From MAHA to MAGA: Can We Get There?

Yves here. KLG uses a 2023 book by Michael Lind, Hell to Pay, to focus on an issue that we’ve harped on since the inception of this website: that highly unequal societies are unhealthy. Even the very wealthy pay a lifespan cost in comparison to the top tier in more equal societies. But despite RFK, Jr. getting some credibility with MAHA and focusing overdue attention to America’s success in getting citizens to consume lots of unhealthy ultra-processed food, his nomination to head HHS is floundering due to continuing criticism of his crankdom on other issues, notably measles vaccines. But this could come out with a better resolution if Trump were to create a cross-agency MAHA initiative and make RFK, Jr. its czar.

As KLG said via e-mail:

Is MAGA to be a performative trope or is the new Administration serious? Even in the “move fast and break things” initial ten days of the Post-Biden Era, they should be given a chance. If MAGA is really serious, then the war on workers in the United States must end and the reversal of fortune of the working classes must be repaired. As Michael Lind puts it in his recent book, this has been “Hell to Pay.” The steps to a solution are surprising simple and incremental, but they would be revolutionary and could actually work. If they don’t, then the hurt will continue indefinitely. Or until MAGA Nation catches on.

By KLG, who has held research and academic positions in three US medical schools since 1995 and is currently Professor of Biochemistry and Associate Dean. He has performed and directed research on protein structure, function, and evolution; cell adhesion and motility; the mechanism of viral fusion proteins; and assembly of the vertebrate heart. He has served on national review panels of both public and private funding agencies, and his research and that of his students has been funded by the American Heart Association, American Cancer Society, and National Institutes of Health

Last time here we discussed Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) and the commentariat was superb in its response.  Thank you, as always.  MAHA will be one of the talking points of the second Trump Administration.  If they are serious and willing to do the work, the foundation upon which to build is strong, and MAHA can become more than a performative trope.  Unless America is made healthy again, it is unlikely that any greatness worth having, as a society and a culture, will come.

As for Make America Great Again, MAGA has been a thing since President Trump’s first campaign.  One way that America could be made great again is by minting our first trillionaire.  Several candidates come to mind, one of whom apparently will not have an office in the White House.  To produce this first trillionaire, the continuing hegemony of the Neoliberal Dispensation (short definition: the market is the measure of all things, even those that cannot be measured) will be essential.  The gains of any return to greatness, so defined, must continue to be privatized while the costs are socialized.

But wealth could also grow from the bottom up rather than tinkle down.  No conventional politician of the Uniparty can begin to think along those lines, but for this to happen the first thing that needs to be done is to end the continuing war on workers in America (which is coming for all workers in the so-called Global North, including those who presently consider themselves immune).  Michael Lind tells this story very well in his recent book, Hell to Pay: How the Suppression of Wages in Destroying America (2023), which shows what is wrong with our political economy.  As a Texan, Lind is always an interesting study.  He is currently a professor in the Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas.

Lind’s books are heterodox in that they challenge everyone’s priors, but they always focus on the problem at hand.  I first came across him in The Next American Nation (1995).  His The New Class War: Saving Democracy from The Managerial Elite (2020) is a serviceable takedown of the Professional Managerial Class (PMC).  But we should remember the PMC also has masters and overlords, although in my long experience they will remain oblivious to this fact until their (mostly good) jobs disappear along with all the others.  Hell to Pay is a worthy sequel to The New Class War.

According to Lind, America is in the midst of five interrelated crises, none of which is new: (1) Demographic, primarily in the collapse of family formation, which has become daunting with daycare in many places approaching $1500 per month and schools in need of help; (2) Social, with the growth of personal isolation and collapse of local communal organizations and institutions; (3) Identity, which involves the “weaponization of identity politics in a zero-sum battle for jobs and status”; (4) Political, with the collapse of the transactional politics of the past (as in, “You pay us well and treat us right, and we will work hard for you; and vice versa.”) in favor of “cultural wars on the right and moral panics on the left”; and (5) Economic, which manifests itself primarily in “too many jobs with low wages, no benefits, and bad (working) conditions.”  This economic crisis is both cause and effect of the other four crises.

Hell to Pay resonates with me because my working life is coextensive with the earliest development and final completion of the Neoliberal Dispensation.  My first non-minimum wage job [1] was in a unionized heavy chemical plant in the mid-1970s.  As a 17-year-old high school graduate my annual wages were more than $55,000 in current dollars, including optional overtime at time-and-a-half, double-time on holidays, with a four-hour overtime minimum.  Overtime was never refused.  Benefits included regular hours, paid vacation and holidays, defined benefit pension, and health insurance that covered virtually all costs above an inconsequential deductible. [2]

Several years later my first job in a research laboratory paid less but had better benefits and served as an apprenticeship that led to rewarding work as a research scientist and professor in academic biomedical science.  The point, though, is this: As a high school graduate, not yet of voting or drinking age (both 18 for me at the time), I was making more than a living wage and this was entirely unremarkable.  I did not understand what was coming for my contemporaries and those who followed.  But few did, other than the readers of recent the Powell Memo.

