The intensity of their critique is fairly new in my experience studying public opinion. This is not grounded in the traditional conflict between labor and capital, workers and management; rather, it is rooted morally in the broken compact that has changed the bargain.
The American people are deeply unhappy with the big banks and financial sector that contributed so dramatically to the financial crash and were bailed out by the government. To be sure, the public spreads blame fairly evenly between themselves for taking on too much debt, the banks for making risky loans, and the government for its weak regulatory hand. But while individuals had to put their books in order and deal with the fallout, the financial industry and bankers never paid the price. They believe “The banks do what they want with impunity” and “have bought the government and they get away with a fine and not any jail time” (postgraduate-educated woman, online). No wonder that today they support “increasing the fines and seeking jail time for executives at financial institutions when they break the law and profit from their wrongdoing” more than almost any other proposal to improve economic conditions.55
But Americans trust big business even less than the banks. Just 21 percent of Americans have confidence in “big business” according to Gallup. That makes them among the least trusted institutions in American society, above only news on the Internet and TV (19 percent, 18 percent) and Congress (7 percent). By comparison, small business is trusted by 62 percent of people, topped only by the military (74 percent), and even banks are ranked higher (26 percent). Even worse, a paltry 13 percent of Americans say they have “a great deal” or “quite a bit of confidence” in “large corporations”—below the level of confidence in the federal government at a time when it was totally deadlocked.56
The public is focused like a laser on “CEOs of big businesses.” When we tested that fairly neutral term with the public in June of 2015, just 23 percent gave a warm or favorable response—and almost twice as many, 40 percent, were cool or unfavorable. Who would have thought a probusiness America would be so negative about the leaders of its large companies? And who would have thought that its college graduates and working class would unite in this aversion to America’s corporate leadership?57
What is going on?
People have watched or experienced the successive restructuring of American businesses, and companies have emerged as pretty hard-hearted and disloyal—both to their employees and to the country. Americans are very conscious that companies pulled out of the compact where hard work would pay off. CEOs are paid record bonuses and “Companies are making record profits with a smaller workforce” (college-educated man, online) by paying as little and employing as few as possible. One college graduate wrote: “New economy means more personal responsibility and not relying on the company that you work for” (college-educated man, online). These were some of the most heated remarks in the face-to-face discussions with college graduates in Portland, Cleveland, and Austin.
What I’ve noticed is that corporations take advantage of people who are getting towards retirement. I have a stack of rejection letters about this big. To get a job when you’re over fifty is almost impossible. (college-educated woman, Oregon)
National Survey of 950 2012 voters conducted by Democracy Corps for the Roosevelt Institute, October 16–21, 2014.
It seems to me like bigger companies, institutions, have less loyalty towards their employees, which means at any time they could get laid off for newer, younger employees. (college-educated Hispanic, Texas)
Is it better to put your life in the hands of a company that now is most likely going to screw you over? (college-educated woman, Oregon)
There’s no loyalty anymore. (college-educated man, Ohio)
The working-class men and women are quick to call it what it is: greed.
The greed of the large corporations, that’s their bottom line, profits. Not bettering the American people or the economy, or the middle class. I hate to say that but it’s the truth. (non-college-educated man, Ohio)
I think there again the key word is “greed”: they’re been selling out all our jobs overseas where they can take advantage of poor people over in other countries where they can pay them a nickel where it could cost them a dollar over here, so everybody’s selling out.… I think they could do a better job at trying to keep our workers, keep the jobs here in America. (non-college-educated white man, age fifty)
It seems like corporate America is all about the mighty dollar and not about the long term but today. (non-college-educated white man, age fifty)
There was a noticeable cry for a “company that respects and values you as a worker and takes care of you as well as you work for them” (college-educated man, online); but today, companies “are not able to understand the real needs of simple families” (college-educated woman, online). They remember a time when it wasn’t this way.
There used to be a time where you built a business, you had your employees, you took care of your employees, you had a relationship with them. Now you’re like a number, and the whole thing is to be able to make your money before somebody takes it away from you. (college-educated woman, Ohio)
No heart, no … nothing. Just that change in my short time of living, seeing companies going from that family-oriented, togetherness, knowing each other, knowing the employees, just the attitude change and just the impersonalization and all of that, it’s amazing to me. (college-educated woman, Ohio)
Because the big companies have played so central a role, the citizenry is following the money. Just a third of Americans say they are satisfied with the “size and influence of major corporations.” The voters had already moved to that conclusion before the financial crash, but about half the country was satisfied just as George W. Bush was assuming office in 2001.58
CEO compensation and tax avoidance have become powerful symbols of what is wrong in the country. More than 60 percent of the country expresses a great deal of concern about the fact that CEOs earn 273 times as much as the average worker, that corporate CEOs give themselves multimillion-dollar bonuses and pensions, and that big corporations such as Verizon and G.E. pay no income tax in some years.59
If you want to hear animated focus groups, you should listen to people talk about how today’s top 1 percent, big businesses and CEOs, use their money and lobbyists to make politics and politicians work for them. They describe the game as “rigged.”
