The “whiteness” associated with the working class has historical roots. In the words of Cherlin:
Many unions did not recruit black members, and even among unions that did, the local chapters were often segregated. When the American Federation of Labor (AFL) became the most powerful union organization in the 1890s, its leader, Samuel Gompers, urged its member unions to admit blacks so that employers could not use low-paid black workers to weaken the position of white workers. But the Federation did little to back up its rhetoric, and a number of important unions, such as the National Association of Machinists, were allowed to join the Federation even though they refused to admit black members. It was a fateful choice. In this way, “working-class” became a term that had the connotation of whiteness, which it retained throughout the nineteenth century and much of the twentieth century.40
In Rust Belt cities and townships, where joblessness is now widespread, the “disciplined self” identity has become harder to maintain, making dormant grievances come alive. We know from a wide range of studies that relative income matters in shaping people’s aspirations and subjective well-being.41 White blue-collar workers felt that they had moved up in the world, but now they feel that they have been left behind. As shown by the General Social Survey, there are considerable racial differences in how people perceive the recent past as well as in their optimism or pessimism about the future. Since 1994, the survey has asked Americans questions like, “Compared to your parents when they were the age you are now, do you think your own standard of living now is much better, somewhat better, about the same, somewhat worse, or much worse than theirs was?” Among non-college-educated citizens, the percentage of negative responses among blacks has decreased since 1994, while negative responses among whites has risen dramatically.42 This shift in attitudes can go a long way toward explaining Trump’s appeal among white working-class voters:
Among less-educated workers, racial tensions remain. White workers, without realizing it, are drawing upon a long history of animosity toward black workers. To be sure, the overt racism of late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century industrialization—a time when white unions largely resisted the incorporation of African Americans—has greatly diminished. Civil rights legislation, changing attitudes, and increased education are among the factors that have improved the relative position of African American workers. No one could imagine a union leader today issuing the kind of blanket denunciation of the “Negro race” that was common in 1900. Nevertheless, there is still a connection between whiteness and the working class.… The white men we interviewed saw the deterioration in their labor market prospects compared to the previous generation, and they were right. In an environment in which overall opportunities for blue-collar labor are constricting, white workers perceive black progress as an unfair usurpation of opportunities rather than as a weakening of the privileged racial position they held.43
We all know that Trump’s campaign involved many racial provocations as well as attacks on America’s elites. His appalling rhetoric was surely appealing to some, and there can be no doubt that he was speaking to the working-class identity that Lamont described in her study. Of course, much of the Trump campaign centered on issues like immigration. But would his tactics have been so successful if there had been well-paying jobs in abundance for the unskilled and their wages were rising? By any account, technology and globalization have played a quantitatively larger role in putting downward pressure on unskilled people’s wages than immigration has: on the contrary, the evidence shows that immigration has boosted employment, innovation, and productivity without having any significant adverse impacts on the wages of the unskilled.44 And the slogan “Make America Great Again” clearly targeted people in the smokestack cities and towns of the Second Industrial Revolution that once flourished but are now in despair. Take, for example, social mobility. Virtually every citizen cares deeply about his or her chances of realizing the American dream. But people’s prospects of moving up the income ladder greatly depends on where they happen to grow up. Among America’s largest cities, the probability that a child born into a family in the bottom quintile of the national income distribution will reach the top quintile varies between 4.4 percent in Charlotte, North Carolina, and 12.9 percent in San Jose, California.45 (While 12.9 percent may seem low, intergenerational mobility by quintile cannot exceed 20 percent: if there is a 20 percent chance that a child born into the bottom quintile will move into the top quintile, its chances are just as good as those of any other child.) The cities of the American South, with their long history of racial segregation, still have the lowest rates of social mobility in the country. But in manufacturing cities like Cleveland, Ohio, and Detroit and Grand Rapids, Michigan, workers’ prospects of climbing the economic ladder have become almost as dismal. What drives such inequalities of opportunity? The places where the American dream has turned into a nightmare have a few things in common: many children grow up in single-parent households, crime is widespread in the community, income disparities are large, and the middle class has withered. In short, they suffer from many of the social ills that we saw characterized in Charles Murray’s Fishtown.