Lind begins with “The Big Lie: You Are Paid What You Deserve,” and uses Lawrence B. Summers of the World Bank and Harvard and winner of the John Bates Clark Medal as evidence: “One of the reasons that inequality has probably gone up in our society is that people are being treated closer to the way they are supposed to be treated.”  That is the usual PMC way of looking at work and employment for the working class, although to be fair to Summers, he has changed his mind since uttering that unfortunate sentence.  The truth is that what workers are paid, and under what working conditions, depends on the relative power of workers and employers.  Other factors do not come into play significantly.

The end of the golden age for organized labor began with the Taft-Hartley Act of 1947 (passed over the veto of President Harry Truman), which, among other things, recognized “independent contractors” as a special class.  It took a while, but this led inexorably to the zero-hour “gig worker” of today who has no set schedule and no fringe benefits and no expectation of a good working conditions.  The response of the neoliberal PMC is to “upgrade your brand” if you want to be successful – that is, make more money.  But this is simply not extensible to the vast majority of the working population.  Besides, not everyone wants or needs to be a “brand,” which is definitely not a requirement for a rewarding life.  A living wage is, however.

As summarized by Lind: “Replacing unionized employees with low-paid disposable contract workers results in a race to the bottom that benefits only affluent investors, managers, and professionals (of the PMC), along with consumers (Neoliberal for “citizen”) who in many cases are much better off than the financially struggling workers who serve them.”  These struggling workers who serve are left to “Save Money. Live Better,” by occasionally buying a 6-pack of tube socks on sale at $6.99.   Under the Neoliberal Dispensation, the United States has inexorably become a Low Wage/High-Welfare Political Economy, in which the low wages paid by companies like Walmart – and among other national brands, McDonalds, Dollar Tree, Amazon, Burger King, and FedEx – are subsidized by the Earned Income Tax Credit,  SNAP, Medicaid and CHIP.

The nuts and bolts of job destruction are well understood: Labor arbitrage by exporting good manufacturing jobs and importing low-wage workers in construction and meatpacking, for example, and doing the same for tech workers at the higher end of the wage scale through the H-1B visa program:

The idea that three-quarters of the workers on earth outside U.S. borders who possess valuable skills desperately needed by Silicon Valley and Wall Street and other U.S. industries just happen to live in one country in obviously absurd.  The predominance of young Indian men among the H-1Bs merely reflects the accidental and is due to the Indian ‘body shops’ as suppliers of  indentured servants to U.S. Companies beginning in the 1990s.” [3]

These essential workers are often trained by those they will replace.  Thus:

Like Ebenezer Scrooge, employers in the United States do not oppose the welfare state, as long as the rules of the welfare state are written in their favor.  Complementing and reinforcing America’s low-wage, low-worker-power institutional regime, the American welfare state, it is worth repeating, privatizes the benefits of cheap labor and socializes the costs.

There is no need to spend much time on what Neoliberal globalization has done to industrial production, other than to point out that China leads in the production of reliable electric vehicles that working people worldwide can afford, should they become available worldwide. [4].  Most active pharmaceutical ingredients come from China and India.  And contrary to what politicians like Bill Clinton Tony Blair have said, globalization is not the equivalent of a “force of nature.”  There are no economic laws, only conventional wisdom and unwisdom.  Forces (or laws) of nature do not exist in the realm of economics.  Rather:

Globalization was and is a deliberate government policy, undertaken by the government of the United States and other national governments to serve the interests of politically powerful employers and investors who seek to use global labor arbitrage, in the form of offshoring and immigration, in order to cripple or destroy organized labor and weaken bargaining power of workers at home and abroad.

When a nation loses control of production of necessities, it also loses control of its future.  This is not to say that a perfervid nationalism is the solution to Making America Great Again or improving the working lives of the people in any other country that has suffered from the Neoliberal Dispensation.  But it does mean that trading independence for a politico-military hegemony was never going to work in the long term in a changing world.  That long term has arrived.  Something must change.

Lind closes with an interesting story, one that I remember but did not quite understand so well at the time.  At a town hall meeting in South Carolina in 2009 during a debate over what became the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare), a constituent of Representative Robert Inglis told the Congressman to “keep your government hands off my Medicare.”  The ridicule of this ostensible rube was predictable.  The libertarian Tyler Cowan called the statement “the funniest sentence I read today.”  Others followed with similar comments.  For Lind, in this reaction “the overclass intelligentsia of the left, right, and center” (the PMC) proceeded to reveal “an inability to distinguish between public assistance and social insurance.” Representative Inglis’s constituent had no trouble making the distinction, however.  Nor do I expect he would have begrudged public assistance to any of his few fellow citizens and neighbors who needed it.

