Newspaper & online reporters and analysts explore the cultural and news stories of the week, with photos frequently added by Esco20, and reveal their significance (with a slant towards Esco 20's opinions)
November 16, 2022
Republicans Officially Take Back the House After 4 Years with Democratic Majority
Kyler Alvord
In this article:
Nancy Pelosi
Speaker of the United States House of Representatives
The Republican Party has secured its first major feat in the 2022 midterm elections, regaining the majority of seats in the U.S. House of Representatives, which has been controlled by Democrats for the past four years.
Republicans were long favored to take control of Congress' lower chamber in 2023 as President Joe Biden's wavering popularity hurt Democratic prospects down the ballot.
Historically, the sitting president's party — in this case, the Democratic Party — suffers greatly during midterms. While Democrats did lose a number of House seats, they exceeded expectations and suffered minimal damage, making it the best a leading party has performed in midterms in 20 years, and the best under a first-term president in 40 years.
House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy and U.S. President Donald Trump attend a legislation signing rally with local farmers on February 19, 2020
Republicans' thin majority in the House will require them to act with a certain level of bipartisanship — and with Democrats maintaining a majority in the Senate, Republicans will have an extra hurdle to jump through if they hope to pass any controversial bills into law.
When the incoming Congress convenes in January, House representatives will cast their votes for a new speaker to lead the congressional chamber. According to tradition, both major party caucuses meet beforehand to select their respective nominees — often the top-ranking party official at the time — and representatives are generally expected to support the nominee that their party has selected.
Mandatory Credit: Photo by Michael Brochstein/SOPA Images/Shutterstock (13074650i) President Joe Biden leaving the White House to go to Rehoboth Beach, Delaware. President Joe Biden Leaving the White House to Rehoboth Beach - 07 Aug 2022
Michael Brochstein/SOPA Images/Shutterstock
On Tuesday, Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy was selected as the GOP's pick to replace Democratic Rep. Nancy Pelosi as House speaker in January. Rep. Steve Scalise was chosen to be the second highest-ranking Republican official, the House majority leader.
McCarthy has already begun preparing for a transition of power in the House, and said his first agenda item will be securing the United States' southern border.
Any impediment to traffic on the bridge could affect Russia’s ability to wage war in southern Ukraine, where Ukraine’s forces have been fighting an increasingly effective counteroffensive.
Ukrainian officials have repeatedly threatened to strike the bridge and some lauded the attack, but Kyiv stopped short of claiming responsibility.
Adam Schreck
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KYIV, Ukraine (AP) — An explosion Saturday caused the partial collapse of a bridge linking the Crimean Peninsula with Russia, damaging an important supply artery for the Kremlin’s faltering war effort in southern Ukraine. Russian authorities said a truck bomb caused the blast, which killed three people.
The speaker of the Russian-backed regional parliament in Crimea immediately accused Ukraine of being behind the explosion; Moscow didn’t apportion blame. Ukrainian officials have repeatedly threatened to strike the bridge and some lauded the destruction, but Kyiv stopped short of claiming responsibility.
The explosion risked a sharp escalation in Russia’s eight-month war, with some Russian lawmakers calling for President Vladimir Putin to declare a “counterterrorism operation” in retaliation, shedding the term “special military operation” that had downplayed the scope of fighting to ordinary Russians.
The Kremlin could use such a move to broaden the power of security agencies, ban rallies, tighten censorship, introduce restrictions on travel, and expand a partial military mobilization that Putin ordered last month.
Hours after the explosion, Russia’s Defense Ministry announced that the air force chief, Gen. Sergei Surovikin, would command all Russian troops in Ukraine. Surovikin, who over the summer was placed in charge of troops in southern Ukraine, had led Russian forces in Syria and was accused of overseeing a brutal bombardment that destroyed much of the city of Aleppo.
Moscow, however, continues to suffer battlefield losses.
On Saturday, a Kremlin-backed official in Ukraine’s Kherson region announced a partial evacuation of civilians from the southern province, one of four illegally annexed by Moscow last week. Kirill Stremousov told Russia’s state-run RIA Novosti agency that young children and their parents, as well as the elderly, could be relocated to two southern Russian regions because Kherson was getting “ready for a difficult period.”
