The Need to Keep Listening
On being wrong about America.
It’s okay to be wrong. We are all prisoners of our experiences.
For years, I thought I understood the motivations of voters in this era. I didn’t. What I’ve come to see is that we are living through a tremendously disruptive chapter in American history, one in which old assumptions, mine included, don’t always hold. As an American from a minority population, I’ve always been attuned to the way race and class intertwine. You can’t escape it; it’s stitched into the American experience, sometimes visible, sometimes hidden in the seams.
The numbers make the point plain. Maternal deaths in the U.S. fell from 817 in 2022 to 669 in 2023, but that apparent progress conceals brutal divides. Women over 40 die at nearly five times the rate of those under 25. Black women face a mortality rate of 50.3 per 100,000 live births, three times higher than White women, and far above Hispanic and Asian mothers. While other groups saw improvements in 2022, the rate for Black women increased. These are preventable deaths, like bleeding, clots, and infections, but prevention doesn’t reach everyone equally.1
Wealth tells the same story. In 2022, White families held, on average, $1.3 million in wealth. Hispanic families averaged $227,000, while Black families averaged $212,000. The median numbers echo the gap: $284,000 for White households, compared to $62,000 for Hispanic families and just $45,000 for Black families. That isn’t an accident or misfortune, but the cumulative weight of redlining, discriminatory lending, and exclusion from programs that built the White middle class. Entire generations were denied homeownership, inheritance, and equity.2
So yes, the hierarchies are undeniable.
And yes, the urgency for some Americans to preserve them is equally undeniable.
However, I find myself drawn to another kind of poverty, one that is less discussed: a poverty of trust.
Not everyone sees institutions for what they are, bureaucracies lumbering along with human error and the occasional success of checks and balances. Instead, people see Washington as a far-off imperial metropolis, even if it sits just across the Beltway from where I live.
For many, it may as well be another planet.
This distrust is rooted in memory. There’s a generation raised on cowboy myths and Cold War zeal, only to be coaxed, or drafted, into wars that felt more like colonial projects than crusades for democracy. Another generation came of age under the banner of “forever wars,” watching young Americans sent to desert nations under the guise of freedom, but really, many suspect, for resource extraction. The cycle repeats: participation demanded, the benefits unevenly distributed, the costs borne by those seeking escape or stability.
Military service, of course, isn’t all futility. It offers skills, education, fitness, and even humanitarian work. However, those benefits are overshadowed by a sense of betrayal, which corrodes trust.
That corrosion spreads far beyond the battlefield. Whether the subject is politicians, bankers, or generals, Americans feel something has been stolen from them.
Powerlessness follows.
And in that powerlessness, why not be entertained?
Why not laugh as the jester humiliates the class of people seen as siphoning off “real America” and leaving behind vacant mall parking lots, predatory banks, and more fast food chains than fresh greens?
One of my favorite newsletters, The Triad by Jonathan V. Last, often explores this territory. I admire it, even when I disagree. He argues that experts don’t deserve the blame they’ve been receiving compared to the general public. I’ve written in defense of experts too: flawed, tunnel-visioned, but still wrestling with public problems in ways the public can’t. Yet lately I wonder if I’ve been too charitable. Maybe the public’s scorn is earned. After all, quality of life indicators are falling, wealth inequality is widening, and the global order built by American experts shows cracks, from anti-communist zealotry to debt structures that look like colonialism in new clothes.
We don’t live in our parents’ world, where affordable education, housing, and workplace contracts tethered people to stability for decades. Nostalgia for that era is often poisoned by revanchism and hierarchy, but it also reflects something true: for many, life has gotten harder.
That’s the paradox.
We’re right to name the inequalities and hierarchies.
We’re right to trace the decline of trust.
But we should also be willing to admit where we’ve been wrong. Not to wallow in it, but to keep asking the questions that might bring us closer to clarity. America in this moment isn’t one story. It’s a cacophony of betrayal and resilience, of scorn and yearning, of decline and possibility.
