Over at Mother Jones, my old colleague Mike Mechanic says the reason for voter discontent is more fundamental than most pundits think:
I’m talking here about something even more basic, something that undergirds so much of America’s discontent. The best explanation, after all, is often the simplest:
Wealth inequality.
There is little that leaves people as pissed off and frustrated as the feeling that no matter how hard they work, they can’t ever seem to get ahead. And this feeling has been slowly festering since the 1980s, when Ronald Reagan and his cadre of supply-side economists launched the first salvos in what would become the great fucking-over of the American middle and working classes.
The frustration was evident in something two very different women in two very different states told me on the very same day in 2022 for a story on how America spends hundreds of billions of dollars a year subsidizing retirement plans mostly for rich people: “I’m going to have to work until I die.”
This is kind of maddening. My heart is with Mike, but my head has a hard time following. It's absolutely true that wealth inequality has increased over the past few decades. According to the Federal Reserve, the wealth difference of the top 10% compared to the working class was 33:1 in 1989. Today it's 41:1
And yet, that doesn't mean the working class is taking it in the shorts. Ditto for those at retirement age:
Adjusted for inflation, the median wealth of the working class has gone up 93% since 1989. That's not as good as the rich, and it hasn't quite kept up with economic growth. Still, it's nearly double.
As for retirement, I can't find wealth figures just for working class retirees, but median wealth for middle class retirees has gone up 129%.
I just don't know who's right here. I know very well that some people are struggling, and some people really do have to keep working longer than they want to. But how many? Simple, reliable data suggests that the working class is doing well, if not spectacularly, and that most people can still retire at age 65 if they want to.¹ What's more, although workers have gotten more pessimistic about retirement, actual retirees are almost all pretty satisfied:
It seems indisputable that lots of working class folks are unhappy about something, but the objective data doesn't give much of a clue about what it might be. Feel free to take your best guess in comments.
¹There's a PhD assignment here for some enterprising grad student. We know for sure that more people are working past 65, but a lot of this is by choice. Nobody has done any work to find out how many elderly people are working longer involuntarily. Somebody should do that and try to figure out if it's changed over time.
Or maybe your data is what Annie Lowrey was warning us about?
The discontent of the relatively affluent wage earner is explained by their declining share of the economy compared to the top income earners. One dimensional analysis presents rising incomes as a reason why minimum and median wage earners should not be dissatisfied. Dismissing minimum and minimum wage growth has not kept up with the economy's reveals a blind spot. A large proportion of these workers have to scrape by to pay the rent and have no surpluses for leisure and savings for retirement. The astounding amounts of revenues earned by the top income earners reveals to wage earners the gap between them is growing beyond reach. A gap Democrats have not been able to bridge with policies leveling utilitarian outcomes for healthcare, housing, adult education.
+1
In my forties, I had this very strong sense that I did not have as good a life, in terms of material things, as my parents did at that age.
Kevin continually puts himself in a conundrum about this. It is a fact that inequality has increased considerably since the 70's. This was not the case in all previous US history. Trump voters have noticed this and how the rich keep getting richer - why wouldn't they and all workers be dissatisfied on economic grounds?
Kevin keeps featuring statistics that show stasis or improvement for working people, but improvements are paltry compared to what upper incomes have gotten. Real wages for production workers are still lower than they were in 1972 (although this does not mean that there was no material improvement). People notice inequality and workers are not placated because a little bit has trickled down to them. Before the 70's there was much greater improvement in living standards for workers.
Economic dissatisfaction among workers is real, but the idea that Democrats are somehow responsible for this is absurd. Republicans are able to pass plutocratic economic measures because they get support from lower-income voters through championing bigotry. Trump lies about the economy, and his followers swallow this because he supports them on "social" issues.
Kevin often acknowledges the role of "social" issues, so how can he not see that this is the critical source of unhappiness among Trump voters? As the left has continually advanced on equality issues, there has always been backlash and resentment. Many people have a real fear of the loss of White Christian Supremacy. Once Republicans capture voters' allegiance on these grounds, they can deflect the economic dissatisfaction to Democrats. Isn't it obvious that Trump is doing this with his blatant lies about the economy? For Trump voters, "social" dissatisfaction is the critical thing.
The media punditry is just wrong to blame Trump's ascendancy on economic instead of cultural dissatisfaction. Trump is not a "populist", he is essentially a bigot. Maybe Kevin puts too much faith in those pundits.
Por que no los dos?
Why can't it be both social and economic dissatisfaction?
