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The sentence that I've underlined is interesting because it's a function of dashed expectations, not of economic growth itself (in other words, change in acceleration instead of change in speed). This is fundamentally different from pointing to bromides about inequality.
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Fine. I'll call it "dashed expectations." (Nevermind that it 80% of the country has no hope of reaching its expectations, and 20% easily get to theirs by luck of birth near the top, these crowds are very unequal.)
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Maybe Obama raised expectations that things would be different and better, and Trump was partly a reaction to those high hopes.
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I think the certainly explains the voters who went Obama in 08 and 12 and then Trump in 16.
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At any rate, I think what you are trying to say is still not thought through. Sure, Trump is a reaction to the failures of neoliberalism, but that's like saying that the French Revolution was caused by monarchy, since the kings weren't making people happy.
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The advocates of neoliberalism still refuse to admit this. They remain committed to coming up with any alternative narrative. They blame the current populism entirely on bigotry, xenophobia, differential in education, etc. They never concede the elephant in the corner: Trump was a very rational vote for a lot of people who are not doing well in the current economy.
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Maybe that's part of it, but maybe it's more that Trump voters aren't stupid, but expect more than they are getting. Or replace "expect" with "feel entitled to". That starts to be a story about their psychology, not about their average incomes.
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I don't see how you divorce the two. Income is just the measuring stick used to determine whether a Trump voter is getting what he thinks he deserves.
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We weren't talking about what the government has an obligation to do. We're in explaining mode. My point, with which I think you agree, is that Trump voters feel entitled to more from their government and resent that they are not getting it. In other words, it's not that they are losers. It's that they have some resentment from not being treated more like winners. Again: this is not about inequality per se, though inequality if a feature of our economy so is not irrelevant.
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I think Trump voters are losers in the sense that they cannot go further up the ladder than where they are, or are actually losing ground. They're perhaps doing ok compared to those at the very bottom, but they're spinning their wheels. The live in places with limited opportunity, or don't have the skills that provide for bright futures.
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This is backwards, and/or makes no sense. There are always economic conditions. And inequality. Always. So they are not a spark. A spark is something that ignites something in the conditions and sparks a reaction. You are right that economic conditions are relevant, because of course, but you are looking at a fire and you have not figured out what the spark was.
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2008 was not a normal "economic condition." And inequality has not always been where it is today. It is roughly on par with what it was in the 20s, just before the Depression.
We were stagnating in 1992. Then we had the internet. The tech boom collapsed in 2000. We replaced it with a housing bubble. That collapsed spectacularly in 2008. And we've found nothing to replace it with save a stock market run-up.
So, the last two bubbles, housing and tech, delivered more broadly for the public. The 2008 recovery, unlike those, has not. It has delivered nicely to those who had assets (stocks most notably) before the crisis. Those who did not have not enjoyed the same recovery.
There remains a nagging sense of unfairness about the bailout that I think sits at the base of this populist response.
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Let's make this more specific. Tulsa and San Francisco are cities. San Francisco has a lot of money, and few Trump voters. Tulsa is poorer and has more Trump voters compared to San Francisco. The Trump voters in Tulsa are more affluent than the non-Trump voters in Tulsa.
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I'm inclined to agree with this, but it's more on gut than anything else.
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Trump voters are mostly Republicans.
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Agreed.
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The more money you have, the more likely you are to vote Republican.
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Huh? That's not what I saw in 2016 at all. Most of the wealthy were voting for Hillary to protect their portfolios. Even Republicans were saying, "I'm holding my nose and doing so because his election will kill the market."
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The less money you have, the more likely you are to vote Democratic.
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I'd rephrase this as, There are more poor Democrat voters generally, and therefore, more poor Democrats than poor Republicans.
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At the same time, the states with higher incomes are more likely to vote for Democrats, and the states with lower incomes are more likely to vote for Republicans.
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Agreed.
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I don't understand why you are so insistent about try to slap the label of "inequality" on this.
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I explained this above. But if you prefer dashed expectations, I'm happy to work with that.
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This would make more sense if you expressed the same idea without the word "inequality." The worst off are in the least "equal" position, so the fact that they are not upset here should tell you that what's driving the anger is not "equality" but something else -- the something else that you describe here in your last three sentences. Trump voters have a grievance about expectations and reality, a resentment towards other people whom they see as getting more than their share. Yes! That's not about inequality. Now figure out what it is about.
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As I noted many posts ago, Trump voters see people at the top making out like Croesius and people at the bottom receiving things like the ACA (which Trump voters seem to think is somehow screwing up their health care). They feel unequal to the top in terms of opportunity and unequal to the bottom in terms of attention and transfers.
