“Sadly, the American Dream is dead.”
After rambling, off script, for most of his 50-minute speech to announce his presidential candidacy in June 2015, Donald Trump had returned to his written remarks for the final section. He delivered these somber words slowly, pausing for emphasis.
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“Sadly. . . the American Dream is dead,” he enunciated, pausing again.
In the cavernous lobby of Trump Tower, an eager supporter filled that pregnant silence. “Bring it back!” she shouted.
Sure enough, that was Trump’s promise and the final line, the bottom line, of his candidacy: “But if I get elected president, I will bring it back bigger and better and stronger than ever before, and we will make America great again!”
This became his mantra. Make America Great Again. The premise of that motto—the American Dream is dead—carried the day in state after state, and it drew boisterous crowds at rallies in places like Lowell, Massachusetts; Beaumont, Texas; Mobile, Alabama (“We’re running on fumes. There’s nothing here … ”); and Springfield, Illinois.
“These rally towns,” the Washington Post reported in an early effort to decode Trump’s meaning, “lag behind the country and their home states on a number of measures. Their median household incomes are lower, and they often have lower rates of homeownership or residents with college degrees.”
On April 26, 2016, my own state of Maryland, along with four other states, voted for Trump in the primary election, putting him on the doorstep of the Republican nomination. “Every single place I go is a disaster,” Trump said in his victory remarks that night.
Trump obviously didn’t go where I had gone on a reporting trip that morning: to Chevy Chase Village Hall, off of Connecticut Avenue, just outside Washington, D.C. Chevy Chase, Maryland, is a Democratic stronghold, but a place that liked Donald Trump in the general election in 2016 far less than it did Mitt Romney in 2012. Trump also got only 16 percent of Republican primary votes in Chevy Chase; 64 percent of primary Republican voters preferred former Ohio Gov. John Kasich.
Chevy Chase’s rejection of Trump in the primary election could be chalked up as liberal Beltway Republicans rejecting Trump. But if we look deeper, we see parallels to Trump’s performance in some very conservative places in Middle America, and the conditions that might have led to both of those places’ rejections of him.
In the case of Chevy Chase, the key to understanding Trump opposition in the primary has a lot to do with understanding the strength of the community, just as it does in a Wisconsin town called Oostburg. Oostburg is different from Chevy Chase in almost every way except for one crucial similarity: Both of these villages are knit together by the kind of community institutions and civil society that have rapidly disintegrated in most of the United States in the past several decades. These places illustrate a kind of social cohesion that directly undermines what Trump says about the direction of the American dream. And so the stories of Chevy Chase and Oostburg, two places that rejected Trump, help us to understand why so many other places in the United States embraced him, and why they might do so again in 2020.
When I arrived at Chevy Chase’s Village Hall, which is the polling place for the village, I found a parking spot between a BMW and a Porsche SUV. That was unsurprising. Chevy Chase Village is the wealthiest municipality in the D.C. region, which is probably the highest-income region in the country. The mean household income in the Village of Chevy Chase is $420,000. Only about 2 percent of America makes that much. Chris Matthews and George F. Will are just two of the well-known residents of the village. Ambassadors, lawyers, bankers and lobbyists populate the beautiful massive homes off Connecticut Avenue, almost all of which are worth more than $1 million. The median home costs $1.52 million.
Chevy Chase Village isn’t merely wealthy in material things. To the extent we can measure the good life, Chevy Chase has it. About 95 percent of Chevy Chase’s families had two parents at home in 2015. The Village Hall hosts a monthly speaker series, which kicked off in April 2017 with a talk by documentary filmmaker Tamara Gold. CIA veteran David Duberman was slated for the next month. A committee of volunteers throws regular parties for the whole village. Saint Patrick’s Day included a “Father/Daughter Pipe/Harpist Team and True Scottish Piper,” according to the Crier, the village’s own newsletter. Children and toddlers can take ballet and musical theater classes at Village Hall. Adults can take Tai Chi.
The community is engaged. At a village meeting I observed, there were presentations by the volunteer members or chairmen and chairwomen of the Community Relations Committee, the Ethics Commission, the Financial Review Committee, the Public Safety Committee, the Traffic Committee, the Local Advisory Panel to the Historic Preservation Commission, the Western Grove Park Friends Group, the Environment and Energy Committee and the Parks and Greenspaces Committee.
Chevy Chase is “the Village” Hillary Clinton said it took to raise a family. And Hillary Clinton took the village. The day I was there for the 2016 primary, Hillary raked in 85 percent of the Democratic primary vote. She would a few months later also dominate the general election at this polling place, beating Donald Trump by 56 points. This tells us something rather obvious to anyone who knows the area: that wealthy, white Chevy Chase is very liberal.