[The top 2 percent are] holding us hostage and then they’ve got the money to buy the politicians to get what they want. (non-college-educated man, Ohio)
The best way to put it unfortunately is the general concept of our elected officials being there to support their constituents and the people that have elected to put them in office and unfortunately I think the reality is that too many times they’re placing their votes with people that line their pockets from special interest groups. (non-college-educated man, Ohio)
The problem is you have corruption on these high levels where you have these people who are, you know, laundering money or they’re giving themselves these multimillion-dollar annual bonuses and they’re cutting wages or they’re cutting jobs or they’re outsourcing jobs. (young woman, Florida)
Congress, these bank owners, bank people, you know, the finance, they need to have a cap on their income so if they make money it means the prices are going to go up in order for them to get their raises. (non-college-educated woman, Ohio)
When a man in suburban Philadelphia learned that those at the top pay a lower effective tax rate, he expressed his disgust for “the bad guy that pays less in taxes than his driver,” saying, “That makes me hate the guy” (college-educated man, Pennsylvania).
Another man was upset because he thought the government “has not done enough to prevent the exile of good jobs from this country,” but then thought better of it: it was “probably on purpose” because they are likely in on the “Global Plan” (college-educated man, online). “They’re all bought, they’re all puppets” (college-educat
ed woman, Oregon).
No wonder the set of problems related to inequality, the top 1 percent, and the power of Wall Street and business interests over Washington is the second most prominent in the consciousness of voters in Democracy Corps’s polling for the Roosevelt Institute.60
* * *
Everyone is restructuring their behavior and thinking about the economy to parallel the changing nature of work. Some remain angry and resentful, and others are resigned and depressed, yet most are pursuing individual strategies to get to stability or success in this new economy, and most would support local and national policy changes if government was not so dysfunctional and corrupt.
The American public is looking for the leaders of the country to say they understand the new rules and offer a vision of how things will be better for them and the country. In Great Britain, all parties are competing to address the cost-of-living crisis, starting with the price of natural gas. Yet in America, no national leader has stepped into this role, as Bill Clinton did when he promised to govern on behalf of the “forgotten middle class.” Barack Obama’s cramped portrayal of inequality or episodic discussion of the middle class and the conservatives’ denialist reaction to the shrinking middle class and rising inequality have left the citizenry to their own devices in understanding and grappling with the new economy.
And the public is very sophisticated and conscious of how much business and government conspire to shape the fortunes in the outcomes in the new economy. Impacting that principle will be central to addressing America’s central contradictions.
5 CONTRADICTIONS OF THE NEW SOCIETY
The great social transformations that are changing the country come with a high social price that badly tarnishes America’s great promise. The contradictions in our cultural exceptionalism are no less foreboding than those that arise with our economic progress. And as with the escalating economic problems, the citizenry will ultimately demand that leaders and parties “get it” and take up an agenda relevant for these times.
America’s cultural exceptionalism comes with a pluralism of marriage types, or what Richard Reeves calls a “multiplicity of marital shapes.” He rightly points out that “the legalization of same-sex marriages is only the latest modulation, after divorce, remarriage, cohabitation, step-children, delayed child-bearing, and chosen childlessness”—and he might well add the huge rise in the number of individuals who never marry. Those changes in the shapes of marriages and families are central to the ascendant values and the changing way of life among Millennials and those in the growing urban centers.1
Yet many of these marriage shapes come with a high price tag. The surge in the number of people living in unmarried households, children raised by a single parent, and the decline of the traditional family and breadwinner role have serious, troubling consequences.
Working-class men, whether white or black, earn less than they did thirty years ago and are single later in life. When working-class men are on their own for longer, they earn lower wages and drift to the margins of the labor and marriage market. While working women are earning more than thirty years ago, they are still challenged by the pay gap with men, dominate in the lowest-paying, growing occupations, and make less in a lifetime because they still do the bulk of the housework and child care and thus work fewer hours. Unmarried women are the most challenged because they struggle to manage work and to raise young children with the added insecurity of just being on their own.
Pointedly, one of the biggest blockages to upward mobility and diminishing inequality in communities and nationally is the number of children raised by single parents. Kids raised by a single parent learn fewer skills and key values at an early age and are much more likely to end up in poverty, while a child raised by two parents is more likely to finish high school and college and get to a middle-class income level. More black children are being raised by single mothers, yet the sharp upward trend today is entirely the result of what is happening with working-class single mothers, regardless of race.
Nonetheless, it is very difficult to begin a frank discussion of the social costs produced by the decline of traditional marriage because they are produced in part by the changing gender roles, the sexual revolution, and the growing secularism that are integral to America’s ascendant trends. And these social changes are still contested.
