A new breakdown of America’s political tribes overlooks the one that just chose the president. EricLevitz writes
The forgotten men and women of our great country. Photo: John Raoux/AP/Shutterstock In the primary’s early days, the media treated him like an afterthought. At cocktail parties in Martha’s Vineyard and happy hours in the East Village, economic and cultural elites agreed that the candidate was more of a has-been — or a punch line — than a serious contender for the presidency.
You wouldn’t know this from mainstream discourse. In sharp contrast to its post-Trump self-correction — in which outlets ordered countless insta-ethnographies of Trump’s postindustrial strongholds — the press has carried on ignoring Biden’s working-class base. The GOP is divided between the gospels of “Free America” and “Real America.” The first evangelizes for a solipsistic species of liberty, as Packer describes it, a “personal freedom, without other people — the negative liberty of ‘Don’t tread on me.
Just America is the nation of Smart America’s “woke,” disaffected children. It’s a land of downwardly mobile millennials who are burned out by the meritocratic rat race, disillusioned by a lifetime of governing catastrophes, and radicalized by the harrowing discrepancy between the post-racial nation they were promised and the racist police state depicted in an endless procession of “viral” summary executions.
As noted above, the median Biden voter was not college educated or, one must presume, familiar with the works of Ibram X. Kendi. A majority of the president’s coalition would not even faintly recognize itself in any of the Americas Packer describes. They don’t work in the knowledge economy or attend anti-racist protests; they have no reverence for globalization or antipathy for patriotism.One may defend Packer’s elision of this constituency by claiming it has no narrative.
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