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    Democrats still misunderstand working-class voters – to their peril | Dustin Guastella

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    Progressives have plenty of bad ideas that should be axed, but populism without an economic promise is a bloodless bleat.It wasn’t long ago that Democratic party moderates expressed ambivalence toward the working class. In 2016, Chuck Schumer summed up the party’s attitude by predicting that “for every blue-collar Democrat we lose in western Pennsylvania, we will pick up two moderate Republicans in the suburbs of Philadelphia”.What a difference a decade makes. In a recent report titled Renewing the Democratic Party the thinktank Third Way warns: “For the first time since the mid-20th century, the central fault line of American politics is neither race and ethnicity nor gender but rather class.” The policy shop even organized a meeting of heavy-weight Democratic party leaders to develop a new strategy for how they might win back the working class.Can moderate Democrats, plotting their path back to power in Loudoun county, Virginia (the richest county in the US), convincingly make a populist pivot?While Third Way’s advice, collected in a widely circulated memo, has some useful insights, more than anything it demonstrates establishment Democrats’ failure to understand the nature of working-class woes. In fact, the revival of populism, left and right, can be understood as a revolt against the world Third Way helped midwife. After all, they embraced an economic model – defined by free trade, deindustrialization, mass global migration and stagnant wages – that was responsible for the left’s breakup with the working class in the first place.Working-class culture clashThird Way’s first takeaway from the election is that Democrats are culturally disconnected from the working class. And they’re right. They advocate moving away from identity politics, insist that candidates use “plain language”, “avoid jargon”, reject “fringe positions” and eschew “overly moralistic or condescending messaging”. This makes sense. Yet newfound fears of identity politics, or the excessive influence of the foundation-funded non-profit left, reflect a certain amnesia. Moreover, turning the ship around is easier said than done.It’s no secret that sanctimonious political correctness, and preachy “social-justice” rhetoric have served as a major means to sideline progressive critics of the prevailing economic order. In fact, long before Hillary Clinton infamously wondered whether breaking up the big banks would “end racism”, her husband’s campaign architects – paradigmatic Third Way Democrats – pursued the same line of attack against critics of the North American Free Trade Agreement (Nafta). Those who didn’t want jobs shipped to the lowest-wage corners of the globe were labeled “racists”. It’s not a coincidence, then, that the rise of identity politics, and even “wokeness”, happened in tandem with the ascent of globalization as championed by Third Way adherents.As factories closed and millions of jobs were drained out of the US, the economic and social power of the working class fell into a steep decline. By the mid-1990s non-profits and thinktanks replaced labor unions as the major source of political influence on the left. With unions taking a backseat, politicking within the Democratic party took on a more elite character. Fights over slices of the economic pie shifted from the vertical axis – between labor and big business, between the rich and the poor – to the horizontal, between cross-class “groups”, unfailingly represented by well-staffed professional advocacy organizations.This all had the convenient effect of rendering blue-collar concerns practically invisible to elite Democrats. While trade, immigration and dissension over cultural issues have long appeared at the top of lists of concerns for non-college educated workers, Democrats wouldn’t listen. Instead they embraced liberal professionals as the vanguard of the New Democrat movement. Welcoming the influence of the Brahmin caste. Meanwhile, liberal cultural institutions (the media, the academy, the arts) increasingly applied downward pressure on blue-collar workers to embrace new values. That is, the values of the elite.Consider that, for the first half of this decade, there were wall-to-wall injunctions from the largest corporations in retail, tech and even finance – not to mention virtually all major media conglomerates – to embrace liberal identity politics, “diversity, equity and inclusion”, and cosmopolitan sexual ethics. Looked at in this light, today’s culture war can best be understood as a working-class revolt against the values of “knowledge economy” elites. It won’t be easy to make peace with the same elite still in charge.Resentment is