It's about the economy, stupid
The American condition and what it means for 2020 and beyond.
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At Untold Story, I’m looking to work through and diagnose both what ails political media coverage and deliver journalism that better diagnosis the American condition going into 2020. It’ll be a process. So far, I’ve announced a new project called The Gonzo Primary by defining the broad parameters for what healthy media coverage might look like as we start from scratch. I’ve worked through some of the key questions for what the value of both the project and this newsletter should be and promised that there is (or should be) a middle ground between so-called “boring,” eat-your-vegetables, issues based coverage, understanding the world from the gonzo perspective and the exhilaration that should come from seeking to understand a presidential campaign.
This week, we’ll dive into the central question of American social and political life: inequality.
The Gonzo Primary Iowa Caucus Countdown: 332 Days
Currently Reading: Ben Fountain’s Beautiful Country Burn Again: Democracy, Rebellion, and Revolution, on Kindle on loan from the public library, about the 2016 election. The Trump phenomenon, he describes, traces to a palpable identity politics as old as the Republic itself:
To be acknowledged as you are, affirmed and blessed from above: one can imagine it as a spiritual experience. A profound burden is lifted. No more doubt, no dark loathings, only the certainty that you are good and on God’s side. Ecstasy isn’t out of the question. What greater thrill besides sex to be delivered to yourself, liberated from the bad opinion of your enemies? Something of that ecstasy could be heard at Trump’s rallies, “Build the wall!” and “Lock her up!” bellowed like Romans watching lions sink their teeth into Christian flesh.
This really happened: Last week, a trillion light years ago in the news warp time continuum, the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) gathered to honor a massive Mao-sized propagandist poster of Donald Trump and hear from a roster of speakers still trying to incite a burn-it-down conservative Revolution. Conservative commentator Michelle Malkin told a gradually enraged crowd (and this is what they came for) that new immigrants were arriving too fast — “chain migration” and legal immigration, in general, is ruining America, she said.
The wall isn’t enough, she implored. Tens of thousands of asylum seekers are given visas like “Pez candies or lotto tickets … unvetted, unmonitored and un-assimilated.”
Malkin, who describes her ethnicity as “unhyphenated American,” was born to Filipino parents who arrived in the U.S. on employer-sponsored visas.
“What about our dreams?” she asked the crowd. “Our enemies are foreign and domestic. The divide in this country is between decent people who want to stand up for America and dastardly people who want to bring America to its knees.”
Malkin all but calls for civil war. “Use the tools at your disposal. Don’t just stand there. Diversity is not our strength — and I know those words are a trigger. Unity is. Good people stand up and fight.”
The now-infamous call to arms against the “ghost of John McCain” for not doing enough to combat immigration was hardly the most objectionable thing she said, though it got the most attention (roughly eight minute mark).
That was before Trump gave what might have been the longest oration in American presidential history (more than two hours) and certainly the most free-wheeling of anyone, ever, in politics. He said, among many other things, that he had to agree with Kim Jong Un on the whole dead American thing (because negotiating?), called Mueller (a Republican) and his team “13 of the angriest Democrats” and, my favorite, said that the Green New Deal boiled down to, “When the wind stops blowing, that is the end of your electric,” as well as the end of gas-powered cars.
The Gonzo Primary Edition: It’s The Economy, Stupid
Bill Clinton’s truism remains because our lives and financial security lie at the heart of the power structure that makes up the political machine. “It’s the economy, stupid,” may be the last time, now that I think of it, that a majority was able to focus on an economic and policy argument rather than one rooted in fear and racism.
Ah, but those were simpler times — before the Great Recession of 2008 that wiped out retirements and laid bare our rigged system that has ignited the class warfare that may define every succeeding American generation and political battle unless we do something about it. We all can agree on the fact that every misplaced decimal on a tax return yields a flurry of letters and threatened legal action for us peans while financial fraud committed on a massive scale goes unpunished by our government — and even rewarded.
The key stuff:
1) Real wages have been stagnant or declining for decades for 90% of workers. Source: Inequality.org.
2) American remains separate and unequal, divided by race. The American Dream is accessible by geography and skin color. Source: Inequality.org.
3) The banks who swept away a good portion of U.S. wealth in 2008 are doing well. Both the 401(k)s and real estate that most people rely on to build wealth, less so. A brief reminder that this man-made crisis was brought on through massive fraud that pushed low-income homeowners into subprime mortgages while trading on said mortgages through complex financial products and taking on massive debt to do so, thus imperiling both the banks and the financial system as a whole. The taxpayers bailed them out, and the federal government never followed through on indicting any of the major players who perpetrated the fraud … or some such thing. It’s too unbelievable to be true, right?
Interestingly, bank profits (net income) has really seesawed in the intervening years, but, in May, hit an all-time high. Source: Federal Reserve of St. Louis.
This is the big picture. The game is rigged. The playing field of the so-called American Dream — the idea being hard work can put anyone from any background at the top — unequal and unattainable. The varying 2020 Democratic field will get at this in their own way and so will Trump. Because bitterness and revenge are his personal rocket fuel, he is a master of prodding the ever-present festering wound of people feeling both screwed over and finding ways to constantly remind his supporters that things are getting better for those in cities and people of color while “real America” gets left behind. He’s leaning hard into those ugly politics the second time around. (No, he won’t be impeached.)
And I have the feeling that how both the Trump Tax Cuts are defined and feel on the ground will play a big role, stated or not. While the average Trump supporter might not care that critics have maligned the tax overhaul from day one as being largely a giveaway for corporations and the ultra-rich, they will know whether they got anything out of it — or whether it exacerbated the bigger trends that have left most Americans pissed off for decades.
So far, wage and employment trends look decent in the Trump era — although these are macros numbers that I, personally, don’t have much trust in, under any president. Still, it’s difficult to tell whether Trump’s 2017 tax overhaul have contributed to a growing economy, according to The Washington Post’s Phillip Bump. And I wonder whether people will get what they expect from the IRS after filing their tax returns next month.
What is unequivocal, Bump writes, is corporate profits saw an immediate spike from the 2017 tax overhaul.
It may be months, or years, before we know the full effect of the Trump tax cuts. But economists don’t sound bullish. And I think we’ll know more soon. But as one researcher put it in Barron’s: “Despite efficiency gains overall, the poorest households can expect to be worse off because of the tax reform. The richest households will fare better, in large part because they own corporate stocks.”
How quickly that reality becomes true — and how people are feeling this time next year — will have a profound effect on what resonates for either side.