America Ascendant

by Stanley B Greenberg

  The often racially charged opposition of white conservatives to America’s first multicultural president is due less to his own mixed heritage and more to what he represents: the big demographic and cultural wave that threatens to swamp so many certitudes.

  Three-quarters of New Yorkers voted to elect Bill de Blasio as mayor of New York City after he and his multiracial family attacked the NYPD’s “stop and frisk” policy as racial profiling and spoke of a “tale of two cities.” De Blasio is the grandson of Italian immigrants from Naples and Grassano on his mother’s side and German immigrants on his father’s. His wife is the granddaughter of Bajan immigrants. Their sixteen-year-old son, Dante, famously sported a hard-to-miss Afro when he delivered de Blasio’s message in the first television ad of the campaign, which self-consciously embraced the multicultural identity of his family and the city. “We will succeed as One City,” the new mayor declared in his inaugural speech, “a city of five boroughs—all created equal. Black, white, Latino, Asian, gay, straight, old, young, rich, middle class, and poor.”94

  The police union and many police officers expressed their frustration by turning their back on Mayor de Blasio at funerals for the two policemen shot by a deranged black gunman who said he was avenging the deaths at the hands of the police of Eric Garner in New York City and Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri. But even this tragedy shows a very different America. The two policemen assassinated by this gunman were Hispanic and Chinese American and part of a police force that came from fifty different countries and spoke sixty-four languages. “I believe that this great police force of this incredibly diverse city can and will show the nation how to bridge any divide,” Vice President Joe Biden observed, reflecting the mayor’s strong call for unity.95

  President Obama’s and Mayor de Blasio’s stories were made possible by three big dynamics, without which these households would not exist or be growing in such numbers: the first is the rapidly growing diversity of the country and the electorate over the past two decades; the second is the prohibition of racial discrimination and promotion of legal equality before this recent influx began; and the third is the increased tolerance and acceptance of other races and racial diversity.

  1. Diversity

  It is hard to overstate the pace of growing diversity in the country over the past two decades, concentrated among younger populations, particularly the Millennials. The black, Hispanic, and Asian portion of the presidential electorate grew inexorably from 16 percent in 1996 to 18 percent in 2000, 21 percent in 2004, and 24 percent in 2008, reaching 26 percent in 2012. The rise was driven by above-average turnout of African Americans, a growing Hispanic population, and accelerating Asian immigration. Between 1990 and 2010, the white portion of the population dropped from 80 percent to 72 percent; in the electorate, the white share fell from 87 percent in 1992 to 74 percent in 2012.96

  Among voters under age thirty, the white proportion has fallen even faster to 58 percent and is expected to shrink to 56 percent by 2020. Racial minorities will form the majority very soon in key swing states such as Florida, Georgia, and Nevada. It is no longer immigration driving this demographic swing, but higher birthrates: in 2011, the Census Bureau reported that nonwhite births outnumbered white births in the United States for the first time.97

  2. Formal racial equality

  But racial diversity alone does not produce the necessary and sufficient conditions for the Obamas and de Blasios. America had plenty of racial diversity in past eras, particularly in the South and Southwest. For most of the twentieth century in the pre–civil rights South, blacks were more than a quarter of the population. Hispanics comprised 20 percent of the Southwest after 1900 (a number up to 30 percent today). But despite sizable minority populations in the South and Southwest, the doctrine of white racial supremacy was the norm, discrimination and segregation were commonplace, and interracial marriage was illegal. It takes other ingredients.98

  Prior to this new period of growing diversity, the country created a legal framework for ensuring racial equality, building on the Fourteenth Amendment’s prohibition: no state shall “deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.” The Civil Rights Act of 1964 prohibited public and private facilities and employers from discriminating on the basis of race, color, religion, or national origin. In addition, Congress passed the Voting Rights Act of 1965, the Fair Housing Act of 1968, the Equal Credit Opportunity Act of 1974, and the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986, which made it illegal for employers to discriminate on the basis of citizenship or national origin. The U.S. Supreme Court struck down state antimiscegenation laws in Loving v. Virginia in 1967.

  Racial integration and affirmative action were deeply contested leading up to this period of growing diversity, but the legal framework and racial equality eventually became the norm.

  3. Attitudinal and cultural changes

  The demographic and cultural changes that transformed American families were ultimately produced by a change in attitudes. America had a long history of overcoming ethnic exclusivity and accepting ethnic diversity and multiculturalism, but moving beyond our racial differences was a much longer and more violent challenge. There is little doubt today that America has become more tolerant and accepting of racial diversity and has embraced it as part of the American character.

  The country had passed numerous measures to bar discrimination, and those produced changes in behavior and attitudes. But acceptance of interracial marriage became the threshold for real racial acceptance and equality. It was not until 1968, a half year after the antimiscegenation laws were ruled unconstitutional, that we saw the first mainstream portrayal of a mixed-race couple in the movie Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner? It is not very dissimilar from gay marriage today, where marriage meant the change was real, just, and unstoppable.

