A Disease of Affluence

“Worldly people”, G. K. Chesterton mused, “never understand even the world; they rely altogether on a few cynical maxims which are not true.” And so it is for huge regions of the American ideological landscape when asked to explain the meteoric rise of Donald Trump in 2016, or his seemingly implausible return last week. 

Far-left radicals, socialists, liberals, centrists, old-fashioned conservatives, academics, mainstream journalists, and everyone else who simply cannot imagine voting for the man themselves, all tend to default to one narrative: Many Americans are struggling economically, left behind, urgently wanting a more egalitarian society, and turned to a fascist movement in desperation. Bernie Sanders summed up this conventional wisdom succinctly; Democrats lost because they “abandoned the working class.” 

Like many, Sanders had moved away from this narrative after 2016, and particularly after 2020, working closely with the Biden administration to pass the most economically progressive legislative agenda in two generations. During the same period, empirical research added its voice—study after study found ‘racial resentment’ a far bigger driver of support for Trump than ‘economic anxiety’. Neither Trump’s core support, nor the drift of formerly Democratic voters to him are well explained by economic desperation. 

Like many cynical maxims that are not even true, it is kept aloft on a cloud of smaller, equally persistent, falsehoods. There is a trope that most Americans work ‘paycheck-to-paycheck’. They don’t. The median American has savings. Politicians on both the left and right love the rhetoric of Americans working multiple jobs to get by. In reality, less than 5% of the labour force does so (and that includes upper-class professionals like a lawyer who does consulting on the side). 

Nor is it what voters themselves say: The average American thinks democrats are far too liberal. They see the party as to their left on both economic and social issues. Only 6% said they thought Harris was not liberal enough. This is not an electorate crying out for socialism, turning away from Democrats because they haven’t seized the means of production.

Finally, the narrative (hereafter called the ‘poverty narrative’) often assumes an outdated (and decidedly masculine) vision of a frustrated proletariat of laid off coal miners, quite at odds with the reality of life for most working Americans in the 21^st century. The 23-year-old barista serving you coffee at Starbucks, who lives with roommates in a small apartment, who doesn’t have job security, or the ability to pursue her goals in life—she most likely did not vote for Trump. The electorate has undergone class realignment, but exit polls still show the lowest income Americans preferred Harris.

And yet, for all that we’ve understood the world better, for all that politicians like Bernie seemed to grow in their ideology, it's the poverty narrative which so many have returned to in the face of last week’s loss. Across the spectrum, people are reverting to the most vapid version of their 2016 selves.

Given the clear attraction of the poverty narrative, the way so many, including so many intelligent and informed people, reach for it like a safety blanket, it is worth asking: why? What needs does it meet, what implicit assumptions does it draw on, and what more challenging reality does it conceal?

To do so, I think it helps start from an internationalist perspective. Americans, even the most liberal ones, can have a decidedly US-centric view of the world. And, as someone who has lived at a range of points on the income ladder in both America and other countries, the poverty narrative is decidedly... strange.

American affluence

The median US household income is $80,000. By most estimates, the median Trump voter’s is somewhat higher. This would be considered upper-middle class in most of Europe and upper-class in most of the world. 

The country has recovered much faster than any peer nation from covid. It has pursued an aggressive full-employment, pro-labor economic policy that has seen rising wages, particularly at the bottom. The theory that growing income would overtake price increases, and inflation would be managed to a ‘soft landing’, has been clearly validated. 

Certainly, most Americans will experience difficulties and financial anxieties from time to time. But if these are sufficient to drive a people to fascism, we would expect the rest of the developed world to have fallen long ago. It hasn’t. 

But don’t those countries have more security in the form of better welfare states? To a degree, but it’s not the security to live at an American standard of living.  The UK jobseekers’ allowance (unemployment insurance) is £70-90 a week (or $89-114). That’s it. A little under £5,000 a year. Most Americans I’ve mentioned this to find that preposterously low, but that’s only because they’re viewing it in the context of American wages. 

In contrast, the US left has long held $15/hr (or $31,000/yr full time) to be the bare minimum and, increasingly, through both legislation and a good labour market, wages are catching up to that. On average, that’s what the barista mentioned earlier earns, and many service workers are able to claim $18-20/ HR, or around $40,000 annually. 

In many countries this is what doctors earn. In the UK, the salary for an NHS Junior Doctor is £32,000 ($40,000).  This will increase over their career, but only to something around the average US professional wage. Their US equivalent would start at $130,000. 

