by Don Peck
Deportations have risen dramatically since the recession began, and prominent senators, including John McCain and Lindsey Graham, have supported hearings to consider amending the Fourteenth Amendment, which grants citizenship as a birthright, regardless of the immigration status of one’s parents. The percentage of Hispanics saying that whites and Hispanics get along “not too well” or “not at all well,” according to Pew Research, rose from 24 percent in 2007 to 41 percent in 2009.
Anti-Muslim sentiment has seemed quick to surface since the downturn began (though violence against Muslims has not risen). The number of Americans with a favorable impression of Islam declined from 41 percent to 30 percent between 2005 and 2010. In the summer of 2010, anger erupted over the plan by a moderate Islamic cleric to build an unobtrusive mosque two blocks away from the site of the World Trade Center. Several mosques around the country were defaced or defiled, and a pastor in Florida threatened to burn the Koran. Martin Peretz, then the editor in chief of the New Republic, publicly questioned whether American Muslims were “worthy of the privileges of the First Amendment.” So quickly did the flames of bigotry seem to rise in some quarters that an “emergency summit” was convened in the nation’s capital by prominent Christian, Jewish, and Muslim leaders to try to quell them. A joint statement expressed alarm over the “anti-Muslim frenzy” and pled for tolerance. “This is not America,” said Cardinal Theodore McCarrick. “America was not built on hate.”
THESE PROLIFERATING SIGNS of a turning inward and a narrowing of American minds should not be surprising: as hard times linger, they reliably produce resentment toward outsiders, suspicion of unfair treatment, and zero-sum thinking. And as is clear from history, frustration is typically strongest not among the most marginalized groups, but among the newly marginalized—that is to say, those whose status and self-image have collapsed most abruptly, or are in the greatest danger of doing so. In the United States today, that describes a large part of the nonprofessional middle class.
Middle-class discontent with the federal government has grown markedly since 2007, finding its clearest expression in the Tea Party movement. Candidates affiliated with the Tea Party won forty seats in the House of Representatives in the 2010 midterm elections, and 41 percent of voters polled on Election Day said their attitude toward the movement was generally supportive; 73 percent said they were angry or dissatisfied with the federal government.
The Tea Party’s active supporters are overwhelmingly white and about 60 percent male; in a 2010 New York Times poll, half described themselves as middle-class and another quarter as working-class (the rest were split among upper-middle-class, lower-class, and upper-class, in descending order of prevalence). A plurality had some college education but not a college degree.
At the core of the Tea Party, it is often asserted, stand older residents of rural regions. And indeed, 75 percent of Tea Party supporters are older than forty-five, and the movement is popular in many rural areas. Yet this characterization is overly narrow and ultimately misleading. An analysis of Tea Party events in the run-up to the 2010 midterms, performed by the political scientist James Gimpel, showed the highest level of activity in former real-estate boomtowns and in newer exurbs around the country—the places where the housing market crashed the hardest.
It appears likely, then, that many of the Tea Party’s supporters are people who used to feel prosperous, but whose stars are now falling and whose lifestyles have become insecure. Unemployment itself isn’t an overwhelming problem within the Tea Party; just 6 percent of its supporters responding to the Times poll said they were temporarily out of work, and 14 percent, less than the nationwide average, said the recession had caused them true “hardship.” (The relatively advanced age of many Tea Party members may be one reason why comparatively few are unemployed. Some are retired, and for older workers, the unemployment rate in this recession has been relatively low.) But more than half said the recession had in one way or another made life “difficult” for them and their family—whether due to falling home values, pay cuts, anxiety, or other problems.
At Rand Paul’s May 2010 Senate primary celebration in Kentucky, his father, Ron, an elder statesman of the Tea Party who was mobbed by supporters in the crowd, said his son’s insurgent victory sent a strong message: “Get rid of the power people, the people who run the show, the people who think they’re above everybody else.” At the Tea Party’s national convention earlier that year, Sarah Palin denounced “elitists” and said America was “ready for another revolution.” At a Utah GOP convention, conservative senator Robert Bennett was jeered before his primary ouster for supporting the bank bailout—“TARP! TARP! TARP!” went the chant.
The Tea Party is powered partly by anger toward a financial elite that, abetted by government, seems to be prospering at the expense of regular people. But the movement seems equally suspicious that less favored groups are also unfairly getting a leg up. According to a survey by the Public Religion Research Institute, 61 percent of people who identified with the Tea Party believed that discrimination against whites was as big a problem as discrimination against minorities, and 58 percent said discrimination against women was no longer a problem. Tea Party supporters generally favor lower taxes and the slashing of government programs that do not benefit them directly, with exemption for those, like Medicare and Social Security, that do. The ideal of market freedom is not deeply held within the movement: in October 2010, 63 percent of Tea Party supporters said free trade was “bad for the U.S.,” and just 24 percent believed it was good for the country.