richNor is it a coincidence why educational cleavages, in particular, play such a major role in cultural and political conflict today. While they were busy fashioning the “New Economy”, Third Way elites insisted that non-college educated workers refashion themselves to suit it. They implored everyone to go to college and learn to code to compete in the emerging high-tech hyper-global world. They were confident that the short-term pain of job losses would be rewarded with future gains. It hasn’t panned out. In terms of income, wealth and even life expectancy, blue-collar workers have found themselves lagging further and further behind their educated white-collar counterparts. Since 2000 wages for non-college educated workers have remained flat or actually fallen. For those with a college degree they have modestly increased. The earnings gap has grown wide.Meanwhile, none have benefitted from the contemporary economic and political arrangement as much as the wealthy. In inverse proportions have the rich profited alongside working-class decline. In 1990 – before Clinton signed Nafta, before Democrats presided over further deregulation of the financial sector, and before the dot-com boom – there were 66 billionaires in the United States. Just 10 years later – after gobs of factory jobs were off-shored – there were 298. A 350% increase. Today, there are more than 748.As a result, even Larry Summers (once a pre-eminent Third Way economist) has identified an “investment dearth” combined with a “savings glut” that has led to economic “secular stagnation”. In layman’s terms: the rich have all the money and they refuse to share. The billionaire hoarding of wealth means investment in the real economy is anemic. They sit like elephants on top of global growth rates. And because workers can’t spend wages they don’t have, effective demand stays flat.The Third Way left promised that the fire sale of public assets, the unshackling of big banks and the introduction of unfettered free trade would unleash unprecedented growth and a rising standard of living for American workers. It didn’t. Instead, it drove down wages and helped them transform their own party into a haven of the affluent and the educated.The paradoxes of pragmatic populismConfronting all this, Third Way now advocates that Democrats embrace a brand of pragmatic populism. They recognize the need to critique “corporate excess and corruption”, they counsel Democrats to avoid “dismissing economic anxieties” and instead acknowledge “real struggles like high prices and stagnant wages”. They even suggest that Democrats fight “for systemic reforms rather than just defending the status quo”.At the same time, they stress that Democrats are hurt by “reflexively attacking wealthy business leaders”. They warn against “vilifying the rich” and “demonizing” corporations. And insist that Democrats be pragmatic “pro-capitalist” reformers.They argue that candidates ought to own “the failures of Democratic governance” they don’t count among these, the broad failure of liberal economic policy to improve the lives of most voters. And while the authors of the memo are right to notice that “Democrats lack a cohesive, inspiring economic agenda”, they don’t offer any ideas for economic renewal. There is nothing about trade, manufacturing, the crisis of mass layoffs or the crumbling of American infrastructure. There is no discussion of jobs programs, labor market policies, overtime pay, or cost-of-living raises. The only mention of wages is to suggest that they ought to be “better”. Worse, Third Way’s insistence that candidates avoid blaming the corporations and the rich – the very group responsible for the broad economic and political crisis – presents a conundrum for would-be Democratic populists: how are they meant to make “the economy” a central talking point, if they don’t have anything to talk about?Blue-collar preferences do seem politically heterodox – progressive on wages and jobs, protectionist on trade, restrictive on immigration, moderate on culture and conservative on the deficit – and it can seem difficult to build a program to suit what seem like conflicting demands. But looked at another way these views add up to a fundamental break with the prevailing economic order. A call to shift society in favor of workers.Yet Third Way’s economic proposals – summed up by the demand for “middle-class tax cuts”– are a last gasp effort at preserving that order. Until, and unless, progressives can campaign in ways that address the root causes of workers’ cultural, social and economic concerns – that is, until the left can provide a compelling case for how to exit the global race to the bottom – the result will be a string of narrow majorities and narrow defeats.Each party taking their turn in office, neither providing a permanent home for the working class.

