Both Democrats and Republicans have spent years pitching themselves as champions of the working class, promising economic and social transformations that would improve their lives and put them at the center of national politics.
In one sentence you succinctly listed most things that would be desirable for the working class, I'll quote a portion of the sentence.
"more jobs, stronger economic growth, rising real incomes, decent health care and retirement benefits, attainable housing in a safe neighborhood, quality schools, cheap gas, affordable basics, fair rules for all workers, and lower taxes."
I guess an increase in wages by half would do it for much on your list. A scarcity of workers forcing employers to give good benefits would also help, of course then you get inflation as the goods and services supplied by workers also rises. But by how much. When I do the math labor costs of a big mac aren't a very big proportion, nor of picking vegetables, or of building a house etc. Costs would rise, but would be outpaced by wages.
How do you accomplish a scarcity of workers or a half again increase in wages, we are not a Communist country after all. Numbers are deceiving. Employers already say they can never find workers, unemployment rates are very low, yet 30% of the adult population doesn't work. That's not counting stay at home moms or early retirement.
Around 2 million workers have been deported, I've yet to hear of much increase in wages or benefits, nothing like early covid when wages skyrocketed and people moved to different employers seeking better conditions. Supply and demand works for the labor market. For too long we have only tried to increase supply, either via our borders or by offshoring to low cost countries.
Would it be possible to not give H2A and H2B visas? We have already seen that tariffs didn't really cause any measurable cost to consumers as most increases were absorbed by the manufacturer looking to preserve market share in the US economy. Would we be willing to pay high enough wages with provided living conditions to attract Americans to work ag? We do currently for oil rigs offshore and in the arctic, ag is much easier and safer work.
The working class voter is gettable, the question is will corporate and the 20% be willing to pay the price.
The important question is not only whether the 20% will be willing to pay the price, it’s whether Democrats will ever be willing to ask them to pay the price.
The split between working class voters and the resented “elites” is an 80-20 split that the GOP understands and exploits while Democrats, increasingly the party of the 20%, try to deflect attention to the top 1% “oligarchy” in order to give a pass to the party’s next-19% base.
Much of the party’s messaging falls flat because working class voters see two-income urban college graduate Democrats as the problem, not their economic peers, no matter how many times top-20% Democrats try to tell them otherwise.
The Republicans are wary of exploiting the Dem schism as it also divides their supporters. There is that entire pro business, Chamber of Commerce side that hates tariffs and loves illegal cheap labor, two pillars of Trumpism.
Eventually it would be nice if these parties sorted themselves out.
There is an interesting possibility or two here. We might see a successful new party similar to, say, the German AfD. If both parties continue to move outwards, space for a center party might arise. We might start to see incumbents thrown out of office much more rapidly, as was once the case. We are seeing more primary challenges that succeed. Term and age limits on Federal office make some sense, though the term limits usually proposed are a bit short.
I agree with you that neither party really represents working class interests, particularly when it comes to the reforms that would make life easier, but it's not just cost. It's also reducing bureacratic requirements. For instance just to build a small loafing shed (say 16' x 16') on my property requires me to submit PLANS (!) and pay $200 for someone to look at a map and determine if the shed would be in a 100-year floodplain. This is a FEMA, and therefore a federal, requirement. These kinds of ridiculous regulatory burdens add up, and are the ones that affect peoples' daily lives, but no politicians even considers them worthy of their attention. Life seems like an endless hassle of government forms and fees and permits whenever you want do anything. We need serious regulatory reform as well. It might be that regulatory reform would also lower costs by removing many ridiculous fees and saving time!
I believe every law and regulation was intended to fix a problem, but also every law and regulation has unintended consequences. The problem is our elected officials rarely look back to address those unintended consequences of their legislation (and the regulations that implement them).
The description of what working class voters want is no doubt accurate, and it describes what American workers actually had for a brief historical moment between 1945-75. But, that moment only existed because America survived WWII intact and as a result enjoyed a 30-year economic monopoly while the rest of the world rebuilt.
