Erik Baker ,oru?luyken porno izlemek orucu February 26, 2025

One Elite, Two Elites, Red Elite, Blue Elite

The decoupling of urban and rural America ? Jamison Lung

Picture an elite. You know, one of the ones that American voters repudiated when they elected Donald Trump last November. The Chicago Tribunehas a helpful if partial litany to spark your imagination: “assistant deans, network anchors, public health officials and, yes, legacy newspaper journalists.” See the laptop on which their email job transpires, arranged beside a cup of Chemex-brewed coffee and a pile of to-be-read copies of The New Yorker on a faux-midcentury desk. You don’t know what they’re typing, but you can guess it’s something woke.  

One strange thing about this hackneyed vision of the ruling class is how plainly self-contradictory it is. Everywhere there are signs of a proverbial bigger fish, looming just out of view. An assistant dean implies a university president and a board of wealthy donors; a journalist implies a media conglomerate, or perhaps a private equity firm, ready to commence layoffs; a public health official implies a whole state apparatus, throughout which, even or especially at its highest echelons, Republicans abound. The elite we’ve conjured up is most likely paying rent for their tastefully furnished apartment to a real estate interest of one sort or another; all the cliché signifiers that make them recognizable testify to their status as a consumer, dependent on a corporate constellation they observe from below. They might still be paying off their student loans.

It doesn’t matter. All these objections have been made before, and they’ll be made again. Since the narrative of Trumpism as a populist revolt against the elite crystallized nearly a decade ago, it has proven impervious to all contravening evidence. Data journalists and political scientists produced reams of statistics debunking “the mythology of Trump’s ‘working-class support.’” Investigators documented the CEOs and business owners and doctors and lawyers who made up most of the mob that stormed the Capitol on January 6, 2021. The historian Patrick Wyman, in a widely read and acclaimed series of essays, charted the ascension of the “American gentry,” the hyper-reactionary business- and land-owning class that dominates political and economic life in small-town and rural America. We all watched as the wealthiest man in the world took over the preferred social media platform of journalists and academics and reengineered it to pummel users with white supremacist conspiracy theories and porn. And still, when Elon Musk’s chosen presidential candidate triumphed for the second time, returning to the White House after four short years in his Florida palace, New York Timescolumnist David Brooks discerned that voters had sent a simple message to “elites”: “Do you see me now?”

Without a doubt, “sending a message” is what many Trump voters understood themselves to be doing. And it is similarly certain that there were plenty of bona fide elites in the Kamala Harris coalition—not only our imagined professional-managerial class stereotype but the big bosses of urban liberal life as well, all those philanthropic bankers and hospital CEOs and nonprofit executives who go to wine-cave fundraisers to drink up assurances that nothing will fundamentally change if Democrats win. The question is not whether liberal elites exist or even why they are resented. It is why they are so much moreresented than the other elites—why, for that matter, the right-wing billionaires and millionaires who have exerted so much control over the federal government for decades and who exercise nearly unimpeded rule over the vast majority of this country’s territory nonetheless get to be the “other” elites, or the “counter-elite,” as the more self-conscious of their number have begun to fashion themselves. Why don’t we see them?

The question of why rural Americans don’t harbor more resentment toward their most proximate overlords has long vexed political analysts. There are really two separate phenomena here that warrant explanation. One is the relatively more conservative bent of rural voters compared to their urban counterparts, a trend that American historians have analyzed for generations. The decline of Populism and the political fissure between agrarian workers and the industrial working class; the vicissitudes of New Deal-era farm policy; the emergence of a conservative class of regional boosters able to garner popular support for their vision of revitalization and modernization; the late-twentieth-century rise of corporations like Walmart that offered small-town Americans a taste of prosperity in exchange for their embrace of a traditionalist company culture—there is no shortage of plausible explanations for why modern American liberalism has had difficulty penetrating the countryside.

