When I went to vote a couple weeks ago, I met a man running for the town council I’d seen but never talked to at our town’s dive bar. Ben represents what I think of as “old town”: the people who’ve lived here all their lives, often the children of parents and even grandparents who did too, mostly white, mostly ethnic, working class, Catholic (though mostly well-lapsed), union, Democratic.
“New town” are the gentrifiers moving in, because we’re the poorest borough of any borough in the school district and have the cheapest housing. (Affluent Americans with children tend to move into school districts rather than towns.) They also are mostly white but not ethnic, affluent, maybe Catholic (and practicing if they are), definitely not union, and either Democratic or Republican. If Democratic, they identify with the modern party more concerned with sexual minorities than the white working class — more Pete Buttigieg than FDR. Many of them were running for the borough council.
It may be a sign of the times. It helps explain America’s divided politics, but has parallels to the UK’s, I think.
After we talked, I went inside to pick up a ballot and found, to my shock, that he was running as a Republican. “I thought you were a Democrat,” I said as I left. “I was,” he added, “but I switched”. Maybe I shouldn’t have been surprised. In the dive bar we both patronise, the owner had put a Trump bumper sticker on one of the pillars where you’d see it as you walked in and put Trumpian signs around the place. The owner yelled at me one night for when I admitted I have been vaccinated.
These people are becoming Republicans. This long precedes Trump, but the polarisation and feelings of alienation Trump exploited pushed them even more into the Republican party. They feel that the Democrats are the party of the gentrifiers
That Ben voted Republican didn’t surprise me. But that he’d registered Republican did. We live up the Ohio River from Pittsburgh, a city with a history much like Birmingham’s or Newcastle’s. Forty years ago, the area just north of us became the poster county for the Reagan Democrats, and culturally, the bar belongs to that county. They’re the American version of the Red Wall Labour voters who voted Tory.
Back then, those people wouldn’t give up their Democratic identity, because they were Democrats in the same way they were Catholics or union members or descendants of whatever east European country their parents or grandparents came from. They started voting Republican because Reagan stood for the things they did. Simple patriotism verging on nationalism was one obvious thing, but so were his optimism, his preaching of freedom and independence, his treatment of government as at best a hindrance and taxes as intrusions that always needed to be lowered.
Many were still Catholic and pro-life. Even then the Democratic party had begun making its pro-choice commitments central to its identity. Reagan campaigned as the pro-life candidate, which was enough for many Catholic Democrats to vote for him.
Now, like Ben, these people are becoming Republicans. This long precedes Trump, but the polarisation and feelings of alienation Trump exploited pushed them even more into the Republican party. They feel that the Democrats are the party of the gentrifiers, using that word as a metaphor for those who would “improve” them against their wishes, the way gentrifiers “improve” a town by taking it over. The Democratic party chose other constituencies over them: sexual minorities, leftist activists, the abortion industry, the irreligious, the public school monopoly, and others. The party would be infinitely better off had it stayed with them.
People like Ben aren’t wrong to think this. As The Washington Post reported a few days ago, the Democrats’ Build Back Better plan “includes a $275 billion tax cut that would almost exclusively benefit high-income households over the next five years.” And here’s the other part: “The tax cut would partially reverse a tax hike from President Donald Trump’s signature 2017 tax bill that was particularly burdensome to high-income, high-tax states.” The Post doesn’t say that the taxhike didn’t burden average people, like Ben, at all.
I voted for him, because he speaks for Old Town. But I also voted for a New Town candidate, a Democrat. I know her, and like her, and think she’ll do a good job. All four New Town candidates won. Ben lost. New Towners vote. Old Towners don’t.
As The Washington Post reported a few days ago, the Democrats’ Build Back Better plan “includes a $275 billion tax cut that would almost exclusively benefit high-income households over the next five years.
I worry, though, that the way things work, the gentrifiers will come to run the town. They’ll move in for the cheaper housing, but having money and an ethos of “getting involved,” they’ll slowly squeeze out Old Town. I’m culturally and otherwise one of them, but I identify with Old Town, and I defer to Old Town because our town is their town in a way it isn’t mine, though we’ve been here 33 years. And I really like our dive bar and the people I know here. I like them more than most of the gentrifiers I know.
I expect that at some point the gentrifiers will try to put the townie dive bar — the town’s only public house — out of business. They’ll offer the best rationalisations about quality of life and the like. Their idea of quality of life, that is, which means improved property values, which means a town like the other, wealthier towns in the school district. After all, you wouldn’t put a townie dive bar in the real estate ads and the gentrifiers won’t go there. But it will ultimately lead to the marginalisation and eventual disappearance of people who’ve loved the borough all their lives.
That may be a sign of the times. Working class Democrats become Republicans because that party seems to care about the same things they do, not least preserving the old ways. A lot resent the same people Trump does (or claims to). They see the Democrats as gentrifiers, people who will destroy the old ways to make the country the kind of place gentrifiers like.
They see them as people who will try to make their town “better,” which means more to the gentrifiers’ taste. These people who talk about cultural sensitivity will destroy cultures like Old Town. They will also lament the polarization of American society, without realizing how much they push people, people they don’t really see, to the Trumpian pole.
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