“THINGS FALL APART” in “THE EDUCATION MYTH”
THINGS FALL APART
The Education Myth under Attack
On November 2, 2010, Republicans rode a wave of discontent with President Barack Obama to a resounding win, taking both houses of Congress and huge gains in state offices too. Scott Walker, a Republican from the Milwaukee suburbs running for governor of Wisconsin, perhaps more effectively than any other candidate in the nation ran a campaign that mobilized the resentment of those left out of the economy created by the education myth. Drawing on a path blazed by his two political heroes—Ronald Reagan and Tommy Thompson—Walker trained the resentment on public employees, especially those who worked in public education.1 Reagan had made hostility to public employees and their unions a key part of his challenge to Gerald Ford in the 1976 Republican primary, and famously, broke the air traffic controllers union during his first year as president in 1981. In Wisconsin, Thompson drew on a reservoir of anger toward public-sector workers in his election campaigns in 1986, 1990, and 1994 as the good manufacturing jobs like those at AMC in Kenosha continued to melt into air.2 Walker deepened this assault on public employees, and he channeled the disappointment stemming from Obama’s failure to save blue-collar livelihoods as he had promised to do in Janesville in 2008.
Walker, in his 2010 campaign, for example, made a major issue of saving manufacturing jobs by arguing he would create the right business climate. The Republican candidate promised that he would prioritize the creation of private-sector, blue-collar jobs, boasting that his agenda would create 250,000 in his first term alone. To do so necessitated lowering taxes, offering corporate incentives, and disciplining the public employee “haves” to help the private sector “have nots.”3
Further, Walker channeled the discontent of rural Wisconsinites, who by that time, harbored deep resentment against their urban counterparts, equating them to unearned economic prosperity, government resources, and public-sector work. Though rural areas in the state received a fair share of resources, those rural Wisconsinites—the very people left out of Florida’s creative class then growing in Madison, the capital city—struggled to secure livelihoods, and took out their frustration on public employees. Further, rural Wisconsinites often believed that the promise of higher education, particularly at the flagship University of Wisconsin-Madison, was outside the reach of their families. Many of these families, as Katherine Cramer’s study of rural Wisconsin has shown, believed UW-Madison did not want rural students to succeed there and that high tuition priced them out of that opportunity.4
Finally, Walker won in part because African Americans—centered in Milwaukee, and the source of a significant number of votes—did not turn out to vote, as they did not see the Democratic candidate (Milwaukee’s own mayor Tom Barrett) making much of an argument to reduce poverty and facilitate good jobs in a city in which male African American workers were hit harder than any other in the nation by capital flight. Indeed, Black turnout in Wisconsin registered one of the steepest declines in states in which African Americans represented an important part of the electorate.5
Conservative populists like Walker, bankrolled by deep-pocketed millionaires and billionaires who wanted to utterly decapitate social democracy, exploited the growing discontent over the plight of those without college degrees in states like Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania, siphoning white rural and working-class votes in a war against the public sector and leveraging the apathy of African Americans toward Democrats who had done very little to make their lives more economically secure. Walker’s agenda, for instance, which never unlinked jobs from education, nonetheless took aim at the liberal version of the myth that asserted that a college degree represented the path to a professional-class job, and the sole path to what Michael Sandel has called “social esteem.” Exploiting the growing resentment against the professional class and Democratic policies around trade that had made nonprofessional-class jobs like manufacturing much less secure, Walker undertook a scorched earth attack on public-sector unions and the University of Wisconsin System, asserting that unionized professionals took from blue-collar workers. This effort opened the way for Walker and other reactionary Republicans to further harm all workers, as his promise of a massive number of jobs never materialized, and he also undercut private-sector unions. Walker’s approach foreshadowed Donald Trump’s in his presidential campaign six years later, as Trump exploited Democrats’ support of a supposed meritocracy that favored those with college degrees and the trade policies that had hurt non-professional workers. Much like Walker, Trump’s promises would be little more than a mirage.
But in the lead up to 2016, it wasn’t only conservatives who were in revolt. Class-based efforts of low-wage workers, like the Fight for $15, and broader anti-corporate movements like Occupy Wall Street, showed that the Obama administration was far from the savior some on the left had expected. Rank-and-file teachers, most prominently in Chicago in the early 2010s, also began to revolt against the education myth, and by making social justice a key part of their organizing, rejected the neoliberal creative-class argument that left African American and Latino working people out of the city’s plans. In 2015, the surprising campaign of Vermont senator Bernie Sanders was premised on the idea of rekindling a comprehensive vision for social democracy not seen since the 1930s. Young people in particular, their future increasingly constrained by a grave competition to gain human capital, supported Sanders in large numbers. Though the Vermont senator didn’t win, a major area of strength for his campaign, importantly, was the Upper Midwest, where Trump would eke out his victory in the pivotal election of 2016.
