Above: Democratic Socialists of America protest in Washington, DC (Credit: Washington.carpe-diem.events)
The following is part one of a two-part essay on the reasons for the growth of Socialism in 2010s America.
Above: Residents protest evictions in San Francisco, where Sillicon Valley’s gentrification has resulted in skyrocketing housing costs and growing homelessness (credit: Zelda Bronstein, The Nation/Ted Gullicksen, Antievictionmappingproject.net).
One out of three millennials in Donald Trump’s America embrace socialism. That number rises to nearly half of all millennial Democrats. More millennials voted for Bernie Sanders, a self-described Democratic Socialist, in the 2016 Democratic primaries than for Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump, combined. Another politician of that label , Alexandria Ocassio Cortez, is 29 years old and extremely popular on social media. She is a rising star of the Democrat Party. Socialist proposals such as medicare for all, free college, a $15 federal minimum wage and a 70% marginal tax rate on the mega rich to pay for it all are more or less mainstream in terms of popular opinion. They are vaunted dogma for a typical college student’s political framework. If there were a referendum on these proposals tomorrow, and every eligible voter participated, America would look like a very different country.
At this point, many readers may be scratching their heads, asking themselves how on earth this could have happened. Free enterprise is sacred as a founding American principal. With the most vigorous free market economy in the world, America is the most powerful nation to have ever existed. Immigrants from every part of the world flock to America for its economic opportunities. Ford, Apple, Amazon, Google and Walmart are American-made titans of industry, innovation and ubiquitous world-wide. These firms and their ilk are responsible for hiring millions and lowering the prices on today’s household goods which were only held by the wealthiest and most powerful generations ago. If you could teleport someone from, say 2004, they would be awestruck at how much we do on our phones.
The most immediate answer to why socialism is popular could be answered in one word: 2008. The global crisis that year, engineered by forces of greed, corruption and narcissism in a hyper-charged banking sector and a complacent, if not encouraging, bipartisan political elite, shook the confidence in American capitalism to its very core. 40% of the American median income family’s wealth was destroyed from 2007 to 2010. The unemployment rate soared to nearly 10% in 2008, and it did not fall to its pre-recession 5% until 2015. Even as that number shrank, the number of demoralized Americans dropping out of the workforce completely, and thus not being counted in unemployment statistics, grew dramatically. In 2016, the Brookings Institute estimated that roughly 12% of men, that’s 7 million Americans, were not working. The once classic ideal of the average middle class American working 9 to 5 is becoming less mainstream and more irrelevant as people retreat to their living rooms or parent’s basement for the comforts of TV, computer screens, Netflix, pornography, marijuana, junk food and video games. In other words, the calamity of 2008 wreaked not only economic pain, but it also frayed American societal fabric.
Above: While working class American productivity has soared since the late 1970s, their wages in real terms have not budged (Credit: Stack Exchange).
Beyond the calamities of the great recession, disturbing economic trends are dominating our current discourse. Middle class factory jobs were once a uniquely American symbol which sustained a vibrant, growing middle class from the second world war until the mid 1970s. From that point, a bipartisan consensus grew around free trade as a way to uplift the global economy and create a much-needed transition of America to a service economy. Neoliberalism, which sees free markets as the sacrosanct path to human prosperity, took hold of Washington in the aftermath of rising unemployment and inflation in the 1970s. Republican and Democratic administrations from Ronald Reagan to Bill Clinton, and most economists, saw free trade as common sense policy, for both America and the world. Beyond trade, neoliberal policymakers saw low taxes on the wealthy, the lowering of inflation and thus wages along with deregulation of America’s financial sector as a vital to America’s destiny. Paul Volker, the legendary chairman of the Federal Reserve, believed that “the standard of living of the average American has to decline.” in order to fight the skyrocketing inflation of the 1970s.
The Economic Policy Institute estimated that the United States lost 3.4 million jobs, 74% of which were in the manufacturing sector after China joined the World Trade Organization in 2000. The same organization estimates that by 2004, the US lost 1 million jobs due to the North America Free Trade Agreement.
