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      The Business Rules the Trump Administration Is Racing to Finish

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      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }The Jobs CrisisCurrent Unemployment RateThe First Six MonthsPermanent LayoffsWhen a $600 Lifeline EndedAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyThe Business Rules the Trump Administration Is Racing to FinishFrom tariffs and trade to the status of Uber drivers, regulators are trying to install new rules or reduce regulations before President-elect Joe Biden takes over.President Trump is rushing to put into effect new economic regulations and executive orders before his term comes to a close.Credit…Erin Schaff/The New York TimesJan. 11, 2021, 3:00 a.m. ETIn the remaining days of his administration, President Trump is rushing to put into effect a raft of new regulations and executive orders that are intended to put his stamp on business, trade and the economy.Previous presidents in their final term have used the period between the election and the inauguration to take last-minute actions to extend and seal their agendas. Some of the changes are clearly aimed at making it harder, at least for a time, for the next administration to pursue its goals.Of course, President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr. could issue new executive orders to overturn Mr. Trump’s. And Democrats in Congress, who will control the House and the Senate, could use the Congressional Review Act to quickly reverse regulatory actions from as far back as late August.Here are some of the things that Mr. Trump and his appointees have done or are trying to do before Mr. Biden’s inauguration on Jan. 20. — Peter EavisProhibiting Chinese apps and other products. Mr. Trump signed an executive order on Tuesday banning transactions with eight Chinese software applications, including Alipay. It was the latest escalation of the president’s economic war with China. Details and the start of the ban will fall to Mr. Biden, who could decide not to follow through on the idea. Separately, the Trump administration has also banned the import of some cotton from the Xinjiang region, where China has detained vast numbers of people who are members of ethnic minorities and forced them to work in fields and factories. In another move, the administration prohibited several Chinese companies, including the chip maker SMIC and the drone maker DJI, from buying American products. The administration is weighing further restrictions on China in its final days, including adding Alibaba and Tencent to a list of companies with ties to the Chinese military, a designation that would prevent Americans from investing in those businesses. — Ana SwansonDefining gig workers as contractors. The Labor Department on Wednesday released the final version of a rule that could classify millions of workers in industries like construction, cleaning and the gig economy as contractors rather than employees, another step toward endorsing the business practices of companies like Uber and Lyft. — Noam ScheiberTrimming social media’s legal shield. The Trump administration recently filed a petition asking the Federal Communications Commission to narrow its interpretation of a powerful legal shield for social media platforms like Facebook and YouTube. If the commission doesn’t act before Inauguration Day, the matter will land in the desk of whomever Mr. Biden picks to lead the agency. — David McCabeTaking the tech giants to court. The Federal Trade Commission filed an antitrust suit against Facebook in December, two months after the Justice Department sued Google. Mr. Biden’s appointees will have to decide how best to move forward with the cases. — David McCabeAdding new cryptocurrency disclosure requirements. The Treasury Department late last month proposed new reporting requirements that it said were intended to prevent money laundering for certain cryptocurrency transactions. It gave only 15 days — over the holidays — for public comment. Lawmakers and digital currency enthusiasts wrote to the Treasury secretary, Steven Mnuchin, to protest and won a short extension. But opponents of the proposed rule say the process and substance are flawed, arguing that the requirement would hinder innovation, and are likely to challenge it in court. — Ephrat LivniLimiting banks on social and environmental issues. The Office of the Comptroller of the Currency is rushing a proposed rule that would ban banks from not lending to certain kinds of businesses, like those in the fossil fuel industry, on environmental or social grounds. The regulator unveiled the proposal on Nov. 20 and limited the time it would accept comments to six weeks despite the interruptions of the holidays. — Emily FlitterOverhauling rules on banks and underserved communities. The Office of the Comptroller of the Currency is also proposing new guidelines on how banks can measure their activities to get credit for fulfilling their obligations under the Community Reinvestment Act, an anti-redlining law that forces them to do business in poor and minority communities. The agency rewrote some of the rules in May, but other regulators — the Federal Reserve and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation — did not sign on. — Emily FlitterInsuring “hot money” deposits. On Dec. 15, the F.D.I.C. expanded the eligibility of brokered deposits for insurance