by Lance Selfa
Hillary Clinton voted in favor of the PATRIOT Act, which enabled the massive roundup and deportation of Arabs and Muslims after 9/11 but did not generate a single charge of terrorism. Throughout her political career, she has without exception strongly supported US military intervention abroad, including the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, still wreaking death and destruction in those countries with no end in sight. Indeed, just hours before the Trump administration announced it had launched fifty-nine cruise missiles on a Syrian airfield on April 6, 2017, Clinton had argued that the United States “should take out [Assad’s] air fields.”16
Surely, many would-be Democratic voters viewed Hillary Clinton with skepticism in 2016, since the Clintons’ record is well known. Perhaps her scripted commitment to Black Lives Matter activists seemed both insincere and hypocritical, as did her support for immigrants’ rights. The hundreds of thousands of dollars she earned giving speeches to Goldman Sachs and other Wall Street vultures could not have sat well with those who lost their homes and jobs during the financial crisis while those same bankers got bailed out.
Clinton demonstrated just how out of touch she was with the working-class and once solidly Democratic base when she announced at a West Virginia campaign stop that she planned to “put a lot of coal miners and coal companies out of business”—without offering new training or help finding new jobs for those coal miners who would be displaced.17 Her clueless comment sounded very much like Republican Mitt Romney’s call in 2008 to “let Detroit go bankrupt” without regard to the mass unemployment such bankruptcy would cause.18 As Cohn observed, “In retrospect, the scale of the Democratic collapse in coal country was a harbinger of just how far the Democrats would fall in their old strongholds once they forfeited the mantle of working-class interests.”19
Nature abhors a vacuum, the old saying goes. The same dictum holds true in politics, and a left—or even a genuinely liberal—flank has been missing in mainstream US politics for decades, in large part because of the rightward shift of the Democratic Party helmed by the Clintons. Once Sanders was out of the picture and Clinton became the Democratic Party candidate in 2016, the vacuum was filled by Trump among millions who could not stomach to vote for another Clinton. As left-wing author Christian Parenti observed after watching many hours of Trump’s speeches, “Contrary to how he was portrayed in the mainstream media, Trump did not talk only of walls, immigration bans, and deportations. In fact, he usually didn’t spend much time on those themes.” Mainly, Trump talked about bringing lost jobs back.20
There is no doubt that Trump fed the racism and sexism that already exists among large swathes of the white population, but he was also addressing the burning issue that Clinton ignored: the economic hardship of the working class, which has accelerated since the economic recovery began in earnest in 2010. Both these factors undoubtedly played a role in Trump’s popularity. But it is also the case that roughly 28 percent of Latino and 27 percent of Asian votes went to Trump, according to exit polls.21 Within the confines of the two-party system, voters are not given the opportunity to vote for their ideal candidate, but rather must settle for the one they perceive as the least harmful.
Clinton did, of course, win the popular vote by nearly three million yet lost the election. Only sixteen years earlier, Al Gore won the popular vote by roughly five hundred thousand, yet George W. Bush was elected president. The Electoral College in the so-called “world’s greatest democracy” is inherently undemocratic. It is a holdover from slavery, originally designed to give disproportionate weight to Southern slave states in elections. It is no coincidence that the Constitutional Convention of 1787 that formed the Electoral College also determined that slaves (denied the right to vote) would be counted as three-fifths of a person for the sole purpose of inflating the representation of slaveholders.22
Why Nonvoters Matter
Yet, even after her surprise loss, Clinton accepted the results without questioning the legitimacy of the Electoral College, speaking volumes about the Party’s commitment to preserving the political and social status quo that ultimately benefits both major parties, even when they lose elections. That status quo includes the power-sharing arrangement between the Democratic and Republican Parties, devised to prevent third parties from gaining a toehold. Voters unhappy with the state of politics are therefore given no other choice than to “kick the bums out”—only to replace them with the “bums” from the other party. The two-party system and its limited choices go a long way toward explaining why voters are used to backing candidates with whom they disagree on many issues, often as a vote against the other candidate. Perhaps for this reason, voter turnout in the United States is historically low overall.
Instead of focusing their discourse around white voters in swing states who voted for Trump, the media should have paid closer attention to the many millions of people who did not vote—who far outnumber those who voted for either party in 2016, and as a group tend to hold more liberal views than the rest of the population. This would give a much more accurate sense of the political leanings of the US population.