But while these processes are all real and their legacy persists, they can’t do much to explain a more recent and striking development: the complete political decoupling of urban and rural America. As the historian of rural America Keith Orejel explains, before the 1990s, voting behavior in urban and rural areas tended to move in the same direction, even if rural voters still preferred Republicans on the margin. One could speak about the country as a whole moving left or right. In the landslide victories that punctuated twentieth-century presidential history, from FDR to LBJ, Ike to Reagan, the bromide that “America decided” every fourth November spoke some real truth. Even embattled, scandal-plagued Bill Clinton mustered a nine-point edge in the 1996 popular vote—a mark that no subsequent presidential victor has matched. As electoral margins tightened on a national level, however, they exploded on a local level. In 1996, over 1,100 counties reported a single-digit margin in the presidential contest. Two decades later, when Trump won his first election, that number was down to 310. National gridlock reflected an inexorable march to the left in America’s cities and a race to the right everywhere else. The 2000 presidential election debuted a county-level results map that, if you squint, looks like it hasn’t changed much in any subsequent vote: a sea of red dotted by metropolitan islands of blue.

In this new landscape, as Robert Brenner and Dylan Riley summarized in an ambitious essay in New Left Review following the 2022 midterms, “winning an election no longer involves appealing to a vast shifting centre but hinges on turnout and mobilization of a deeply but closely divided electorate.” For Brenner and Riley, the key axes of polarization are educational attainment and race. In the twenty-first century, they argue, the electorate has fissured along these lines into the camps of “MAGA politics, which seeks to redistribute income away from non-white and immigrant workers, and multicultural neoliberalism, which seeks to redistribute income toward the highly educated,” irrespective of race or national origin.

What is key, in their view, is that these camps both vie to redistribute income within the working class, rather than from capitalists to workers. Old-school social-democratic “reformism” worked toward such downward redistribution, but that politics ran aground on the shoals of what Brenner has famously called the “Long Downturn,” the stagnation that he argues has afflicted capitalist economies around the world since the 1970s. Instead of seeking to secure a bigger piece of a steadily expanding pie, today’s workers fight over the measly slice that’s been cut for them: white workers without college degrees vote for right-wing politicians who will protect the economic value of their whiteness by restricting immigration and shoring up racial hierarchy; the multiracial professional workforce votes for Democrats whose policymaking inflates the knowledge economy and thus the wage premium attached to their degrees.

The Brenner-Riley account is suggestive but problematic. It helpfully draws attention to the electoral stalemate that is the defining feature of contemporary national politics in the United States, and perceptively relates this outcome to the demise of the twentieth-century politics of economic growth. But the explanation they provide over-extrapolates from a moment—2016 to 2022—when Republicans made significant gains among white voters without college degrees while Democrats retained the loyalty of the vast majority of workers of color regardless of educational attainment. This chronology does not map neatly onto the disappearance of the “vast shifting centre” and the ossification of the electoral map, which predated the era of MAGA politics by nearly two decades. As late as 2008, Obama won non-college educated voters decisively. On the other side, with the benefit of hindsight, the 2024 election results corroborate suspicions that the Democratic Party’s position among a range of racial minority groups is not nearly as secure as it may have appeared even a few years ago.

It is also not clear that Republican policymaking is actually designed to redistribute income from professionally employed immigrants and workers of color to white non-college-educated workers, or that Democratic policymaking is geared to distribute income in the opposite direction. Rhetorical differences between the parties aside, the history of American immigration policy since the late twentieth century is one of brutal continuity. Conversely, while it is true, as Brenner and Riley observe, that the Democratic policy agenda funnels resources into the sector the U.S. Census Bureau calls “Educational Services, and Health Care and Social Assistance,” it is not quite right to describe the effect as a subsidy for college degree holders. “A substantial portion of those working in these fields likely have some sort of credential,” they write, which is true but a bit misleading. A minority of health care workers hold a bachelor’s degree or above, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, and the proportion of workers in the sector without a college degree has grown in the twenty-first century.