A view shows a fire on the Kerch bridge at sunrise in the Kerch Strait, Crimea.
STRINGER . VIA REUTERS
The 19-kilometer (12-mile) Kerch Bridge, on a strait that connects the Black Sea and the Sea of Azov, is a tangible symbol of Moscow’s claims on Crimea and an essential link to the peninsula, which Russia annexed from Ukraine in 2014. The $3.6 billion bridge, the longest in Europe, is vital to sustaining Russia’s military operations in southern Ukraine. Putin himself presided over the bridge’s opening in 2018.
The attack on it “will have a further sapping effort on Russian morale, (and) will give an extra boost to Ukraine’s,” said James Nixey of Chatham House, a think tank in London. “Conceivably the Russians can rebuild it, but they can’t defend it while losing a war.”
Russia’s National Anti-Terrorism Committee said a truck bomb caused seven railway cars carrying fuel to catch fire, resulting in the “partial collapse of two sections of the bridge.” A man and a woman in a vehicle on the bridge were killed, Russia’s Investigative Committee said. It didn’t say who the third victim was.
All vehicles crossing the bridge are supposed to undergo state-of-the-art checks for explosives. The truck that exploded was owned by a resident of the Krasnodar region, in southern Russia. Russian authorities said the man’s home was searched and experts were looking at the truck’s route.
The Ukrainian postal service announced that it would issue stamps commemorating the blast.
ED RAM VIA GETTY IMAGES
Train and automobile traffic over the bridge was temporarily suspended. Automobile traffic resumed Saturday afternoon on one of the two links that remained intact from the blast, with the flow alternating in each direction, Crimea’s Russia-backed regional leader, Sergey Aksyonov, wrote on Telegram.
Rail traffic was resuming slowly. Two passenger trains departed from the Crimean cities of Sevastopol and Simferopol and headed toward the bridge Saturday evening. Passenger ferry links between Crimea and the Russian mainland were being relaunched Sunday.
While Russia seized areas north of Crimea early during its invasion of Ukraine and built a land corridor to it along the Sea of Azov, Ukraine is pressing a counteroffensive to reclaim those lands.
The Russian Defense Ministry said its troops in the south were receiving necessary supplies through that corridor and by sea. Russia’s Energy Ministry said Crimea has enough fuel for 15 days.
Russian war bloggers responded to the bridge attack with fury, urging Moscow to retaliate by striking Ukrainian civilian infrastructure. Putin ordered the creation of a government panel to deal with the emergency.
Gennady Zyuganov, head of the Russian Communist Party, said the “terror attack” should serve as a wake-up call. “The long-overdue measures haven’t been taken yet, the special operation must be turned into a counterterrorist operation,” he said.
Leonid Slutsky, head of the foreign affairs committee in the Russian parliament’s lower house, said “consequences will be imminent” if Ukraine was responsible. And Sergei Mironov, leader of the Just Russia faction, said Russia should respond by attacking key Ukrainian infrastructure, including power plants, bridges and railways.
Such statements may herald a decision by Putin to declare a counterterrorism operation.
The parliamentary leader of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s party stopped short of claiming that Kyiv was responsible, but appeared to cast the bridge explosion as a consequence of Moscow’s takeover of Crimea.
“Russian illegal construction is starting to fall apart and catch fire. The reason is simple: If you build something explosive, then sooner or later it will explode,” said David Arakhamia of the Servant of the People party.
The Ukrainian postal service announced it would issue stamps commemorating the blast, as it did after the sinking of the Moskva, a Russian flagship cruiser, by a Ukrainian strike.
The secretary of Ukraine’s National Security and Defense Council, Oleksiy Danilov, tweeted a video with the Kerch Bridge on fire and Marilyn Monroe singing her famous “Happy Birthday Mr. President” song. Putin turned 70 on Friday.
In Moscow, Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said “the reaction of the Kyiv regime to the destruction of civilian infrastructure shows its terrorist nature.”
The 19-kilometer (12-mile) bridge across the Kerch Strait linking the Black Sea and the Sea of Azov opened in 2018 and is the longest in Europe.
STRINGER . VIA REUTERS
Local authorities in Crimea made conflicting statements about what the damaged bridge would mean for residents. The peninsula is a popular destination for Russian tourists and home to a naval base. A Russian tourist association estimated that 50,000 tourists were in Crimea on vacation on Saturday.