Once the rest of the world was able to compete with American industry with more modern plants and cheaper labor the postwar labor-management bargain that built the middle class became economically unsustainable, but American politicians on both sides fuel the fantasy that the historically anomalous postwar boom can somehow be recreated with the right set of policies. The rise of populism is partly due to workers’ anger at leaders who continue to make a promise that is inherently impossible to fulfill.
There is no natural law of politics/policy that says/said that globalization needed to be a race to the bottom.
The fact is that during those supposedly USA "monopoly" years all Western countries grew, specially in Western Europe and Japan. Even in Latin American, other developing areas as well as in the Soviet sphere.
Growth also ended around the same time in most places, which is why this period is idealized all around the world.
The common argument around declining profits as the reason for race to the bottom globalization is more argumentative commonplace than explanation.
Why then did China manage to develop, if the profit problem hasn't been solved?
We have seen under Biden and now even under Trump how inflation is used by elite economic interests to justify their policy preferences.
There are many reasons for growth to have stagnated, including the fact that housing areas for easy development and energy production for easy development became a bit scarcer.
Western dependence on energy imports from the unstable Middle East was not the result of a natural law.
The environmental trade offs from industry pollution and urban development didn't have to lead to such a degree of urban flight.
Housing is probably the best policy instrument to increase birth rates and yet all Western countries have housing crises. It doesn't have to be this way.
Mass transit, including to the suburbs, didn't have to stop expanding. Again, China shows it can be done.
The West chose to allow bad policy trade offs, the fossil industry killing renewables, the auto and airline industries killing trains specially. We continue down this path to this day.
The suburbs kill the cities or the cities kill the suburbs, as seen with the debate around Work from Home.
The West has deindustrialized to the point its defense industry can't even rearm even if it wanted to.
We choose how we manage technologies, as seen with the debates around self-controlling Artificial Intelligence.
We also choose how to manage political technologies, like monetary interest rates and governmental guarantees/insurance.
There is no natural law that said Social Security, the FDIC or FHA, etc needed to be created. They provided a huge stabilizing role in society and the economy.
What natural or economic law says we can't with think and create new solutions again?
China - where factory workers make about 20% of US wages for comparable work and whose standard of living that’s far lower than that enjoyed by their American counterparts - makes my point. It has been able to grow by underpricing the US and other global competitors, a major part of which comes from its low labor costs.
All commodities, including American labor, are subject to a global “race to the bottom” because they are worth no more than the global market is willing to pay. There are no doubt some reasonable policy solutions out there, but promising to recreate America circa 1962 isn’t one of them.
The argument that most domestic labor prices/values are subject to global market standards has been disproven time and again in actual economics research (even neoliberal research). There is no such "global market".
If this global market did exist, why have Chinese wages gone up exponentially, even in light of the fact that there are so many even poorer countries?
Yes, China is dumping industrial goods, just like the West did for most of the 19th and 20th centuries. During that period the West also often had very high tariffs and manipulated foreign agricultural markets. Now we beg China to buy US agricultural products...
No one needs to return to 1962 to:
- first, acknowledge that Chinese wages have gone up so much because China is implementing the same measures the West implemented during its golden age;
- second, stop parroting the neoliberal narrative about there being no alternative to the race to the bottom globalization of the past half century.
Your original comments talks is deterministic and defeatists, so your caveat now about "reasonable policy solutions out there" reads like a cop out.
I have no idea what the best solutions are because the root of the problem is building expectations that don’t align with present reality (Chinese wages have increased, but are still only a fraction of American wages) but it seems to me that pretending that we can somehow go back to the days of postwar AFL-CIO and UAW labor contracts isn’t among them.
By some strange coincidence, the people who want more government in our lives tend to work for the government. More government is better for them, whether they be 'working people' or college educated 'administrators.' And that includes the massive number of NGOs, who get their funding from governments, and then distribute it to alleged nongovernment employees. Yet they know where their paycheck is coming from. That's a big pot, full of social workers, museum staff, teachers, staff of various organizations that 'improve' lives, and of course, public broadcasting.
By some strange coincidence, most of these organizations operate within cities, the only places that have strong democrat support.
