As Senator Bernie Sanders will tell you, the Republican war on the middle class is bad for democracy and for capitalism. But could the GOP’s class warfare have its own self-correcting mechanism in Donald Trump?
Pew Research released a report yesterday showing that the middle class (by their definition, folks earning between two thirds and double the median income) no longer makes up a majority of the U.S. population. In 1971, the middle class included 80.0 million adults, far more than the 51.6 million adults in the lower and upper economic tiers combined. Now the middle class is outnumbered just a hair (well, half a million hairs) by the other two tiers, 120.8 million to 121.3 million.
That shift in numbers is accompanied by a shift in wealth. In 1970, the middle class earned 62% of aggregate income, while the upper class earned 29%. Those two classes have traded positions in the hierarchy: the upper income group earned 49% of aggregate income in 2014, while the middle class earned only 43%. That wealth concentration is dangerous politically: arguably, in 1970, if everyone participated in the political process, the middle class could outgun the upper class in a campaign finance battle. Now the wealthy elites have more ammo than the middle class. (This concern should sound familiar.) That wealth concentration is also dangerous economically: healthy capitalism depends on a healthy middle class buying lots of homes, cars, lawn mowers, and vacations.
Undermine the political strength and economic security of the middle class, and you foment lots of uncertainty, fear, and anger among lots of decent Americans who thought all they had to do to hold onto the American dream was work hard and watch football. Now feel that good life slipping away for reasons they can’t identify or fix. They feel Black Elk’s despair: how can good people go hungry while bad people grow fat?
Naturally, those despairing middle-classers want to reclaim their political and economic strength. They want to know who’s to blame, who’s to be punished and banished.
And who comes to tell them how to take their country back and from whom? A rich Republican Presidential candidate who wears a cheap baseball cap with his tailored Italian business jacket, tells them to fear the Hispanics and Muslims, and surges to the front of the pack:
Median-income voters, particularly non-college-educated men, are also at the core of billionaire Donald Trump’s surprising surge in the Republican presidential campaign. His supporters’ sense that their once-secure middle-class standing is in danger of slipping appears to be fueling much of the anger against the government and immigrant groups [Don Lee, “Study: US Middle-Class Families Are No Longer in the Majority,” Kansas City Star, 2015.12.09].
Yet this very Republican candidate is revealing the fascism inherent in his party’s corporatist policies. He is using the rage of the victims of the Republican war on the middle class to undermine the Republican Party itself, drowning out and driving out more reasonable candidates, pushing other candidates to make even crazier statements, and threatening to take his voters away from the Republicans.
The less demagogically capable Jeb Bush tells us that Trump’s campaign is just a liberal conspiracy to help Hillary Clinton win. But Trump is really the rotten fruit of the Republicans’ own tree, grown in decades of pro-rich voodoo economics that have empowered the rich and disempowered everyone else to the point that they might actually vote for a monster like Trump. Thanks, Republicans.
Related Reading: Ohio Governor John Kasich gets the connection between middle-class decline and Trump-mania. But he doesn’t think Trump will upset the GOP apple cart:
Ohio Gov. John Kasich says 2016 rival Donald Trump has “ridden the horse called celebrity” to the head of the Republican presidential field, tapping the frustration many Americans feel about their lives.
“I think there’s a degree that people are, like, saying, you know, ‘I’m frustrated,’ ” Kasich told Capital Download. ” ‘I lost a lot of my wealth. I may have lost my job or my kid can’t get a job and I’m really mad.’ And sometimes they find a vehicle with which to, at least for a moment, express deep dissatisfaction, maybe in some ways even anger.
“But I don’t think it lasts. That’s not who we are as a country.”
That is, he adds, “unless everything I’ve known in my political career and adult life is false” [Susan Page, “Kasich on How to Defeat ISIL—and Trump,” USA Today, 2015.12.09].
Kasich has better hope it doesn’t last past the primaries.
“,,,, “unless everything I’ve known in my political career and adult life is false”….”
And there is the real issue. Of course, everything Kasich – and the Repubs have “known” politically, economically, has been false. His statement also demonstrates another false “knowing” of the Repubs, a tendency to look upon the past as the only reality that bears attending to.
RIchard, I’m glad you zeroed in on that last line from Kasich. It hints at the “hoop” thing I’m thinking of in my allusion to Black Elk.