The Center Doesn’t Hold
While President Obama professed his faith in both an incremental approach to reform and the education myth, conservative political candidates mobilized the growing discontent of those left out of the professional class. In 2010, Republicans in Congress won massive victories two years after the election of a Democratic president, just as had been the case in 1994. This time, Republicans won a net of sixty-three seats (even more than in 1994) to flip the House, and six seats in the Senate, leaving Democrats with a narrow—and easily filibustered—majority. As important as the check on Democrats in Washington, DC, was what happened in the states. Republicans netted six governorships and control of twenty state legislatures. Like any election, this one was complicated, and stemmed, at least in part, from the motivation of those disaffected with the Obama administration—on the failure to hold finance capital accountable for the economic crisis and for the opacity of the ACA—to turn out to vote. Some of this discontent took the form of the Tea Party, which was given oxygen from the ultrawealthy paleoconservative brothers Charles and David Koch.6 This was also the first election since Citizens United v. FEC (2010) opened the floodgates of dark money, disproportionately to Republicans.7
The new regimes across the United States were much more conservative than many Republican administrations had been before, and they were also plugged into a corporate, right-wing bill factory, the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC). Further, the most conservative shifts took place in the Midwestern states where enormous pressure on blue-collar livelihoods had led to higher-than-average unemployment rates following the economic crisis. Ultra-conservative Republican governors Scott Walker, Rick Snyder (MI), Tom Corbett (PA), and John Kasich (OH) were all elected in 2010. In Wisconsin, the legislature also flipped from a Democratic majority to a Republican majority, giving the GOP free rein to remake state politics.
After taking over as governor in 2011, Walker immediately mobilized resentment against the education myth to usher in an ALEC-directed attack on public employees called Act 10. In what had been the first state to guarantee public employee labor rights (in 1959), Walker and the Republican legislature used the pretext of a budget crisis to effectively strip bargaining rights from public employees in the state.8 Thousands of Wisconsinites demonstrated against the bill and Democratic legislators even left the state to prevent the senate from mustering the quorum needed to take up the bill. Ultimately, however, the GOP was victorious. As a report by Jeffrey Keefe of the Economic Policy Institute pointed out, public employees in Wisconsin were actually underpaid, when factoring in their education level, relative to comparable employees in the public sector. But the adjustment of this calculation for education level speaks volumes. As Keefe pointed out, about 60 percent of public employees had college degrees, while only 30 percent of private-sector workers did. These public employees had health insurance and other benefits that many private-sector workers—after years of capital flight and decimation of private-sector unions—lacked.9
Indeed, the Walker agenda clearly targeted the professional-class “winners” of the competition for human capital. Walker’s first budget included a massive cut to public education: almost $800 million to K-12, $250 million to the UW System, and $70 million to the state’s technical colleges.10 Here Walker’s animus toward public employees departed from Thompson, who was governor at a time when the mainstream of the Republican Party had clearly bought into the mythology around education. In contrast to Thompson, who been a vocal booster for the UW System, Walker in 2015 sought and won another massive budget cut for the UW System—another $250 million—that also eliminated statutory protections for tenure. Walker attempted an even more reactionary change to the mission of the UW System, unsuccessfully trying to extract “the search for truth” and reducing the mission to meeting the state’s “workforce needs.”11 On the one hand, shifting the UW System more toward the needs of employers was within the conservative orbit of the education myth, but combined with the assault on tenure, which has had a crushing impact on the national reputation of the UW System, it also represented a clear assault on the professional creative class in the state.
In 2017, Walker desperately sought to fulfill his campaign promise to create more manufacturing jobs by brokering a deal to get the Taiwanese corporation Foxconn to build a factory in Wisconsin. The deal only brought in a negligible number of jobs, and Walker was defeated by superintendent of education Tony Evers in an extremely narrow election in 2018.12 Nevertheless, Walker’s eight years in office realigned Wisconsin politics for the foreseeable future.
Walker was the most successful, but other Midwestern governors mobilized similar resentments. In Ohio, Kasich worked with a Republican legislature to pass that state’s version of Act 10.13 In Michigan, Snyder was able to pass a right-to-work law, primarily targeting teacher unions, that eliminated union security clauses for both public- and private-sector employees, and in Pennsylvania, Corbett, like Walker, ushered in a gargantuan cut to public education.14 Though Corbett was defeated by a Democrat in 2014, and Ohio’s public employee law was repealed through a referendum in November 2011, Kasich and Snyder, like Walker, were reelected to second terms, and these states all went for Trump in 2016.