Let's talk about covid! Covid craziness was a big wake up for many Americans about just how untrustworthy the expert class that Democrats love. While states like California kept public schools ( but not private) closed for two years, Florida opened up after just a few months. A brand new vaccine rolled out by Pfizer was mandated for millions- including pregnant women! Billions were made by Pfizer and Moderna. Working class people are not dumb. They were mostly at work during the lockdowns when the laptop class was at home in their pyjamas.
It's not just the economy, stupid! - as the inelegant saying goes. I will also add that working class people often have hard lives, but they want dignity not hand outs.
We need to be precise in our language. Most people have to work for a living. Therefore, most people are working "class". Using the word class to label people is also incorrect. You are dividing people based on their wealth or lack thereof. Using the word income when delineating between groups of people is more accurate, i.e. lower income, middle income, etc.
Income as the dividing line isn’t accurate in the context of political views and values because plenty of business owners, tradespeople, union workers, etc. continue to identify with the class they came from after they reach the class that matches their income. Education level is the true divide.
Labor as the basis of “working class” is not participating in capitalist wealth creation. All citizens need equity in productive capital ownership and control that comes from prudent risk-taking. In capitalism, labor is an input cost.
That is very simplistic. Most of the people who own homes own them as a result of employment in the capitalist free market.
DC is rightly called The Swamp. I prefer that our economy be handled by capitalists as much as possible, as opposed to a federal government that is worse than incompetent, and which has greatly overstepped its constitutional bounds
Simplistic is the wrong word though most economic truths are simple, it's fundamental. Capitalist success rewards residual claimants - it's why people get rich in Silicon Valley and why we call the free market system "capital-ism."
People own homes because they have income they can leverage by borrowing. That income can come from capital or labor - the capitalist system favors capital over labor and our financial and tax policies have merely amplified this. To not own productive capital is to limit oneself as an input cost.
That's great as far as economic philosophy goes, but capitalism pays the bills.
Money has value only to the extent that there is something to buy (or sell). Nothing sees to the production of goods and services like free market capitalism. That includes houses. You can't buy a house, either with borrowed money or earned money, until there is a house.
I'm not sure we have any difference of opinion here. My comment is pro-capitalist where risk-taking capital investment and accumulation is an imperative for everyone in one form or another. And none of this needs flow through a bureaucracy - rather, it obviates the need for bureaucratic redistributive institutions. Tax policy needs reform to promote capital investment and accumulation for all classes.
Can’t help but read this and think about demographics. Not having the exact numbers in front of me, I believe many of those who fit into the contemporary “working class” bracket are increasingly Latino and male. The disillusionment with both parties is a phenomenon on the rise among Latino voters, which is one explanation for why so many ‘24 Trump voters appear to be flipping and preparing to cast their ballots for Democrats this midterm cycle. Whether it bears out remains to be seen. The outcome of Nov. 3 will give us concrete evidence of the shift and, just maybe, give parties a stronger understanding of what is resonating with working-class voters — Latino or writ large — so that it can be translated into policy. I don’t think we’re at the point of a third party yet, but we are in a moment where I can see the pool of who is defined as swing voters growing beyond the stereotypical “soccer mom” to a broader more ideologically diverse group of voters that includes an increasing number of Latino men.
I think you’re right that working-class voters have heard a great deal about what each party intends to do without seeing enough improvement in their own lives. The question I keep coming back to is whether they can see a workable portfolio of actions. What is being done to stop the bleeding on the problems they face right now? What will address the underlying problems over the next few years? And what long-term investments will put things on a better path? All three have to be there. If a long-term strategy creates a short-term burden, leaders have to acknowledge it and either do something to reduce that burden or explain clearly why people are being asked to bear it.
The long-term piece raises another question. A new industry or stronger infrastructure may be good for the country, but a working-class family may look at it and think, “How is my child going to benefit from that?” Is there a practical, affordable route into those jobs? What training is needed, who pays for it, and does it actually lead to employment? People may even see that such a path could be built, but doubt that the necessary changes will happen if they run up against powerful groups with other priorities. That suspicion is part of the problem. It is hard to ask people to buy into a long-term strategy when they cannot see either relief from today’s pressures or a path they trust will actually be opened to them.
In one sentence you succinctly listed most things that would be desirable for the working class, I'll quote a portion of the sentence.