Dr. David Nelson, one of my philosophy profs at SDSU, had us read Black Elk Speaks to illustrate the power of “hoops”—a.k.a., our worldviews. When Black Elk spoke of seeing bad men grow fat while good men went hungry, he was speaking of his “hoop”, his way of understanding the world, breaking. America’s middle class sees its “hoop” breaking: they work hard, play by the rules, celebrate capitalism, respect the flag, do all the things that the American hoop says should provide a happy and secure life… and they still can’t afford college, can’t make the mortgage payment, can’t save for retirement. When our hoops break, we are vulnerable to self-destructive notions (Ghost shirts will repel the cavalry’s bullets; banning Muslims will make America great again).
Kasich is trying to keep his hoop together. He thinks there is something stronger in our hoop than concerns about economic security, some resistance to anger and adherence to principles of democracy and good governance. Yet he may be underestimating the importance of economic security and the depth of the fracture in the middle class’s hoop.
Hoopla! https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ouroboros
When the GOP winked and nodded at Trump birtherism instead of nipping it in the bud, they set in motion a political mobius hoop that has turned around and bitten them in their collective behind. What goes around comes around, or as per one of my old mentors, ‘you don’t get to vote on the way things are. Because you already did.’
Interesting critical thinking exercise: the next time someone mentions the “middle class,” ask them how they define “middle class.” Regardless where you stand in the political spectrum, the answers may surprise you.
Very interesting exercise, Michael! Whatever definitions are out there, fewer people think they qualify as middle class:
In the years of unregulated banking and corruption before 2008, it would have been easy to see how many people thought they were middle class as they were flipping houses and doing things that involved a lot of money. The false economy fell because of the strains of unfunded wars and they lost their collective arse’s. What people have forgotten was how close we came to a complete meltdown that was saved by some stimulus put in place by the democrats. South Dakota got a large influx of money for projects that helped save construction jobs and stimulated our economy. The governor got 40 million for his new plane and to hell with a railroad, thanks republicans. If the United States is dumb enough to elect a bankrupt failure like Donald Trump, we had better develop a strong appetite for weak soup in the kitchen.
The fact that the RNC is unwilling to rein in “The Donald” speaks volumes about the Republican party.
And what is the Democratic answer to all of this? To nominate Hillary, the wife of Bill Clinton. A president who gave us NAFTA, “most favored nation” trade status for the Chinese, welfare reform without corporate welfare reform, and the dismantling of the Glass-Steagall Act.
Maybe Hillary is not Bill, but she was once a “Goldwater Girl” and recently she was proud to claim she was a moderate at best. The Republicans may not be a true friend to the American dream for the middle class, but Democrats also have been an embarrassing enabler to this trending reality specially during the Clinton era.
Even if Trump is not a Clinton conspiracy candidate and merely a Trojan horse to the working man or woman in and of himself panning to the “Mad as hell and I am not going to take it any more” crowd, he is still conveniently helping to give us the same reality or economic trend regardless of who wins in 2016.
Winston-Clinton didn’t do any of that stuff w/o strong prevarication from a hostile,wingnut house,sinate and Scotus.
Bingo, Winston, You wrote, “he is still conveniently helping to give us the same reality or economic trend regardless of who wins in 2016.”
And therein lies the rub that so many on the left do not want to recognize. Our country has continually moved right ever since Nixon, no matter who was in control of the Whitehouse, the Congress or the SCOTUS. But can you begin to imagine at any time in your lifetime before the turn of this past century, that the Supreme Court would have ruled as they did on Citizens United?
Mike,
Clinton came into office as a “Kennedy want to be.” After the Republicans took over control of the Congress in 1994, Clinton in a warpage manner decided his only real goal was to be FDR (He was the first Democratic President to be re-elected in 60 years) in terms of political longevity, while at the same time he proclaimed to a Republican Congress, “…That the era of Big government was over with…” But then, he ended his presidency more like Nixon.
Through it all, he could have survived it all without signing off on the welfare reform Act, NAFTA, or the changes to Glass-Steagall (Clinton’s personality was definitely superlative to dull and aging Bob Dole), but he did it because he lacks the true compassion of an authentic American liberal and wanted the big win, which I am afraid his wife exemplifies as well.
There is a good reason for why Senator Warren is the only female Democratic Senator who has not joined the women’s Clinton caucus within the current Senate on the Democratic side; and that should be a telling reality to us all.
