How economic arrogance destroyed the Working Class, the Middle Class and the American Dream.
I find myself at a loss when someone casually shares a conspiracy theory. Nonsense suddenly coming out of someone’s mouth when I think I’m having a casual conversation throws me for a loop.
Last week I mentioned to a new acquaintance that I had scheduled a COVID booster at Walgreens.
“Oh, I’d never do that”, he said casually.
I had no idea what was coming. Or where he was going. Around the bend as it turned out.
“Yeah”, I said, thinking he got his vaccinations at Walgreens too. “I don’t know why Walgreens makes you make an appointment. It’s not like it was a couple of years ago when tons of people wanted vaccinations right away.”
“They make them out of aborted babies you know.”
I had no idea what this man was talking about. I thought I might have missed part an important part of the conversation. I hadn’t.
“Make what out of aborted babies?”
“The COVID vaccine.”
I was so stunned that I needed clarification.
“The COVID vaccine is made out of aborted babies?”
“That’s right!” he said. There was something like triumph or conviction in his voice.
“I must have missed that”, I said softly trying to sound thoughtful instead of incredulous.
I’ve been through conversations like this before and I’m always left mystified. How can anyone believe this kind of thing?
More perplexing, how can they believe it so much that they’d let other people know they believe it? Do they have any idea what they sound like?
In 2021 when Marjorie Taylor Greene argued that California wildfires were the result of a conspiracy involving Jewish controlled satellite lasers, I thought of the paranoid schizophrenic clients I once worked with. That is exactly the kind of delusional thoughts that sometimes intruded on their troubled minds. When they spoke those thoughts aloud, they alienated their friends and endangered their jobs.
In their case, we adjusted medication, but Marjorie Taylor Greene gets re-elected.
She beat an army veteran who believes in bipartisanship and bridge-building. Oh, and he was the best-funded Congressional candidate in the entire country with campaign contributions totaling $15 million.
These are some of the things pushing me to find out why so many people seem to have left their brains on a shelf somewhere and have no idea how that makes them look to others.
I already knew a little.
In the early days of the internet, it was an article of faith that the free access to information would “democratize” knowledge. The marketplace of ideas would winnow out the bad ideas and leave the good ones.
It didn’t.
Instead, the internet is a platform for any half-baked notion, conspiracy theory and outlandish assertion that anyone in the world can imagine.
It wasn’t always like that.
Before the internet, people got their information from TV and radio. There was something called the Fairness Doctrine, a Federal Communications Commission rule mandating that TV and radio had to give access to opposing views.
There’s nothing like that on the internet.
Anybody can say anything they want on the internet and they don’t have to give the time of day to free and open discussion of other ideas.
Jason Stanley thinks that many people believe crazy ideas because they have abandoned reason and logic. They rely on beliefs, personalities and emotions instead of reason and logic.
Maybe.
“The argument from the “marketplace of ideas” model for free speech works only if the underlying disposition of the society is to accept the force of reason over the power of irrational resentments and prejudice…Attempting to counter such rhetoric with reason is akin to using a pamphlet against a pistol.” p.68
Stanley, J. (2018) How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them. First ed. New York: Random House.
Steven Pinker says that education is the answer to misinformation.
“So much changes when you get an education! You unlearn dangerous superstitions, such as that leaders rule by divine right, or that people who don’t look like you are less than human…You learn that charismatic saviors have led their countries to disaster. You learn that your own convictions, no matter how heartfelt or popular, may be mistaken…Not least, you learn that there are ways of resolving conflicts without violence.” p.235
Pinker, S. (2018). Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress. Penguin Publishing Group.
If one of the roles of education is to inoculate people against crackpot theories, nonsense assertions and half-baked conclusions it has failed miserably.
We can add that to the list of educational fiascos.
Are people’s lives so topsy-turvey that they no longer see logical connections and have abandoned faith in experts and authorities? How has respect for trusted sources of information gone from noted academics and Nobel Prize winners to any yahoo who posts on Twitter or Facebook?
I think the answer is in the death of the Industrial Economy, the consequent demise of the Middle Class, and the end of the Social Contract that unified those constructs.