  Only recently, in fact, have Americans embraced interracial marriage in overwhelming numbers. Overall approval went up slowly during the civil rights era and stalled short of a majority in the 1980s before it began to climb again in 1997; today, approval is at an all-time high of 87 percent. White approval also jumped in 1997 and now stands at 84 percent.99

  Some Americans were simply coming to terms with the inexorable march of demography, but some, like the young, were coming to view interracial marriage as a positive thing, something that shows we are a better society. More than 60 percent of those under age thirty and almost half of those under fifty believe that more interracial marriages has been a change for the better, while only 5 percent say it has made things worse. Contrast that with older and more conservative Americans: just a quarter of seniors and a third of conservatives look at interracial marriages and say this makes us a better America. Barely a majority of those over fifty and just over a third of seniors tell pollsters it would be okay if a member of their own family married someone of a different race.100

  Millennials—those born between 1980 and 1995—will make up well over a third of eligible voters in 2016 and will count for four in ten eligible voters in 2020. There is every reason to believe that the younger generation behind them shares their same outlook with a vengeance. For many young people, tolerance is a point of pride: they embrace intermarriage and racial diversity as part of their consciousness, in contrast to their perception of the views of older people. A plurality of Americans agrees that younger people have better attitudes toward other races and groups than do older people.101

  Accelerating diversity, legal equality, reduced barriers, and, most important, changes in attitudes and dominant values that allow for the greater frequency of interracial households are changing the country well beyond the institution of marriage.

  * * *

  With 111.5 million people watching “America’s game,” Coca-Cola aired a sixty-second Super Bowl commercial. It began with a classic American archetype—a cowboy, riding out of a forest and looking out on a remote lake—but went on
to capture the rest of the faces of America today. It showed, for the first time in a Super Bowl ad, two dads skating with their young daughter. It displayed the vast racial and ethnic diversity of the millions watching—Jews wearing skullcaps, Arab Americans in head scarves, African American kids break dancing, Mexican Americans at a movie, and a Native American grandmother with her grandchildren. America’s unofficial anthem, “America the Beautiful,” played in the background, and the lyrics rang out in English, but then in Spanish, Tagalog, Hebrew, Hindi, Keres, and Senegalese French. In an official statement, the president of Coca-Cola North America said, “We hope the ad gets people talking and thinking about what it means to be proud to be an American.”102

  Well, it sure did! Conservative critics took to Twitter to condemn Coke’s choice to use languages other than English. The hashtag #BoycottCoke became a globally trending topic, with some expressing their frustrations, though more condemned or made fun of the conservative backlash. Surprising no one, Rush Limbaugh conjured up an entire conspiracy where the Republican leaders in Congress had aired the ad to drum up support for the immigration reform plan opposed by Limbaugh.

  But the conservative discomfort is less interesting than Coke’s decision to double down on the ad, announcing they would run it during the Olympics as well. Corporate America is on board with this rapidly changing America, and brands such as Coke are proudly aligning themselves with this multicultural nation on the world stage.

  This just underscores how President Bill Clinton’s formulation about unity from diversity has become the common sense of our times and the ascendant framework for our society and politics. We have come a long way from the old Europe and even the old America.

  Part II

  AMERICA’S DEEPEST PROBLEMS

  4 CONTRADICTIONS OF THE NEW ECONOMY

  The president of the United States believes America’s economy is ascendant and exceptional. For a considerable time, he has tried to educate the American people about the transformative economic changes leading “business leaders around the world” to declare that “China is no longer the world’s number one place to invest; America is.” The United States “is closer to energy independence than we’ve been in decades” and “is better-positioned for the twenty-first century than any other nation on Earth.”1

  His confidence makes me believe he peeked at an early draft of this book. He piles on the evidence in almost every speech. America is producing “more oil here in the United States than we buy from abroad”; our “high school graduation rate is a record high”; “more young people are earning college degrees than ever before”; and “the deficit is coming down to boot, been cut more than half.”2

  The American people, on the other hand, could not have been more unenthusiastic in their reactions to this account of America’s position and future glory. Democracy Corps captured their reactions to the president’s portrayal of America’s economic situation in his 2014 State of the Union address. We observed fifty voters who turned their dial meters up or down in reaction to his words, and while they rallied appropriately to America beating China, their lines headed down when the president turned to the future.

  That is the rub. Except for a five-year interlude in the late 1990s, the majority of Americans have been critical of America’s economy and successive presidents’ economic stewardship for the past thirty years. The Clinton interlude was the one period of very low unemployment, a rising median income, a falling poverty rate, moderated inequality, and budget surplus. Ordinary citizens are very focused on what is happening to the average American and to their own families. The almost three-decade-long stagnation for those in the middle is the dominant thread in people’s consciousness. That is the starting point and why such negativity of spirit is the not-so-new normal.3

  The focus on the pessimism alone, however, understates the scope of people’s new economic consciousness. Almost never getting a raise was already a given, but then came the consolidation of manufacturing and the advent of outsourcing and new technologies that all spelled fewer American jobs. Americans were working more hours and jobs were now paying less and offering fewer benefits. They recalled when the floor fell out from under the economy and their leveraged families lost their jobs and the equity in their homes. They watched when the government only rushed to rescue the banks and the auto industry. They watched failed CEOs receive taxpayer-funded bailouts and then take millions in bonuses, and the super-rich with their Super PACs kept winning even more influence in Washington.

