The angry white power movement that helped propel Donald Trump’s ascendancy from provocateur to president rests on one truth and two lies. The truth is that the so-called forgotten and downtrodden middle class really has been seriously harmed and ignored. These are the lies: its travail was caused by non-whites, and Trump will make everything better.
Over the past decade, the “American Dream” that many of us grew up on has faded slowly into oblivion. Gone is the social compact by which hard work – with or without a college degree – delivered the good life, complete with home ownership, medical insurance, a retirement plan, and a spouse able to stay home to raise the kids and manage the household. There is a trove of economic data that paints a dismally bleak picture for middle America. Real wages keep falling. Good jobs are disappearing. Hope has morphed into anger.
Of course, this dream was always a white thing, at least in terms of attainability. Statistically, far more Caucasians got there than racial minorities, or women not married to a man. That explains the results of a recent poll that showed white men are far more angry about their economic plight than blacks, Hispanics, Latinos or women of any race. This, despite the fact that women and minorities are still at an economic disadvantage compared to white males. The idyllic middle-class life was built with decent paychecks issued mainly to guys who were white. When the jobs fueling this lifestyle started to disappear, the dream faded, leaving a thick residue of anger in its wake.
And along came Trump, the pied piper for angry white men. He wowed them with a simple two-note tune: America is overrun by people who don’t look like us; and, we need to bring back all the good jobs we lost. Here he is, waxing polemically with one-eighth of a run-on sentence during the campaign: “We’re going to bring back our jobs, and we’re going to save our jobs, and people are going to have great jobs again. . .” Unsurprisingly, he won the votes of white males without a college degree by a margin of 49 percentage points. And it’s been a love-and-anger fest ever since.
Those white supremacists who marched in Charlottesville may have been on the fringes of this movement, but they voiced the fears of many in their demographic by chanting, “You will not replace us.” In 1980, whites were 80% of the U.S. population. They are now at 63%, heading to under 50% by 2043. Of course, there is not a scintilla of economic evidence linking white economic malaise to an increase in diversity. But anger always breathes better with a bogeyman, particularly in authoritarian politics.
Still, Trump was on to something that most politicians ignored. The middle class’ economic pain was much more than aftershocks of the Great Recession. The lost jobs aren’t coming back. We are in the throes of a massive structural change, marked by an obscene income disparity, and a growing inability of ordinary folks to support themselves. The situation has gotten so bad that, for the first time in decades, the life expectancy of middle aged white Americans has started to drop. Earlier this year, Princeton University researchers attributed the trend to what they called “deaths of despair”. They identified four causes: stress of economic struggles, suicides, alcohol and drug overdoses.
Unfortunately for Trump’s base – and the rest of America – anger alone will not restore middle class vitality and viability, particularly misplaced anger. Nonwhites, whose economic woes are far worse than those of their Caucasian counterparts, are not to blame. Neither are trade agreements or globalization. Sure, NAFTA wreaked some havoc on our jobs, but that was more than 20 years ago. Most of that work is now performed by robots or other nonhuman technological processes.
Two Ball State professors examined manufacturing job losses between 2000 and 2010. They found that 13% were lost due to trade agreements and 87% through automation. The Bureau of Labor Statistics reports that the high-paying manufacturing sector accounted for 34.4% of the country’s jobs in 2000, but only 8.7% in 2015. Despite the dramatic loss of manufacturing jobs, productivity has remained relatively constant. That’s because more stuff gets made with fewer workers. The Brookings Institute says it now takes only six workers to generate $1 million in manufacturing output. The same level in 1980 would have taken 25 workers.
Simply put, the problem facing America’s working class is pervasive and systemic. The inertia of uncontrolled technology is redefining the world of work, and eliminating millions of good jobs. Tragically, nobody is doing anything about it. Plenty of people are thinking about it – economists, academicians, think tanks. Fixes like massive worker retraining, job creation, technology regulation and a guaranteed annual income are out there. But they haven’t gone beyond the pondering stage because most of our elected office holders have lacked the courage to seriously tackle this issue.
And that gave Trump an opening. Long fueled by anger himself, the Donald opportunistically saw what others wouldn’t: millions of outraged and forgotten people, fed up with negative balances and surrounded by folks who weren’t like them. Nobody seemed to give a damn about their plight. Then along came the star of “The Apprentice”, every bit as worked up, bitter and belligerent toward the ruling class as they were. Why wouldn’t they drink the Kool Aid?
Meanwhile, deaths of despair are now baked into the American Dream. Trump’s promise to bring all the great jobs back was nothing more than slick Willy Loman bravado. However, there is still time to rewrite the next act of this play. Are you listening, Democrats? It’s time to fill the Republican void with a smart, effective, Ted Kennedy-like program that will save the middle class. Mocking Trump’s failures is not sufficient. What we need is a sound legislative plan, an all-out campaign to replace despair with hope.
Wonderfully thought out and written piece Bruce.
And the plight of this group grows only darker in the decades ahead: Technology is just getting started eliminating jobs and not only for the working and middle class but at all levels of the economic ladder.
Government can and should help. However, continuous learning is an absolute requirement for every citizen who wants to have a job from now on. Playing the victim is not only ugly but it is futile and a phony leader who enables that role is worse than a bad person.
Required reading!
Required reading Bruce!