Yves here. It’s striking to see non-US commentators depict Trump as fulfilling voter wishes, when he’s largely engaged in a massive bait and switch. Trump did not start talking about his 1890s Gilded Era fantasies until after his win. He campaigned as a peace candidate who vowed to end the war in Ukraine in 24 hours (which he could have done as far as US support was concerned). Instead, not only is the US still dithering in Ukraine, but a Mideast buildup points to more ferocious bombing of Yemen, or worse, a war against Iran. He never revealed his intent to destroy Social Security or the funding of science. He did promise to “protect our borders” and contain immigration, but not the brutality and routine illegality of the removal program.
This piece, while it makes some sound points, depicts anger as driving the Trump vote when inflation, immigration, and the emptiness of Kamala Harris were the major factors. The author also depicts stronger social safety nets as a political impossibility, as if voters would reject it, as opposed to moneyed interests. AIPAC has shown how: fund a primary challenger. Even if the pro-social-support candidate prevails, he’s had to spend so much to get to the general election so as to be vulnerable to the other’s party’s choice.
By Richard Baldwin, Professor of International Economics IMD Business School, Lausanne; VoxEU Founder & Editor-in-Chief VoxEU. Originally published at VoxEU
If Trump’s trade policy is the earthquake, the long-standing hardships confronting America’s middle class are the tectonic plate shifts that made it inevitable. America was hit by globalisation and robotics shocks like all advanced economies, but unlike other advanced economies, it failed to help its workers adjust since the New Deal’s ‘helping hand’ policies had been removed. This fuelled economic frustration, simmering anger, and the election of an avowed protectionist. But tariffs aren’t being used as a solution; they are an excuse for not doing things that would actually help – like Canadian-style social policy. Those are politically impossible as they would require higher taxes and bigger government.
It’s hard to make sense of US trade policy these days. But it is nigh on impossible unless you understand the American middle class’s discontent and how it has built up over decades under Democrats and Republicans alike.
It takes a bit of effort, and even discomfort, to read about the fail-trail of traditional Democrats and traditional Republicans, but the upside is that once you make the effort, you will understand how persistent the US’s new attitude is likely to be.
In a nutshell, middle-class malaise and resulting fury led the US to shift to trade-hesitancy in Obama’s first term. The hesitancy turned to hostility in Trump’s first term, and in his second term it has turned to something close to isolationism.
The question of why America’s middle class is so angry is easy to ask; harder to answer. The next section starts with my answer to the question and then a look at how it emerged over the years.
Why is America’s Middle Class So Angry?
Middle-class anger driven by economic and status issues
The anger simmering in America’s middle class isn’t irrational – it’s economic reality. Many Americans cannot even dream of buying the home they grew up in. There is no way they’ll have the job security that their parents took for granted. They are finding it hard to afford a middle-class living on today’s middle-class incomes.
But it is not just about the prices they pay and how much is in their wallets. Pride matters. The last few decades have wounded the pride and shaken the confidence of many working Americans for whom the American Dream was disrupted – especially those who didn’t go to university, but even many who did.
The American Dream is not a promise that you’ll do well. It is a belief. It is a hope. It’s the idea that working hard, showing up every day and giving it your best, will allow anyone – regardless of background – to build a better life for their families. Part of the American Dream was a belief that, regardless of the nature of the shocks and shifts, you’d have a fighting chance of being one of the winners.
Here is a link to a whole slew of Pew Research charts demonstrating the socioeconomic woes of the US middle class. They illustrate how the American Dream wasn’t always an empty slogan.
How Did the US Get This Point?
Middle-class miracle after the Great Depression
The rise of the American middle class after the devastations of the Great Depression is nothing short of miraculous, although the starting point was grim (Milanovic 2016, Stiglitz 2019).
The US economy and its middle class were shattered by the Great Depression and the Calvin-Coolidge-esque faith in markets that guide Washington’s policy reactions. That changed with Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal policies, which were established to help the downtrodden and the left-behind.
With FDR’s New Deal, the role of the government was to help the little guy – to look after economic stability, provide full employment, and protect people from monopolists and from political manipulations by plutocrats. That’s when Social Security and unemployment insurance were invented. Unions and collective bargaining were legalised. The Fair Labor Standards Act put a floor on workplace conditions.
In the America that Ronald Reagan grew up in, for example, people believed that the government was there to help the little guy. Using public investment, financial regulation, and social protections, the US federal government revived the economy, re-establishing public confidence in the economy and the American Dream.