Reintroducing the lens of geography—somewhat mystifyingly absent from Brenner and Riley’s account—helps clarify things. In particular, their explanation of working-class Republican voting behavior works splendidly if one replaces “white and non-college-educated” with “non-metropolitan,” an overlapping but not coextensive category. Outside the big cities, there is no doubt about the Long Downturn. As Orejel emphasizes, the economic history of rural America since the late twentieth century, and especially since the Great Recession, is one of total devastation—in particular, job loss on a staggering scale, spiraling in tandem with a younger generation’s rapid outmigration. The imperative becomes, under such circumstances, to hold onto what’s left by whatever means necessary.

Slash government spending, except on farm subsidies, in order to cut taxes; eliminate “job-killing regulations” to reduce business costs to a bare minimum; expand oil and gas extraction; and, yes, crack down on immigrants who “steal” American jobs—the core platform of the twenty-first-century Republican Party makes little sense as a program for a sustainable future. But it becomes legible as a bargain proposed to people in struggling rural communities: fewer social services and less breathable air down the road in exchange for fewer layoffs today. With few of those places, by the 1990s, resembling a prosperous welfare state to begin with, it is not hard to understand why a reasonable person might take that deal.

It is a deal, in turn, which is explicitly anchored in a vision of class collaboration. In the Republican lexicon—which, again, in the last several decades has been engineered for a predominantly rural target audience—the wealthy are “job creators.” The pillars of the party, arguably its most reliable voters anywhere, are affluent business owners in decaying small-town communities: Wyman’s “American gentry.” They have recruited many of their proletarianized neighbors to their cause by promising to give them jobs, or keep them on the payroll, if they vote to cut taxes and relax regulatory standards. But those workers, in joining the red team, do more than cast ballots for Republican politicians. They learn to see the local ruling class as a bulwark against the further erosion of their communities. Their prosperity is important because it keeps money and people in the town. Their white supremacy, their jealously guarded inheritance from the antebellum master class, helps explain why the disproportionate victims of government evisceration don’t deserve better. Their values of faith and family promote the kind of social cohesion that wards against the temptation for young people to flee to the sinful city. There, in the metropolis, with fortunes propped up by government largesse, dwell the real elites.

You can tell an equal and opposite story about class and party politics in the big cities—up to a point. A map of the areas where the workers in the “Educational Services, Health Care & Social Assistance” sector are most concentrated looks an awful lot like a map of places where the Democrats still perform well, which in turn looks like a map of major metropolises. That makes sense. For much of the late twentieth century, metropolitan economies were hit just as hard, if not harder, by the Long Downturn as rural areas. In many eastern and midwestern cities, what came to be known as the “urban crisis” had roots stretching back to the period after World War II, when large manufacturing firms began fleeing urban union strongholds for suburbs and exurbs, especially in the favorable business climate of the Sunbelt. By the 1970s, New York and Detroit were in ruins, their industrial base decimated, while upstart retailers like Walmart and Amway grew vertiginously in small towns. The industrial working class got “recycled,” as Gabriel Winant puts it, into employment in health care, education, and government services.

Big cities weathered this transition best because they have the tax base to support a robust public sector—especially those cities, like New York, that in the 1980s and 1990s succeeded in attracting droves of yuppies. Even the largely privatized health care industry remains propped up by government spending. While rural places around the country increasingly suffered from hospital closures and a shortage of schoolteachers, health care and social service employment in New York increased by 75 percent between 1969 and 1989. Education employment fully doubled. Under such circumstances, it made sense for working people in big cities to retain and even intensify their fealty to the Democrats.

Paring down taxes and regulations in the hope that private employers would use the savings to keep workers on the payroll did not make sense to them as it did to their rural and small-city counterparts: their jobs depended on taxes and even, for some government-services employees, on regulations. Although the Democratic Party scaled back its commitment to the welfare state and repudiated its past ambitions for serious reform, it remained—to the chagrin of its neoliberal wing—the political home of social-service spending. Teachers might resent and even strike against Democratic municipal officeholders, but they were not liable to vote for Republicans out of frustration. Even nastier budget cuts and union-busting maneuvers would be sure to follow. No less than in rural areas, economic stagnation made jobs precious; the urban crisis was, at its core, a crisis of chronic unemployment. Any political compromise that forestalled layoffs appeared worthwhile.

