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.
It's not that the working class has it so lousy but that the 0.01% have nothing that can constrain their most idle fantasies, and with that much money those idle fantasies can fuck with everyone on Earth.
That's why billionaires should be illegal. Their existence is a crime, either now or at some point inevitably.
1+ eat the rich
Fava beans and Chianti?
Kevin, the rich have gotten more. Jealousy is universal and fundamental.
I'm not an enterprising PhD student but I think the formula would be:
X = monthly income at retirement which would be needed to fund middle class lifestyle w/o stress.
Y = percentage of the population which has that or will have that.
Z = the number of millions of people, as a percentage, who are below the "Y" cutoff.
Those are the millions susceptible to fear mongering or blaming. I'm betting its quite a few million. I would also bet its at least everyone below those median numbers. Its a function of setting "X" and "X" goes with both an actual number and an expectation.
I don't think it's all that hard to understand really. There's a core group that just likes what Trump is pitching. HRC called them the 'basket of deplorables'. That's a weird turn of phrase. I prefer, unredeemable assholes. But for a lot of the rest it's just the inflation thing. And the problem with that is that it's just so fucking stupid. For good reason politicians are hesitant to say that voters are dumb.
I'm not a politician.
Voters are dumb.
I wish Kevin would at least try to shake his assumption that people must have logical reasons tethered to reality for their irrational, emotion-based voting decisions.
A woman of my acquaintance, an intelligent woman with two degrees, told me years ago she could never vote for Kevin Rudd (Australian Labor leader) because of his awful lip curl when he smiled. Just as millions of Americans would cut off their hands before voting for a woman who supposedly cackled like Kamala.
Yes. Philip Converse researched this 60 years ago and found that almost a quarter of voters are like this: they vote based on complete nonsense. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2004/08/30/the-unpolitical-animal
You took the words out of my mouth. It’s a plus to me that Kevin’s guiding thoughts are to check data sources and to be willing to be contrarian. But I’m just not sure that works when it comes to why people vote a certain way.
A lot of the graph of wealth appears to be home price:
https://www.longtermtrends.net/home-price-vs-inflation/
Including home prices in this assessment is misleading in two ways: first, people still need a place to live, so it doesn't help them that their homes have increased in value if they can't sell the house and get that value. Second, higher home prices mean higher property taxes, which can cause cash flow problems for homeowners.
Kevin, I know you read the WSJ.
Check the deranged editorial pages for the slavering "Democrats, Blame Yourselves":
"Democrats also began using the term 'Latinx,' which sounds to many Spanish-speakers like illiterate cultural imperialism from elites."
That's it. That's the whole election. I'm convinced.
Yup. That's it. Nevermind the fact that "Democrats" to my knowledge haven't started using the term Latinx in any meaningful way. Some people did, and I'd bet that a lot of those people would vote for Democrats, but so what? It's not like this has any actual consequence, and it certainly has nothing to do with the federal government.
If they really want to play that game, then "Republicans" are fascists and support Nazis. What's that you say? Elected Republicans and Republican leaders obviously aren't fascists and they don't support Nazis? Too bad. Some segment of the Republican electorate does, so you all get to own it.
Of course, the real problem is that Republicans have an entire right wing propaganda machine that Democrats just don't have. Democrats keep bringing facts and reality to the fantasy LARPing fight that is modern American politics. That's all there is to it. It's all social media clout, vibes, and outright nonsense. The only thing that might stop it is a national catastrophe that is undeniable, but I have my doubts since the last one didn't.
+1. Covid-19 was bad but no where near as bad as it could have been. But I'm afraid a more drastic national catastrophe might push us faster into authoritarianism. As usual things are going to get much worse before they even start to get better.
Also - I wish Kevin would provide more details on how he generates his charts.
This PBS show (Frontline - Two American Families: 1991-2024) certainly paints life pretty tough for these 2 families:
https://www.pbs.org/video/two-american-families-1991-2024-preview/
For this election, a lot of people are bathing in fox news land... and people just didn't like going through the pandemic and ensuing inflation. Even if there was no better way through it, they complained and voted that way :-/
I don't know if it's really responsible for Trump in this case, but I think there is something to the idea that there are stable rich societies and stable poor societies, but those in the middle, and especially those transitioning between the two states, tend to be messy, turbulent, and violent. One classic example is something like 20th century Colombia, where you had a country that was totally capable of becoming much wealthier through development, but the ostensibly "legitimate" traditional oligarchy plus a rising class of gazillionaire drug lords hoovered up all the money from a largely agrarian population. The result was La Violencia - a civil war of all of these groups against each other in various configurations for control of the country's economic resources.