But a closer look tells us something more specific. Compare Hillary’s 56-point margin with 2012, when Obama defeated Mitt Romney by 31 points. There is something about Chevy Chase that makes it like Trump so much less than it likes Romney. Chevy Chase’s aversion to Trump appears much more clearly when we set aside the general election, which is a choice between a Republican and a Democrat. We need to focus instead on the Republican primary, where Trump got a fraction of Kasich’s vote share.
Chevy Chase’s wealth is extreme, but the phenomenon in play here—wealthy, highly educated people in affluent communities eschewing Donald Trump and his proclamation that the American Dream is dead—is common. Chevy Chase is in Montgomery County, Maryland, which is the third-most-educated county in the nation, measured by advanced degrees—31.6 percent of adults over 25 have a graduate or professional degree. (Nationally the rate is less than 12 percent.) The rest of the top four—Arlington and Alexandria in Virginia, and the District of Columbia (functionally a county for our purposes)—are among Trump’s 35 worst counties in America. You can spot the suburbs, chock-full of advanced degrees and six-figure salaries, by looking at a primary election map for counties that voted for John Kasich or Marco Rubio.
The best explanation of why these pockets of elites rejected Trump is found in Trump’s own words. He was selling a sense of decline and a desperate need to turn things around. In Kasich Country, though—in college towns and prosperous suburbs—people believed the American Dream was alive. These people also believed America was great already, while much of the electorate didn’t.
This isn’t a universal rule, and it doesn’t apply as well to the general election, when voters were picking between Trump and Hillary. But, as a general rule, you can use Trump’s electoral strength in the early Republican primaries as a proxy for pessimism. Trump Country, by this definition, is the places where hope is low and where the good life appears out of reach. So the flip side is this: Where Trump bombed—especially in the GOP primaries, but also compared with Romney in 2012—are the places where you can sniff out confidence, optimism, hope and, if you’ll pardon the treacle, the American Dream.
If we start our search for the American Dream in Hillary’s Village, the Village of Chevy Chase, it’s tempting to come to a materialistic conclusion: People with money have hope, and the American Dream is alive and well in wealthy neighborhoods.
But a closer look at the primary map reveals other pockets of Trump opposition (in the early days)—another model of the good life. There’s a different sort of village out there.
There’s Oostburg.
Oostburg couldn’t be more different from Chevy Chase. While Chevy Chase borders the District of Columbia, the Village of Oostburg sprouted up in the farm fields of Wisconsin. It’s an outlying suburb of Sheboygan, Wisconsin—which is itself not exactly a booming metropolis.
The median home in Oostburg is worth $148,000, meaning you could buy ten homes in Oostburg for the price of one in Chevy Chase. Oostburg is not poor: The average household earns $58,000, which is slightly above the national average. Even that slight advantage in household income has a clear—and salient—demographic explanation: Oostburg is a family town.
As a rule, different types of households nationwide have very different median incomes. Married-family households on average have higher incomes than non-married or nonfamily households. Oostburg is much denser with married-family households than the rest of the country is (two-thirds of all households in Oostburg compared with less than 50 percent nationwide), and that difference explains Oostburg’s advantage over the national median. In other words, Oostburg’s wealth is literally its family strength.
And if you ask Oostburgers, they’ll say their family strength is really community strength. A few weeks before that Maryland primary, I spent a couple of days in Oostburg to cover the Wisconsin primaries. Just as I would visit Chevy Chase because of what made it stand out—its wealth—I picked Oostburg because of what made it stand out: its Dutchness, and the strong community that the Dutch are known for, even centuries after they immigrated to the United States.
Forty-five percent of Oostburg claims Dutch heritage according to the census. Another 42 percent are German. “Oostburg” is Dutch for East-town. Dutch settlers came here in the 1840s, and the signs of the Netherlands, such as tulips and miniature windmills, are everywhere. “If you ain’t Dutch, you ain’t much,” was a phrase I first heard at the lunch counter of Judi’s Place, the family-owned diner.
On Sunday morning at Judi’s, I saw the truest manifestation of the town’s Dutch heritage, and it wasn’t the diner cuisine: Dozens of families streamed in to dine with their neighbors after service at one of the four Reformed churches in the village. While there’s no speaker series highlighting famous residents, the community’s strength is unquestionable. Neighbors all greet each other at Judi’s. Customers of the diner prepared and delivered frozen meals to the waitress, who was scheduled to have surgery the next day.
