A Letter To Trump Voters From An Overeducated Liberal

Since Donald Trump easily beat Kamala Harris to secure a second term in The White House this month, I penned quite a few articles about the US election.

Longtime readers will attest that the number of election-related articles published here in recent days was, if anything, fewer than what I might’ve published during tumultuous periods for US politics in years past. My editorial strategy has evolved such that I’m more deliberate and discerning in an effort to make every article “count,” while still ensuring a steady, predictable flow of content.

Newer readers were, from what I can tell, a bit surprised at the scope and tenor of my election coverage. On the first point (i.e., regarding the share of daily coverage devoted to US politics), those readers should understand: This platform is, was and always will be partially dedicated to political coverage, domestic and global. There’s nothing at all unusual about the number of political articles published here since November 6. If it strikes you otherwise, you simply haven’t been a reader for very long or else you read selectively until now and didn’t notice how much political content I actually publish in the normal course of business.

On the second point, I never made a secret of my political bias: I’m a progressive liberal. Full stop. I’m not a Wall Streeter. I can only say that so many times. Trading isn’t my natural habitat. I crash-landed in this realm by accident after my plane passed through a wormhole on the way to a farm in Colombia, and the portal back to my real life closed before I could get my Cessna repaired. Now I’m stuck here with you people. Forever. I adapted to your ways, co-opted your culture and learned to speak your language better than you do. Now I chant in jargon — “weaponized gamma” — like so many incantations and behold, the natives were mesmerized.

Jokes aside, a lot of you assume things about me. Politically and otherwise. Most of those assumptions are wrong. A handful of you — the ones who actually read between the lines of the Monthlies — get it by now. One of you — maybe two — out of thousands, has the whole thing figured out. The rest of you will never get it, or not entirely anyway. And that’s ok. You don’t need to get most of it, but you do need to get this: Whatever I did (or didn’t do) for a living prior to 2016, I was an (over)educated liberal by day, by training and on paper. I will always be that in spirit, just the same as I’ll always be… well, again, some of you get it, some of you don’t.

10 days on from the election, the (over)educated liberal in me wanted to pen a quick letter to the Trump supporters out there, a coalition which, we’ve just learned, is now considerably more diverse and probably larger than it was four years ago. Lend me your ear, just for a moment. Some of you may need a dictionary. In that respect at least, Google’s your friend.

I’ve said this I don’t know how many times, but it really can’t be emphasized enough: There’s a lot that’s unique about Trump, but through the lens of authoritarian populism, he’s typecast and his “movement” is commensurately hackneyed. It’s formulaic: Quick fixes to highly complex problems is populism 101, and you learn how to politically monetize untapped rage capital in your first semester as a demagoguery major.

It’s so, so terribly unfortunate that half of America (and I’m excluding the Wall Street vote here, because those Trump votes have to be analyzed separately) can’t see that in Trump and MAGA. The reason they can’t is simple: They lack context. Without the sense of history that comes from a formalized college education, they’re not immune to what, time and again, proves to be a deadly socio-political virus. A four-year degree would immunize those voters, both by providing for the discovery of historical populism and by affording them the analytical thinking skills necessary to rule out as viable certain lines of argumentation and identify manipulative, predatory rhetoric as disqualifying and dangerous.

The Ruy Teixeira and John Judis narrative (see my full exposition here) has a lot of explanatory power when it comes to the educational gentrification of the Democratic party, illustrated below.

I used that figure in “The Divide,” the March Monthly Letter linked above. It’s based on a Nate Cohn analysis of data from the Census Bureau, the American National Elections Studies and public polling.

Although this shift garnered quite a bit of attention over the past decade or so, the 2024 election was a veritable clarion call: The result underscored the extent to which educational gentrification threatens to destroy what, not so very long ago, was a Democratic coalition that Republicans worried might prevent the GOP from ever claiming the presidency again post-Bush.

This educational gentrification has “succeeded” in ostracizing key Democratic constituencies, driving more blue-collar workers into the arms of the Republican party and even allowing Trump, a notorious racist and a bloviating xenophobe, to peel off Black and Hispanic voters some of whom, it turns out, don’t want to defund the police, don’t want open borders and don’t care the first thing about the increasingly niche, single-issue politics (over)educated liberals like myself mistakenly believe are important.