Yes, there are some conservatives who recognize the tension. Nick Schulz, conservative economist and chief editor of the American Enterprise Institute’s online magazine, has declared “the collapse of the intact family is one of the most significant economic facts of our time,” but acknowledges that “because the debate about family structure is so thoroughly tied up in the culture war” it cannot be legitimately debated. He laments that it is “tied up with the country’s often bitter politics of race, feminism, and sexual politics,” not to mention the politics of religion.2
But it is hard to set aside the ideological debates when social conservatives are waging a full-scale culture war contesting the ascendant trends. They are challenging the sexual independence and economic autonomy of women and the growing secularism that has less certitude about what is right and what is wrong behavior. As I write, social conservatives are suing to limit the contraceptive coverage in the Affordable Care Act on religious grounds and moving to bar abortion or make it virtually unavailable in all the states where they exercise political control. Every new piece of legislation bogged down in the Republican-controlled Congress is weighed down by new attempts to limit abortion. That real-time battle against the new freedoms prevents a constructive public discussion of how to address the very real social costs, though the problems will only worsen without reforms.
This moment is not so different from when Daniel Patrick Moynihan, a prominent academic and urban policy adviser to President Richard Nixon, released his 1965 report, “The Negro Family.” He asserted that the “fundamental problem” facing the black community is the state of the family, which is “the basic socializing unit” because “by and large, adult conduct in society is learned as a child.” “The evidence—not final, but powerfully persuasive—is that the Negro family in the urban ghettos is crumbling.” He acknowledged with great eloquence the powerful legacy of virulent racism and discrimination shaping black communities as the root of the problem, but he also insisted that “so long as this situation persists, the cycle of poverty and disadvantage will continue to repeat itself.” With the black “illegitimacy” rate growing from 16.8 percent in 1940 to 23.6 percent in 1963, well above the 3.1 percent rate among whites, he made the case for national action.3
Moynihan came under withering attack for seeming to put the blame on blacks themselves and for diminishing the pressure to mitigate the effects of so many years of legalized racial discrimination and segregation. Just a couple of years after the passage of the historic civil rights laws, it seemed to relieve pressure to desegregate the schools and urban areas and to take affirmative action to offset entrenched racial discrimination in education and employment.
Indeed, I joined that pushback from the margins as a new political science assistant professor in urban studies at Yale University. I had studied with Nathan Glazer and Edward Banfield, and James Q. Wilson had been my PhD thesis adviser at the Department of Government at Harvard. They were the principal intellectuals allied with Moynihan, who stressed values over condition. With my own research in poor neighborhoods, I was right to be critical of Edward Banfield’s theory of a “culture of poverty” holding people back in America’s cities, though on the question of the family raised by Moynihan, I was wrong.4
New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof’s recent apology for liberals will be much more effective than mine in getting people to revisit that period: “One historic mistake by liberals in social policy was the condemnation of Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s warning in 1965 of the breakdown of the African-American family.” It is really basic: children raised by a single parent are three times more likely to live in poverty than those ra
ised by two. “He was not racist, he was prescient,” because, as Nick Schulz points out, “when Moynihan claimed there was a crisis in the black family, the illegitimacy rate among American blacks was a little over 23 percent.” Today, the proportion of nonmarital births is now 29 percent among whites and 44 percent among white workers.5
It took the breakdown of the family among the white working class to get America’s attention again. So be it.
Working-class men have been hit the hardest by the decline of stable industrial jobs with decent pay and benefits sufficient to support a family. “Less-educated workers are in trouble, and men are in trouble, and less-educated men are in deep trouble,” Jonathan Rauch wrote in The National Journal. Rauch cites one MIT labor economist sounding the alarm: “It has reached a very extreme point.” These men are being steadily marginalized by the economic changes but also the social transformations that delayed the age when men married and that undermined the traditional breadwinner role—one where men took great pride in being able to support the family and children.6
Many of the ascendant groups have trouble viewing their frustration and depression as legitimate. Books such as Michael Kimmel’s Angry White Men are concerned with the most extreme and “entitled” voices “who refuse to even be dragged kicking and screaming into that inevitable future.” They seek to further marginalize these working-class men, not to recognize their marginalization as part of the contradictions of these times.7
During that period, women moved into higher education and the labor force and made gains in income and inroads into more skilled careers where they were previously unrepresented. At the same time, they were pulling back from the traditional wife and homemaker roles, and even marriage and motherhood altogether in some cases. Women still dominate the lowest-paying occupations, are underrepresented in the highest ones, and face a wage gap and a lifetime income and achievement gap as they still bear the largest share of responsibility for home and child care. Nonetheless, they see growing opportunities and are adapting by learning new skills and constructing family arrangements that work for them.
America Ascendant Page 16