coverage. These deposits are infusions of cash into a bank in exchange for a high interest rate, but are known as “hot money” because the clients can move the deposits from bank to bank for higher returns. Critics say the change could put the insurance fund at risk. F.D.I.C. officials said the new rule was needed to “modernize” the brokered deposits system. — Emily FlitterNarrowing regulatory authority over airlines. The Department of Transportation in December authorized a rule, sought by airlines and travel agents, that limits the department’s authority over the industry by defining what constitutes an unfair and deceptive practice. Consumer groups widely opposed the rule. Airlines argued that the rule would limit regulatory overreach. And the department said the definitions it used were in line with its past practice. — Niraj ChokshiRolling back a light bulb rule. The Department of Energy has moved to block a rule that would phase out incandescent light bulbs, which people and businesses have increasingly been replacing with much more efficient LED and compact fluorescent bulbs. The energy secretary, Dan Brouillette, a former auto industry lobbyist, said in December that the Trump administration did not want to limit consumer choice. The rule had been slated to go into effect on Jan. 1 and was required by a law passed in 2007. — Ivan PennAdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      The Capitol Riot Showed Us America's Ugly Truth

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      AdvertisementContinue reading the main storyOpinionSupported byContinue reading the main storyWe’ve Seen the Ugly Truth About AmericaBut if the Democrats dare to use their power, a brave new world might be possible.Contributing Opinion WriterJan. 7, 2021, 7:51 p.m. ETNational Guard troops on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial during a Black Lives Matter protest on June 2, 2020.Credit…Win Mcnamee/Getty ImagesThere are two images. In one, National Guard troops, most with no identifying information on their uniforms, stand on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in anticipation of violence from people peacefully protesting the killing of George Floyd. In the second image, thousands of protesters — domestic terrorists, really — swarm the Capitol. They wear red MAGA hats and carry Trump flags and show their faces because they want to be seen. They don’t seem to fear the consequences of being identified. More images — a man sitting in Nancy Pelosi’s office, his feet on a desk, a smirk on his face. A man carrying a stolen lectern, smiling at the camera. A man in the Senate chamber doing parkour.On Wednesday, Jan. 6, Congress was set to conduct a largely ceremonial count of the electoral votes. There were rumblings that a few ambitious, craven politicians planned to object to the votes in several states. The president openly pressured Vice President Mike Pence to thwart the vote ratification — something not in Mr. Pence’s power to do.But I don’t think any of us expected to see radical, nearly all white protesters storming the Capitol as if it were the Bastille. I don’t think we expected to see Capitol Police basically ushering these terrorists into the building and letting them have the run on the place for a ridiculous amount of time while the world watched in shock and disgust. I don’t think we expected to see some of those police officers taking selfies with the intruders. I don’t think we expected that the violent protesters would be there by the explicit invitation of the president, who told a raucous gathering of his supporters to head over to the Capitol. “You have to show strength, and you have to be strong,” he said.On Wednesday, the world bore witness to white supremacy unchecked. I nearly choked on the bitter pill of what white people who no doubt condemned Black Lives Matter protesters as “thugs” felt so entitled to do.After the Capitol was cleared of protesters, Congress returned to work. Politicians peacocked and pontificated in condescending ways about the Constitution and flawed state voting procedures that, in fact, worked perfectly. Senator Ben Sasse smarmed about being neighborly and shoveling snow. He took a bizarre, jovial tone as if all the moment called for was a bit of charm. Senator Mitt Romney tried to take the role of elder statesman, expressing the level of outrage he should have shown over the past four years. It was all pageantry — too little, too late.Barack Obama famously spoke of a more perfect union. After this week, I don’t know that such an ambition is possible. I don’t know that it ever was. I don’t know that this union could or should be perfected.A pro-Trump extremist sitting at a desk in House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s office on Wednesday.Credit…Jim Lo Scalzo/EPA, via ShutterstockPoliticians and pundits have promised that the guardrails of democracy will protect the republic. They’ve said we need to trust in checks and balances and the peaceful transition of power that the United States claims is a hallmark of our country. And many of us have, however tentatively, allowed ourselves to believe that the laws this country was built on, however flawed, were strong enough to withstand authoritarian encroachments by President Trump and Republicans. What the days and weeks since the 2020 election have shown us is that the guardrails have been destroyed. Or maybe they were never there. Maybe they were never anything