The Great Recession of 2008 is where I put the bookend marking the end of the Industrial Economy and the Middle Class…
Industry had been declining for decades before 2008 and the Middle Class was disappearing along with it. That was something that drew a lot of attention from social scientists and economists, but these days we don’t hear so much about it. That’s because the end of the Middle Class is old news.
It’s gone.
But that distance helps us realize that the industrial economy made the Middle Class possible.
Remember the Steel Belt?
It was the region that began roughly a couple of hundred miles north and south of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania and stretched across the region of the Great Lakes into the foothills of the Rockies.
Every sort of heavy industry was based there. So was consumer manufacturing. That’s where cars, refrigerators and air conditioners were manufactured. So were rail cars, locomotives and semi-trucks. Hundreds of thousands of people — mostly men — worked in those heavy industries.
And they made a good living…
Good enough that one man could support four or five others. It was called the nuclear family and it was another product of the industrial economy. Young couples didn’t have to live with their parents in the old-fashioned extended family any more.
Young men of the 1960’s and 70’s assumed they would follow the path of their fathers, grand fathers and uncles, making a good blue collar living. They could marry their sweethearts and start a family of their own, just as their older relatives did.
They could chase their dreams by charting their own lives.
That’s what Thomas Jefferson meant when he talked about the “Pursuit of Happiness”.
They thought their Middle Class lifestyle would go on forever. Young men and women graduating from high school in the 1960’s and 1970’s assumed that a steady well-paying job and comfortable Middle Class life was their birthright.
Work hard, get a good education and the future of you and your children would be assured. That was the social contract.
But it didn’t work out for them.
Somehow, things went bad…
The rebuilding of Europe was complete. America’s enemies became its customers. And then they became America’s competitors. By the 1970’s German and Japanese cars and motorcycles began hitting American streets.
The 1970s saw the rise of OPEC, boycotts, price controls and wage freezes. That was the setting in which the dollar was uncoupled from gold and became worth only what people thought it was worth. That is what brought on stagflation — simultaneous inflation, unemployment and recession.
Unions began to lose their power…
Contract negotiations gradually drifted from demands for higher pay and more benefits to cushioning layoffs and holding the line on pay cuts. Soon they were negotiating layoffs and pay cuts.
The promise of lifetime membership in the Middle Class began to dim.
Ronald Reagan’s 1984 re-election campaign ran on the slogan, “It’s morning in America” as if we would all wake up to a resurrection of past prosperity.
At about that time Bruce Springsteen released an album called “Born in the USA”. The title track was a rock ballad about Viet Nam veterans returning to a country that could not offer them jobs or futures.
Also on the album was “My Hometown” containing the lyrics:
“They’re closing down the textile mill across the railroad tracks; Foreman says “These jobs are going, boys; And they ain’t coming back…”
The Steel Belt turned into the Rust Belt. Factories closed, their assets sold to foreign manufactures. And the people who had worked in those closed factories?
Pulitzer Prize winners Don Bartlett and James Steele put it this way in 1992:
“You might think of what is happening in the economy — and thereby to you and your family — in terms of a professional hockey game…Imagine if the old rules were repealed, if the referees were removed…That, in essence, is what is happening to the America economy. Someone changed the rules, And there is no referee, Which means there is no one looking after the interests of the middle class…. They are the forgotten Americans.” p. xvi
Barlett D. L. & Steele J. B. (1992). America: What went wrong? Andrews and McMeel.
Detroit was an industrial center and also a cultural one…
It was Motor City, supplier of cars and trucks to the world and also the home of Mo-Town Records, supplier of iconic Rhythm and Blues to the world.
In the decades following 1980, Detroit lost half its population. Entire neighborhoods were torn down and repurposed into parks and pastures.
Nearby Flint, supplier of auto electronics and accessories and birthplace of Grand Funk Railroad, a symbol of American rock and roll culture, is now a cautionary lesson in poverty, political dysfunction and an infrastructure that poisoned its residents.
Steve Forbes captured the experience of displaced blue-collar workers this way:
“Worst of all, no one knows why all of this is happening. You’re not sure why prices are rising or why your money doesn’t go as far as it once did. Meanwhile you see certain people reaping unfair windfalls. They’re getting rich not though honest work, but from distorted capital markets or government cronyism.” p. 62
Forbes S., Lewis, N., Ames, E. (2022). Inflation: What It Is Why It’s Bad and How to Fix It. New York NY: Encounter Books.
