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Trump, Sanders and the Wage Class

Deacon923

Deacon923

Scooter Banks
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I ran across these two pieces this morning. I thought they were both very insightful in describing the appeal of Trump and who his supporters are. Both pieces are focused on Trump, but I really think that most of the analysis is just as accurate if you apply it to Sanders. Both men are essentially appealing to the same group, the wage-earning class, and represent a challenge to the preferences of the salary class. Take a read and see what you think.

http://thearchdruidreport.blogspot.com/2016/01/donald-trump-and-politics-of-resentment.html
http://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2016/1/31/wages-a-comeback?utm_content=buffer900b2&utm_medium=social&utm_source=facebook.com&utm_campaign=buffer

The essential insight is that if you look at American society and divide it into the investor class, salary class, wage class, and welfare class, the disruptions of the past 30 years have destroyed the wage class while basically leaving the other three classes more or less where they were. Trump (and IMO Sanders) represent the backlash of the wage class against the salary class. I would put a finder point on it and say Trump represents the backlash of the right-leaning members of the wage class against all three other classes. Many wage earners resent those they perceive as getting a free ride from the government, and vote against government assistance, even though the wage earners are the most likely to need that assistance during their lives. Sanders primarily represents the backlash of the left-leaning members of the wage class against the salary and investment classes.


*Please note: I am not a regular reader of "the Archdruid Report". I got to it from the Strong Towns piece. Don't really know anything about this John Michael Greer person, he probably is a kook in some ways but I thought this particular piece was worthy of posting.
 
I've always been intrigued by the relationship between wage earners and their resentment of government assistance. I think a lot of it comes down to a misunderstanding of how broad the government assistance net truly is, i.e. many wage earners do not consider programs they participate in to be welfare or government assistance while it assuredly is.
 
A lot of it has to do with what is framed as a handout -- food stamps, unemployment, disability, etc. -- and what is not -- tax breaks for business, infrastructure, security, etc.
 
I don't understand. Neither link is to an article from The Atlantic.
 
Their success is also evidence of the further polarization of politics. Neither of those guys sits exactly near the middle politically. They are also evidence that people are fed up with all the polish and soundbyte phoniness that usually comes with the nominee.
 
Couple thoughts.

1) any self-identified member of the "Salary class" has a false consciousness problem.

2) really not true that the "welfare class" haven't experienced much in the way of changes. Welfare reform has been devastating, $2-a-day poverty (not counting illiquid, in-kind benefits) has risen sharply since 1996. TANF essentially doesn't exist. Guilford budgeted $20k for TANF this year in a $72mm department. More: http://www.demos.org/blog/9/8/15/rise-2-day-poverty-and-what-do-about-it

3) my understanding of the demographics is the big unmistakable thing about Bernie's support is The Youth, not particular class divides. His barnstorming stops have generally been in college towns, not manufacturing hubs.

4) I do think working-class resentment of benefits recipients is real. NYT/ProPublica did a deep dive on Kentuckians and the gubernatorial election that showed that. But Trump hasn't really tapped into that, beyond calling a lot of people losers. His rhetoric is way lighter on cutting government programs than the typical R candidate.
 
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Thanks, Tuffalo. I think the point about the "welfare class" is not that there hasn't been any change, but that the change has not been as disruptive as what has happened to wage earners. i.e., Ronald Reagan's "welfare queens" notwithstanding, nobody was living a thriving middle class life on welfare in 1970, 1980, or 1990. The life might suck even worse now than it did then, but overall it's all just different shades of suck.

On the other hand, the wage earning class has gone from a situation where not that long ago a family could expect to live a relatively comfortable existence with one breadwinner at a blue collar job, to a situation where there are hardly any blue collar jobs left and those that do exist don't pay nearly what they did in real terms. Thus the disillusionment.

Another side issue is that studies have shown that the very poor are overwhelmingly disengaged from the political process. Even if the "welfare class" has received a raw deal, very few of that group has the time, ability, or money to do anything about it within the political process. The wage earning class still has some ability to rise up and impact elections, and they are showing it this cycle.

None of that is meant to contradict your statements about the weakening of safety net programs, all of which are true.
 
Trump's extremism is different than a polarized version. He's very vocal about areas he is far right but doesn't really talk about his other positions which are decidedly more moderate or even liberal. Bernie is about as far left as you can go on the US scale IMO.
 
5th point: the work of a successful democratic socialist movement is to rid the so-called salary class of its false consciousness, not arrange the wage class against that "class".
 
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Seriously asking but what was the big differences between salary class and wage class when wage class was strong? 2&2 loves to point out that in class warfare that those that are less still have lots of modern conveniences that would not have been available back in the day. So when the wage class was strong what benefits were the salary class or is it the salary and wage class use to be the same class but different way of earning money that now ceases to exist.
 
i think you might have to ask the authors of the pieces. I kind of took these class designations in the OP as simply an original way to conceptualize the current politico-socio-economic climate.

I also have a question: how are the SES classes traditionally defined in the literature in this century in the US (or just post WWII)? is it just upper class, middle, and lower?
 