more than an illusion we created to believe this country was stronger than it was.As Americans began to process the Trump-endorsed insurrection, the blatant sedition, public figures shared the same platitudes about America that they always do when something in this country goes gravely wrong. Jamie Dimon, the chief executive of JPMorgan Chase; Joe Biden; Maria Shriver; Republican senators; and others declared that this is not America, that we are better than this, with “this” being the coup attempt, or Trump’s histrionics, or the politicians who, with a desperate thirst for power, allowed Trump’s lies about the election to flourish, unchallenged.This is America. This has always been America. If this were not America, this coup attempt would not have happened. It’s time we face this ugly truth, let it sink into the marrow of our bones, let it move us to action.With everything that took place in Washington on Wednesday, it was easy to forget that Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock won their Senate races in Georgia. Their victories were gratifying and cathartic, the result of solid campaigns and the hard work of organizers on the ground in the state, from Stacey Abrams’s Fair Fight to Mijente and many others. Years of activism against the state’s dedication to voter suppression made these victories possible. The easy narrative will be that Black women and Black people saved this country. And they did. And they should be celebrated. But the more challenging narrative is that we now have to honor our salvation by doing something with it.For the first time in many years, Democrats will control the House, the Senate, and the presidency. Real change is not as elusive as it seemed before the Georgia runoffs because Joe Biden and Kamala Harris’s administration is well positioned to enact many of their policies. If the Democrats dare to use the power they have amassed, a brave new world might be possible.In the coming weeks, we’ll undoubtedly hear the argument that now is the time for centrism and compromise and bipartisan efforts. That argument is wrong. There is no compromise with politicians who amass power, hoard it, and refuse to relinquish it when the democratic process does not work in their favor. There is no compromise with politicians who create a set of conditions that allow a coup attempt to take place, resulting in four deaths, countless injuries, and irreparable damage to the country both domestically and internationally. These people do not care about working with their colleagues on the other side of the proverbial aisle. They have an agenda, and whenever they are in power, they execute that agenda with precision and discipline. And they do so unapologetically.It’s time for Democrats to use their power in the same way and legislate without worrying about how Republican voters or politicians will respond. Cancel student loan debt. Pass another voting rights act that enfranchises as many Americans as possible. Create a true path to citizenship for undocumented Americans. Implement a $15 minimum hourly wage. Enact “Medicare for all.” Realistically, only so much is possible with a slender majority in the Senate, but the opportunity to make the most of the next two years is there.With the power they hold, Democrats can try to make this country a more equitable and generous place rather than one where the interests of the very wealthy and powerful are the priority. If they don’t, they are no better than their Republican counterparts, and in fact, they are worse because they will have squandered a real opportunity to do the work for which they were elected. Over the past four years, we have endured many battles for the soul of the country, but the war for the soul of this country rages on. I hope the Biden-Harris administration and the 117th Congress can end that war, once and for all.Roxane Gay (@rgay) is a contributing Opinion writer.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      Trump Is to Blame for Capitol Attack

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      AdvertisementContinue reading the main storyOpinionSupported byContinue reading the main storyTrump Is to Blame for Capitol AttackThe president incited his followers to violence. There must be consequences.The editorial board is a group of opinion journalists whose views are informed by expertise, research, debate and certain longstanding values. It is separate from the newsroom.Jan. 6, 2021, 8:01 p.m. ETCredit…Samuel Corum/Getty ImagesPresident Trump and his Republican enablers in Congress incited a violent attack Wednesday against the government they lead and the nation they profess to love. This cannot be allowed to stand.Mr. Trump’s seditious rhetoric prompted a mob of thousands of people to storm the U.S. Capitol building, some breaking onto the House and Senate floors, where the nation’s elected representatives had gathered to perform their constitutional duty of counting electoral votes and confirming the election of Joe Biden as president.It is fitting that some carried the Confederate flag as they attacked the seat of American government and forced the suspension of congressional debate. They shattered windows and broke doors, clashing with overwhelmed security forces as they shouted their support for Mr. Trump and their defiance of the lawful results of the 2020 election. One woman was killed. The nation’s leaders were sent scurrying for shelter.Explosives were found in the