For a hate-peddling racist like Trump, it’s always 1989

Let’s get the obvious stuff out of the way. Yes, Donald Trump is a vile racist. He regularly uses dehumanizing language about nonwhites, including members of Congress.

What I haven’t seen pointed out much, however, is that Trump’s racism rests on a vision of America that is decades out of date. In his mind it’s always 1989. And that’s not an accident: The ways America has changed over the past three decades, both good and bad, are utterly inconsistent with Trump-style racism.

But Trump doesn’t seem to be aware times have changed. His vision of “American carnage” is one of a nation whose principal social problem is inner-city violence, perpetrated by nonwhites. That’s a comfortable vision if you’re a racist who considers nonwhites inferior. But it’s completely wrong as a picture of America today.

For one thing, violent crime has fallen drastically since the early 1990s, especially in big cities. Our cities certainly aren’t perfectly safe, and some cities — like Baltimore — haven’t shared in the progress. But the social state of urban America is vastly better.

On the other hand, the social state of rural America — white rural America — is deteriorating. To the extent there really is such a thing as American carnage — and we are in fact seeing rising age-adjusted mortality and declining life expectancy — it’s concentrated among less-educated whites, especially in rural areas, who are suffering from a surge in “deaths of despair” from opioids, suicide and alcohol that has pushed mortality rates above those of African-Americans.

And indicators of social collapse, like the percentage of prime-age men not working, have also surged in the small town and rural areas of the “eastern heartland,” with its mostly white population.

What this says is that the racists, and even those who claimed there was some peculiar problem with black culture, were wrong, and the sociologist William Julius Wilson was right.

When social collapse seemed to be basically a problem for innercity blacks, it was possible to argue that its roots lay in some unique cultural dysfunction, and quite a few commentators hinted there was something about being nonwhite that predisposed people toward antisocial behavior.

What Wilson argued, however, was that social dysfunction was an effect, not a cause. His work, culminating in the justly celebrated book “When Work Disappears,” made the case that declining job opportunities for urban workers, rather than some underlying cultural or racial disposition, explained the decline in prime-age employment, the decline of the traditional family, and more.

How might one test Wilson’s hypothesis? Well, you could destroy job opportunities for a number of white people, and see if they experienced a decline in propensity to work, stopped forming stable families, and so on. And sure enough, that’s exactly what has happened to parts of nonmetropolitan America.

Which brings us back to Trump and his attack on Rep. Elijah Cummings, whom he accused of representing a district a “mess” where “no human being would want to live.” Actually, part of the district is affluent and well educated.

But the real irony is that if you ask which districts really are “messes” in the sense of suffering from severe social problems, many strongly supported Trump in 2016. And Trump is, of course, doing nothing to help. All he has to offer is hate.