Bring on Your Wrecking Ball

Plus, the most Republican and most Democratic colleges, employers, careers

The headline in the top left corner of the front page of the New York Times, “Trump Swings Wrecking Ball at Status Quo,” made me smile, and sent me back to a predecessor site of The Editors, where, on October 27, 2017, I published an item headlined “The Springsteen President.”

It mentioned the Bruce Springsteen song “Wrecking Ball.”  I wrote:

Springsteen first performed that song publicly in 2009 at Giants Stadium in New Jersey, which was to be demolished. It is not only about wrecking, but about what is to be built.

The song wouldn't have applied to Obama. But it may be the one tune that best explains President Trump. Trump, with his judicial nominees and his regulatory, and legislative agenda, with his tweets aimed like darts at the arrogant coastal elites, is determined to undo a lot of the centralization of power in Washington that has accumulated over decades. He is the wrecking ball.

So if you got the guts mister, yeah, if you got the balls
If you think it's your time, then step to the line, and bring on your wrecking ball

Bring on your wrecking ball
Bring on your wrecking ball
Come on and take your best shot, let me see what you got
Bring on your wrecking ball...

So hold tight on your anger, you hold tight on your anger
Hold tight to your anger, don't fall to your fears

That may help explain why so many senators and members of the Washington and New York-based press corps so ardently dislike, even fear Trump. Those politicians and journalists have succeeded under the set-up that Trump wants to knock down. Trump has showed up with a wrecking ball at their Washington front door. Trump's base understands that, which may be why the attacks from the press and the senators haven't shaken their support for Trump….

Springsteen and American presidential politics have a long and complicated history. A 2014 Politico piece traces it to the conservative columnist George Will attending a Springsteen concert back in 1984, and President Reagan then making a campaign appearance in New Jersey and offering a tribute to the performer's "message of hope."

Leave it to Reagan, the great optimist, to find in Springsteen's songs a message of hope. It's easily missed, but it's unmistakably there, even in a song like "Wrecking Ball," written years after Reagan's death: "Don't fall to your fears."

The "wrecking ball" did knock down the old Giants Stadium, but that venue was replaced at the Meadowlands by MetLife Stadium. The new stadium has a larger capacity, includes more luxury boxes and club seats, and is more environmentally friendly. The change ended up better for the fans and for the team owners. The new stadium is more comfortable and more profitable than the old one.

Any builder, like Trump, knows that before putting up a hotel or a casino or a luxury apartment building, you have to first prepare the site. Sometimes that requires a wrecking ball. It's not a wrecking ball of mere destruction. It's a wrecking ball that's a prerequisite for creativity and growth, for dynamic improvement….It's not a sad song. The hope it conveys is why so many people who voted for Trump are greeting his presidency by cheering it on. In essence, they are singing along with Springsteen: "Bring on your wrecking ball."

Anyway, we will see what happens and how it works out for the country. From the narrow perspective of the journalistic competition, and at the risk of self-congratulation, it’s satisfying to have been there with the “wrecking ball” analysis seven years ahead. And it’s nice to see the Times catching up to the idea. It’s validating, even if, once you read past the headline, their take is considerably darker than mine was in 2017. It’s another The Editors Told You So moment. I’m grateful to have sources who are so far out front in understanding and explaining what is happening.

Political sorting in the U.S. labor market: A graduate student in economics at Harvard, Sahil Chinoy, has posted a research paper that uses the nifty method of merging a file with national voter registration data together with LinkedIn profile data on jobs and where people went to school. He comes up with findings about political tilts in professions, workplaces, and among students and graduates of universities. The title of the paper is Political Sorting in the U.S. Labor Market: Evidence and Explanations, and it is by Chinoy and Martin Koenen. 

The charts, which Chinoy generously gave permission to reproduce here, are pretty neat:

Boeing has been hit with complaints about quality and safety issues in some passenger planes. The New York City Department of Education spends a lot of money per student with not-that-great-results as measured by standardized test scores, especially in comparison to some high-achieving charter school networks. It’s interesting that the employers at the top of both lists are heavily unionized and somewhat troubled.

