Alienated America

Why Some Places Thrive While Others Collapse

Timothy P. Carney

• Publisher: Harper
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780062797148
• Topic: Sciences sociales
• Subtopic: Classes sociales et disparités économiques

Now a Washington Post bestseller.

Respected conservative journalist and commentator Timothy P. Carney continues the conversation begun with Hillbilly Elegy and the classic Bowling Alone in this hard-hitting analysis that identifies the true factor behind the decline of the American dream: it is not purely the result of economics as the left claims, but the collapse of the institutions that made us successful, including marriage, church, and civic life. During the 2016 presidential campaign, Donald J. Trump proclaimed, "the American dream is dead, " and this message resonated across the country.

Why do so many people believe that the American dream is no longer within reach? Growing inequality, stubborn pockets of immobility, rising rates of deadly addiction, the increasing and troubling fact that where you start determines where you end up, heightening political strife—these are the disturbing realities threatening ordinary American lives today.

The standard accounts pointed to economic problems among the working class, but the root was a cultural collapse: While the educated and wealthy elites still enjoy strong communities, most blue-collar Americans lack strong communities and institutions that bind them to their neighbors. And outside of the elites, the central American institution has been religion

That is, it's not the factory closings that have torn us apart; it's the church closings. The dissolution of our most cherished institutions—nuclear families, places of worship, civic organizations—has not only divided us, but eroded our sense of worth, belief in opportunity, and connection to one another.

In Abandoned America, Carney visits all corners of America, from the dim country bars of Southwestern Pennsylvania., to the bustling Mormon wards of Salt Lake City, and explains the most important data and research to demonstrate how the social connection is the great divide in America. He shows that Trump's surprising victory was the most visible symptom of this deep-seated problem. In addition to his detailed exploration of how a range of societal changes have, in tandem, damaged us, Carney provides a framework that will lead us back out of a lonely, modern wilderness.

Chapter 1

It Takes a Village

Where the American Dream Lives

Sadly, the American Dream is dead.”

After rambling, off script, for most of his fifty-minute speech to announce his presidential candidacy in June 2015, Donald Trump had returned to his written remarks for the final section. He delivered these somber words slowly, pausing for emphasis.

“Sadly. . . the American Dream is dead,” he enunciated, pausing again.

In the cavernous lobby of Trump Tower, an eager supporter filled that pregnant silence. “Bring it back!” she shouted.

Sure enough, that was Trump’s promise and the final line, the bottom line, of his candidacy: “But if I get elected president, I will bring it back bigger and better and stronger than ever before, and we will make America great again!”

This became his motto. Make America Great Again. The premise of that motto—the American Dream is dead—carried the day in state after state, and it drew crowds at rallies in places like Lowell, Massachusetts; Beaumont, Texas; Mobile, Alabama (“We’re running on fumes. There’s nothing here. . . .”); and Springfield, Illinois.

“These rally towns,” the Washington Post reported in an early effort to decode Trump’s meaning, “lag behind the country and their home states on a number of measures. Their median household incomes are lower, and they often have lower rates of homeownership or residents with college degrees.”¹

On April 26, 2016, my own state of Maryland, along with four other states, voted for Trump, putting him on the doorstep of the Republican nomination. “Every single place I go is a disaster,” Trump said in his victory remarks that night.

Trump obviously didn’t go where I had gone that morning: to Chevy Chase Village Hall, off Connecticut Avenue, just outside Washington, D.C.

When I arrived at Village Hall, which is the polling place for the village, I found a parking spot between a BMW and a Porsche SUV. That was unsurprising. Chevy Chase Village is the wealthiest municipality in the D.C. region, which is probably the highest-income region in the country. The mean household income in the Village of Chevy Chase is $420,000.² Only about 2 percent of America makes that much.

Chris Matthews and George F. Will are just two of the well-known residents of the village. Ambassadors, lawyers, bankers, and lobbyists populate the beautiful massive homes off Connecticut Avenue, almost all of which are worth more than $1 million. The median home costs $1.52 million.³

Chevy Chase Village isn’t merely wealthy in material things. To the extent we can measure the good life, Chevy Chase has it. About 95 percent of Chevy Chase’s families had two parents at home in 2015. The Village Hall hosts a monthly speaker series, which kicked off in April 2017 with a talk by documentary filmmaker Tamara Gold. CIA veteran David Duberman was slated for the next month.