The left began to take on the education myth during the Obama years too. First, Occupy Wall Street, a protest movement that began in September 2011, elevated the issue of wealth inequality onto the national stage through the public occupation of Zuccotti Park in New York City. Though the demands of Occupy were opaque, the movement rejected the notion that American economic inequality was the legitimate outcome of a meritocratic competition in which those who accrued the right human capital were appropriately rewarded. Further, though the protestors were forcibly ejected in November, Occupy encampments spread to cities across the United States, organizers went on to work in other radical social movements, and Occupy was a factor in social democratic Vermont senator Bernie Sanders’s decision to run for president in 2016.15
A much more politically sophisticated effort to remake American social democracy emerged through the Chicago Teachers Union (CTU), which made the nation aware of its efforts in a ground-breaking strike against neoliberal austerity in September 2012. It is fitting, given the emergence of Obama and Duncan, that a labor battle in their hometown outlined a new path for American teacher unions. In 2010, an insurgent group of activists called the Caucus of Rank-and-File Educators (CORE) won an election to take the CTU in a different direction. Previous leadership had sought merely to protect teaching jobs in the context of the neoliberal reforms in the city (a defensible goal, to be sure), but CORE officers led the union to organize with other community members in a rejection of the notion that the chance at acquiring human capital was all that was owed to students and that teachers were responsible for the persistent poverty in Chicago.16
Indeed, by the early 2010s, after decades of efforts to hold teachers accountable for their students’ lack of economic security, there was “broad agreement,” in the words of Joanne Barkan, that teachers were responsible for all that was wrong with American schools. Barkan points to a “consensus” that transcended political party and included think tanks, nonprofits, conservative antiunion groups, hedge fund managers, and editorialists who “all concur that teachers, protected by their unions, deserve primary blame for the failure of 15.6 million poor children to excel academically. Teachers also bear much responsibility for the decline of K-12 education overall (about 85 percent of children attend public schools), to the point that the United States is floundering in the global economy.” This campaign escalated into attempts to reform public education by finding ways to surveil, discipline, and fire teachers.17 Indeed, despite the efforts of national union leaders like Shanker and Chase to make unions more palatable by embracing the education myth, ironically, teachers were blamed even more for the inequality abetted by the American political system. Illinois, under a Democratic administration, was one of the first states to change its laws to deepen the connection between student test scores and teacher evaluations to be eligible for additional funding through Race to the Top.
Preparing for contract negotiations in 2012, the CTU developed a vision, called The Schools Chicago’s Children Deserve, to frame their demands. Though the document did not explicitly reject the economic opportunity associated with public education, it called for broad social democratic change, including smaller class sizes; more nurses, social workers, and psychologists; free public transportation for students; and an end to racial inequities in schools, particularly around disciplinary practices. Importantly, the CTU sought investment in art and music courses, as well as partnering with families to reinvigorate the community connection with schools, asserting that “families are not customers, students are not seats.”18
As the union’s contract expired in September 2012, the school district sought to increase the school day while forcing teachers to contribute more to their benefits, limiting tenure, and connecting teachers’ performance even more closely to student test scores. Ninety percent of the city’s teachers voted to authorize a strike, and thousands of teachers and their supporters marched downtown during the seven-day strike.19 Mayor Rahm Emanuel, who had served in both the Clinton and Obama administrations, played hardball with the teachers, but the union’s resolve and the support of the community, coupled with the timing of the strike (the September in which Obama sought reelection), turned the tide in the teacher’s favor. Emanuel and the school board agreed to raises for the teachers and dropped efforts to curtail tenure and increase the use of test scores to evaluate teachers. Other teachers had resisted efforts at top-down accountability before, but no union had challenged the foundation of the education myth in the spectacular way the CTU did. The effort became a model for other unions across the country.
Still No Guarantees
Following the Tea Party wave in 2010, Obama spent the next two years skirmishing with a Republican Congress over the budget. Going into the 2012 campaign, much of the luster had worn off the social democratic promises Obama made in 2008. His opponent, however, establishment Republican governor Mitt Romney, offered little more than typical platitudes about lowering taxes and free markets. And, Romney’s candidacy was tarnished by his connection to Bain Capital, a firm that profited from the destruction of nonprofessional-class jobs.20
Romney symbolized just how out of touch he was when he was recorded speaking at a big dollar fundraiser in which he claimed that 47 percent of the country were unproductive parasites who did not pay federal taxes. The former Massachusetts governor walked back his comment, but the Obama campaign took the populist high ground, which gave the incumbent just enough traction to hold off his opponent.21 Still, the margin of victory was less than resounding: in a lower turnout election than 2008, Obama’s popular vote margin fell below 4 percent (from 7.2 percent) and electoral college votes declined to 332 (from 364). Democrats picked up a mere eight seats in the House and two in the Senate. They lost the latter two years later. This was hardly the reelection campaign that reform-oriented Democrats like FDR or LBJ had enjoyed after winning major social democratic reforms.