For me, the Clintons are merely a firewall against a worse virus, but until we take hold of our Party as a party of economic justice we will continue to be, I am afraid, the party of the lesser evil…
It’s interesting to me that the upper class grew by 7.1% between ’71 and ’15, and the lower class grew only by 3.8%.
So the middle class is hallowing out, but more families climbed the ladder than slid back down.
Did you notice how Pew defined “middle class” though? Took the median household income and set the minimum at 2/3rds the median, but the ceiling at double the median.
I wonder why they did that.
The root cause driving the inequality gap is the Federal Reserve’s expansive monetary policy aka monetary easing which at it’s roots is liberal Keynesian economics. With the anemic growth in GDP belying increases in productivity, the Fed’s low to no interest rates have been the reason for inflated stock market values. This low/no interest rates has crushed returns on savings accounts, CD’s and bonds which are the investment bastions of the middle and retirement classes. Because of the dismal performance in these conservative savings instruments, investment in the stock market has increased inflating stock returns. Because the wealthy and big business tend to own more stock, higher stock prices have given the rich greater gains than the poor and middle class.
The Fed’s low interest rates have lowered borrowing costs for corporations boosting profits which in turn increases the upper classes wealth.The middle and poorer classes with their smaller savings and lacking assets, resort to an overuse of credit to sustain their lifestyle. But while the Fed has lowered interest rates for corporations, credit card rates have failed to follow suit.
Until the Fed figures out how to unwind QE 1-4∞ without lighting the inflation fuse (good luck with that), the inequality gap will only continue to increase unabated.
“Yet this very Republican candidate is revealing the fascism inherent in his party’s corporatist policies. He is using the rage of the victims of the Republican war on the middle class to undermine the Republican Party itself”
So Cory, are you saying that the middle class is only Republican?
Wayne B. You cannot conflate % increases with “more people”.
For example,
an increase of 7,100 to a base of 100,000 = 7.1%
while an increase of 380,000 to a base of 10,000,000 = 3.8%
10
In this example (closer to the real numbers at work here) MORE PEOPLE, by a factor of approx. 54X “more people” falling into poverty.
GET REAL – it will be of benefit to you.
Don Coyote – I thought that it was a conservative mantra that the stock market is “owned by the middle class – not just the wealthy” via 401ks, etc.??? What happened to that perspective? Inconvenient in this discussion? Haven’t you made that claim in the past Sibby?
Richard,
I am “REAL”. I also understand data pretty well. I wasn’t conflating. I think you need to re-read how the data is delivered. I am correct that more households as a percentage of the whole climbed up to middle class status than fell into lower class status.
Pew looked at households’ income and did a longitudinal breakdown. They then defined middle class (I’m not exactly sure why they used uneven differences from the median). Everyone below is lower; everyone above is upper.
But from 1971 to 2015, each slice in time presents a full 100% of households.
So the % of households who were in the upper class grew by 7.1%
The % of households who were in the lower class grew by 3.8%
So if there were 100 households in 1971, 61 were middle class, 25 were lower class, and 14 were upper class.
If we still had 100 households in 2015, only 50 were middle class, 29 were lower class, and 21 were upper class.
So the upper class grew more than the lower class.
It’s also true the number of households in the US increased – from 66.7 million in 1971 to about 124 million households in 2015.
So in 2015, there are roughly 62.3 million middle income households. There are roughly 26.4 million upper income households, and 36.3 million lower class households.
In 1971, there were roughly 40 million middle income households, 9.4 million upper class, and 15.2 million lower income households.
All of that uses Pews #s and underlying assumptions. We can talk raw numbers if you want, but my original assessment is still correct.
@ Richard: Not necessarily a mantra you can attribute exclusively to conservatives. Yes, collectively the middle class is invested into the market and stock ownership remains widespread. However the average 401k at Fidelity is around $92K and a typical 401k nearing retirement has about $111,000. Meanwhile a bottom 1 percenter drags home 3x that every year. And let’s not even go to the disparity between a Gates or a Bezos or a Buffett and the average middle class Joe. Plus you are forgetting that many middle class families were squeezed or spooked out of the market during the recession sacrificing those assets to survive while unemployed.
Don, Keynesian economics is why we have had a middle class in modern times to begin with…
The decline of the middle class over the last 45 years is not do to low interest rates on savings. Although, that is now another new challenge for the middle class.