Voter turnout is strongly correlated to class position—extremely high among the wealthiest Americans and falling steadily as incomes decline. Policy analyst Sean McElwee showed that fewer than half of those with incomes of $20,000 or less voted in 2012, while those from households earning more than $75,000 voted at a rate of 77 percent.23 In 2008, fully 99 percent of those in the top 1 and 0.1 percent of incomes voted. As he summarized, “Since the end of World War II, voter turnout has never risen above 65 percent of the electorate. Disproportionately, these non-voting citizens are low-income, young, less educated, and people of color.”24
It is also worth bearing in mind (which mainstream commentators most often do not) the large number of voting-age people not allowed to vote, who are overwhelmingly poor and disproportionately made up of Black people and other people of color. The poor make up 55 percent of those who are not allowed to vote in presidential elections.25 Fully four million people who are technically US citizens are excluded from representation by the Electoral College because they live in US territories, including Puerto Rico, which are ruled by the US government but denied the right to vote for president.26 In addition, a total of 6.1 million Americans are barred from voting because of a prior felony conviction. One in every thirteen African Americans have lost their voting rights for this reason.27 The 2016 election was also the first since the Supreme Court struck down key protections of the Voting Rights Act, leading to a surge in voting restrictions, including voter ID requirements, that have been shown to depress the votes of Black, Latino, poor, and transgender people.
In 2014, McElwee documented why those who have the right to vote decide not to do so—and this large sector of society leans left of the political mainstream. There are many reasons why low-income people face practical difficulties in exercising this legal right, including difficulty in getting time off work, childcare responsibilities, lack of transportation, and long waiting lines, among other reasons. But 41 percent of nonvoters also said, “My vote doesn’t make a difference anyway,” while 59 percent said, “Nothing ever gets done; it’s a bunch of empty promises.”28 Likewise, the Rev. Charles Williams, pastor of King Solomon Baptist Church in Detroit and president of the National Action Network of Michigan, said that in 2016, especially among “young people and millennials,” he heard, “I feel like I’m just voting for the lesser of two evils. That doesn’t give you the push to vote.”29
But McElwee’s findings also confirmed that nonvoters tend to be more liberal than voters—favoring in much larger numbers policies that “make union organizing easier” and provide “more federal assistance for schools,” and agreeing that “government should guarantee jobs” and “government should provide health insurance.” And “while likely voters in the 2012 presidential election split 47 percent in favor of Obama and 47 percent in favor of Romney, 59 percent of non-voters supported Obama and only 24 percent supported Romney
.”30
When the pro-Clinton super PAC Priorities USA surveyed Obama voters who switched to Trump, along with those who abstained from voting in 2016, it reported in May 2017 that Hillary Clinton had “a Wall Street problem,” and she was completely out of touch with the economic problems ordinary people faced. As the Washington Post reported, “A shockingly large percentage of these Obama-Trump voters said Democrats’ economic policies will favor the wealthy—twice the percentage that said the same about Trump,” while 53 percent said their vote was “more a vote against Clinton” than a vote for Trump. The pollsters concluded that “drop-off voters are decidedly anti-Trump,” describing former Obama voters who didn’t make it to the polls on Election Day.31 Obama, soon after leaving office, accepted a fee of $400,000 for a single speaking engagement with Wall Street’s Cantor Fitzgerald, underlining the Democrats’ problem with ordinary people.
The Wreckage of Neoliberalism
The United States is strewn with the wreckage of neoliberalism, its landscape dotted with once-thriving communities built around manufacturing jobs where Walmart is now the biggest employer, setting the low standard for local wages. Well before Trump ever ran for president, the scale of class inequality in the United States was already the worst in the industrialized world. The Allianz Global Wealth Report 2015, using figures from 2014, reported that the United States possessed a larger amount of personal wealth than any other country, at 41.6 percent of the global wealth total. At the same time, the report found that the United States also had the largest concentration of overall wealth in the hands of the proportionately fewest people, leading it to call the United States “the Unequal States of America.”32
In January 2017, the British business magazine the Economist reported that its Intelligence Unit, the research and analysis division of the Economist group, had downgraded the United States from a “full democracy” to a “flawed democracy”—based on low voter turnout, the degree of distrust that the population holds toward government institutions, and the high level of class inequality. “Popular trust in government, elected representatives, and political parties has fallen to extremely low levels in the US. This has been a long-term trend and one that preceded the election of Mr. Trump as the US president in November 2016,” stated the report. It added, “[Trump] appealed to the angry, anti-political mood of large swathes of the electorate who feel that the two mainstream parties no longer speak for them.”33
The neoliberal project over the last forty years has been entirely bipartisan, continuing unabated no matter which party occupied the White House. And both Hillary and Bill Clinton, alongside Republicans, played a major role in implementing it. The US ruling class began what was then called the “employers’ offensive” in the mid-1970s, before anyone had coined the term neoliberalism to describe it. In 1974, Business Week put forward the corporate class’s plan to shift the balance of class forces decisively in its favor: “It will be a hard pill for many Americans to swallow—the idea of doing with less so that big business can have more. Nothing that this nation, or any other nation, has done in modern economic history compares in difficulty with the selling job that must now be done to make people accept the new reality.”34
That new reality was straightforward, thanks to a coalition of Democrats and Republicans in Congress: a green light for union-busting, corporate deregulation, regressive taxation, and so-called globalization—allowing capital to cross national borders unrestrained in the search for low-wage labor and maximum profits around the world. Meanwhile, the global working class was yet more tightly controlled when attempting to migrate through borders, whether these migrants were fleeing from war, poverty, and hunger or from violent dictators. The neoliberal agenda forced workers on a global scale yet more directly in competition with each other, in a race to the bottom.
