America has disinvited the Clintons

By Jason Lim

When it became obvious that Donald Trump would win, my mind for some reason recalled an old 2014 article in the Washington Post titled, “In Fairfax County kindergarten classes, school system’s future comes into focus.”

This is what the article said:

“Long an enclave of predominantly white, middle-class families with a top-class school system, Fairfax has experienced a dramatic demographic shift in recent years that is nowhere more obvious than in the county’s kindergarten classrooms. The white student population is receding and is being replaced with fast-growing numbers of poor students and children of immigrants for whom English is a second language. 

More than one-third of the 13,424 kindergartners in the county this year qualified for free or reduced-price meals, a federal measure of poverty, and close to 40 percent of the Class of 2026 requires additional English instruction, among the most ever for a Fairfax kindergarten class…

In Montgomery County, more than 35 percent of the students receive free or reduced-priced meals, compared with 22 percent in 2000. Poor students now account for 68 percent of the kindergarten class in Prince George’s County, and 3 in 10 kindergartners this year received additional English instruction.

The shifts are clearly evident in Fairfax’s elementary schools, where more students are arriving less prepared for kindergarten, putting them at an immediate disadvantage.”

Let’s take this macro analysis down to the level of a white middle class parent with children in this school system.

I have sacrificed and bought a way-too-expensive house in Fairfax County so that my kids can go to a good school. But the teachers in these schools now have to deal with mostly Hispanic kids who are not ready for kindergarten. I understand that these kids are put at an immediate disadvantage compared to other kids like mine, but this conversely means that my kids will soon be put at a disadvantage because teachers have to spend more time working with the less prepared kids.

Then I see that the school is allocating more resources to feed and teach English to these kids. Which is great, except that it means less money is going to educating my kids. In a limited budget environment, doing more of one means doing less of another. And there has been a 22,000-student surge since 2004. This means that my taxes are going to educate and feed these additional children who are mostly Hispanic immigrants, many of whom I suspect are undocumented.

The article further notes, “In the school’s (Springfield’s Lynbrook Elementary) front office, the administrative staff primarily speaks Spanish to the students and their families. Most parents are not literate in their own language, McNamee said. Meredith Hopkins, a third-year kindergarten teacher at Lynbrook, said she has never had a native English speaker in her classes.”

So, when I go visit my kid’s school for a parent-teacher conference, I feel as if I stepped into a different, alien world in which Hispanic kids are the absolute majority and Spanish is the main language. And all this is being enabled by my increasing tax dollars. And because I make enough money to be middle class, I don’t get any of the subsidies, tax breaks, or social services that these families seem to get just for being here.

Oh, and here’s the kicker. Because the school’s rating is inevitably going down, my home value is tanking, which means that I can’t even move. And I can’t afford to send my kids to a private school either.

This is the visceral narrative facing this white, middle-class parent in Fairfax. Is this entirely accurate? Probably not from a macroeconomic perspective. We know that immigrants, undocumented or not, create more wealth than they take out from the system. But we also know that any productivity gained by the system has mostly gone to the very top of the food chain, the so-called Davos Crowd. In the meanwhile, white parents are stuck facing a deteriorating future for their kids. This is profoundly debilitating and disheartening.

Can you blame them for being angry at the system? Does this anger speak to our worst instincts? Yes, racial tribalism is alive and well. Does this manifest itself in hateful, racist rhetoric? Yes, and we cringe.

But their pain is real as well. So is their fear for their kids. And in their everyday reality, it’s the immigrants who are the direct cause of their pain. They want someone to make the pain stop. All politics is local, and their local reality is what Trump championed.

As Naomi Klein writes in The Guardian, “they have witnessed the rise of the Davos class, a hyper-connected network of banking and tech billionaires, elected leaders who are awfully cozy with those interests, and Hollywood celebrities who make the whole thing seem unbearably glamorous.”

She adds, “Success is a party to which they were not invited, and they know in their hearts that this rising wealth and power is somehow directly connected to their growing debts and powerlessness.”

And the Clinton’s were the founding members of this crowd. They threw a huge party but didn’t invite a huge swath of America. And now America has disinvited the Clintons.

Jason Lim is a Washington, D.C.-based expert on innovation, leadership and organizational culture. He has been writing for The Korea Times since 2006. Reach him at jasonlim@msn.com, facebook. com/jasonlimkoreatimes or @jasonlim2012.