I think you could make the argument that increased inequality in the US is starting to breed that kind of instability. Despite the fact that the US is not populated by Colombians working for slave labor on United Fruit's plantations, it is obvious that oligarchs have the US economy and politics in a stranglehold; if you're a typical working person you might be able to work yourself into the petit-bourgeoisie, but getting rich is like hoping you win the lottery - it's laughably out of reach. People have an intuitive sense of that but the problem is so big and impersonal that most can't quite get their arms around it.
And it doesn't help that for the last 80 years people have internalized the idea that the American Dream means being able to at least own a nice big house and more and more expensive cars. Poor land-use policies leading to housing shortages and inflation in the auto market would cause resentment there even if Fox News and its associated information environment weren't amplifying rightwing psychosis (like the idea that anyone can get rich quick if you just know what cryptocurrencies you should be buying) on a national scale.
I think for many people it's the perception of wealth and who has it rather than the reality. What I don't get is why people think Trump is going to fix this for them and start handing out wads of cash to everyone. Btw, I work at a large cultural institution in Southern California (we're very DEI) and we have been assured by Latina hispanic staff that Latinx is the phrase to use now.
They think Trump is going to hand them wads of cash because he promised them he would and they believe him. I posted a list of his promises in the comments under Kevin’s “As always, tax cuts for the rich are Job 1” post. Check it out and guess which promises he will even try to keep.
I really don't think Trump voters actually expect him to do any of the things he says. It's not about policy, which is why D's keep missing the mark. It's about feeling like they're being left behind, and no amount of facts and data is going to convince them otherwise. Listen to them talk about Trump. "He understands our problems." "He speaks for us." Please. Trump understands nothing and cares only about himself. But they hear in Trump what they want to say...they're angry.
Culture war is really about grievance, and who is all grievance all the time?
The most outrageous slogan is "Trump will fix it" ignoring the fact that he didn't fix anything the first four year he was in office. He only said he did, and gullible people believed him.
That’s it. It seems that most people are not rational at all. They somehow have a herd mentality that can be influenced by someone like Trump. I don’t think he really lies so much as uses any freighted words he wants to provoke emotional responses.
If interested, check out Influence by Robert Cialdini. He studied how people decide on things. We don’t have time to do a lengthy analysis each time we need to decide something so we have developed a bunch of short cuts.
A simple example is social proof. We tend to rely on the crowd. They did a test in a coffee shop. One tray of pastry held just one item. Each time someone bought it they replaced it. That item outsold all the others because people figured that the crowd was buying it. Also, scarcity applied. Scarce items are more valuable.
The point is that a lot of people have hot buttons and react to those and never sit down and reason through policy issues.
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
I suspect for a lot of older workers, the "choice" is between continuing to work, and a precipitous drop in standard of living (taking in a roommate, selling the house, giving up car/freedom, reducing consumption of fresh fruit/vegetables, ceasing any and all leisure travel, etc). So sure, they can "choose" to spend their dwindling time on earth living a far less enjoyable existence. There are also many older workers who could get by fine in the near term, but don't like the looks of that nest egg, and very nervously calculate they're looking at a plunge in quality of life if they're "unlucky" enough to survive into their 80s. So they're too scared to stop working, and strive to remain in the paid labor force until they absolutely no longer are able.
The line between "voluntary" and "involuntary" is a thin one for many older workers.
Believe it or not, but some people actually love their work and keep doing it by choice. They might be a minority, but they absolutely exist. I know, because I'll be one of them. I plan to keep working until nobody will have me anymore, but I should be able to retire comfortably by normal full retirement age.
While absolute wealth growth matter, the wealth inequality remains, and within a given economy/society it causes its own problems. I continue to hold that wealth inequality and stagnant housing growth in dense urban cities explains a lot of our politics.
Wealth inequality invariably leads to political inequality invariably leads to wealth inequality. Which is precisely how the people at the top of the pyramid want things to be. IOW, wealth inequality is a model misspecification; what these boyos really want is power inequality. Whether through wealth, politics or cultural institutions, it's all the same to them.
+1
Yeah, I think the perception that the rich control what happens in D.C. is a huge factor in this.
Both my father and a close friend worked in sales. They worked past 70 because they liked the work. Both gradually phased out, keeping their preferred clients and favorite travel routes, until they finally decided it was enough long after most people were done. It wasn’t about money as they both seem to have plenty, it was about contributing.
