CONFRONTING THE BUILDING CHALLENGES OF THE WORKING CLASS
Today, all of America worries about the growing dysfunction of the family, the breakdown of marriage and children raised on their own, the growing violence, and the use of drugs. Middle-size cities and small towns have lost big companies, stores, and new investment. Many expressed their anger at the political and economic elites by voting for Donald Trump.
What conservatives and Republican leaders see are people who have grown dependent on government and been failed by the War on Poverty, unemployment and disability benefits, food stamps, housing vouchers, and free health care that have created a hammock that allows people to drop out of the labor market. Vance’s book suggests a dysfunctional culture has left these people and communities disabled and our medicine cabinet of policies pretty empty.
The problem with those judgments is that you have to erase a lot of history and experience with a lot of policy outcomes to get there. Working-class families and communities are in trouble, but it is fair to conclude that a lot of things contributed to it. It was not just bad choices. It was not lack of personal responsibility or a government that was clueless about how to get to a better economy and society. The country is not powerless. Voters today think others were writing the rules of the economy in ways that favored them, and they have a pretty good idea of things government can do that would make a difference.
Well, the full Republican takeover of the U.S. government gave the GOP the opportunity to address the profound problems facing the white working class who had played such a big role in Donald Trump’s victory and in putting Tea Party Republicans in power in the House and Senate and in control of state governments. And they devoted 2018 to building in “work requirements” before the “able-bodied” could receive welfare benefits or food stamps, or be covered by Medicaid.56
In January, the Trump administration allowed states to impose work requirements, and Kentucky tried before it was blocked by the courts. In April, the administration instructed cabinet members to find areas to impose work requirements or make them more severe. And the House Republicans introduced stringent work requirements for receiving food stamps in their version of the Farm Bill. The “work requirements” remained the principal contrast between the House and Senate bills as the country went and voted.57
They paid no attention to the evidence that prior imposition of work requirements had no long-term effect on people staying in the labor force or on the poverty rate. Indeed, as Alvin Chang and Tara Golshan write, “It made them poorer.” It ignored that half of the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) recipients already worked while they received food stamps and that three quarters worked in the year afterward. And that the people hurt are the children, who are often the reason these benefits exist.58
They ignored the fact that these programs exist to help people who are poor, to help them manage with wages that can’t get them out of poverty, or to get health care like any other family. The reason conservatives have embraced “work requirements” is to keep lower-income and working-class Americans from becoming indolent. Is that really all they have to offer working people? What an insult. Are conservatives so bereft of ideas?
The Republicans lost dramatically in the anti-Trump wave election, but most of all, they lost across the industrial Midwest and Rust Belt, stretching from Pennsylvania to Iowa and Kansas. The repudiation of conservatives was greatest with the non-Evangelical working class who wanted more from Republicans than this anti-government trope—they didn’t believe that food stamps and Medicaid led to people swinging idly in hammocks.
And for good measure, voters also retired Speaker Paul Ryan to his hammock. Republicans would do well to unlearn the lessons of Hillbilly Elegy.
8 HOW DID DEMOCRATS LET DONALD TRUMP WIN?
SO, HOW DID DEMOCRATS EVER let Donald Trump become president of the United States? How did they allow this Tea Party–led GOP to get total control nationally and in the majority of states? How did they let them do so much damage to the country? How did they allow the GOP to suppress every effort to use government for public benefit?
What did Democrats get wrong?
And how do they embrace a very different politics that allows them to crush the GOP electorally and lead a period of explosive change?
It begins with recognizing that Democratic leaders contributed mightily to the alienation of voters that produced successive disruptive elections that put the Republicans in power.
The spotlight turned immediately to the white working-class voters who supported Donald Trump. But Democrats didn’t have a white working-class problem. They had a working-class problem. White working-class voters revolted against President Obama’s bank bailout and more, but so did much of the New America that was not motivated to defend what Democrats had done on the economy and health care. Democrats lost control nationally and in the states because of an explosion of racial resentment under President Obama, but that is only part of the story. Democrats lost the confidence of voters early in the period when Democrats had control of the presidency and the U.S. Congress and most of the states. They did not pause to reflect why they got “shellacked” in 2010 or lost so many seats at all levels of government, election after election. Even a disgraced GOP conducted a postmortem after President Obama was reelected in 2012, but Democrats never took stock and changed course.
Donald Trump would not be president of the United States, of course, but for critical help from the Russians, the FBI, and the Hillary Clinton campaign’s malpractice. However, the 2016 election shouldn’t have been close. Clinton would have closed in 2016 with an unassailable lead if Democrats had been in touch with what was happening to ordinary Americans or showed any anger about a corrupt political system dominated by the banks, big corporations, and rich donors.