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To complicate things for you: People who are not white who are in the economic position you describe do not go for Trump populism. That suggests that there's something important about ethnicity going on.
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I think that's just the traditional racial politics. Minorities don't get behind Rs. It'd be really interesting if Trump had run as a D. If he had not used racist dog whistles, not courted the bigot vote, and been friendly toward minorities, his message - "you're getting screwed in a rigged game" - would have garnered a lot of support among Ds. Bernie is proof of that.
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Then I suggested that you have some view of the lower class as being poor people who don't work.
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I don't, and I don't know how you can conclude this.
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I guess I didn't make myself clear. You seemed to be using "the working poor" and "the middle class" as if the former is a subset of the latter. Implicitly, there is someone poorer than "the working poor" who is not part of the "middle class", because "middle" means between two other things. These poor people presumably are not "working," because you refer to the "working poor" to distinguish them from the other poor, who are implicitly non-working. The idea that poor people just laze around may be 180 degrees from your "thinking about the working poor," but I was suggesting that's what you were implying about the people poorer than the middle class, since you seem to thinking that they are poor and are not working.
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This is bizarre reasoning. I think the fraction of people who wish to remain poor, not work, and loaf about is ridiculously small. My view is that almost all people who are not working are not working because the economy has rendered them unable to find work. They're obsolete, unskilled, run into terrible luck, etc.
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And I am saying that a lot of the specific things you have said about the middle seem right, but that referring to the problem with the label of "inequality" is not right, because you are talking about voters who are more affluent than the people in their communities who are not populist. And white. They are white.
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Fine. I'll work with "dashed expectations." But it's awfully clumsy.
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Dude, I voted against it. If you want to focus on who these populists are and what they stand for, you ought to start with the fact they tend to be affluent whites, older than most of us, and they vote for Republicans. I haven't ignored shit. I didn't vote for a third-party Libertarian candidate. But again -- I'm not talking now about what to do about it, I'm just talking about what it is. I'm disagreeing with you about how to understand what is happening.
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Maybe a ladder is the best analogy. Trump voters seem to think they can't get up the ladder. I think many of them believe you can still do so by simply working hard. They don't seem to understand that working smart is what's really required. And they really don't grasp what dad said in those truly honest moments - "It's mostly about
who you know." I think a lot of Trump voters are people who actually believed the narrative about the American Dream. This may be a large part of their feeling entitled.
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Populism is not about inequality. And it's not a disease. And if you think left-wing populism is our problem, you have your head up your ass.
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Oh yes it is. If we stumbled into a "new internet" and gains accrued broadly, lifting the incomes of the Trump voters, this populism would disappear overnight.
Left wing populism isn't a problem now, but it will be in the near future. After trying right wing populism via Trump, the next pendulum swing is left wing populism.
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No. I advocate for finding a group to blame because different people have done different things and bear more and less responsibility for what has happened.
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Which is another way of saying everyone owns part of this mess. Which is why picking one group to blame is both intellectually dishonest and counterproductive. You're never fixing anything. Your just elevating one group of blameworthy folks' bad ideas over another's.
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Undeniably, my view about what has happened drives me to take a side. If you're not going to pick a side and stand for something, then you don't stand for anything, and blaming everyone is just a cop-out.
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No. It's being intellectually honest. It's being factual. If numerous causes were at work, all numerous causes should be flagged as such. We can discuss who owns more or less blame, but if you're to blame -- and we're all to blame for this new populism's emergence -- we must admit that. You cannot run healthy societies on lies, and ignoring any group's liability while focusing on another's is a form of lying. It crafts a false story about what happened.
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I'm not tribalized. That's a populist thing. There's a fundamental asymmetry here, which is that the right feels like a beleaguered tribe in a country they feel entitled to, and the left does not.
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That's part of the story. But nowhere near the whole of it. The economic factors at work are the fascinating part. You downplay those in favor of a psychological explanation. I think the two are essential to the analysis in equal amounts. The psychology at work is largely a manifestation of the economic pressures.
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No shit, Sherlock. That is exactly the point I am making. Since globalization has been around for a long time, and this populism we have now is emergent, then you need to think critically about how then differed from now, because just saying things like "globalization" and "inequality" isn't it.
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Three things have made this moment different. The aberrational US dominance and middle class gains in the US following WWII, 2008 (emphasis on the bailout), and the Internet. I don't need to explain the interplay between the three, and the uniqueness of the last one, to show how this is a much different world. Sometimes, "this time it
is different."