Other than Notre Dame, even the “most Republican” of the top colleges still tilt Democratic. I found the University of Chicago result surprising, given that the school has a reputation for being a little more ideologically balanced than a lot of the rest of high-end higher-education. What the study is picking up from the LinkedIn profiles are alumni and students, not employees.

These findings may strike some as obvious or expected—social workers are liberal, CEOs and people who work in the oil and defense industries lean more to the right—but it’s neat to get empirical confirmation with the match of LinkedIn profiles and party registration data, not simply with survey research or anecdotes. For those who detect and are annoyed by media bias and publishing industry bias, seeing the partisan tilts in “writers and editors” and “writing and editing” is also illuminating.

Recent work elsewhere: “Big Foundations Helped Democrats Lose the Election” is the headline over a piece I wrote for the Wall Street Journal. Check it out over at the Journal if you are interested and have access.

For the Algemeiner, I wrote about how “Members of the family of Raphael Lemkin, a Jewish lawyer who coined the term “genocide” and pushed for the passage of the UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of Genocide, say they are outraged that a Pennsylvania-based nonprofit organization is using the Lemkin name to pursue an agenda of extreme anti-Israel activism.” Check that one out over at the Algemeiner if you are interested. 

Harris campaign paid media figures who interviewed her: Buried deep in a New York Times article about where the Harris campaign spending went are these disclosures:

Some media allies of Ms. Harris were also paid. …

Roland Martin, who hosts his own streaming programming and runs a media company called Nu Vision Media, received $350,000 in September for a “media buy” that he said was for advertising.

“It should have been a hell of a lot more,” Mr. Martin said in a brief interview. “More should have been spent on Black-owned media.” Mr. Martin interviewed Ms. Harris in October.

Ms. Harris’s campaign also made two $250,000 donations to National Action Network, the organization led by the Rev. Al Sharpton. Mr. Sharpton interviewed Ms. Harris on MSNBC in October.

I went back and watched the full Sharpton interview with Harris about what Sharpton called “an extraordinary historic campaign” and saw no disclosure of the donations. Sharpton called Trump “hostile and erratic.” (The disclosure issue aside, the interview was enough to remind me how grateful I am that the Harris campaign is over.)

The Dartmouth Union that won’t let a pro-Israel Christian quit: The indignities of being a graduate student these days frequently include being forced to pay dues to a labor union advocating for anti-Israel positions. The Dartmouth, the student newspaper at Dartmouth College, has a scoop on the case of Benjamin Logsdon, who is trying to get a doctorate in math.

Dartmouth’s grad students are represented by a union called Graduate Organized Laborers of Dartmouth-United Electrical Workers. The UE, in contrast to the more mainstream IBEW, has long been a far-left union, to the point of being forced out of the CIO for failing to expel Communists from its leadership. The UE signed a July 23, 2024 letter to President Biden calling on him “to immediately halt all military aid to Israel.”

The Dartmouth quotes Jacob Comello, a spokesman for the Right to Work Legal Foundation, which is advocating on Logsdon’s behalf. “Logsdon is a Christian whose sincere religious beliefs put him at odds with GOLD union officials and the radical activity and ideological positions they are promoting, especially as regards to Israel,” Comello said.

Good for the Right to Work Legal Foundation and especially good for Logsdon, who deserves some kind of Profile in Courage award for standing up against his union. The union claims that “Removing him from the unit is not something the union is legally empowered to do, and refusing to represent Mr. Logsdon — even in response to his request — would subject the union to charges with the National Labor Relations Board for failing in its Duty of Fair Representation.” I doubt that’s accurate. If it is accurate, it’d probably make sense for Congress to amend the labor law to make it crystal clear that no employee should be forced to be represented by a union promoting abhorrent policies.

Thank you: Become a paying subscriber to The Editors today and ensure your full access to content that may put you seven years ahead of the New York Times. We aren’t taking money from any political campaigns. Instead we are supported by readers like you. Thanks to those of you who are already paying readers. We can use a few more paid subscribers to meet our year-end goals, so if you can spare the $8 a month or $80 a year, please act now.