The vast majority of the country, working people, and the Democrats’ electoral base were shattered by the financial crisis. They lost nearly all their wealth, and their incomes only regained precrisis levels in President Obama’s last year, seven years after the 2008 crash. Jobs no longer paid what they used to and few got raises now, yet people faced daunting and skyrocketing costs for health care, prescription drugs, childcare, student debt, and housing. The great majority of working people were at their wits’ end. And Obamacare mandated they have health insurance or face a fine, yet the deductibles were so high they could never afford to use it.
Meanwhile, working families were a mess. More kids were being raised by single parents. Drugs and violence were shortening life expectancy. Women were deep into the labor market, yet got no help with family leave, childcare, or equal pay. Working women were on their own.
And all Democratic presidents in living memory welcomed globalization, including expanded trade, new trade agreements, and expanded immigration, without serious consideration to its impact at home. The new trade agreements accelerated the outsourcing of American jobs and put further downward pressure on American wages. The elites thought it was worth the price or prioritized other goals. While President Obama genuinely sought comprehensive immigration reform that expanded border and workplace enforcement, candidate Hillary Clinton seemed to care only about assuring a path to citizenship for the undocumented and DACA Dreamers.
The great majority of voters were seething that CEOs had so much power, despite selling out their companies and their country. The big banks had wrecked the economy yet they inexplicably got bailed out and now seemed to call the shots. Voters watched the explosion of campaign spending over a decade by super PACs, corporations, and billionaires, and believed they had rigged the rules of the economy to work for them, not for the middle class that was struggling and on the edge.
Yet, the Democrats’ campaigns in four national elections starting in 2010 called on voters to “build on the progress” and “build ladders of opportunity” for those who had not yet shared in the broad gains. President Obama’s closing argument while stumping for Clinton touted the economic recovery
under his leadership and argued that Hillary Clinton had the experience to build on his progress: “We’ve seen America turn recession into recovery. Our businesses create 15.5 million new jobs.” He pumped, “Incomes are rising. Poverty is falling. Twenty million more Americans have health insurance. Those are just the facts.”
Liberal economists and social scientists, progressive think tanks such as the Roosevelt Institute and the Center for American Progress, and the vast network of progressive advocacy groups advanced strong critiques of the economy and proposed bold reforms, yet only in the 2018 anti-Trump election did Democrats campaign with a passion to disrupt the status quo.
If you want to understand how out of touch Democrats were before President Trump’s election in 2016, please read this sincere account by White House Senior Advisor Ben Rhodes of President Obama’s thinking through what they got wrong and how Donald Trump could have been elected president of the United States:
Along the streets of Lima (Peru) the crowds still waved as the president of the United States passed by. “What if we were wrong?” Obama said, sitting opposite me in the Beast. “Wrong about what?” I asked. For days, we had been trying to deconstruct what had happened in the recent election. Obama had complained he couldn’t believe that the election was lost, rattling off the indicators—“Five percent unemployment. Twenty million covered. Gas at two bucks a gallon. We had it all teed up!” Now he told me about a piece he had read in The New York Times, a column asserting that liberals had forgotten how important identity is to people, that we had embraced a message indistinguishable from John Lennon’s “Imagine”—touting an empty, cosmopolitan globalism that could no longer reach people. Imagine all the people, sharing all the world. “Maybe we pushed too far,” he said. “Maybe people just want to fall back into their tribe.”1
On Election Day 2016, I asked voters in a survey for the Roosevelt Institute whether the economy had “started to get to full employment” and whether “a lot of people are finding jobs that pay more” or whether “jobs still don’t pay enough to live on” and people have to “struggle to save anything.” When you saw that 60 percent of those who voted believed jobs didn’t pay enough to live on—and when you saw that those who strongly believed that outnumbered those with great faith in the incipient recovery by three to one—you didn’t need to look very far for why Donald Trump was elected. Among people of color and unmarried women—the Democrats’ so-called base—two thirds rejected President Obama’s view of the economy.
On Election Day 2016, I also asked people eight years after the financial crisis whether they could handle an unexpected expense of five hundred dollars, and nearly four in ten said they could not, including a majority of unmarried women and large numbers of minorities, millennials, and the white working class. The country wasn’t remotely teed up to embrace a leader who would merely tinker with the economy or political system.