Obama’s second term was a listless four years in which he failed to advance even the rhetoric of a social democratic agenda. The biggest idea he put forward, in fact, was a series of proposals in his 2015 State of the Union address called Middle-Class Economics, which largely consisted of recycled education myth tropes. Despite exploding inequality—that GOP priorities such as smashing unions and cutting taxes were exacerbating—Obama continued to frame the question, not as one of security for working people, but merely a better shot at a decent livelihood. “Will we accept an economy where only a few of us do spectacularly well?” he asked. “Or will we commit ourselves to an economy that generates rising incomes and chances for everyone who makes the effort?” In the speech, Obama highlighted erstwhile waitress Rebekah Erler of Minneapolis, whose husband, a construction worker, struggled following the economic crisis in 2008. The president focused on the role education played in her accessing a decent job and supporting the family as Ben’s work dried up: “Rebekah took out student loans, enrolled in community college, and retrained for a new career.”22 One thing was clear: the more restrictive breadwinner model of social democracy—in which the family accessed benefits through the secure job of the male worker—had long passed. Obama lauded the effort of a woman worker to support her family. But this story, in which Rebekah represented one of “the millions who have worked hard, and scrimped, and sacrificed, and retooled” begged the question of how the Democratic agenda had failed to advance a vision in which workers like Rebekah and Ben couldn’t simply have a decent livelihood without the struggle and the student debt.
Middle-class economics, then, would not upset the mythologies around education and meritocracy but would provide marginal improvements to “restore the link between hard work and growing opportunity for every American.” Regurgitating the line of so many Democrats from Clinton on, Obama argued that “to make sure folks keep earning higher wages down the road, we have to do more to help Americans upgrade their skills.” Though he paid lip service to restoring union rights and investment in infrastructure, Obama offered few specific proposals. Instead, he employed a human capital argument to pitch a plan for two years of tuition-free community college: “America thrived in the 20th century because we made high school free, sent a generation of GIs to college, and trained the best workforce in the world. But in a 21st century economy that rewards knowledge like never before, we need to do more.” And, though Obama didn’t mention it by name, he also offered his support for the Trans-Pacific Partnership—then being negotiated by his administration—in order “protect American workers, with strong new trade deals from Asia to Europe that aren’t just free, but fair.”23
If Obama’s first term primarily upheld the education myth by focusing on K-12 education, his second term continued to do so largely in the terrain of higher education and job training. Early on in his first administration, Obama had worked with Congress to expand Pell Grant access, both by increasing the number of students who could receive it (Pell Grant funding is distributed through a first-come, first-serve basis until the budgeted funds run out) and increasing the maximum benefit. Still, the fact that college tuition had increased so dramatically by the 2010s meant that, in the words of one study, “by 2015 federal support for student aid was chiefly in the form of loans, which accounted for almost 60 percent of federal [student aid] spending.”24
Interventions in Obama’s second term focused on the necessity of making colleges and universities more accountable so students could shop for the colleges that would supposedly better position them to get a job. Here, the administration built on an idea from the Spellings Commission, which had argued for such a scheme in 2006.25 And, in 2013, the administration floated the idea that since “some form of higher education is the surest path into the middle class” while college tuition continued going up, more accountability was needed to keep costs down and insure it would be the best investment possible. As Obama put it, Americans should know “who’s offering the best value to students and [ensure] taxpayers get a bigger bang for their buck.” Obama’s system would focus on student debt and graduation rates and, crucially, the question of “how well do those graduates do in the workforce?”26 Ultimately, while the president’s plan did not include specific numerical rankings, the Education Department published an “Education Scorecard,” which asserted as its most important metric a salary range for graduates and average annual cost, challenging Americans to think about the direct connection between higher education and jobs, even if graduates’ income level resulted from geography, union rights, family connections, or something else entirely.27 And no part of the Education Scorecard recognized the importance higher education might play in facilitating the “human potentiality” of civic and political engagement Danielle Allen argues is essential for citizens in a functioning democracy.
