Why America hasn’t become great again

United States President Donald Trump and his MAGA base are often portrayed as a break from past political norms. While that is certainly true, it overlooks the long and predictable path that led to his rise.

The slogan “Make America Great Again” (MAGA) became the movement’s rallying cry, tapping into a nostalgic vision of a past era of economic prosperity and social dominance and appealing to voters who feel left behind by demographic and economic change.

Trump is the predictable result of the deteriorating economic conditions in the U.S. since the 1980s and the political machinations that brought those economic conditions about. In our recent book , we explore how the U.S. has set itself on a path toward self-destruction.

The rise of corporate power

In the 1970s, higher taxes and regulation, a growing “rights-conscious revolution” around the environment, gender and race, demand for rising wages and increasing foreign competition threatened corporate power. In response, American business embarked on what billionaire Warren Buffett described as “class warfare.”

To transfer wealth and power from the many to the few, institutions had to be organized, government policies reoriented and economists, journalists and politicians recruited, funded and promoted.

Corporate lobbying skyrocketed. In 1971, only 175 firms had registered lobbyists in Washington, D.C.,; by 1982, 2,445 did. The number of corporate political action committees (PACs) rose from fewer than 300 in 1976 to more than 1,200 by the mid-1980s.

Business lobbying organizations advocated for policies like corporate tax cuts, deregulation, free trade, anti-worker legislation and more permissive rules on corporate political donations. Between 1998 and 2022, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce spent US$1.8 billion on lobbying activities, making it the single largest spender in the nation.

The role of wealthy individuals

Individual business owners also chipped in. Figures like Charles and David Koch funded organizations that aligned with their desire to create a U.S. free from government regulation, taxation, redistribution or public services. During the 2016 election cycle, Koch-backed PACs spent just under US$900 million.

Many of these organizations, like the Tea Party, also helped put into the mainstream an evangelical creationism that distrusted science and expert opinion, supported a patriarchal animosity to women’s rights, opposed policies to further racial equality and expressed xenophobic opinions.

The flood of corporate money shifted the political centre, making Democrats more conservative. No progressive economic policy has been passed in the United States since the 1970, with the tepid exception of the Affordable Care Act, which is friendly to the health insurance industry.

The strategy proved remarkably successful. According to political scientists Martin Gilens and Benjamin Page, when wealthy Americans strongly support a policy, it’s about twice as likely to be adopted. But strong support from the middle class has “essentially no effect.”

How does this happen in a working democracy?

Business leaders cannot win elections on their own — they need allies. One particularly large group was easy to convince. Since the 1960s, no Democratic presidential candidate has won the majority of white voters.

Between the 1960-64 and 1968-72 election cycle, support for Democratic candidates among less-educated white voters fell from 55 to 35 per cent. With the exception of the 1992 and 1996 elections when their votes were more evenly split, this gap has held to the present day.

Although their share of the population is declining, less-educated white voters still made up just under 50 per cent of the electorate nationally in 2018. College-educated white voters have tended to split their votes more evenly or provide a small edge to Republicans.

If Democrats have branded themselves as the party of inclusion — of different races, genders, ethnicities and sexualities — the Republican Party has defended what they euphemistically term “traditional values.”

In a Faustian bargain to advance a pro-business agenda, the Republican Party successfully appealed to less-educated white voters, whose historical economic and social advantages have been diminishing. They earn less and die younger than they used to and their advantages over other groups in society are diminishing.

The Republican Party seized on this group’s discontent and actively channelled it against African Americans and immigrants. As early as the 1960s, the Republican’s Southern strategy promoted racism, successfully shifting white voters to their party and shifting the political spectrum to the right. That strategy continued through Ronald Reagan, George W. Bush, the Tea Party and Trump.

Importantly, this shift in voting preferences occurred well before the advent of the so-called “Rust Belt.” According to Pew Research, manufacturing jobs peaked in 1979.

Faced with declining standards of living, less-educated white voters could have chosen solidarity with all other workers and forced concessions from the elite of the business community to make the lives of all working-class people better. Instead, they voted to maintain the relative advantage of being white.

Rising inequality

The redistribution of income and wealth was detrimental to most Americans. Between 1973 and 2000, the average income of the bottom 90 per cent of U.S. taxpayers fell by seven per cent. Incomes of the top one per cent rose by 148 per cent, the top 0.1 per cent by 343 per cent, and the top 0.01 per cent rose by 599 per cent.

If the income distribution had remained unchanged from the mid-1970s, by 2018, the median income would be 58 per cent higher ($21,000 more a year). The decline in profits was halted, but at the expense of working families. Stagnant wages, massive debt and ever longer working hours became their fate.

Income stagnation is not the only quality of life indicator that suffered. In 1980, life expectancy in the U.S. was about average for an affluent nation. By the 2020s, it dropped to the lowest among wealthy countries, even behind China or Chile, largely due to the stagnation of life expectancy for working-class people.

The paradox of “red state” support

Less-educated white voters have historically supported politicians (mainly Republicans) who support cutting taxes for the rich and cutting social programs that they significantly benefit from.

In 2023, the Republican Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders of Arkansas vowed to get the “bureaucratic tyrants” of the federal government “out of your wallets.” Yet the numbers tell a different story.

In 2019, the federal government collected only half as much in taxes as it spent in the state, amounting to about US$5,500 per person in Arkansas. Similar patterns hold in many other regions.

Republican Kentucky is the largest destination of federal transfers, receiving US$14,000 per resident, approximately 30 per cent of its entire gross domestic product.

The electoral preferences of red states don’t result in good outcomes. States won by Trump in the 2016 presidential election had lower average scores (similar to Russia) on the American Human Development Index — which measures income, education and health — than states won by Democrats, which are similar to the Netherlands.

The modern Republican agenda

For decades, the alliance between less-educated white voters and business worked very well for business. Trump’s MAGA still delivers longstanding pro-business policies, from deregulation to antagonism to workers’ rights and massive tax cuts for the rich.

Today, however, the Republican Party now also promotes policies that business has long fostered, if not supported, including a distrust of facts and science, the ethnic cleansing of the labour force, racism, a vengeance for justice and a hodgepodge of crony, incompetent economic priorities and policies.

This combination has created a more unstable and unpredictable political, economic and social environment, leaving a significant majority of CEOs yearning for the stable Republican Party of a bygone era.