What Was So Great About America Again?

by Kevin Lively

The re-election of Donald Trump has prompted a spectrum of reactions among those who are . . . unenthusiastic . . . at this outcome. One common reaction I’ve observed among progressive friends and those who enthusiastically rather than grudgingly vote Democrat is confusion. Many reactions are understandable: dread about the implications for climate change, concern for the human rights of undocumented migrants in the US, or a low-grade panic over the fact that the Supreme Court has literally vested the office with immunity against legal persecution for assassinations, although apparently Obama’s assassinations of US citizens get a pass. Confusion, however, is only explicable as a consequence of a media ecosystem which rarely manages to coherently discuss many of the serious issues in American society, and crucially the role of policy choices by the government under both Democratic and Republican leadership which either failed to address or directly exacerbated these problems.

As any very stable genius glancing at a red hat in public can tell you, the appeal which won Mr. Trump his first democratic victory is ultimately rooted in nostalgia. But nostalgia for what exactly? Was American really greater in the past than it is now? And if so what changed and why?

Well this is a layered question. There is of course the obvious fact that for a non-negligible share of Trump voters this nostalgia is rooted in a time before the Civil Rights Act extended de jure if not de facto equal rights to non-white, non-christian, non-heteronormative non-men. If nothing else one can look at the day one rescinding of Diversity, Equity, Inclusion and Accessibility programs across the federal government and its contractors as an appeasement to that crowd. However, while this discrimination is indisputably a crucial aspect of American society and will continue to severely negatively affect human rights in the US, it is also not the only reason for Trump’s election. This in evidence from the increases Trump made among non-white voters, although the total numbers are still biased towards white men.

For the moment however, I do not want focus specifically on the very important issue of racism and discrimination, and instead look to other causes for support for Trump, although the USA being what it is, it will still permeate the discussion. Let’s start with the short term. Assuming there was a modicum of greatness in Trump’s first term we can look to an April 2024 New York Times / Sienna poll for what voters remembered about 2017-2021.

New York Times / Sienna Poll, April 2024

The first result can be safely disregarded because, well, if you were asked that question at random and hadn’t been in a blissful coma for the past 10 years, I would hope that about 40% of the time you would also say that Trump’s nuclear-armed rap-battle with Kim Jong Un and public encouragement of injecting disinfectant was memorable. So then what remains, overwhelmingly, is the economy. This is an absolutely staggering result given that it overshadows one of the most socially and economically traumatic events of the 21st century and a coup attempt each by about a factor of five. It appears these were mostly nostalgic memories because in the end voters who were concerned about their financial well-being broke strongly for Trump. Those citing inflation as the most important factor in their vote were twice as likely to support Trump over Harris.

Okay, but inflation has internationally and historically been correlated with anti-incumbent votes, and anyway this guy still got elected in 2016, so what was the nostalgia trip back then?

Already back in 2014, before Trump was a factor, polls from the mid-terms showed that 65% of respondents said the country was headed on the “wrong track”, the 2nd highest behind post-financial-crash results from 2008. Almost half of the respondents expected the next generation to be worse off than the last. This is the most since the question was introduced in 1996. This was the opinion among those of the electorate who bothered to vote: turnout was only 36.6% of the eligible electorate, the lowest since 1942, and a 24% decrease from 2012, the second largest drop-off in the history of the country.

One potential contribution to this sense of malaise was picked up in December 2015 when Case and Deaton published their landmark “Deaths of Despair” study. They showed that morbidity rates among white people ages 45-54 had been increasing at a rate of 1.8% per year from 1998-2013 compared to other US demographics in this age range, which matched international norms: decreasing about 2% per year. Breaking down this phenomena by education, whites with a high school education or less in this age-range had changes in mortality rates due to alcohol and drug poisoning 9.5 times higher than those with Bachelors degrees, with suicide deaths at 5 times the college educated rate.

A. Case, A. Deaton, Rising morbidity and mortality in midlife among white non-Hispanic Americans in the 21st century, Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A. 112 (49) 15078-15083, Figure 1

Notably this amounts to a 9% documented increase in premature deaths among this cohort. However, in order to match the, falling but still very high, mortality rate among African Americans the rate would have had to increase by more than 50%. Furthermore Native American morbidity rates over a similar time frame increased by 30%. It’s somewhat telling that while the “Deaths of Despair” among white Americans has been widely circulated these later statistics are disregarded. Shockingly, the data in this study only went up to 2013, well before the Fentanyl epidemic. The death rate from drug poisoning across the population has since more than doubled, and in the African American population quadrupled.

A pivotal work which helps to understand changes across all of American society which could potentially be lying behind these facts came out of the RAND Corporation, an unequivocally mainstream and widely respected think-tank heavily embedded with the Defense Department. In 2020 RAND released a study which found that if economic growth from 1975-2018 been distributed as equitably among the US population as it had been from the Second World War to 1974, that “the aggregate income for the population below the 90th percentile would have been $2.5 trillion (67%) higher in 2018” and that the difference in aggregate income across 1975-2018 would have been $47 trillion dollars. These numbers so large as to be abstract. Instead, take a look at the income distribution for Full-Year Full-Time Prime-Aged Workers in 2018 versus their estimates under this counterfactual, in 2018 inflation adjusted dollars.

