This started just as an observation, but seems to have turned into a long sermon. Sorry about that!
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I have been thinking a lot recently about the 2016 and 2020 elections, and about two aspects in particular; (a) the fact that after 4 years of Trump mismanagement he still drew the second greatest number of presidential votes in history, exceeded only by Biden, and (b) the profound split in the nation that these elections have revealed. The media talking heads tend to think of this split as liberal vs conservative, and are often fairly disdainful of the conservative side, the “deplorables”. But I think that is really pretty shallow, condescending and self-serving reasoning. The reality is, I think far more complex.
First of all, we are all – liberal and conservative alike – in this together. As Ben Franklin once said, "We must all hang together, or, most assuredly, we shall all hang separately." That is as true now as it was when Franklin said it. Well-off urban elites, stock brokers, politicians, academics and senior executives may disdain the “lesser classes” that vote for people like Trump, but in fact they are wholly dependent on all those “lesser classes” for their daily comfort, indeed even for their daily existence.
Think about what the world would be like if all the highly-paid people in the country stopped working for a month. Some software would be delayed, college classes and academic research would stop, some stocks wouldn’t get traded, some lawsuits and big corporate mergers would be on hold, lots of inter-office memos wouldn’t get written, and Congress wouldn’t get anything done. Would anyone really notice, except perhaps for the missing doctors?
Now think about what the world would be like if all the low-paid people, the “deplorables” stopped working for a month. The food would run out first, since no one would be working the warehouses, driving the delivery trucks, or restocking the store shelves. Water, gas and electricity, telephone and internet would go next, since no one would be maintaining the utilities or repairing the inevitable breakdowns. All construction and home maintenance would stop. People on cruise ships or in hotels would suddenly find themselves having to make their own beds, clean their own bathrooms and cook their own meals. Police and fire protection would disappear. There would be no gas at the gas stations or oil in the home furnaces because no one was driving the resupply tankers, but the oil refineries would be shut down anyway, with no skilled trades to maintain and run them. And of course most farmer’s crops would suffer and lots of livestock would die
My first point is that we are all dependent on one another in this society. And just because someone is wealthy and highly paid, and perhaps highly educated, it doesn’t follow that they are therefore more essential than people who are paid less or are less educated. There are times when a good plumber is far more important than a nuclear physicist, or a good nurse more important than a thoracic surgeon, or a good farmer more important than a corporate lawyer.
Our society has people with a wide range of abilities. Some are smarter than others. Some have more drive than others. Some were lucky enough to get better education than others. Some are healthier, or stronger, or taller than others. Not everyone is suited to be a professor of mathematics or a wall street “quant” or a C++ programmer, just as not everyone is good at car mechanics or farming or being an Olympic gymnast.
This distribution of ability is reality, and a healthy society needs to find a way to provide a reasonable life and useful employment for almost everyone, whatever their functioning level. That used to be possible for the majority of people in this country. There were lots of assembly-line jobs in manufacturing, jobs in skilled trades like pipefitting or welding or construction, moderate-skill office jobs like typists and filing clerks and messenger boys, and manual labor jobs like dockworkers and ditch diggers. And there was farming. These jobs, especially after unions became common, usually provided a reasonable, if not opulent, living wage for people with average intelligence and a high school, or even just a grade school, education. An assembly line worker at GM or Ford or Whirlpool could afford a house and car and occasional vacations away, and support a family reasonably.
But the world has changed. Lower-skill jobs have been automated, or moved offshore to lower-wage third world nations. Dockworkers were displaced by container ships. Small farmers were bought out or outcompeted by huge agribusinesses. Ditchdiggers and road builders were replaced by complex million-dollar machines run by one guy. Filing clerks were displaced by computers. Auto assembly lines are now rows upon rows of robot arms. Travel agents were displaced by online self-service sites. And on and on…. Read Barbara Ehrenreich’s 2011 book Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting by in America to get an idea of what this is like now for the average worker.
Here are two graphs I posted last year that make the point:
The point of this first graph is that those of us in the top income brackets have done very well indeed since 1965. Those in the lower income brackets have seen hardly any wage improvement at all in 60 years! No wonder they are struggling.
The second graph makes the point that since about 1970, increased productivity has not been matched by increased wages. Where did all that excess profit go since 1970? Mostly to the top 1%, and in fact mostly to the top 0.1%. No wonder so much of the country is furious and willing to elect anybody who will at least acknowledge their pain.
The result is that we now have a substantial proportion of the nation, many of average intelligence and no more than high school education, that can no longer make a living wage. And we have evolved an “upper class” of generally (though not universally) more intelligent people, generally with more education, who work in highly-paid fields, often technical fields, and who unfortunately seemed to have developed a disdain for their less-well-off fellow citizens.
This has produced an unhealthy tension in our society, with the well-off disdaining the less-well-off and the less-well-off deeply resenting the well-off, and for good reason.
We have developed a tradition at our family parties of watching funny YouTube videos at one point in the party. At a recent birthday party (via zoom, of course) we all watched a really funny video in which a (liberal) reporter interviewed Trump supporters, many of whom were revealed by his rather condescending questioning to be not really very bright. I laughed a lot, yet on further reflection I am really embarrassed that I laughed at the ignorance of those people – it revealed an intellectual arrogance in myself I am not proud of.
