The Outer Borough Mind

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.