Blue-collar Americans have much to be unhappy about. As noted above, they have felt a blow to family finances, some have experienced divorce, and others are in deteriorating health. It is true that Trump voters were a mixed bag, with an overrepresentation of high-income earners, but many economists believe that economic distress across working-class white Americans—those who have seen their jobs taken by machines or the Chinese—swung the election for him. This explanation is not just appealing because it is intuitive; it is also empirically grounded. Globalization made American politics more polarized even before the days of Trumpism. Ideological extremists in Congress have gained more votes where the labor market prospects for the unskilled have deteriorated. Since China’s admission to the World Trade Organization in 2001, Congressional districts exposed to the forces of globalization have been more likely to replace moderate incumbents with more ideologically extreme successors in both parties.46 Of course, Trump made globalization a key plank of his campaign, and unsurprisingly he also enjoyed the greatest gains—relative to George W. Bush’s 2000 results—in areas most exposed to Chinese imports.47 But while globalization is the most frequently cited villain, automation has also helped shatter the communities of the so-called blue-collar’s aristocracy. Even if production is brought back to the United States, it will not replace the vast numbers of jobs for non-college-educated members of the middle class that have been lost to the process of deindustrialization. The computer revolution, which has also been an underlying facilitator of globalization, has meant diminishing opportunity for the unskilled across the board: routine work is now disappearing in parts of the developing world as well.48
In America, this process has been going on for decades, yet it was hidden by other factors. Though many blue-collar men have seen their incomes decline in real terms, family incomes were still rising for some, as more and more women joined the workforce. Women helped offset the work deficit among men up until 2000, when the growth in female labor force participation was reversed. But there was still another source of relief: the everyday consequences of technological change for the middle class were counterbalanced by subsidized mortgages for low-income households, which meant that consumption was broadly unaffected even as incomes fell. This was made possible by the flow of liquidity from China, leaving even unskilled Americans under the illusion that their standards of living were rising until the housing bubble burst in 2007.49 In addition, the housing boom masked the vanishing of industrial jobs for the unskilled as a growing abundance of construction jobs simultaneously pushed in the other direction. The Great Recession, in other words, revealed the long-term disappearance of routine blue-collar jobs that had been hidden by excessive cheap credit and the consequent housing bubble.50
To be sure, the recession itself also directly led to job loss across the country. But
in areas where factories closed, unemployment has fallen since. The problem is that while many jobs have returned, well-paying jobs have not. Amy Goldstein’s brilliant account of citizens’ postrecession experience in Janesville, where General Motors closed its factory in 2008, describes the state of the town as follows:
So, seven and a half years after the Great Recession technically ended, how is Janesville faring? Surprisingly well, or not, depending on how you measure. By the most recent count, unemployment in Rock County has slid remarkably to just under 4 percent, the lowest level since the start of the century. As many people are working now as just before the Great Recession; distribution centers have arrived, Beloit plants such as ones for Frito-Lay and Hormel Foods have been hiring, and some people are working further away. Good news. But not everyone who now has a job is earning enough for the comfortable life they expected. Real wages in the county have fallen since the assembly plant shut down.… For the moment, the big job news is that Dollar General has decided to put a distribution center on the south side of town. The city government is providing an $11.5 million package of economic incentives—a new Janesville record. The workforce that Dollar General says it will need—about 300 at first and perhaps 550 eventually—will bring the biggest hiring spurt in years. Most of the jobs will pay $15 or $16 per hour—far below the $28 wage GM’ers were being paid when the plant closed, but decent enough money in town these days. In a sign of a lingering hunger for work or better pay, when Dollar General held a recent job fair, three thousand people showed up.51
Janesville is not an isolated example. Across the Rust Belt, middle-income jobs have not come back, and with recent advances in automation technology, it seems increasingly unlikely that they will. In 2017, the Washington Post ran a story on Wilmington, Ohio—a predominantly white town that in 1995 had been featured in Norman Crampton’s The 100 Best Small Towns in America.52 Trump had visited Wilmington twice during his campaign, and that had paid off. Wilmington had turned into a place where making America great again had become an expectation rather than just a slogan. When the German freight company DHL packed up and left Wilmington in 2008, 7,000 jobs disappeared from a town with a population of 12,500. Michael O’Machearley, who makes custom knives in his backyard, now earns half of what he did before he was laid off from his DHL shipping job in 2008. But considering the circumstances, he thinks that he has been doing well. As he explains, “There were people in this town that went through divorces because of it [the DHL closure], that lost their homes because of it. You couldn’t sell a house in this town for any kind of money.… Our downtown used to be a precious place. It died.”53 The big hope in town is that Wilmington might become an Amazon shipping and distribution hub. The problem, O’Machearley tells us, is that they “won’t hire the same amount of people because they use a lot of robots.”54
O’Machearley did not lose his job to automation. But he was right in thinking that robots have meant fewer and fewer available jobs for unskilled workers who suffer bad luck. Had he lost his job in the peak postwar years, when well-paying jobs for the unskilled were abundant, things would not have been as harsh. Before the age of automation, workers accepted the churn in the labor market with the expectation that they would eventually come out ahead. Yet it has become less likely that they will today. In Ohio, a state that Trump won in a landslide, 350,000 factory jobs have disappeared since 2000, and the middle class has shrunk more than in perhaps any other state. Health care has become the largest employer, but jobs in that sector often pay less than the production jobs that disappeared. The median yearly income has dropped from $57,748 in 2000 to $49,308 in 2015, adjusting for inflation. One reason is that Ohio is second only to Michigan in terms of the number of robots operating in its factories.
