Dems should run on Trump’s failed populism
He didn’t fix the ‘rigged’ system. He made it worse.
“The economy is rigged. The banking system is rigged. There’s a lot of things that are rigged in this world of ours, and that’s why a lot of you haven’t had an effective wage increase in 20 years.” — Presidential hopeful Donald Trump in 2016
Trump ran as the populist candidate (while accusing Hillary Clinton of being bought and paid for by elite globalist special interests). Clinton positioned herself as the moderate responsible nonpopulist, proposing incremental changes to America’s policies.
As we head toward the 2020 election, voices are again calling for Democrats to be responsible moderates, the adults in the room. Trump is a hypocritical demagogue who has done nothing to drain the swamp, but given half a chance, he’ll again run as a populist. Democrats need to address the issues that concern most Americans and position themselves as populists — not as incrementalist technocrats.
About 60% of American voters believe that the economic system is designed to benefit those in power, and they have a point. The median American is a high school graduate without a college degree. For this median American, real wages have been flat for 40 years, with an unemployment rate much higher than for college graduates. And that median American is more likely to work at jobs with limited or no benefits compared with college graduates. Over the same period, the wage premium for having a higher education (compared with a worker with a high school diploma or less) increased from about 50% to 100%.
Americans without a college degree (at least 55% of the workforce) have been, at best, treading water for decades. Trump is accurate that in many ways, our system is rigged against these households, particularly toward the bottom of the income distribution.
America doesn’t provide equality of opportunity. Overall, the USA lags behind most industrialized countries for intergenerational income mobility (how much your parents’ situation explains your performance in life). If you’re born poor in America, you’re more likely to remain poor. In the USA, nearly 50% of the next generation’s income is explainable by parental income. In Canada, it’s closer to 20%.
If you’re white with college-educated parents in America, you benefit from a glass floor. A white male (born into a family in the top 20% of U.S. income distribution) has a 40% chance of staying in the top 20%. But blacks born into poor families face a concrete ceiling in terms of upward mobility — and no glass floor for blacks born into affluent families.
Education isn’t always the answer. If you are poor, young and work hard at school, the odds are still stacked against you. In America, a high performing student born into a poor family (bottom 25% of the income distribution) has only slightly more than half the chance of graduating from college as an academically comparable student from an affluent family (top 25%). High-performing students from poor families who do go to college are more likely to attend academically inappropriate colleges — for instance, a local community college instead of a selective four-year research university. So their opportunities are more limited.
More broadly, we live in a country where a billionaire like Warren Buffett has a lower tax rate than his secretary, wages as a share of America’s gross domestic product have declined from about 50% in 1970 to 43% in 2017, and the International Monetary Fund is concerned about increasing corporate market power in advanced economies.
Trump has done nothing to address these problems. Indeed, his major domestic policy achievement was his tax cuts, which tilted the system even more in the direction of the ultrarich.
Collectively, these and other metrics reveal an American society that is rigged. This time, Democrats should embrace the populist message full on — and make Trump eat his own words.
Steven Strauss, who was a first generation college student, is a visiting professor at Princeton University’s Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, an economic development specialist and a member of USA TODAY’s Board of Contributors.