Trump through the eyes of a French geographer
Christophe Guilluy’s work deserves to effect an upheaval in how we view Western domestic politics. He takes a geographical rather than a political, social or economic point of departure. This doesn’t change everything, but it changes and clarifies a great deal.
Here are his main points.
First and foremost he holds that, politically, socially, economically, the Western world is best understood as divided, not by social class or by the preoccupations of contemporary leftists and rightists, but by those who benefit from globalization and those who do not.
Those who benefit live where the economy is dynamic. These urban and suburban centres host tech industries and their spinoffs, as well as those who provide services to this group. Some of the winners are what the French call bobos, bourgeois bohemians. They also include comfortable retirees, what Thomas Picketty calls a rentier class, who have benefited from stocks, exploding real estate values in the globalised urban centres. In Europe, they enjoy a solid social safety net. In the US, they can afford good health insurance, perhaps because they entered retirement with a good health plan.
Also among these beneficiaries are — a fundamentally important observation — immigrants. Why of course! These are the people who provide the other benefiting groups with nannies, nurses, cleaners, landscapers, waiters, cooks, security guards, and shop assistants. Think of Anthony Bourdain’s paeans to the Hispanic kitchen workers without whom, he says, the upscale restaurant business would not exist. All of a sudden, the pro-immigrant stance of the successful middle classes in the big cities can be understood, not in terms of some fundamental decency, but as a simple alliance of interests.
Those who do not benefit live elsewhere, in Guilluy’s France péripherique or similar locations. This is not one geographic area, much less the literal periphery of anywhere. It is a diverse set of areas inhabited by the losers of globalisation. It includes many small cities, small towns, some suburbs of large towns, decayed industrial areas, some farming regions, and even some neighbourhoods. In a gentrifying neighbourhood, even particular buildings might belong to la France péripherique. (*)
To arrive at this extremely fine-grained geographical analysis, Guilluy’s looked at literally thousands of locations in France. His delineation of a discontinuous, heterogenous ‘region’ puts a focus on the sloppy thinking of those who triumphantly proclaim that no, the ‘populists’ are not from small towns, or not working class, or not displaced by technology, or not from the most impoverished regions, or not from certain states. These proclamations are undermined as soon as Guilluy suggests that maybe the ‘populists’ don’t fit neatly into any one of these categories, but draw their numbers from all of them.
He notes that the loser classes will not move out of the periphery to the high-employment centres, not because they’re out of touch with realities, but because the move would require them either to insert themselves as unwelcome interlopers in immigrant quarters, or to spend much more than they could afford in the bourgeois quarters. And for people who have been unemployed for some time, even transport costs for 20 or 25 kilometers from a cheap suburb are beyond their means.
These and other realities put the insistence that populists are poorly educated in a harsh light. Even if there were lots of solid jobs for the highly educated — hardly obvious from the gig economy — unemployed workers could not afford to take them up. Even if travel and housing costs were no issue, there is no reason to suppose that becoming highly educated is a practical strategy. There are enough highly educated workers in non-peripheral areas. How will computer skills in the industrial wastelands provide a key to success? Almost half a century of tech development have shown that no substantial number of peripheral locations, divorced from the necessary infrastructure, are going to become tech centres. Tech is conceived in the largest cities and produced in giant offshore factories, or on the enormous ‘campuses’ of one or two smaller urban centres. Technology isn’t a cottage industry.
Guilluy also argues against the winners’ pretensions of moral superiority. He points out that all the prosperous beneficiaries of globalization, who champion the cause of their immigrant servants, never actually live with them. Quite the contrary: housing costs and often schooling choices erect a strong barrier against interaction with their beloved cooks, nannies, restaurant staff, cleaners and landscapers. It is the losers of globalisation who actually have to work out ‘multiculturalism’ on the ground. Guilluy points out that this has been achieved, if only at times by population movements, with the barest minimum of violence. Despite this, the losers are regularly accused of deep-seated, perhaps fascist racism.
But what are these losers afraid of? Guilluy’s geographical perspective enables him to explain what otherwise seem utterly irrational fears about being ‘swamped’. Critics of the losers would insist that if anyone is swamped, it is the immigrants — they are the small, sometimes tiny minority. Yet when Guilluy says that ‘no one wants to be a minority’, he doesn’t look at national population figures. He looks at where people live — neighborhoods, particular suburbs, particular streets. If the losers move away, or don’t move to the dynamic areas, it’s not because they are racists. It’s because they would have to live in the cheap, immigrant areas — and like people everywhere, they don’t want to live at the good pleasure of a local majority, a population that vastly outnumbers them. Guilluy cites numerous polls demonstrating that this concern is prevalent literally all over the world, not excluding non-white nations and often to a greater extent than in France. Yet the inhabitants of la France péripherique, even when not overtly accused of bigotry, are often called ‘the whites’, a move which Guilluy contends implicitly dismisses their concerns as racist.
Guilluy notes that every single ‘non-populist’ political party, without the slightest distinction of left and right and whatever their verbalisations, accepts globalisation unconditionally. They all, in the final analysis, adhere to the orthodoxies against protectionism and for the free movement of peoples, therefore the breaking down of political and social national borders. These parties tend to ignore or demonize the losers in the periphery. Even when they don’t, it is only a pose. Guilluy gives the example of Sarkozy’s unsuccessful appeal to the ‘petits blancs’, which lacked credibility because Sarkozy admitted more immigrants than any French president before or since. The point here is not that immigration, much less immigrants, are good or bad. It is that immigration, even if good for ‘the economy’, delivers those benefits only to the winners and their allies. None of these political constituencies, and this would apply to American ‘leftists’, show any interest in the fate of those who live outside the dynamic centres of globalising activity.