Finally, rhetoric about job training as the solution to rising inequality and downward pressure on blue-collar workers found a modest resurgence in Obama’s second term. By 2014, unemployment levels, particularly when factoring in the “hidden unemployment” rate, persisted at higher levels than before the economic crisis of 2008 (The Bureau of Labor Statistics does not count long-term unemployed workers in its official unemployment tallies). Corporate leaders and human capital–oriented think tanks explained these numbers not as the long-term consequence of employers’ efforts to cut costs, but instead defined them as a “skills gap.” On January 4, 2014, for instance, Jamie Dimon, one of the nation’s wealthiest investment bankers, and Marlene Seltzer, CEO of Jobs for the Future, authored a piece in Politico touting programs like JPMorgan Chase’s “New Skills at Work” to close the nation’s supposed skills gap. Employing boilerplate language now familiar to readers who have made it this far in this book, Dimon and Seltzer argued, “Today’s globalized and technology-driven economy presents serious challenges. But it also offers opportunities and rewards skills. By strategically investing in people, training them in the skills employers in their communities are looking for, we can help drive down unemployment while building the foundation for the broadly shared prosperity we all seek.”28
The irony of this argument alone makes it worth mentioning, considering that Dimon had just received a huge raise to a $20 million salary in 2013 in spite of the fact that JPMorgan Chase lost money the previous quarter and had had to pay $20 billion in fines for “serious misrepresentations about its mortgage-backed securities.”29 More important, the argument was empirically wrong: as economist Paul Krugman pointed out two months later, chronically unemployed workers in the United States had skills on par with those who had jobs and basically suffered from being outside of the labor market for an extended period of time. In other words, they were unemployed because they were unemployed, not because they were unemployable. Further, as Krugman pointed out, if there were huge gaps in skills, employers would have been bidding up wages, which certainly was not happening.30
But empirical realities didn’t stop the Obama administration from furthering this narrative. On July 22, 2014, Obama signed into law the Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act, effectively the replacement for Reagan’s JTPA, which had been replaced by Clinton’s Workforce Investment Act of 1998. The bill was bipartisan, and as part of the effort, Obama had tasked Vice President Joe Biden with developing a “roadmap” for “how to keep and maintain the highest-skilled workforce in the world.” As Biden explained in his remarks on the bill, Americans were more than willing to “learn the new skills of the 21st century that the workforce requires.” The bill would not do anything to ensure Americans had jobs, of course, but it would “empower job seekers and employers with better data on what jobs are available and what skills are needed to fill those jobs.” Biden suggested job training could help unemployed Americans better access professional-class jobs such as computer coding and petroleum engineering. For those who did not or could not reinvent their lives through job training, as Biden capped thirty years of this argument, entry to the middle-class was restricted: “The mission is to widen the aperture to be able to get into the middle class by expanding opportunity. No guarantees, just expanding opportunity to American men and women.”31
Doomsday: Election of 2016
In April 2015, former secretary of state Hillary Clinton announced she was running for president. Clinton, of course, was the First Lady from 1993 to 2001, and then served as senator for New York. She ran for president in 2008, finishing second to Obama and then joined his administration. Clinton’s campaign, as had her spouse’s campaigns in the 1990s, continued to assert that America was a meritocracy in which making education more accessible represented one of the small changes necessary to make the United States more prosperous for everyone.
In her campaign launch in June, Clinton invoked the legacy of Franklin D. Roosevelt by giving her speech on Roosevelt Island at Four Freedoms Park in New York City. In the speech, Clinton criticized the growing inequality and the unfairness of the economy. Unlike FDR, however, Clinton’s vision for change centered on helping Americans acquire education to advance in the meritocracy. Her ultimate pitch was, like Obama, to open up the middle-class to more Americans who worked hard and made the right choices in the human capital marketplace: “Just weeks ago,” Clinton began, “I met . . . a single mom juggling a job and classes at community college, while raising three kids. She doesn’t expect anything to come easy. But she did ask me: What more can be done so it isn’t quite so hard for families like hers? I want to be her champion and your champion.”32
In addition to being closely connected to two of the most prominent Democrats advancing the education myth—Bill Clinton and Barack Obama—Hillary Clinton was also connected to two free trade deals that signified Democrats’ lack of attention to the livelihoods of those without college degrees: NAFTA, and the TPP, which Obama had begun negotiating during Clinton’s tenure as secretary of state. In the latter role, Clinton had praised TPP dozens of times, referring to it as the “gold standard” of deals.33
The TPP was a free trade agreement struck between the most important economies in the Pacific Rim. Though the Obama administration signed onto the treaty in 2016, it was never ratified by Congress and so the agreement was never actually binding. Based on the history of NAFTA, many Americans were unenthused about the deal’s possibility for upholding workers’ rights and environmental protections. Economists critical of the deal argued it would, like NAFTA, cost Americans jobs, particularly in the Midwest. One study asserted that trade deficits with TPP countries already cost the United States 40,000 jobs in Wisconsin, 215,000 in Michigan, and 113,000 in Ohio in 2015 and would only exacerbate losses were the deal ratified.34 Senator Bernie Sanders called the TPP “NAFTA on steroids.” Sanders’s argument, reminiscent of Perot’s in 1993, was that the trade deal would further incentivize American corporations to shift production to countries like Vietnam or Malaysia where workers made extremely low wages and toiled with few labor protections.35
In May 2016, Sanders announced his campaign as a social democratic alternative to Clinton and the neoliberal course of the Democratic Party. An independent first elected to the House in 1990, Sanders caucused with Democrats in that chamber as well as the Senate after getting elected there in 2006. As a representative, Sanders helped to form the Progressive Caucus, walked the picket line in opposition to NAFTA, and became known as a prominent advocate of workers’ rights. He was also one of the few representatives to vote against No Child Left Behind in 2002. In the Senate, Sanders successfully advocated to include community health centers in the ACA, fought to protect Social Security, and gave a long filibuster in 2010 in which he opposed Obama’s deal to extend Bush tax breaks to wealthy Americans.36
Sanders’s launch speech in May 2015 called for a “political revolution” against the corporate interests he argued were responsible for the crisis of economic inequality and putting the nation on the precipice of environmental catastrophe. While promising a $1 trillion jobs program (though not a guarantee), Sanders hit Clinton on trade deals: “For decades, presidents from both parties have supported trade agreements which have cost us millions of decent paying jobs as corporate America shuts down plants here and moves to low-wage countries. As president, my trade policies will break that cycle of agreements which enrich at the expense of the working people of this country.” He also called for a guarantee of healthcare through Medicare-for-all.