Social policies are downsized: From helping hand to invisible hand
Then came Reaganomics. From the 1980s, the US pivoted from Roosevelt’s vision of government as protector to Ronald Reagan’s supply-side economics and the trickle-down theory. When Reagan took office in 1981, the top marginal income tax rate was about 70%. Ten years later, it was down to about 40%. This is where it has stayed for the last 35 years, unchanged by Democrats or Republicans.
These tax cuts weren’t free – they were paid for by eroding America’s social policies. The government didn’t eliminate all social policies, since many were too popular to kill. But the visible helping hand of the government was steadily replaced by the invisible hand of the market – undermining the safety net that working families used to be able to count on in hard times.
The globotics shocks hits an unprotected middle class
This weakening of social policy coincided with another seismic shift: the ICT revolution, which accelerated industrial automation from the 1970s and turbocharged globalisation from the late 1980s. The economic impact of this combined shock – what I call the globotics shock (Baldwin 2019) – caused massive labour force dislocation in all advanced economies. The globalisation part of this is often called the China Shock (Autor et al. 2016, or Piketty 2020)
ICT hit low- and high-education workers differently: The skills twist
Rapid advances in information and communication technology (the ICT revolution) disproportionately affected middle-skilled workers engaged in manual labour. We are talking about jobs that, in Reagan’s youth, were considered good jobs. How was that?
ICT advances created better substitutes (via industrial automation) for middle-skill manual labour – especially those working in factories. This, in turn, depressed their wage growth and narrowed opportunities for those who lost their jobs. This is how the tech shock part of globotics undermined middle-class incomes and job prospects.
Exactly the opposite happened for high-education workers. Workers who had university degrees and worked in knowledge-intensive occupations benefited from the ICT revolution. For them, improved ICT gave them better tools to work with – things like desktop and laptop computers, easy-to-use database software, writing software, and analytic tools like Excel.
This sharp contrast can be thought of as a ‘skills twist’: ICT created better substitutes for middle-skilled workers but better tools for high-education workers. The result was a marked increase in inequality since the computer-on-a-chip was invented in 1973.
ICT turbocharged globalisation and offshoring
The ICT revolution’s impact on US manufacturing workers was felt from the 1970s as ICT automated away industrial jobs. From the late 1980s, the ICT revolution hit US workers by facilitating the offshoring of industrial jobs to low-wage nations.
The key was the way that ICT made it feasible to separate stages of production, to offshore them to faraway emerging economies and yet coordinate all the manufacturing stages. ICT thus made offshoring feasible; vast wage differences made it profitable.
A key, but underappreciated, point is that this offshoring was impactful because it moved the advanced manufacturing technology of US firms (like Tesla) to emerging economies, where it was combined with low-wage labour. In this way, industrial offshoring created a new, highly competitive combination: high tech with low wages. This made it hard for advanced economy workers – who had high tech and high wages – to compete. A similar difficulty faced industrial workers in emerging markets that didn’t get offshored stages of production. They were competing with low tech and low wages.
As it turned out, nations with the high tech, low wage combination saw their global shares of manufacturing soar – especially China. Nations with high tech and high wages saw their global share decline. The low-tech, low-wage rest of the world saw very little change in their global shares.
Importantly, the globotics shocks struck the world economy at an unprecedent pace since they were driven by digital technology, which was advancing at exponential speed.
The resulting devastation: Social pathologies in America
With FDR’s helping hand having been replaced by trickle-down’s cold shoulder, the American middle class had to face the globotics shocks alone.
The shocks without safety nets devastated the middle class, leading to outcomes never seen before: frequent school shootings, an opioid crisis, an obesity epidemic, medical bankruptcies, high maternal mortality rates, crushing student debt, world-leading incarceration rates, high rates of old-age poverty, concerning levels of homelessness, rising suicide rates among low-education middle-class people, and other deaths of despair (Case and Denton 2020). Such social pathologies are unknown at comparable levels in other advanced economies.
Middle class frustration: Watching the rich pull away as the poor catch up
All the while, the middle class was forced to witness the rich pulling away from them on the upscale side, while the poor were catching up on the downscale side – as John Burn-Murdoch showed in his recent Data Points column (Burn-Murdoch 2025). If you think about that, you’ll see that it meant that the American Dream was working – just not for the middle class.
The shocks without social policy created a society where American children today are performing active shooter drills at the same schools where their parents performed fire drills. Strangely, no one thinks that the US political system can fix that, or that it should even try. The result was economic and social upheaval that created a deep and lingering middle-class malaise.
American Discontent and Backlash
It’s hardly surprising that the middle class grew angry – deeply, justifiably angry. Every four years, they elected a traditional Democrat or a traditional Republican, but none of them provided meaningful relief. They didn’t even provide credible plans for fixing America’s socioeconomic problems, since creating the necessary social policies would have required higher taxes – a policy that had become politically impossible in the US, for reasons that are hard to pinpoint.
