Weekend reads: Ross Barkan on the Outer Borough Mind

Understanding Donald Trump

Win McNamee/Getty Images

Here at Lean Out, we’ve spent the past several weeks covering the American election and its aftermath — and mulling over the reasons why Donald Trump won. We’ve checked in with writers in upstate New York and Midland, Texas, and have interviewed journalist Andy Mills on what the media missed and author Ruy Teixeira on what the Democrats need to take away from this defeat.

This weekend, I’m pleased to bring you an essay from the American journalist and fellow Substacker Ross Barkan. He was on the Lean Out podcast earlier this fall talking about the leaderless nature of the modern left. In his evocative essay today, he sheds light on Trump’s outsider mindset. — TH

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The professional class can never fully comprehend Donald Trump; most of the professional class did not grow up in the boroughs surrounding Manhattan. This does not mean there’s any great folk wisdom to be had on Parsons Boulevard or the Grand Concourse or Bay Ridge Parkway. It only means that a Weltanschauung can be forged by one where lives, and if Trump and I don’t have very much in common, we do share this: we are products of outer borough life. “One of the longest journeys in the world is the journey from Brooklyn to Manhattan — or at least from certain neighborhoods in Brooklyn to certain parts of Manhattan,” the Brownsville-reared Norman Podhoretz wrote more than a half century ago. If the divide between the boroughs has narrowed since then, with gentrification metastasizing, this is still not wrong. To certain residents of Brooklyn, Queens, the Bronx, and Staten Island, Manhattan will always be The City: gleaming, remote, the locus of great envy and resentment, the terminus of a long, creaking subway ride.

Or allow me a caveat — the non-Manhattan neighborhoods in closest proximity to Manhattan do not share the outer borough mindset any longer. The professional class is too ensconced there. Once, neighborhoods like Park Slope and Carroll Gardens, when they were brawling Irish strongholds, did. DUMBO, beneath the Manhattan Bridge, was an industrial outpost. Williamsburg and Greenpoint were for working stiffs, the Polish and the Puerto Ricans. These days, they belong to the mid-level financiers, nonprofit executives, and upwardly mobile youth who make up the spine of the Democratic Party. Among the professional class who live in the coveted outer borough neighborhoods — those that have properly gentrified — there is a term used to discuss and dismiss the rest, one I’ve come to resent: deep. Are you in deep Brooklyn or deep Queens? Depth is a measure of how far you are from Manhattan as well as the cultural exports of the neighborhoods considered to lie in proper commuting distance. It is time measured on the subway, as well as a greater psychological chasm that will not be crossed. Life isn’t quite happening, they imply, in deep Brooklyn or deep Queens. Not like in Bushwick or Astoria.

Trump grew up in Jamaica Estates, an affluent enclave bordering working class Jamaica, Queens. The residents there do not cross Hillside Avenue to rove among the Black sections of Jamaica unless they must. Trump’s father, Fred, was a wealthy real estate developer who built a great deal of housing in Brooklyn and Queens for largely white families who belonged to the working and middle classes. Fred’s projects were unfashionable but lucrative, dun-colored and dependable. There was no glitz, only power; Fred was a patron of the local Democratic machines, and there wasn’t a governor or mayor who wouldn’t take his phone calls. Fred did not resent being an outer borough builder. He had grown rich that way. His brash, bilious son, however, did not want to remain in Queens, or at the family office on Avenue Z in Sheepshead Bay. He wanted Manhattan.

If there is a single way, still, to understand Donald Trump, the 45th and 47th president of the United States, it’s to recall the boy gazing out onto the vast, glassy plain of City and wishing, more than anything else in this life, to belong to that — to be of it, fully, and perhaps one day be its king. What Trump knows is that he can dominate America but not Manhattan. The Manhattan elites will not take him seriously. The builders there know who built what, who owns what, who has credit and who does not. They know he is a comic book’s idea of a rich person, a fantasy he willed into being but is still an illusion. Trump is now in Florida because they will have him there. West Palm Beach receives garish Donald J. as one of their own. The New York rich, meanwhile, are ruthlessly discreet, as are most of the American families, often WASP, who found their fortunes more than a century ago and tend to their titanic inheritances in cool, comforting shadow. They armor themselves on Park or Fifth or on Central Park West, and they’d rather waft through charity dinners than run for office themselves. Michael Bloomberg was the exception, not the rule. The ruling class is not interested in downgrading to Gracie Mansion or the White House. A rube could take Trump Tower seriously, but not a billionaire, and Trump only found the legitimacy he craved through elected office. Fred asked for favors. Donald wanted to be the man granting them.