Guilluy’s conclusions do not apply as neatly to the US as they do to Europe and Canada. For one thing, given a very weak social safety net and the constant insecurities surrounding medical care, the class of comfortable retirees is proportionately much smaller. For another, the immigration issue has a different aspect. The cultural gap between the main group of US immigrants — ‘Hispanics’ — and mainstream America is much smaller than the cultural gap between the main group of immigrants to France — North Africans — and mainstream French. The US immigrants are Catholic, a very large minority among whites and the faith of a much-loved and famous president. Moreover, Christianity has become much less sectarian, more ‘ecumenical’, than it was in the 19th Century, so it matters that Mexicans and mainstream Americans share a Christian cultural background. Finally, the Mexican/Spanish cultural influence on the US runs much deeper than the cultural influence of the early medieval Islamic presence in France. (On the other hand, the overwhelming majority of immigrants to France are legal.)
Yet there are important similarities, including the existence of an economically excluded voting block. This has been established authoritatively in a Brookings study that, while it captures some of Guilluy’s painstaking attention to detail, has commanded virtually no attention:
The 2016 presidential race had signaled as much. Donald Trump carried 2,584 counties across the country, but calculations by scholars at the Brookings Institution showed that the 472 counties Hillary Clinton carried accounted for nearly two-thirds of U.S. economic output.
Now, new Brookings calculations show the same from 2018 House elections. With a few races still undecided, districts won by Democrats account for 61 percent of America’s gross domestic product, districts won by Republicans 38 percent.
In other words, there is indeed a ‘peripheral America’, and it is indeed voting against the pro-globalization regions represented by the Democrats and, pre-Trump, by Republicans as well. The realities of this division can be summarized in three points.
First, the economic patterns will not right themselves. It is a case of, as the Bible says, unto him that hath shall be given. This is illustrated by Amazon’s criteria for its second headquarters:
It only limited the competition to “metropolitan areas with more than one million people” and “urban or suburban locations with the potential to attract and retain strong technical talent.”
The big, globalization-friendly cities have assets that the rust belt cannot hope to match. There is no tech redemption for them. It is against this background that the desultory efforts to revive the rust belt should be assessed. It’s unclear whether the suggestion that fired auto workers in the Midwest should learn to code comes from cruel cynicism or self-induced naïveté.
Second, no one has even proposed serious remedies. No one so much as imagines the possibility that, for example, Amazon & Google might be compelled to locate in the rust-belt. No one supposes that those areas should have received massive subsidies to develop protected secondary tech manufacturing facilities, or that US producers should be required to buy from them. These may be impractical, even foolish ideas, but they serve to illustrate the scale on which relief for the rust belt must be conceived. Paul Krugman’s laughably modest proposals for helping the losers are all the more telling given he is one of the most sympathetic and talented people to address the problem:
We can and should do a lot to improve the lives of Americans in lagging regions. We can guarantee access to health care and raise their incomes with wage subsidies and other policies (in fact, the earned-income tax credit, which helps low-wage workers, already disproportionally benefits workers in low-income states).
Large-scale job creation and change to the economies of these regions are not, in these suggestions, even on the horizon. On the contrary, it is taken for granted that help cannot mean anything more than a kinder, gentler, low-wage, dead-end eternity. So it seems that (1) the ‘populist’ regions are economically distinguishable by their losses due to globalization, (2) there is no realistic prospect that these losses will be made good.
Third, the losers are left with virtually no political options. For all Krugman’s good intentions, there is a certain obtuseness in his assessment of the losers’ situation:
…the sense of being left behind can make people angry even if their material needs are taken care of.
Here Krugman shows himself oblivious to the losers’ political vulnerability. Whatever is done for ‘their material needs’, it happens at the good pleasure of the winners. The losers have no political party to defend them. Even their crap jobs are, all things considered, a kind of charity. ‘Retail salespersons’ and cashiers, for example, are the largest occupational groups in the US. Those jobs are just waiting for online shopping and automated cashiers to spread. Call centers are equally precarious. The losers are simply left behind; they survive at the mercy of others who, it must be said, are not well-disposed towards them.
It would be a mistake to patronize the losers as suckers, falling for Trump’s anti-immigration and protectionist slogans. That Trump hasn’t or won’t deliver relief is besides the point: he is the only politician to have sided with them. Nor would it be wise to suppose that the only danger of neglecting rust belts is a surge in extreme right-wing activity. For one thing, the rust belt is unlikely to be the last area to suffer from increasing globalisation and technology’s creative disruption: it’s unclear why current tech centers are immune from these threats. For another, as Guilluy suggests, you can’t really run a society when a majority of the population is excluded from concern, compassion, and indeed the economy itself. An economy can’t very well prosper if the impoverishment of its participants is brushed aside as a mere human-interest story.
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* This take on the 2018 election, from one of the very best analysts of US political demographics, illustrates how current approaches completely fail to capture Guilluy’s insight:
So how exactly did the suburbs help make a Democratic majority possible? Using CityLab’s neighborhood density categorizations, we can place all 435 districts into six groups that range from “Pure Rural” to “Pure Urban” and get a sense of which types of seats mattered most to Democrats. The two categories we’re most interested in are “Sparse Suburban” and “Dense Suburban.” “Sparse Suburban” covers districts in outer-ring suburbs at the edge of major metropolitan areas, like the Virginia 10th, which sits outside of Washington, D.C. “Dense Suburban” districts, on the other hand, are those where people are packed in more tightly in mostly inner-ring suburbs and some urban areas, like the California 25th, which falls in the Los Angeles metro area. And as the table below shows, Democrats are poised for a net gain of 27 seats from these two categories, which is four more than they needed to gain a majority.2 In other words, 75 percent of Democrats’ gains came from these predominantly suburban districts.