Given all this, a populist backlash was almost inevitable.
After 40 years of rising middle-class malaise and no real solutions, Americans elected a billionaire who blamed globalisation and ‘wokeness’ for the middle-class devastation. This billionaire has promised to help the middle class by pulling away even more social policies, cutting taxes for corporations and the well-to-do. It’s hard to see how this was a winning sales pitch to the US middle class, but it worked.
My explanation is that their anger at traditional Democrats and Republicans for failing them for decades led them to try something, anything, that wasn’t more of the same. Something had to change. Come the hour, come the hero, as they say. Or at least that is one way to comprehend the political earthquake that happened in November 2016 and 2024.
Why the Anti-Trade Emphasis?
While a backlash and populism are understandable, the question remains: why is today’s populism so anti-trade?
It’s important to start by explaining that the seemingly natural answer is wrong. The natural answer is that trade (in the absence of ‘helping hand’ policies) caused the middle-class problems, so anti-trade policies should fix them. Why is that false?
Tariffs, however, will not – indeed cannot – fix the plight of the American middle class. It is literally impossible.
- Tariffs protect goods-producing sectors, but few Americans work in those sectors (about 8% in manufacturing and about 2% in farming); most have service jobs.
- Tariffs cannot be put on service imports (tariffs are added as goods clear customs, but services don’t go through customs so they cannot be tariffed).
This means that tariffs harm most middle-class workers; they drive up goods prices without providing extra protection to service-sector jobs. I’m waiting to see how middle-class workers with service-sector jobs will react when they see that tariffs have driven up the prices of things they buy every week in Walmart.
Anti-trade policies as an excuse for not undertaking effective policies
So, tariffs won’t help the middle class. At the same time, the solutions used in other advanced economies to help the middle class won’t work since the US median voter is miles away from believing that more government and higher taxes would improve the situation.
Given there is no solution that is both economically effective and politically feasible, the American political classes – Democrats and Republicans alike – have turned to the time-honoured Plan B: convince the voters that it is someone else’s fault. When they realise that they can’t fix a problem, any politician will tell you that the next thing to do is to find someone else to blame. The full spectrum of the US policymaking community has decided that foreigners and trade in goods are an excellent candidate for the role of blame-eater – China in particular.
Summary and Concluding Remarks
The slow-burning hardship confronting the American middle class is the root cause of the backlash that brought Donald Trump and his tariffs to power. But American middle-class woes are not the result of technology and globalisation shocks alone; nor are they the middle class’s fault. Middle-class malaise, in my view, stems from the globotics shocks hitting a society that had removed the adjustment polices that had helped the middle class adjust to shocks in the past.
The role of the missing social policies comes into focus when contrasting the American experiences with that of all other advanced economies. While all other advanced economies also suffered the same globotics shocks, their governments had ‘helping hand’ policies in place that facilitated economic adjustment. There was a middle-class backlash but greatly moderated – and it tended to be focused on immigration rather than trade.
Tariffs, to my way of thinking, aren’t popular with US politicians because they are a tried-and-true solution for middle-class malaise; tariffs are popular with them because they are a substitute for politically unpopular policies that would work. And tariffs come with the side benefit of making it seem like the middle class’s problems are not “Made in America”, when in fact they were.
What does this all mean for world trade? I’ll make three points, as one always should.
- First, American middle-class malaise is here to stay. Trade policy won’t fix it – if for no other reason than most of the middle class works in the service sector where tariffs don’t defend, they damage. The policies that would help would require higher taxes, and this is politically infeasible in America’s current political climate.
- Second, America’s anti-trade, or trade-hesitant, stance started with Obama, not Trump – and it is likely to long outlive Trump’s presidency. The full spectrum of the US policymaking community has decided that foreigners and trade in goods are an excellent candidate for the role of blame-eater – China in particular. Since there are no policies that are both economically effective and politically feasible, trade will continue to be the blame-eater in the US for the foreseeable future.
- Third, US middle-class malaise doesn’t mean the end of the world trade system as we know it. The US accounts for less than 15% of world trade, so, as long as the other countries don’t follow the US’s lead with respect to each other, trade overall should do OK.
See original post for references
This article is selling a Democrat theme. The boogeyman is Big Tech via manufacturing automation (the villain is an Elon type tech person) with trade as the scapegoat.
