America has gotten both better and worse
How MAGA supporters and detractors both have a point and miss the point
It’s no secret that political discourse in the US today is horrible. Social media interactions about contentious topics range from “tense” to “dumpster fire.” News consumption has bifurcated along party lines. Friends and family members have become estranged over support for or antipathy toward different candidates.
As I was preparing to write an entirely different article, I came to a realization that bowled me over and gave me hope for repairing some of the fractures in our society. That revelation was that conservatives and progressives are both right when they say we either should or shouldn’t try to bring back the past.
To my anti-MAGA readers: I hope you will acknowledge some good reasons why people look fondly to the past.
To my pro-MAGA readers: I hope you’ll see why many people find the slogan offensive, even if what they dislike isn’t what you liked.
What does it mean to make America great “again”?
Many self-identified Republicans, when interviewed about what they want members of the other party to know about them, stressed that just because they’re conservative doesn’t mean they’re racist. Yet Republicans often embrace the slogan “Make America great again,” which makes me and other progressives reflexively think of the racism, sexism, and pressure to conform that characterized the Baby Boom in America (the decades after World War II). We think, How could you want to bring that back and then say you’re not racist?
But if the working class — which makes up a larger share of Republican voters than of Democrats — looks backward with rose-colored glasses while claiming not to be racist, we’ll find it more productive to ask ourselves why.
Old assumptions
In the book What We Owe Each Other, Minouche Shafik introduced me to the concept of “the social contract.” Rather than a literal contract, it refers to the implicit and/or explicit agreements we have made with the other people in our society. The book explains,
All societies choose to have some things left to individuals and others determined collectively. The norms and rules governing how those collective institutions operate is what I will call the social contract.
Shafik writes that in the developed Western world, especially in the late 19th and most of the 20th century,
…social contracts were built on the premise that families would have a sole male breadwinner and that women would take care of the young and the old. There was also a general presumption that people would stay married until they died and give birth to children only when married. They would have steady employment with very few employers over a career, and the education and skills accumulated in school would be enough for a lifetime. Most would have only a few years of retirement, and the support needed in old age would be provided by families.
Reading that, I was struck by how much those assumptions sound like the “good ol’ days” that are sometimes idealized — usually by conservatives, who are, as I mentioned above, predominantly working class. Those attitudes and circumstances were just normal back in the ’40s, when many of our social safety net policies were established.
Old solutions
People without a college education recognize that their parents or grandparents had an easier time earning middle-class money than they do today. They might think, quite reasonably, that if we could just bring old norms back, life would get better now.
But business has moved forward alongside culture, and neither one can be dragged backward — nor do many of us want to return to the social norms of a bygone era.
However, I think both camps are partially right. The MAGA camp is right in that aspects of our economy were demonstrably fairer in the mid-20th century — but not much else. We could smooth over many disagreements if we realize that we can decouple “what we had in the past” from “what society looked like in the past.”
In my next article, I’ll argue that what we need is to bring policy forward. But first, I want to show some ways that life really was better “back then,” as well as ways that it definitely wasn’t.
The good ol’ days?
There were many aspects of life in the post-war era that actually were better than today — namely, that all classes benefited from economic growth and prosperity. (That’s not to say all races and genders did, but this section focuses on the good.)
For example, the phrase “a rising tide lifts all boats” — which is meant to indicate that growing the economy is good for everyone — actually applied. From 1947 until the mid-1970s, every income bracket grew at about the same rate (shown by the nearly overlapping lines in the chart below). Yes, the rich got richer, but the poor were also getting richer.
However, around 1975, the rate at which incomes grew began to diverge. The richest 5% of Americans by household income (the red line above) kept growing at much the same rate as before, rising 80% above 1973 levels by 2018 even after accounting for inflation. Meanwhile, incomes around the middle grew slowly — showing only about a 30% gain over the same period. And the poorest fifth of Americans, by income, saw theirs grow hardly at all, now barely 20% above 1973 levels.
Similarly, wealth concentration at the top decreased from the Great Depression until the early 1970s — meaning wealth was more evenly distributed. (In the following graph, both lines decrease sharply after 1930, then more slowly but still decreasing.) Starting around 1980, however, wealth began to concentrate upwards again.
More wealth controlled by the top 1% means less for everyone else to split up and fight over. It’s mind-boggling that the top 1% could control even 20% of the nation’s wealth, but the more it rises, the less the rest of us are sharing.
Other measures of economic inequality that dipped in the middle of the 20th century have also been climbing again. People who grew up with working-class parents and enjoyed a middle-class lifestyle expected that option to be available, but there are fewer jobs that pay for that life. That’s great news if you’ve made it to the upper income bracket, but less so if you’re trending in the other direction.