    Dustin Guastella is a research associate at the Center for Working Class Politics and the director of operations for Teamsters Local 623. More

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      What is ‘abundance’ liberalism, and why are people arguing about it?

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      Is progressive public policy in America broken? Do many left-leaning laws actually make life more expensive for struggling people? Is regulatory red tape hindering growth and innovation? Have Democratic-run cities, such as New York and San Francisco, become giant billboards against liberal governance?These arguments wouldn’t sound out of place in a policy paper from a conservative thinktank. Yet their newest champions are two of America’s best-known left-leaning journalists, the New York Times’ Ezra Klein and the Atlantic’s Derek Thompson – and they believe the left is overdue for a reckoning of sorts.Klein and Thompson make their case in a new book simply called, with no subtitle, Abundance. The authors put forward a positive pitch for “abundance liberalism”: a vision of the US where policymakers spend less time fighting over how to apportion scarce resources and more time making sure there’s no scarcity to start with.View image in fullscreenAbundance has received a mostly positive reception so far, but also sparked debate, with critics arguing that the book ignores the effect of corporate power, downplays Republicans’ role in the crises that the US faces or overstates the effectiveness of its policy prescriptions. A writer in the left-leaning magazine American Prospect accused the “abundance agenda” of being “neoliberalism repackaged for a post-neoliberal world”.The book opens with a striking image of a US, in the year 2050, that is close to utopia. Americans’ electrical needs are powered by sustainable energy “so clean it barely leaves a carbon trace and so cheap you can scarcely find it on your monthly bill”. AI breakthroughs, labor rights and economic reforms mean that most people can do their jobs in a shorter workweek. Vertical farms provide cheap and fresh vegetables, desalinated water from the ocean is used as drinking water, and lab-grown meat has replaced animal slaughter.This near-future America – less the gritty neon smog of Blade Runner than a hi-tech Copenhagen – is entirely achievable, the authors argue. It just requires political vision and a willingness to reconsider certain assumptions.Despite being the richest country in the world, the US has a problem of scarcity, particularly in Democratic-run metropolitan areas, where the costs of housing and other basic needs have spiraled out of control. This is exacerbated by the traditional progressive solution of giving people money or vouchers to help them pay for finite resources such as housing, healthcare and food, the book argues, which increases demand and merely makes those things even more expensive.“The problem is that if you subsidize the cost of something that there isn’t enough of, you’ll raise prices or force rationing,” Klein has said. He and Thompson have described themselves as “supply-side” progressives, borrowing a term usually associated with conservative economic theories.What the US badly needs to do is build, they argue – build more houses, public transportation, power plants and other infrastructure – but that isn’t happening.One obstacle is nimbyism, the tendency of people to support public works and development in the abstract but fight them when they affect their own neighborhoods. Another is “everything bagel” logrolling that complicates what should be narrowly focused legislation by layering it with other social and political objectives, such as diverse hiring requirements or climate crisis goals, in order to appease interest groups or political constituencies.In an example Thompson recently discussed on a podcast, then president Joe Biden signed legislation in 2021 providing $42bn of funding to expand access to broadband internet in rural America. As of this December, according to Politico, the program had “yet to connect a single household”. Critics told Politico that this was partly because of a “suite of federal conditions” that required states “accepting the money to make sure providers plan for climate change, reach out to unionized workforces and hire locally”, as well as guarantee affordable broadband plans for people with low incomes.