But, of course, it isn’t over. The financial crisis remains the most influential event of the 21st century. It left millions of people — many of whom were already anxious about the economy — feeling much more anxious, if not downright angry. Their frustration has helped create a threat to Western liberal democracy that would have been hard to imagine a decade ago. Far-right political parties are on the rise across Europe, and Britain is leaving the European Union. The United States elected a racist reality-television star who has thrown the presidency into chaos. Look around, and you can see the lingering effects of the financial crisis just about everywhere — everywhere, that is, except in the most commonly cited economic statistics. So who are you going to believe: those statistics, or your own eyes?
The stock market, for example, has completely recovered from the financial crisis, and then some. Stocks are now worth almost 60 percent more than when the crisis began in 2007, according to a inflation-adjusted measure from Moody’s Analytics. But wealthy households own the bulk of stocks. Most Americans are much more dependent on their houses. That’s why the net worth of the median household is still about 20 percent lower than it was in early 2007. When television commentators drone on about the Dow, they’re not talking about a good measure of most people’s wealth. The unemployment rate has also become less meaningful than it once was. In recent decades, the number of idle working-age adults has surged. They are not working, not looking for work, not going to school and not taking care of children. Many of them would like to work, but they can’t find a decent-paying job and have given up looking. They are not counted in the official unemployment rate. All the while, the federal government and much of the news media continue to act as if the same economic measures that made sense decades ago still make sense today. Habit comes before accuracy.
Recession stories tend to begin the same way: lost job, lost home, lost savings. How they end varies much more widely. New York Times reporters interviewed hundreds of people during the Great Recession, many of them in the midst of their darkest days. We spoke with five of them again. There was the former factory worker thumbing her Bible looking for hope amid a fruitless job search; the recent college graduate considering his options in a barren job market; the Florida homeowner praying a government stimulus check could save him from foreclosure. In recent weeks, we returned to them to find out what happened next. A few have thrived, overcoming the recession or even using it as a springboard to success. Some were able to find their footing, but could not make up all the ground they had lost. For others, the recession was the moment when it all fell apart. Many seemed to disappear entirely, leaving a trail of disconnected phones, outdated addresses and abandoned Facebook profiles. The individuals we spoke with come from different backgrounds, industries and parts of the country. But for all of them, there were specific moments — right or wrong decisions, bits of good luck or misfortune — that determined where they are today.
It’s been a decade since Lehman Brothers collapsed, careening America deeper into the Great Recession that led nearly 9 million Americans to lose their jobs. Many politicians and economists tout our strong recovery since the financial and housing collapse and lost jobs, with the official unemployment rate tumbling to 3.9 percent. But the proportion of men who were working last month was more than 4 percentage points lower than it was a decade ago. It’s not news that the percentage of men working has been declining for decades. The male labor force participation rate — the term of art used by economists — declined by about 5 percentage points in the 28 years before the Great Recession. But that rate fell sharply after the financial crisis, dropping by nearly the same amount in the decade following. Now, about 69 percent of men are part of the labor force compared to about 86 percent in the early 1950s. Including the unemployed, just 66 percent of men are working. (Meanwhile, the rate for women, which had steadily increased until 2001, is now 3 percentage points lower than at its peak, and 2.4 points lower since Lehman declared bankruptcy.)
The idea that our economy no longer has a place for a certain slice of the American male population has fully permeated our national consciousness. Working-class white men, often without decent (or any) jobs, have been endlessly discussed as the constituency that propelled Donald Trump to the White House. But the reality is much more complex than that. Non-working men of all races, millennials, over 50, middle- and upper-middle-class men, and formerly incarcerated men all make up this group. I talked to hundreds of them, as well as the women in their lives and the professionals trying to help them, for my new book, Man Out: Men on the Sidelines of American Life, to understand who these men are, why this has happened, and what happens when men don’t work. I came away convinced that not working has had and will continue to have profoundly negative effects on not only these non-working men but our entire society.
Anand Giridharadas’s criticism of the American donor class and its self-serving idea of change is spot on. As a wealthy American, I’m accustomed to my friends’ patting themselves on the back for making the world a better place, without taking a second to consider the structural inequality that gives them access to huge amounts of money that they can spend on philanthropy. At best they’re silent on how our tax code contributes to their wealth, but too many (like the “patriotic philanthropist” David Rubenstein) actually go one step further and actively advocate for policies that enrich themselves but hurt our country. Our tax code doesn’t favor the wealthy by accident. There’s a reason millionaires can pay a lower tax rate than middle-class Americans. It’s because many great philanthropists have spent vast sums of money to influence Congress for their own personal gain. The donor class, people like me, should start taking an active role in fixing structural inequality, not rewarding ourselves for surface-level charity.
