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February 3 - February 12, 2021
But as I considered it more during our stay, I saw in greater detail the contours of this support we were enjoying.
Our dense and broad network of friends, which had become a short-term safety net, wasn’t merely a network of friends. It was a network of organizations, companies, churches, schools, and clubs. The hubs that bound us to these friends are what we call “institutions of civil society.”
Like the health insurance that paid most of the bill, the “insurance” of the social networks had provided great peace of mind without ever rising to the front of our consciousness.
If
you belong to a church, you’ve probably experienced something like it, on either the giving end or the receiving end, or both. Alternatively, if you are college educated and married, even if you don’t belong to a church, you probably have many ties to civil society institutions—swim clubs, PTAs, workplaces, book clubs—that provide this sort of infrastructure of friends and associates.
“[N]etworking power is like the air we breathe—so pervasive it’s easy to miss,” author J. D. Vance wrote when he finished law school and joined the elite.1 Vance noticed the networks, though, when he was at law school. It was a shocking realization for him that personal connections, typically through institutions of civil society, were central to the success of the elites. Growing up in a broken family in a working-class suburb, Vance hadn’t had those networks. It wasn’t so much that people in working-class towns had less powerful connections; it was that every family was less connected—to
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What generated the interest in working-class white Middle America? Donald Trump.
Rather than a book about Trump, this is a book about Trump voters. More specifically, it’s about Trump’s core supporters, who voted for him in the Republican primaries in 2016.
It was a referendum on whether or not the American Dream was still alive.
This isn’t a book about Trump. It’s certainly not a book about Hillary Clinton. Only indirectly do Trump’s policies and proposals play a role here, because what Trump has done as president is largely immaterial to this story. What candidate Trump said is mostly immaterial, except for his central message: The American Dream is dead.
But maybe the things we think accompany the American Dream are the things that really are the American Dream. What if the T-ball game, the standing-room-only high school Christmas concert, the parish potluck, and decorating the community hall for a wedding—what if those activities are not the dressings around the American Dream, but what if they are the American Dream?
Yes!
In this book, I’m going to take you to the parts of America where the Dream is clearly alive, as well as the places where the Dream seems dead. To really learn from this tour through time and place, you, the reader, may need to abandon your understanding of how to measure the good life. We will look at many numbers, regarding marriage, suicide, income, employment, and so on. But those numbers are epiphenomena—they are ripples out from what matters.
This study turns out to be a study of place, of social capital, of civil society, of community, and of church.
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.
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
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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,”
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
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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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
While there’s no speaker series highlighting famous residents, the community’s strength is unquestionable. Neighbors all greet each other at Judi’s. Customers of the diner prepared and delivered frozen meals to the waitress, who was scheduled to have surgery the next day. One man—a mechanic named Dan at the local farm—complained to me about the recent Christmas concert at the public school. He couldn’t get a seat in the gym for the concert, because all of his neighbors, even those with no school-age children, were taking up the seats. One neighbor shrugged at Dan’s plight of having no seat.
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What made Oostburg so immune to Trump’s appeal? It’s inadequate to say that Christian conservatives rejected this twice-divorced recently pro-choice New York playboy. In South Carolina, a few weeks earlier, Trump won the evangelical vote with the same percentage (33 percent) that he won the rest of the state, according to exit polls. Oostburg wasn’t a mere outlier, either. If you wanted to predict which rural, Christian counties would buck the Trump train when they had a choice among Republicans like Cruz and Rubio and Kasich, you could have done a lot worse than looking at a county’s Dutch
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Utah is the most religious state in the country by almost any measure. It also boasts strong families, a strong economy, and a strong safety net. No state has as much economic mobility—the ability to earn more than your parents—as Utah, according to researcher Raj Chetty.9 The American Dream is alive and well there.
In the 2016 Republican primaries and caucuses, across more than three thousand counties in the United States, only about 1 percent of counties gave Donald Trump less than 20 percent of the vote.
So you can boil the anti-Trump places in the early primaries down to two categories: (1) the highly educated elites and (2) the tight-knit religious communities. These look like two different (maybe even very different) types of places. But in a crucial sense, they’re one type of place. Here’s the common thread between the Oostburgs and the Chevy Chases, and among analogues around the country: Both villages have strong institutions of civil society—local governments, churches, country clubs, garden clubs, good public schools, and, in Oostburg’s case, Judi’s Place. Those community institutions
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Yes!
