Purpose
In the winter of 2018, Harvard economists Benjamin Austin, Edward Glaeser, and Lawrence Summers published a paper called Saving the heartland: Place-based policies in 21st century America. This study demonstrated with concise prose and quantitative analysis that âAmerica appears to be evolving into durable islands of wealth and poverty. At the broadest level, the nation can be divided into its wealthy, costly coasts, a reasonably successful Western Heartland, and a painfully not working Eastern Heartlandâ (p. 5). The rustbelt of deindustrialization and its concomitant rise in joblessness includes âstates from Mississippi to Michigan, generally east of the Mississippi and not on the Atlantic coastâ (p. 3). Between 2005 and 2010, more manufacturing jobs were lost than âduring the worst years of the Depressionâ (Smil, p. 134).
The implications of this growing geography of emptied out shells of factories and joblessness starts with economic loss, but it leads to tears in the social fabric of the nation. Increased public rancor and an intensified partisanship are the cost of financial freefall among the disenfranchised majority of Americans who are daily losing their footing in the American dream (Reeves 2017; Pew 2017; Smil 2013). The Pew Research Center, a non-partisan and highly regarded source of demographic surveys, found by 2015 that âThe gaps in income and wealth between middle- and upper-income households widened substantially in the past three to four decadesâ (p. 8). The US is now a country of social and economic islands, divided into havens for the haves and wastelands for the have nots. In less than a generation, we have become two Americas. An expanding pool of populist candidates for public office at all levels of government âcry for revolutionâ on mirroring extremes of the left and right (Sitaraman, p. 273). We are in a socio-economic crisis. Our democracy is at a crossroads. The purpose of this book is to point a practical way toward a better economic future for all Americans. If the middle class regains its economic place within the republic, equality is strengthened.
My underlying mission here is not just to survey what has come before for the purpose of theoretical academic review. Whether pluralist or structuralist, the American political scientist is ultimately concerned with contributing toward a polis that is as equitable as possible. That disciplinary aim undergirds this work. In this chapter we synthesize exemplars of current research that describe the features of the American income gap and its most salient social ramifications. By this chapterâs conclusion we will have elicited from the literature a set of core principles that provide a basis for specific policy solutions laid out in the next chapter. We move then in the second chapter to a set of concrete legislative proposals, springing from the literature but new here in their framing. The goal of Chap. 2 is the heart of this study: to propose a set of policies that will make sense to most Americans regardless of ideological persuasion. If that consensus can be achieved, then legislative action is possible. In the third and final chapter, once agendas have been laid out, I offer a renewed American political language that is civil and considers the promise of an inclusive and responsive democracy for future generations. The optimism of this vision is obvious, but it is no dream. Given the current national crisis reported above, this project is an immediate national necessity.
Class
The history of convergence, which posits that all Americansâ incomes would grow together because typically, âmigration flowed to high income regions, and capital was attracted by low wages in poorer areasâŠhas slowed or even reversed, and place-based non-employment has become durableâ (Austin et al., p. 2). Convergence, once the hallmark of an American economic system that relied on a widespread middle class living and working alongside the wealthy, has morphed in this postindustrial age into divergence, whether in its strict economic definition of incomes growing more disparate, or, more metaphorically, referencing deepened class separation in terms of place and culture as well.
We are living in a binary political economy. One America is more educated, healthier, and growing wealthier in a technologically and service driven economy, while the other is less educated, less healthy, and poorer than its own familial forebears due to the generational loss of manufacturing in its regional span (Temin 2017). In 2016, one year after its diagnosis of a widening inco`me gap, the Pew Research Center stated that âthe 10 metropolitan areas with the greatest losses in economic status from 2000 to 2014 have one thing in commonâa greater than average reliance on manufacturingâ (p. 13). It is not hard to quickly conclude that entrenched regional economic divergence results in social and political divergence as well. The New York Times, citing the Austin, Glaeser, and Summers study, in addition to a host of other experts, reported an ongoing âchasm you can find nationwideâ in regional voting patterns based on âthe gap between haves and have-notsâ (Irwin 2018).
The national electoral insurgencies of Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump were campaigns based on middle class jobs creation and propelled one of these two non-traditional populist candidates into the White House. The SandersâTrump moment may not have been a uniquely aberrant race in US campaign history. The 2016 presidential election was likely the political culmination of a divorce between two divergent Americas, separated socially, spatially, and most palpably, economically. This divorce has been an acrimonious one, lending itself to an exceptionally uncivil current national tone (Zogby 2016; Weber Shandwick 2018). Current political and social patterns are fast becoming an embedded feature of how Americans are now thinking about public policy. One need look no further than the upstart populist candidacies of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in New York and Brian Kemp in Georgia, each in their own way representative political heirs of Sanders and Trump, respectively. While Ocasio-Cortez might be a self-proclaimed socialist and Kemp an anti-regulatory nativist, these emergent political voices share in common a class-driven discourse of aggrieved resentment emphasizing the decline of the middle class and public policy remade for Americans who feel left behind by a national economy that continues to be âhoardedâ (Reeves 2017) by an increasingly affluent, white collar cohort.
It is critical to point out at the start of this study, for the sake of showing just how urgent our work here is in forging policy agendas for the American middle class, that the downwardly mobile workforce Reeves references, whose American dream of economic security has been snatched from their grip, is 80 percent of US citizens. It is also important to note that this is not a racial divide. It is a socio-economic one. Reeves himself makes explicit that, while race is still a structural cleavage in the US, âclass barriers are rising, even as those related to race are slowly loweredâ (p. 121). Among scholars, Temin most consistently focuses on race as a location of abiding historic disadvantage in terms of the urban minority poor. But, he suggests that tragic American tradition of not serving the minority poor lends a kind of cultural legitimacy to not serving any poor. Temin continues, âThe failure of schools affects white and Latino members of the low-wage sector as much as blacks. Social mobility has decreased as inequality has increasedâ (p. 154).
Neighborhoods too are no longer segregated only by race. Exclusionary zoning restricts building in many affluent communities to expensive, low density residences, thereby disallowing smaller, less expensive multi-family residences. It was implemented to keep blacks out of white municipalities. Now exclusionary zoning is also used by local zoning boards to keep out the increasing population of white lower income families. The Washington Post reported in 2017 that âSince 2000, there has been a 145 percent increase in whites living in neighborhoods of concentrated povertyâ (Winkler 2017). Race has been found unconstitutional by the Courts as a means to limit local development. Economic status has not (Winkler 2017). Income levels are now more than ever the most ubiquitous form of residential segregation. Classism has not just become a fixture in education and housing. Reeves finds that âon the top rungs of society, where market meritocratic values dominate, class barriers are rising, even as those related to race are slowly loweredâ (p. 120). A decisive classism has subsumed our democracy. It is not that the issue of race has fully eroded as a form of spatial division. It is only that it has been superseded by economic class.
As early as 2000, âthe top 20 percent of taxpayers realized nearly three quarters of all income gainsâ (Davey 2012, p. 23). Those who have bee...