We all know that political development has taken very different turns in different places. While a link between political voice and welfare spending exists, voting rights for more people does not necessarily mean more redistribution. The relationship between the expansion of the franchise and social spending is a complex one. Even in liberal democracies, citizens do not have the right to vote separately on every single issue. They must rely on their elected representatives, who trade influence on many different issues. The United States was born out of a revolution against the concentration of power of the British monarchy and founded on the principle of equality and self-rule by the commoner. In this spirit, America from the very beginning had a much larger franchise than European nations. Universal white male suffrage came in the 1820s, but that did not lead to much redistributive taxing and spending, as Tocqueville feared would be the case. Before the Great Depression, U.S. government poor relief, for example, never exceeded 0.6 percent of the national income. And there were very few private funds directed to supporting the poor. In 1896, even the founder of the New York Charity Organization Society, Josephine Shaw Lowell, made clear that she didn’t believe in poor relief: “Their distress is due to inherent faults, either physical, mental, or moral … [R]elief is an evil—always. Even when necessary, I believe it is still an evil. One reason that it is an evil is because energy, independence, industry, and self-reliance are undermined by it.”14
Why didn’t the working poor demand more redistribution? One reason is that the early democratization of America came with its own set of problems. In the succeeding decades, the party system that emerged had to gather support from a new group of poor and uneducated voters. The promise of a job or other personal favors turned out to be the most effective way of mobilizing them. Clientelism soon became widespread at virtually every level of government. The lucrative short-term benefits offered to the working poor meant that their long-term interests suffered. Because ordinary citizens got individual favors in return for political participation, it proved much harder to recruit them into the kind of working-class or socialist parties that popped up in Europe, where people demanded more redistribution, universal health care, and so on.15 Both the Republican and Democratic Parties gained support from working-class Americans by offering short-term benefits rather than long-term policy involvement. As the historian Richard Oestreicher has argued, the rise of clientelism is one reason why socialism never arrived in America.16
The reform agenda of the Progressive Era, which ended the problem of clientelism, is not the focus here. Rather, nineteenth-century clientelism illustrates a broader point about the role of the middle class in stable democracy: poor and uneducated voters cannot achieve much politically on their own. Redistributive taxing and spending depend on whether the middle-income voters feel an affinity with people with lower incomes. Long-term divisions between middle- and lower-income voters can thus undermine the pursuit of common political goals. When inequality is rampant, as it was in the nineteenth century, there is little loyalty between the middle class and the working poor. In other words, its easiest to assemble a political coalition to compensate the losers to technological progress—or other sources of dislocation—when there is a broad middle class, and thus when there’s the least need for it. As Lindert writes, “The more a middle-income voter looks at the likely recipients of public aid and says ‘that could be me’ (or my daughter, or my whole family), the greater that voter’s willingness to vote for taxes to fund such aid.”17 A broader middle class with a different set of expectations was required to open the door for a new kind of middle-class politics.
The Great Depression ended a period of extraordinary wage growth for ordinary people. In the period 1900–28, the yearly income of full-time manufacturing workers grew by more than 50 percent. Workers in transportation and construction also experienced similar pay rises. They were reaping the gains from growth, just like the white-collar workforce above them. The Depression, as we all know, spawned the New Deal and the rise of the welfare state. But both depended on loyalty between the white-collar middle class and the working class. In the decades that followed, such loyalty only grew stronger, as the working class joined the ranks of the middle class. As Robert Putnam’s colorful descriptions of life in Port Clinton in the 1950s illustrate, “The children of manual workers and of professionals came from similar homes and mixed unselfconsciously in schools and neighborhoods, in scout troops and church groups.… Everyone knew everyone else’s first name.”18 Port Clinton was not an exception in this regard. At that time, manual workmen and their families could live on the same street as a white-collar family. Such middle-class living provided the foundation for middle-class politics. Robert Gordon explains:
This rough economic equality was a political fact of the first importance. It meant that, in a break with the drift of things in pre-war America, postwar America had no working class and no working-class politics. It instead had a middle-class politics for an expanding middle class bigger in aspiration and self-identification than it was in fact—more people wanted to be seen as middle-class than had yet arrived at that state of felicity. Socialism in America, the German political economist Werner Sombart wrote in 1906, foundered upon “roast beef and apple pie,” a metaphor for American plenty. The expanding middle class of the postwar era—property owning, bourgeois in outlook, centrist in politics—hardly proved him wrong. The clear overlap between blue-collar and white-collar ambitions and success from the 1940s until the 1970s symbolized the egalitarian experience of a diverse and stable middle class.19
Thus, when Americans came out of two tumultuous world wars and the Great Depression, they found themselves in a position where their politics were no longer sharply polarized. Workers had seen their incomes rise steadily as mechanization made their skills more valuable, and they had won greater privileges for themselves. The growing pie was divided equally between labor and capital. The postwar years were a time of rapid wage growth, steady profit growth, job security and stability, and fewer instances of labor unrest. The living standards of ordinary citizens kept rising, to the point where many workers or their children were able to afford a middle-class lifestyle. To paraphrase Fukuyama, Marx’s communist utopia failed to materialize in the industrial world because his proletariat turned into a growing middle class. The ascent of the middle class put America on a virtuous cycle, with economic and political convergence going hand in hand. More and more workers shifted into middle-income jobs, where they became more middle class in political outlook.