To understand the phenomenon of alienation and coming apart, we need to do more than consider who these people are. We need to consider where they are.
Geography, more than we typically assume, is destiny.
Trump did better in the primaries among people who didn’t go to church, polls show. “Trump trailed Ted Cruz by 15 points among Republicans who attended religious services every week,” Peter Beinart reported. “But he led Cruz by a whopping 27 points among those who did not.”
Wow!
Oostburg voted Cruz and Chevy Chase voted Kasich. Within the context of Republicans, churchgoing white Christians are conservative while wealthy, highly educated white suburbanites are moderates. You could see these two things as opposites, but the stories of Kasich Country and Cruz Country are the same story: People enmeshed in strong communities rejected Trump in the early primaries while people alienated, abandoned, lacking social ties and community rushed to him immediately.
Yes!
Trump’s best large county in the Iowa caucuses, Pottawattamie, had the weakest civil society—churches, neighborhood groups, volunteering, voting—of any large county in Iowa, and is known instead for its neon-lighted casinos erected to bring in out-of-state gamblers.
Everyone trying to explain Trump’s rise early on noted that he had “tapped into a deep sense of frustration.” That phrase became a cliché, but it was true. Articulating that frustration precisely and explaining its causes were a lot harder.
After the election, conservative intellectual Yuval Levin put his finger on it best. “At the root of the most significant problems America faces at home is the weakening of our core institutions—family and community, church and school, business and labor associations, civic and fraternal organizations.”
To explain Trump’s core supporters, many commentators pointed to the factories that were closing, but they should have been pointing to the churches that were closing.
Yes!
But if we see the problem as primarily a dissolution of civil society, a collapse of community, then it becomes clear that “idleness,” if you want to call it that, can be understood not as a sin but as an affliction. These people have been deprived of meaningful things to do.
Yes!
In places like Chevy Chase or Oostburg, people are given things to do. Any longtime member of a robust religious congregation has laughed and warned someone, “Oh, don’t go talk to Sally Davis unless you want to be given some ministry to run.” If you belong to a small neighborhood swimming pool, you probably can spot the look in the eye of the board member when he’s coming over to ask for volunteers. Our bosses, our wives, our husbands, our neighbors, and our kids’ swim coaches rope us into stuff. Those of us tangled up in thick webs of civil society show industriousness not mostly because we
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This dissolution of civil society leaves people alienated. Robert Nisbet, author of The Quest for Community, defined alienation this way: “The state of mind that can find a social order remote, incomprehensible, or fraudulent; beyond real hope or desire; inviting apathy, boredom, or even hostility.” The alienated individual “not only does not feel a part of the social order; he has lost interest in being a part of it.”
Alienation is the disease of working-class America. Its most important accompaniment is family collapse. Strong families are the necessary condition of the good life, of economic mobility, and of the American Dream. The story of Election 2016, the story of the working-class struggle in America, the story of rising suicides and crumbling families, and the story of growing inequality and falling economic mobility, is properly understood as the story of the dissolution of civil society.
Yes!
Why do so many people believe the American Dream is dead? I think the answer is this: because strong communities have crumbled, and much of America has been left abandoned, without the web of human connections and institutions that make the good life possible. More of America is a wasteland of alienation. Less of America is the “village.”
Yes.
But remember the second village. There could, conceivably, be more Oostburgs. The raw material is more renewable there, and arguably it used to be more plentiful and could be again. It’s a sense of duty to one’s neighbors—a duty that includes a sense of duty to one’s family. It’s a sense of both being looked after and being needed. It’s a sense of a common, higher purpose. It’s shared, resilient mediating institutions. And frankly, in America at least, that common purpose is a common faith, and those mediating institutions are really the church.
Yes.
God says that an individual’s flourishing relies on something very worldly: the city. Only if the city flourishes can you flourish. If the city doesn’t flourish, you cannot flourish.
Keep this in mind!
Economic mobility is at the heart of the American Dream, and mobility was very real back then. A kid graduating from high school in 1958 (and thus born in 1940) had a 90 percent chance of earning more money than his parents.
The old folks back then were propped up by Social Security, funded by 8.6 workers for every retiree. Able-bodied men were expected to work, and almost all of them did. The unemployment rate in July 1955 was 4.0 percent. If a household was headed by adults in their thirties or forties, odds were overwhelming (above 80 percent) that at least one adult worked forty hours a week4—this was true even for families whose head didn’t go to college.