I'm repeating myself from another thread, but here it is:
Relativity applies to more than just physics. People in the middle see the wealthy getting wealthier and the poor closing the gap, so it feels like they're moving backwards. You can tell them until you're out of breath about how their situation is improving, show them charts, tables and graphs until your hands hurt, but it's no use. They all think they have it worse than their parents, while living in a larger house in a nicer neighborhood, driving two cars while their parents made do with one Chevy station wagon, and taking regular trips to Disneyworld.
This is from a Duke University study of Los Angeles in 2016. I doubt much has changed:
White households in Los Angeles have a median net worth of $355,000. In comparison, Mexicans and U.S. blacks have a median wealth of $3,500 and $4,000, respectively. Among nonwhite groups, Japanese ($592,000), Asian Indian ($460,000), and Chinese ($408,200) households had higher median wealth than whites.
https://socialequity.duke.edu/research-duke/the-color-of-wealth-in-los-angeles-2/#:~:text=Key%20Findings,higher%20median%20wealth%20than%20whites.
Perhaps we are looking, in part, with a social comparison issue. In psychology we look at upward versus downward social comparisons. If your media, social feeds, etc. constantly show people who have lives that appear better than yours, there is a tendency to become depressed and angry. If, instead, you are someone who works with the poor and disadvantaged, you feel good about your life. Think of all the “influencers” so many people follow. It is not hard to see how so many people may feel depressed and angry that they are not able to live like the rich and famous.
This is a point also made by a TPM commenter (#4 in the most recent letters reacting to the election) that I'm still thinking about.
This commenter doesn't take it back as far as Mechanic does (and I'd agree more with Mechanic on that) but argues that the huge money injections in response to the 2008 crisis and covid (eg especially quantitative easing, zirp, covid relief money) together with low or zero general interest rates have vastly driven up the nominal value of financial assets and some hard assets like real estate, and that this has caused a huge expansion of our wealth disparity, and hardship for people who don't have financial assets or real property. (Here's a link that might work, for anyone interested: https://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/your-reactions-4-2)
A big point this raises for me in the context of Kevin's post is that it's about extremes, not medians. The top extreme is way, way more extreme in wealth than it was before maybe about 1980, and there seems to be a bigger slice of our society with eye-popping wealth. Conventional comparatives like "top 1%" or whatever may obscure this.
At the same time, rising values of real estate and financial assets also benefit a particular slice of the populace disproportionately, and here the dividing line is more age than income level-- particularly people old enough to have bought a house before the turn of the century. This age-wealth disparity has already gotten quite a bit of attention, and needs to be part of the picture of economic discontent.
Where Mechanic mentions people feeling like they can't get ahead is where I'm most sympathetic to what he says and where I think Kevin's statistics aren't very convincing. And that feeling obviously relates specifically to asset prices, most clearly houses-- which are proverbially most families' single most important asset and ownership of which has been central to both retirement financing writ large and having some wealth to pass along to children.
To me this really looks like a serious problem and it particularly bites younger people. Even if incomes *are* going up faster than consumer prices, what happens when you factor in rent, car payments and insurance, credit card interest, student loans for some, and doubled housing prices over a relatively short span? Without family money for a down payment, people in very many markets around the country have to despair of ever being able to get near buying a house and getting on that generational-wealth escalator. Too much income is already committed. And I think this affects the parents of these people, too.
If we're looking just at cohorts, then young non-college males would seem to have good reason to feel like they'll never get ahead, and maybe the most reason of any cohort to think that. And they don't have to be particularly low down on the income scale to reach that conclusion, either, if they're in major metro areas. And even if they're middle-class, then their options might include waiting until their parents will them the homes they're in, or hoping the 'rents are far enough along on their mortgage to borrow for a down payment (unlikely for a lot of the sandwich generation). But don't mortgagors disqualify borrowers for getting down payments that way, anyway?
So yes, I think conditions have been changing for a couple of generations, and accelerating in the past 15 years, in ways that hurt a pretty broad slice of people's sense that they could get ahead. And that has to have political consequences. It won't explain everything, but it has to be taken into account.
I actually don't really fully understand what this guy is talking about. What does he mean when he says that stock and bond prices are "very high"?
Obviously, if he means that things like nominal share prices of things like big typical index funds are high, that's idiotic. The funds can and do split when the nominal prices are high! It is totally irrelevant that the Vanguard S&P 500 ETF is at about $550/share.
