In the crisis of World War II, the nation
made the political choices that created the robust egalitarian economy
of the next 30 years. Can we respond to the climate crisis with similar
policies to rebuild the middle class?
For
most Americans, the central economic fact of the past four decades is
the stagnation and decline of earnings. Yet this shift is not the
central political fact. Why hasn’t the system’s brutal turn against the working and middle class risen to a first-tier public issue?
The
raw material is surely there. Americans are far from satisfied with the
deal they are getting. Polls show that large majorities believe that
the top 1 percent takes too much, that the income distribution is too
unequal, that their children are likely to be worse off than they are,
that job security is precarious, and that the middle class is at risk.
Two
big factors prevent these issues from assuming center stage. First, the
public is increasingly skeptical that government can do much to change
things for the better. The sense of resignation and cynicism plays to
the ideology of repugicans—the claim that government doesn’t have a big
part to play in the economy and that we’re all on our own. Conversely,
resignation harms Democrats, whose core ideology is that government
exists to help ordinary people. The repugicans have done their best to
prevent Democrats from delivering on the vision of activist government.
Second,
persistent divisions of race as well as a nativist backlash against
immigrants undermine a common politics of uplift for working Americans
generally. The New Deal/Great Society formula of tax, spend, benefit,
and elect has been sundered by stagnation of working-class earnings and
fears that government aid would only go to “them”—the undeserving poor.
That fear explains much of the opposition to the Affordable Care Act. It
sheds light on why victims of the subprime bust were not the objects of
broad public sympathy. Racial division has been the standard repugican
playbook since Nixon’s Southern Strategy, intensified by Ronald Reagan
and redoubled by the teabaggers. The more that working families are
economically stressed, the less help that government delivers, and the
more the tax burden tilts away from the top, the more 'credibility' the lunatic fringe wingnuts have.
In
recent years, with repugicans intensifying their strategy of total
blockade, the Obama administration’s economic policies have been reduced
mostly to a politics of gesture. Increases in the minimum wage, modest
educational reforms, orders for the Labor Department to crack down on
overtime abuses, tweaks to the tax structure—such policies will help
around the edges but not transform the structure of an economy that
delivers increasing inequality and insecurity. The Affordable Care Act, a
legislative success that was more than a gesture, was so bungled in its
execution that, on balance, it raised more doubts about the place of
affirmative government and its steward, the Democrats. The 2009 stimulus
was a limited success, but it was too small to alter the deeper
dynamics of the economy.
The obstacles to reclaiming a
fairer society have little to do with immutable characteristics of the
new, global, digital economy. They are mainly political.
How
to break out of this vicious circle? How to make the economic plight of
working families the core concern that it ought to be? How to restore
constructive government to a leading role in that project? The
obstacles to reclaiming a fairer society have little to do with
immutable characteristics of the new, global, digital economy. They are
mainly political.
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