Pervasive conditions of austerity often made it difficult for urban employers to sweeten the deal any further. But they discovered another strategy that could help them shore up their workers’ loyalty at low cost: affirming the diverse identities of the urban workforce and compromising with demands for inclusion. This deal made sense for both sides. If struggles for better wages were likely to prove fruitless, workers could at least push for solid protections against discrimination. And if employers couldn’t find it in their budgets to pay their workers more, they could at least try to demonstrate their concern for their well-being by making paper commitments to a bigotry-free workplace.

Affirmative action programs became commonplace; sexual harassment became, at least in theory, punishable; some private and public urban employers began to afford same-sex partners (city dwellers, almost exclusively) access to the benefits granted to heterosexual spouses. These developments did not represent any serious structural challenge to hierarchies of race, gender, and sexuality, and in many cases served to defang or co-opt more radical liberation movements of the 1960s and 1970s. But they helped make cultural liberalism the substrate of class collaboration in the cities, much like cultural conservatism in the country.

Why am I writing in the past tense? Much of this history, after all, is still alive today. But a quarter of the way through the twenty-first century, the political economy of America’s major cities looks different from how it did at its outset—even as the situation in small-town America remains recognizable, if more dire. There is a case to be made that the wealthiest metropolises have exited the Long Downturn: manufacturing profitability (Brenner’s key criterion) may still be constrained, but economic growth as economists measure it is back in a big way, and jobs have come along with it. While total rural employment remains below its level at the start of the Great Recession, the urban workforce has grown by over 10 percent. Unemployment in many major metro areas is below 6 percent, sometimes significantly so. And crucially, the gig economy has created an urban employer of last resort. Not everyone who’s unemployed can or wants to drive for Uber, of course, but the elasticity of the app workforce helps further cushion against the chronic joblessness that characterized the urban crisis of the late twentieth century.

Many of these jobs, to be clear, suck. Former comptroller of the currency Eugene Ludwig recently struck a nerve with a piece in Politicothat argued for including people who can only find part-time work or jobs that pay below a poverty wage in unemployment statistics––a move which would bump up today’s historically low figures to encompass close to a quarter of the workforce. Ludwig’s article resonated because it affirmed the truth that you can technically have a job and still justly feel yourself to be screwed. But there is a big difference between getting screwed by your shitty job and getting screwed by not having a job at all. The latter experience naturally tends to direct your ire toward the far-off structural forces, real or imagined, responsible for depriving you of work—fodder, sometimes, for unhelpful conspiratorial thinking but also fuel for righteous rage at austerity and the stingy politicians responsible for it. The former experience, in contrast, breeds more personalized forms of resentment: toward the boss that’s stiffing you and the customers mistreating you and, perhaps, the progressive bromides they espouse while neglecting your suffering. As we’ve seen in recent years, that resentment can fuel labor organizing where the infrastructure exists to channel it in that direction, but it can also diffuse into a less coherently political suspicion of liberal elites.

Affluent liberals, as both employers and inexhaustible fountains of consumer spending, are pillars of the urban job market. They are ubiquitous; it sometimes feels like they are the only people who can afford to live in our biggest cities. Unlike both their affluent rural counterparts and their predecessors among the urban rich, this class is staunchly Democratic, and they’ve been rewarded for it handsomely. From the Clinton years through the election of Joe Biden, the finance and tech industries formed the central engines of urban wealth accumulation, if not working-class employment. They also emerged as the Democratic Party’s most important beachheads in the world of capital. To secure this alliance, local and national policymakers have protected these sectors from meaningful regulation and lavished firms with tax advantages and government contracts.