If he means, rather, that relative to the underlying business fundamentals, asset prices are high right now, that makes more sense. Asset prices do appear to be pretty high right now, especially for the biggest companies in the stock market. But stock prices are not that high yet - like obviously at totally unprecedented levels, or levels that suggest a correction or even a crash is imminent. Bonds are kind of expensive according to at least some analysts. In other words, this all appears to be the normal functioning of the business cycle - some times are better to buy stocks than other times, and this appears to be a time when they're just pricey.
I don't know how you can blame that on QE or other expansionary policies - both the stock and bond markets had a significant downturn in 2022 because of interest rate hikes, now they're back because the economy had a soft landing, and probably in the next year or two we're going to have another significant correction. Is QE supposed to be to blame for all this simply because this guy has the idea in his head that interest rates aren't "supposed" to be this low?
One other thing - I'm struggling to understand what he's talking about when he says:
Anything that can be bought on credit has become incredibly expensive: stocks, bonds, real estate (particularly in large urban areas where people own a lot of stocks and bonds), technology company valuations, speculative assets like cryptocurrencies — even education, in the United States.
What exactly is this guy talking about? Yes, obviously real estate is bought on credit. I would venture to guess that the vast majority of individual investors borrow little to none of the money they are investing - margin requirements are so high at most brokers that it's not worth it. Most crypto bros are not leveraging up to buy more crypto and most wealthy people don't borrow piles of money to pay for ritzy private schools.
Okay, institutional investors like hedge funds and so forth might often use leverage, but besides the fact that hedge fund returns are usually crappy, not all that many individual investors buy them. If there were really an insanely, extraordinarily high amount of leverage in the financial economy right now, stemming from institutional investors taking advantage of cheap money to borrow to invest, I feel like we'd be hearing about it - wouldn't that be noticeable at the level of major banks?
The letter reads like a very banal case of a pompous law partner pretending that he can cosplay as an economist. Elite lawyers love to do stuff like that.
I read it as saying that money was poured into the system from 2008 in order to deal with that financial crisis and again in 2020-21 for covid, and that when interest rates are very low and people can't find a decent return they chase assets and bubbles result. In other words I saw QE as kind of a stand-in for the whole series of measures to expand money supply and lower rates; all that money has to go somewhere, and it went into financial assets and real estate.
That letter seems like it's written from a very orthodox, maybe monetarist, point of view, and what I didn't appreciate when I first read it was that QE is a particular bete noire from that point of view because it explicitly relies on central banks buying up debt from a wide range of issuers, including private ones, rather than just from the government. So by definition it supports or drives up bonds and bond-like instruments, hence writer AJ's focus on that. In the US, iirc, the Fed eventually tapered off the QE asset-- and "asset"-- buying and then slowly dumped them back into the market. Wikipedia's article on QE is pretty good in touching on these kinds of views, I think.
Anyway, the implication I drew was that financial assets and real estate in particular remain artificially high, mainly because of all the money sloshing around in the system, and even though rates are currently fairly high. And I think that has something going for it, particularly in the context of income and wealth patterns since Reagan, ie when income stagnation got cemented at the lower end and wealth disparities got into a widening track.
That's the value part of the letter for me and I don't sign on to AJ's economic forecasts! But they're why I think it's probably very orthodox in expecting either recession/depression or inflation.
If we do get a recession in the near future, I can't tell you how fervently I want it to be 2026, far enough into his term that trump owns it.
The thing is, interest rates are not that high unless you're only taking the last 15 years or so as the baseline. The federal funds rate was at 5 to 6.5% throughout all of the 1990s boom. It was at similar levels through most of the 1960s expansion.
As for housing prices, it seems like much of the issue isn't a demand problem - of too much money in the system. It's a supply problem - a bunch of cities are not building enough housing to actually keep up. (Are homeownership rates surging right now, suggesting that more people than before have the cash to buy?) I don't see much evidence that financial assets are booming because of too much cheap money, either - it seems like we're just nearing the end of a normal-ish business cycle where Wall Street has gotten a bit over its skis and bid up stock prices simply because that's what always tends to happen right before a significant correction.
That's exactly it: money was poured in to the system, and some of it went to folks lower on the wealth scale. Those who could do so snatched up assets like homes or even second homes.
PE firms did the same thing but at grander scales. In search of a return, they completed the commodification of the housing market post-2008 and hoovered up all kinds of other assets.
There is far too much money sloshing around in unproductive, let alone destructive, ways. PE as it currently exists is a crime against humanity.