ThinkingWithMyDeac said:
Seriously asking but what was the big differences between salary class and wage class when wage class was strong? 2&2 loves to point out that in class warfare that those that are less still have lots of modern conveniences that would not have been available back in the day. So when the wage class was strong what benefits were the salary class or is it the salary and wage class use to be the same class but different way of earning money that now ceases to exist.
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I think the answer is that in the past, being a wage earner was a legit path to get in and stay in the "middle class" and have reasonably similar prospects for your life and children as the salary class. By and large, the salary class is still middle to upper class, but the wage earners are now finding it almost impossible to get into the middle class.
 
I mostly read "salary class" as white-collar middle class folks and "wage class" as blue-collar middle class folks, the latter has greatly shrunk and the former doesn't currently identify - at least on a large scale - as being a part of the labor movement, though, to echo Tuffalo, they ought to.
 
JuiceCrewAllStar said:
I mostly read "salary class" as white-collar middle class folks and "wage class" as blue-collar middle class folks, the latter has greatly shrunk and the former doesn't currently identify - at least on a large scale - as being a part of the labor movement, though, to echo Tuffalo, they ought to.
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kind of... I think the point of the authors I posted is that jobs that pay an hourly wage and jobs that pay a salary are fundamentally different, and the people that occupy those jobs have fundamentally different mindsets, to the point that it is useful to draw a distinction between them. That's the case even though there is a substantial overlap in gross income between the two. I guess part of the point is there used to be a lot more overlap.

The wage jobs have gotten steadily more precarious and insecure, and vulnerable to forces like globalization. The salary jobs have not (of course, as the authors note, there are plenty of exceptions to these rules, but we're talking macro trends here). The economy has been arranged to benefit the salary earners and the investment class, to the direct expense of the wage class. Movement from wage class to salary class is hard, especially for a mid-career worker, so even though things like globalization may produce more jobs or at least the same number of jobs overall, many of them are jobs that are not accessible to the wage earners who lose their jobs.
 
ThinkingWithMyDeac said:
Seriously asking but what was the big differences between salary class and wage class when wage class was strong? 2&2 loves to point out that in class warfare that those that are less still have lots of modern conveniences that would not have been available back in the day. So when the wage class was strong what benefits were the salary class or is it the salary and wage class use to be the same class but different way of earning money that now ceases to exist.
Click to expand...

You used to be able to get good jobs back in the day even without a college degree. I grew up outside of Baltimore, and the biggest employers there back in the day were Beth Steel and the docks. With technology and automation and cutting back certain industries like steel, those jobs dried up. Same in VA, where the largest employer 30+ years ago were the naval ship yards down in Hampton Roads. Now, the biggest employer in MD is the UMd school system, and the biggest employer in VA is Walmart, like it is in many other states (before that it was Food Lion for a while). Jobs at Beth Steel and the ship yards paid well, and you probably had a nice pension (young folks who don't work for a govt entity may not know what a pension is because they are becoming extinct). Now that former steel worker's kid without a college degree is going to have a lot harder time staying in the middle class. We've become a service economy basically, like the British right before us. We were well on the way to becoming a service economy before NAFTA and the TPP. And a reciprocal lack of tariffs does help certain industries here and hurt certain industries here - like the California wine industry was thrilled with the TPP, but the UAW and auto industry was against it.
 
cville deac said:
You used to be able to get good jobs back in the day even without a college degree. I grew up outside of Baltimore, and the biggest employers there back in the day were Beth Steel and the docks. With technology and automation and cutting back certain industries like steel, those jobs dried up. Same in VA, where the largest employer 30+ years ago were the naval ship yards down in Hampton Roads. Now, the biggest employer in MD is the UMd school system, and the biggest employer in VA is Walmart, like it is in many other states (before that it was Food Lion for a while). Jobs at Beth Steel and the ship yards paid well, and you probably had a nice pension (young folks who don't work for a govt entity may not know what a pension is because they are becoming extinct). Now that former steel worker's kid without a college degree is going to have a lot harder time staying in the middle class. We've become a service economy basically, like the British right before us. We were well on the way to becoming a service economy before NAFTA and the TPP. And a reciprocal lack of tariffs does help certain industries here and hurt certain industries here - like the California wine industry was thrilled with the TPP, but the UAW and auto industry was against it.
Click to expand...

Good take.
 
Deacon923 said:
kind of... I think the point of the authors I posted is that jobs that pay an hourly wage and jobs that pay a salary are fundamentally different, and the people that occupy those jobs have fundamentally different mindsets, to the point that it is useful to draw a distinction between them. That's the case even though there is a substantial overlap in gross income between the two. I guess part of the point is there used to be a lot more overlap.

The wage jobs have gotten steadily more precarious and insecure, and vulnerable to forces like globalization. The salary jobs have not (of course, as the authors note, there are plenty of exceptions to these rules, but we're talking macro trends here). The economy has been arranged to benefit the salary earners and the investment class, to the direct expense of the wage class. Movement from wage class to salary class is hard, especially for a mid-career worker, so even though things like globalization may produce more jobs or at least the same number of jobs overall, many of them are jobs that are not accessible to the wage earners who lose their jobs.
Click to expand...

A lot of people, maybe the majority, in salaried positions shouldn't be FLSA exempt and should be hourly wage earners. Again, false consciousness. Workers of the world unite!
 
I would guess that he is talking about salary people who are really part of the wage class.
 
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