Part II:
Future Stability?
Actually, that is what has made America work. As author Michael Lind notes in the most recent issue of The Atlantic Monthly, a large, healthy middle class doesn't just happen in a capitalist system. "The truth is that each of America's successive middle classes has been artificially created by government-sponsored social engineering," he writes. Since 1800, you've had land distribution laws that promoted small farmers – America's first middle class – high tariffs, the end of child labor and strict immigration limits benefiting turn-of-the-century industrial workers and Social Security, Medicare and the GI Bill, among other initiatives, that solidified the middle class during the last half century.
So what programs guarantee the future stability of the middle class? Few politicians have any answers, and tax cuts don't count.
Indeed, a powerful case can be made that racism and anti-government sentiment are just by-products of the squeeze on the middle and lower classes – eggs to the much larger chicken of enormous and increasing income inequality. Reaganomics has led to numbers like these: In 1979, the top 5 percent of earners made 11 times more than those in the bottom 20 percent. Now, the elite earn 19 times more than the lowest 20 percent. Meanwhile, the economy during that period grew just three times and typical family incomes only doubled.
And CEOs have really been rolling in the dough since the Reagan years. In the 1970s, they made 25 times what the average worker made annually. That number rose to almost 100 times by 1988. By 2000, CEOs made 500 times, on average, what the typical worker made, according to numbers compiled by economist and professor Jeff Madrick. These are inequalities that we haven't seen since the 1920s. The only difference is that during the 1920s, the economy grew rapidly. That isn't the case now, and it can be argued that such inequality leads to the search for scapegoats. "Roughly, since 1973, we've been growing about 1 percent a year slower than we did since 1870, and that's very significant when you accumulate it over time," says Madrick.
You might expect a little outrage from the average worker when confronted with numbers like these, especially when he sees little that government is doing in his own life, but it's distressingly rare. Instead, the opposite appears to be happening – a sort of political paralysis that's reflected in the blank stares of Seneca's Wal-Mart employees.
Journalist George Packer, in his introduction to "The Fight Is for Democracy: Winning the War of Ideas in America and the World," captures the downward spiral of American politics: "The relationship between democracy and economic inequality ... creates a kind of self-perpetuating cycle: The people hold government in low esteem; public power shrinks against the awesome might of corporations and rich individuals; money and its influence claims a greater and greater share of political power; and the public, priced out of the democratic game, grows ever more cynical about politics and puts more of its energy into private ends. Far from creating a surge of reform, the erosion of the middle class has only deepened the disenchantment."
It didn't have to be that way, especially for white males. In the early 1970s, wages stopped going up for males, and in particular for lower-income or middle-income, less-educated white males. Nearly 60 percent experienced either a decline or almost no gain in wages, Madrick writes. They rose for minorities and women, but only because they'd been so much lower to begin with.
With a little more imagination, the government response might have been to step in and re-train the workers who were falling behind. It would have meant more spending, but not a huge increase, Madrick says, and it might have helped avoid the pervasive anti-government feelings I heard on my trip through the South.
Add solutions to the current wage-growth killers – increasing childcare and healthcare costs – to worker training, and maybe the political landscape is different in the South. Maybe more folks have a vested interest.
Instead, as Sparks of Blairsville suggests, those low-skill workers just kept falling behind until companies started shipping their jobs out of America.
"You wouldn't believe the jobs we've lost in this area, and now this wasn't a great place to come to work to start with," Sparks says. "But these companies that keep farming it out overseas ... where's your kids going to work one of these days?"
If progressive politicians want to break the GOP death grip among rural whites, Sparks' question is one they need to answer. They should begin by charting a new course for expanding the middle class – the backbone of American promise and political clout – in the new century. Maybe then the words Democrats speak will connect with the lives most people in this country lead.
Kevin Griffis is a staff writer for Creative Loafing-Atlanta.
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