If you squint hard enough, you can begin to see some resemblance between the Tea Party and the Populist movement of the late nineteenth century, a movement of downwardly mobile farmers who felt deeply exploited by the financiers of their time. The Populists formed the only grassroots political cause in American history that achieved widespread support and didn’t fade quickly away; the movement grew for two decades before reaching its apotheosis in 1896, and for a time, it looked possible that it might upend and remake the traditional two-party system in the United States. Like the Tea Party, it was born in an environment of rapid economic change, rising inequality, and increasingly burdensome debt—an environment, in the words of the historian Lawrence Goodwyn, in which “a large number of people in the United States discovered that the economic premises of their society were working against them.” Like the Tea Party, the Populist movement attracted earnest and well-meaning people, previously uninvolved in politics, who felt that neither Democrats nor Republicans were serving “plain people” like themselves. And like the Tea Party, it developed worrisome characteristics: nationalism side by side with an aggressive provincialism; reflexive anti-elitism; a strong sense of moral superiority; little reverence for the present, and too much for a partly imagined past.
At its core, however, Populism was a class-based movement, with class-based goals. By contrast, as the conservative political analyst David Frum has noted, American populist ire in recent generations has nearly always been focused on the best-educated rather than the wealthy. A key difference between the Populist movement and the Tea Party is that the latter, so far, has not taken on an anti-business or anti-rich cast. Despite its flirtations with protectionism and its loathing of the bank bailouts, the Tea Party still fits relatively easily within the GOP—favoring small government, light regulation, and low taxes at every income level.
Yet if class distinctions continue to grow sharper in the United States, and if educational differences keep looming larger as a filter between the classes, one wonders whether the populist distinction between wealth and education will last very far into the twenty-first century. One of many reasons that Sarah Palin is the natural leader of the Tea Party is that she has achieved power and material success outside of the usual meritocratic channels. But her path to wealth—celebrity—is of course not widely available, even in the age of reality TV.
In his 1951 book, The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Mo
vements, the social writer Eric Hoffer argued that all mass movements, whether religious, social, or nationalist, share certain essential characteristics, and are rooted in the failing self-esteem of large groups of people. Ruined middle classes, Hoffer noted, are highly susceptible to movements; they “throb with the ferment of frustration. The memory of better things is as fire in their veins.” Over time, feelings of helplessness and worthlessness foster paranoia, which shifts guilt and blame onto others. Boredom with a stagnant life inspires identification with radical causes. To one extent or another, wrote Hoffer, mass movements always breed “enthusiasm, fervent hope, hatred and intolerance.” Their stated goals are less important than the psychological and emotional void they fill, and in fact are easily mutable.
The American middle class, while under increasing pressure, is hardly ruined. And aggressive populism—whether embodied in the Tea Party movement or any other—does not look likely to gain dominance over U.S. politics anytime soon. Even the Populist movement, which developed deep institutional roots and had deeper grievances than those of the middle class today, was ultimately crushed by business and financial interests in 1896, once it had become a true threat to them. (The Populists had cast their lot with the Democrats by then, and the Republican Party, fueled by unprecedented campaign contributions, developed a new and more sophisticated campaign machine that would dominate politics for years thereafter.) It is very difficult for any outsider movement to succeed in American politics. That difficulty is all the greater today—and the odds that any genuinely anti-elite movement could succeed are all the longer—because of the nature of our meritocracy, which lifts natural leaders from the communities of their birth and absorbs them.
Yet that very fact also makes modern grassroots movements less apt to develop responsible and coherent positions, and more vulnerable to demagoguery. When discredited ideas and irresponsible proposals gain a wide following, they do eventually exert an influence on policy and on the culture, even if their main proponents never gain power. And of course, the “tail risk” of an inchoate populism should not be overlooked; however unlikely a populist government might seem in any particular year, should economic pressures increase, the dam could someday break. The frustration felt today by many Tea Party supporters is not without basis. It is likely to increase as the cities of the “coastal elite” and other elite enclaves shrug off the recession.
IN JULY 2010, a Penn Schoen Berland poll of Washington, DC, elites—defined as college graduates involved in politics or policy who make more than $75,000 a year—revealed their views about the economy to be much more positive than those of most Americans; nationwide, about two out of three survey respondents said the U.S. economy was on the wrong track, but less than half of the Washington elites surveyed felt the same way. (Elites were also less concerned about immigration than most Americans, and more apt to think the Tea Party was a fad that would “go away soon.”) A large majority acknowledged that the current downturn had affected them less than it had most Americans.
A salary of $75,000 is hardly a ticket to high living, especially in Washington, where costs are steep. But it’s no mystery why Washington’s political elites have a rosier view of the economy than most Americans. The city’s professional suburbs are among the very richest in America. And while a relatively large number of poor people do live in Washington itself, many of them are sequestered in corners of the city where the professional class seldom sets foot. The city and its environs are a primary habitat for America’s meritocratic winners, and most of the area’s professional inhabitants have felt the recession only lightly.
The federal government, of course, did not stand idly by as the recession unfolded. Aggressive action by the Fed and Treasury immediately after the crash almost certainly prevented a true depression. The stimulus package of 2009 helped stabilize the economy, and more modest measures at the end of 2010 were passed explicitly to speed growth in 2011. Hesitancy to do more is understandable; by 2010, most Americans believed the government had done too much, rather than too little, and worries about the national debt were widespread.
