Go read this right now
Did you see Thomas Frank’s column at Salon Today? It’s quite short and, bubbly Facebook memes notwithstanding, it’s rare to see this much wisdom packed in such a tight space.
The word is a polite one, but “inequality” is what we say when we mean to describe the ruined downtown of your city, or your constant fear that the next round of layoffs will include you, or the impeccable air conditioning of your boss’s McMansion, or the way you had to declare bankruptcy when your child got sick. It is a pleasant-sounding euphemism for the Appalachification of our world. “The defining challenge of our time”?: Oh, yes.
Give it a look.
lullaby pit 
I’m reminded of Gavin’s recent piece, Tackling poverty means that there will be more KFCs in Africa (http://scholarsandrogues.com/2014/02/03/tackling-poverty-means-that-there-will-be-more-kfcs-in-africa/)
“Maybe you don’t like what the Kenyan government is doing with their electoral authority? Did you vote for them? If you happen to be a Kenyan, and you plan to vote in the next elections, vote for someone else next time. If not, let the Kenyans figure it out for themselves.”
In this case, we’re all Kenyans. We need to stop voting for the people who create the problems in hopes that they’ll then solve them to our satisfaction. We need to take the people we elect to the mat when they sell us out by appointing the kinds of self-serving advisors and wonks they are prone to select.
I’m all for local determination when it comes to resolving these matters. Sadly, some of our locales are more inclined to a regressive approach. That should be fine, too. Let them figure it out for themselves. By that, I mean we should stop subsidizing their lousy decisions, to wit, no more taker states. When the blue states stop footing red state bills, maybe then the blue states will have more resources to dedicate to their own self determination and the red states will be forced to deal with the fruits of their decisions.
In no case should we keep letting the professional expecters who fail to expect the entirely expectable or the people who cut their checks maintain control of the decision making process.
appallachiafication. nice descriptor
you know, we on the left all say people are worse off now than in the fifties and sixties, just like those on the right say people are worse off now, but i recently read a provocative piece asking why people aren’t out in the streets? I mean, why isnt the middle class rioting? his argument was that although people may be worse off in relative terms, in absolute terms they’re better off. the cato institute has done similar work analyzing standards of living now and over the last 100 years and come to the same conclusion.
so my question, where’s the empirical proof that people are worse off, or is this just more of professor frank’s catchy but not particularly accurate rhetoric?
my suspicion is those on the right are correct and those on the left are wrong. the right is worse off and the left is better off.
the rich right probably havent seen their status change. i’d doubt the increase in wall street wealth has affected the life style of the koch brothers much, or the romneys, or the adelsons. a billion and two billion are much of a muchness, lifestyle wise.
however, for the middle class right, white men now have to compete for jobs with women and people of color, and poor whites have lost the social status that accrued to them based on race alone. many of them live in small towns hollowed out by economics and the advent of telecommunications. Further, i’d guess that the majority of those lost manufacturing jobs were felt by right-wingers (although surely some hit blacks in the urban midwest and Los angeles.) and finally, those on the right have seen their primary belief system become marginalized and laughed at. no one with a brain really takes church any more seriously than a clogging festival–a quaint artifact of another time. we have athiests on tv for goodness sake, bill maher.
meanwhile, since those of us on the left tend to be smarter and better educated (that’s empirical folks, not snottiness) and urbanized. we don’t depend on race alone for status. we’ve gotten rid of the draft so now it’s only poor (and mainly right wing) white kids who die overseas. in absolute terms, the poor blacks of today are much, much, much less poor than the poor blacks of fifty years ago. yes, the projects are bad, but they have lights, heat, toilets, and floors, which the shacks of the fifties and sixties did not. they also have tv’s, phones, and some sort of health care. there surely are people living in cars and it’s bad, but it’s really not as bad as it used to be.
so, as sincere as mr. frank’s outrage is, i suspect his scholarship doesn’t match it, and sitting in his comfortable home in the burbs of washington, the compassion he feels for the poor middle class is more likely based on fuzzy nostalgia thn actual facts.
I think much of what you say here is probably correct, although not all of it. See Frank’s comment on military service, for instance. Also, most of those lost manufacturing jobs were reliably Democratic union voters. We’re not talking about bleeding heart liberals here in many cases, but they certainly weren’t “right wingers.” Unless I’m misunderstanding your point.
Regardless, I don’t think your point really indicts what Frank is saying. He isn’t arguing that the inequality gap has targeted the left. He’s saying that a) it’s real, b) it’s pervasive, and c) the Dems need to begin explicitly talking about class in a way they’re clearly not comfortable with if they want to make any hay.
