"Getting screwed" economically in America

I think economic anxiety is what's driving our rancid politics, and that this is what made a Trump victory possible last November. This idea is the basic takeaway from Franklin Foer's article in the July/August 2017 issue of The Atlantic: "What’s Wrong With the Democrats?"

Sen. Elizabeth
Warren (D-Maine)

Foer talks in the article, towards its end, about the "great hope of the populist left" of the Democratic Party, Senator Elizabeth Warren of Maine, who may run for president in 2020. If she does, her campaign will focus on "the idea of fairness." Put bluntly, fairness simply means "people shouldn't get screwed."

Today, just about everybody below the top (say) twenty percent of income earners — everyone who is not upper middle class or higher — is afraid they will get screwed. If it doesn't happen to them, it will happen to their children or grandkids.

Sen. Warren thinks it is mainly "business concentration" — not enough market competition — that leads to income inequality and people getting screwed.

Foer writes:

Everyone can plainly see the lack of competition in many sectors — the way that there are five big banks, four big airlines, one dominant social-media company, one maker of EpiPens. What’s more, a small set of institutional investors — BlackRock, Fidelity, Vanguard — holds stock in a vast percentage of public companies, so even sectors that look somewhat competitive are less so than they appear. CVS and Walgreens, for instance, have a strikingly similar set of major shareholders. The same is true for Apple and Microsoft. 

... As a senator, [Warren] can see how the ills of finance—the industry’s concentration, its abuse of political power — have been replicated across the American economy. Last June in Washington, she gave an important speech, naming a long new list of enemies — oligopolistic companies like Comcast and Google and Walmart, which she blamed for sapping the life from the American economy. “When Big Business can shut out competition, entrepreneurs and small businesses are denied their shot at building something new and exciting.” ... “Competition in America is essential to liberty in America.” 

... if [Warren] does run [for president], she will likely seek to channel working-class anger toward behemoth firms, their executives, and the government officials who coddle them. It’s not a terribly complicated case to build, since the headlines are so packed with the ... exploits of those firms: the continued predations of banks on their own customers; airline overbooking; life-saving allergy injections that cost hundreds of dollars; cable companies exacting ever-higher fees; the exposure of low-level workers to such erratic hours that it becomes impossible to establish a daily routine; a broad indifference to consumers.

*****

Even if Elizabeth Warren stays in the Senate, it's obvious she thinks breaking up the economic "behemoths" would make life better for just about everybody below the upper middle class — if not everybody beneath the top one percent. Let's say, for the sake of argument, that she can succeed in bringing this about, either as a senator or as president. My question is: Wouldn't it help our politics immensely?

I think it would. For example, Foer mentions that a major strain of Democratic thinkers have been driven in recent decades by "identity politics," the perceived need

to combat the bias and discrimination that [this strain] believes is built into the system. What it seeks isn’t just the protection of minorities’ and women’s rights, but the validation of minorities and women in the eyes of the national culture, which it believes has marginalized them.

Well, it was another "identity group" which feels marginalized — whites without a college diploma — that put Trump over the top last year. In other words, today we have a large number of identity groups, each clamoring for recognition and help — typically, at the expense of other groups. It's a classic case of "there isn't enough to go around, and we need to make sure we get our share."

Stanley Greenberg

Foer describes how this same sort of dynamic propelled Ronald Reagan into the White House by winning the 1980 election. There was much economic dislocation and anxiety then, too. After Reagan won, a Democratic pollster/political scientist, Stanley Greenberg, was dispatched to Macomb County, Michigan, just outside Detroit, to figure out why Reagan did so well. Greenberg hosted focus groups among the disaffected people, mostly white, who had voted for Reagan. He found much seething resentment of black people: "African Americans, [the disaffected] complained, had benefited at their expense."

Greenberg returned to Macomb County following Trump's victory last year and hosted focus groups again. Now, he finds, Macomb's resentments are targeted not at blacks so much as at immigrants. Same dynamic, though a different target.

The upshot of all this seems to me to be that:

1. If we could only expand the economic "pie" faster than it has grown since the Great Recession of 2008 — indeed, faster than it has grown since about 1970, when income inequality started to widen — we could ease economic anxiety mightily and get Americans pulling together politically more than they have done in many years.
2. In order to get faster economic growth, we need to do what Senator Elizabeth Warren is calling for: breaking up the market "behemoths" that are prospering greatly at the expense of ordinary Americans of all races, ethnicities, genders, etc.

And so be it!