"more jobs, stronger economic growth, rising real incomes, decent health care and retirement benefits, attainable housing in a safe neighborhood, quality schools, cheap gas, affordable basics, fair rules for all workers, and lower taxes."
I guess an increase in wages by half would do it for much on your list. A scarcity of workers forcing employers to give good benefits would also help, of course then you get inflation as the goods and services supplied by workers also rises. But by how much. When I do the math labor costs of a big mac aren't a very big proportion, nor of picking vegetables, or of building a house etc. Costs would rise, but would be outpaced by wages.
How do you accomplish a scarcity of workers or a half again increase in wages, we are not a Communist country after all. Numbers are deceiving. Employers already say they can never find workers, unemployment rates are very low, yet 30% of the adult population doesn't work. That's not counting stay at home moms or early retirement.
Around 2 million workers have been deported, I've yet to hear of much increase in wages or benefits, nothing like early covid when wages skyrocketed and people moved to different employers seeking better conditions. Supply and demand works for the labor market. For too long we have only tried to increase supply, either via our borders or by offshoring to low cost countries.
Would it be possible to not give H2A and H2B visas? We have already seen that tariffs didn't really cause any measurable cost to consumers as most increases were absorbed by the manufacturer looking to preserve market share in the US economy. Would we be willing to pay high enough wages with provided living conditions to attract Americans to work ag? We do currently for oil rigs offshore and in the arctic, ag is much easier and safer work.
The working class voter is gettable, the question is will corporate and the 20% be willing to pay the price.
The important question is not only whether the 20% will be willing to pay the price, it’s whether Democrats will ever be willing to ask them to pay the price.
The split between working class voters and the resented “elites” is an 80-20 split that the GOP understands and exploits while Democrats, increasingly the party of the 20%, try to deflect attention to the top 1% “oligarchy” in order to give a pass to the party’s next-19% base.
Much of the party’s messaging falls flat because working class voters see two-income urban college graduate Democrats as the problem, not their economic peers, no matter how many times top-20% Democrats try to tell them otherwise.
The Republicans are wary of exploiting the Dem schism as it also divides their supporters. There is that entire pro business, Chamber of Commerce side that hates tariffs and loves illegal cheap labor, two pillars of Trumpism.
Eventually it would be nice if these parties sorted themselves out.
There is an interesting possibility or two here. We might see a successful new party similar to, say, the German AfD. If both parties continue to move outwards, space for a center party might arise. We might start to see incumbents thrown out of office much more rapidly, as was once the case. We are seeing more primary challenges that succeed. Term and age limits on Federal office make some sense, though the term limits usually proposed are a bit short.
I agree with you that neither party really represents working class interests, particularly when it comes to the reforms that would make life easier, but it's not just cost. It's also reducing bureacratic requirements. For instance just to build a small loafing shed (say 16' x 16') on my property requires me to submit PLANS (!) and pay $200 for someone to look at a map and determine if the shed would be in a 100-year floodplain. This is a FEMA, and therefore a federal, requirement. These kinds of ridiculous regulatory burdens add up, and are the ones that affect peoples' daily lives, but no politicians even considers them worthy of their attention. Life seems like an endless hassle of government forms and fees and permits whenever you want do anything. We need serious regulatory reform as well. It might be that regulatory reform would also lower costs by removing many ridiculous fees and saving time!
I believe every law and regulation was intended to fix a problem, but also every law and regulation has unintended consequences. The problem is our elected officials rarely look back to address those unintended consequences of their legislation (and the regulations that implement them).
The description of what working class voters want is no doubt accurate, and it describes what American workers actually had for a brief historical moment between 1945-75. But, that moment only existed because America survived WWII intact and as a result enjoyed a 30-year economic monopoly while the rest of the world rebuilt.
Once the rest of the world was able to compete with American industry with more modern plants and cheaper labor the postwar labor-management bargain that built the middle class became economically unsustainable, but American politicians on both sides fuel the fantasy that the historically anomalous postwar boom can somehow be recreated with the right set of policies. The rise of populism is partly due to workers’ anger at leaders who continue to make a promise that is inherently impossible to fulfill.
There is no natural law of politics/policy that says/said that globalization needed to be a race to the bottom.