Capitol and multiple locations around Washington. Pro-Trump protests also shut down statehouses around the country.Mr. Trump sparked these assaults. He has railed for months against the verdict rendered by voters in November. He summoned his supporters to gather in Washington on this day, and encouraged them to march on the Capitol. He told them that the election was being stolen. He told them to fight. He told them he might join them and, even as they stormed the building, he declined for long hours to tell them to stop, to condemn their actions, to raise a finger in defense of the Constitution that he swore to preserve and protect. When he finally spoke, late in the day, he affirmed the protesters’ anger, telling them again that the election was stolen, but asking them to go home anyway. It was the performance of a man unwilling to fulfill his duties as president or to confront the consequences of his own behavior.The president needs to be held accountable — through impeachment proceedings or criminal prosecution — and the same goes for his supporters who carried out the violence. In time, there should be an investigation of the failure of the Capitol Police to prepare for an attack that was announced and planned in public.This is not just an attack on the results of the 2020 election. It is a precedent — a permission slip for similar opposition to the outcomes of future elections. It must be clearly rejected, and placed beyond the pale of permissible conduct.The leaders of the Republican Party also bear a measure of responsibility for the attack on the Capitol.Many in the G.O.P. have participated in the vigorous retailing of lies about the election. They have sought to undermine public confidence in democracy, questioning the legitimacy of Mr. Biden’s victory without providing any evidence for their claims. Their statements led some of those who trust them to conclude violence was necessary.Few have been as explicit as Rudy Giuliani, the president’s personal lawyer, who earlier Wednesday suggested, “Let’s have trial by combat!” But even as extremists boiled up around the Capitol, lapping against the security barriers, Republicans in the House and the Senate were chipping away at democracy from the inside.Senator Ted Cruz, Republican of Texas, invoked the 1877 commission that resolved the disputed presidential election of 1876 as a model for what he described as addressing reasonable doubts about the 2020 election. There is no factual basis for such doubts about the 2020 vote, but Mr. Cruz’s choice of analogy is historically resonant. In the 1876 election, white Democrats used widespread political violence to prevent Black people from voting and then demanded the end of Reconstruction as the price of the survival of a compromised Republic — ushering in an era of racial terror and cementing the exclusion of Southern Blacks from participatory democracy.The modern Republican Party, in its systematic efforts to suppress voting, and its refusal to acknowledge the legitimacy of elections that it loses, is similarly seeking to maintain its political power on the basis of disenfranchisement. Wednesday’s insurrection is evidence of an alarming willingness to pursue that goal with violence.It is clear that some Republican leaders are starting to fear the consequences of enabling Mr. Trump. Before the attack started, Senator Mitch McConnell, the majority leader, decried efforts by his fellow Republicans to overturn the results of the election. But his eloquence was the very definition of a gesture both too little and too late. They who sow the wind, reap the whirlwind.Other politicians have had firmer convictions. Former presidential candidate Mitt Romney tweeted, “What happened at the U.S. Capitol today was an insurrection, incited by the President of the United States.”The Constitution requires Congress to count and announce the results of a presidential election on Jan. 6 of the following year. While the mob was able to put that process on hold, it will not be able to prevent it, or Mr. Biden’s inauguration in two weeks.But the attack is a reminder of the fragility of self-government.Jan. 6, 2021, will go down as a dark day. The question is whether, even as Mr. Trump’s time in office ends, America is at the beginning of a descent into an even darker and more divided epoch or the end of one. The danger is real, but the answer is not foreordained. Republican politicians have the power, and the responsibility, to chart a different course by ending their rhetorical assaults on American democracy and rising in defense of the nation they swore oaths to serve.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      What Republicans Might Gain if They Lose Georgia