“I don’t want the state of Virginia taking, say, federal money to build broadband internet and then charging poor rural folks, like, $200 a month to go online,” Thompson said. “But by holding those values so closely … we accidentally built just about nothing.” A “confusion of process versus outcomes” meant that “very little was actually done on behalf of the Americans for whom we wanted to raise their living standards”.Another example is California, which in 1982 began studying the idea of implementing a high-speed rail system across the state. The idea was, and is, extremely popular with voters, and billions of dollars were budgeted for the project. Four decades later, almost none of it has been built. A “vetocracy” of regulatory, legal, environmental and political considerations have caused endless delays and continually narrowed the project’s ambition.“In the time California has spent failing to complete its 500-mile high-speed rail system,” Thompson and Klein write, “China has built more than 23,000 miles of high-speed rail.”The solution to these problems, Abundance argues, is a combination of techno-optimism, ambitious and clearly defined policy goals, and political leadership that is willing at times to say no to progressive pressure groups.Klein and Thompson favorably cite what happened when a bridge collapsed in Pennsylvania in 2023, crippling an essential highway. To fix it would typically take months of planning, consultation and reviews; Governor Josh Shapiro instead declared a state of emergency that allowed the reconstruction of the bridge with union labor but free from many normal processes. The highway reopened in 12 days, instead of the 12 to 24 months that it might have taken.Abundance makes clear that it is a book written for the left, and isn’t really interested in elaborating the ways that Republicans and conservatives have contributed to these problems, though Klein and Thompson acknowledge that they have. Yet within the left the book has proved controversial.“[I]t would be a huge mistake,” Matt Bruenig, a policy analyst, wrote in Jacobin, “to sideline whatever focus there is on welfare state expansion and economic egalitarianism in favor of a focus on administrative burdens in construction.”He continued: “Indeed, we have now seen what it looks like when the government supports and subsidizes technological innovation and implementation without concerning itself with the inegalitarianism of the system. His name is Elon Musk. In its desire to promote electrical vehicles and rocketry innovations, the US government made him the richest man in the world and then he used his riches to take over a major political communications platform and then the government.”While agreeing with some of Abundance’s aims, the journalists Paul Glastris and Nate Weisberg, writing in the Washington Monthly, argued that the book’s prescriptions wouldn’t necessarily bring the kind of sweeping changes that Klein and Thompson believe. For example, according to examples they cite, areas of the US that have reformed zoning laws to make it easier to build apartment buildings and multifamily homes have seen only modest reductions in the cost of housing.Thompson and Klein have argued that the abundance agenda is bigger than any individual policy proposal, and more about the Democratic party and other left-leaning institutions rethinking their own ambitions and how they conceive of success and failure.“Liberals should be able to say: Vote for us, and we will govern the country the way we govern California!” they write. “Instead, conservatives are able to say: Vote for them, and they will govern the country the way they govern California! … What has gone wrong?” More

