American Bounty
This week Americans travel home for Thanksgiving. In spite of inclement weather forecasts, a record eighty million people will be on the move. Families will reconnect, turkey will be eaten, football will be watched. Traditionally we thank God for the extraordinary bounty of this country.
But many of us are right now feeling the ache of an election that divided us existentially. Nearly half of those who voted believe that the country is in danger: the stated determination of Donald Trump, the great disrupter, to throw into disarray institutions that have safeguarded this two-hundred-and-fifty-year experiment in democracy is a heartache. We are grieving. Those who voted for him did not necessarily like him – though some did. But a common thread among his supporters was a sense of desperation with things as they are.
We hope this Thanksgiving time will help us affirm all that we love and to deepen our connections with things and people that matter to us.
Why did the Democrats lose? Kamala Harris has largely been credited for running an excellent campaign, and her debate performance against Donald Trump on September 10 was remarkably good. Her weaknesses were that she did not address the immigration crisis and the economy adequately. She ran on democracy and abortion, and those proved not to be enough.
She was hampered by the process by which she became the nominee. By announcing before he chose her as his vice-presidential candidate in 2020 that he intended to choose a woman, Joe Biden made it hard for her to shake off an aura of his “diversity” choice. This tainted her in the eyes of the right, who have made what they call “wokeness” and “cultural Marxism” and “diversity, equity and inclusion” (DEI) the butt of their disparagement. Mr. Biden’s failure to bow out of the race a year earlier denied us Democratic primaries where candidates would have been tested. Then there is the fact that it has been extremely rare for a vice-president to follow their sitting president into office. George H.W. Bush did it in the 1988 election. The president who did it before Bush was Martin Van Buren in 1836. This is because it is so difficult to defend the record of your predecessor while trying to assert your distinctive potential. All this in addition to Harris having to overcome standard prejudices about a black female candidate.
Harris was also seriously hampered by the Democratic Party’s more longstanding confusion over its essence and role. The Democratic Party has come to represent the meritocracy of the elite, and in the process, the party has lost its attunement with working people and its traditional primary focus on the disadvantaged. Instead, its emphasis on cultural identity as an approach to empowerment has taken that to extremes, as seen with transgender issues that do not resonate with large numbers and make the party seem out of touch. In a country that has shifted to the right since 1980, Democrats have seen their passion for economic equality trashed as “Marxism” by the other party. The trick is to find a left-of-center position that resonates with a country whose composite national outlook falls to the right-of-center.
Of course, a party that feels no inhibitions about lying or about indulging in crowd-pleasing denigration is, unfortunately, going to have an advantage. Trump created and played on fear. He trumped up beliefs that the illegal immigrants of this country are taking jobs away from others who want them and making people unsafe, even though crime rates of immigrants are generally low. His reported intention to deport large numbers of illegal immigrants who have not committed crimes will draw down on numbers working in agriculture and contribute to rising food prices.
But the key point about the Trump victory is that Trump was able to appeal to a very large and disaffected group who believe they have been left out when it comes to sharing in the purpose, culture and bounty of this country.
People were incensed about inflation, but the problem was greater than that. In the years since 1981, the gap between the rich and poor in America has brutally widened. Wages have remained stagnant, while tax deductions for the wealthy have increased exponentially. In 2021, America’s richest 1 percent of households averaged 139 times as much income as the bottom 20 percent, according to the Congressional Budget Office. Trade unions have all but disappeared. Ronald Reagan’s administration removed regulation of guardrails on companies and limitations on stock buybacks. NAFTA (passed in the Clinton administration) encouraged sending basic industries overseas, leaving whole towns in the midwest with no livelihood. It was also on Bill Clinton’s watch that welfare ceased to be an open-ended entitlement from the federal government. Instead, money is now given as block grants to states, which distribute it according to their own formulas, often including a requirement that a person be working in order to get welfare. The new system introduced caps on length of time aid could be given and fines for those who did not comply with aspects of the regulations.
Former Secretary of Labor, Robert Reich, brought to America’s attention a few days ago that General Motors just last week laid off 1,000 workers, having laid off 1,500 workers last summer. The company mumbled that their bottom line could not meet the costs of paying these workers, but Reich reports that GM’s profits for this year will surpass its 2022 record profit of $14.5 billion. GM CEO Mary Barra’s compensation for 2024 is slated to be $27.8 million, making the ratio of her compensation to that of the average worker 303:1.
Historians tell us that revolutions happen not when things reach their worst but when things start getting better. At that point expectations rise, and then when things don’t continue to improve, people protest. The pandemic, interestingly, has ended up helping many in the workforce who benefitted from the hiatus during which they had federal assistance and were freed up to look for better paying jobs. Large numbers have moved from the service industry (restaurants, hotels, et cetera) into tech, which grew enormously during the pandemic. This raised expectations and gave people more sense of power, enhancing their hopes for more.
But the lives of those at the very bottom of the economic ladder may well have been permanently disrupted by the pandemic. COVID-19 mortality rates affected the economically disadvantaged disproportionately. Millions of Americans in the lower socio-economic tier are still suffering that psychological shock, as well as experiencing a disruption of the fragile economic balance of their lives. Government handouts during the pandemic reduced the poverty rate on the short term. Trump instituted those handouts, but it was left to Biden to end them once COVID-19 had receded. He had to do it, but he did it just as inflation was hotting up.
All of the above provides some background to the anger and the welcoming of disruptive populist politics we saw during the presidential election on November 5.
Will Donald Trump be able to meet the expectations of those who elected him? Right now, we don’t yet know which of his policy promises will come to fruition in his administration. Cabinet nominations indicate that in most cases loyalty to himself is a more important criterion than experience with the substance of the position. Six of his nominees had a role in preparing the Heritage Foundation’s 2025 Project, a policy blueprint for the new administration that reorganizes the federal bureaucracy to further a conservative agenda, greatly enhancing the powers of the presidency. It encourages Mr. Trump in his plan to fire as many as 50,000 civil servants in the federal government and designate their jobs as political appointments, thus allowing him to fill the bureaucracy with more loyal followers. Mr. Trump promises to place tariffs on imports from Canada, Mexico, and China on day one – an action that will result in further inflation. He also promises to lower corporate taxes from 21 percent to 15 percent, further enriching the wealthy.
Mr. Trump’s promise to improve the economic lives of working people seems unlikely to be achieved with such policies.
Privileged Americans have always been able to be complacent about the bounty and possibilities of this country. But in a country whose ethos of self-help seems bottomless, the disinclination to use government to redistribute resources has been a no-no written into the culture. This is a country founded, in the minds of many people, on an idea that freedom consists of minimal government action. Inroads into this mindset were made during the period bookended by Franklin Roosevelt and Lyndon Johnson. Subsequently the pushback has been enormous, making Barack Obama’s success in passing a broader health insurance system that still left over twenty million uninsured a near miracle. What this election has made clear is that working people see through intellectualized notions of empowerment. They respond to words that resonate with their experience.
As we approach this Thanksgiving Day, we are thankful that our recent election occurred without violence. We recognize anew that our precious democracy requires participation and vigilance from all of us and we prepare ourselves to discover new ways to do that. And we ask ourselves, at a time when the frustrations of our workforce have been brought before us afresh, can we imagine a country that can redefine itself from being a self-help, me-first collective that denies its obligations to those left behind, to a country determined to allow everyone to thrive?