Employers have always threatened to relocate their companies elsewhere as a tactic to keep workers from organizing unions and demanding higher wages. Throughout much of the twentieth century, this usually pitted workers in the northern United States against those in the nonunion southern part of the country. Neoliberal globalization extended this competition among workers far beyond US borders, as capitalists scoured the world in search of the cheapest wages and operating costs to maximize profits. Thus, the textile industry moved most of its operations to the southern United States by the mid-twentieth century, only to relocate to the Global South in the 1990s and 2000s.
Free trade agreements like NAFTA came to symbolize neoliberalism’s assault on the US working class, but they were just one part of its multipronged attack. And while outsourcing US jobs, especially to China, certainly played a role in the downward spiral of US wages, it’s also true that increasing technology and automation allowed manufacturers to maintain and even increase output with far fewer workers. As labor activist and scholar Kim Moody argued:
A more likely explanation for manufacturing job losses on the scale of the last thirty years or so, one that is internal to the workings of US capitalism and, indeed, capitalism generally, is to be found in the rise of productivity extracted after 1980 by the introduction of lean production methods, new technology, and capital’s accelerated counteroffensive against labor—an explanation based in class conflict itself [emphasis added].35
But one of the most important goals of neoliberalism was simply crushing working-class organizations that could fight against lower wages. When Ronald Reagan took office in 1981, one of his first presidential actions was firing the striking members of the Professional Air Traffic Controllers’ Organization (PATCO), crushing the strike and destroying the union—a union that had endorsed his campaign—and sharply escalating the employers’ offensive. After that, employers were given free reign to force their workers to “give back” hard-earned wages and benefits during contract negotiations and to break unions by hiring professional union-busting firms, even when profits were high. It is not a coincidence that strike levels dropped significantly during the 1980s, falling steadily ever since. In February 2017, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that work stoppages over the last decade have been the lowest on record, noting that the “average number of major work stoppages by decade has declined over 95 percent since 1947.”36
Amid this one-sided class war, union membership also fell sharply, from 20.1 percent in 1983 to 10.7 percent overall in 2016, and just 6.4 percent in the private sector, a level comparable to that before the labor upheaval of 1930s won the legal right to organize unions.37 As of 2014, only 7.4 percent of young workers aged eighteen to twenty-nine were members of unions, even though 55 percent of them viewed unions favorably.38
Indeed, the war on unions escalated over the last decade, as Republican-dominated state legislatures went on an antiunion rampage in the Midwest, passing a wave of “right to work” laws that allow nonunion workers to withhold union dues even when they benefit from union contracts. Once a hallmark of the antiunion, low-wage South, twenty-eight states had adopted “right to work” by February 2017—including the Midwestern states of Indiana, Michigan, Wisconsin, West Virginia, Kentucky, and Missouri—with no end in sight.
The Real State of the US Working Class
The US working class was the highest paid in the world during the postwar economic boom, but its wages entered a downward spiral in the mid-1970s. Today it is the lowest paid among OECD countries, with the greatest proportion of low-wage jobs, defined as paying less than two-thirds of the nation’s median income. Twenty-six percent of jobs in the United States fell into this category, earning less than $23,390 in the OECD’s 2014 report.39
While most media reports have described US wages as “stagnating” over recent decades, the reality is far worse. Most middle-income earners have fallen off the face of the map, either advancing into the upper income tier or, more likely for the working- and lower-middle class, joining lower-income earners.40 In addition, examining wages and incomes tells not even half the story about individuals in the lower-income tier, because so many more
workers have joined that tier as the category of middle-income earners has hollowed out.
Far from its ostensibly “free market” ideology, neoliberalism has produced government austerity for the working class combined with economic welfare for the corporate class. This policy has taken many forms that have severely eroded working-class living standards, including regressive taxes (such as increased sales taxes); cuts in emergency heating and food-stamp subsidies; higher fees for everything from traffic tickets to public transportation; rising premiums and deductibles for health insurance coverage; higher rents; unaffordable childcare costs—among other expenses built into everyday life. Almost none of these is adequately incorporated into mainstream media analyses of the class divide.
The political establishment perhaps believed that shielding this reality from mainstream discourse would fool those suffering because of these policies. “Poverty Goes Down, Coverage Goes Up, and America Gets a Raise,” announced MSNBC on September 13, 2016, about the Census Bureau finding that not only did all US incomes rise in the previous year, but incomes also grew the fastest for the poorest people.41 We must ask whether this cheerful announcement fooled those workers whose lives have been turned upside down in recent decades. Even by the Census Bureau’s own measurement, in 2015 median household income (which is the level at which 50 percent of the population makes more and the other 50 percent makes less) was lower than in 2007, and lower still than the all-time high in 1999. Further examination also reveals that people in rural areas didn’t share in the increase, but rather experienced a 2 percent decrease in median income in 2015—which fell to just $44,657 for these households, far below the national median.