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      Do Trump and co want a world reclaimed by straight white men? It’s not certain they’ll get it | Andy Beckett

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      For people who believe that the world should be run by straight white men, these are heady times. Probably the most powerful social conservative on the planet occupies the White House again, and seems determined to drive “immoral” and “discriminatory” diversity policies out of American life.Two years ago, the US supreme court banned the use of affirmative action in university admissions. A growing list of American and British companies, from Ford to BT to Goldman Sachs, appear to be reducing their commitment to the once fashionable corporate principles of diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI). Meanwhile, Reform UK promises to “scrap DEI rules that have lowered standards and reduced economic productivity”. In politics, commerce and education, a huge, potentially lasting counterrevolution seems to be under way.“The death of DEI is finally here,” wrote the columnist Michael Deacon in the Telegraph last year, “and it’s a joy to behold … A radical progressive ideology that, in recent years, has held countless western institutions in its miserable grip … is finally loosening.”For many companies, promoting diversity has only been a priority for a few years, since the surge of anti-racist activism set off around the world by Black Lives Matter in 2020. And in some ways the inclusive values of DEI and the winner-takes-all ethos of capitalism have always been an awkward fit. For all but the most ethical businesses, hiring and employing people in a more egalitarian way is less fundamental than maximising profits.In many supposedly diverse companies, progress towards a truly representative workforce, especially in senior positions, has been slow and far from complete. From rightwing and leftwing perspectives, it can be argued that diversity policies have just been a cynical experiment: yet another attempt to polish corporate capitalism’s increasingly tarnished public image. Now that the political climate has changed, the experiment is being unceremoniously abandoned.But is the situation really that clearcut? One of the key features of current rightwing populism is a desire to escape complicated social realities, and so it is with the revolt against diversity. Thanks to globalisation, immigration and trends in birthrates, Britain and the US, like most other rich countries, are much more multicultural than they were in the 1980s – the last time there was a big conservative pushback against diversity policies. Between 1980 and 2019, the minority ethnic proportion of the US population doubled to 40%. In England and Wales, the proportion of people who didn’t describe themselves as white British doubled between 2001 and 2021 alone: from one in eight to one in four. During these decades of flux, there were also profound shifts in how millions of Britons and Americans thought about feminism, gender, sexuality and disability.None of these socially embedded trends is likely to be completely reversed, however much rightwing populists rail against them. In a speech last week, Kemi Badenoch described diversity policies as “poison”, but the Conservatives have their own equal opportunities policy, with her face on the document’s first page. It commits the party to being “a supportive and inclusive environment where … the diversity of people’s backgrounds and circumstances will be positively valued … [and] where the party will also continue to work towards its dedicated goal of encouraging and promoting equality and diversity”. It’s easy to see these commitments as insincere or hypocritical, but they are also a sign of how far DEI ideas have spread.Back in the 1980s, the last transatlantic campaign against diversity policies was led by Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan. Her government caricatured Labour councils that helped minorities as “loony left”, and then took many of their powers away. Meanwhile, in the US, Ronald Reagan aimed to abolish the federal government’s affirmative action programme, which he saw as “bureaucratic” social engineering. He also reduced funding for the agency that enforced equal opportunities employment law, drastically reducing the number of cases it brought against companies.But his counterrevolution got no further. Strong opposition – hard to imagine now – came from relatively liberal senior figures in the Republican party. More relevant to today, further support for diversity policies came from big business. “When Reagan sought to tear down affirmative action,” wrote the American sociologist Frank Dobbin in his 2009 book, Inventing Equal Opportunity, “corporate America stood together to oppose the [president’s] idea.”Businesses argued that diverse workforces made the best use of the country’s range of talent and were more creative and productive, and more able to understand a broad spectrum of customers at home and abroad. Shrewdly, businesses also rebranded affirmative action in more neutral, less political language, as “human resources management”. Reagan’s attempt to abolish affirmative action was quietly abandoned.Might today’s war on diversity fail in a similar way? The forces of white male supremacy have a more relentless rightwing media on their side than in Reagan and Thatcher’s day. Donald Trump and other reactionary populists also seem less likely to compromise in culture wars than their more pragmatic conservative predecessors.Yet with multiculturalism now deeply entrenched, rooting out diversity policies will be harder than Trump’s confident executive orders suggest. Legal opposition is building, and there are already signs that business is hiding its diversity programmes behind euphemisms again. On Tuesday, Apple shareholders voted against ending the company’s diversity programme. “DEI is being rebranded – not disbanded,” complained the rightwing New York Post recently. It pointed out that some companies widely thought to have dropped DEI continued to promote it on their websites in slightly modified language. If diversity policies increase profits – and according to the president of the British Chambers of Commerce, Martha Lane Fox, “Businesses that embed diversity have 25% higher financial results” – then even the most determined anti-DEI campaign is unlikely to totally prevail.Moreover, what the reactionaries want is less clear and coherent than it first seems. Do they want to restore a society utterly dominated by straight white men, which is almost certainly impossible? Or do they accept the existence of a diverse society, as long as it isn’t actually shaped by diversity policies? On these questions, conservatives are divided.Even Trump sometimes acknowledges American diversity’s permanence and importance. In his inauguration speech, he boasted of his “increases in support from … young and old, men and women, African Americans, Hispanic Americans, Asian Americans …” Social conservatives around the world may be feeling triumphant now, but their revolt against diversity has probably come too late.

      Andy Beckett is a Guardian columnist More

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      An excess of billionaires is destabilising politics – just as academics predicted