One man—a mechanic named Dan at the local farm—complained to me about the recent Christmas concert at the public school. He couldn’t get a seat in the gym for the concert, because all of his neighbors, even those with no school-age children, were taking up the seats. One neighbor shrugged at Dan’s plight of having no seat. “We gotta come see our kids,” the neighbor said. Again, the neighbor had no children singing that day, but Oostburgers consider the kids of Oostburg “our kids.” It takes a village, and Oostburg fits the bill of that village.
But this isn’t Hillary’s type of village politically. Trump won 80 to 13 in November. Back in 2014, one blogger suggested Oostburg was the most conservative town in Wisconsin. But just as in Chevy Chase, Oostburg’s Republicans had no use for Donald Trump in the primary election. Trump, who dominated most of Wisconsin’s rural areas, scored only 15 percent in the Republican primary in this village. That’s a familiar percentage—it’s only one point off from his total in Chevy Chase.
What made Oostburg so immune to Trump’s appeal? It’s inadequate to say that Christian conservatives rejected this twice-divorced recently pro-choice New York playboy. In South Carolina, a few weeks earlier, Trump won the evangelical vote with the same percentage (33 percent) that he won the rest of the state, according to exit polls.
Oostburg wasn’t a mere outlier, either. If you wanted to predict which rural, Christian counties would buck the Trump train when they had a choice among Republicans like Cruz and Rubio and Kasich, you could have done a lot worse than looking at a county’s Dutch population.
Here’s the common thread between the Oostburgs and the Chevy Chases, and among analogues around the country: Both villages have strong institutions of civil society—local governments,
churches, country clubs, garden clubs, good public schools and, in Oostburg’s case, Judi’s Place.
Those community institutions constitute the infrastructure that is necessary to support families.
And the institutions in turn are supported by families. Strong families are the precondition for the good life, and for mobility—the dream, grounded in realistic hope, that no matter your starting point, you can succeed and your children can do even better.
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When data show that the white working class was Trump’s base, it’s easy to see the phrase “white working class” as a simple statement of race and income. It’s more important, though, as a description of a social class—even a way of life. “White working-class Americans of all ages,” writes Emma Green in the Atlantic, citing research by the Public Religion Research Institute and the Atlantic, “were much less likely than their college-educated peers to participate in sports teams, book clubs, or neighborhood associations—55 percent vs. 31 percent said they seldom or never participated in those kinds of activities.”
This had political salience. That PRRI poll, taken in mid-primaries, when Ted Cruz was the last viable challenger, found Trump leading among GOP voters 37 to 31. But among GOP voters who were “civically disengaged,” Trump led 50 to 24. Oostburg voted Cruz and Chevy Chase voted Kasich. Within the context of Republicans, churchgoing white Christians are conservative while wealthy, highly educated white suburbanites are moderates.
You could see these two things as opposites, but the stories of Kasich Country and Cruz Country are the same story: People enmeshed in strong communities rejected Trump in the early primaries while people alienated, abandoned, lacking social ties and community rushed to him immediately.
Trump’s best large county in the Iowa caucuses, Pottawattamie, had the weakest civil society—churches, neighborhood groups, volunteering, voting—of any large county in Iowa, and is known instead for its neon-lighted casinos erected to bring in out-of-state gamblers. His best small county is notable mostly for church closures and the shuttering of its largest employer in early 2016. It also ranks at the bottom of the state in widely used measures of civil society.
His other best places in those early primaries—places like Buchanan County, Virginia; and Fayette County, Pennsylvania—looked similarly vacant.
Why do so many people believe the American Dream is dead? I think the answer is this: because strong communities have crumbled, and much of America has been left abandoned, without the web of human connections and institutions that make the good life possible. More of America is a wasteland of alienation. Less of America is the “village.”
Can this change?
America has more Chevy Chases today than it did a generation ago, but that’s because wealthy people are clustering more. Making more Chevy Chases is a zero-sum game: It means drawing the skilled, the active, the educated, the leaders out of other communities and concentrating them in places where normal folk can’t afford a house. There is also a clear limit on how many pockets of elites America can have, because, by definition, the elites are few.
But remember the second village, Oostburg. The raw material is more renewable there, and arguably it used to be more plentiful and could be again. It’s a sense of duty to one’s neighbors—a duty that includes a sense of duty to one’s family. It’s a sense of both being looked after and being needed. It’s a sense of a common, higher purpose. It’s shared, resilient mediating institutions. And frankly, in America at least, that common purpose is a common faith, and those mediating institutions are really the church. There could be more Oostburgs, too.
From the forthcoming book ALIENATED AMERICA: Why Some Places Thrive While Others Collapse by Timothy P. Carney. Copyright © 2019 by Timothy P. Carney. To be published on February 19, 2019 by Harper, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers. Excerpted by permission.
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