The deficit hawks are dead. Their demise technically came Tuesday when the Congressional Budget Office calculated the federal deficit at $895 billion for the first 11 months of fiscal 2018 — a stunning gap that was met with a collective shrug on Capitol Hill. But the real death of the deficit hawks came late last year and early this year, as Republicans such as House Speaker Paul D. Ryan (Wis.) who had railed against deficits in the first years of the Obama administration pushed through a massive tax cut despite CBO projections of a surge in federal borrowing. Given possible high ground on the issue, Democrats have largely fielded a crop of candidates across the nation who have ignored, played down or outright rejected the significance of the still-growing deficits. The Democrats have, across all factions of their party, lambasted the Republican tax-cut legislation of December and the $1.5 trillion shortfall it is estimated to leave in the budget over the next decade. But they have not attacked that as money that should go to the U.S. treasury to pay down the overall $21 trillion debt. Rather, they have almost universally pledged that the money be used for other federal spending, such as infrastructure or an expansion of the Affordable Care Act.
That’s a far cry from 2006, when House Democrats marched toward a decisive midterm victory that thrust them into the majority. Then, their numbers were populated by fiscal conservatives in Southern and rural districts who pledged to cut the deficit, as well as antiwar liberals who wanted to bring troops home from Iraq at a time when the war was costing more than $100 billion a year. Some Democrats from that era acknowledge that the issue simply does not have as much resonance now, in large part because of the economic collapse that went into motion 10 years ago this week and the wage stagnation that followed years thereafter. “When they write the history of this time, the financial collapse and the Great Recession is going to be the defining moment that changed the politics around a lot of these issues, around things like deficits,” said Rep. Joe Courtney (D-Conn.), a member of the 2006 Democratic class. Rather than worry about surging deficits, Democrats are pushing for ways to boost everyday life for working Americans, Courtney said. “That economic fragility that people felt in the wake of the Great Recession has kind of overtaken the fiscal-hawk sort of priorities,” he said. With Democrats not focusing on the issue, Republicans have been given a free ride with voters. In April, just 14 percent of Americans cited the deficit as the most important issue, according to the Kaiser Health Tracking Poll. Deficits trailed the economy (25 percent), health care (24 percent), gun issues (23 percent) and immigration (17 percent).
Throughout 2011 and 2012, Speaker Boehner (R-Ohio) staged several fiscal showdowns with President Barack Obama that led to some modest deficit reduction, through spending caps on annual federal agency budgets and higher taxes on families with more than $400,000 in income. Those deals were essentially scuttled by the December passage of the tax cuts and a subsequent budget blueprint that was a bipartisan binge for the House and Senate appropriations committees, which set defense and domestic agency spending. If you want to rein in the debt, do not bother the appropriators. “If you want to deal with deficits, you’re going to have to deal with entitlements. That’s where the spending is,” said Rep. Tom Cole (R-Okla.), a senior member of the House Appropriations Committee. Some lawmakers predict that, eventually, the financial markets will force Congress into action. “It’s not really just candidates who get to decide whether deficits matter or not,” Courtney said. “I think external forces are going to show up and change that.”
It didn’t go over well in Alabama that Trump reportedly called his ’Bama-bred attorney general, Jeff Sessions, “a dumb Southerner” and ridiculed his accent. Trump has denied the account from Bob Woodward’s new book, “Fear.” Abraham Lincoln said, “No man has a good enough memory to be a successful liar,” and Trump clearly doesn’t have the bandwidth for the magnitude of his mendacity. I’ll take the word of Woodward, White House stenographer for at least six presidents, over Trump — who just passed the 5,000 mark for false or misleading statements during his presidency. Trump has used the regional dis before, calling the family of another ex-wife, Marla Maples, “dumb Southerners” and “hillbillies,” as one reporter recalled. Last week, the longtime Trump confidant Roger Stone trashed Sessions as an “insubordinate hillbilly” — expressing a double dose of hick hatred. It’s in Trump’s character to deride those without gold-plated bathroom fixtures as inferior. His people, as he said in a North Dakota non sequitur, have the best apartments and the nicest boats. But you don’t need what comes out of his mouth as proof of his class disdain. Look at the two biggest policy initiatives of his presidency. (i.e., attempting to destroy Obamacare and tax cuts for the rich running up deficits)
More than 40 million Americans voted in primaries this year, a staggering increase from four years ago and a sign of virtually unprecedented voter enthusiasm ahead of the midterm elections. Primary voter turnout was higher than in 2014 for both Democrats and Republicans in most states across the country — though Democrats have a decided advantage. Through Thursday’s vote in New York, more than 22.7 million Democrats had cast ballots in party primaries, compared with just 13.8 million in 2014. Among Republicans, 19.3 million showed up to vote, an increase from the 15.5 million who voted in GOP primaries four years ago. Political scientists say the higher turnout among primary electorates is a sign that voters across the spectrum are more excited to take part in the midterms than in previous years. Some said higher participation in Democratic primaries should worry Republicans, who already face a challenging midterm cycle. “The surge in Democratic primary turnout shows that the party’s occasional voters are energized, which is an especially encouraging sign in a midterm because so many of these voters sit out anything but a presidential race,” said Thad Kousser, who heads the political science department at the University of California-San Diego.
