Links To And Excerpts From NYT Article “Why the Working Class Votes Against Its Economic Interests” With A Link To An Additional Resource

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In this post, I link to and excerpt from the New York Times article, Why the Working Class Votes Against Its Economic Interests, by Jeff Madrick, July 31, 2020

All that follows is from the above.

THE SYSTEM
Who Rigged It, How We Fix It
By Robert B. Reich
BREAK ’EM UP
Recovering Our Freedom From Big Ag, Big Tech, and Big Money
By Zephyr Teachout

One of the mysteries in politics for decades now has been why white working-class Americans began to vote Republican in large numbers in the 1960s and 1970s. After all, it was Democrats who supported labor unions, higher minimum wages, expanded unemployment insurance, Medicare and generous Social Security, helping to lift workers into the middle class.

Of course, an alternative economic view, led by economists like Milton Friedman, was that this turn toward the Republican Party was rational and served workers’ interests. He emphasized free markets, entrepreneurialism and the maximization of profit. These, Friedman argued, would raise wages for many and even most Americans.

But wages did not rise. And yet many in the working class kept voting Republican, still seemingly angered by Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society, which was dedicated to helping the poor and assuring equal rights for people of color. In the 1980s, under Ronald Reagan, income inequality began to rise sharply; wages for typical Americans stagnated and poverty and homelessness increased. Capital investment remained relatively weak despite deep tax cuts (as it does today under Donald Trump). At the same time, antitrust regulation was severely wounded, and giant corporations began to monopolize industry after industry.

But the presidential election of 2016 sent the sharpest message yet. Working-class voters in Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin opted for Trump, and apparently against their economic interests. Trump had succeeded in appealing to their anger and the Democrats were caught flat-footed.

Two new books, “The System,” by the former labor secretary Robert B. Reich, and “Break ’Em Up,” by the lawyer and activist Zephyr Teachout, a onetime candidate for New York State attorney general, are among the latest examples of an evolving set of explanations that try to make sense of the 2016 results.

A powerful money-fueled oligarchy has emerged in America that is an enemy of democracy, Reich writes. The self-interested power of the nation’s wealthy often goes unnoticed by voters, and is partly misdirected by right-wing rhetoric about issues like immigration. But it leads to lower wages, less product choice and abusive labor practices. Trump has harnessed the frustration of the working class, Reich says, but he was a “smokescreen” for the oligarchy. Reich has an almost unmatched ability to make insightful observations about the nation’s inequities, and in “The System,” he observes that the question is no longer Democrat versus Republican or left versus right, but “democracy versus oligarchy.”

To Teachout, what’s behind our rigged system is the close cousin of oligarchy: corporate monopoly. Teachout lists her culprits, among them familiar names: Amazon, Google, Facebook, Monsanto, AT&T, Verizon, Walmart, Pfizer, Comcast, Apple and CVS. These companies “represent a new political phenomenon,” she says, “a 21st-century form of centralized, authoritarian government.”

Two dramatic related facts underscore the claims of both Reich and Teachout. The much discussed rise of wealth among the top 0.1 percent, which now has 20 percent of the nation’s wealth compared with only 10 percent 40 years ago, has been brought to light in recent years by the innovative economists Thomas Piketty and Emmanuel Saez. The flip side is that wages for the large majority of American workers have stagnated more or less over this same period.

Jeff Madrick, the author, most recently, of “Invisible Americans: The Tragic Cost of Child Poverty,” is the director of the Bernard Schwartz Rediscovering Government Initiative at the Century Foundation.

THE SYSTEM
Who Rigged It, How We Fix It
By Robert B. Reich
224 pp. Alfred A. Knopf. $24.

BREAK ’EM UP
Recovering Our Freedom From Big Ag, Big Tech, and Big Money
By Zephyr Teachout
320 pp. All Points Books. $28.99.

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