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      AdvertisementContinue reading the main storyOpinionSupported byContinue reading the main storyWhat Republicans Might Gain if They Lose GeorgiaThey have survived Trump for the last four years. But disentangling from him might get easier if his latest sabotage succeeds.Opinion ColumnistJan. 5, 2021Defeats for Senators Kelly Loeffler and David Perdue would show there is a real political cost to endorsing not just President Trump but also his fantasy politics.Credit…Damon Winter/The New York TimesAt this time of year, normally a sleepy, unremarkable period, I often write a column summing up the things that I got wrong in the previous year’s worth of punditry. Given that everything is rather more harrowing than usual this year, the habit feels a little self-indulgent — except that one important and mostly falsified hypothesis that I once held, not just for 2020 but across the entire Trump era, is about to be put to one last test.The hypothesis was that by nominating Donald Trump for the presidency and lashing itself so closely to his unique mixture of corruption, incompetence and malice, the Republican Party set itself up for a sweeping political repudiation — on the order of what it faced in 1964, after Watergate and in the last two elections of the George W. Bush era.I was wrong about this in 2016, but after the pandemic arrived in 2020 and Trump responded so Trumpishly, I suspected that the reckoning had finally arrived — that the president was sinking himself and that his party would likely go down with him.Trump did sink, but not as deeply as I anticipated — and meanwhile, the G.O.P. kept bobbing, its House caucus actually increasing, its hold on a few crucial Senate seats surprisingly maintained.Where did I go wrong? Despite making it a frequent theme, I probably underestimated the public’s reluctance to hand a self-radicalizing liberalism full control of government, given its matchless power in other institutions. I also probably underestimated the stabilizing effect of the economic relief efforts on people’s finances, which made the pandemic year less devastating and the anti-incumbent mood less intense. And I suspect there was more lockdown fatigue, more wariness of the Democratic Party’s preferred public-health regime, than the coronavirus polling captured.Add up all those factors, and you have a decent explanation for both the slightly higher-than-expected Trump vote and the voters who wanted to be rid of him but preferred divided government, in numbers that helped keep the Republican Party afloat.Pundits are supposed to learn from the past, and learning from the Republican overperformance in November 2020 would lead one to expect that the G.O.P. will keep its two Georgia Senate seats in today’s runoffs. After all, Trump himself has been defeated (his unwillingness to admit as much notwithstanding), the Georgia suburbs boast plenty of the kind of mildly conservative voters who voted for Joe Biden but also might like to see his presidency held in check, and David Perdue, one of the two Republican senators on the ballot, ran ahead of the president nine weeks ago. A Republican Party that survived the Trump era without the kind of shellacking I kept expecting should surely be able to win the first Senate races of the Biden era.Except that this isn’t the Biden era, is it? Not for two more weeks; for now, it’s still the Trump era, the Trump show, the last crazy act (until he runs in 2024, that is), with everything dialed up as far as he can take it: the wildest conspiracy theories, the most perfect phone calls to beleaguered state officials and the most depressing sort of voter-fraud pandering from the irresponsibility caucus among congressional Republicans. And all of it happening while the Covid curve bends upward, a new strain spreads and the vaccine rollout falls well short of Trump administration predictions — not that the president shows any evidence of caring.This context makes prediction a fool’s errand. You can’t use historical case studies to model pandemic-era runoff elections in which the president is making war on the officials of his own party and some of his fiercest online supporters are urging a boycott of the vote.But since prediction is often just an expression of desire, I’ll tell you what I want to happen. Even though the party richly deserved some sort of punishment, I didn’t want the G.O.P. to be destroyed by its affiliation with Trump, because I’m one of those Americans who don’t want to be ruled by liberalism in its current incarnation, let alone whatever form is slowly being born. But now that the party has survived four years of Trumpism without handing the Democrats a congressional supermajority, and now that Amy Coney Barrett is on the Supreme Court and Joe Manchin, Susan Collins and Mitt Romney will hold real power in the Senate, whatever happens in Georgia — well, now I do want Perdue and Kelly Loeffler to lose these races, mostly because I don’t want the Republican Party to be permanently ruled by Donald J. Trump.Obviously, a runoff-day defeat won’t by itself prevent Trump from winning the party’s nomination four years hence or bestriding its internal culture in the meantime. (Indeed, for some of his supporters it would probably confirm their belief that the presidential election was stolen — because look, the Democrats did it twice!) But the sense that there is a real political cost to slavishly endorsing not just Trump but also his fantasy politics, his narrative of stolen victory, seems a necessary precondition for the separation that elected Republicans need to seek — working carefully, like a bomb-dismantling team — between their position and the soon-to-be-former president’s, if they don’t want him to just claim the leadership of their party by default.That kind of Trump-forever future is what Josh Hawley and Ted Cruz and others are making possible, with their ambitious pandering. Hawley and Cruz both want to be Trump’s heir apparent (as though he doesn’t already have several in his family), but the deeper they go into the Trumpian dreampolitik, the more they build up the voter-fraud mythos, the more likely it becomes that they’ll just be