The fact is that during those supposedly USA "monopoly" years all Western countries grew, specially in Western Europe and Japan. Even in Latin American, other developing areas as well as in the Soviet sphere.
Growth also ended around the same time in most places, which is why this period is idealized all around the world.
The common argument around declining profits as the reason for race to the bottom globalization is more argumentative commonplace than explanation.
Why then did China manage to develop, if the profit problem hasn't been solved?
We have seen under Biden and now even under Trump how inflation is used by elite economic interests to justify their policy preferences.
There are many reasons for growth to have stagnated, including the fact that housing areas for easy development and energy production for easy development became a bit scarcer.
Western dependence on energy imports from the unstable Middle East was not the result of a natural law.
The environmental trade offs from industry pollution and urban development didn't have to lead to such a degree of urban flight.
Housing is probably the best policy instrument to increase birth rates and yet all Western countries have housing crises. It doesn't have to be this way.
Mass transit, including to the suburbs, didn't have to stop expanding. Again, China shows it can be done.
The West chose to allow bad policy trade offs, the fossil industry killing renewables, the auto and airline industries killing trains specially. We continue down this path to this day.
The suburbs kill the cities or the cities kill the suburbs, as seen with the debate around Work from Home.
The West has deindustrialized to the point its defense industry can't even rearm even if it wanted to.
We choose how we manage technologies, as seen with the debates around self-controlling Artificial Intelligence.
We also choose how to manage political technologies, like monetary interest rates and governmental guarantees/insurance.
There is no natural law that said Social Security, the FDIC or FHA, etc needed to be created. They provided a huge stabilizing role in society and the economy.
What natural or economic law says we can't with think and create new solutions again?
China - where factory workers make about 20% of US wages for comparable work and whose standard of living that’s far lower than that enjoyed by their American counterparts - makes my point. It has been able to grow by underpricing the US and other global competitors, a major part of which comes from its low labor costs.
All commodities, including American labor, are subject to a global “race to the bottom” because they are worth no more than the global market is willing to pay. There are no doubt some reasonable policy solutions out there, but promising to recreate America circa 1962 isn’t one of them.
The argument that most domestic labor prices/values are subject to global market standards has been disproven time and again in actual economics research (even neoliberal research). There is no such "global market".
If this global market did exist, why have Chinese wages gone up exponentially, even in light of the fact that there are so many even poorer countries?
Yes, China is dumping industrial goods, just like the West did for most of the 19th and 20th centuries. During that period the West also often had very high tariffs and manipulated foreign agricultural markets. Now we beg China to buy US agricultural products...
No one needs to return to 1962 to:
- first, acknowledge that Chinese wages have gone up so much because China is implementing the same measures the West implemented during its golden age;
- second, stop parroting the neoliberal narrative about there being no alternative to the race to the bottom globalization of the past half century.
Your original comments talks is deterministic and defeatists, so your caveat now about "reasonable policy solutions out there" reads like a cop out.
I have no idea what the best solutions are because the root of the problem is building expectations that don’t align with present reality (Chinese wages have increased, but are still only a fraction of American wages) but it seems to me that pretending that we can somehow go back to the days of postwar AFL-CIO and UAW labor contracts isn’t among them.
By some strange coincidence, the people who want more government in our lives tend to work for the government. More government is better for them, whether they be 'working people' or college educated 'administrators.' And that includes the massive number of NGOs, who get their funding from governments, and then distribute it to alleged nongovernment employees. Yet they know where their paycheck is coming from. That's a big pot, full of social workers, museum staff, teachers, staff of various organizations that 'improve' lives, and of course, public broadcasting.
By some strange coincidence, most of these organizations operate within cities, the only places that have strong democrat support.
No coincidences!
Let's talk about covid! Covid craziness was a big wake up for many Americans about just how untrustworthy the expert class that Democrats love. While states like California kept public schools ( but not private) closed for two years, Florida opened up after just a few months. A brand new vaccine rolled out by Pfizer was mandated for millions- including pregnant women! Billions were made by Pfizer and Moderna. Working class people are not dumb. They were mostly at work during the lockdowns when the laptop class was at home in their pyjamas.
