History lesson

For complicated reasons that I will nod at here, but may go into more deeply in days ahead, the 1970s represented the high water mark for American workers. The inequality between the richest countries, of which the U.S. was the largest and pretty much the richest, and the poorest, was at its height; but inequality in the U.S. was at its lowest. The working class as we understood it then was actually a fairly recent historical phenomenon, that emerged in the Industrial Revolution of the late 19th and developed further in the early 20th Century. For all that time, workers were immiserated. They typically worked 12 hour days, 7 days a week, and barely got by. Women and children worked as well as men. Work was dangerous, unhealthy, soul destroying. 

The trajectory of development was interrupted by two World Wars and the Great Depression, so it's not an entirely coherent story, but by the 1950s two major developments had begun to transform the status of the working class. The first was that technological development and the increase in fixed capital had greatly increased the productivity associated with each worker. (Economists speak of the "productivity of labor," but many people are misled by this term into imagining that it is a function of workers' industry and skill. Actually it's a function of the power of the machinery owned by their employers to magnify their hourly output.) The second was that workers had organized to demand an end to the system that had oppressed them. Notably during the Great Depression, this so threatened capitalists that many of them agreed with making reforms that would improve workers' status and defuse the threat of revolution.

So we got the New Deal, effective labor unions, progressive taxation, support for education and home buying -- particularly for WWII veterans. We got the massive infrastructure investments of the Eisenhower era. By the 1970s it was considered pretty much the norm that industrial workers would own their homes, that their children would have the opportunity for higher education, that they could afford to eat in restaurants and take vacations and everyone assumed their children would be better off than they were. Well okay, I'm talking about white people. 

But all that started to change. Since the 1970s, the incomes of the lowest 50% or workers have barely risen; in fact most men earn less than they did in 1980, but the decline was covered for a time by increased labor force participation and higher earnings for women. But incomes of the top 10% have risen by almost 40% and the richest people have gotten richer at an astonishing and accelerating rate. We're back to levels of inequality that last occurred before WWI. And the pain is obviously not evenly distributed. It's hit some less populous areas and parts of the Midwest the hardest, among others. And yes, people have been dying young from opioid addiction and alcoholism and suicide.

Why did this happen? Well, yes, globalization has something to do with it. American workers aren't going to be paid $40 and hour to screw TVs together when Chinese workers will do it for a tenth as much. Containerization, trade treaties, just in time inventory management, all contributed. But there are fewer low and semi-skilled jobs to be had anyway, because a) robots do much of the factory floor work and b) less of the economy consists of making stuff anyway. Companies like Facebook and Google have very little capital and their only low-skilled employees are office cleaners. In fact they have comparatively few employees at all, compared to their revenue, and the money all flows to stock owners. 

Neither the Democrats nor the Republicans did anything about this. The result is that a malignant clown who at least acknowledged it, but blamed immigrants, Black people, lesbian and gay and transgendered people, college professors, environmentalists, China, amorphous "elites," and basically everybody and anybody that some segment of the people resented or disliked, could suck up the votes of low and middle income white people; and meanwhile wealthy Republican donors knew that he wasn't really going to do anything to threaten their privilege. And he hasn't actually done a damn thing for his voters, in fact they are worse off now than they were in 2016, but that's nothing new for them. The performance blaming other powerless people is enough.