No, the plight of the middle class is that for decades every aspect of the US system became predatory and they were the prey. The US government, Democrats and Republicans, enabled it. Medical, education, finance, insurance, real estate, various varieties of taxes (at local, state, and federal levels), end of life care, funeral costs, etc, everything became predatory. The US government provided tax breaks for companies to offshore jobs, dismantling private sector unions, increased their job insecurity, and transitioned employment to lesser paying service sector jobs. While money printing papered over this situation and insulated parts of the US economy, for many, their wages were being suppressed while everything was getting more expensive. The rest of the story, and the 2024 election, is decades worth of this math finally coming to a head with the traditional reliable Democrat base of voters abandoning the party.
As far as trade goes, people instinctively know the playing field isn’t level. Competing with countries with no labor protections, no workplace safety rules, no environmental laws, no social cost structures like unemployment insurance, and lower costs for everything in general is not a fair competition. The overall US cost structure, including the cost of government labor, is too high and puts US labor in a non-competitive situation before the race even begins. Any move to lower US cost structures would mean more automation everywhere in our economy, including highly educated white collar labor, and more DOGE’s at a federal, state, and local level. If that happens, public sector labor will fight to not get caught up in this race to the bottom that the private sector has found itself in.
Yes, the other theme being pushed is that voters drive policy. Totally false narrative which Yves deftly eviscerated:
. No end to war in Ukraine.
. Escalation in Mideast.
. Nothing much against undocumented migrants but police state action against legal residents for political dissent.
. Nothing done against inflation; trade policy likely to massively exacerbate it.
The interesting thing is that his voters remain loyal. They’ve gotten so used to being beaten down that they have no choice. Learned helplessness. Or they can’t help but be sucked into his personality cult.
“They didn’t even provide credible plans for fixing America’s socioeconomic problems, since creating the necessary social policies would have required higher taxes” —- an additional BS crutch thrown in to support a Democrat theme.
Agree with Dave.
Also, all this moaning about how these policys and directives without any real legislative or constitutional action…. just repub and Dem theatrics.
It reveals the political calculus IMO.
The Democrates are thrilled to see the ship of state go down under the repubs for no other reason than it allows them to persue the same policies, the same practices that have been the sole cause of the ” plight of the middle class is that for decades every aspect of the US system became predatory and they were the prey. The US government, Democrats and Republicans, enabled it.” I would remove the US government in the statement as that paints a broad brush, in that, the wholesale enabalized privitization by the Dems and Repubs via big money has captured the US Government as shown by the wide divergence between what is legislated and what the people want – For instance majority do not approve of genocide or it’s enablement yet both house and senate overwhelmingly approve support.
More simply, letting the ship stear towards the shoals lets them get back into the wheelhouse whereupon they can continue merrily on their way to destroy the republic. They don’t even need to propose any alternative….like progressive policies – say even the minimum to raise the cap on SS or even invert it.
They just fall back on the lame TINA and no new taxes cause we can’t, and we can’t be talking political economy or what best for the planet cause were to busy puffing up the next asset to be used to imiserate everybody into bond-servatude.
Not a whisper to be passed on any legislation progressive to keep us from ground
Big Tech has gotten so much of the limelight, Big Finance and the top 6-ish universal banks have been forgotten, lol.
JP Morgan Chase, Bank of America, Citi, Wells Fargo should be broken up like the late-stage Roman Empire, along regional lines.
Chase is the most egregious—at #1 it is 9x bigger in assets than the #10 American bank, and double the size of #3.
Not holding my breath….Ultra-Big banks have been around so long, that for Normies, and even small business owners, life in a pure regional-bank-world seems like an anachronism.
Yeah, I recall prof. Black using the specialized term, “criminogenic” years ago to describe the US financial system. Crime in high places in the US is either ignored or institutionalized. It’s perfectly normal, a non-issue. They are TBTF – above the law.
Thank you. The article seems dubious indeed on off shoring since it was the rise of the country’s middle class after WW2 that also had a lot to do with it. Working in a factory is something most middle class people don’t want to do. It was China’s developing nation status that made it a manufacturing powerhouse because so much of it is indeed manual labor with extensive use of robots a more recent phenomenon and one that Tesla found difficult to make work in the early stages.
And your robot factory will do you little good if there are no workers to buy the output. “Fordism” seemed the commonsense position before the financial whiz kids came to dominate. They are what we should shipping elsewhere.
Good summary, David!
Every year things get worse for 90-percent of people.
It’s clear there will be no course corrections from our ruling class. They will not allow it. Our ruling class are as cruel and depraved as any before.
Protests or voting for democrats in the midterms won’t help.
Nobody can even predict what will happen over the next 3-months. The only certainty is it is going to be bad.
