Center Not Holding

I spoke post-election to the Current Events Class in Evanston, 30 or so mature and very successful professional and business couples who have been meeting for decades to assay the world around them.

            Over coffee before my remarks, I learned that most couples had been unfavorable to Trump. I also sensed that their children and adult grandchildren were married and part of what I call the two-income “double professional” class, and doing very well.

In this election, Evanston and most of the suburbs in the once reliably GOP “golden crescent” around Chicago went for Hillary. In contrast, my rural county of Stark, like all of rural Downstate, was casting two of every three votes, or more, for Donald Trump, a much more GOP turnout than normal.

I pointed out to the worthies in Evanston that, sadly different from the situations of their offspring, many families in Stark, often headed by single white moms, are earning as little as 1/12th to 1/30th (this last for single moms) that of the double professionals.

When I was growing up in Stark in the 1950s, most families were intact and felt middle class.

This, even though they had less purchasing power wealth than many of today’s poor families. For example, purchase of the new, miniscule-screen TVs was a big deal back then, and many had to hold off for a few years.

Like many rural folks, the bread-winner often had a job “on the line” at CAT or John Deere, up to an hour’s drive away. The factory worker earned maybe a third as much as the general practitioner “doc” living just down the street. Enough certainly for both to feel middle class.

Today that broad swath of the rather comfortable middle, living in the same neighborhood, is largely gone. The double professionals often live instead in gated communities, consciously removed from the hoi polloi.

The center is not holding, I fear, just as Yeats worried in his post-WWI poem.

In this recent election, the anxious, even scared, underemployed former factory class may have gotten its revenge. What might it portend?

I called several former students, all deeply ensconced inside the Beltway, to see what they thought.

I admit this is ironic, as Trump campaigned against this powerful swirl of D.C. interests. Yet that is where he will have to govern, and not from Trump Plaza.

Will Trump want to be a one or two-term president, one observed, rather astutely, I thought. If the former, he may play strictly to his base, keeping all in turmoil for four years.

If Trump wants a longer tenure—which would certainly be needed to fulfill his objective of “draining the swamp” in the Washington—he will be more centrist, hoping to convince the many anti-Hillary (not pro-Trump) voters that he can run the country effectively.

Because of his signature campaign promise, Trump has to address “The Wall,” even if it is a “virtual wall,” which might use high-tech surveillance along much of the 1,900-mile border with Mexico.

            Second, he must try to stimulate good jobs for his base. This will be difficult, to say the least, I fear.

Any “on the line” factory jobs brought back to the US from over the border or across the pond would likely soon be squeezed out by continuing technological change.

            A huge jobs-generating infrastructure program is indeed badly needed, for example, to replace, not just re-pave, our mostly worn-out, 60-year-old interstate system. To get such a program off the ground will take most of his first term.

            Another savvy former student, now D.C. lawyer, noted that, “Trump is not—at least has never been to this point—an ideologue.” So, he may fly by the seat of his pants.

            Another wondered which Trump we might see? That is, will he revert to campaign mode and lash out via twitter at real and perceived slights? Or will he be ennobled by the presidency?

            Randy Fritz, a retired history teacher friend, pointed back to Chester A. Arthur, a New York political hack elected vice president in 1880. President James A. Garfield died shortly after their election of medical ignorance, following an assassination attempt.

            The most reluctant, unprepared president in history, Arthur rose nobly to the challenge, signed the first civil service act and modernized the Navy.

The biggest challenge for Trump, among a daunting array of international and domestic conundrums, is to try to reduce somehow the psychological and economic gap between “the haves” in Evanston and the underemployed in Stark County, who worry that the future may not need them.