Adapted from Price, Carter C. and Kathryn A. Edwards, Trends in Income From 1975 to 2018. Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corporation, 2020, Table 2.b

Under this counterfactual, over 95% of the population would have benefited and the median worker would be making nearly twice as much today as they actually are. This upward redistribution of wealth is what inequality is actually about, not the size of Jeff Bezos’ yacht. Furthermore this is only income inequality. What is, I would argue, even more important is wealth inequality, as enough wealth can generate passive income, and is easier to transfer between generations. Between 1983-2016, the share of wealth held by middle income families has decreased by about half, and the wealth ratio of the richest 5% compared to the second quintile (between 20-40% on the poorer end) went from a 114 to a 248 times difference.

The RAND study doesn’t make any attempt to explain why inequality has increased so much in the US, but it’s important to note that while other countries like those in Europe have had similar patterns of upward income redistribution, it is not nearly on the same scale.

What this means is that all things being equal, this inequality and similarly the disparate health outcomes between sectors of the US population and other wealthy countries must be due to policy choices (the US Healthcare system looms prominently in mind). In further columns I would like to go into more detail about the constellation of policies which lead to this shift starting around the mid 70’s but for now I will simply quickly collect a handful of relevant factors.

The RAND study helpfully mentions, in passing, in the Appendix, that in this time window the top marginal federal income tax rate fell from 70% to 37%. Coincidentally almost exactly around 1975 union membership in the US began to collapse from about 30% to now about 10%, which drops to 6% when disregarding government jobs. These trends were exacerbated first by Reagan who broke the Air Traffic Controllers strike in 1981, and appointed business friendly managers to the National Labor Relations Board. When Clinton came in and finalized the NAFTA deal that Reagan and HW Bush set up, one of it’s effects was that multi-national manufacturers in the US began to threaten plant closures in about 50% of unionization drives. Even when unionization drives were successful, the closure rates went up by three times compared to before NAFTA. Furthermore, flooding the Mexican market with federally subsidized US-Agribusiness corn collapsed large sectors of the Mexican rural economy, causing two million displaced farmers, increasing food prices and poverty and thereby exacerbating the flow of migrants, many of which I assume are good people.

In this environment in 1997 Alan Greenspan, the Chairman of the Federal Reserve under Clinton, gave testimony to the Senate Banking Committee in which he lauded the state of the economy, and remarked that “atypical restraint on compensation increases [for workers] has been evident for a few years now and appears to be mainly the consequence of greater worker insecurity” and suggested that “faster productivity growth last year meant that rising compensation gains did not cause labor costs per unit of output to increase any more rapidly” and since non-labor costs were constant, that “profits and rates of return on capital have risen to high levels”. So insecurity, that is, not knowing if you’re going to have your contract renewed, waiting to be laid-off with little notice and being unable to unionize, has suppressed wages, allowing money to be redirected into corporate profits. While all this was happening the US prison population went from being on the high end of OECD countries to being unique phenomena in the modern world.

Carrying on from HW Bush’s and Clinton’s murderous sanctions on Iraq, which by 1996 had caused up to half a million children to die from US actions, a price which Secretary of State Albright said was “worth it“, the Bush II administration invaded, leading to an even worse calamity for the region. For the domestic population, this meant US troops were sent to be maimed and die for a cause which by 2016 54% of even Republican voters said “wasn’t worth fighting”. Finally after years of deregulation, the banking sector crashed at the end of the Bush term and Obama picked up the pieces, with the policy advice of the likes of Robert Rubin and Larry Summers who had contributed to the policies of deregulation in the first place.

This is the stage onto which Trump came. Recalling the deaths of despair, in the end he won the support of non-college educated whites at 64% compared to 28% for Clinton. What was he saying in order to get such lop-sided victories? In the Republican primaries Trump broke from virtually all other Republican politicians, but aligned with the population by declaring during a debate that Iraq was based on a lie, that it was a “obviously” a mistake which led to Iran taking over the country (which was actually kind of true), confirmed a statement from 2008 that “it would have been a wonderful thing to impeach Bush”, and that the war “destabilized the middle east”. This was met by boos from the audience who proceeded to applaud Bush’s brother’s half-hearted attempt to defend his kin-folk. By the way, who else remembers how his campaign ended with him begging an audience to clap for him? During his campaign Trump also openly attacked free-trade deals which have been supported continuously by Republican and Democratic presidents since 1980, despite 47% of GOP voters and 24% of the Democratic voters being of the opinion that free-trade hurts their communities as of September 2016.

Again, he was also clearly using explicit racism in the case of anti-Mexican and Chinese sentiment, alongside the usual coded racism against African Americans on top of unbelievable sexism. Nonetheless, in a 2020 article (non pay-walled version) Thomas Ferguson and colleagues analyze votes at the congressional district level by economic activity, namely the percentage of district economic activity in Agricultural, Manufacturing, Fossil Fuels and IT. They also separately analyzed the vote along racial and religious dimensions. Doing so they find stronger correlations of pro-Trump votes across the board in the economic disaggregation, with anti-correlation in IT sector, and much weaker correlations in the racial and religious disaggregation. So while racial resentment was a factor (there’s even a quantifiable metric for it, apparently?), it was far from the only one.

In conclusion, I want to be absolutely clear that I agree with many former members of the Trump administration that he constitutes a clear and present danger to democracy, human rights and the rule of law. I want to furthermore be absolutely clear that I do not believe that the Trump administration will actually do anything to meaningfully address any of the issues I have mentioned. Indeed, the project 2025 document reads like a playbook for exacerbating all of them. Instead what I would like to see is that progressive people who want to live in a more equitable, just and fair world are able to speak to those who are suffering from these policy choices, made over decades, and offer them honest, logical and well thought-through solutions. It’s either that those of us who are privileged enough to be able to study these problems try to understand and communicate their real causes, or it’s that we let demagogues exploit the suffering they cause to expand their own power.

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