One upshot of all the wealth sloshing around the upper echelons of the urban class structure is that there are millions and millions of workers further down the ladder whose primary occupation is providing goods and services to rich people, instead of fellow members of the working class. In The Rise of the Creative Class, his 2002 manifesto for urban revitalization driven by educated professionals’ affluence, Richard Florida bragged that he had “just about all the servants of an English lord, except that they’re not mine full-time and they don’t live below stairs.” Now such servants are just a smartphone tap away. In New York City, even employment growth in health services is almost exclusively concentrated in the rapidly expanding field of home health care; home aides’ clients are not necessarily as wealthy as Richard Florida, but they are usually wealthier than the workers, who earn an average of $38,280 annually.

This new servant class confronts an ever-higher cost of living, especially in the housing market. As the biggest cities have gotten richer in the twenty-first century, they have also gotten more unequal—more unequal, in fact, than smaller cities and rural areas. Here we have, finally, the key asymmetry between rural and urban political economy. Rural workers are poorer than their local elites, but they’re even poorer than the urban elites they see in the media. Urban workers, meanwhile, struggle as much as their rural counterparts, but they are surrounded by unprecedented prosperity instead of economic devastation. They may be aware intellectually that the gentry in the countryside is much richer than they are, but every day they are brought face to face, body to body, with a local ruling class that seems to be richer than just about anyone. And those people vote Democrat.

In November 2024, the county-by-county map of election results by county looked, at a glance, much like it has in each presidential contest this century: red country, blue cities, yielding a razor-sharp margin overall. Urban voters are still mostly voting for Democrats, for the same reasons they have done so for a long time. As we have already seen in the early weeks of Trump’s second reign, the Republican agenda poses a threat to the livelihoods of people working in health care and education and government services; it threatens the welfare of queer and trans people and immigrants even more acutely; it offends the cultural values that predominate in metropolitan areas. But voters shifted more toward the Republicans in “core urban” counties than they did anywhere else—and the multiracial urban working class seems to have been the vanguard of this shift. Racial diversity predicted a neighborhood’s likelihood to swing toward Trump more strongly than any other factor.

We should be wary of attributing this trend, like any other trend in electoral politics, to any one single factor. We also don’t yet know whether it will continue. Like much about the new Trump administration, the reaction of voters is difficult to predict. But Democrats are right to be freaking out about it. Their ability to preserve the national political stalemate rests on their ability to dominate in the cities to the same degree that Republicans rule everywhere else—which in turn depends on their ability to convince urban capitalists and workers alike that they’re on their side. In the world described by Brenner and Riley, where pervasive stagnation converts electoral politics into a tug-of-war over a fixed surplus, that trick is easier to pull off. Each side is trying to shift the pool of capital in its direction—enriching local elites while also warding against unemployment. But that’s no longer the situation. The urban economy is growing; the blue team won the tug of war.

Now its richest and poorest members are fighting with each other over the rope. That puts the Democratic Party in a distinctively awkward position. On the one hand, capitalists in finance and tech are doing so well that they seem to have recovered a belief in their ability to accumulate independently of the political mechanisms the Democrats have been able to offer them for the last few decades. Their biggest concern is no longer the risk that the gravy train will get turned off in Washington, but rather the demands that their own workforce is making on them for money and for power. “I don’t want a bunch of snot-nosed brats on the West Coast telling me what I can or can’t say online,” one senior tech lawyer recently told the Financial Times.

When it comes to waging war on the snot-nosed brats who work for them, the Republicans—with their open hostility to the labor movement and an “anti-woke” playbook to deploy against professional worker organizing—are better allies for tech executives than a Democratic Party that still needs to win those same workers’ votes to remain competitive. Donations from Wall Street and Silicon Valley swung sharply toward Trump in the 2024 election cycle. And in the aftermath of Trump’s victory, wealthy financiers and tech executives have practically been climbing over each other for the chance to bend the knee to him.

