Good Luck With Your Predictions

A lifetime ago​—​on June 14, 2015, for example​—​people who worked in politics and elections thought that they understood with a fair sense of certainty how elections and politics worked. Politics, sort of like physics, had immutable laws, rather like gravity. Demography seemed to be one of them. On the left, John Judis and Ruy Teixeira had written a book saying that the increase in numbers of darker-skinned citizens would over time tilt electoral power toward the Democrats, while on the right, Henry Olsen was honing his theory that the Republican party was and would be moved in perpetuity by the ideological struggles among social conserv-atives, secular conservatives, somewhat conservatives, and moderates who made up its four factions. But that was then. Donald Trump entered the Republican primary contest the next day, these definitions ceased to wield their old power, and the world as we knew it dissolved.

As for ideology, Trump's campaign tore through, broke up, and scrambled Olsen's "four faces," splitting each one into pro and con factions. As for ethnic bloc voting, Trump's tirades and his speech, plus his inherent appeal to racist white elements, did unite most of the nonwhites against him. But white voters themselves refused to behave as a bloc, and instead found themselves split down the middle, driven by his controversial person and programs into divergent and opposing parts. Region meant nothing, as people north and south, east and west showed the same divisions. Religion, which had been a critical factor since the culture wars had begun 40 years earlier, ceased to be a meaningful predictor, as Trump split the faithful into quarreling factions. What mattered​—​the one thing that did matter​—​was a college diploma, a symbol of import that stands at one moment for different and critical things: for social as well as financial security, for entree into the class from which leaders are chosen, for comfort and ease in the knowledge economy, and for having the wherewithal to withstand the domestic upheavals the collapse of the old social mores has brought.

Olsen, a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, has called this our first "European" election, as it resembles contests in Europe in which working-class parties oppose establishment forces. But it might also be called the Charles Murray election, after the American Enterprise Institute scholar whose 2012 book Coming Apart gave voice to his fear that in the past 50 years the United States has been separating into two countries, distinct and unequal, one containing those enriched by the emerging knowledge economy and the other those betrayed by it. The current disruption is proving his case.

This split in the country was a long time in coming, and its causes go back many years. Nonwhites in America have mostly seen their living standards improving, whites with degrees know the world is their oyster, but the white working class is the one group that has lived for some time with a strong sense of slippage, of life moving backward, and more and more out of control. It thinks (or is told) of a time in the past when factories boomed and cities and towns were built up around them, when men from abroad, or from the farms or the slums, could find jobs in them that would last them a lifetime, on which they bought homes and raised families, and later retired on adequate pensions that took care of the specter of want. For decades, the economy grew by 3 percent a year or more, personal income rose steadily, and people got used to the upward trajectory. Then all of it came to a halt.

"The turning point was 1973, the year that hourly wages, which had steadily risen for thirty years, began to stagnate or even fall," Ross Douthat and Reihan Salam wrote in their 2008 book Grand New Party. "There was a recession, but the problem ran deeper. .  .  . Globalization began to hurt American manufacturing as jobs slipped away overseas, rising immigration rates following the 1964 reform, created a glut of low wage labor; and skill-biased technological change meant that the market for employment privileged education over hard work." From that time on, economic news in this country would focus on stories of plants shutting down and large corporations hiring outside of this country or moving their plants overseas. Automation let manufacturers do more with fewer people. When the recovery came in the '80s and '90s, it boosted the financial and technological sectors, but the manufacturing jobs never really came back. While the working class slipped, the Internet and computer technology created a new world of high-tech jobs and a new class of those adept in the information economy, which became bigger, more broadly based, and richer than any in history. "Real income for the bottom quartile of American families fell after 1970," Murray tells us in Coming Apart. "The poor didn't actually get poorer .  .  . but they didn't improve their position much, either. Real family income for families in the middle was flat. Just about all of the benefits of economic growth from 1970 to 2010 went to people in the upper half of the income distribution."