September 2, 2015: GOP Trumped, Middle Class Revolt, Populism Run Amok

 

“Any internal revolt or revolution is always a middle class affair.”

                       ----from “The Quotations of Chairman Joe”

 Ah but, you protest, what about the American Revolution?  To which I reply that the American Revolution is a misnomer: it was not a revolution but a contest to accomplish two things: (1) establish home rule, and (2) decide who would rule at home.  It was the landed gentry that, in any case, held the reins of government with little or no change at all in the relative relations of the constituent elements of society: the yeoman farmer, the merchant, the banker, the slave.   Establishing home rule, while constituting a revolt, does not a ‘revolution’ make, not in the context of the modern understanding of the term. In any case I would plead that the American Revolution is exceptional in that it represented a revolt against a colonial power not an internal uprising. 

Since then the landed aristocracy, ruling the several states before and after independence, has been fighting a long rear-guard action against the rest of the population, as the country has witnessed several populist revolts against the established order.  But as, for instance, during the French and Russian and Cuban revolutions, although it may have been the great unwashed who would storm the Bastille or the Palace it was the lawyer and merchants who would coopt the revolutions and bend them to their will.  The truth is that no matter how much Karl Marx would disparage the bourgeoisie, so commanding are the middle classes that it would be the middle class professionals and intellectual elites who would take possession of the revolutions and give them meaning and form.  And so just as the French Revolution produced a Robespierre and a Napoleon (a lawyer and a army officer by trade) and the Russian Revolution gave the world middle class intellectuals like Lenin and Trotsky, and the Cuban Revolution gave us Castro and Guevara (a lawyer and doctor), so too have the less extreme revolts in the United States been led by stalwart representatives of the middle class.

The famous “Jacksonian Democracy” of the 1830’s was led by a professional (albeit rich) army officer, but the thrust was to put government in the hands of the ‘ordinary’ citizen—the middle class political partisans who would reap the ‘spoils’ after winning an election.   The great reforms of the Civil war was accomplished by a renowned railroad and corporate attorney, the ‘Progressive’ movement found its manifestation in the revolt of the ‘displaced elites’—those men of property and standing that had been temporarily pushed aside by the new wealth of the ‘Gilded Age’, men like Teddy Roosevelt and Henry Adams.  Similarly the New Deal saw the emergence of men like Franklin Roosevelt who marshalled the energies of stalwart spokesmen of the middle class, men like Rexford Tugwell, Sherwood Anderson, Harold Ickes, Louis Brandies, Paul Douglas, Harry Hopkins and many others who would mold and shape the new economic order.  Many, if not most, of this country’s greatest political and economic accomplishments have been the work of middle class movements, from organizing labor to civil rights; from expanding the vote to ensuring full employment; from protecting the environment, to educating our young, all have been the result of political movements organized by, and largely favoring the interests, of the middle class.  In the textbooks of American history we tend to see the history of populism as a salutary one; as one that has fueled the drive toward ‘progressive’ reforms. The ‘will of the people’ accomplishing, in the words of Jeremy Bentham, ‘the greatest good for the greatest number’.

But there is a darker side to ‘Populism”.  In Europe, the “Revolt of the Masses” (to use a phrase by the Spanish philosopher Jose Ortega y Gasset) would, in the 20^th century, give the world a populist British Labor government in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War, but it would just as likely present the world with a fascist regime in Italy and Germany or a Communist one in the emerging Soviet Union.  Whether the revolt succeeds or not depends on the severity of the distress as well as the alienation of the people.  What form the revolt takes depends upon who leads it.  The point here is that a ‘beneficial’ populism cannot be seen as a foregone conclusion. 

In the United States we have, to be sure, not seen these kinds of extremes.  Compromise and moderation have, until recently, been salutary American virtues.  Nevertheless we have had, in our collective history, witnessed some of the darker sides of populism. Shay’s Rebellion and the Whiskey Rebellion in the early years of our experiment with self-governance were led by middle class farmers.  The ‘Anti-Abolition’ Riots of the 1830’s in which New York City merchants financed and organized ‘popular’ protests against abolitionists.  The ‘Know-Nothing’ party of the 19^th century, arising as it did as a nativist, anti-Catholic, Anti-Semitic, reaction to immigration and economic dislocation is a case in point. The Rise of the Klan in the 1920’s also presents us with an example of ‘populism’ run amok.  Few of these succeeded having been overcome by more civilized manifestations of popular discontent.

This is precisely the challenge we face today.