Even though Sanders used human capital language to make the argument, he also advocated for tuition-free public higher education.37 Further, while Sanders fought to make human capital more broadly accessible, he also, fundamentally, rejected the notion that college would be the only avenue toward economic security, and that other economic interventions were necessary. In his campaign memoir he made clear, “Not everybody wants to go to college, and not everybody needs to go to college. This country needs a large supply of carpenters, plumbers, welders, bricklayers, ironworkers, mechanics, and many other professions that pay workers, especially those with unions, good wages for doing very important, skilled work.”38
Sanders was initially written off as a protest candidate by beltway insiders, but he gained traction quickly, highlighting the growing thirst among many Democrats for a broadly social democratic vision. Indeed, Robert Reich, who was perhaps the most vocal advocate for the education myth in the Clinton administration, had moved far from his argument in the early 1990s that upskilling workers and increasing access to college would unleash broad prosperity among Americans. In his 2016 book Saving Capitalism: For the Many, Not the Few, Reich now referred to the “meritocratic myth” that workers were rewarded for their “worth” in the marketplace, instead pointing out that exploding income inequality was “largely the consequence of how power has been allocated and utilized.” The former labor secretary specifically pointed to the growing power of corporations, the weakening of unions, and the enactment of trade deals to explain what was happening. Saving Capitalism was a particularly stark turnaround from Reich’s account of NAFTA in Locked in the Cabinet, as he admitted in 2016 that he had harbored objections he could not make public as secretary of labor. Indeed, Reich, pointing out that even the wages of most college graduates had stagnated in the years after Clinton left office, concluded with a mea culpa: “I was wrong in believing that college degrees would deliver steadily higher wages and a larger share of the economic pie.”39
Mobilizing many of the Americans whom Reich had pointed out were struggling, Sanders fared well in early state competitions, coming within a percentage point of winning Iowa and handily winning New Hampshire. Clinton ran up huge margins in southern states and delegate-rich liberal states with large professional-class populations like New York and California. Sanders’s surprise showing, which included the majority of young Democratic voters, garnered more than thirteen million votes and 46 percent of the total pledged delegates, this in spite of Clinton having most of the party structure behind her, including the endorsement of almost 80 percent of the so-called superdelegates.40 Importantly, Sanders also won victories in states such as Wisconsin, Michigan, and Ohio that had been decimated by blue-collar job loss and reactionary policies from Republican governors since 2011. Further, much of his appeal stemmed from separating his candidacy from Hillary Clinton’s on trade. In Wisconsin, Sanders won by thirteen points overall, including every single county except for one.41 It wasn’t enough to win the nomination, however, and even though Sanders had pulled Clinton left—forcing her to publicly oppose TPP, for instance—she faced a tough race from the Republican nominee.
On June 16, 2015, Donald Trump, the self-proclaimed billionaire and television celebrity, announced he was running for the Republican nomination for president.42 Though Trump had no experience in government nor had ever won elected office, it wasn’t his first foray into politics. In 2000, he considered a third-party candidate run with Ross Perot’s Reform Party (Pat Buchanan won the nomination instead) and flirted with running for the GOP nomination in 2012. In 2015, he entered a crowded field that eventually included almost twenty candidates.
Much like the reaction of establishment Democrats to Sanders in the Democratic primary, both the established Republican officeholders and media pundits gave Trump little chance at winning. But the real estate mogul quickly captivated Republican voters and media attention by making spectacular and typically false claims while tapping into resentment against the nation’s political dynasties.