“Any move to lower US cost structures would mean more automation”… Maybe. but Michael Hudson notes that the tendency to privatize monopolies like utilities and infrastructure is neoliberalism’s prescription–and that’s unrelated to automation. Making utilities and infrastructure–and banking–a public service is what brought China’s (and Germany’s) cost structure down and made their labor competitive internationally. The MBA illusion that the only profit that matters is next quarter’s, and Milton Friedman’s suggestion that profit justifies all bad behavior are companion awfulness.
Then the writer believes we must raise taxes to get revenue for any alternative. Apparently dollars grow on billionaires! Taxes as a remedy for economic inequality isn’t mentioned.
The tendency of profit-seeking firms to fight the inevitable downward pressure on profits leads them to attempt to dominate markets as monopolies (or oligopolies), or to do unproductive things (cf. military contracting) It’s capitalism itself that is behind the current situation
The article is worth reading for these two observations:
Tariffs protect goods-producing sectors, but few Americans work in those sectors (about 8% in manufacturing and about 2% in farming); most have service jobs.
Tariffs cannot be put on service imports (tariffs are added as goods clear customs, but services don’t go through customs so they cannot be tariffed).
These ideas are central for understanding why the tariffs regime will fail.
Much of the article, though, is an inadequate analysis. I clicked through to Baldwin’s biog and discover that he’s part of the Peterson Institute, yes, Peterson who wants to destroy Social Security. At least, Baldwin seems to understand that the social state buys social peace.
Further, Baldwin is skating around what the “middle class” is. Currently, some enormous percentage of USonions define themselves at middle class. I’ve seen polls and estimates that go over 70 percent.
The current U.S. economy, though, has 1 percent controlling half the economy, 5 to 10 percent as upper-middle class, maybe 40 percent as middle class, and half the population pauperized.
Baldwin wants to hearken back to some FDR-caused miracle of a middle class, but that simply didn’t happen. In 1920, for the first time, the majority of the U.S. population was urban. So you had roughly half the population on the land or in small towns. The middle class in small-town America of 1929 would have been the pastor of the Presbyterian church, the teachers, the doctor, and the owners of the larger shops. Everyone else would have been working class.
Writing a whole article without acknowledging a working class is a major oversight, in my not-so-humble opinion. Note the absence of labor unions.
What is the middle class? Some would say that the U.S. middle class didn’t truly emerge until after WWII. I am reminded of The Donna Reed Show of the late 1950s, in which her hubby, a doctor, received patients in an office in his house.
If we want to talk about what the U.S. middle class was before WWII, then it’s Sinclair Lewis. Babbitt is from 1922. Arrowsmith is 1925. Dodsworth is 1929 — an excellent novel of U.S. moneyed foolishness.
But Baldwin’s “middle class” is too oooshy concept to support his analysis. Is this “middle class” angry and against trade? Who knows? Another word that is poorly defined is “trade” — and I think that the article glosses too much over the export of jobs as “trade” and the outsourcing of valued skills as an accidental side effect.
I take your point regarding identifying the “middle class”, these mean quite different things in different countries, as do some political terms. (“liberal” for example). Class consciousness is something of a taboo in US culture. It sounds “commie” to talk about “working class interests” int the US. It seems the vocabulary and discourse have been carefully scripted to shape public perception.
The US public has been told that everyone is “middle class”. It is largely an empty term, and roughly equates with “consumer”, (or even debt peon).
Even when watching US television shows, most people are portrayed as “middle class” or upper middle, with perfect, bleached teeth, perfect hair etc.
In many UK-based TV shows, I notice more working class people portrayed with more believable characters, and not everyone has perfectly bleached teeth and a perfect coiff.
Absolutely. All those film school trust fund babies know little about being poor. And you write/film what you know.
There are some films from older directors or on historical subjects that refresh with a past perspective. Last night I caught ‘A Complete Unknown’ about the rise of Bob Dylan and thought this was good both for the acting and for the look back at a time when being a starving artist was more of a thing than perfect teeth. The theme is innocence versus the changes brought on by success.
Well, we have a fight on our hands. From what I can tell today, China has said eff it Donnie. They’re willing to wrestle the dumb shithead to the ground. Don’t you love the news reports? “The world’s second-largest economy steps up the fight in the tariff wars”. China isn’t second, but if one values one’s freedom, I suppose one must learn to not piss off Trump by truth-telling or one will get it up the arse in reprisal, which is free speech as defined in NYC by mobsters. Do as I say not what I do. Or something. Or if you’re Iran, don’t do what you’re not planning to do, or be bombed — such is the genius of Donald J Trump and Ritter, as espoused by the Piranha Brothers.