All of this really highlights for me how fucking bad it was for us that we had Republicans in charge in the initial aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis (ignoring that they're the ones who got us there in the first place), and that Obama/Congress in 2009 didn't bail out actual mortgage holders instead of large financial institutions who didn't need/deserve it.
During the recovery period in the 2010s, the wealth-holders had so much more ability to buy assets at bargain basement prices than everybody else and it accelerated the consolidation of wealth inequality. THAT'S what's fucking us in the ass right now, politically speaking. "Social dissatisfaction" of Trump voters is just a sideshow/excuse.
Forget it, Jake. It’s MAGAtown.
Basic living expenses keep going up for everyone.
If you own a house, your insurance is going up (assuming you aren't getting canceled.
If you rent, rents are going up.
Veterinary care keeps going up.
Copays for medical care keep going up.
Groceries keep going up.
Cable bills keep going up.
A burger at the drive through keeps going up.
People are looking for someone to blame for the fact that their fixed incomes are not covering their expenses. Californians blame Newsom, everyone else blames Democrats in general because we demanded higher standards, lower emissions, cleaner energy, regulations, higher minimum wage, etc...
Nobody wants to accept that corporations are using AI and other tools to optimize their pricing for maximum profit. They'll push prices as high as they can reasonably go, losing the bottom 10% of their buyers is made up for by higher profits from those that just pay the higher price.
They hate socialism and communism, but can't accept the realities of capitalism either.
As has been pointed out many many times whenever this comes up, most people are not on "fixed incomes"! Regular working-class people, on average, have seen significantly increased real wages during the Biden years, though of course there will always be some seeing less of an increase and some seeing more. Social Security is indexed to inflation - it's not staying the same nominally while inflation makes every good and service more expensive.
+1
I'd say that capitalism has been extremely successful at misdirecting blame for the problems it has cost.
I remeber a clip of old propaganda video saying God approves of capitalism. I think it was in one of Michael Moores movies.
So they vote for Trump? The guy whose tax cuts made the rich richer? Idiots then.
The GOP has lied to its constituency for decades convincing them that the real issue is [fill in name of scapegoat here] and not tax cuts that are meant to be used as an excuse to gut social welfare programs. They turned to Trump simply because he's a better liar. That's why the GOP is now controlled by Trump. Same lies, better delivery. I would guess they'll grow tired of his lies eventually, but not before he leaves politics. Every good con man knows when to pack up and leave.
+1
Some comments:
1) Trump changed the lying from dishonesty (telling lies when needed, but still preferring truth where possible) to anti-honesty (always prefer lies).
2) Trump added contempt to democracy and the Constitution and the principles associated with it.
3) His delivery of lies is much much much much better. None of the Republicans has anything close to the kind of supporters that Trump has.
4) As a result of (1), (2) and (3), Trump is a mortal danger to American democracy, while other Republicans, as vile as they are, are not.
5) He is not going to leave as long as he is functionally healthy.
+1. Republicans are only concerned that Trump still signs any bill they put in front of him. Which he will because he litteraly doesn't care and his interests align with theirs. He'll have no choice but to leave in fou years. I highly doubt the Republicans or the extremist judges he appointed to the SC have respect enough or perhaps fear him enough for them to disregard the constitution. Don't quote me on that for circumstances can change. Besides he achieved one important thing if not the most important, he avoided the consequences of his convictions, both current and possible future ones.
It wasn't about turnout:
https://www.cauldron.llc/medium-data-blog/its-not-about-turnout
Thanks for the link, which makes an important point that refutes at least one anguished LGM post I can think of.
In the same vein, Marcy Wheeler just re-skeeted a political scientist's calculation that across PA, MI, and WI combined, if a little over 123,000 votes had gone for Harris instead of Trump, she'd be measuring the drapes today. That's as of now, with votes yet to be counted. And with CA finally coming in whenever it does, she might yet take the popular vote.
So can we venture to say that when it's all said and done, this will look remarkably like both 2016 and 2020? A few tens of thousands of votes across three states deciding the whole thing?
Which is not to say there haven't been shifts within electoral groups that will bear looking into. Just that when it's all said and done, it won't have been a blowout, no matter what the head bloviator will say.
You can put up 30 charts and 100 power point slides.
What was the price of eggs anytime in 2019?
How about last year when everyone was talking about the price of egss and having feelings about it?
All I want to know is this: who the hell is eating so many eggs that they even notice the price - much less are materially harmed by even a 100% increase? I honestly couldn't tell you what eggs cost ever, but I assume they're somewhere between $0 and $10 a dozen and I'd be just fine as long as they remain somewhere in that range.