Elsewhere, the U.N. nuclear watchdog said Ukraine’s Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant has lost its last remaining external power source as a result of renewed shelling and is now relying on emergency diesel generators.
Ukrainian authorities were also just beginning to sift through the wreckage of the devastated city of Lyman in eastern Ukraine, assessing the humanitarian toll and the possibility of war crimes after a months-long Russian occupation.
The blast on the bridge occurred hours after explosions rocked the eastern Ukrainian city of Kharkiv early Saturday, sending towering plumes of smoke into the sky and triggering secondary explosions. Ukrainian officials accused Russia of pounding Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second-largest city, with surface-to-air missiles in two largely residential neighborhoods.
Kharkiv resident Tetiana Samoilenko’s apartment caught fire in the attack. She was in the kitchen when the blast struck, sending glass flying.
“Now I have no roof over my head. Now I don’t know what to do next,” the 80-year-old said.
In the course of twenty books, Annie Ernaux has devoted herself to the excavation of her own life.
April 13, 2020 “A Girl’s Story” is a reconstruction of events and a deconstruction of feelings.Illustration by Claire Merchlinsky Ayoung woman has her first sexual experience. She is pleased to be desired by someone. She does not feel humiliated. But, later, she is mocked, tormented by others who believe that she has debased herself. Those whom she thought of as her friends now treat her like nothing. She feels shame. Is the shame hers? Or is it a reflection of what is expected of her?
“To go all the way to the end of ’58 means agreeing to the demolition of all the interpretations I’ve assembled over the years,” Annie Ernaux writes in “A Girl’s Story” (Seven Stories), published in French in 2016, and now in English, translated by Alison L. Strayer. The book is an account of a sexual encounter Ernaux had as a teen-ager, and it is both a reconstruction of events and a deconstruction of feelings. The emotional history, she hopes, will be the most personal one, the truest one. The challenge of being a historian, however, is knowing whether what she felt—and what she still feels—really comes from within.
The book circles around the summer of 1958, when eighteen-year-old Annie is working as a camp counsellor in northern France, in a town she calls “S.” She is sheltered and naïve; aside from a trip to Lourdes with her father, she has barely left home. At camp, she develops a crush on a man she calls H. He looks like Marlon Brando: “She does not care that the other female counselors murmur to each other that he’s all brawn, no brains.” She thinks of him as “the Archangel.”
What draws her to H is a need to be seen. No one has ever looked at her with such a “heavy gaze.” They dance at a counsellors’ party. “Seduction” is not the right word for what happens next. But Ernaux doesn’t give these events a single name. Instead, she describes, as clearly as she can, how she follows H to her room, how “she feels his sex prod at her belly through her jeans. . . . There is no difference between what she does and what happens to her.” Soon, “a thick jet of sperm explodes in her face, gushing all the way into her nostrils.” The precision of this language doesn’t necessarily evoke pleasure, but Annie is consumed by emotion, desperate for H and the possibility of his desire.
Ernaux is an unusual memoirist: she distrusts her memory. She writes in the first person, and then abruptly switches and speaks about herself from a distance, calling past selves “the girl of ’58” or “the girl of S.” At times, it seems as though she were looking at herself in an old photograph or a scene in a movie. She tells us when she is getting lost in the story, and where her memory goes blank. Ernaux does not so much reveal the past—she does not pretend to have any authoritative access to it—as unpack it. “What is the point of writing,” she says, “if not to unearth things?”
In this attempt at unearthing, her prose combines the spare and the unsparing. She seems desperate to put it all on the page: period blood, abortions, contraceptive pills, dirty underwear, erections, and semen. But Ernaux’s writing is rubbed down, simple, almost clinical in its exactness. From the vantage of adulthood, she Googles and questions, she revisits old haunts and reads old letters, as if she were a detective cracking an unsolvable case: the mystery of her own past. But none of this investigating is done, one senses, with the expectation of ever truly settling on a truth. “I am not trying to remember,” she writes. “I am trying to be inside. . . . To be there at that very instant, without spilling over into the before or after. To be in the pure immanence of a moment.”