As usual, I like the Yves summary better than the article.
«Then came Reaganomics. From the 1980s, the US pivoted from Roosevelt’s vision of government as protector to Ronald Reagan’s supply-side economics and the trickle-down theory.»
Yes, but myopic. The counter-revolution started with the Capital Strike of 1936. A not insignificant component of that strike was the increasing redirection of US (and Western) investment to Germany’s ‘National Socialist’ project. After that, FDR was a well-meaning lame duck.
John Nance Garner, FDR’s VP, a Texas Nazi sympathizer (‘isolationist’) and a not-so-secret opponent of the New Deal, would have won the Dem’s nomination … but that one week before the convention, Paris fell to the Hitler-Stalin alliance. The Repubs had nominated Wendell Willkie, an FDR-lite who would have cleaned Garner’s clock. So the 1940 convention reluctantly drafted FDR.
The coups de grace came with (a) the assassination of Henry Wallace in the 1944 convention and (b) the
assassinationelimination of FDR: while the lame duck was incommunicado slow-boating to Yalta, the Allied Generals initiated Operation Sunrise/Paperclip/Gladio.The rest is history.
“Paris fell to the Hitler-Stalin alliance”.
Bistro comes from when the Russians reached Paris after the Napoleonic wars, in 1814 or so. There was no Hitler-Stalin alliance, but a Treaty of Non-Agression, done in August 1939. Same as the treaty of Non-Agression between Poland and Germany from 1936, or the treaty between Germany and UK from 1936 I think, on the size of their navies…
There was no Red Army soldier parading on Paris beside Werhmacht in 1940.
Don’t perpetuate falshoods.
That reminds me: I was told a few years ago, by a young Ukrainian who had just graduated with a law degree in Kiev (and newly arrived in the US), that Germany was only defending itself from “Russian aggression” in WWII, and that it was Stalin who violated the “Molotov-Ribbentrop” pact. I had read that they were teaching this sort of thing in Ukraine, but having a person with a law degree tell me that in person was shocking.
Yes, Russian troops (and other coalition troops) were in Paris in 1814, but they didn’t stay and trash the place. Moscow, of course, did get trashed by Napoleon a year or so before that.
And it might not be too far off the mark to claim that Paris fell so quickly due to the Germans being jacked up on amphetamines, not having to eat or sleep.
Sorry. Should have put sarc-quotes around ‘Hitler-Stalin’.
I’m seeing a lot of tweets carrying ideas like this one-
https://xcancel.com/DC_Draino/status/1909245442040410291#m
But I’m ready to call bs on the whole thing. It is just one ginormous bait and switch taking place here with Americans being convinced that the whole world was taking advantage of them and cheating them of all that money that Trump is going to get back for them. Lemme explain. Take a look at the chart on the following page at the top-
https://aneconomicsense.org/2015/02/13/why-wages-have-stagnated-while-gdp-has-grown-the-proximate-factors/
You will see that real wages have been flat-lining since the70s, even though things like medical healthcare, education, rents, etc. have been rapidly rising. The blue line shows you at the same time the GDP of the US going up like Sputnik. Now think that the distance between the red and blue lines represents created wealth. So who exactly has been capturing that wealth? I’ll give you a hint. It’s not the Chinese. Ever wonder where all the billionaires/corporations are getting their wealth from? FWIW, my own opinion is that chart shows you what has been happening. It does not show you the decades before 1980 when wage/growth and GDP went up in parallel with each other but from the early 70s on they were detached. Just imagine an America of 2025 where wage growth and GDP still went up in tandem with each other. Long story short? It’s not foreigners that have been cheating Americans of their money but people much closer to home and which Trump is deliberately hiding.
And to think neoclassical/neoliberal economic ideology (so-called theory) says that wages rise with productivity gains. Yeah, right. I vaguely recall someone years ago made a chart that illustrated what average wages would be if this were true. Needless to say, they would be much higher.
DoubleThink at its finest: “The US is the most powerful nation in the history of the world”, but at the same time: The US is a helpless victim, being taken advantage of by powerful nations like Vietnam, Cambodia…
Yeah and they owe the US billions for the privilege of being carpet bombed. We’ll get them to pay for it eh, in USD of course.
There is no mention of why the middle-class is allergic to taxes or the how race was cynically used to argue that any money raised would go to “those people”, who Reagan described, pejoratively, as buying T-bone steaks and driving Cadillacs.
My memory may be faulty, but I think FOX was talking about America’s Golden Age nonstop during Thanksgiving week.