Trump skewered the political establishment and upended the niceties that defined electoral politics. He cast aspersions against undocumented Mexican immigrants and pledged to build a wall between the United States and Mexico. He caricatured critiques of racism and sexism as political correctness. It is easy enough to point to the absurdity of Trump’s campaign, as well as the bold-faced lies he spun to gain media attention. Any reasonable person should, indeed, condemn the white supremacy and schadenfreude that motivated many of his followers in the primary, and the for-profit media bears a good deal of responsibility for elevating Trump, whose performances were excellent for ratings. But amidst all these phenomena, we should not lose sight that there was a rejection of an education myth in which politicians, especially Democrats, had brokered trade deals eliminating manufacturing jobs while lecturing workers to go back to school and learn new skills. In powerful ways, Trump campaigned, on a national and much more fantastical scale, as governors like Walker had done in states like Wisconsin.
In an obviously more vulgar manner, Trump, like Obama in 2008, campaigned on the security of blue-collar jobs. He began his launch speech, for instance, by arguing:
Our country is in serious trouble. We don’t have victories anymore. We used to have victories, but we don’t have them. When was the last time anybody saw us beating, let’s say, China in a trade deal? They kill us. I beat China all the time. All the time. When did we beat Japan at anything? They send their cars over by the millions, and what do we do? When was the last time you saw a Chevrolet in Tokyo? It doesn’t exist, folks. They beat us all the time. When do we beat Mexico at the border? They’re laughing at us, at our stupidity. And now they are beating us economically. They are not our friend, believe me. But they’re killing us economically.
After calling Mexican immigrants “rapists,” Trump argued, in marked contrast to Clinton, whose speech argued the United States was tweaks away from broad prosperity,
Our labor participation rate was the worst since 1978. But think of it, GDP below zero, horrible labor participation rate. And our real unemployment is anywhere from 18 to 20 percent. Don’t believe the 5.6. Don’t believe it. That’s right. A lot of people up there can’t get jobs. They can’t get jobs, because there are no jobs, because China has our jobs and Mexico has our jobs. They all have jobs. But the real number, the real number is anywhere from 18 to 19 and maybe even 21 percent, and nobody talks about it, because it’s a statistic that’s full of nonsense.43
Here Trump spoke to a reality many Americans were facing. They had been told about the improving American economy, but they knew that lower unemployment rates were not equating to higher wages or more job security.
Trump, however, promised change. “We have people that have no incentive to work. But they’re going to have incentive to work [when I am president], because the greatest social program is a job,” he argued. “And they’ll be proud, and they’ll love it, and they’ll make much more than they would’ve ever made . . . I will be the greatest jobs president that God ever created. I tell you that. I’ll bring back our jobs from China, from Mexico, from Japan, from so many places.” Trump did not have any actual plan to do any of these things. His stream-of-consciousness remarks concluded with an assertion that he would jawbone the heads of corporations into moving manufacturing back to the United States. But for some working people, in states like Wisconsin, who had heard Democratic politicians retreat from big social democratic ideas that could help them make their lives more secure, Trump’s argument likely seemed a welcome alternative, even if it came with unsavory attacks on undocumented immigrants.
The New Yorker dominated the delegate count and easily won the GOP nomination with a commanding plurality of the total votes cast (about 45 percent, while Senator Ted Cruz, who had the second most, got 25 percent). In the general election, Clinton faced several unfair critiques, including a false equivalency between her use of a private email server while secretary of state and Trump’s history of corrupt business practices, failure to disclose his financial records, and celebration of sexual assault in a 2005 Access Hollywood interview. Still, Clinton made plenty of mistakes in framing the question of blue-collar livelihoods. For instance, in a CNN town hall in March 2016, Clinton promised to “put a lot of coal miners and coal companies out of business” in the context of shifting toward green energy future. Miners, many of them Trump supporters, protested her speaking events in Appalachia, and this gaffe likely played a role in Sanders’s commanding win in the West Virginia primary.44
Further, at a fundraiser in September 2016, Clinton called half of Trump’s supporters a “basket of deplorables. . . . racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic—you name it” arguing that many of them were “irredeemable.” Clinton did point out that the other half of Trump’s supporters “feel that the government has let them down, the economy has let them down, nobody cares about them, nobody worries about what happens to their lives, and they’re just desperate for change.”45 Still, the recent history of mainstream Democrats, who for decades pitched the notion that upgrading workers’ human capital was the only shot for an economic livelihood in a changing world, left many workers who feared for the future of their manufacturing jobs with little confidence in the party. Further, a comment like this—replayed incessantly on right-wing media—fed into the notion that Democrats seemed to hold Republican voters in low social regard. Trump, on the other hand, promised to save jobs like those at the Carrier HVAC factory in Indiana, which had announced it would shift production to Mexico but reversed course after a conversation with Trump.46
Coal mining may have been dangerous and work at plants like Carrier may not have represented the creative-class work Florida celebrated in the many iterations of his book. And, even without Democratic support for trade deals speeding up the process, blue-collar livelihoods would have undoubtedly been under duress over the past several decades. But the education myth—treating living people as fungible assets who should upgrade their skills and seek new jobs where they were plentiful—neglected the humanity of these workers. Some of them were at points of their lives in which they didn’t want to go to college or retrain. Some simply might not want to go to school at all and nonetheless felt entitled to economic security. Many more were rooted in communities and didn’t want to move away from where they lived. All of these realities were missing from the creative-class assumptions that Clinton and other national Democratic leaders had relied on for so long.
