No longer were youth so ready to marry in their early twenties, buy a home, and raise a family of four or five. In this same era, a series of global financial shocks, from the dot-com bust to the more radical 2008 near–financial meltdown, reflected a radical ongoing restructuring in American middle-class life, characterized by stagnant net income, family disintegration, and eroding consumer confidence. But who exactly laid the tile, put the engine inside the cars, grew the arugula, or put slate on the new hip roof? After all, prestige cars, kitchen upgrades, gentrified home remodels, and niche food were never more in demand by the new elite. One cultural artifact was that as our techies and financiers became rich, as did those who engaged in electric paper across time and space (lawyers, academics, insurers, investors, bankers, bureaucratic managers), the value of muscularity and the trades was deprecated. And they felt that they were rightly compensated for both their talent and their ideological commitment to building a better post-American, globalized world. Meanwhile, the naturally progressive, more enlightened, and certainly cooler and hipper transcended their parents’ parochialism and therefore plugged in properly to the global project. London and New York shared far more cultural affinities than did New York and Salt Lake City.
Or, more charitably to the elites, the muscular classes were too racist, xenophobic, or dense to get with the globalist agenda, and deserved the ostracism and isolation they suffered from the new “world is flat” community. In a reversal of cause and effect, losers, crazies, clingers, American “East Germans,” and deplorables themselves were blamed for driving industries out of their neighborhoods (as if the characters out of Duck Dynasty or Ax Men turned off potential employers). Ideologies and apologies accumulated to justify the new divide. It created new iconic billionaires in high tech and finance, and their subsidiaries of coastal elites, while hollowing out the muscular jobs largely in the American interior. Globalization had an unfortunate effect of undermining national unity. What has caused the United States to split apart so rapidly? Red and blue states ensure that locale magnifies differences that were mostly manageable during the administrations of Ford, Carter, Reagan, the Bushes, and Clinton. Left–Right factionalism is increasingly fueled by geography - always history’s force multiplier of civil strife. We are now nearing a point comparable to 1860, and perhaps past 1968. Donald Trump’s election was not so much a catalyst for the divide as a manifestation and amplification of the existing schism.
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