In The Sinking Middle Class, you state:
Elections now rarely seem anything but imminent and historic. We heard in 2018 of the most important election of our lifetime. As soon as it was over candidates announced for the infinitely more important 2020 presidential vote.
Was the 2020 election more historic and important than usual? Why or why not?
It was unquestionably an important election, a defeat for white nationalism and for Donald Trump's authoritarianism. It returns us to a more familiar pattern of less-than-functional US politics in which Democrats will administer neoliberal rule, albeit with a voting base that is Black, Indigenous, and Latina/o and or sympathetic to socialism in its near majority. If social movements can energize the demands of those groups the 2020 election might end being seen as important beyond the fact of what it prevented.
Recently I read a book, Has China Won? by Kishore Mahbubani, which, among many things, argues that if China can induce other countries, especially in Europe, to move away from the Dollar, then it could prove catastrophic for the American middle class, which he suggests is, as you say, built on illusion. Any thoughts on such a strategy and its consequences?
The specifics here far exceed my expertise but the question does verge on an issue I regard as critical and ignored. That is the relationship between the unravelling of the US political system and the decline of the US as the hegemonic leader in the world economy. Trump's instability and isolation is usually read as peculiar to him and to the far right and perhaps as something destined to disappear with his loss and ultimate discrediting. But what if the decline of the US economy in world importance has left it one empire among several rival ones, unable to police and direct a world system but clinging desperately to the illusion that it can do so. The wild swings between petulant threats and America First disinterest in global institutions that Trump presented fit his own pathologies and attention span but we are likely to see them again, and in both parties. The death wish politics associated with COVID and masks in the US also fit well with end-of-imperial-domination desperation.
How would you "define" the middle class in America today? Are we all becoming 'deplorables'?
In The Sinking Middle Class I argue that the idea that the US is a "middle class society" has thrived over the last 90 years because it has meant so many different things. Middle class is a term of self-identification through which people of all sorts of different levels of wealth and various relations with management imagine themselves as having something in common. Many people with working class jobs choose to identify as middle class, though less so in recent years. Cold War ideology and electoral political appeals have encouraged such identifications immeasurably, promising respect and attention to those claiming middle class status. (Also encouraged, tragically, is a "white working class" identity.) On the other hand, middle class is at other times defined by experts (below $250,000 in annual income, presidential advisers often argue, or college-educated, or those within a certain percentage of median wealth, for example). Self-identification, if data collectors offer working class as an additional choice, does in this period yield useful information. As for "deplorables," the pandemic response so far seems more eager to cast us as "expendables" instead.
How did Trumpism play into the slippage of the great buffer zone between the poor and the ultra-rich?
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