Writing in 1961, Robert Dahl famously began his landmark work on modern political science with the question, “In a political system where nearly every adult may vote but where knowledge, wealth, social position, access to officials, and other resources are unequally distributed, who actually governs?”20 His work examined the experience of New Haven, Connecticut, in the late 1950s, and the answer was that political power was highly dispersed. New Haven, and indeed America, was run by the middle-class median voter. And just as important, as Americans had grown closer together economically, they had also grown closer politically. In the period 1900–75, the percentage of moderate Democrats and Republicans increased in the House of Representatives and the Senate, while the number of extremists fell in both parties: “In the middle of the twentieth century, the Democrats and the Republicans did dance almost cheek to cheek in a courtship of the political middle.”21
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When the political scientist Larry Bartels recently revisited Dahl’s question, he found that its “significance … has been magnified, and the pertinence of his answer has been cast in doubt, by dramatic economic and political changes in the United States over the past half-century.”22 As economic inequality has skyrocketed in recent decades, why has not a massive upsurge in redistributive taxing and spending followed, as median voter theories predict? If there is a link between political voice and redistribution, should we not expect more of the latter? Yet since 1980, American social
expenditure on unemployment, housing, family allowances and cash benefits, and labor market programs has been stagnant as a percentage of gross domestic product.23
One possible reason could be that low-income workers might want to keep taxes low in the expectation that they will earn more later in life. However, this explanation will not do it: as we have seen, Americans are now much more pessimistic about their own prospects and those of their children than they were a generation ago. Thus, quite naturally, political scientists have begun to wonder if the pluralistic democracy that Dahl observed has not been undone by a small and increasingly wealthy elite whose members deploy their economic power to their own political advantage. A key concern is that growing economic inequality has made the political system less responsive to the needs of ordinary citizens, which in turn has solidified economic inequality. As the middle class has shrunk, the number of moderate members of Congress has fallen sharply, and politics has become polarized: “Conservative and liberal have become almost perfect synonyms for Republican and Democrat.”24 The relationship between economic and political polarization has aptly been characterized as a “dance” with much back and forth. Economic inequality feeds political polarization and vice versa, making it harder to redress inequality that may arise from nonpolitical changes in technology, trade, compensation practices, and so on.25
Another related concern is that the growing concentration of wealth is undermining the legitimacy of democracy. Expensive political campaigns, for example, have increased the reliance of elected officials on people with economic power. Yet the diminishing political voice of average working Americans has been driven by a much broader set of interests than those of a few wealthy individuals. More worrying is the fact that corporate spending on lobbying has greatly increased while membership of labor unions has fallen, “eroding the primary mechanism for organized representation of working people in the governmental process.”26 As an illustrative example, consider the erosion of the minimum wage. We know from a wealth of survey evidence that there is long-standing and broad support to increase it, among both Democrats and Republicans. During the 2006 and 2008 election campaigns, the Cooperative Congressional Election Study asked almost 70,000 Americans whether they favored or opposed raising the minimum wage. Among Democrats, 95 percent were in favor, almost regardless of their earnings. Among low-income Republicans, about 75 percent favored raising the minimum wage, while only 45 percent of those earning more than $150,000 per year were in favor. This is just one of many such surveys, and “the breadth and consistency of public support for raising the minimum wage make it all the more surprising that the real value of the minimum wage has declined so substantially since the 1960s.”27 However, as the journalist Marilyn Geewax has noted, despite favorable opinion polls, few voters ever contact their elected representatives about the issue, while “restaurateurs and small-business owners were organized, energized and informed by top-notch lobbyists who never stopped telling Congress that higher wages would cut profits and limit the ability to create jobs.”28 In addition, the decline of organized labor has hardly made the case of labor easier. Analyzing the correlates of year-to-year fluctuations in the real minimum wage in the period 1949–2013, Bartels shows that the real value of the minimum wage has been 40–55 cents higher under Democratic presidents than Republican ones. Yet the fates of the minimum wage supporters, he finds, have been even more dependent on organized labor.29
The point is not that raising the minimum wage would be the best way of addressing workers’ concerns. Higher minimum wages also spur efforts to automate, suggesting that its benefits for labor might be short-lived.30 However, Bartels’s analysis illustrates a broader point, which is that the failure to raise the minimum wage, despite widespread support, suggests that workers are losing political influence. Unionization, as we all know, was at a high point in the mid-1950s, when factory and office machines made the skills of non-college-educated workers more valuable and thereby increased their earning power. This also made the unions stronger, though there were cases (for example, with lamplighters and longshoremen) when technology made workers’ skills–and thus the unions representing them—obsolete. Yet their members were a mere fraction of the working population. The single largest industry in the mid-twentieth century was automotive, and the United Auto Workers (UAW) union achieved significant benefits for its members, including higher wages, generous pensions, and health insurance, while conceding to management decisions regarding mechanization and other key capital investments. In 1950, UAW’s president, Walter Reuther, negotiated what Fortune magazine would call “the Treaty of Detroit” with General Motors and made similar deals with Ford and Chrysler, protecting car companies from strikes while gaining higher pay and more holidays for its members in return, among other things. These deals also influenced collective bargaining in many other mass-production industries of the Second Industrial Revolution. But as the sociologist Andrew Cherlin writes:
