skills to succeed in the classroom, and with a few exceptions, these students are unwilling to put in the hard work to play catch up.
Tracking of students makes sense because in principle it puts students where their interests lie and also in a group of similar peers. Part of the argument for tracking is another hard truth: traditional academia seems unwilling, even at teaching-centered colleges, to do the hard work of creating a culture of, well, hard work. Students define the culture via the values they come in with. So, privileged students can focus on networking while taking easy A courses while less advantaged students struggle with the choice between socializing and working hard. I would love to see my institution and others show our students that we all need to come together, work hard, accepting and supporting peers from all walks of life.
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Don't lump us all together and don't assume we are all taken in by nativism. There are things we, as working class Americans want across the political spectrum -- "white" or not. We want decent jobs with livable wages. We want drinkable water and safe food. We want security, respect and a voice on the job and in the country. We want our Social Security protected. We want safe as possible working conditions, good schools for our children and environmental protections that guarantee a livable future for them. Politicians that speak to these issues with sincerity will likely get our support.
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Here's the deal Democrats. Take a close look at how Tammy Baldwin, senator from Wisconsin, ripped her Koch funded opponent to shreds - by 11%. Shouldn't have happened. In the early going pundits claimed this was an easy Republican "get".
What they didn't count on is that Baldwin is a model senator. She constantly canvasses the state, talking with small business owners from both parties and making herself available in small communities. She understands her role as a senator. She was re-elected because voters know her and like her. Voters know she represents their interests (and she knows what they are) when she's back in Washington.
Study up Schumer.
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This argument is all backwards. Why should labor need to organize against the markets who abuse them. We don't need labor reform right now. First we corporate reform. That means no more "at-will" contracts or the rampant abuses inherent in the gig economy. The gig economy extends from working professionals to the working poor. That's not a class issue.
Next we need to pass legislation debunking the erroneous classification of corporations as citizens. Then we'll have a conversation about corporate interaction with campaign finance laws. Once all that is done, there's the issue of profit sharing. Jeff Bezos recently took away stock options for long time employees. It's like having your pentioned cancelled ten years from retirement. Co-ops are okay but not when companies are allowed to unilaterally change the rules of the game. That should be illegal.
We could certainly organize career paths more along the lines of Germany that would help. However, labor isn't the problem. The system is systematically rigged against wage labor in form. College educated or otherwise. This true in the conservative courts. This is true in Congress. This especially true in the new Republican tax bill which President Trump signed into law. Corporate America has picked a fight with labor. I'm not really interested in their opinions on how we should reform. The fight belongs at their doorstep.
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What, no mention of occupational licensure? The deadliest missile directed at the economically downtrodden and a source of privilege for middle-class professionals? Bernard Shaw rightly called professions "conspiracies against the laity".
It has long been one of the dirty secrets of Progressives that they are the principal champions of economic privilege. It is a corrupt payoff to their bases -- e.g., organized labor, notably the teachers' unions. But it also rewards organized groups over the really poor. As an example, take the case of hairdressers using to use the threat of fines and imprisonment against women who earn a few bucks braiding another person's hair without a license.
Some 50 years ago, Milton Friedman argued that a system of certification -- that informs consumers about the qualifications of a practitioner -- is socially desirable, but "licensure" -- that prevents practitioners from engaging in a trade if they don't the requisite qualification -- has become a source of economic privilege.
Let's help the poor by unshackling our economy.
"We in the college-educated sliver have built a culture, an economy and a political system that are all about ourselves. It’s time to pass labor market reforms that will make life decent for everybody."
If that's what you really want, the first thing to do is to STOP the GOP's anti-intellectualism and to stop cultivating the idea that if wages are low, it's because "the elites" don't care about them.
The Democrats' wealthiest donors actively support bills that increase the minimum wage and that increase taxes for people like them, whereas your party does the exact opposite.
They support unions whereas your party tries every possible legal and illegal way to destroy them.
They support campaign finance reform which would give the vote and opinion of the majority of the working class (and in 2016, only one fifth of them voted for Trump, remember?) much more power in DC, and of course reduce the power of REPUBLICAN elites trying to use the government to destroy the middle class because that's what their wealthy donors ask them to do.
They support healthcare reform and education reform that allows the poor to get into the middle class and allows more people born into the middle class to try to stay there.
Conclusion: nor America's workers, nor the Democrats' "elites" waited for you, dear Mr. Brooks, to not only start caring but also DOING something about the GOP-induced sell out of this country to the wealthiest corporations. You're welcome anyhow ... ;-)
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Why would the “white rural worker class” send a message by voting majority republican?
The GOP has for the last five decades pursued policies favoring the rich over the poor, the owners of capital over the have nots, companies over unions, tax cuts over social spending, education, health and infrastructure.