Of course, our recollections aren’t continuous, and you can’t always get “inside,” no matter how many angles you try. The difficulty of interiority is perhaps one reason that Ernaux, both as a girl and as an adult, can’t help but turn to those around her for cues. As readers, we lose access to “the girl of S,” often at the moments when we need it most. Instead, Ernaux begins to discuss the reactions of the other counsellors:
I will have to present another list that includes the coarse taunts, the hooting and jeering, the insults passed off as jokes, whereby the male counselors made her an object of scorn and derision, they whose verbal hegemony went unquestioned and was even admired by the female counselors.
Reading this book in 2020, one is tempted to think of these gaps and tricks of memory in terms of trauma—the kind of trauma that keeps women from giving, or getting, a full account of their own lives. Completion, we’re told, is a necessary condition for truth. “Don’t tell us the story of your life, it’s full of holes,” the other counsellors like to say. Her peers dig up her letters and read them out loud to one another. They drag her to H’s door. The teen-age Ernaux does not realize what is happening. It is only later that she perceives the effects of this “verbal hegemony.” When someone writes “Long live whores” on her mirror in toothpaste, these words begin to shape how she sees herself.
And it isn’t so easy to look away from the mirrors that society creates for us. When Ernaux leaves the camp, she develops bulimia, and her period stops. “I could not imagine there was a name for my behavior. . . . I thought of it as a moral failing. I don’t believe I linked it to H.”
These links are what Ernaux, as a writer, has always been after. In the sixty years and twenty books since the summer of 1958, she has been devoted to a single task: the excavation of her own life. “I would go so far as to judge my previous books as vague approximations” of reality, Ernaux writes in “A Girl’s Story.” In one, she describes a love affair; in another, the relationship between her parents. Throughout, the contours of her story stay the same—a childhood in Normandy as the daughter of two grocers, the shame of her lower-class upbringing, the clash of these origins with her later literary successes. Her mother “knew all the household tips that lessened the strain of poverty.
This knowledge . . . stops at my generation. I am only the archivist,” she writes in her 1988 book, “A Woman’s Story.”Ernaux’s books are small, simple, rarely exceeding a hundred pages. In each, she is always asking how she can be sure that her memories are correct. In “A Woman’s Story,” she talks about her mother’s death. Nearly a decade later, in “I Remain in Darkness” (1997), she goes back to that moment and declares her recollection incomplete—she hadn’t fully described her mother’s long cognitive decline, the terrors of dementia. A consistent voice guides each of these revisitations: a scientific and searching “I.” The books are whittled down to an intense core—not a confession but a kind of personal epistemology. In France, they have brought Ernaux fame, prizes, and a number of stylistic descendants.
Central to her work is an awareness that the most intimate moments of life are always governed by the circumstances in which they occur—that probing the personal will also involve investigating the historical. This is clearest in “Happening” (2000), an account of an abortion Ernaux had in 1963. Early in the book, she describes going to see an acquaintance who is known as an activist for greater access to birth control. He tries to sleep with her. Then he tells her that he can’t help her. After she has travelled to Paris to obtain the abortion, she hears that “a woman who lived round the corner would do it for three hundred francs. . . . Now that I no longer needed them, suddenly, bevies of abortionists were springing up left, right, and center.” By the time Ernaux published the book, abortion had been legalized. But a victory in legislation does not make disclosure any easier. “When a new law abolishing discrimination is passed, former victims tend to remain silent on the grounds that ‘now it’s all over,’ ” she writes. “So what went on is surrounded by the same veil of secrecy as before.”
In typical Ernaux fashion, she reads over her old diary to compare what she still remembers with what she experienced at the time:
To convey my predicament, I never resorted to descriptive terms or expressions such as “I’m expecting,” “pregnant” or “pregnancy.” They endorsed a future event that would never materialize. There was no point naming something that I was planning to get rid of. In my diary I would write, “it” or “that thing,” only once “pregnant.”
Writing from a very different future, she is struck by her own “euphemisms and understatements.” The pages of a diary are, ostensibly, the safest, most honest record of a self—and yet even here Ernaux sees her internal narrative being shaped by external pressures, such as laws. Her most private experiences, she sees, were not really her own at all.
