Opinion | Trump Is No Populist

Over the past 20 years or so many of us social observer types have been writing about the horrific chasms separating the educated class (people with college degrees) from the working class (people without).Some of these chasms involve basic health outcomes.People without college degrees die about eight years sooner than people with four-year degrees.Some of the chasms involve family structure.

Women with only a high school degree or less are about five times as likely to have children out of wedlock as women with a college degree.Some of the chasms are sociological.People with only high school degrees or less are much more likely to say they have no close friends.

They are more likely to live in towns where social capital is collapsing and the young are fleeing.Some of these chasms involve educational outcomes.By sixth grade, the children of poor families are performing four grade levels lower than the children of affluent families.

As Daniel Markovits of Yale has pointed out, the education gap between affluent and non-affluent students today is greater than the gap between white and Black people in the era of Jim Crow.If America elected a populist as president, you would expect him to devote his administration to addressing these inequities, to boosting the destinies of working-class Americans.But that’s not what President Trump is doing.

He seems to have no plans to narrow the education chasms, no plans to narrow the health outcome chasms or the family structure chasms.He has basically no plans to revive the communities that have been decimated by postindustrialization.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.

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