The discontent manifest in America today spans the political spectrum, from the progressive inclusiveness of Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, to the ugly regressive politics of the ‘teabaggers’ and the political nativists.  As in the 1930’s when the social compact, under siege by the stresses of the Depression and the Dust Bowl, America was given a choice between a Franklin Roosevelt or a Huey Long so now, under similar stresses, the rise of ‘populism’ is presenting us a choice between Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump.

According to a new poll released by Public Policy Polling (PPP) Trump now has a nearly 2 to 1 lead over his nearest rival, an obscure Detroit Physician named Ben Carson (29-15%) with dynastic favorite JEB Bush registering a paltry 8% in the national sample.  I know, polling this far out is relatively meaningless but these numbers are important for two reasons.

First, Trump has trumped the GOP.  He has, through his bombastic rhetoric and behavior, sucked the air out of the room, commanding headlines, getting on the television talk and news shows and, with his confrontational politics, energized the ‘tea bagging’ Republican base.  So successful has his short tenure in the campaign been that he has taken support from the likes of Rand Paul, Scott Walker, Chris Christie and others who, just a few short weeks ago, were seen as serious contenders for the Republican nomination.  This is important inasmuch as it will greatly influence the ability of these candidates to raise much needed money, measured in the tens of millions of dollars necessary to field a national campaign by early next spring.  So commanding has Trump’s position become that any candidate wishing to openly challenge him in debate risks now alienating the party’s political base.  In other words it is becoming increasingly politically self-defeating to openly confront “The Donald”; the party may very well ‘shoot the messenger’.  The question increasingly confronting the rest of the field is which and how many are willing to fall on their swords in order to ‘save’ the party.

Secondly, the poll reveals that not only is support for Trump growing but the levels of xenophobia, paranoia, and schizophrenia have, at the base of the Republican Party reached truly alarming levels.  Here is a short profile of the right-wing alternative universe, the current ‘dark side’ of populism. 

“Our new poll finds that Trump is benefiting from a GOP electorate that thinks Barack Obama is a Muslim and was born in another country, and that immigrant children should be deported. 66% of Trump's supporters believe that Obama is a Muslim to just 12% that grant he's a Christian. 61% think Obama was not born in the United States to only 21% who accept that he was. And 63% want to amend the Constitution to eliminate birthright citizenship, to only 20% who want to keep things the way they are.

Trump's beliefs represent the consensus among the GOP electorate. 51% overall want to eliminate birthright citizenship. 54% think President Obama is a Muslim. And only 29% grant that President Obama was born in the United States. That's less than the 40% who think Canadian born Ted Cruz was born in the United States.

Trump's supporters aren't alone in those attitudes though. Only among supporters of John Kasich (58/13), Jeb Bush (56/18), Chris Christie (59/33), and Marco Rubio (42/30) are there more people who think President Obama was born in the United States than that he wasn't. And when you look at whose supporters are more inclined to think that the President is a Christian than a Muslim the list shrinks to just Christie (55/29), Kasich (41/22), and Bush (29/22).  Bush's inability to appeal to the kind of people who hold these beliefs is what's keeping him from succeeding in the race- his overall favorability is 39/42, and with voters identifying themselves as 'very conservative' it's all the way down at 33/48.” (1)

And therein lies the conundrum. By creating this ‘alternate universe’ and appealing to the least educated, lowest information voters, the modern Republican Party had become hostage to an emerging political base representing the worst instincts of ‘populist’ politics in America.   

The question is can these forces once again be overcome by more civilized manifestations of popular discontent?  Only a successful Bernie Sanders will answer in the affirmative, otherwise it will be a long, dark, night.

________

1.     http://www.publicpolicypolling.com/main/2015/08/trump-supporters-think-obama-is-a-muslim-born-in-another-country.html

 

March 9, 2015: For Data Mavens, Devastation of the Middle Class, The Cost of 'Tinkle-Down' Reaganomics.

Robert Reich first emerged upon the national scene as an economics professor at Harvard where he published several books. In 1993 he became Secretary of Labor in the Clinton administration and thereafter returned to Academia to assume a chair as professor of economics at Berkeley. He’s recently produced a film entitled "Inequality for All" and has become a harsh critic of current economic policies including some of the trade agreements that he had so eloquently advocated two decades ago. Cataloguing the devastation that has been done to the American Middle Class, Reich posted this entry on Facebook March 6:

"For you data mavens, here’s some useful analysis from Professor Emmanuel Saez, my colleague here at Berkeley who, along with Thomas Piketty, has done the key research on income inequality:

The largest share of the income of the top 1 percent of Americans is concentrated in the top 0.1 percent and 0.01 percent. The average income of the top 1 percent in 2013 (latest data available) was $1.2 million; the average for the top 0.1 percent, $5.3 million; and the top 0.01 percent, $24.9 million. If America had the same income distribution now that it had in 1979, the top 1 percent would now be getting $1 trillion less annual income, and the bottom 80 percent $1 trillion more – which would come to about $700,000 less this year for the average family in the top 1 percent, and about $11,000 more for the average family in the bottom 80 percent."

