The Demand for Populism in the Imaginary Age of Anxiety
I read Ross Douthat’s new Atlantic article on the electoral opportunity open to the Democrats as a chance to characterize the Democratic “threat” in a way that makes Douthat’s conservative “populist” alternative look like an attractive counter-strategy for ‘08 Republicans in the market for advisers.
The pressure of continued outsourcing may also increase the public’s appetite for a smart left populism, as even well-educated workers—in fields from financial services to health care—begin to face stiff competition from overseas. In this landscape, it’s easy to imagine the middle-class anxiety that the political scientist Jacob Hacker termed “office-park populism” defining the domestic debate over the next 20 years, and easy to imagine a Democratic majority that capitalizes on the opportunity.
The phrase “easy to imagine” has all the virtues of theft over honest toil. It is “easy to imagine” that the Kaiser won the Great War and that I’m writing in German (and a pith helmet). Likewise, it is easy to imagine Jacob Hacker’s now-largely-discredited thesis of income volatility and our current cyclical financial worries defining domestic politics in a generation, but why would we bother to imagine it? Let’s imagine instead the centrality of the coming “robot gap” in American politics.
There is good evidence that many Americans just now are worried about the economy and find it hard to pay off debt, as this Harris Poll shows. But, on the other hand, this doesn’t seem to be breeding the kind of discontent likely to push a populist to power. According to another very recent Harris Poll, the level of overall satisfaction is up since 2003, well over half of Americans say their life situation has improved over the last few years, and nearly 2/3 expect it to improve over the next five. Some of this pretty clearly has an economic component. When broken down according to generation, Gen X-ers, like me, (ages 31-42, according to Harris) were most likely to report improvement in their life situation over the past five years, and this is likely because we saw the largest wage gains in that period as many of us finished the 20s transition from entry-level to mid- and upper-level positions. By contrast the oldest cohort–either holding steady in late career, or retired–was least likely to report an gain in life satisfaction over the last half-decade. Sensibly enough, the young group Harris calls the “Echo Boomers” (aka “Gen Y” — ages 18-30), slightly edges out X-ers as most likely to expect improvement in their life situation. The level and trend of American life satisfaction looks so rosy and expectations for future improvement are so high, that it is hard for me to see how a populist politics is supposed to hit takeoff velocity, or how Democrats are supposed to capitalize on some kind of alleged trend of high anxiety that never seems to materialize in the numbers.
Economic anxiety is cyclical. Housing market aside, the current economic indicators look good. I’ll be surprised if the public isn’t pretty happy with its economic lot in a year or so–and especially when Bush is clearing brush full time. In any case, conservatives don’t need to think right-wing populism is just the thing to stave off left-wing populism, since left-wing populism built on some elusive but magically potent middle class economic anxiety is about as authentic a threat as Osama’s caliphate.
August 30th, 2007 11:05
It doesn’t seem obvious that the life situation numbers you’re citing are the most relevant facts here. Isn’t it possible that I both find my life situation to be improving as I age, and move to a better job, but also be angry at the thought that my lot is overall worse than my parents’?
This may well be true of a lot of people in my generation who are moving up in the world, but still lack healthcare or face worse job prospects than our parents’ generation did.
August 30th, 2007 11:32
My parents didn’t have iPods, HDTV, broadband internet access, etc., at my age, and neither did yours.
Most people are in a much better situation than their parents were, and their prospects are dramatically better. Few would choose to trade places (losing years now, or going back in time and losing technology).
It’s easy to find comparisons to anger one, if he’s inclined to look for those things and to get angry about them. But, I don’t think that there’s any public policy that’s going to solve such people’s problems.
It’s true that some of them don’t know it. But it’s also true that many people (and more will come to) realize that trade makes us better off, generally; and protectionism is for losers.
August 30th, 2007 15:58
I’m certainly anti-protectionism, but this issue is mostly about the perceptions of the electorate. I think they’d say the idea that while iPods are fantastic, issues like their salary relative to the costs of housing and healthcare are more fundamental.
August 31st, 2007 17:45
Why are you so quick to dismiss the looming Robot Gap! We need a new Manhattan Project to address it! And a Marshall Plan!
September 2nd, 2007 01:59
“My parents didn’t have iPods, HDTV, broadband internet access, etc., at my age, and neither did yours. Most people are in a much better situation than their parents were, and their prospects are dramatically better.”
You know, there’s really more to life than iPods … such as houses in good school districts with reasonable commutes so you can afford to have children before you’re 40. On the crucial metric of “affordable family formation” are we really better off?
September 2nd, 2007 18:31
Yes.
Are we biased against realizing it?
Yes.
September 3rd, 2007 20:51
[...] follows up on the debate over his latest Atlantic piece on future Democratic electoral prospects, and he explains [...]
September 3rd, 2007 23:09
“My parents didn’t have iPods, HDTV, broadband internet access, etc., at my age, and neither did yours.”
At my age, my parents had a family car and a truck for hauling supplies. The car was ten years old, making it the “new” car. The truck was older.
