By
Robert
Reich
First, we'll start out with a short video on how to deal with your Uncle Bob at the Christmas dinner table:
To see this video on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ByhKM8NBK2E. Here's why Uncle Bob is so angry:
The
great American middle class has become an anxious class – and it’s in revolt.
Before
I explain how that revolt is playing out, you need to understand the sources of
the anxiety.
Start
with the fact that the middle class is shrinking, according to a new Pew survey.
The
odds of falling into poverty are frighteningly high, especially for the majority without college degrees.
Two-thirds
of Americans are living paycheck to paycheck. Most could lose their jobs at any
time.
Many
are part of a burgeoning “on-demand” workforce – employed as needed, paid
whatever they can get whenever they can get it.
Yet
if they don’t keep up with rent or mortgage payments, or can’t pay for
groceries or utilities, they’ll lose their footing.
The
stress is taking a toll. For the first time in history, the lifespans of
middle-class whites are dropping.
According to research by the recent Nobel-prize winning economist, Angus Deaton, and his co-researcher Anne Case, middle-aged white men and women in the United States have been dying earlier.
They’re
poisoning themselves with drugs and alcohol, or committing suicide.
The
odds of being gunned down in America by a jihadist are far smaller than the
odds of such self-inflicted deaths, but the recent tragedy in San Bernadino
only heightens an overwhelming sense of arbitrariness and fragility.
The
anxious class feels vulnerable to forces over which they have no control.
Terrible things happen for no reason.
Yet
government can’t be counted on to protect them.
Safety
nets are full of holes. Most people who lose their jobs don’t even qualify for unemployment
insurance.
Government
won’t protect their jobs from being outsourced to Asia or being taken by a
worker here illegally.
Government
can’t even protect them from evil people with guns or bombs. Which is why the
anxious class is arming itself, buying guns at a record rate.
They
view government as not so much incompetent as not giving a damn. It’s working
for the big guys and fat cats – the crony capitalists who bankroll candidates
and get special favors in return.
When
I visited so-called “red” states this fall, I kept hearing angry complaints
that government is run by Wall Street bankers who get bailed out after wreaking
havoc on the economy, corporate titans who get cheap labor, and billionaires
who get tax loopholes.
Last
year two highly-respected political scientists, Martin Gilens and Benjamin
Page, took a close look at 1,799 policy decisions Congress made
over the course of over twenty years, and who influenced those decisions.
Their
conclusion: “The preferences of the average American appear to have only a
minuscule, near-zero, statistically non-significant impact upon public policy.”
It
was only a matter of time before the anxious class would revolt.
They’d
support a strongman who’d promise to protect them from all the chaos.
Who’d
save jobs from being shipped abroad, slam Wall Street, stick it to China, get
rid of people here illegally, and block terrorists from getting into America.
A
strongman who’d make America great again – which really means make average
working people safe again.
It
was a pipe dream, of course – a conjurer’s trick. No single person can do this.
The world is far too complex. You can’t build a wall along the Mexican border.
You can’t keep out all Muslims. You can’t stop corporations from outsourcing
abroad.
Nor
should you even try.
Besides,
we live in a messy democracy, not a dictatorship.
Still,
they think maybe he’s smart enough and tough enough to pull it off. He’s rich.
He tells it like it is.
He
makes every issue a test of personal strength. He calls himself strong and his
adversaries weak.
So
what if he’s crude and rude? Maybe that’s what it takes to protect average
people in this cruelly precarious world.
For
years I’ve heard the rumbles of the anxious class. I’ve listened to their
growing anger – in union halls and bars, in coal mines and beauty parlors, on
the Main Streets and byways of the washed-out backwaters of America.
I’ve
heard their complaints and cynicism, their conspiracy theories and their
outrage.
Most
are good people, not bigots or racists. They work hard and they have a strong
sense of fairness.
But
their world has been slowly coming apart. And they’re scared and fed up.
Now
someone comes along who’s even more of a bully than those who for years have
bullied them economically, politically, and even violently.
The
attraction is understandable, even though misguided.
If
not Donald Trump, then it will be someone else posing as a strongman. If not
this election cycle, it will be the next one.
The
revolt of the anxious class has just begun.
ROBERT B. REICH is Chancellor’s Professor of Public Policy at
the University of California at Berkeley and Senior Fellow at the Blum Center
for Developing Economies. He served as Secretary of Labor in the Clinton
administration, for which Time Magazine named him one of the ten most effective
cabinet secretaries of the twentieth century. He has written fourteen books,
including the best sellers “Aftershock, “The Work of Nations," and
"Beyond Outrage," and, his most recent, "Saving
Capitalism." He is also a founding editor of the American Prospect
magazine, chairman of Common Cause, a member of the American Academy of Arts
and Sciences, and co-creator of the award-winning documentary, INEQUALITY FOR
ALL.