And Trump is the reason
The chaos coming from & surrounding the White House this past month has been even higher than usual, so there’s clear signs all the negative news & scandal have been wearing on Trump’s polling numbers, which in turn has made the GOP prospects in November increasingly dim. The red areas are shrinking: red-america-doesnt-
The prognosis for President Donald Trump and his party was grim. In a post-Labor Day briefing at the White House, a top Republican pollster told senior staff that the determining factor in the election wouldn’t be the improving economy or the steady increase in job creation. It would be how voters feel about Trump. And the majority of the electorate, including a sizable percentage of Republican-leaning voters, doesn’t feel good about the president, according to a presentation from pollster Neil Newhouse that spanned dozens of pages. Newhouse’s briefing came amid a darkening mood among Republican officials as the November election nears. Party leaders were already worried that a surge in enthusiasm among Democrats and disdain for Trump by moderate Republicans would put the House out of reach. But some Republicans now fear their Senate majority is also in peril — a scenario that was unthinkable a few months ago given the favorable Senate map for the GOP. “For Republican candidates to win in swing states, they need all of the voters who support President Trump, plus a chunk of those who do not,” said Whit Ayres, a GOP pollster. “That is threading a very narrow strategic needle.” Operatives in both parties say Republicans still have the edge in the fight for control of the Senate. But GOP officials are increasingly worried that nominees in conservative-leaning states like Missouri and Indiana are underperforming, while races in Tennessee and Texas that should be slam-dunks for Republicans are close. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell raised an alarm last week, warning that each of the competitive Senate races would be “like a knife fight in an alley.”
Polling Blue
Even Drudge is sending out dire predictions for the side he advocates for: matt-drudge-claims-gop-
As Democrats enter the fall midterm campaign with palpable confidence about reclaiming the House and perhaps even the Senate, tensions are rising between the White House and congressional Republicans over who is to blame for political difficulties facing the party, with President Trump’s advisers pointing to the high number of G.O.P. retirements and lawmakers placing the blame squarely on the president’s divisive style. Yet Republican leaders do agree on one surprising element in the battle for Congress: They cannot rely on the booming economy to win over undecided voters. To the dismay of party leaders, the healthy economy and Mr. Trump have become countervailing forces. The decline in unemployment and soaring gross domestic product, along with the tax overhaul Republicans argue is fueling the growth, have been obscured by the president’s inflammatory moves on immigration, Vladimir V. Putin and other fronts, party leaders say. These self-inflicted wounds since early summer have helped push Mr. Trump’s approval ratings below 40 percent and the fortunes of his party down with them. “This is very much a referendum on the president,” Representative Tom Cole, an Oklahoma Republican, said of the November election. “If we had to fight this campaign on what we accomplished in Congress and on the state of the economy, I think we’d almost certainly keep our majority.” Glen Bolger, a leading Republican pollster working on several top races this year, was even blunter: “People think the economy is doing well, but that’s not what they’re voting on — they’re voting on the chaos of the guy in the White House.”
But conservatism is more deeply besieged by the Republican Party, its alleged harbor. If you consider the themes I’ve emphasized above, it becomes clearer that the GOP is not only not conservative, but actually dedicated to destroying that tradition. Republicans pursue the ideology of free markets and lower and lower taxation, regardless of its brutal assault on fiscal solvency, human dignity, social cohesion, and community life. They have nominated and protected a president who assaults the norms that conservatives revere, has contempt for existing institutions and sees the rule of law as a means to advance his own interests, rather than that of the society as a whole. This is a man and a party that has such disdain for conserving anything that it is actively despoiling our landscape, enabling a climate catastrophe. It is a party that has generated crippling and everlasting debt — even in good economic times — in a way that makes a mockery of any compact between generations. It is a party that actively endorses cruelty as a policy tool, deploys fear as its prime political weapon, and insists that the opposite party has no legitimate right to govern at all. It is the party of torture, the absolute nemesis of the liberal inheritance, the party of corruption, propaganda, vote suppression, and barely masked bigotry.
I despise it because I am a conservative. I don’t believe that conservatism can be revived on the right (it has been thankfully sustained, by default, by the Democrats in recent decades) until this hateful philistine would-be despot and his know-nothing cult is gone. And by revived, I do not mean a return to neoconservatism abroad or supply side crack-pottery at home. The 1980s and 1990s are over. I mean a conservatism that can tackle soaring social and economic inequality as a way to save capitalism, restore the financial sector as an aid to free markets and not their corrupting parasite, a conservatism that will end our unending wars, rid the criminal justice system of its racial blind spots, defend liberal education and high culture against the barbarians of postmodernism and the well-intentioned toxins of affirmative action, pay down the debt, reform the corruption of religious faith, protect our physical landscape, invest in non-carbon energy, and begin at the local level to rebuild community and the spirit of American civil association. I know there’s no place for this in our current political climate. And that is why I believe this country is in as grave a crisis as any since the 1850s. Without a healthy conservatism, liberalism will degenerate. Without liberalism, conservatism has no inheritance to defend. And both rich veins in Western moderation are now under assault from the ideological left and the authoritarian right. We have to brave this pincer attack, conservatives and liberals together, or we will die together.
Recent Comments