Woke liberals would never laugh at the ignorance of Muslims, or blacks, or transgenders, or Hispanics – and plenty of them are ignorant, though no fault of their own. And most people would understand that it is not right to laugh at a cripple. But somehow it is ok to laugh at the ignorance of our own fellow citizens, who also are generally ignorant through no fault of their own, but just the luck of their genes, their parentage and/or their social condition. I don’t think so!
So my second point is that we have a serious social problem – the workplace no longer has reasonable jobs for people who weren’t lucky enough to get the good intelligence genes, and/or lucky enough to be born into families wealthy enough to give them a good education. This has produced a very large portion of the population who are in deep economic distress, who are being ignored – even disdained – by the better-off, and who, reasonably enough, deeply resent this. Enough of them that some 73+ million of them voted for Trump, or at least against the status quo, in this last election despite all his obvious faults, many just to give a finger to the ruling elites. That’s a lot of people to piss off at once!
I highly recommend Arlie Hochschild’s 2016 book Strangers In Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right. A liberal Berkeley sociologist, Hochschild set out to “cross the wall” and try to see the world from the point of view of the “deplorables”. In my opinion she succeeded, and what she found is quite revealing.
The serious social tension that that is revealed in this election can destroy a society, can lead to civil unrest, civil war, or revolution, and can create the conditions for the rise of authoritarian leaders and regimes. There are valid ethical/religious arguments for being more compassionate toward those less-well-off than ourselves, but let me make a more pragmatic argument: we risk our own well-being if we don’t address this problem. Take a look around the world at places that have fallen into revolution or authoritarian rule. There are plenty of examples, and none of them are pretty.
My third point is that our current political system is unable to solve this problem, or perhaps even to recognize or understand the problem. The reasons are too complex to explore here, but the point – which is probably obvious – is that the federal political system is dysfunctional at the moment, heavily beholden to wealthy individuals, corporations and special interest groups ($14+ BILLION was spent on the 2020 campaign!), staffed mostly by the rich (the majority of the 116th Congress were millionaires). The end result of these effects, and many others, is that U.S. federal politicians in both parties generally have little real idea of the economic difficulties of a large segment of the population, and little incentive to correct their ignorance. Local politicians have a better grasp of the problems, but much less political leverage.
Some commentators are fond of claiming that Trump voters are so dumb that they are voting against their own best interests. Perhaps not. Most of us think globalization has been a good thing; it has certainly helped our investments. But if you are a 50-year old unemployed factory worker whose factory was moved overseas and whose town is now a wasteland, it doesn’t look so good. Forgiving college loans sounds like a great idea – if you are middle class. If you didn’t go to college it just looks like a government handout to a special interest group. Green energy sounds like a great idea, unless you happen to be one of the twenty million or so who make your living directly or indirectly from the extraction, processing or transportation of oil or gas (sure, in theory you can retrain from being an oil rig roustabout to installing wind turbines 500 feet in the air – how likely is that?). I can understand why some people don’t think the major parties - Republican or Democrat alike – represent them, and why they might vote for someone who doesn’t talk down to them condescendingly, and who at least acknowledges their pain, even if he didn’t really do much to change it.
It seems to me this all has to start with an attitude change, mostly among those of us who are better off and better educated. It starts with the recognition that most of us are where we are now due primarily to dumb luck – we were lucky enough to get good genes, lucky enough to manage to get a good education, lucky enough (most of us) not to get saddled with a debilitating disease or depression or get trapped in an addiction that ruined our chances, lucky enough not to have a family or be raised in a subculture or go to a school that killed our interest in learning. It may be true that we are where we are now because we worked hard – but there are lots of people in the country who have worked a lot harder than we ever did and are still dirt poor. We were just lucky, so we have no cause to feel superior to those “dumb Trump supporters”.
It continues with the recognition, as I said earlier, that we are all in this together. It is in our own best interests to ensure that ALL our fellow citizens have a decent life. There are moral and religious arguments for this as well, but I want to make the pragmatic argument: if enough of our fellow citizens become desperate and disillusioned enough, it will threaten the stability - even perhaps the very existence – of our nation. We think we are so smart, so we ought to be smart enough to see that.
It ends with the recognition that it is OUR responsibility, the responsibility of those of us who are better-off and better-educated, to deal with this problem. We (or at least our class, if not ourselves personally) created this problem, with our drive to automation and globalization and efficiency and higher profits, heedless of the human consequences to the workers thereby displaced. It is our class who has profited, sometimes handsomely, from these changes. It is our class who has the education to figure out how to make a more equitable workplace in the nation, and our class who has the wealth and political power to make the required changes. In short, we (as a class, if not personally) caused the problem, so it is up to us to fix it.
It will take a lot more than the sort of band-aids politicians typically offer to win votes, like a $15 minimum wage (nice, but not much help if one has no job at all), or Obamacare (helpful when sick, but not much use for putting food on the table day to day or buying warm clothes), or tax cuts (not much help if you are among the 44% of the country that doesn’t make enough to pay taxes), or farm subsidies (which go almost entirely to huge agribusinesses, not small farmers). It will take a rethinking of the workplace and the economy, and figuring out how to create enough useful and meaningful jobs that pay a living wage for people of average intelligence and without higher education.
That’s our challenge. And if we don’t take it up, we deserve the consequences.
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