There’s a fair bit of feminism in this idea. Ernaux often refers to Simone de Beauvoir, whose “Second Sex” sought to show how a woman’s choices, decisions, and even thoughts were molded by economic and social conditions. These conditions create a kind of corridor through which one’s life passes. “One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman,” de Beauvoir wrote. One way to read Ernaux’s book is as an attempt to understand that opaque, painful, essential process of “becoming.” (Ernaux sent her first book to de Beauvoir, and also her second. De Beauvoir wrote to say that she preferred the first.) Where de Beauvoir describes the process in theory, Ernaux renders it in visceral detail: the food that she eats, the food she purges, the sight of blood in her underwear.
She does this most successfully in her 2008 book, “The Years,” a kind of hybrid memoir of postwar France. It moves chronologically from the Second World War until the beginning of the twenty-first century, but the scope and the point of view of the story are always changing. Here is a description of the end of the war, and here is an account of a teen-age girl’s first experiences masturbating. Here is the rise of the Internet, where “we could research the symptoms of throat cancer, recipes for moussaka, the age of Catherine Deneuve, the weather in Osaka . . . buy anything from white mice and revolvers to Viagra and dildos.” And here, just a few pages later, is an intimate story of watching one’s children have children of their own.
This pastiche of images and insights can seem like a haphazard swirl, but it is, Ernaux’s books suggest, the only authentic way to twine the personal and the historical. In “A Girl’s Story,” Ernaux finds herself toggling between the understandings she has reached in her seventies and the confusions she endured as a teen-ager. Just ten years after she left camp, the country was overtaken by the sexual revolution. Sexuality became something to celebrate, not something to hide. This both does and doesn’t matter:
Ten years is a very short time in the greater scheme of History, but immense when life is just beginning. It represents thousands of days and hours over which the meaning of things that one has experienced remains unchanged, shameful.
It is almost impossible to consolidate knowledge and memory into one. “Must I, as of now, move back and forth between one historical vision and another, between 1958 and 2014? I dream of a sentence that would contain them both, seamlessly, by way of a new syntax,” she writes. But a story that is fully continuous, a story without gaps, escapes her.
At the end of the book, Ernaux describes visiting the camp a few years after working there. It should be a moment of closure. But she looks around and sees only gray walls and empty gardens. The location does not speak to her. It seems, she writes, “less familiar than I had thought.” Instead, it is she who feels the urge to speak. Returning to the camp, she writes, is a “kind of propitiatory gesture” that allows her to see her memories as inspiration rather than as a source of shame. It is after this visit that she begins to write—that she begins, step by step, to move toward an elusive whole. ♦
Published in the print edition of the April 20, 2020, issue, with the headline “Living Memory.”
The Republican Party has become crucially dependent on a segment of white voters suffering what analysts call a “mortality penalty.”
This penalty encompasses not only disproportionately high levels of so-called deaths of despair — suicide, drug overdoses and alcohol abuse — but also across-the-board increases in several categories of disease, injury and emotional disorder.
Case and Deaton write that the correlation between Republican voting and life expectancy “goes from plus 0.42 when Gerald Ford was the Republican candidate — healthier states voted for Ford and against Carter — to minus 0.69 in 2016 and minus 0.64 in 2020. States classified as the least healthy voted for Trump and against Biden.”
Case and Deaton contend that the ballots cast for Donald Trump by members of the white working class “are surely not for a president who will dismantle safety nets but against a Democratic Party that represents an alliance between minorities — whom working-class whites see as displacing them and challenging their once solid if unperceived privilege — and an educated elite that has benefited from globalization and from a soaring stock market, which was fueled by the rising profitability of those same firms that were increasingly denying jobs to the working class.”
Carol Graham, a senior fellow at Brookings, described the erosion of economic and social status for whites without college degrees in a 2021 paper:
From 2005 to 2019, an average of 70,000 Americans died annually from deaths of despair (suicide, drug overdose, and alcohol poisoning). These deaths are concentrated among less than college educated middle-aged whites, with those out of the labor force disproportionately represented. Low-income minorities are significantly more optimistic than whites and much less likely to die of these deaths. This despair reflects the decline of the white working class. Counties with more respondents reporting lost hope in the years before 2016 were more likely to vote for Trump.