There you have it, the best estimate for the cost of ‘tinkle-down’ Reaganomics has been tabulated to cost the Median Household about $11,000.00 a year.

March 3, 2014: Assault on the Middle Class, State-Sanctioned Greed, Don't Agonize...Organize

Senator Corker is not alone in this headlong assault on the middle class.  Everywhere, across the country, diligent Rescumlicans are about the business of conducting a headlong assault on both the New Deal and organized labor rolling back a century of progress.  There’s Scott Walker in Wisconsin waging war on the public employee unions, Rick Snyder, a former hedge fund tycoon, turning Michigan into a ‘right to starve’ state further solidifying it’s position as the Alabama of the Midwest.  Then there’s John Kasich of Ohio, previous congressman best known for leading the impeachment crusade against Bill Clinton while in the House, now as governor of Ohio he first led a battle to savage public employee unions and, after the voters overturned the law by public referendum we now find him leading the fight to keep as many voters away from the polls as indeceny will allow.  Across America we see a concerted effort to wage war on the workers of this country, first by seeking to limit the ability of workers to organize, second by seeking to roll back worker’s hard earned gaines by , as Corker demonstrated, using real or imagined crises to wring draconian concessions from the working class, and lastly by seeking to protect their political backsides from an associated political cost by restricting access to the ballot box.  The result is that, as the aforementioned graph demonstrates, the percentage of the national wealth held by the middle class of this country is on the decline.

Bill Moyers featured as a guest on his PBS program last season former Secretary of Labor Robert Reich.  Reich, now economics professor at Berkley, has recently published a book dealing with the state of the economy in the post-Bush era.  It transpires that the top 1% made off with 95% of the economic gains made since the crash of ’07.  Below is a graph illustrating the relative gains by each of the 5 economic groupings in recent years. 

If one were to further break down this income distribution, one would find that most of the gains within the top 5% went to the highest 1%, with the lion’s share going to the top one half of one per cent.  Meanwhile, as this graph so aptly demonstrates, the bottom 80% are falling behind. 

To see the impact of the state-sanctioned greed let’s look at what has happened to median income in recent years, but first a word of explanation for those unfamiliar with the arcane ways of the statistician.  Conservatives gloss over what is happening to the middle class by using income averages.  The average household income and the mean household income are not the same standards of measure because averages can, in this case, be misleading.  For instance you could put Bill Gates in a room with 40 homeless people and the average wealth of everyone in the room would be well over a Billion dollars. But if you measure by Median wealth and you would get a quite different and quite startling answer, for Median wealth would approach, in this example, near zero. For such measurements real wealth or yearly household incomes are measured by the median and by deviations from the median known to the statistically obtuse as “standard deviations”.  Think of the median as the true middle, like the median on the road.  Here, in this statistic, one can measure the relative position, success or the struggles of the ‘average’ american—that is the American Middle Class. 

As you can see, since 2007 the “average” or median household income has gone down by roughly $4,000.00 per year. The Middle Class has lost, in the wake of the recession, 7.8 or roughly 8% of its purchasing power.  So while the top one percent has made off with 95% of the economic gains since the last recession the middle class has lost nearly 8% of it’s income. Only belatedly has this administration begun to address this problem.

The consequences of allowing these trends to continue unabated is amply illustrated in the graph below.

The graph clearly shows that the percentage of the national wealth held by the middle class, adjusted for inflation to 2012 dollars, reached its peak in 1968. A whole host of problems and issues arose in the 1970s from the election of Richard Outhouse Nixon to the Arab Oil Boycott, to the introduction into the labor force of the Baby Boomers (otherwise known as the ‘generation of swine’), which set the stage for the downward decent of the purchasing power of Main Street America.  What has been so troubling has been the governmental response, or rather lack of response to this trend.  In fact governance has mostly involved creating new and novel means to accelerate the trend either by nearly eliminating any semblance of ‘progressivism’ in the tax code, shifting taxation so that work is now taxed at a much higher rate than wealth, and by turning a blind eye when we are not turning back the clock on regulations (principally financial regulations) and anti-trust.  Here we see that administrations, be they Democratic or Republican have not altered the general shape of the curve, giving damning testament to the growing dominance to the now near dictatorship of Capital. 

 There is a solution to this, one that is best expressed by an old adage “don’t agonize…organize”

If you're part of the middle class, thank a union.