As noted above, since the Great Recession, the number of robots in America’s factories has grown by 50 percent. The robot revolution is largely a Rust Belt phenomenon, and this is also where Trump made the greatest gains for the Republican Party. The Rust Belt, which swung the election for him, used to be part of what pundits and political analysts call the Blue Wall—that is, safe Democratic states. Not every manufacturing town there voted for Trump. But electoral districts specializing in industries that have invested heavily in automation overwhelmingly did. Whether voters had found their jobs taken over by robots or simply faced diminishing outside opportunities as a consequence, they were more likely to support Trump. My research with Thor Berger and Chinchih Chen shows that Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin would have swung in favor of Hillary Clinton, leaving the Democratic Party with a majority, had the number of robots in America’s factories not increased since the 2012 election. We accounted for a variety of alternative explanations, including globalization and immigration. While counterfactuals must always be taken with a grain of salt, there is clearly a relationship between levels of automation and voting patterns, which provides a powerful explanation for why the three states—which went Democratic in every presidential election since 1992—ended up being won by Trump.55
The role of technological progress in triggering protests is thus as salient today as it was in the early nineteenth century. As was the case then, protest recently has been driven by fundamental concerns over fading opportunity in the labor market. As Toke Aidt, Gabriel Leon, and Max Satchell argue in a recent study, “The current situation of ex-miners in the north of England and factory workers in the American Midwest is not unlike that of rural farm workers made redundant by the adoption of threshing machines in the early 1830s.”56 But the authors also show that while the Captain Swing riots were driven by concerns that threshing machines would take people’s jobs, there was also significant contagion when potential rioters in one parish learned about riots in neighboring parishes—which suggests that information flows exacerbated workers’ concerns.57 Such contagion is much greater today. The Swing riots predated the construction of the railroads and the telegraph network (meaning that information had to travel by foot, horseback, or carriage), so contagion primarily occurred through meetings at markets and fairs. In the age of social media, by contrast, the information diffusion process has dramatically speeded up. And as is well known, the artificial intelligence used by Facebook and other companies learns about its users’ preferences and thus reinforces their political beliefs and prejudices. Social media undoubtedly became an important channel that allowed the Trump campaign to tap into people’s discontents, as the Cambridge Analytica scandal bears witness, but it was not in itself the cause of people’s concerns.
The New Luddites
Globalization has moved to center stage of the political debate. During the 2016 U.S. presidential election, Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump both made blistering assaults on trade agreements a main theme of their campaigns. Trump’s win was in part attributable to the adverse impacts of trade on parts of the labor market, and it stands to reason that his campaign promises to renegotiate trade deals, which he claimed had benefited other countries at the expense of American workers, appealed to those who felt that they had lost out to globalization. His assaults on trade were surely excessive, but there is no question that many manual workers and their families have felt the consequences of low-cost competition intensely—especially since China’s admission to the World Trade Organization (WTO). Globalization did not lift all of the boats, but neither did automation. As the economist Dani Rodrik writes, “Globalization was hardly the only shock which gutted established social contracts. By all accounts, automation and new digital technologies played a quantitatively greater role in de-industrialization and in spatial and income inequalities.”58
Rodrik also offers a powerful explanation for why globalization has become the political target that automation has not. “What gives trade particular political salience,” he argues, “is that it often raises fairness concerns in ways that the other major contributor to inequality—technology—does not.”59 Inequality is more problematic when it occurs due to unfair competition. When a better technology
makes an old one obsolete, nobody has reason to complain: “Banning the light bulb because candle makers would lose their jobs strikes almost everyone as a silly idea.”60 But when a firm competes by outsourcing production to countries where firms compete according to different ground rules—where labor’s bargaining rights are repressed and child labor is prevalent, undercutting the social contract and institutional arrangements of Western nations—opposition is more likely. Though globalization and automation have hit the same people, they feel less sanguine about trade, because firms in countries like China and Vietnam violate trade rules and compete on terms that would be illegal under American laws and regulations. Trade, in other words, is not problematic just because it redistributes income. Almost every policy intervention or market transaction does that in some way. Technological progress has been a source of ceaseless churn in the labor market for more than two centuries. But, as Rodrik writes, “when we expect the redistributive effects to even out in the long run, so that everyone eventually comes out ahead, we are more likely to overlook reshufflings of income. That is a key reason why we believe that technological progress should run its course, despite its short-run destructive effects on some.”61
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