And maybe being wrong is the only way to keep listening.
Policy Center for Maternal Mental Health (2025), Maternal Mortality in the U.S.: A Declining Trend with Persistent Racial Disparities in the Black Population (Policy Center for Maternal and Infant Health), accessed August 19, 2025, Policy Center for Maternal Mental Health, https://policycentermmh.org/maternal-mortality-in-the-u-s-a-declining-trend-with-persistent-racial-disparities-in-the-black-population/.
Urban Institute, “Nine Charts about Wealth Inequality in America,” Urban Institute, April 25, 2024, accessed August 19, 2025, https://apps.urban.org/features/wealth-inequality-charts/.
There is an assumption, perpetuated by the likes of Bill Clinton, James Carville and economists that we are economic creatures, first and foremost. That may be true,until we have full bellies, a warm and dry place to lay our head.
I invoke Maslows heirarchy of needs.
There was an assumption among Democrats that they had the minority vote locked in, only to discover, but they still can't come to grips with reality, that they don't.
I don't know for a fact, but I know it is true (plagarizing Bill Maher) that black and Hispanic men tend to conservative, while the women tend to liberal., and that fact is slowly being acknowledged, especially in polls and focus groups.
The needs of the male are primordial and transcend species, once the belly is full, and creatures needs fulfilled, the male needs to feel dominant, that he can copulate and procreate
The rise in social status and independence of females, have proven a threat to the male, and he feels victimized. Tis a paradox that a person feels themselves a victim because they have lost the ability to victimize and subdue others, but the modern world runs on victim hood.
The great competition in our world is to be considered a victim. Trump claims it all of the time, witch hunts, Russia, Russia, Russia, he is being picked on says he.
The vile underbelly of white Christian nationalism, as manifested in fascism, neo NAZI, KKK is their belief that they are victims of a liberal democracy which has enabled the "mud people" the "nigrahs", the "femiNAZI's," the queers, to become their equal, not just their equals but their betters.
The Democrats thought that they had the Hispanic vote wrapped up, because of Trumps obvious racism, but not true. The vast majority of Hispanics, including "illegals" and naturalized citizens are law abiding, hard workers and entrepreneurs and despised the gangs, cartels and criminals that give them a bad name, one such is the infamous Joe Arpao, frmr Sheriff of Mariposa Co, AZ
They foolishly believed that Trump's plan was to get rid of the bad hombres that give the community a bad name, and now Hispanic citizens who voted for Trump are finding themselves confronted and detained, even deported by the thugs of ICE.
Racial discrimination and warfare are a subset of class, and has been successful use to keep us, the lowly, splintered and at odds with each other
Bernie Sanders knew that, but because of social constraints he couldn't say it aloud, so he restricted his conversation to one of class, and that enabled the Democratic party to play the race card in South Carolina and across the south. They won the primary, but the same meme that wins the primary is the one that loses the general, apparently the Democratic Party is tone deaf or not really serious about winning.
(I am inclined to the latter, as Kamala conceded the election to Trump at 4 PM, Nov 6th while they were still counting votes.
When I say full bellies, I mean social, psyche, and physical needs, and liberals have full bellies, while conservatives are perpetually needy.
The ragged poor, the disenfranchised, those at the bottom of the social and cultural barrel are not liberal or conservative, they just want to be able to eat, feed their children, and a warm dry place to sleep,they aren't interested in the nuances of politics and international affairs.,that is a luxury for the well fed and housed.
Maslows hierarchy of needs. Liberals are one rung up from conservatives.,today prior to 1919 and FDR, they were clawing their way up through the conservative barrier, that they succeeded has spurred a reaction, where the former masters of the universe are angry,embittered and feel marginalized, and driven to "restore order" (their order where they are again masters of the universe)
Thought-provoking. I've certainly had to revise 6 or 7 decades of my experience in light of the new understandings I come to over the past 10 years.
I remain optimistic that we will emerge from this as a better society and nation.