A committee of volunteers throws regular parties for the whole village. Saint Patrick’s Day included a “Father/Daughter Pipe/Harpist Team and True Scottish Piper,” according to the Crier, the village’s own newsletter. Children and toddlers can take ballet and musical theater classes at Village Hall. Adults can take Tai Chi.

Almost exactly one year after the primary, I returned, to observe the village’s annual meeting.

“Oh, Mrs. O’Connor!” the village’s chief of police, John Fitzgerald, shouted across the parking lot, with a flirting tone. “I didn’t recognize you in that new car.” Mrs. O’Connor blushed and smiled. She chairs the village’s Committee for Seniors.

Having its own village police force is impressive enough, considering the population of two thousand. Fitzgerald knows how extraordinary this is. “This community is really, really good to work in,” Fitzgerald, a big Irish cop of the type I’m used to from New York, said at the annual meeting. “Small is good.”

When he discussed the force’s most recent initiative—a camera on Grafton Street to bust folks using it as a cut-through to Wisconsin Avenue—Chief Fitzgerald described it as “right near Mr. Marsh’s house.” The evening seemed like a scene out of Thornton Wilder’s Our Town.

The community is engaged. At the village meeting, there were presentations by the volunteer members or chairmen and chairwomen of the Community Relations Committee, the Ethics Commission, the Financial Review Committee, the Public Safety Committee, the Traffic Committee, the Local Advisory Panel to the Historic Preservation Commission, the Western Grove Park Friends Group, the Environment and Energy Committee, the Parks and Greenspaces Committee, plus Mrs. O’Connor for the seniors committee.

A village of two thousand people stocking ten committees with a handful of volunteers each is extraordinary. There are other details. The coffee-and-desserts reception before the annual meeting featured seasonal flower arrangements provided by the village’s Garden Club.

The Community Relations Committee organized a parents’ night out where they brought in neighborhood teenagers to babysit in the charming Village Hall, so that the adults could enjoy a dinner at the restaurants within walking distance. Betty O’Connor’s seniors committee brings in innovative experts to help the village’s elderly who are struggling physically or with dementia.

Walk down Grove Street on a Monday evening, and you will see kids from a handful of families mixing together to ride their bikes and scooters, and dribble their basketballs and soccer balls down the brick sidewalks. Parents hanging out front keep an occasional eye on the neighborhood kids.

Chevy Chase is “the Village” Hillary Clinton said it took to raise a family.

And it’s no surprise Hillary Clinton took the village.

At one of the village’s impressive homes, a politically connected financier, who is also the son of a former top diplomat, hosted a fund-raiser for Hillary Clinton in November 2015. The couple hosting the event raised enough to qualify as “Hillblazers”—Clinton’s name for those who raised over $100,000. But so did a dozen other Chevy Chase residents.⁴

The day I was there for the 2016 primary, Hillary raked in 85 percent of the primary vote. She would a few months later also dominate the general election at this polling place, beating Donald Trump by 56 points. This tells us that wealthy, white Chevy Chase is very liberal. But a closer look tells us something more specific.

Compare Hillary’s 56-point margin with 2012 when Obama defeated Mitt Romney by 31 points. There is something about Chevy Chase that makes it like Trump so much less than it likes Romney.

Chevy Chase’s aversion to Trump appears much more clearly when we set aside the general election, which is a choice between a Republican and a Democrat. We need to focus instead on the Republican primary.

Trump performed dismally among Republican primary voters in the Village of Chevy Chase. John Kasich, the moderate of the three-man field, overwhelmingly won the village with 64 percent (compared with his 23 percent statewide). Donald Trump scored only 16 percent in the village (compared with his massive 54 percent statewide).

Chevy Chase’s wealth is extreme, but the phenomenon in play here—wealthy, highly educated people in affluent communities eschewing Donald Trump and his proclamation that the American Dream is dead—is common. Chevy Chase is in Montgomery County, Maryland, which is the third-most-educated county in the nation, measured by advanced degrees—31.6 percent of adults over twenty-five have a graduate or professional degree.⁵ (Nationally the rate is less than 12 percent.) The rest of the top four—Arlington and Alexandria in Virginia, and the District of Columbia (functionally a county for our purposes)—are among Trump’s thirty-five worst counties in America.

You can spot the suburbs chock-full of advanced degrees and six-figure salaries by looking at a primary election map for counties that voted for John Kasich or Marco Rubio.

