On the Politics of the Diploma Divide

(& Recoiling in Opposing Directions)

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Just before the election, I went for a walk in my neighborhood and stopped to talk to three people standing by a Harris Walz yard sign. I said I loved seeing all the Harris signs and mentioned one anomalous nearby block where there were five Trump signs. One neighbor said, “Too close to the railroad tracks, I guess.”

I didn’t respond, but in the days to come, I’d keep hearing her comment in my head. I kept wishing I’d said, “My mother grew up one house from the railroad tracks,” and kept thinking that if Trump won, attitudes like this woman’s would be a big part of why.

I grew up working-class, but with differences. My father was a railroad shop electrician. My mother stayed at home. When I was little, we had one car, an old brown Plymouth coupe that kept breaking down. Meanwhile, my mother’s family had upper-class pretensions, since my maternal great-grandfather, a businessman named Jesse Spurling, lived in a big plantation-style house in Sanford called The Oaks and drove a Pierce Arrow. Most importantly, however, we had books in the house.

I often identify with my working class roots and react strongly against some of the idiotic entitlements of the wealthy, but in adolescence, I came to realize certain working-class characteristics in my immediate environment as noxious, especially a scorn for education and creativity and art, rigidity that frequently extended to ugly prejudices like racism, sexism and homophobia. I don’t mean to suggest all working-class people share this orientation and clearly the wealthy and the working class have their own sets of conservatisms, which sometimes overlap.

This last month, I’ve reacted inwardly with increasing annoyance to attitudes from both sides. My personal understanding of “wealthy” extends to supposedly liberal people I know who live in grand historic homes whom I’ve heard call themselves “poor.” I’d slice off my toes before I’d vote for Trump, but I understand wanting to vote differently from such out-of-touch entitlement.

My mother, granddaughter of Spurling of The Oaks, died when I was 12. It was from her that I learned to think of myself as a writer. She championed my creativity. I entered my adolescence with just my father, whose grandfather was a Georgia sharecropper, who rarely showed interest in my love of writing and whose literary interests extended not much further than the occasional mention that Edgar Allen Poe was “weird.” When I invited him to the commencement ceremony for my master’s degree (I didn’t participate in my bachelor’s or doctoral commencements), he left me a voice mail, which I can still hear in my head, saying, “About that thing Wednesday night, I think we’ll just skip it.”

So I recoil in two opposing directions. I recoil from the snobbery of self-assumed “liberals” who look down on people who didn’t have the same educational opportunities, or didn’t make much of them. And I recoil from the redneck aversion to education and imagination and new ways of thinking that I first met in the working-class side of my childhood home equation. I know that for people for whom life’s an emergency, education seems a luxury. I worked from four a.m. to noon in a warehouse while I earned my bachelor’s at the nearest state university. In fact, I consider education a responsibility, a moral value. But I also know I grew up reading, surrounded by books and the encouragement of my parents, and that these facts too are privilege.

And this soul-schism meets the cultural schism in our country. It matches two crises that I think are related: a crisis in education and a crisis in the Democratic Party. Despite Trump’s followers saying he won in a landslide, he didn’t quite get 50 percent of the popular vote. The sense of a landslide comes from the fact that this time he didn’t lose the popular vote while still winning the electoral college vote. We’re still a 50/50 country.

The crisis in education in this country is palpable everywhere. It’s not a coincidence that Trump brags that he doesn’t read because he has a “big brain” and that 54 percent of Americans cannot read past a sixth grade level. It’s not a coincidence that Trump’s politics are fueled by misinformation and disinformation and that the newspaper industry has collapsed, from daily circulations of more than 63 million in the early 1990s to less than a third of that, all while Jacksonville’s paper, The Florida Times-Union, for example, has a staff that’s 10 percent of what it was 20 years ago.

The crisis in the Democratic Party is its loss of the working class. The Democratic Party, in its early to mid-20^th century connotations, supported all those who needed a leg up. To many people, that seemed to shift from meaning working-class whites to racial minorities. It’s absolutely true that white Southerners, heavily working-class, switched from voting Democratic to voting Republican when Democrats became the party of Civil Rights. It’s also the case that over the last several decades, a college education as an indicator of how one voted has flipped. In 1960, JFK lost the white college-educated vote by a two to one margin. Six decades later, Joe Biden lost the white non-college-educated vote by the same.

The political tension of the Diploma Divide, ironically, is as taut as that of a suspension bridge. Working-class support for Trump only solidifies the self-congratulatory disdain of the left-leaning educated, while the condescension of the educated classes only further cements white working-class loyalty to a New York real estate fraudster. Were one political party to break through to the other side, it would likely own the next era in American history. The Republican Party has become increasingly fascist. I hope the Democratic Party can bring back part of the working class without sacrificing any of its own ideals, indeed by emphasizing its ideals in the right way. The stakes are existential.