If you’re wondering whether I understand what’s just happened to Democrats, that should answer your question. I do. And if you’ve read the other Monthlies, you know I can recite, from memory, the socioeconomic narrative which explains how neoliberalism’s failures and collateral damage sowed the seeds for Trump. Oblivious I am most assuredly not.

We do a lot of silly things as (over)educated liberals. We’re meme fodder. I get that, and I’m cognizant of it every, single day. I go out of my way to avoid manifesting the (over)educated liberal stereotype. People see me, and they don’t know what I am. What I’m not is walking around in a tweed blazer with tight jeans, a curly mop head and some John Lennon glasses.

But here’s thing. We (over)educated liberals may not know much, particularly relative to how much time and money we spent getting stupid, but we know some history and we can hear it when it rhymes. We may be easy to dupe on some scores, but not on something like this.

That simple observation — that a college education is at least partial immunity to Trump’s brand of politics — may go a very long way towards explaining why a discernible, but relatively slow, long run trend (i.e., the educational gentrification of the Democratic party) suddenly went vertical in 2016. Occam’s razor.

I’ve read laborious explanations for the same vertical inflection, and they all feel needlessly tortured. Why do we go to college? The brochures will tell you it’s to discover your passion and prepare yourself for a related career. But a four-year degree does a lot more for you than that. Indeed in an era when many four-year degrees are proving to be useless, at best, for obtaining gainful employment, the critical thinking skills you learn on campus might be the only silver lining in those interminable monthly student loan payments.

In 2016, Americans were presented with a textbook populist demagogue for president. We (over)educated liberals didn’t just reject him, we rejected him out of hand. Not because we were somehow so aloof in our Ivory Towers — so brainwashed by the cult of neoliberalism and so obliviously ensconced in our urban digs — that we were incapable of understanding the grievances of those to whom Trump appealed, but rather because we’ve read this movie before (if you will), and we know damn well how it ends.

I ask myself often if Trump’s supporters outside of Wall Street (where people still remember how to vote for the own economic self-interest) ever wonder how and why it is that (over)educated liberals seem so sure about their reservations regarding a man who, let us not forget, used to be a Democrat. Why, Trump’s supporters often ask, do (over)educated liberals “hate Trump.” The answer to that latter question is that we don’t. We don’t “hate Trump.” We just know what happens when people like him discover the power of populist politics.

I’m going to leave you today with what I wrote as the riot on Capitol Hill was unfolding on January 6, 2021. You tell me if it sounds like someone who’s filled with “hate” towards the “other half,” or whether it sounds like precisely what it was: A sympathetic “I told you so” which, regrettably and almost inevitably, I’ll have to write again when Trump’s second term ends in the same violent melee as his first.

As protesters waving Trump flags marched on the Capitol, spurred on by the man himself and riled up by Alex Jones, who was on the scene, lawmakers were evacuated for their own safety. The Secret Service was deployed. The Capitol was locked down. At least one person was shot and killed.

The Trump faithful were branded “criminals” and “insurrectionists” by members of both parties, just as the African Americans who destroyed property over the summer during racial justice protests were deemed “thugs” and “looters.”

But watching the spectacle, one was reminded that, for the most part, the president’s supporters are victims.

Victims of their own gullibility, sure. But also victims of an economic system that failed them. And continues to fail them.

Victims of an education system that failed them. And continues to fail them.

Victims of a healthcare system that failed them. And continues to fail them.

And victims of a government that failed them. And continues to fail them.

Beyond that, Trump’s supporters are victims of a fraudulent narrative sold to them by a man who spent his entire adult life peddling empty packages wrapped in gilded promises he never intended to keep and whose business career was a case study in failure, resurrected, ironically, by a television show premised on a fabricated history of success.

Blame for the conditions that brought [Trump] to power lies elsewhere, but he leaves the country in worse shape than when he entered the White House.

Like the human and economic toll inflicted by the pandemic, some of that damage is structural. It will never be undone.