Trump made a major issue of trade deals that had put downward pressure on blue-collar livelihoods, and he went hard—and effectively—after Clinton for her support of NAFTA and TPP. He promised to bring back jobs and the dignity that seemed to be attached to them, and for some Americans, particularly in places in which manufacturing jobs had been lost, those promises, even if unlikely to be true, were better than hearing about the need to get the right education yet again.
With these winds at his back, Trump was elected president of the United States. Trump won the electoral college by narrowly capturing the so-called rust-belt states of Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania. Though many Democrats rightly pointed out that Trump handily lost the popular vote, the geographic distribution of this vote was meaningful: subtract the state of California, and Trump would have won by 1.4 million. Subtract New York, too, and Trump would have received over 3 million more than Clinton.
American presidential elections are never the consequence of one development. But there are a few statistics that, as we attempt to understand both Trump and the broader political divisions that elevated him to the presidency, require greater attention. Whites without college degrees voted for Trump in overwhelming numbers, while fewer minority voters went to the polls compared to previous presidential elections. Further, despite overwhelming support for Clinton from the labor movement, many individual union members voted for Trump, as the supposed billionaire won a greater percentage of the union household vote (43 percent) than either Romney (40 percent) or McCain (39 percent). When third-party votes were factored in, the result was even more pronounced: Obama had won 61 percent of this demographic in 2008, while Clinton only won 53 percent eight years later.47 These represented hundreds of thousands of votes, which likely made a significant difference in states like Wisconsin and Michigan.
It is true that Trump voters, on the whole, were wealthier than Obama voters, and that not having a college degree doesn’t necessarily mean that one does not own a thriving business or have a high-paying job.48 Clearly, plenty went for Trump because they wanted lower taxes, because they valued religious ideology above all else, or because they simply wanted to protect the advantages whites had historically enjoyed in the United States. Trump, however, won somewhere in the range of 6.7 million to 9.2 million Obama voters from 2012, which represented between 11–15 percent of Trump’s total.49 The Obama-Trump voters, many of them almost certainly union households, represented the margin that swung the election. And many of these voters went for Trump because, just as they had bet on Obama after his promises all the way back in Janesville, they saw the New York real estate mogul as more likely to restore the livelihoods—and the social esteem—of noncollege-educated workers.50
The Point of No Return
The numbers for Trump, indeed, spoke to a fear that Richard Florida had outlined in 2002 as he concluded The Rise of the Creative Class:
I fear we may well be splitting into two distinct societies with different institutions, different economies, religious orientations and politics. One is creative and diverse—a cosmopolitan admixture of high-tech people, bohemians, scientists, and engineers, the media and the professions. The other is a more close-knit, church-based, older civic society of working people and rural dwellers. The former is ascendant and likely to dominate the nation’s economic future. Not only are these places richer, faster growing and more technologically savvy, they are also attracting people. The reason is simple: These places are open and easy to enter. They are where people can most easily find opportunity, build support structures and be themselves.51
This was a version, of course, of what sociologist Daniel Bell had predicted back in the 1970s. In the case of Florida’s prediction, however, Trump’s election highlighted that, even after the development of these two distinct societies, the electoral college’s outsized support for smaller, more rural states meant that those outside the creative class could not be ignored, even if some Democrats wanted to.
Obama ran as the president to bridge this divide: he argued he could provide prosperity for the creative class, the manufacturing working class, and the service sector. He would reject free trade deals and empower working people, while also enhancing diversity and opportunity for the creative class. In office, Obama doubled down on mythological thinking, however, pushing market-based education reform and hawking access to college as the opportunity equalizer. In this sense, he largely sided with the professional class as president, mostly turning his back on the working people who elected him. Hillary Clinton’s campaign, with its connections to the last two Democratic administrations, was a fitting symbol of the recent history of the party in 2016. Both Sanders and Trump, from the left and from the right, represented a revolt against the assumptions of the education myth.
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