Lack of hope, in Graham’s view, “is a central issue. The American dream is in tatters and, ironically, it is worse for whites.” America’s high levels of reported pain, she writes, “are largely driven by middle-aged whites. As there is no objective reason that whites should have more pain than minorities, who typically have significantly worse working conditions and access to health care, this suggests psychological pain as well as physical pain.”
There are, Graham argues, long-term reasons for this. As blue-collar jobs began to decline from the late 1970s on, those displaced workers — and their communities — lost their purpose and identity and lack a narrative for going forward. For decades whites had privileged access to these jobs and the stable communities that came with them. Primarily white manufacturing and mining communities — in the suburbs and rural areas and often in the heartland — have the highest rates of despair and deaths. In contrast, more diverse urban communities have higher levels of optimism, better health indicators, and significantly lower rates of these deaths.
In contrast to non-college whites, Graham continued, minorities, who had unequal access to those jobs and worse objective conditions to begin with, developed coping skills and supportive community ties in the absence of coherent public safety nets. Belief in education and strong communities have served them well in overcoming much adversity. African Americans remain more likely to believe in the value of a college education than are low-income whites. Minority communities based in part on having empathy for those who fall behind, meanwhile, have emerged from battling persistent discrimination.
Over the past three years, however, there has been a sharp increase in drug overdose deaths among Black men, Graham noted in an email:
The “new” Black despair is less understood and perhaps more complex. A big factor is simply Fentanyl for urban Black men. Plain and simple. But other candidates are Covid and the hit the African American communities took; Trump and the increase of “acceptance” for blatant and open racism; and, for some, George Floyd and continued police violence against blacks. There is also a phenomenon among urban Black males that has to do with longer term despair: nothing to lose, weak problem-solving skills, drug gangs and more.
The role of race and gender in deaths of despair, especially drug-related deaths, is complex. Case wrote in an email:
Women have always been less likely to kill themselves with drugs or alcohol, or by suicide. However, from the mid-1990s into the 20-teens, for whites without a four-year college degree, death rates from all three causes rose in parallel between men and women. So the level has always been higher for men, but the trend (and so the increase) was very similar between less-educated white men and women.
For Blacks and Hispanics the story is different. Deaths of Despair were falling for less educated Black and Hispanic men from the early 1990s to the 20-teens and were constant over that period (at a much lower rate) for Black and Hispanic women without a B.A. After the arrival of Fentanyl as a street drug in 2013, rates started rising for both Black and Hispanic men and women without a B.A., but at a much faster rate for men.
In their October 2014 study, “Economic Strain and Children’s Behavior,” Lindsey Jeanne Leininger, a professor at Dartmouth’s Tuck School of Business, and Ariel Kalil, a professor of public policy at the University of Chicago, found : “The processes through which white and Black individuals experience stress from macroeconomic shocks are different,” she wrote, adding that the “white population, which is more resourced and less accustomed to being financially worried, is feeling threatened by economic shocks in a way that is not very much reflective of their actual economic circumstances. In our study, among Black parents, what we are seeing is basically that perceptions of economic strain are strongly correlated with actual income-to-needs.”
This phenomenon has been in evidence for some time.
A 2010 Pew Research Center study that examined the effects of the Great Recession on Black and white Americans reported that Black Americans consistently suffered more in terms of unemployment, work cutbacks and other measures, but remained far more optimistic about the future than whites. Twice as many Black as white Americans were forced during the 2008 recession to work fewer hours, to take unpaid leave or switch to part-time, and Black unemployment rose from 8.9 to 15.5 percent from April 2007 to April 2009, compared with an increase from 3.7 to 8 percent for whites.
Despite experiencing more hardship, 81 percent of Black Americans agreed with the statement “America will always continue to be prosperous and make economic progress,” compared with 59 percent of whites; 45 percent of Black Americans said the country was still in recession compared with 57 percent of whites. Pew found that 81 percent of the Black Americans it surveyed responded yes when asked “Is America still a land of prosperity?” compared with 59 percent of whites. Asked “will your children’s future standard of living be better or worse than yours?” 69 percent of Black Americans said better, and 17 percent said worse, while 38 percent of whites said better and 29 percent said worse. there are similar patterns for other measures of suffering. In “Trends in Extreme Distress in the United States, 1993-2019,” David G. Blanchflower and Andrew J. Oswald, economists at Dartmouth and the University of Warwick in Britain, note that “the proportion of the U.S. population in extreme distress rose from 3.6 percent in 1993 to 6.4 percent in 2019. Among low-education midlife white persons, the percentage more than doubled, from 4.8 percent to 11.5 percent.”