Their vote preference makes no sense, if we assume a rational basis for their vote. The decision is not based on their interests but resentment against people of color who they perceive as a threat to their diminished status.
Trump and his party exploit the fear to their advantage and use their minority government to further undermine the people who voted for them.
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We simply don’t need as many workers as there are people. We over produce and over-extract resources to send them soon to the nearest landfill. Our economy is an unsustainable Ponzi Scheme. We don’t need more “production”.
What we need is a Universal Basic Income. If the top .01% stopped receiving and hoarding all the wealth made by the minions, there would be more than enough to go around. Over the ages, technological changes have destroyed people’s way of life. We need to cushion these blows and thereby make our economy more responsive. I rountinely mutter to myself “ find another way to make a living”, but that’s not so easy.
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Was discussing the decline of Sears with a friend who called it the Amazon of its era. I had to point out the a lifetime Sears, non-corporate employee maintained a middle class lifestyle, put kids through college, and retired comfortably. How many lifetime Amazon, non-corporate employees will be able to make that claim?
Brooks is correct in that blue-collar work in the USA has been devalued in that it is not fairly compensated as profits flow to the top 1%. In a consumer-based economy, poorly compensated workers make for a very weak economy. A consumer-based economy that is forced to rely on the top 1% is a banana republic.
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I don't know if the following statement sounds corny, patronizing or what, but I mean it to be taken literally and at face value: I want good things for working class people in this country.
Truck drivers, fast food, factory workers, coal country... they are ALL particularly vulnerable in the very near future and they are being led down a primrose path. Automation is not going to be stopped. "The Wall," the tariffs, the deregulation, cutting immigration, pulling out of and/or repudiating trade deals... I have heard precious little about what is going to happen to people when (don't kid yourself... WHEN) machines can deliver packages, make burgers, drive goods across the country, stock shelves and assemble and/or print most products.
If you want an extremely watered down preview? Look at Uber's impact on cab drivers. A century-old, but utterly complacent industry got eviscerated! Now imagine Uber had access to reliable self-driving vehicles. At that point, arguments about "workers' rights" or "wages" become mostly academic. Now apply that principle across multiple industries.
Pay teachers properly. Ask educators for a core sciences wish list and rubber stamp it. If there's a budget problem raise taxes, cancel some aircraft carriers, Air BnB the WH, whatever it takes to raise the skill level of the U.S. work force across the board. Give working class families a fighting chance before we have a "Grapes of Wrath" situation on our hands!
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You are getting closer Brooks, things have been going wrong for the past several decades. But the past several decades have been dominated by Reagan inspired GOP/neoliberal economic policy. Basically Republican economic policy. The only thing the Republicans have not succeeded at is ending Social Security and Medicare, but doing both those things would have very little effect (at least not in a good way) on the economic situation, certainly in the long term. So the past several decades should prove to anyone that Republican (supply-side, tax cutting, give all the money to the rich "job-creators" and hope for the best) policy is a failure. The failure of the Democrats is that, through neoliberalism, they went along with it. That is why Pelosi and Schumer and their ingrained Republicanesque style is on the way out. The new Democrats will stick to the values of the old Democrats, that means work of the working class. We need to build high speed internet to the red rural areas like interstate highways, and the government has to do it. We need to fund their schools; the Republicans have defunded the entire school system. And if it comes down to taxing companies for taking jobs across the boarder to pay for the losses here, then that is what we will have to do. And so on. Leonhardt has the best column today.
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Mr Brooks,
There have been theories that Trump supporters are less motivated by economics than by cultural issues, which Trump has capitalized on big time.
However, no one can dispute what is going on in this county economically, particularly in the ever widening chasm between the very rich and the rest of us. Our government's misplaced priorities are at the root of our problems, along with the control that money and corporations exert over everything. Until the private and corporate big money gets taken out of politics, I do not see things changing.
A sign that you haven't a clue about the poor, is your statement that welfare is so the poor can "consume more". In my experience as a nurse, the amounts of assistance given are extremely small and will not allow for discretionary spending.
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To the extent that it is anyone’s “fault” it is not that of college grads with white collar jobs. It is the natural consequence of corporate globalization. If Chinese labor will assemble washing machines cheap enough to put them in American homes at lower cost than Amercan labor can, then the manufacturer will make more profit assembling them there.
That is not the fault of white collar workers in insurance companies. It is Darwin at work, since these same voters would oppose any fixes that help others.
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There is a third option: public community colleges. Not every person who has been through a vocational program ends up in a satisfying job, and many lack the reading, writing, computation, and critical thinking skills to move into other fields. Community colleges offer both instruction and support for diverse groups of students and do so at an affordable price.
I sent my children through two years of community college before they transferred to four-year colleges. They both graduated with little to no debt and found good jobs.
Tracking students into vocational programs is not always the right choice. A four-year college is not always the right choice. It's important to help people adapt to a changing job market with flexible options.
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