The outer borough drive to power can be harnessed for good or ill alike. It’s not an accident many of the greatest artists of the last century came from Brooklyn, Queens, and the Bronx, and that exceedingly ambitious people have long battled toward Manhattan, lured onward by Big City glory. If wielded correctly, this outer borough resentment is manna. I’ll show them produces your best work, vaults you into stations once unimaginable. It’s not so different than the Midwestern boys and girls who want to make it big in the East — except, perhaps, resentment burn brighter in those who are most near the City’s roar. Anguish, too. Few works of art capture this better than “Saturday Night Fever.” Filmed in the Brooklyn neighborhood of Bay Ridge, where I grew up, the John Travolta flick is recalled as a gauzy paean to disco. Those who’ve watched it closely know the 1977 film, one of the best of its era, is an unsparing view of white, working-class malaise in a swath of the borough that is, psychically, much further than one subway ride. Travolta’s Tony Manero begins to long for escape, but can’t quite break free from his old pals, who have no ambitions beyond Saturday night. His love interest, Stephanie, hungers to get through the tunnel and cement herself in The City; she chides Tony for not seeming to want more out of his life except dancing and sex. Between the iconic dance scenes, there’s a gang-rape and a death on the Verrazzano-Narrows Bridge. Tony needs to decide whether he can break away.

The Bay Ridge of my childhood was much more bucolic than that; it was the 1990s, not the 1970s, and I took a healthier view of Manhattan because both my mother and father worked there. It was a very Republican neighborhood then. As a Jew, I was in a distinct minority, which surprises those who imagine there are as many New York Jews sprinkled around the five boroughs as fire hydrants. It was heavily Irish and Italian and Catholic, as well as Greek Orthodox. The Asian and Arab populations were growing. One of the more amusing turns of the last few years has been the emergence of the “rad-trad” aesthetic, the bid of certain self-declared dissidents to ostentatiously convert to Catholicism to irritate secular liberals. Anyone who grew up in outer borough New York would understand Catholicism to be the least subversive religion (or pose) imaginable. Churches seem to spring up on every other Bay Ridge block. As a teen, I played for baseball teams sponsored by St. Patrick’s, St. Bernadette’s, and St. Francis Xavier. I took the anti-Semitic taunts from Catholic boys who were speaking more from ignorance than malice. I still enjoyed Christmastime, because the lights on the houses, as gaudy as they could be, shone lovingly in the dark.

There was fighting. Kids in certain neighborhoods, of certain eras, had to shove or punch eventually. I was not a large child, nor especially tough. I never thought of myself as a fighter. And yet, surveying my memory, I realize I was in at least four physical fights, including a tussle in the dugout with a teammate when I was sixteen. He had put a used condom in my glove and I, in retaliation, knocked his hat off and stomped on it. He punched me, I swung back, and the coach booted us both from the field. Tempers seemed to always run hot. Parochial, sure, but there was an honor culture one had to abide by. Talk shit, get hit. Two bits of Trump lore I understood intuitively, from growing up in southern Brooklyn: locker room talk and hitting someone back as hard — or harder — than they hit you.

The outer boroughs like Trump as much as any American hinterland. Each cycle, he grows his vote there. It’s not just the whites anymore, the elderly Tony Maneros and their swaggering children affixing MAGA flags to their attached homes. The white-lash thesis lies as dead as Kamala Harris’ political career. The Chinese of Bensonhurst have grown into staunch Republicans. The Latinos of Corona seem headed there. Don’t even ask about the Russian and Orthodox Jews who once, from time to time, split their tickets for local Democrats and barely do now. Manhattan is now trending bluest, more than the Bronx, still the poorest of the five boroughs. What Trump was selling, many of the working class were buying — or, simply, they found the Democrats, at home and abroad in Washington, had nothing much to offer them anymore. In Fred Trump’s day, the Democratic organizations were organizations. They whipped voters block to block, inserted themselves into neighborhood struggles, and ensured their local clubs were packed with volunteers. They dispensed patronage, but it wasn’t as if every Democratic voter was getting a job with the city. They wanted to belong to a kind of civic life, and the machines had that to give. Now the organizations carry on as phantoms, as after-images of a different age. The machines hardly run at all.

In the Democratic Party, Trump sees Manhattan. His followers see Manhattan, too. They exult because they have won, but they lack all patrician grace, or the self-assuredness a technocratic, managerial party might bring to bear in victory. They are ruddy and angry and anxious. They know, when their thoughts go quiet and the TV’s turned down low, this is it — this is the zenith. Second term presidents get unpopular. Majorities slip away. Opponents wise up. An outer borough will not just become an inner borough. Trump’s policies are insider policies (tax cuts for the rich, right-wing judges for the courts) but he will never govern like an insider, like someone who belongs in the seat of power. He seems to not care, but I will hazard that he just might — that he longs, in his singular demented way, to be another Lincoln or Roosevelt, a man infused with enough gravity to endure through the centuries. When Stephanie is telling Tony he has to get serious about his life and get out of the neighborhood, there’s a poignancy to her harangues; she sounds so much like she’s from Bay Ridge, trilling on about what’s refeyened and which directuh she likes and what the women in the aweffice drink. If Tony is a troglodyte to her, Manhattan audiences sneer at them both. Even when you cross the bridge, the neighborhood comes with you. It’s in your voice and lodged in your heart.