So, where do we go from here?  In my professional life, when a reviewer writes that a research proposal is “incremental,” that is damning not even with faint praise, notwithstanding that virtually all of science advances incrementally as outlined here previously.  Sometimes these increments can be revolutionary.  Incremental change is also our best hope in politics.  While employers whose business models depend on low wages complemented by high welfare will naturally but mistakenly fight any increase in overall compensation for their workers, it is possible to (just barely) imagine a compromise in favor of higher payroll taxes for expanded social-insurance benefits in exchange for the performative feel-good fantasy of paying for those benefits entirely by “soaking the rich.”  For example, following Lind with some emendations, this Living Wage/Social Insurance Political Economy would include:

• Social insurance benefits approved by the center left that are earned by work history and thus less politically vulnerable to future repeal than other policies such as tax credits. Those who cannot work would receive similar benefits. [5]  Minor policy changes such as raising the cap on income subject to Social Security taxes would support a generous Social Security System in perpetuity.  Healthcare rather than “access to healthcare” would be a right for all and not attached to employment, justly ending job lock.  But contrary to current usage, that does not mean “free.”  Healthcare would be paid out of our taxes (which are the cost of living in a civilized society according to the Republican Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.) and getting medical care at no-cost but not free at the point of delivery, doctor’s office, clinic, or hospital.

• Programs designed to reinforce the work ethic and reduce the need for what they view as “free riding” on public assistance to please pro-family conservatives. This would, of course, require a job guarantee.  Here we should remember that President Bill Clinton ended “Welfare As We Know It” in 1996 when he signed the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act.  The title might have been more Orwellian if they had tried a little harder.  It must also be added here that liberals are just as likely to be pro-family as conservatives.

• A society of “winners” that would include working-class families, traditional social democrats, and conservative and liberal “familists.” Again, most people are familists – left, right, and center in the vague current usage of these terms.

• An unhappy rump of “losers” would include cheap-labor employers, ideological libertarians, Neoliberals of the Uniparty, and “those on the socialist left who reject the distinction between earned social insurance benefits and public assistance.” I do not know what Lind means by “socialist left,” in the United States (or anywhere else for that matter), other than as a tired trope worthy of “scare quotes” because in the United States “socialist” might as well be “satanist.”

But there is nothing here that should be impossible.

In fact, these incremental changes would be revolutionary.  And they would Make America Great Again by going back to a future that existed for the relatively short period of recent American history that began with the sit-down strike in Flint in 1937 and continued, albeit with some conflict, through the Great Compression (pdf) that lasted from the end of World War II through the Administration of Jimmy Carter and the beginnings of the so-called Reagan Revolution.  During this period, the CEO of General Electric bragged that the company was the largest and most profitable industrial corporation in America, all the while considering its employees assets who were to be treated well rather than liabilities to be minimized.

Pie in the sky?  Probably.  Placing faith in the sincerity of politicians is certainly a stretch.  But for those of us who came of age when there was real hope for a politics on the Left Wing of the Possible, hope continues to spring eternal while optimism remains the last refuge of scoundrels.  MAGA, properly understood, can only be a movement to bring our political economy in line with the needs and reasonable desires of all working families in the United States.  And everywhere else on planet Earth.  Should MAGA work, the rich will also still be rich, but marginally less so – not that they could know it, except by constantly comparing themselves with their “peers” in real time to determine who has the biggest pile according to Fortune.

Notes

[1]  When I did work for minimum wage it was ~$12.00 per hour in current dollars; the federal minimum wage in the United States is $7.25 per hour – unchanged since 2009.  The actual minimum wage is higher in most states, but as a wage floor, the current federal minimum wage is subterranean.

[2]  My rank in the chemical plant was G2 (nobody began at G1 according to the union contract).  The highest hourly employee was G13 ~$193,000 in current dollars (calculations are courtesy of the Bureau of Labor Statistics Inflation Calculator).  No wonder so many hourly workers owned a boat and had a cabin in the woods as a weekend retreat.

[3] 74.1% of H-1B visas issued for specialty workers in 2020 went to nationals from India.

[4]  EVs are not a long-term solution to anything but they can be a key component in the transition to a less-carbon-intensive economy.

[5]  When I was very young, an uncle was killed in a traffic accident.  My aunt was able to raise my cousins on Social Security Survivor Benefits until they were old enough for her to re-enter the workforce.  At the time survivor benefits for children extended through post-secondary education, which was right and proper to a modern civilized political economy.