The American middle class was once a roaring success-- but its rewards were granted disproportionately to the white working class. The American middle class is no longer the wealthiest in the world, and most of the developed world has a larger middle class than the United States does. The middle class is disappearing all across the country, according to the latest Pew Research data, and its remaining members are earning less than they once did.
We can rebuild the middle class by rebuilding our crumbling infrastructure, and by addressing our trade deficit. This, too, would benefit workers in many different demographics.
The Experts
Those Trump voters may well be, as the political scientists wrote, "driven by emotional reactions and candidate attachments, rather than by pure information" -- a statement that could arguably be made about most voters. And they may have proven reluctant to accept concrete numbers about the employment market. But that reluctance may also have stemmed from the fact that those numbers aren't emotionally true for them.
As the old political aphorism says, "every voter is an expert in her own life." White, black, male, female: Together, millions of these voters face a shared future filled with risks and challenges. They know their own realities better than many of the so-called experts do. Maybe it's time to stop lecturing them and start learning from them. Together they can form the coalition we will need to build a more just economy.
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