The Soul of America
It’s the Opportunity, Stupid.
Trends, not snapshots
Thirty years on, James Carville’s famous exhortation/meme to the Clinton campaign and its supporters not to over-complicate the message needs some updating: it’s less about the E-word (economy) and more about the O-word (opportunity), the long wave trend, not the snapshot.
Recessions, bubbles, interest rates & inflation, booms & busts come and go. Your kids being less well off at age 27 than you were, and their kids even less well off than them … that’s the End of the Dream. Secular, not cyclical, as the saying goes.
Since Carville’s 1992 rant, we’ve had the grand New World Order experiment (for which his boss can be partially accountable), resulting in the Elephant Curve². That 2013 analysis is now growing long in the tooth. The latest 2024 study gets more granular, more (cringe) intersectional. Add race, generation and geography to the class mix:
That’s why the Have Not revolt of 2016 didn’t sweep Bernie into power (though many of his supporters did flip to Trump after he lost the blue primary to HRC). Opportunity kept ticking along for lower class blacks as it was cratering for lower class whites, as neatly summarized by this chart from German Lopez and Ashley Wu’s NYT coverage of that Census Bureau/Harvard/Cornell research report:
Cue the white racialist demagogues.
Political economy is too complex for any simple policy fixes. To regain the power necessary to implement any of the complex ones that actually work (like Health Care and Infrastructure … or sensible Immigration), the demos first gets a say, filtered by the anachronism of the Electoral College.
My free friendly advice to the blues, while the euphoria of the Biden → Harris transition holds: frame your 2024 case around the O-word, stupid, before the reds grab it. JD Vance arguably already did, back in 2016, with Hillbilly Elegy … not to mention Melania embodying the concept.
Opportunity vs Opportunism.
Notes:
[1] Created by the author, generated by Microsoft Copilot Designer, powered by DALL-E 3. For what it’s worth, that’s supposed to be a big fat diamond ring on Lady Opportunity’s hand, and the plaque on the base is supposed to read “I Don’t Care, Do U?”. Generative AI not quite yet there.
[2] The original Lakner-Milanovic Elephant Curve was bad enough:
The 2018 update from Alvaredo et al is even worse:
Note the horizontal scale.