And the high-paying jobs more often require a college education. In the graph below, we see that households that are headed by a college graduate (“College”) and those that aren’t (“Noncollege”) have similar wages and similar wealth through the 1970s (where the lines overlap).
Then incomes, and especially net worth (“wealth”), begin to diverge, increasing much faster for College households. It’s much harder for people without a college degree to build wealth today, even though less than 40% of Americans have earned one.
Social mobility is often measured by the odds that children (in historical measures, sons) will earn more than their parents (or fathers). Obviously, the more a child’s parents earned, the less likely that child will be able to earn more than they did. But it’s not the top bracket that we worry about; on the far right of the graph below, those kids had really rich parents, so they’ll be fine even if they don’t get high-paying jobs.
The lines are all higher on the left, since the obvious corollary is that the less parents make, the more likely their child will be able to out-earn them. But you can see that in each generation, the line drops faster and dips lower — meaning fewer children today can earn more at age 30 than their parents did at the same age. Americans born in the ’40s and ’50s found it a lot easier to keep up with their parents than today’s workers do.
The bad ol’ days?
Despite the gloomier economic prospects today, there’s a reason the MAGA slogan receives so much pushback: life in the post-war Baby Boom definitely wasn’t better for everyone.
While pay gains between rich and poor men were more equitable in the mid-20th century, the pay gap between men and women started out large and has improved only slowly. Today, women earn about 82% of what men their age earn, and even among the youngest workers, who grew up in a supposedly more egalitarian era, women are still at 92% of men’s earnings. Working women don’t want to go back to when the gap was 20 percentage points larger (the left side of the red/top line below).
Not to mention that women who joined the workforce encountered plenty of sexual harassment. Changing the “boys club” dynamic in many workplaces has met with significant resistance (from men), but at least sexual harassment is now illegal. The Equal Pay Act of 1963 required equal pay for equivalent work, and the Civil Rights Act of 1964 prohibited discrimination based on sex, which was interpreted to include sexual harassment.
I think it should be obvious to everyone that people of color also had a harder time of things “back then,” even if their experience today still falls far short of what it ought to be. To start with, the last recorded public lynching of a Black person was only in 1964(!). While the practice had been declining before then, that’s still within living memory of my parents!
Even places that were ostensibly safe from lynchings could legally expel Blacks (and/or other people of color) after dark — known as “sundown towns” — and were especially prevalent in the Midwest. Black people were subjected to restrictive codes, known as Jim Crow laws, which weren’t made fully illegal until 1968 and have ramifications to this day.
The housing industry legally discriminated against Black people in myriad ways, leading to segregation of neighborhoods and of people of color into less desirable areas. Because home ownership has been an important way for families to build wealth, that segregation has led to Black families losing more ground over time.
Though I’ve focused on Black people, all non-whites have faced discrimination. Chinese people faced restricted immigration and racist stereotyping. Immigration laws in the post-World War II era included the National Origin Act’s system of allocating quotas, which were explicitly to “preserve the sociological and cultural balance of the United States” — in other words, to favor white Europeans. Legal immigration was subject to country quota systems until 1965, and the replacement policy of “favoring family reunification and skilled immigrants” still enables racial and religious discrimination.
Then there’s the discrimination faced by disabled people prior to the Americans with Disabilities Act, which wasn’t passed until 1990. Queer people of all races and genders suffered; homosexual acts were illegal in 49 states as recently as 1969, and being publicly out could get you assassinated. Native American parents didn’t have the right to prevent their children from being taken to off-reservation schools until 1978!
I think you get the point.
Of course, people didn’t immediately get better treatment just because laws changed. We still have work to do. That said, I’m certain anyone mentioned here wouldn’t want to go back to times when all that discrimination was also legal and tolerated.
What now?
It’s worth noting that our opinions about our collective past are also colored by our present status. If you’re someone who (would have) suffered from the prejudice of a prior era, you’re rightly more focused on the social gains made against prejudice. Similarly, if you’re financially comfortable now, it’s easier to look outside yourself and see the changes in America as positive.
Conversely, working-class people who can no longer feed their families with the same jobs that gave their own parents a middle-class life maybe should — but probably aren’t — going to say, “Well, that’s OK since [pick a group] are so much better off now.” (Very few of us would.) We all hope to maintain or exceed the standard of living in which we grew up.
The cleverness of a slogan like “Make America great again” is that it could refer to almost anything. It lets the listener fill in what they think the speaker means, for better or worse. So even if you wear a MAGA hat thinking of better pay, not fewer civil rights, I hope it’s clear why the slogan brings up so much pushback and anger.
But we’re still left with the question of what to do now. Some things have gone wrong since the post-war era, and some have gotten better. How do we keep the latter and fix the former? In my next article, I’ll argue that updating our social contract is the way to move us all forward.
If you enjoyed this article, consider reading the rest of my publication.
