Out of the Past

When I was twelve or thirteen, probably in 1970, my parents took me on a drive up Highway 395, on the eastern side of the Sierra Nevadas. We stopped in a town called Bridgeport, and I was struck, even at that age, by how it seemed left from an earlier era. None of the high-desert towns we saw on that trip were what you'd call cutting-edge communities, but they had all been more visibly shaped by Post-War America than Bridgeport.
       About fifteen years later, my friend Will Jacobs showed me a then-obscure movie from 1947 called Out of the Past. I was startled to see a road sign reading “Bridgeport” appear during the opening credits, and still more surprised to recognize the town—not much different from the town I'd seen nearly a quarter-century after the movie had been shot. The movie was, of course, about our relationships with our pasts, and in it Bridgeport represented a lost, simpler America in contrast with the corruption of Reno, Los Angeles, and my own San Francisco. It kicked me into a fervent exploration of film noir, mostly because it's a great movie but I think partly because of the way Bridgeport linked me to its doomed protagonist through that same eerie sense of timelessness I'd experienced in my own past. 
       Some months ago, my wife and I decided to take a driving trip along that same Highway 395, and I made sure we spent the first night in Bridgeport. It had been forty-six years since I'd seen the town for the first time, nearly seventy since Robert Mitchum had filmed his scenes there. As if I'd gone back to it in a dream, I found it quiet, nearly empty, and almost unchanged. 
       The town knew nothing of me, and I knew very little of it, really. But walking down those nearly empty streets in the late evening and early morning, I had a sense of having stepped not only into a lost American but somehow into a lost part of myself that I can't clearly see, a part both real and imagined.

Bookends of History

All year I’ve been forcing myself not to blog about the election. It’s not easy: I’ve been a passionate election-watcher since 1976, and I’ve never seen one as weird and gruesomely fascinating as this one. But I have a book to revise, a big book, and my publisher has now set a publication date, in October of next year. Which means I can’t take my brain off it unless I want to cause some real trouble.
       I have, though, persuaded myself that I’m allowed to write a little bit about the election when I can put in the framework of my book. In my last post I compared the current lunacy to the election of 1828. This time I thought I should tie that up. Because the election of 1828 was the beginning of a vast narrative arc in American history, and I think now we’re arriving at the end of that same arc: the age of the white working class. 

       For the first few decades of our republic, voting rights were restricted nearly everywhere to men with property and money. Then, starting mostly in the 1820s, a wave of democratic sentiment pushed state governments to extend the suffrage to nearly all adult white men. Barely over 100,000 Americans voted for presidential candidates or electors in 1820. About 360,000 voted four years later. Over 1.1 million voted in 1828.  
       That changed everything. An elite electorate had chosen a series of Founding Fathers for president, then the aristocratic son of a Founding Father. The voters of 1828 threw out John Quincy Adams and overwhelmingly chose Andrew Jackson, a war hero, a Westerner, and a populist. Ever since, the most powerful group in every American election has been working-class whites. If either political party could win the hearts of most of those voters, it could dominate the nation.

       "Working class" is a messy and poorly defined term, of course, and making too much of it can distort things. Most political scientists these days base the definition on formal education. Income is an unreliable measure, mostly because of the way issues of age throw it off (an Ivy League law student can earn a lot less than a union industrial worker of his own age), so "high school only" vs. "college educated" becomes the easiest way to attempt to isolate most of the things we mean by "class." Those voters aren’t necessary industrial workers; in fact, through most of our history, they were overwhelmingly farmers, and now more of them are in service jobs than industry. A better name might be that phrase popular in Jackson's era: the "common man."
       Whatever we call them, before World War II they accounted for about 85% of the American electorate. Over the next few decades, two things changed: first, more white people started attending college, leading to changes in occupations, social allegiances, and political agendas; next, the non-white population soared. The proportion of those "working-class" whites had sunk to 65% of voters by 1980. It plummeted to 48%, no longer a majority, only twelve years later. In 2012, it had slid to 37%.
          The Democratic dominance of American politics from 1932 to 1968 was based on those voters. When the Democrats began to lose that demographic in the wake of the Civil Rights years, the Republicans rose, triumphing with the emergence of the blue-collar "Reagan Democrats." It was Bill Clinton’s ability to pull most of them back away from the Republicans that enabled him to win in 1992. When George Bush won them back again, the Republicans took back the White House.
       Then, in 2008, Barack Obama won only 40% of no-college white voters but still easily won the election. Four years later he was reelected with only 36%. He still had to fight for those voters: he would have lost some key states, including Ohio, if he hadn't run much better among them there than he had nationally. Still, for the first time, a candidate could lose that constituency and not lose the election.
       This year, what had formerly been one of a whole constellation of demographic, numerical phenomena has become the center of the narrative. Donald Trump has targeted those voters ("I love the poorly educated!") like no candidate since the Great Depression. He’s virtually turned the election into a battle between them and everyone else. And he’s succeeding with them, usually polling close to 70%. 
       The kind of dominance Trump has among working-class whites would have brought on a landslide victory in the mid-20th century, and even just a few elections ago would have guaranteed a victory. But now he's decidedly trailing in the polls. It looks as though Hillary Clinton is going to be rejected overwhelmingly by the white "common man," and more narrowly by the white "common woman," and yet still become president. 
       I’ve seen Trump compared to Andrew Jackson many times this past year. I even did it myself, in my last blog post. I think, though, that they aren't so much parallel as complementary. They’re bookends. One stands at the beginning of a story, the other at the end.
        Of course, it’s still conceivable that Trump could win. This could turn out to be a late rally by the white working class before the rising generation of non-white Americans swamps them, a demographic Battle of the Bulge, made possible by the peculiarities of the Electoral College system. But it’s more likely that we’re watching a grand pageant, a sort of vast, improvisational theater production, about the end of an era.
       So right now I’m simultaneously revising a book about the beginning of the long dominance of Jackson’s "common people" and watching the end of that arc played out dramatically. The election is still distracting as hell when I’m supposed to be working on the book. But it's interesting and moving to see it as a summation of so much of what I’m writing about. (And, anyway, that makes for a great pretext to write political blogs.)

Has there ever been an election like this before?

My work on the book this week compels me to write about the presidential election. A national turning point, pitting a steady but boring representative of the dominant elite who liked to talk about economic plans and infrastructures against an unpredictable populist running on his questionable achievements outside politics, dodging clear policy statements and harping on the corruption of the system. The ugliest campaign ever, all about mutual character assassination—one candidate called a secretive quasi-aristocrat with ties to the banks who rose to power through family connections and corrupt bargains, the other a hateful, adulterous sleazeball in it for nothing but personal glory—and almost nothing about the issues. Old sex scandals trotted out by the press. And both sides wailing with apocalyptic predictions of national doom: They're going to keep selling the people out to the international banking establishment until we've lost control of our country! He's going to usher in mob rule, violence, and chaos!
       At least in the election I'm writing about there's no suspense to endure—we've known the ending for a long time. The poor old establishment voters really thought they had a chance to win, convinced that the American people would never be stupid enough to give the country to that hot-headed egomaniac with the big, silly-looking hair. But of course it was the candidate with the huge rallies and insanely enthusiastic followers who won in a landslide, thanks mostly to working-class men who'd never voted before. When the returns came in from Ohio and Pennsylvania, the incumbents knew they were finished.
       Welcome to 1828.