  Dial testing focus groups among 44 swing voters in Denver, Colorado, conducted by Greenberg Quinlan Rosner Research for Democracy Corps and Women’s Voices Women Vote Action Fund, January 28, 2014.

  The ascendant economic trends in the country are very important, but ordinary Americans live the contradictions. Their experience with this new economic reality sets the stage for a new economic consciousness.

  THE ECONOMIC REALITY

  Consider how the households at the midpoint of the income scale are faring. The median household income, $51,017, is just $2,497 more than it was in 1979—that is a cumulative increase of just 5.1 percent over a span of more than thirty years. After reaching a high point in 1999, the median income has fallen 9 percent. It fell steadily leading up to and during the financial crisis and recession, and has not rebounded since. Today, a large majority says their family’s income is falling behind the cost of living, including 56 percent of the sizable bloc of Americans earning between $30,000 and $75,000 a year. The bottom 40 percent of the population is spending nearly 40 percent of its income on housing alone.4

  The median income continued to slope downward because those who became unemployed during the crisis and then found a new job took an average $610 cut in monthly salary and benefits, 17 percent below their compensation before the crisis. That sizable and abrupt cut, we shall see, deeply impacted people’s understanding of the new jobs created in this economy.5

  “Put simply, the recession took middle-class jobs, and the recovery has replaced them with low-income ones,” The New York Times’s Annie Lowrey concludes. The data bears this out. The Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta estimates that almost half of the jobs gained during the recovery were low-wage jobs.6

  Two of the sectors that saw the largest employment gains during the “recovery” were leisure and hospitality (mostly in restaurants) and education and health services (mostly nursing aides and technicians), not the highest-paying sectors. The employment growth in business and professional services jobs was the largest, though this came mostly from new secretaries and temporary workers, not architects, accountants, and lawyers.7

  Automation and robotics are now taking a real toll, and now even the economic profession has moved to a new judgment about this new economy. A full three-quarters of the leading economists surveyed by the University of Chicago thought automation in the past had not eroded employment. It had created new occupations in its wake. But when asked about the last few years, a third said automation was the main reason median wages had fallen and fully 29 percent were not sure. Economist Lawrence Summers concluded that automation does not always create jobs, and “This is something that’s emerging before us right now.”8

  American manufacturing is in a kind of renaissance as it recovers as a proportion of the overall economy, though with manufacturing transformed, it has regained only 568,000 of the 6 million jobs lost between 2000 and 2009—and they are paying much less. The new hires and new UAW members in Michigan now earn between $16 and $19 an hour. The starting pay for the new GE jobs in Louisville is even lower, at $13.50 an hour, and the new Volkswagen jobs in Chattanooga pay just a dollar more—less than half of what it costs to employ autoworkers in Germany. Even at that level of pay, economists estimate that a quarter of American jobs can be offshored, which puts employers under further pressure to keep wages low.9

  Moreover, the leading and admired companies of the new high-tech age, such as Apple, Google, and Amazon, just do not employ as many people
in the United States in comparison to the major industries of the past. As Harold Myerson notes, the biggest employers here today are all low-wage retailers, while in the 1960s, it was GM, AT&T, and Ford.10

  Those developments split the economy “into both very stagnant sectors and some very dynamic sectors.” People see the writing on the wall and are aligning their skills accordingly, such that “ever more people are starting to fall on one side of the divide or the other.”11

  During the rest of this decade, job growth will continue to come heavily in the service sector and low-wage occupations. The occupations expected to grow the most are those of registered nurses, postsecondary teachers, truck drivers, customer service professionals, office clerks, laborers and movers, retail sales clerks, home health aides, personal care aides, and fast-food workers. The average yearly wage for these job categories—$32,386—is dramatically below the median income.12

  People are not deluded when they describe the jobs of the new economy as minimum-wage jobs. The minimum-wage labor force more than doubled between 2007 and 2012, growing from 1.7 million workers to 3.6 million workers. These are not the jobs filled by teenagers on a pathway to a lifetime of work, as described in the conservative portrait. Four in ten minimum-wage workers have some college education or a four-year degree; only one in seven is a teenager. Worse still, the minimum wage, which Republicans refuse to raise, is only 38 percent of the national median wage, putting America’s minimum-wage workers at the low end among OECD countries, on a par with Estonia, the Czech Republic, and Japan, and dramatically below mainstream Europe. In Britain, the last Labour government introduced legislation raising the minimum wage, and now minimum-wage workers make nearly half the median wage.13

  The service sector jobs that account for most of the job growth in America do not offer appreciably more pay and therefore are hardly a reason for a person to pack up and move to another city, which is a major reason why Americans have become more averse to moving to another state or metropolitan area.14