The UK jobseekers’ allowance may sound low to Americans, but in many countries that is the average wage. Those countries are also not lurching towards fascism right now. Indeed, it’s precisely because they’ve had it harder that they’re not. Many are democracies now, but had crazed dictators in living memory, so they’re not as flippant with risking that outcome as we’ve become. We no longer really have anyone alive from WW2, our last system-level crisis. Americans have not been pushed to the brink by hardship; they’ve grown complacent.

My father-in-law grew up in the Dominican Republic and was politically active against a brutal authoritarian regime there. I recall his take on would-be American revolutionaries of the right and left, unembedded in a long ideological narrative about their origins, but instantly more incisive—‘these people are soft’ he said with a shrug.  The poverty narrative also imagines American voters are very stupid. Apparently, because their desire for more downward distribution of wealth has been inadequately met by Democrats, they are now turning to the party most openly connected to the upward distribution of wealth of any in the developed world. And that they’ve done so, not in response to the Third Way politics of the 90s, but in response to the most economically populist Democratic Party of our lifetimes. The child tax credit halved child poverty. No one seemed to care when it was lost. The GDP of a European country was spent on clean energy; huge, historic investments have been made in infrastructure and manufacturing. The president stood in a picket line for the first-ever time. These are difficult details for the poverty narrative, so it simply ignores them. 

A better narrative is the drift Democrats have seen in their coalition is the end phases of a gradual realignment that started with the Civil Rights Movement. As Angie Maxwell and Todd Shields convincingly demonstrate in The Long Southern Strategy, the process of racist white southern voters (and others with a ‘southern identity’) moving from their ancestral home in the Democratic Party to an increasingly nativist Republican one was a long one. The bulk of them had left by Clinton’s time, but a few stuck around well into the Bush and Obama presidencies. 

The defection of seven million ‘working-class’ (I use parentheses because many are reasonably affluent) voters to Trump in 2016 was not a delayed reaction to the economic policies of Clinton two decades prior. Rather it was a final few late adapters catching up to where their cohort had been for some time. Many had already been trending this way, having voted for Bush and split tickets under Obama. With Trump the realignment was complete: attitudes to race now directly lined up with partisan identity. These voters are now locked in as Republicans. They will not return in our lifetimes. 

A morality play with bad morals

If the narrative of an abandoned working class, acting out of economic desperation is false, or at the very least misleading, why does it have such appeal? To be fair, the poverty narrative doesn’t have absolutely nothing to commend it. Around 30 million Americans live on a household income of less than $30,000. Having done so myself, I can confirm this is indeed quite stressful. Some, not a majority, and perhaps quite a small minority, but some, have doubtless vented this on the wrong target. 

It’s also clear that, with little muscle memory of it, electorates the world over have not responded well to inflation. Democrats have not been spared the resulting anti-incumbent anger. While I think the underlying approach was the right one, we might ask how well the party communicated it with voters. Biden was an effective foil to Trump in 2020 but was not able to offer a narrative on the economy thereafter. Harris' presentation was smoother (a low bar), but her talk of an ‘opportunity economy’ came off as buzzwordy and vapid. Individual policies polled well, but she was unable to connect them to an underlying vision or set of values.

While not completely absolving Democrats, it is worth stating they were operating in an incredibly hostile media environment. The coverage of the (objectively strong) economy was relentlessly negative, while progressive legislation was not covered at all. The result is most Americans do not know the what the IRA is, or that it passed. Most Americans rate their own finances well, but believe (factually incorrectly) that the economy is in recession.

All this provides some context for why the poverty narrative was so easy to revert to for many. Also, I think it’s comforting: It validates people’s priors—it turns out all we needed to do was implement the exact policies they happened to favour anyway! It also lets us sidestep harder conversations (to which I will return). As much as anything though, it’s a morality play, one that emerges from our implicit frameworks and subconscious assumptions. Consider it in parallel to other explanations of the election: ‘it was a backlash to woke/cancel culture’; ‘young men are sick of feminism’, ‘the Democrats weren’t civil about Trump supporters’; and ‘Democrats shouldn’t have campaigned on trans rights.’ Notice that in all these narratives voters moving right are not granted any agency. They are just reacting to something liberals have done. As a result, liberals are implicitly assumed to bear responsibility for the outcome. 

I call this ‘what did you say to make him hit you?’ politics. The implication is intentional: We tend to perceive both liberalism and the Democratic party as female-coded—the result of decades of heavily gendered use of language by conservatives. This filters into our assessment of moral responsibility (which is also gendered), in which we offer explanations for the bad behaviour of male-coded groups and shy away from direct condemnation. We are asked to ‘understand’ the perspective of those who shift to the right and cautioned against ‘dismissing’ them. Long narratives are concocted in which explanation fades into excuse. 