Also, it grinds my gears when people, particularly the media, label Trump a populist. He is very much not a populist. He's an oligarch who speaks platitudes so that he can do the oligarchic things he wants to do.
+10.
I recommend in the strongest terms reading pages 85 t0 92 or Richard Rorty's 1998 book "Achieving our Country". It has the virtue (amongst others) of predicting the loss of an election like this last one, rather than concocting an explanation in hindsight, given the shift of the Democratic party in the 1960s and 70s from its long-standing economic concerns to cultural concerns that are irrelevant (or at best secondary) to 75% of the population.
While inequality is significant, I also think it's significant that a large number of older men feel that nobody gives a damn about them or how they are doing overall. They have increasingly weaker social connections and networks, deteriorating health, often driven by a life of physical labor, and a sense that they aren't supposed to talk about it, driven by old-school ideas about masculinity.
On top of that, we went through covid. Which further damaged social connections. I think there's an epidemic of loneliness out there, and someone pretending to care about people is going to become very, very attractive.
Political attention often ends up being zero-sum. There are a bunch of initiatives that I support - equality for women, for minorities, for disabled people, for LGBTQ people, and so on.
The result of this is loneliness. The feeling that nobody gives a rats ass about you and your (possible first-world, but maybe not) problems.
I think that's a factor in what we're seeing.
I don't. MAGAs have families and coworkers, and can maybe join some Gravy Seals or a Harley Davidson club for more buddies.
We are hearing that late deciders broke for Trump; i.e. voters who made their decisions after TFG amped up the insults, hate speech and threats; and when anonymous sources were saying that TFG's campaign advisors were frustrated trying to get him to stick to immigration and inflation/economy, the issues they thought worked in his favor. Of course, he just says more of whatever his rally crowds cheer. Because of his advancing cognitive decline, it took him a while to catch on that his crowds didn't care much about sharks or boat batteries, but he finally tossed out the red meat they love to hear. And apparently it was OK with the undecideds. or even attractive to them. God help us.
+1
While my general view is that Trump has been "successful" by exploiting cultural conflicts, I certainly agree that economic inequality is an important issue. The problem is that Trump's economic agenda will not alleviate any of the inequality and probably increase it. One can certainly claim that Harris wasn't aggressive enough in attacking this issue but advocating programs for the poor hasn't ever been a big political winner for Democratic candidates. I liked Warren's wealth tax but it didn't do much for her bid for the Presidency. At least Harris proposed things that would help (child tax credit--help to purchase houses etc). What were Trump's proposals? There may well be some "economic anxiety" out there but all Trump did was exploit it.
Too bad I can't post a chart or graph here at the charts and graphs blog. Or cats.
Anyway, all pay levels through a lot of history have generally gone up with overall economic productivity, just as taught in Econ class. Until the Reagan administration.
1948-1979: Productivity up 118%, compensation up 108%
1979-2019: Productivity up 60%, compensation up 14%
I don't know why you are blaming Reagan. The decoupling of compensation and productivity growth happened earlier -- in the early 1970s.
https://www.epi.org/publication/understanding-the-historic-divergence-between-productivity-and-a-typical-workers-pay-why-it-matters-and-why-its-real/
About the same time that union membership started to decline and the income share going to the top 10% started to increase.
https://jacobin.com/2021/09/labor-day-chart-union-membership-share-top-10-percent-income-inequality
And about the same time the current wave of immigration started (FIG. 5)
https://cis.org/Report/ForeignBorn-Share-and-Number-Record-Highs-February-2024
And the Bretton Woods system ended. And we lowered our tariffs and our balance of trade went to shit.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_balance_of_trade#/media/File:U.S._Trade_Balance_(1895%E2%80%932015)_and_Trade_Policies.png
How about them apples?
Agree, but Reagan's destruction of the air-traffic controllers union PATCO certainly threw gasoline on the fire.
Yup. Reagan was terrible.
Gen X isn't retiring yet, so... and is a smaller generation so barely moves the needle of averages.
Yes, wealth inequality is a big part of the reason.
There was this experiment. Some monkeys were perfectly happy with being given a cucumber, until some other monkeys were given grapes. Then all hell broke loose as the cucumber monkeys flew into a rage.
If voters are mad about the economy, and then vote for the party that will make the economy worse, then being mad about the economy isn't the problem. Economic and general illiteracy are the problems.
Does wealth inequality explain Trump?
She laughed at his tiny weird looking dick. Anything else is just rationalizing it.