All that notwithstanding, the political will to action undeniably diminished—and the government, to some extent, became unfocused—soon after the stock market began to rally and business profits began to grow again. Over the past two years, I’ve spoken with many political leaders and officials about the economy, and every one of them seems to genuinely regret the pain that the recession has inflicted on so many Americans. But as early as the fall of 2009, many of them simultaneously seemed to believe that the healing was well advanced. The acceptance of that idea is doubtless made easy by the tenor of their daily interactions with associates, friends, and acquaintances. Within the Washington professional community’s social circles, nearly everyone you meet seems to be doing just fine.
In his 2005 paper, “Inequality and Democratic Responsiveness,” Martin Gilens, a political scientist at Princeton University, examined the influence that different classes of Americans exert on federal government action. Sifting through detailed survey data on public support for thousands of proposed policy changes from 1981 through 2002, he found that, in essence, the government is responsive only to the wishes of the rich. Gilens compared popular support for different initiatives at the tenth, fiftieth, and ninetieth income percentiles. On many issues, poor, middle-class, and rich Americans held similar views. When they didn’t, however, it was crystal clear whose interests legislators and other policy makers served. When the rich and poor disagreed about an issue, policy hewed closely to the preferences of the rich, and was “wholly unrelated” to the preferences of the poor. The same was true, more or less, when the opinions of the rich differed from those of median-income Americans. When middle-class preference for any given policy flipped from strong opposition to strong support, the probability of government action rose by only 6 percent, on average, if the rich remained opposed. By contrast, when the rich got behind an issue that the middle class opposed, the chances of government action rose by 30 percent. “Whether or not elected officials and other decision makers ‘care’ about middle-class Americans,” Gilens concluded, “influence over actual policy outcomes appears to be reserved almost exclusively for those at the top of the income distribution.”
The sequestration of the rich and affluent from other Americans—in tandem with the flow of money toward positions that the rich hold dear—may in large part explain the intensity with which certain ideals are held in Washington (unrestrained finance; free trade as an end in itself). A whole ideology of governing has grown over the past thirty years, extending across party lines, that is defensible intellectually, but congenial to the rich and well educated above all. This ideology, for the most part, does not directly conflict with the ideal of a broadly shared prosperity. Yet increasingly, it appears to be insufficient for the achievement of that goal—and perhaps indifferent to it.
Some three years after the crash, America’s banking institutions are generally larger and more powerful than they were before, and they carry an even stronger implicit government guarantee against failure. The plan to close the loophole that allows hedge-fund managers to pay just 15 percent of their income in taxes died a quiet death in the Senate in 2010. A new free-trade agreement with South Korea, the biggest since NAFTA, was negotiated by the White House near the end of that year. The temporary income-tax cuts passed by the Bush administration, and tilted toward high earners, were extended. Not all of these measures were bad policy, and some of them carry substantial benefits for the middle class. Nonetheless, it is undeniable that throughout the Great Recession, and particularly with regard to long-term policies involving the financial industry, one of the more prominent national political developments has been the furtherance of positions, however unpopular, that benefit and are supported by the elite.
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POLITICAL FORECASTING IS a murky business, but the state of the economy will likely determine the presidential election of 2012. The m
alaise of the 1970s, to one extent or another, cost both Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter reelection. Ronald Reagan, whose approval ratings suffered along with the economy through much of his first term, won a landslide reelection in no small part because incomes and the economy were improving extremely quickly by 1984. George H. W. Bush, whose midterm approval ratings were so high that some of the most prominent Democrats decided not to run against him, was not so lucky; recession returned in the latter half of his first and only term (the recession ended a few months before the 1992 election, but that had not yet translated into bigger paychecks when voters cast their ballots). In 1996, the economy was booming when Bill Clinton won his second term, easily dispatching Bob Dole; job growth was strong, and wages were rising.
Other factors besides the economy can of course swing elections. “Incumbent fatigue” tends to hurt the prospects of candidates who follow a two-term president from the same party; that’s one reason George W. Bush beat Al Gore by a whisker in 2000, despite a strong economy. Wars and other traumas can override economic concerns; the war on terror almost certainly boosted Bush’s reelection prospects in 2004 (economic conditions in that year were middling, on balance).
But economic conditions are usually the dominant factor in modern presidential elections. In particular, voters respond strongly to the direction of the economy during the election year. As the journalist John Judis has observed, the unemployment rate in November 1984, when Reagan won reelection, was 7.2 percent, the same as it was in July 1981, soon after he’d assumed the presidency. But in between it had been much higher. Voters didn’t punish Reagan for the high unemployment and economic contraction that encompassed much of his first term; they rewarded him for strong income growth and a falling rate of unemployment in 1984 itself. Similarly, in 1936, Franklin Delano Roosevelt was easily reelected despite an unemployment rate of about 14 percent; unemployment had been much higher in the years before.