From The Hedgehog Review, Summer 2026 issue:
I met Chrome Dome, a retired trucker wearing a red MAGA hat over his bald head, in a Lewiston, Maine, McDonald’s three weeks before Trump was first elected. During the previous two years, I had interviewed thousands of people like him across the United States, in towns that, like Lewiston, were dealing with industrial decline and loss. I was pretty sure of what was about to come, down to the details—a soliloquy on decline, of good jobs moved to Mexico or China, of safe, clean neighborhoods destroyed by immigrants, of politicians who cared only about big-city billionaires and professors, not hard-working people, and then maybe a rant about Clinton (one or both), Obama, Reagan, or Bush (one or both), in that order of frequency.
Chrome Dome, in his early eighties, delivered it all with the usual color. Both of his parents had worked in textile mills that closed in the 1990s, he had a good childhood despite being poor because “we never wanted for anything,” and he had fashioned a good life for himself as a trucker, eventually moving into the house he was raised in and starting his own family. But all that had changed, and now his grandkids had no chance unless they left town and went to college and never came back, which is what he hoped they would do—because why would you stay in this shithole? And, of course, none of this was fair, and that was why he was voting for Trump. No, he didn’t usually vote, couldn’t remember the last time he had, because what was the point? Weren’t they all the same, out only for their billionaire friends? Sure, Trump was a billionaire, but not like the other ones, because he says things you aren’t supposed to say, and that gets everybody’s panties all twisted in a knot.
When I ask him when it all “went wrong,” he launches into a critique of the trucking industry, complains about the decline in lifestyle and wages over his life, and concludes by saying, “And that is the last time I voted for a president, because he stabbed us working people in the back.” “Reagan?” I ask. “No, Jimmy Carter.” And that is when I learn, to my embarrassment, that it was Carter, the candidate I had once campaigned for at my parents’ side, who had deregulated the trucking industry.
That move was part of a larger program of deregulation that would reshape the country, triggering a deluge of consolidation, offshoring, and financialization. While this eroded America’s industrial base, especially in the Midwest, it engorged Wall Street with profits and filled New York City with young, highly educated professionals who would remake it along with the nation, and then result, arguably, four decades later, in Chrome Dome, like a lot of other “low-educational attainment” Americans, voting for and electing Donald Trump, to the surprise of everyone with a national voice.
Yuppies, a new book by historian Dylan Gottlieb, is an attempt to portray how sweeping a national transformation this set of policies (deregulation, financialization, deindustrialization) represented, by focusing on its foot soldiers in New York City: the meritocratic class of strivers who arrived in vast numbers beginning in the late 1970s.
They were the top graduates of the finest colleges, drawn to New York City by extraordinarily high-paying jobs in companies that were anything but antiestablishment—bulge-bracket banks, global accounting firms, and the law firms that defended and supported both. They were living proof that whatever idealism the prior decade might have inspired, plenty of its members could still be enticed with a large and steady paycheck from a corporate America that soon manufactured little that was tangible, besides enormous profits.
Over the next decade, these men and women changed New York City at all levels—economically, demographically, culturally, and politically—reinvigorating a broken, crime-ridden city with the profits that derived from (depending on your perspective) either a transformational wave of productivity, efficiency, and economic growth, or from the strip-mining of working-class America, taking away all its people held sacred and replacing it with more stuff at lower costs.
I was, and am, a member of this group, although I never saw myself as one. Yuppie was a dirty word when I was in college. Yet cultural forces have a way of shaping us despite our best intentions, and, six months after receiving a PhD in physics, I joined a booming Wall Street, walking a path blazed fifteen years earlier by the yuppies. My mother, a lifelong Democrat, never approved: The banks were not to be trusted, ever. They had foreclosed on her family dairy farm back in the 1930s, sending her, her brother, and her widowed mother into a decade of penury—and a lifetime of voting for the firmly anti-banking, working-class party, the Democrats.
I arrived on a Wall Street replete with new employees who looked nothing like me but thought like me. We were a diverse mix drawn from every part of the United States—from small Southern towns, from the Midwest, even from the trailer parks of Appalachia—all of us highly educated and sharing a philosophy best described as “libertarianism lite.” This was, uniformly, a socially liberal, fiscally conservative group who checked all the right diversity boxes and believed that individual liberty, especially when applied to businesses, was collectively beneficial and even represented history’s natural endpoint.
This philosophy was incarnate in newly elected President Bill Clinton, who was one of us. He might have acted more down-home than we did, but what mattered was that he had become the leader of the free world on merit alone. He represented the new Democratic Party, one that embraced Wall Street instead of shunning it, that was committed to undoing the bad deeds Franklin D. Roosevelt had done—all things my mother and her generation believed needed to be done to keep the banks from ravaging the country. That included bailing out banks when they found themselves out over their skis and ripping up the last of the Depression-era financial regulations, such as the Glass-Steagall Act, already a dead letter....
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