Hillary Clinton campaigned with President Obama in successive closing weekends and she, too, chose not to speak to the economic stress of working-class women, many of whom were still in play late in the election, nor did she empathize with the everyday struggles of the Democrats’ own electoral base of minorities, millennials, and unmarried women. These voters were looking for leaders that got it, not big posters saying, “Hope, not hate.” That failure to connect diminished turnout in the big metropolitan areas that allowed Trump his tragic win.2
Source: Democracy Corps for Roosevelt Institute, Election night survey of 2016 voters
What was the reality for most Americans during the Obama presidency? Most lost wealth and their incomes fell, particularly for those at the bottom of the ladder. Those who lost jobs when the financial crisis took its biggest toll found jobs that earned $610 less a month in salary and benefits. While the country had regained a half million manufacturing jobs by 2014, that was a fraction of the 6 million such jobs lost in the decade before the crisis. The number in minimum-wage jobs doubled between the crisis and Obama’s reelection in 2012, and the number of those feeling discouraged about their personal finances did not budge up through the end of 2015.3
In late 2014, according to my economic tracking survey for the Roosevelt Institute, 55 percent of people said their families had had to make big changes in their buying habits at the grocery store to deal with rising prices. That was not surprising because when I asked what was the most important economic problem for the country to address, 57 percent chose “jobs that don’t pay enough to live on” and “working families that can’t afford childcare and student debt.”4
A similar number picked government spending and debt and regulation, and they won out when the GOP took control in the Congress and in the states.
The president of the United States was the main messenger for the Democrats through this whole period, and Obama’s consistent economic message to the country—from one year after the crash through the 2016 presidential election—was this: the recession has been transformed into a dependable recovery, our economy is creating jobs, and the country is on the right track, but the Republicans drove our economy “into the ditch” and are doing everything possible to obstruct our progress.
So, election after election, Republicans racked up landslide margins with white working-class voters, while the Democrats’ discontented base failed to rally to defend President Obama. That formula allowed Donald Trump to win enough states in 2016 to become president.
Understandably, Democrats and progressives have been reluctant to criticize President Obama because his bold actions really did save America from another Great Depression and his administration was so much more effective than any other government in the developed world, where austerity reigned. Nobody wanted to say anything that diminished his presidency when it was under vicious attack then and now from a Tea Party–dominated GOP that sought to gridlock the country, impose austerity, and heighten racial resentment.
Well, the great majority of working people never heard from Democrats that this party was angry that jobs don’t pay enough to live on and wages don’t keep up with rising costs that put working people on the edge financially.
President Trump and the Republicans thought they had teed up an even stronger economy for the 2018 election, and they got crushed. They passed and promoted their massive tax cut, unemployment had dropped to 3.5 percent, and the economy had grown at a 3.4 percent rate in the final months before the election.5 They shared the same view of the macro economy that put off working people. President Trump said:
So I want to thank all of the people that are making this economy go. We have so many people working so hard. But it’s booming. And veteran unemployment has reached its lowest level in nearly twenty-one years. And it’s going to be better. [Applause] Going to be even be better. And that number will be better—because if you look at the various statistics, African American employment [unemployment] is the lowest level in history. Hispanic employment [unemployment] is the lowest level in history. Asian employment [unemployment] is the lowest level in history.6
Pundits and strategists in both parties thought President Trump’s misogyny, arrogance, corruption, and divisiveness dragged him down and kept him from benefiting electorally from the economy’s performance, but they had not learned anything about our economy. Trump was hurt, not helped, by his efforts to convince voters they were making economic gains.
Less than half of those who voted in 2018 endorsed the modest statement, “The economy is strong and families like mine are beginning to be more financially secure,” while six in ten said their wages weren’t keeping up with the cost of living. Two thirds of African Americans, unmarried women, and Hispanics said that, half with intensity, as did over 60 percent of millennials and white working-class women and a big majority of white working-class men, a third with intensity.
Since the financial crash and for the whole period that Obama and Trump have governed, elites just haven’t understood how much working people are struggling to keep up with rising costs and how frustrat
ed they are that those in power don’t get it.
Most Americans now take as a given that pay increases are few and far between, and they face an endemic cost-of-living crisis. Any modest real income gains are overwhelmed by the rising and formidable costs for health care, childcare, housing, and college. Those are not discretionary expenses but critical investments where the government has provided precious little help.
CRISIS OF HEALTH CARE COSTS
It is the cost of health care that is most explosive, though. The Affordable Care Act slowed the rate of inflation but right now, those costs go up 5 percent a year. Prescription drug costs of regularly prescribed medications increased by 8.4 percent in 2017 alone.7 That is why nine in ten say health care costs are “out of control”—three quarters with intensity. That is why health care was one of the reasons voters punished Republicans in the 2018 election.
But in every election before 2018, working people punished Democrats on the passage and implementation of the Affordable Care Act, or Obamacare. And it was not because of government overreach. Trump voters rejected repealing it out of hand, and rarely talked about its unfair subsidies to the poor. At every point and in every state, voters have supported the expansion of Medicaid to cover more people. People were dismayed when health care reform brought impossible out-of-pocket health care costs that pushed them even closer to the edge.
Again, Democrats were not very self-critical on the implementation of the Affordable Care Act because it was under vicious ideological attack from Republicans, who were determined to make it fail. Republicans would not entertain any amendments that would allow Congress to address the problems in any new program. They opposed any increase in subsidies and fought expansion of Medicaid in the states.
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