Feelings of Helplessness Driving Electorate Anger And Anxiety
I’ve been meaning to take on this Gregg Easterbrook opinion piece in the Times from about a month ago, but just haven’t gotten around to it. But today is the day. In his piece, Easterbrook bemoans the lack of optimism on all sides, liberal and conservative, these days. He has special condemnation for progressives and liberals – conservative have long been doomsayers holding onto the past, but liberals have always pointed toward a better future with optimism. As he rightly points out, “Pollution, discrimination, crime and most diseases are in an extended decline; living standards, longevity and education levels continue to rise.”
But some of his other examples of how much better things are today actually seem to me to be fueling our pessimism. With regard to the “death of manufacturing”, he says, “It’s just that advancing technology allows more manufacturing with fewer workers”. Well, that is most definitely true but it’s a bug rather than a feature for someone looking for a manufacturing job. About stagnating middle class wages, he cites a study from the Brookings Institute that shows middle class income rising 36% when factoring in reduced taxes and increased benefits over the last generation. To counter that, I’ll cite this graph from Branco Milanovich that shows global income growth by income percentile from 1988-2008:
As you can see, compared to most of the rest of the world, the middle class in the developed world has fared incredibly poorly. So, despite an increasing quality of life, they feel they are actually falling behind.
Other examples of unfounded liberal pessimism that Easterbrook cites actually seem to contradict that very point. Among other items, he lists the liberal doomsayers’ predictions that the world’s supply of petroleum would run dry, that large numbers of animal species would be going extinct, and crop failures would be widespread. Well, it is quite possible that we reached peak oil this decade; scientists say that we are in the midst of the sixth period of great extinctions in the Earth’s history and global warming will only accelerate this process; and global warming will only create more havoc with global agriculture – in fact, some point to a severe drought as the trigger for the civil war in Syria. It appears, then, that those liberal pessimists may have been onto something.
On the other hand, Kevin Drum takes a slightly more nuanced view of the reported pessimism and anxiety of today’s voters. As he rightly points out, Hispanics and other minorities are actually far more optimistic these days than their white counterparts. And, he notes, current economic statistics reflect a well-functioning economy so that doesn’t readily explain the anxiety that voters are reported to feel. Rather, he thinks this anxiety, especially among Trump voters, is the more cultural than economic – “It’s cultural, not economic. It’s demographics, not paychecks. It’s about not being the boss anymore. It’s about lower-class white communities now exhibiting pathologies—drug abuse, low marriage rates, etc.—that were once reasons for them to look down on blacks.” I can’t say that I necessarily disagree with that premise, but that explanation certainly doesn’t apply to those voters who supported Sanders so passionately. So, I’m not sure it’s the whole story.
My belief is that the current levels of anxiety in the electorate arise from a deep-seated feeling of helplessness. Way back in 1993, Bill Clinton said, ” If you work hard and play by the rules, you should be given a chance to go as far as your God-given ability will take you”. That was hardly true for everyone even back then, but it seems even more out of reach for most of us today. Perhaps our anxiety is driven by the overwhelming nature of the enormous problems we face combined with the ineffectiveness of our institutions to deal with those issues. But more importantly, as Cecilia Ford points out, is the fact that we feel we have no control over our environment. No matter how good we are at our job, we could lose it tomorrow because of globalization or automation; reducing carbon emissions requires a world-wide effort which is way beyond our individual capabilities; international and domestic terrorism can strike us without warning; even a good education does not guarantee a good job; there’s been no progress on intractable problems like Israel-Palestine internationally or gun control domestically; Republican Congressional strategy is based on making sure nothing gets done and nothing works as it should. In addition, technology continually floods us with even more bad news on a continual basis – you actually have to make an effort to avoid it. And the same technology helps fragment families and communities while giving a façade of closeness. And this is just not a US issue – it is widespread across Western Europe as well.
All these and many, many more that I haven’t mentioned combine to feed into our feelings of helplessness. And that helplessness feeds a despair that is driving the unrest that pervades the electorate in the US and in Europe, with both conservatives and liberals. And that despair creates the demand that the status quo can not stand – things must change.