This development has the right-wing intelligentsia frothing at the mouth. Conservative bloggers and think tankers have for years argued that the right can only break the power of the “woke” elite, which they believe has ruled America since the Civil Rights Act, by cultivating the support of a “counter-elite,” a term pinched from the so-called complexity scientist Peter Turchin. This crowd long ago selected J.D. Vance as its Great White Hope, a bridge between the traditional ruling class of movement conservatism—the bootstrapping gentry of the exurbs and small cities in decline—and the finance-tech elite that the likes of Peter Thiel have been working on pulling to the far right. So it is not surprising to see Bari Weiss, for instance, crowing that Trump’s victory, with Vance on the ticket and Thiel and Musk at his side, represents “the triumph of the counter-elites.” It is, however, reasonable to wonder how long a coalition formed of the richest people outside the big cities working in tandem with the richest people in the big cities can continue to frame itself as a counter-elite with any degree of rhetorical purchase. Once all the public health officials are laid off, the journalists replaced by ChatGPT, and the assistant deans swapped with robots piloted by miniature clones of Christopher Rufo like Eddie Murphy in Meet Dave, will anyone still believe they are the ones who really rule our society?

The Democrats, however, seem reluctant to seize on this moment to try to liberate themselves from dependence on the financiers and tech moguls at the summit of our urbanized political economy. It’s not exactly surprising to see them trying to hold onto whatever degree of elite support they can—which is still, at present, far from nothing, even if it is less than what it was five years ago. Party officials’ salaries need to stay ample; the consultants must keep getting their checks; lobbyists have to be pacified. This is just how a modern capitalist political party operates. Democratic overtures to big business, however—Kamala Harris’s refusal to commit to reappointing Lina Khan as FTC director, or her sycophantic approach to the crypto industry—only reinforce the perception that they are the party of the urban elite. “There are a lot of good billionaires out there that have been with Democrats, who share our values, and we will take their money,” newly minted DNC chair Ken Martin said at a candidate forum earlier this year, summarizing the party’s current tightrope act. “But we’re not taking money from those bad billionaires.”

The association between the Democrats and the “good billionaires” who own our liberal cities makes it harder for the party to appeal to an urban workforce that is now often less concerned with the specter of unemployment than with the fact that they still struggle to make ends meet when they do have a job, despite the immense wealth enjoyed by everyone to whom they deliver food and serve coffee, whose teeth and houses they clean, who outbids them when they’re apartment-hunting. Whether or not those workers actually embrace the Republicans is to some extent beside the point. The number of 2020 Biden voters who didn’t vote at all in 2024 was vastly greater than the number who switched to Trump, and greater than his margin of victory. But there is reason to believe that at least some members of the urban working class, especially men, have been negatively polarized against the liberal cultural values they associate with the Democratic Party and the hypocritical metropolitan elites it represents. When your boss is talking about diversity and inclusion while refusing you a raise, it’s easy to lose sight of the historical reality that those elites, from 1968 to 2020, have primarily embraced liberal attitudes on race, gender, and sexuality only to the extent they have been forced to by worker uprisings.

It is far from clear how the Democrats can wriggle their way out of this jam, but that is not the left’s responsibility to figure out. The bad news is that our task is not much more straightforward. In the aftermath of the election, as happens every time the Democrats lose, a chorus of voices has risen to explain that we just need to cut out the distractions and refocus on pure and simple class struggle. Everyone hates the elites, apparently, so the left just needs to do a better job explaining that our political program is the best way to stick it to them. But that premise is not exactly right. Everyone hates someof the elites. A lot of people are still just fine with wide swaths of the ruling class, and even more troublingly, with their reactionary cultural values—which are not merely odious in principle but in many cases an obstacle to true class solidarity, leading conservative workers to back the boss, for instance, when they take steps to make the lives of queer and trans employees more difficult.

The truth is that the class struggle in America today is anything but pure and simple. To get to a place where a politically unified working class is striving against the capitalist class, properly understood in its totality, would be an extraordinary achievement. It will take both practical and ideological work. The first step is to realize exactly how far away we are starting. In relishing the rage that has erupted against one set of elites—and recognizing the real political possibilities it opens up for us—we must not let the other one off the hook.