This will sound more than a little gruesome, but if you want to explain Donald Trump, look no further than the increasing rates of suicide and death by drugs among white, middle-aged Americans.
Specifically, those who skipped college and instead trusted the pensioned paths blazed by their parents. Even more specifically: Many of my brothers and sisters in the M.D. Collins High School class of ’73, and those who followed quickly on their heels.
They’re in trouble, and they’re angry. They’re taking it out on themselves, and on politics as we know it.
A new Princeton University study shows mortality rates among Americans of all racial and ethnic backgrounds and most age groups in healthy decline.
Only one group is a proven exception, with deaths by suicide, alcohol and drug poisoning, and liver disease increasing at a rate unseen in any other wealthy nation: Middle-aged white Americans.
Not just any middle-aged white Americans. This trend is driven by those whose educations that went no further than a high school diploma. We’re talking death by blue collar.
They are dying, say the authors, in numbers comparable to lives lost during the AIDS epidemic of the 1980s. “Those currently in midlife may be a ‘lost generation’ whose future is less bright than those who preceded them,” the study concludes.
The Princeton research is both sobering – and more than a little familiar, if you’ve been watching the GOP side of the 2016 race for president.
The study dovetails ever so neatly with the rise of billionaire Donald Trump. Throughout the summer, we tried to explain him. We examined his body language, his policy positions – or at least, his lack of them. If we could have, we would have put Trump’s hair on a tray and slid it into an MRI machine. In many ways, he still baffles us.
But numerous polls did lock onto one peculiarity of the Trump appeal. More than half of his support – one survey put it at high as 58 percent – consisted of older adults who had entered the workforce immediately after graduating high school.
A national poll by Quinnipiac University last week showed that in a head-to-head match-up, Democrat Hillary Clinton would beat Trump 46 to 43 percent. But eliminate all voters with college degrees, and Trump wins, 47 to 42 percent.
Trump’s tough position on immigration, even his campaign slogan – “Make America Great Again” – speak to an older, disaffected audience, noted Alan Abramowitz, a political scientist at Emory University.
“Hispanics and other non-whites are becoming a larger part of the population, and gaining ground and gaining power,” he said. “A lot of people in that demographic probably see themselves as losing out.”
In Tuesday night’s GOP presidential debate in Milwaukee, the first question of the evening went to Trump. Would he favor an increase in the minimum wage? “I hate to say it, but we have to leave it the way it is,” Trump said.
Contrary to what you might think, that answer is unlikely to shake these older high-school-diploma voters. They are focused more on the cliff that retirement represents than entry-level wages.
Abramowitz is one of several academics in Georgia focused on the polarization of American politics. Keith Poole at the University of Georgia is another.
The higher mortality rate found in the Princeton study didn’t surprise him. “The people who have been thrown on the ash heap in the last 30 years have been basically blue-collar white males,” Poole said. “So I wasn’t surprised to see that they’re the ones checking out. People are mad, and they have a right to be mad.”
And they are as rootless as Trump sometimes appears to be. “A lot of them don’t vote, a lot of them aren’t part of the work force. They’re kind of floating, because no one’s doing anything for them,” Poole said. “They’re not part of the process anymore, and their jobs have vanished.”
Nationally, Poole points to the decline in union jobs – as do many others. But neither Atlanta nor Georgia has ever been strong union territory, and it doesn’t explain the disappearance of blue-collar jobs here – or why Trump has led in the few polls conducted in this state. So let me introduce you to my old high school crowd.
Four decades or so ago, M.D. Collins High School, like the handful of others in south Fulton County, was a factory that churned out small, overwhelmingly white armies of blue-collar workers every May.
The school was off Old National Highway, in the shadow of what is now the Rev. Creflo Dollar’s monument to the prosperity gospel. So the neighborhood has changed somewhat.
A few of us in each class escaped to college. The vast majority left to become cops, mechanics, firemen, cashiers and construction workers. And parents, too.
But the Holy Grail was nearby Hartsfield International Airport (Maynard Jackson wouldn’t become mayor until 1974) with its limitless supply of pensioned, well-paying jobs that would see you through until Social Security kicked in. Guaranteed.
My classmates barely had five years in before airline deregulation kicked in – started by Richard Nixon, but signed into law by Jimmy Carter. Pay stalled, benefits dropped. It would be the first of many, many rugs pulled out from under them.
The Princeton study lists many possible causes for a white, blue-collar spike in self-destruction that is happening in the U.S., but not in Europe. Financial insecurity is one. Unlike Europe, the U.S. has shifted away from pensions in favor of stock-market dependent 401(k) accounts.
If you’re forced to gamble on your golden years, why not gamble on Donald Trump, too?
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