Underneath all this is the reality that we’ve noted here many times – on so many economic issues, the Democrats might as well be GOPers.
frank–minorities well represented, but that’s not the point i was trying to make. the point was that rich whites are no longer represented. in the sixties, the john kerry’s went to war. not now.
True. Which is why a lot of us believe that bringing back the draft would be a good thing. If you put the silver spoon set’s kids in harm’s way, it might calm their bloodlust a bit. Yeah, they’d still use their stroke to work around the system, but at least they’d have to try.
sam
the problem is union voters are no longer reliable democrats. when union jobs went away, the people who held those jobs didnt, but they changed voting allegiance under nixon. they are right wingers.
i stick to my point. show me the stats that say the middle class is really eroding. i’ve done the research and it’s not that easy to find. it’s easy to show that the rich are getting much richer, but not so easy to see the middle or poor getting poorer. and to the extent that is happening, i stick to my hypothesis that it’s disproportionately affecting white conservatives.
Two points. First, yes, Nixon put a dent in the Dem hold on union voters. It got worse when Reagan arrived. I thought we were talking about the traditional coalition from the New Deal to that point.
Second, I don’t know that anyone here would necessarily disagree that white conservatives are taking a big hit – perhaps even the worst of it, as you suggest. I’m just not clear why you think this is a rebuttal to the author’s point. My guess is that he’d agree with you, too. You seem to be re reading him as saying that the inequality issue is targeting Democrats. That isn’t his point at all. He’s saying that it’s targeting a segment and that the Dems need to address this looming question of class if they hope to solve the problem.
i’m saying i’m not sure his conclusion that the middle class is eroding is true.
my point about if it is true, it’s not targeting who we think is a side point and obviously i should have left it out, since it seems to have garnered more discussion than my main point.
Okay, that makes sense.
A few weeks back we had this eroding middle class discussion and found ourselves, more than anything, I think, at odds over the definition of the term. You were advancing a range that included a low end that was no way in hell in line with any kind of contextual understanding of middle class that I have ever run across. I suspect that any kind of conclusive conversation on the subject will need to first address that – and given how cost of living varies from place to place, I imagine that might be a tricky project. There is probably a dollar figure that’s pretty damned good in Lower Bama and you couldn’t live on it in Seattle, let alone SF or Boston or NY.
Then we need to see an adjusted longitudinal table of wealth. Starting postwar and going year by through until now, what percentage of people occupy that range?
I can’t help thinking that somebody out there is bound to have done this, but nothing I have seen so far fits the bill.
frank,
see my correction. bad grammar on my part. i was trying to say only poor kids, and among whites, only the poor whites. thanks for catching.
i think we live in a time when it’s not possible to raise taxes and it’s simply not possible for not-for-profits to cut costs (it’s not easy for any organization to cut costs.) in this particular case, military spending and entitlement for us old people are particularly untouchable. net, net, if you cant raise one line or lower the other, you have to do something to make the sums work.
the only option is a stealth tax, which means inflation and currency devaluation. since food is outside the cpi, this “tax” is underreported. obviously, a stealth tax of that sort disproportionately hits the middle class.
so yes, by the measure of taxation, the tax burden is being shifted to the middle class both explicitly and implicitly.
to really answer if the middle class is eroding, the right analysis would need to rigorously define the middle class and look at not only the size of the middle class but their purchasing power, lifestyle, and equally important, their opportunity set over time.
it’s a complex analysis. as lex has pointed out on this site, in the sixties most of the us population had paid health care, but doesnt today. prices are higher, but there are material differences in what we pay and what we get. in 1963, a new color tv cost $495, about 8% of income and a typical car cost about 50%. today the same numbers are 1% and 62%–electronics goods are a lot cheaper and manufactured goods a bit more expensive. however, the quality of both is hugely better.
i havent seen any real analyiss. instead, i see crap like the link below which makes the argument that the rich are getting a greater portion of additional wealth creation which must mean the midddle class is eroding. that’s exactly analogous to me arguing that because i eat more at dinner, you must get a smaller portion, which phrased like that is obvious nonsense.
it’s simply bad analysis and a foolish conclusion.
yes, we may all feel things are getting worse for the middle class, but this is one case where a good analysis would be far more helpful than gut feel, or even worse, bad analysis. i dont know the answer, but i’m certainly not convinced that the middle class is really eroding.