stuck serving him for four more years — or longer.So there needs to be some counterpressure, some sense that dreampolitik has costs. And defeat for two Republicans who have cynically gone along with the president’s stolen-election narrative, to the point of attacking their own state’s Republican-run electoral system, feels like a plausible place for the diminishment of Trump to start.I don’t think that diminishment is necessary to save the American republic from dictatorship, as many of Trump’s critics have long imagined, and with increasing intensity the longer his election challenge has gone on. Whatever potentially crisis-inducing precedents Republican senators are establishing this month, the forces and institutions — technological, judicial, military — that could actually make America into some kind of autocracy are not aligned with right-wing populism, and less so with every passing day.But Trump’s diminishment is definitely necessary if the American right is ever going to be a force for something other than deeper decadence, deeper gridlock, fantasy politics and partisan battles that have nothing to do with the challenges the country really faces.Or to distill the point: You don’t have to see Trump as a Caesar to recognize his behavior this month as Nero-esque, playing a QAnon-grade fiddle while the pandemic burns. We imported at least one of the new variants of the coronavirus from overseas in the past few weeks — like the pandemic itself, the kind of thing a populist-nationalist president is supposed to try to slam the door against — but instead of shutting down flights from Britain or South Africa, he’s been too busy pushing the stupidest election challenge in recorded history, while slipping ever-closer to blaming the lizard people for his defeat.I don’t know how any of this ends. But somewhere between the wipeout of the Republican Party that I once expected and the 2024 Trump restoration that I fear, there’s a world where the party spends the next four years very gradually distancing and disentangling itself from its Mad Pretender and his claims.And since that scenario becomes a little more likely if Georgia goes for the Democrats, I think that not only liberals, but also those Republicans who want a conservatism after Trump, should welcome that result.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTOpinion) and Instagram.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      Asian-American Voters Can Help Decide Elections. But for Which Party?

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      95 Percent of Representatives Have a Degree. Look Where That’s Got Us.

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      AdvertisementContinue reading the main storyOpinionSupported byContinue reading the main story95 Percent of Representatives Have a Degree. Look Where That’s Got Us.All these credentials haven’t led to better results.Opinion columnistDec. 21, 2020Credit…Damon Winter/The New York TimesOver the last few decades, Congress has diversified in important ways. It has gotten less white, less male, less straight — all positive developments. But as I was staring at one of the many recent Senate hearings, filled with the usual magisterial blustering and self-important yada yada, it dawned on me that there’s a way that Congress has moved in a wrong direction, and become quite brazenly unrepresentative.No, it’s not that the place seethes with millionaires, though there’s that problem too.It’s that members of Congress are credentialed out the wazoo. An astonishing number have a small kite of extra initials fluttering after their names.According to the Congressional Research Service, more than one third of the House and more than half the Senate have law degrees. Roughly a fifth of senators and representatives have their master’s. Four senators and 21 House members have MDs, and an identical number in each body (four, twenty-one) have some kind of doctoral degree, whether it’s a Ph.D., a D.Phil., an Ed.D., or a D. Min.But perhaps most fundamentally, 95 percent of today’s House members have a bachelor’s degree, as does every member of the Senate. Yet just a bit more than one-third of Americans do.“This means that the credentialed few govern the uncredentialed many,” writes the political philosopher Michael J. Sandel in “The Tyranny of Merit,” published this fall.There’s an argument to be made that we should want our representatives to be a highly lettered lot. Lots of people have made it, as far back as Plato.The problem is that there doesn’t seem to be any correlation between good governance and educational attainment that Sandel can discern. In the 1960s, he noted, we got the Vietnam War thanks to “the best and the brightest” — it’s been so long since the publication of David Halberstam’s book that people forget the title was morbidly ironic. In the 1990s and 2000s, the highly credentialed gave us (and here Sandel paused for a deep breath) “stagnant wages, financial deregulation, income inequality, the financial crisis of 2008, a bank bailout that did little to help ordinary people, a decaying infrastructure, and the highest incarceration rate in the world.”Five years ago, Nicholas Carnes, a political scientist at Duke, tried to measure whether more formal education made political leaders better at their jobs. After conducting a sweeping review of 228 countries between the years 1875 and 2004, he and a colleague concluded: No. It did not. A college education did