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instead of helping ordinary people to get ahead.”23
Compounding the problem was “more than half of the respondents [believed] the American dream [wasn’t] attainable, and over half [said] their financial conditions [hadn’t] improved the way they imagined.”24 A “NBC/Wall Street Journal poll showed that only 24 percent of voters [thought] the country [was] headed in the right direction, and 70 percent [said] it was on the wrong track.” 25
This is why concern about social status continues to align with populist politics. In their 2019 paper, entitled “Populism as a Problem of Social Integration, Gideon and Hall argued that “much of the discontent fueling support for radical parties is rooted in feelings of social marginalization–namely, in the sense some people have that they have been pushed to the fringes of their national community and deprived of the roles and respect normally accorded full members of it.” They further argued “the more marginal people feel they are to society, the more they are to feel alienated from its political system– providing a reservoir of support for radical parties.”26
No wonder the American public was not really in the mood to listen about causes. It may have been the case, as some people argued, that “for the country’s first 200 years, Americans combined a healthy skepticism about government with an acceptance of necessity... [but] [t]oday, conservatives, in particular, have “forgotten” that balanced view.”27 It may also be true “the country [had] been brainwashed by a powerful alliance of forces hostile to government: big businesses, especially Wall Street, spending unparalleled lobbying dollars to advance its narrow self interest; a new wealthy elite propagating wrongheaded Ayn Rand notions that free markets are always good and government always bad; and a Republican Party using a strategy of attacking and weakening government as a way to win more power for itself.”28 But it is not clear people cared about such arguments. They were simply tired of the same old thing and wanted change, any change.
Never mind such situations often end badly, with calls for strongmen coming about and tyrannical leaders coming to power. It’s where a fair number of people were at the moment. This was evident in the polling numbers that showed support for Donald Trump, the Republican presidential nominee, who ran against the establishment on a platform of change. A CBS News poll in April 2016 showed 58 percent of Republican primary voters thought special interests had not much or no influence on Trump and 52 percent of them saw Trump as the candidate “most likely to get things done once he gets to Washington.”29 The result: Trump won the election.
So, given what we have learned, the bigger question is: why weren’t people angrier? According to Jeff Manza and Clem Brooks, the reason people were not angrier was because they continued to believe they had a personal chance to experience upward mobility:
Mobility optimists may simultaneously express hostility to the “rich” or the “1 percent” and harbor doubts about the “fairness” of the economy. But they may also retain a belief in the promise of their own (or their children’s) economic prospects that insulates them from reacting to historical trends with more vigorous support for policy reform efforts.30
If true, then the consequence would be “the broader hope that ‘rising citizen demands for redistribution [could] reshape the policy environment’ ... appears, at best, to be very slow in coming and to be countered by a very
powerful set of forces including an enduring mobility trope.”31 But the reality is: no matter how much a person “believes” or “hopes” their children will experience greater opportunity and hence live a better life, it will probably not happen.
The Ping-Pong of Presidential Elections
The division that existed in 2016 continues
today. In fact, America appears as deeply