This is bad morality: Someone being poor, or annoyed with the excesses of social justice, does not justify them becoming a fascist. It’s also a poor understanding of the world. Most Trump supporters are not poor (in a global sense, most are very affluent).  Finally, we shouldn’t think of the far right as simply responding to liberalism—this is a movement with ideas, goals, and plans of its own. The way it moves in the world is highly agential. Most of the last decade has been liberals reacting to things it has done, not the other way around.

For the socialist left specifically, it’s also a morality play about society, one in which fascism isn’t a movement with ideas and goals of its own, but the punishment for neoliberalism, an inevitable and deserved consequence of it. Socialism then emerges from the ashes as our reward for having accepted our chastisement. The world doesn’t work like that. Many developed countries are cycling between mainline liberalism and far-right populism because those are the options that their systems put before the electorate. They are the ones put before the electorate because they have the most adherents. That’s it. It’s not a cyclical process of history in which each system invariably produces its successor. History does not have laws like that. It’s just stuff that happens.

Socialism claims it is uniquely able to inspire people. That only it can prevent the siren call of fascism. But socialism—to put it mildly—does not have the electoral track record to back that up. While individual socialist policies can poll well, the total package—the values, narratives, and rhetoric—is a decidedly minority thing. Maybe roughly the 6% who find Harris insufficiently liberal. Rather than face that reality directly, each loss is met with complaints of unfairness, that the system was set against them. 

The reality is, if you can’t organise, win people over, and win elections in a liberal democracy with free speech, free association, and a universal franchise, you’re not suddenly going to be able to win in authoritarian herrenvolk democracy without any of those things, much less under full totalitarianism. You’ve never beaten the first level of the game on bunny mode but are convinced you’d complete the entire thing easily if the difficulty went up to nightmare plus. 

I take no relish in saying that. This would be a much better world if the main options that people bought into, and got put before the electorate, were liberalism and socialism, if every general election was Clinton v. Sanders, or liberalism vs. Burkean conservatism, or even a true libertarianism, or any combination of the above. But it’s not. We’re in a world where the options that can gain traction are liberalism and far-right pseudo-populist fascism. The time has long passed for us to be indulging in simple morality plays in which the latter is just a reaction to the former. 

A mean and slavish people

The narrative that hardship makes people tribal, and nativist, and mean, and vindictive—that toleration is only possible in a society of pure affluence—reflects a dark view of human nature. If that is true, then socialism, or even a progressive liberalism, isn’t. Those things aren’t compatible. It’s also a much more condescending view than whatever is ascribing to sneering affluent liberals by those who hold it. 

But it isn’t true. The core of the MAGA base isn’t people who can’t afford enough $2 packs of pasta and $3 jars of tomato sauce to feed their children. I’m not saying that person doesn’t exist, but statistically they’re not representative. MAGA is someone who earns $70,000 a year and is angry that their overpriced Waitrose shop costs a bit more. MAGA is someone who is angry that they might have to shift from buying their goods at a middle-class-coded supermarket to the cheaper, working-class-coded supermarket. 

The American Republic has been pulled down, possibly past the point of no return, by affluent people. People who have lives their ancestors would have literally killed for. Who on average spend 10% of their pay on groceries, the lowest in the country’s history, not to mention human history. Who are lashing out at others at the slightest inconvenience, because they want to lash out at others. 

Americans are prosperous, but without any deep sense of obligations to others. We are a highly commercial, individualist people, and when we let go of even a thin liberal conception of the public good, we become nasty, petty, small, vindictive and irrational. J.S. Mill, a philosopher who truly prized individual development, also warned of its dangers in isolation:

The spirit of a commercial people will be... essentially mean and slavish wherever public spirit is not cultivated by an extensive participation of the people in the business of government.

This, I think, is what has befallen America. This is a disease of affluence, not poverty. This isn’t a story of a working class that is being pinched. It’s the story of a working class that is doing better than any comparable working class ever has and a professional class who are angry about that. Who feel that this newfound security means they no longer show proper deference to their social betters. 

I am as disappointed as anyone that the policies I wanted the Democratic Party to pursue have not had the electoral payoff I hoped they would. I can easily admit my own error: while I never thought policy was everything, I hoped it (and rising wages) would have some impact. 