The amount of income the middle class has been directing towards savings has been declining since the late 1970s and has shown no real relationship to the savings rate. The decline is correlative to the decline of the middle class’s disposable income, thus the decline of the middle class.
Your comments about the market and wealth generation are correct in that they have made the rich richer, but it also speaks to how we have gone from being a capitalistic system which multiplies for the common good to a system which primarily manipulates and services those with wealth.
Free trade and supply side economics are the main causes of the decline of the middle class. The former has systematically destroyed millions of middle class jobs and the later has allowed the rich to become richer to the point where Wall Streets owns both political parties and the generation of wealth has increasingly become a value determined by intangible assets instead of tangible assets.
Wayne, the trend, however, is the destruction of the middle class in favor of an upper class which is serviced by the lower class workers. Further proof that our economy is increasingly manipulative instead of productive – a reality facilitated by free trade, thus the destruction of our manufacturing capability, and the increasing dependency of our economy upon speculation to generate wealth instead of actual production which directly stimulates the economy with Adam Smith’s “invisible hand.”
Trump thanks Dakota Free Press and all the others out there for all the free press.
Many are running to him because of those who hate him.
Pure politics is why Trump is leading the pack. He has Trumped them in their own game. Good one for the Donald. He is no more a Hitler than Jerry or Mifi. But, he could be forced to follow his words as most presidents are.
If you like your plan you can keep your plan.
Winston,imho,Clinton was forced to dance to the wingnuts tunes trying to avoid dancing at the end of an impeachment noose. Wingnuts went after Clinton as payback for Nixon being forced to resign. They made no bones about wanting to nail a Dem in retaliation.
Speaking of fictional characters Ben Carson is mulling a third party run if he is rejected by the GOPe.
Mike, NAFTA, welfare Reform, and the “end of big government” comment all came before Monica showed up on radar in the late fall of ’97.
As far as the Nixon payback. In my opinion, Newt’s government shut downs and the Clinton impeachment were the beginnings of the Republican strategy of attempting to hijack our democratic system – a strategy, which many Republicans still practice or try to practice today.
Les, thanks for taking me out of the Hitler pack, really appreciate that. Trump may not be Hitler as that is not the preach he is on. What he is preaching is what the rank and file Republican base believes is the reincarnation of someplace they feel they have had taken from them. They are angry that the bankers who forced them into loosing their gains have never been punished. The banks are pumping moolah into the hate speeches and that has turned the worm. That has then made them pick a different target to unleash their hate on. The poor, the disabled, the people of color in particular get their hatred up. Disagreement is always healthy in debates, but hatred, that is not healthy for a democracy.
mfi- you must mean Glass-Steagall as Winston is correct on the timing of the NAFTA. Clinton owns that turd and all the misery that has come from it.
Key Elements
Some of the key kinks in the Whitewater tangle:
A fraudulent $300,000 federally backed loan to Susan McDougal, some of which went into Whitewater Development Corp. David Hale, a former Little Rock judge whose company issued the loan, told investigators that Bill Clinton pressured him to do so.
The mysterious disappearance and rediscovery of billing records showing the extent of Hillary Clinton’s legal work for McDougal’s savings and loan. Missing and under subpoena for two years, they turned up in January 1996 in the Clintons’ private quarters at the White House.
The firing of seven members of the White House travel office in 1993, possibly to make room for Clinton friends – followed by an FBI investigation of the office, allegedly opened under pressure from the White House to justify the firings. Sometimes called “Travelgate.”
The 1993 suicide of White House counsel Vincent Foster, hard on the heels of the travel-office imbroglio and his filing of delinquent Whitewater Corp. tax returns.
The collection of hundreds of confidential FBI files on prominent Republicans by a minor White House operative in 1993 and 1994. Sometimes called “Filegate.”
The more than $700,000 paid to former associate attorney general Webster L. Hubbell, most of it from friends of President Clinton and Democratic Party supporters, just as the former law partner of Hillary Clinton was coming under intense scrutiny by Whitewater investigators.
Until the Lewinsky matter, the Clintons came through allega
Whitewater investigation started in 1994 around the same time as wingnuts got control of both houses of congress for the first time in about 40 years. All these allegations against Clinton were precursors to actual impeachment charges-which would have been filed earlier if anyone could prove Clinton’s committed any crimes.