And when did we become a nation of whining babies that can't deal with a year or two of frankly moderate inflation? Where are all the rugged manly men that pulled themselves up by their own bootstraps and built the nation with absolutely no help from anyone? In the corner crying about the price of eggs I guess? Fucking pussies.
👍
It’s the corrosive sense of insecurity of living in a world where risk has increased, despite having done everything “right”. They’ve worked hard, saved, but there’s plenty of those people who fit Jasper_in_Boston’s words:
There are also many older workers who could get by fine in the near term, but don't like the looks of that nest egg, and very nervously calculate they're looking at a plunge in quality of life if they're "unlucky" enough to survive into their 80s.
Meanwhile Fox and R’s are doing their best to undermine social security and convince people it’ll only last a few more years.
The bottom line is the feeling of being on your own in a dangerous world you’re not ready for. Yeah, they’re pissed off and looking for someone to blame. It wasn’t supposed to be this way.
Trump is fantastic at sniffing that out and offering up scapegoats (immigrants, trans people, etc).
Insecurity is corrosive. It makes people tribal and mean. Throw in some racism and sexism and you’ve got the makings of a right wing cult ready to burn it all down.
So yeah, inequality underlies this sense that the neoliberal order - which most Democrats have supported for decades - is failing them. Neither party was offering an alternative until trump came along. Of course his way won’t work either.
His way will only make things worse. At best he'll do exactly what the Republicans want him to do which is almost as bad.
His way will make things worse for everyone but him and the people he decides to favor. The way to curry such favor is very simple: flattery and bribes. Or, in Trumpese "loyalty". Just be careful, because it's a one way street, and you'll fall out of favor quickly when someone comes along and displays even more "loyalty".
+1
I’m one of those who may have to work (at a crummy job) until I die. And I don’t care what the reason is for that.
A learned argument wealth inequality gave us Trump:
https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/trump-election-inequality-meant-that-us-democracy-was-doomed-by-jason-stanley-2024-11
Unfortunately the writer concludes that was it for free and fair elections in the US.
The question is why do people think Trump can or even cares about doing anything about wealth inequality? Despite his claims he's no different than the Republicans when it comes to dealing with wealth inequality. He'd rather not do anything and won't.
The error is to think that a statistical analysis is The Mode to Explain. It continues your error, dear Drum for a long time in misunderstanding equally inflation impact in socio-political terms
Most human beings do not do statistical benchmarking.
They benchmark against their comparative recent status and their comparative status versus their expectations.
Ergo your analysis in terms of what the Working Class is upset about is in the terms of science, "not even wrong"
The Democrats the past 20 years approximately have become increasingly focused in speech and conveyed agenda as the party of University graduating urban and sub-urban relative elite (as compared to the working class although not as compared of to the wealthy, shall we say the top 10% of the wealth brackets) - a Robespierriene social-class middle elite in a fashion.
Engaging in GDP and macro-statistics lectures is partially what you lot got wrong (including the long-running inflation denialism-to-poopooing "transition and oh you dim sods only believe this due to Fox News" which directly played into the prejudice and image of you all in this domain)- and thus we all have to globally suffer Trump II
Definition of actual policy should be statistically informed but trying to define The Reason for the working class feelings this way is, again 'Not Even Wrong'
There isn't a single conservative who wouldn't shoot you dead if he thought he could get away with it, rationalize that it's all part of life's grand adventure, and the next day think it's all yesterday's news.
Ah, the “aren’t you happy with your 90 inch TV from Costco?” argument.
This is why the better stat is that ratio of CEO to average worker thing you see once in a while. In the 60s, 30 or so. Today, 340.
Because we are a species that’s cares much more about comparison than absolute value.
Wealth inequality is the actual reason for Trump’s success, but Trumpists don’t even know it. Let’s not forget that despite statistics showing income gains for the working class, rural America is an empty shell of misery for the people there who are not well off - which is most of them. These people are also disproportionately hyper-religious, so they are predisposed to believe unbelievable things. This has given conservative media the ability to successfully blame the modernization of cultural norms for their misery, while ignoring the real reasons, which are mostly economic and driven by wealth inequality.
I think income inequality does play a large role in two ways:
1) The middle is constantly exposed to the lifestyles of the upper-middle/low rich via television and social media. That has changed expectations of what is "normal" and made people very aware of what they can't have.
2) The growth of the billionaire class and giant international corporations makes people feel they have no influence or power.
Which was solved in this election by explicitly giving billionaires control of the federal government. MAGA?