EASY CHAIR
Losing My Religion
By Kevin Baker
EASY CHAIR 5I
n the Seventies, when I came of age
politically, being a lefty was all
about believing that “the people”
would always save us, if they just knew
the truth. We were still immersed in the
Century of the Common Man. We
believed, as Henry Wallace once put it,
that “the march of freedom of the past
one hundred and fifty years has been a
long-drawn-out people’s revolution.”
The moral arc of the universe might be
long, but the people, united, were push-
ing us more and more quickly along it.
This view was bred in the bone,
our national religion from “We the
People” through Aaron Copland’s
“Fanfare for the Common Man,” to
Carl Sandburg’s The People, Yes:Yes to the paradoxes of democracy,
Yes to the hopes of government
Of the people by the people for the
people,
No to the debauchery of the public
mind,
No to personal malice nursed and
fed ...That all the peoples of the world, gath-
ered here in peace and in freedom,
would know what to do: this was the
bedrock faith of America. Yes there was
slavery, yes there was the destruction of
the Indian nations—there were many
horrors and mistakes— but these were
just the inherited ills of the Old World.
Never before had there been anything
like America, and we the people would
make it work. The People, Yes.
It is a hard notion to let go. For the
past three years, it has been almost
touching to see how tenaciously so
many commentators on the political
scene still cling to it. Since 2016, there
has been a steady drumbeat from com-mentators insisting that something
must have gone very wrong for the
people to have allowed the election of
Donald Trump. Something must have
been done to them, the people, to make
them so desperate that they would em-
power a president as puerile, unquali-
fied, and openly venal as this one.
“America’s working class is in desper-
ate shape,” wrote the New York Times
columnist Nicholas Kristof. In another
op-ed, he noted that mortality rates for
working-class whites had soared in the
twenty- first century, surpassing those of
black Americans. “Democrats didn’t do
enough to address this suffering, so
Trump won working-class voters—
because he at least faked empathy for
struggling workers,” Kristof explained.
What’s more, he has written, Demo-
crats “have a knack for antagonizing
the working class by coming off as con-
descending, angry elitists” with a “pro-
gressive wing [that] has tarred all
Trump voters as racists, idiots and big-
ots.” The trouble is that “many Demo-
crats live in an urban blue bubble, with-
out a single Trump-supporting friend”
and their “hatred for Trump voters also
leaves the Democratic Party more re-
moved from working-class pain.”
Elsewhere on the Times op-ed page,
Timothy Egan informed us that “Dem-
ocrats can no longer connect to the
white working class.” He cited a sister
who ekes out a living in a janitorial job
but who is convinced that “many
Democrats ... are dismissive of her
religious beliefs and condescending of
her lot in life. She’s turned off by the
virtue-signaling know-it-alls,” he
wrote. So are “many others [who] sim-
ply feel insulted and dismissed” and
hence won’t so much as listen to Dem-ocratic plans to better their material
circumstances with proposals such as
free health or child care, or an afford-
able college education.
“For decades, Democrats, intoxi-
cated with the elixir of global trade
and its stock market wealth, ignored
the cries of the Rust Belt,” the journal-
ist Mike Kelly wrote in USA Today last
December, reporting as part of a three-
year project of traveling around the
country and listening to Trump voters.
He went on:Democrats promised to retrain factory
workers and miners. But to what end?
Some coal miners I met were earning
more than $100,000 a year. Can train-
ing programs, dreamed up by office-
bound intellectuals in Brooks Brothers
suits or Eileen Fisher dresses, find jobs to
match those salaries? ... Bet on the Rust
Belt voting for Trump until the Demo-
crats figure out how to get their hands
dirty and actually pay a visit.The crowning example of such ana-
lyses came, predictably enough, from
David Brooks, who in a Times column
last October created a fictional dialogue
between two characters designated
as “Urban Guy” and “Flyover Man.”
The virtuous, working-class, Midwest-
ern Flyover Man rages against the
Democrats—simultaneously socialists
and elites—who have abandoned him
to economic penury, and declares un-
dying devotion to Trump, telling Urban
Guy, “See ya’ in hell, brother.”T
he fact is, though, that the av-
erage Trump supporter today
is neither a raging nihilist nor
a blameless victim, and that he or she
did not turn to the Republicans out of