A more mature American left would grapple with this, but to hear them talk today you’d think none of that policy ever happened. You might say the Democrats should have done more. They would say they did what they could with the congressional majorities they had. I’ll leave that for others to adjudicate. My response would be that doesn’t take seriously not just the lack of impact but the backlash that economic populism did have. 

It's not that the middle-class professional family doesn’t know or care that the driver bringing them their food delivery makes what a British doctor does. I think when they are aware, they’re often quite angry about it. They like having the people who serve them be desperate. They see it as an insult that someone, in their eyes, so far beneath them is charging that much for their services. It matters little to them that they themselves earn what a British Member of Parliament does precisely because America pursued a bottom-up labor market strategy.

Abraham Lincoln prior to the Civil War argued against slavery not just on moral but economic grounds: large plantations would be displaced by free workers. A free society would be a more prosperous one. This, to slavery’s defenders, completely missed the point. John C. Calhoun, a proslavery senator, in a famous speech responded:

Can as much, on the score of equality be said of the North? With us, the two great divisions of society are not rich and poor, but White and Black; and all the former, the poor as well as the rich, belong to the upper class, and are respected... and hence have a position and pride of character which either poverty nor misfortune can deprive them.

It wasn’t, for Calhoun, about absolute financial status, but about always having someone beneath you. This, I think,  is the common impulse behind both Trump’s core support, and the marginal gains he’s made from Democrats with many groups. People use this quote to show how voters will often privilege social concerns over economic, symbolic goods over material. Clearly that is a big part of the story here: many Americans, including many non-white Americans, are deeply troubled by the prospect of a symbolically equal citizenry.

I’d argue that Calhoun’s quote also gets at something more fundamental that unites both the social and economic sides of the political brain: People like having social inferiors. They will often prioritise this over not just narrow economic interest, but virtually any other concern. Once people gain a bit of comfort, the desire to punish people for not ‘knowing their place’ (be it the working class, women, or a racial group) can become their sole political instinct. The Trump movement is about reinstating or reenforcing structures that allow them to do so.

This is the instinct that lies behind MAGA.  It is both what motivates its faithful and converts newcomers. To put it more cautiously, the poverty narrative is just that—a narrative. It is a highly simplified parable about a nation of three hundred plus million souls. Parables are not literally true, they are abstractions that may help, or hinder, our understanding of the world. I think the story I’ve offered here helps us grapple with our circumstances better.

What about 2024’s democratic defections? What I’ve argued might be true for Trump’s core support, and even for the ‘white working class’ defections the Democratic party suffered in 2016, but what about now? After all, he made big inroads with a number of groups—many non-white.

While white supremacy, and white feelings of grievance, are clearly a big part of the new right, that’s not quite the through-line I’m drawing here: the desire is to always have someone beneath you as much as it is to maintain a place at the top. Anti-Black racism, the core social cleavage in America, is not confined  to non-Hispanic whites. Further, the desire for social inferiors  is not limited to racial expression.  In all the groups Trump gained with (young people, Hispanics, middle-income) most of the defections came from men. I think anger (sometimes self-aware, often subconscious) at women increasingly succeeding in the world, not always being beneath men socially, is one of the big things that attracts people of all backgrounds to Trump. Finally, economic position itself can be a source of dominance. The feeling of anger at a door-dash driver charging $20/hr for their time, or at service staff who are not desperate, or anyone you feel is beneath you claiming some dignity for themselves—that is not unique to any group of people.  It is sadly just human. 

Aristocratic contempt for the lower orders is nothing new—just ask the Greek and Roman authors. Throughout history, this impulse has not just been cruel, but petty and irrational. Elites will often undermine their own position and tear apart the fabric of the state to lash out at others. To not just dominate but humiliate them. America has now achieved such broad prosperity that this aristocratic brain rot is infecting, or at least within reach, of huge swathes of the voting electorate. 

Liberalism has acted as something of a guard against this. Liberal ideology is not merely a set of policies, or even a philosophy. It is a way of being in the world. Balancing individualism and social obligation in careful tension immunizes the ideology’s adherents to the worst pathologies of prosperity. A rich liberal is often a preposterous creature; vain, overly impressed by their own intellect, affected in their politics, and more than a little hypocritical. But they are still light years away from the enthusiastic ignorance, performative cruelty, and zealous nihilism that await us in liberalism's absence.

It's easy to pretend that all of this is a reaction, one caused by an inadequate economic platform, solvable with a better one. But it isn’t. Our country has been captured by a force that has its own ideas about our future. One that is ancient, compelling, and evil. 

Featured image is Black Trash Bin With Green Leaves