not mean less inequality, a greater G.D.P., fewer labor strikes, lower unemployment or less military conflict.Sandel argues that the technocratic elite’s slow annexation of Congress and European parliaments — which resulted in the rather fateful decisions to outsource jobs and deregulate finance — helped enable the populist revolts now rippling through the West. “It distorted our priorities,” Sandel told me, “and made for a political class that’s too tolerant of crony capitalism and much less attentive to fundamental questions of the dignity of work.”Both parties are to blame for this. But it was Democrats, Sandel wrote, who seemed especially bullish on the virtues of the meritocracy, arguing that college would be the road to prosperity for the struggling. And it’s a fine idea, well-intentioned, idealistic at its core. But implicit in it is also a punishing notion: If you don’t succeed, you have only yourself to blame. Which President Trump spotted in a trice.“Unlike Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, who spoke constantly of ‘opportunity’” Sandel wrote, “Trump scarcely mentioned the word. Instead, he offered blunt talk of winners and losers.”Trump was equally blunt after winning the Nevada Republican caucuses in 2016. “I love the poorly educated!” he shouted.A pair of studies from 2019 also tell the story, in numbers, of the professionalization of the Democratic Party — or what Sandel calls “the valorization of credentialism.” One, from Politico, shows that House and Senate Democrats are much more likely to have gone to private liberal arts colleges than public universities, whereas the reverse is true of their Republican counterparts; another shows that congressional Democrats are far more likely to hire graduates of Ivy League schools.This class bias made whites without college degrees ripe for Republican recruitment. In both 2016 and 2020, two thirds of them voted for Trump; though the G.O.P. is the minority party in the House, more Republican members than Democrats currently do not have college degrees. All 11 are male. Most of them come from the deindustrialized Midwest and South.Oh, and in the incoming Congress? Six of the seven new members without four-year college degrees are Republicans.Of course, far darker forces help explain the lures of the modern G.O.P. You’d have to be blind and deaf not to detect them. For decades, Republicans have appealed both cynically and in earnest — it’s hard to know which is more appalling — to racial and ethnic resentments, if not hatred. There’s a reason that the Black working class isn’t defecting to the Republican Party in droves. (Of the nine Democrats in the House without college degrees, seven, it’s worth noting, are people of color.)For now, it seems to matter little that Republicans have offered little by way of policy to restore the dignity of work. They’ve tapped into a gusher of resentment, and they seem delighted to channel it, irrespective of where, or if, they got their diplomas. Ted Cruz, quite arguably the Senate’s most insolent snob — he wouldn’t sit in a study group at Harvard Law with anyone who hadn’t graduated from Princeton, Yale or Harvard — was ready to argue on Trump’s behalf to overturn the 2020 election results, should the disgraceful Texas attorney general’s case have reached the Supreme Court.Which raises a provocative question. Given that Trumpism has found purchase among graduates of Harvard Law, would it make any difference if Congress better reflected the United States and had more members without college degrees? Would it meaningfully alter policy at all?It would likely depend on where they came from. I keep thinking of what Rep. Al Green, Democrat of Texas, told me. His father was a mechanic’s assistant in the segregated South. The white men he worked for cruelly called him “The Secretary” because he could neither read nor write. “So if my father had been elected? You’d have a different Congress,” Green said. “But if it’d been the people who he served — the mechanics who gave him a pejorative moniker? We’d probably have the Congress we have now.”It’s hard to say whether more socioeconomic diversity would guarantee differences in policy or efficiency. But it could do something more subtle: Rebuild public trust.“There are people who look at Congress and see the political class as a closed system,” Carnes told me. “My guess is that if Congress looked more like people do as a whole, the cynical view — Oh, they’re all in their ivory tower, they don’t care about us — would get less oxygen.”When I spoke to Representative Troy Balderson, a Republican from Ohio, he agreed, adding that if more members of Congress didn’t have four-year college degrees, it would erode some stigma associated with not having one.“When I talk to high school kids and say, ‘I didn’t finish my degree,’ their faces light up,” he told me. Balderson tried college and loved it, but knew he wasn’t cut out for it. He eventually moved back to his hometown to run his family car dealership. Students tend to find his story emboldening. The mere mention of four-year college sets off panic in many of them; they’ve been stereotyped before they even grow up, out of the game before it even starts. “If you don’t have a college degree,” he explains, “you’re a has-been.” Then they look at him and see larger possibilities. That they can be someone’s voice. “You can become a member of Congress.”The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More