They had one TV, black and white with VHF only. You watched what the Big 3 gave you, or you read a book. (We had lots of books, many 40 years old or more.) Or you could listen to the radio. (Radios were cheap, so everybody had one.)
They had two phones, but only because Dad salvaged one thrown away at the factory. Those two phones shared one land line. It hadn’t been a party line in nearly a decade, so we thought it was pretty cool. On the other hand, long distance cost so much that it was reserved for a five minute call at holidays.
Maybe once a month, if we were very good, we might go out to eat — meaning we stopped at McDonald’s and ate in the car. Otherwise, meals were at home, hand made by Mom (or by Dad, depending on the night). A lot of the food was grown in our own garden. The beef was usually from a side of beef we purchased from a friend with a dairy farm, and stuck in a giant freezer all year. Mom canned lots of vegetables, pickles, and jams and jellies.
To make ends meet, Dad worked a lot of overtime, plus some moonlighting jobs that kept him out late nights.
So when I read this…
“You know, there’s really more to life than iPods … such as houses in good school districts with reasonable commutes so you can afford to have children before you’re 40. On the crucial metric of “affordable family formation” are we really better off?”
…I have to wonder if the families who can’t afford houses in good school districts with reasonable commutes might have more income for those purposes if they simply lived what was a common middle class lifestyle of the 70s.
I’m not saying anyone HAS TO live that way; but since we were healthy and happy and not particularly deprived, then that’s a decent standard of living. Anyone whose lifestyle is a lot higher than that — more and newer cars, more electronic toys, more DVDs and just more stuff — is choosing a set of nonessential luxuries. That may prevent them from choosing another set of nonessential luxuries, such as “houses in good school districts with reasonable commutes so you can afford to have children before you’re 40.” But that’s a choice, not a hardship forced on them by the economy.
September 3rd, 2007 23:16
Martin, you’ve really got to the heart of the matter.
September 3rd, 2007 23:16
Steve Sailor, you have every opportunity to relocate to a house near good schools and get a new job there that has full benefits. You are simply unwilling to try. Assuming you’re an American, that fact alone means that your ancestors, who lived in inconceivable poverty compared with you and who certainly could not have imagined the material wealth that you are taking for granted, were not afraid to take far, far greater risks.
Gil is absolutely right.
September 3rd, 2007 23:49
“that I’m writing in German (and a pith helmet)”
I think you’re thinking of a pickelhaube (spiked helmet.)
But seriously…
Will, you’re on target here about the improbability of a populist strategy, and Martin has it exactly right. He is describing the reality if what is now recalled as the Golden Age of working-class life. And yeah, you had health insurance — but when you got to the doctor they couldn’t cure much beyond bacterial infections and basic surgery. Heart problems involving surgery, cancer of any kind, organ failures — they pretty much just sent you home to recover or die, mostly the latter
September 4th, 2007 00:28
I grew up in relative affluence- we weren’t wealthy, but we had a nice house, two used cars, and enough money to pay tuition at a girl’s school for my sister and I. My husband and I have all that my parents have and more, even as a single income family. We have better health insurance, money set aside for the kids for college, and our cars were new when we got them.
There are real strains on family income- a recent report showed that many families local and state taxes have increased dramatically over the last 20 years- but in some cases I think that our parents generation was better off simply because they lived more modestly, so they had less to worry about.
September 4th, 2007 05:39
When I grew up in the 60’s and 70’s, mmost families had one car, no cable TV, no air conditioning, and homes had about 1/2 the square footage per person as today.
I think if people today who are struggling with debt would adopt the type of lifestyle that was considered normal about 40 years ago, they would soon find themselves with large savings accounts.
September 4th, 2007 08:52
While I’m sympathetic to the argument, it feels to me like you’re hanging a lot on this one poll which for all we know is too eccentric to be useful for anything other than newspaper filler. It would be interesting to look at the correlation of this poll with GDP or other indicators over the past 20 or so years to see whether it tracks economic wellbeing in a meaningful fashion.
The other problem I have here is that people neither marry nor vote by reason alone, or perhaps even primarily. Broadly speaking, you are right that a laid-off GE supervisor now working in a Wal-Mart without insurance would be more likely to survive cancer or a heart attack today than the CEO of GE would have been 30 years ago. However, I see two very large confounding factors here.
First, products with warranties are worth more than equivalent ones without, even if consumers expect to not need the warranty during the life of the product. Recently I had an uninsured, low-income friend who needed major surgery, and while in the end she received very good care without being financially devastated, the minute she was able to afford insurance, she shelled out for it, and felt much better as a result.
Second, the argument about everyone being better off than everyone was 20 or 30 years ago has the problem of requiring people to differentiate between relative and absolute outcomes. In my day job I do a lot of sales and marketing, and I’ve learned the hard way that consumers can’t be trusted to understand anything that requires even one level of extrapolation. I can hear John Edwards saying, “This nut wants you to believe you’re better off without insurance today than you were with insurance 10 or 20 years ago.”
September 4th, 2007 14:14
At first I thought WW’s post ended with Obama’s caliphate.
May 5th, 2008 10:41
Martin, you’ve really got to the heart of the matter.