Blanchflower and Oswald point out that “something fundamental appears to have occurred among white, low-education, middle-aged citizens.”
Employment prospects play a key role among those in extreme distress, according to Blanchflower and Oswald. A disproportionately large share of those falling into this extreme category agreed with the statement “I am unable to find work.”
In her 2020 paper, “Trends in U.S. Working-Age Non-Hispanic White Mortality: Rural-Urban and Within-Rural Differences,” Shannon M. Monnat, a professor of sociology at Syracuse University’s Maxwell School, explained that “between 1990-92 and 2016-18, the mortality rates among non-Hispanic whites increased by 9.6 deaths per 100,000 population among metro males and 30.5 among metro females but increased by 70.1 and 65.0 among nonmetro (rural and exurban) males and females, respectively.”
Monnat described these differences as a “nonmetro mortality penalty.”
The Trump electorate comprises groups that on the surface appear to have very different interests. On the one hand, a large share of Trump supporters are working-class, live in working-class communities, have borne the brunt of economic dislocation and decline due to economic restructuring. On the other hand, Trump has benefited from major corporate donors who have interests in maintaining large tax breaks for the wealthy, deregulation of environmental and labor laws, and from an economic environment that makes it easy to exploit workers. In 2016 at least, Trump’s victory relied not just on rural and small-city working-class voters, but also on more affluent voters. Exit polls suggested that a majority of people who earned more than $50,000 per year voted for Trump.
Work has historically been about more than a paycheck in the U.S. American identities are wrapped up in our jobs. But the U.S. working-class (people without a college degree, people who work in blue-collar jobs) regularly receive the message that their work is not important and that they are irrelevant and disposable. That message is delivered through stagnant wages, declining health and retirement benefits, government safety-net programs for which they do not qualify but for which they pay taxes, and the seemingly ubiquitous message (mostly from Democrats) that success means graduating from college.
Three economists, David Autor, David Dorn and Gordon Hanson of M.I.T., the University of Zurich and Harvard, reported in their 2018 paper, “When Work Disappears: Manufacturing Decline and the Falling Marriage Market Value of Young Men,” on the debilitating consequences for working-class men of the “China shock” — that is, of sharp increases in manufacturing competition with China:
Shocks to manufacturing labor demand, measured at the commuting-zone level, exert large negative impacts on men’s relative employment and earnings. Although losses are visible throughout the earnings distribution, the relative declines in male earnings are largest at the bottom of the distribution.
Such shocks “curtail the availability and desirability of potentially marriageable young men along multiple dimensions: reducing the share of men among young adults and increasing the prevalence of idleness — the state of being neither employed nor in school — among young men who remain.”
These adverse trends, Autor, Dorn and Hanson report, “induce a differential and economically large rise in male mortality from drug and alcohol poisoning, H.I.V./AIDS, and homicide” and simultaneously “raise the fraction of mothers who are unwed, the fraction of children in single-headed households, and the fraction of children living in poverty.”
I asked Autor for his thoughts on the implications of these developments for the Trump electorate. He replied by email:
Many among the majority of American workers who do not have a four-year college degree feel, justifiably, that the last three decades of rapid globalization and automation have made their jobs more precarious, scarcer, less prestigious, and lower paid. Neither party has been successful in restoring the economic security and standing of non-college workers (and yes, especially non-college white males). The roots of these economic grievances are authentic, so I don’t think these voters should be denigrated for seeking a change in policy direction. That said, I don’t think the Trump/MAGA brand has much in the way of substantive policy to address these issues, and I believe that Democrats do far more to protect and improve economic prospects for blue-collar workers.
There is some evidence that partisanship correlates with mortality rates.
It is very likely, as Anne Case wrote in her email, that the United States is fast approaching a point where
Education divides everything, including connection to the labor market, marriage, connection to institutions (like organized religion), physical and mental health, and mortality. It does so for whites, Blacks and Hispanics. There has been a profound (not yet complete) convergence in life expectancy by education. There are two Americas now: one with a B.A. and one without.
Credit...Damon Winter/The New York Times