Agree with previous comments that Baldwin is missing a few key pieces – effectively the whole program to create these stories and their strawman, the power of Unions and social programs (including the GI Bill) even if benefits were most often to white people.
THAT WAS AFTER HE WON!!!
I love your OUTRAGE! Yves. I find it hard to read any other analyses of the trump shit-show –other than yours– because there is almost a total lack of outrage from everyone else.
If these events don’t elicit outrage, what will?
Outrage is “hot” and quickly burns out and cools off. What is needed is cold enduring hatred focused on the right targets for the right reasons. And which can feed a desire for revenge against the proper targets . . . a revenge pursued for years and decades, a revenge best served over and over and over and over again.
MTP. MTAP. ( Make Them Pay. Make Them All Pay).
Since the freshly-realized “traitor in one’s midst” is often more hated than the ” open enemy”, some “traitors in our midst” might be the first targets to try out some cold enduring revenge on. The easiest targets I can think of in the political shooting gallery might be the ten DemParty Senators who voted for C and then for CR, and who will support the Trumpublican budget in the end. One could call those DemSenators the ” Dirty Rat Ten”. One could call their leader Schumer ” Dirty Rat Number One”. Those who are running again could be targeted for loss in their next election, even if if means getting a Trumpublican elected instead, as the “price of revenge” and to show that ” revenge is possible”). And if they are defeated, follow that up with a campaign to destroy their public and private lives in every legal way possible for the rest of their physical life-span.
Why Americans are acting this way is based on their fundamental immunity to reason, facts, history, empathy, and – most importantly – imagination. This immunity has grown over time, due to factors such as declining educational standards, consumption of cr@p food, environmental poisoning, increasing use of both legal and illegal drugs, media propaganda, stress, and a culture of hyper-individualism stoked by anti-social media.
You can see the decline of imagination in American popular culture: formulaic “music” autotuned and indistinguishable from AI produced mush, movies featuring ear-shattering ADHD sound levels hashed and rehashed from comic books and classic films, literature (and every other art form) compromised by AI. The absence of creativity and of independent thought is illustrated by the outpouring of vapid mindless cr@p in popular media spaces readily consumed by the great unwashed US masses.
Which gets us to the (unaddressed) bottom line of the current situation: what is to be done? Clearly, approaches which got us into this mess won’t get us out, in fact they will make things worse.
But a people capable of the fundamental and radical changes needed have to first be capable of imagining those changes. You have to have independent thinkers. Those who can’t think for themselves are never going to change, and unfortunately, we’re talking about the vast majority of Americans these daze.
Those Americans who think they are capable of independent thinking should live in an independent-thinking-based way. Maybe it would have an effect on some Americans around them who might see and wonder. I can think of an article and a site-blurb ( and the site it blurbs for) which could be twin guides-resources for people seeking to create little fortresses of independent-thought-living.
First there is this article on a “why” to do so.
https://exiledonline.com/elite-versus-elitny/#:~:text=This%20article%20was%20first%20published%20in%20The%20eXile,act%20like%20hicks%20and%20get%20away%20with%20it.
Here is the blurb to various works from Kurt Saxon on Survivalism. It is only a taster and a teaser to get you to buy more printed stuff. Still , the articles printed are interesting in themselves and the blurb is a guide on how to live separately and semi-safely. The last paragraph is especially inspiring.
https://www.survivalplus.com/home/
April 2, 2025: “81% of Americans consider foreign trade as an opportunity for economic growth, jumping 20 percentage points since last year.
Those seeing it as more of a threat to the U.S. economy has fallen by half, to 14%.”
https://x.com/Gallup/status/1907474617499005433
Not sure this is clarifying aniything, like a lot of polls. If they were taking Trump’s tariffs into account, I suppose survey respondents could believe tariffs would ultimately result in freer trade after nations capitulate, after taking such advantage of poor America. Or, maybe “free trade” just sounds so good. If the survey asked the question with something about off-shoring American jobs what would the response be?
Another factor that I always harp on is the lack of democratic choice, and lack of accountability. The last general election should make it clear.
Very simply put;
The “winner takes all” (first past the post) electoral system produces only two parties.
Both parties are legally bribed by the “donor class” (oligarchy)
Real wages, living standards, health outcomes etc. have slowly declined over the past decades.
Wealth and income disparities have increased, giving the top 1% more power and more “free speech”
The media is saturated with political ads, lies and BS (in many countries this is strictly regulated). A vicious cycle ensues and the D/R merry-go-round continues
The public are played as suckers, but what can they do?
The US has the most expensive and Best Democracy Money Can Buy. It’s a tragic joke.
I really believe that auctioning off political seats to the highest bidder on live TV and streaming would be more honest and transparent.