Drug overdoses became more common in the new Rust Belt. But it wasn’t young people who were overdosing. They were moving away. There was no future in the Rust Belt. It was older men who were turning to drugs, even those with some education .
The same ones whose expectations and assumptions about the course of their lives had slowly drifted away.
The media began to refer to them as “Joe Six Pack”, as if the identity of an entire generation in the heartland of America involved nothing more than beer, a TV and a couch.
The region in which they lived became “flyover country” for politicians who held them in such contempt they felt the need to advertise their arrogance.
In 2016, Donald Trump acknowledged the anger and disillusionment of an entire generation of abandoned and ridiculed blue-collar workers by redefining them as victims.
It was minorities and foreigners, along with coastal elites and social progressives who betrayed the American Dream, the Trump Trope goes, robbing the dispossessed working class of the prosperous Middle Class lives they had envisioned for themselves.
That simple message resonated with the hardworking but underemployed Americans who knew the Middle Class lifestyle to which they aspired no longer existed.
And how did the the political and social elite respond?
With the infamous “basket of deplorables” speech by Hillary Clinton. It was a line delivered in 2016 to bankers during a semi-private fundraising event.
The condescending insult cost Clinton the Presidency…
Clinton lost Iowa, Ohio, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin — all Rust Belt states in the American Heartland. Clinton won the popular vote, but it was the loss of Heartland Electoral College votes that resulted in Clinton losing the election.
But the demise of the Middle Class and the loss of the American Dream was not the result of partisan politics.
It’s an economic and social issue.
Trump is galvanizing support from a huge portion of the electorate not because his message represents the ideology of the Republican Party, economic realities or objective reason.
Like all effective marketing, it is emotionally driven. Specifically using the emotions of fear, anxiety and anger. For people with diminished futures it makes for a powerful message.
Politicians of both parties have been doing this for years. Voters are seeing through it and are sick of it.
Read: Disgusted Voters Are Abandoning Both Parties
So what is to be done?
Here’s my idealistic playbook:
First, admit the Industrial Economy is dead and there is nothing taking its place…
For now, at least, we are doomed to a lifestyle far diminished from that of our parents and grandparents. However, like the people who built the Industrial Economy, we can build its successor.
Orient to the 22nd century…
We need to get away from thinking about using 19th century technologies like railroads to transport workers to 20th century settings like office buildings. Instead, we need to think in terms of laying the foundation for the economy of the 22nd century.
Help everyone contribute to the online economy…
Every mass transit bill coming out of Congress needs to include funding for nationwide wifi and assistance with training and distribution of personal computers. Everyone needs to be online using full size computers and monitors that lend themselves to commerce, not consumption.
Social media needs to be discouraged, not by government edict or taxation, but with a public shaming movement modeled after Mothers Against Drunk Driving.
Reform Wall Street…
Turn the stock markets back into vehicles for financing businesses that create jobs and prosperity. That means an end to the Federal Reserve creating money out of thin air and injecting it into the stock market to inflate its value. That is a great benefit to people who are already rich, but eventually that money has to be created by hardworking, but underemployed and poorly paid American taxpayers.
That also means bringing back moral hazard. When Wall Street financiers see their colleagues losing their shirts from time to time they will be more careful about creating safe investments that return real value.
Energy is the key…
Finally, embrace technology focusing on energy production. Not just a little, but a lot. Windmills and solar panels are not the path to a 22nd century economy.
Cheap plentiful energy is…
China is working on space based solar energy while we help them finance it by buying their silicone and graphite for residential solar panels and cell phone batteries.
There is nothing wrong with solar panels and batteries, but we can do a lot better.
We need to invest in energy producers like tidal, thermo-nuclear and asteroid mining. And let’s not forget the advantages of nuclear power.
But none of that is likely to happen…
We are on the same path we have been on for decades. Now it has brought us to Donald Trump, and quite possibly a slide into authoritarianism and a rejection of the liberal democratic values of the Founders that guided this country for almost 250 years.
Orwell’s 1984 might be right around the corner.
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