It's not just the economy, stupid! - as the inelegant saying goes. I will also add that working class people often have hard lives, but they want dignity not hand outs.
We need to be precise in our language. Most people have to work for a living. Therefore, most people are working "class". Using the word class to label people is also incorrect. You are dividing people based on their wealth or lack thereof. Using the word income when delineating between groups of people is more accurate, i.e. lower income, middle income, etc.
Income as the dividing line isn’t accurate in the context of political views and values because plenty of business owners, tradespeople, union workers, etc. continue to identify with the class they came from after they reach the class that matches their income. Education level is the true divide.
Labor as the basis of “working class” is not participating in capitalist wealth creation. All citizens need equity in productive capital ownership and control that comes from prudent risk-taking. In capitalism, labor is an input cost.
That is very simplistic. Most of the people who own homes own them as a result of employment in the capitalist free market.
DC is rightly called The Swamp. I prefer that our economy be handled by capitalists as much as possible, as opposed to a federal government that is worse than incompetent, and which has greatly overstepped its constitutional bounds
Simplistic is the wrong word though most economic truths are simple, it's fundamental. Capitalist success rewards residual claimants - it's why people get rich in Silicon Valley and why we call the free market system "capital-ism."
People own homes because they have income they can leverage by borrowing. That income can come from capital or labor - the capitalist system favors capital over labor and our financial and tax policies have merely amplified this. To not own productive capital is to limit oneself as an input cost.
That's great as far as economic philosophy goes, but capitalism pays the bills.
Money has value only to the extent that there is something to buy (or sell). Nothing sees to the production of goods and services like free market capitalism. That includes houses. You can't buy a house, either with borrowed money or earned money, until there is a house.
I'm not sure we have any difference of opinion here. My comment is pro-capitalist where risk-taking capital investment and accumulation is an imperative for everyone in one form or another. And none of this needs flow through a bureaucracy - rather, it obviates the need for bureaucratic redistributive institutions. Tax policy needs reform to promote capital investment and accumulation for all classes.
Can’t help but read this and think about demographics. Not having the exact numbers in front of me, I believe many of those who fit into the contemporary “working class” bracket are increasingly Latino and male. The disillusionment with both parties is a phenomenon on the rise among Latino voters, which is one explanation for why so many ‘24 Trump voters appear to be flipping and preparing to cast their ballots for Democrats this midterm cycle. Whether it bears out remains to be seen. The outcome of Nov. 3 will give us concrete evidence of the shift and, just maybe, give parties a stronger understanding of what is resonating with working-class voters — Latino or writ large — so that it can be translated into policy. I don’t think we’re at the point of a third party yet, but we are in a moment where I can see the pool of who is defined as swing voters growing beyond the stereotypical “soccer mom” to a broader more ideologically diverse group of voters that includes an increasing number of Latino men.
I think you’re right that working-class voters have heard a great deal about what each party intends to do without seeing enough improvement in their own lives. The question I keep coming back to is whether they can see a workable portfolio of actions. What is being done to stop the bleeding on the problems they face right now? What will address the underlying problems over the next few years? And what long-term investments will put things on a better path? All three have to be there. If a long-term strategy creates a short-term burden, leaders have to acknowledge it and either do something to reduce that burden or explain clearly why people are being asked to bear it.
The long-term piece raises another question. A new industry or stronger infrastructure may be good for the country, but a working-class family may look at it and think, “How is my child going to benefit from that?” Is there a practical, affordable route into those jobs? What training is needed, who pays for it, and does it actually lead to employment? People may even see that such a path could be built, but doubt that the necessary changes will happen if they run up against powerful groups with other priorities. That suspicion is part of the problem. It is hard to ask people to buy into a long-term strategy when they cannot see either relief from today’s pressures or a path they trust will actually be opened to them.
I'm curious how the 70 million Americans working in the gig economy map to the set of classes: working, lower middle, middle , and upper.
It’s self evident to everyone except the rural working class.
These folks will believe anything that this president says.
I’m afraid that Peter Turchin is right in his book “ End Times ”.
A counter Elite must stand up and direct the working class to what’s best for them.
It sounds ridiculous, but I’m learning over these months and years, that it’s increasingly true.