People are angry and desperate, but the only thing they can do is “vote” for one of two BigMoney, oligarchy-approved candidates. So now, the Ds do the usual dog and pony show: I see AOC and Sanders trying to sheepdog the disgruntled Ds back to voting for a D candidate. Rinse and repeat. Meanwhile the rot continues…
First, we have to admit that the US has no functioning democracy. But that would force people to admit they have been living a lie for years and it is painful
The job of the politicians, and the bought and paid for sycophant media, is to tell the public that they will do something positive for them, while the donors require the opposite. Politics is most often a “bait and switch operation”. Promises are a laughable. Two chickens in every pot, two cars in every garage, lower grocery bills….
Anything that can be done is outside the electoral system and most of it cannot be expressed on social media.
You might think that, but I couldn’t possibly comment.
The author fails to extrapolate the damaging impact of the information technology displacement of employment. This phenomenon is not going to be limited to the low-education middle class; it will steadily chew into the high-education strata as AI gets better at almost everything, from neurosurgery to urban planning. Like the shrinking dry deck space on the Titanic, the political base supporting the plutocracy will become insufficient. The only question will be how much disruption results before adequate income and wealth distribution is restored.
Why was no one asking during the presidential campaign, “Make America great again? So when was America great? What era are we trying to get back to?” Because if you said the 1890s then, hardly anybody would have gone for that. Most people, if they had any answer beyond “when I was 10 years old” would have said the 1950s. When we had a top tax rate of around 90%. Duhhh! High taxes on the wealthy has always been the only way to make America great for ordinary people. How is it that the so-called middle class keeps forgetting this? It’s a pretty lame opposition party that can’t make this point over and over again.
“But tariffs aren’t being used as a solution; they are an excuse for not doing things that would actually help – like Canadian-style social policy. Those are politically impossible as they would require higher taxes and bigger government.”
Thanks, Yves, for mentioning this in your introduction. I was very proud of Prime Minister Carney when he explained that the tariffs collected would be used to help the workers who would be unemployed because of the tariffs from Trump.
The author, like too many others, has in his head a fantasy version of Canada.
Canada is a neoliberal, hyper-financialized, dystopia like the USA, but about ten years behind. Everything that happened in the USA, from Reagan onward, is happening in Canada.
Canada no longer has a functioning welfare state. A residue of the post-WWII system still exists, but it is patchy, complicated, and increasingly privatized–the system now mostly serves itself.
Homelessness and beggary are rampant. The gap between poor and rich is vast, and widening. Costs of all essentials have outpaced wages for decades.
Mark Carney is the investment banker globalist mascot for all of this: “Davos Man,” to the max. The federal liberals are now waving the flag, because they’re scoundrels with no other refuge.
Instead of goods tariffs, is it time for wage and environmental policy tariffs instead especially for any company that off shores back office, customer service and lower level tech work regardless of how many layers of subcontractors they try to hide it under?
example – average worker here gets $90-120K, average worker in Romania or India gets paid 20-30K, company gets taxed the difference and that goes to the US govt if they try to outsource it. Goes for outsourcing any role to any country in the world.
Of course that would require an enforcement agency and govt workers empowered to actually do their jobs.
Democrats being for workers is a myth going back to ancient history of the labor wars. Schools don’t teach it. You have to search it out and the best histories are in books in a corporate info world.
The first betrayal was Taft-Hartley and it’s been downhill since. First slowly then faster.
Dems screwed workers with NAFTA. https://www.govtrack.us/congress/votes/103-1993/s395
Obama wanted 4 trillion in Social Security cuts, ect.
So, the enemy of my enemy is my friend. Revenge is a thing. Some Trumpsters (the people Dems left behind.) may be having regrets but others are happy to spread the misery.
Soccer moms in the burbs are in a tizzy but the retired service worker in the trailer park who lives like crap couldn’t care less. At least for now.
The Republicans are merely the known enemy, while the Democrats have been the betrayers — the latter is most unforgivable.
I think the correct answer, historically, is that Democrats were “diverse” in a real sense and some or even many of them were pro labor, which gave the labor a vicarious seat at the table. Now that Dems have traded the diversity of interesrs for doversity of looks couplex with a monolithic ideology, that is no more.
We may as well face it. In the last election, what we had was a choice between one viciously toxic poison pill or the other.
Also a choice of not engaging in pill taking ritual, and not being enthusiastic about gulping it, not to mention not advocating that one viciously toxic poison pill is better than the other. Lots of choices that people do not want to face, because they want to believe that the next elections are different from all the previous ones, and that they are not the bad guys.