Whereas the 1950s workers, backed by their powerful unions, trusted management enough to pledge uninterrupted labor on the assembly line in return for good wages and the promise of retirement pensions down the road, today’s workers and employers do not trust each other to pledge much of anything.… The power of unions has faded: the overwhelming majority of less-educated young adults do not work in a place where a union has successfully organized. Absent an agreement between labor and management, young adults have neither the right to decent wages and benefits nor the obligation to be loyal workers.… It is as though the 1950s Treaty of Detroit, so lauded by Walter Reuther and other leaders of organized labor at the time, has been replaced by pervasive distrust.31
In the mid-twentieth century, trade unions were an institution that gave workers a coherent political voice and created social ties among the unskilled. For example, Putnam has persuasively argued that workers’ social capital has declined as union membership has dropped.32 What’s more, the type of workers represented by unions has changed as well. When union density was at its peak in the 1950s and 1960s, union members were relatively unskilled. Now union members are just as skilled as nonmembers.33
A similar shift away from representing the unskilled can also be observed in party politics. In the 1950s and 1960s, the non-college-educated members of the middle class constituted the base support for left-wing political parties. Indeed, drawing upon postelectoral surveys, Thomas Piketty has shown that in those decades, left-wing parties in France, Britain, and America favored greater redistribution and were elected by voters with limited education. But afterward traditionally labor-supporting social-democratic parties have become associated with voters who have more education. In the 2000s and 2010s, Piketty argues, this shift gave rise to a multiple-elite party system, in which highly educated elites now vote for the new left, whereas the wealthy vote for the right.34
Thus, the unskilled have become increasingly detached from the main political parties. Labor unions, which gave workers additional bargaining power and political voice while facilitating social ties among the unskilled, are in decline. At the same time, the impact of cognitive segregation is that symbolic analysts are less likely to have firsthand knowledge of the lives of the working class because they do not see each other in the communities in which they live. Increasing economic segregation has meant that the unskilled have become more and more detached from those who have prospered, which explains why political preferences have also become polarized along geographic lines.35
Globalization, Automation, and Populism
Elected officials have become unresponsive to the concerns of millions of unskilled citizens, leaving their political interests unserved or ignored. A year before General Motors closed its plant in Janesville, Wisconsin, in 2008, President Barack Obama gave a spirited speech at the factory, suggesting that “this plant will be here for another hundred years.”36 After its closure, the chairman of Obama’s White House Council on Automotive Communities and Workers paid one visit to Janesville but failed to off
er any significant help or relief. When Obama told a cheering crowd that “the auto industry is back on top” at a campaign rally in Madison in 2012, the citizens of Janesville who happened to see him on the news must have wondered what he was talking about. To paraphrase Amy Goldstein, those words would have been hard to repeat in Janesville.37
Populism and identity politics have been fueled by diminishing economic opportunity for the unskilled and the lack of a political response to their concerns. During the 2016 presidential election, Donald Trump infuriated just about every conceivable group except perhaps one: the white working class. It has been argued that the election outcome was a result of anxiety about the future status of white Americans as the dominant group rather than about the consequence of economic hardships. As the political scientist Diana C. Mutz puts it, “In many ways, a sense of group threat is a much tougher opponent than an economic downturn, because it is a psychological mindset rather than an actual event or misfortune.”38 However, this explanation ignores the fact that white Americans are seeing themselves, and their identity, threatened because of fading opportunity in the labor market. The working class was always more than an economic category—it was a cultural phenomenon, too. In the manufacturing era, industrial male workers had to find ways of taking pride in monotonous toil on a factory’s assembly line. Their solution, the sociologist Michèle Lamont has convincingly argued, was to construct an identity as “the disciplined self.”39 It took discipline to get up early each morning, go to a factory, and perform the same routine job hour after hour, day after day. And it took discipline to be a family breadwinner, bringing home a paycheck every week of the year. When Lamont interviewed blue-collar men in the 1990s, she also found that they sharply contrasted their own type of discipline with that of other groups of Americans. The college-educated elites or symbolic analysts were perceived as untrustworthy. Blue-collar Americans believed that those people lacked integrity and would do anything to move up in the ranks. Blue-collar whites also distanced themselves from the black population, whose members they believed lacked discipline and too often lived on welfare.
The Technology Trap Page 31