Despite all of Donald Trump’s promises, the high paying factory jobs that were once given to legions of high school graduates are not coming back to the US. Automation makes this prospect a pipe dream. In what is being termed “the jobs apocalypse,” automation promises to replace millions of jobs held by low-skill, low-wage workers as robotics and artificial intelligence make significant strides in fundamentally remaking the economy. Corporate elites rhapsodize this future, and its potential economic devistation for millions of people, as “disruption.”
Beyond automation, many are increasingly concerned about the rise of “the gig economy,” which is replacing steady, stable middle class jobs and the very concept of a 9 to 5 lifestyle. The gig economy describes workers scraping by with no long term fixed employment commitments. We have seen the rise of Uber, temp employment agencies and web-based contract work. Economists see these trends as responses to an economy that simply has less work to go around due to automation, and the great recession fallout.
How exactly is the gig economy working out for America’s working class? Bloomberg News, hardly the media organ of agitation bent on destroying capitalism, compared gig workers of our post-Industrial society to how Marx envisioned the proletariat of his industrial age. He defined the proletariat as masses of workers repeatedly crushed by the capitalist classes who supplant man with machine, thereby increasing capital accumulation through growing labor efficiency and profit margins. Only today, that machine is the ride sharing app on your phone, and the person driving you is likely working for less than the federal minimum wage. Many observers are increasingly seeing the ‘gig economy’ as a cynical way to brand the old practice of denying employees health care coverage, pensions and labor protections as something new and cutting edge for the digital era.
In an image that epitomizes predatory capitalism, perhaps the largest homeless crisis in the developed world can be found just a short drive away from the 21st century seat of capitalist wealth and power: Silicon Valley. Many of those who are homeless, numbering at 7,499 in 2017, work in the region’s gig economy. They are simply paid too little, at an average paltry of $19,000 annually, and priced out through gentrification by tech workers of former working class neighborhoods of nearby San Francisco. Few people seem to notice or care however, with one woman living out of her car, describing herself as belonging to “an army of invisible people.” Her statement is not entirely true. One entreprenuer wrote to the San Francisco mayor that he was “enraged” in being forced to see homeless “rif raff” on his way to work.
This snapshot of inequality only begins to describe the failings of capitalism in 2019 America and the Socialist backlash. I will continue this discussion in the upcoming part of this essay. I hope you will join me with your comments.
Communism may be defined as a continuous measure, like height or temperature. If one defines it as the fraction of the GDP controlled by central government, America is 90% Commie. One does not have to have title to a business to control it. Regulation is sufficient.
Wages have been suppressed to enrich the Bolshevik billionaires that own the Democratic Party by importation of immigrants at all levels of skills, all the way up to the professions, and the jobs requiring innovation and creativity.
Donald Trump rolled back regulation the tiniest amount, and the economy exploded. There is now a labor shortage, in part from the stopping of immigration. The constituents of the Democratic Party, females, blacks, Hispanics, young people, have benefitted the most. Now the Bolshevik billionaires are apoplectic. Through their media outlets and through their Democrat politicians, they are attacking Trump, and doing nothing else, to get rid of him.
David, I don’t accept your definition of communism as “a fraction of the GDP controlled by government.” How does that work? Secondly, even if that were true, you are wrong. Where did you get that 90% figure? The total government spending (federal, state and local) as a percentage of GDP is estimated to be at 36% this year. I don’t think even the Soviet Union had government spending constitute 90% Of GDP.
While it is true many in business support high immigration as a means to exploit immigrants for their labor, those businessmen influence both political parties.
How exactly has “the economy exploded” under Trump? The stock market is not an indicator of how most Americans are doing, just those wealthy enough to own considerable amounts of stock. We just got out of a painful government shutdown that cost the US $6 billion according to CNBC. Moreover, the corporate tax cut has largely fizziled out, producing no meaningful economic growth through corporate investment or wage/bonus increases. Corporations largely used the money they received in useless, and I’d argue morally dubious, stock buybacks which benefited very few people.