If we begin at the beginning of the nominating contests, in Iowa, Rubio won Polk County (home to prosperous Des Moines) and two adjacent counties, Story and Dallas, while Trump finished third in that trio of counties. Story County is home to Iowa State University. College towns across the country are also part of that Rubio-Kasich Country.

In Michigan, Kasich won Washtenaw County (home to the University of Michigan) and Kalamazoo County (home to Bell’s Brewery and Western Michigan University). While Trump won every county in Pennsylvania’s primary, Kasich’s strongest showing wasn’t his birthplace in Western Pennsylvania but the wealthy and highly educated “collar counties” around Philadelphia: Montgomery, Delaware, and Chester.

It’s easy to see this pattern as a simple matter of ideology: Kasich was running as the moderate candidate, and colleges and rich people are more moderate. But during the primaries, Trump, by most measures, was less conservative than Kasich. Trump was more open to taxing the rich, wanted higher spending, was less enamored of free trade, and was more enthusiastic about a government role in health care.

The best explanation of why these pockets of elites rejected Trump is found in Trump’s own words. He was selling a sense of decline and a desperate need to turn things around. In Kasich Country, though—in college towns and prosperous suburbs—people believed the American Dream was alive. These people also believed America was Great already, while much of the electorate didn’t.

This isn’t a universal rule, and it doesn’t apply as well to the general election, when voters were picking between Trump and Hillary. But, as a general rule, you can use Trump’s electoral strength in the early Republican primaries as a proxy for pessimism.

Trump Country, by this definition, is the places where hope is low and where the good life appears out of reach. So the flip side is this: Where Trump bombed—especially in the GOP primaries, but also compared with Romney in 2012—are the places where you can sniff out confidence, optimism, hope, and, if you’ll pardon the treacle, the American Dream.

This story is far more important than political analysis. If we come to understand what makes Trump Country Trump Country, we can better understand the plight of the working class and the current economic and cultural splitting of this country. More important, discerning what made some of the country immune to Trump, aside from standard partisan allegiances, will show us where lie hope, mobility, and optimism.

What makes some places thrive, but others collapse?

This is a huge question. It’s probably the central question of American society today, in which it is increasingly true that where you start (geographically and socioeconomically) determines where you end up. It’s a question about growing inequality, stubborn pockets of immobility, and the cultural coming-apart we are suffering. Trump’s shocking wins of the Republican primary and the general election were the most visible symptoms of this problem. If we start our search for the American Dream in Hillary’s Village, the Village of Chevy Chase, it’s tempting to come to a materialistic conclusion: People with money have hope, and the American Dream is alive and well in wealthy neighborhoods.

But a closer look at the primary map reveals other pockets of Trump opposition (in the early days)—another model of the good life. There’s a different sort of village out there.

The Other Village

Oostburg couldn’t be more different from Chevy Chase.

While Chevy Chase borders the District of Columbia, the Village of Oostburg sprouted up in the farm fields of Wisconsin. It’s an outlying suburb of Sheboygan, Wisconsin—which is itself not exactly a booming metropolis.

The median home in Oostburg is worth $148,000, meaning you could buy ten homes in Oostburg for the price of one in Chevy Chase.⁶ Oostburg is not poor: The average household earns $58,000, which is slightly above the national average. Even that slight advantage in household income has a clear—and salient—demographic explanation: Oostburg is a family town.

As a rule, different types of households nationwide have very different median incomes. Married-family households on average have higher incomes than non-married or nonfamily households. Oostburg is much denser with married-family households than the rest of the country is (two-thirds of all households in Oostburg compared with less than 50 percent nationwide), and that difference explains Oostburg’s advantage over the national median.⁷

In other words, Oostburg’s wealth is literally its family strength. And if you ask Oostburgers, they’ll say their family strength is really community strength.

A few weeks before that Maryland primary, I spent a couple of days in Oostburg to cover the Wisconsin primaries. Just as I would visit Chevy Chase because of what made it stand out—its wealth—I picked Oostburg because of what made it stand out: its Dutchness.

Forty-five percent of Oostburg claims Dutch heritage according to the census. Another 42 percent are German. “Oostburg” is Dutch for East-town. Dutch settlers came here in the 1840s, and the signs of the Netherlands, such as tulips and miniature windmills, are everywhere. “If you ain’t Dutch, you ain’t much,” was a phrase I first heard at the lunch counter of Judi’s Place, the family-owned din...