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      The concept of “elite overproduction” was developed by social scientist Peter Turchin around the turn of this century to describe something specific: too many rich people for not enough rich-person jobs. It’s a byproduct of inequality: a ton of poor people, sure, but also a superfluity of the wealthy, without enough positions to house them in the influence and status to which they think themselves entitled. In a modern context, that would mean senior positions in the government and civil service, along with the top tier of finance and law, but Turchin tested the hypothesis from ancient Rome to 19th-century Britain. The names and nature of the contested jobs and titles changed; the pattern remained. Turchin predicted in 2010 that by the 2020s it would be destabilising US politics.In the UK in recent years the phrase has been repurposed in the wildest ways – to mean an excess of people at university creates unwanted activism (my précis); or, in the Economist (paraphrasing again), landslides create too many mediocre backbench MPs, who can’t hope for preferment so make trouble instead. And while the second proposition might be true, the first is basic anti-intellectualism. Turchin didn’t specify exactly how much wealth puts you in a situation with an overproduced elite, but he didn’t mean debt-laden students; he didn’t mean MPs; he meant, for brevity, billionaires or the top 1%. When a lot of your media are billionaire-owned, those media sources become endlessly inventive in taking the heat off billionaires, nipping criticism in the bud by pilfering its vocabulary and throwing it back at everyone.But put a pin in that for a second, because elite overproduction in its true sense is hitting global politics square in the jaw. Elon Musk has inserted himself into the US election by means long term and short, above board and below it. His impact on X (formerly Twitter) since he bought it was mired for a while in comical cackhandedness, but over the past few months the real purpose has crystallised. Paid-for verification removed any faith in trusted sources that couldn’t be bought; Republican accounts flourish, Democratic ones languish. Musk himself has amplified lies and conspiracy theories. He has directly given $75m to his America PAC (political action committee), which has an X account and a yellow tick (whatever the hell that means) – it peddles xenophobic bilge. Musk opened a $1m Philadelphia voter giveaway that may be illegal earlier in the month.Musk also spoke at the Madison Square Garden rally, but left the “ironic” fash posting (derogatory language about places and races) to others. He made one promise: “We’re going to get the government off your back.” He fleshed out what small government meant, in a telephone town hall (like a radio phone in, except the radio phones you, the constituents) over the weekend: ordinary Americans would face “temporary hardship” as welfare programmes are slashed in order to restructure the economy, but they should embrace the pain, as “it will ensure long-term prosperity”.It’s not the worst thing to come out of Trump’s camp in these last, nail-biting few days, and it’s by no means the worst thing Musk has said, but it is the cleanest image yet of what elite overproduction looks like: Elon Musk could never have got himself elected into office in the US. But as the cost-cutting tsar, a made-up role Trump has promised him, he would exert extraordinary power to cause pain, with the only choice left to citizens being whether or not to hug it. Another billionaire donor, John Paulson, has been floated for the treasury secretary job, and Trump has a track record of rewarding big-ticket donors with a seat at the table – the billionaire Stephen Schwarzman boasted in print about his role in the new North America Free Trade Agreement negotiations in 2018, and as part of Trump’s “strategic and policy forum” during the 2017 administration.Inconveniently, more billionaires (21) have donated to Kamala Harris’s campaign than to Trump’s (14); this is a problem for mature democracies everywhere. All political parties court high net worth individuals. It creates an atmosphere of equivalence – if a rich man buys your clothes, how is that different to his buying you a social media platform, except that you’re a cheaper date? If a rich man quashes an endorsement of your rival, but doesn’t endorse you, does that pass the sniff test? If a rich man creates a thinktank, which devises an ideological scheme that people are medium-sure that you, in government, will adopt wholesale, whose proposals are recruiting ideologically loyal civil servants, collecting data on abortions and limiting the use of abortion pills, is that any different to a money-bags with a pet peeve buying a tennis match with a political leader at a charity auction?And what about the billionaires who keep a finger on both scales, donate to both candidates because why not, it suits them to stay friends and it’s chicken feed to them anyway? Is all this just the same game?Qualitatively, yes: all billionaires are bad news in politics; all bought influence is undemocratic. But as billionaires line up behind a neofascist, you can see that this is a new phase in which they’re looking for more bang for their buck. They’re not trying to protect their commercial interests; they don’t need more money. They don’t even seek to shore up their own political influence – rather, to neuter any influence that may countervail it. Delinquent elites are in an open crusade against democracy, which, yes, does appear to be pretty destabilising.

      Zoe Williams is a Guardian columnist More

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      America’s problem is massive inequality – not ‘woke’ educated elites | Robert Reich

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      More than a third of Harvard’s graduating seniors are heading into finance or management consulting – two professions notable for how quickly their practitioners “make a bag”, or make money, reports the New York Times.Similar percentages show up in other prestigious universities.Frankly, if anything, I’m surprised that only a third of graduating seniors at Harvard and similar places are heading into finance and consulting.In this era of raging income inequality and billionaire robber barons, the bags are gigantic. At Goldman Sachs they start at $105,000 to $164,000. At McKinsey, $100,000 to $140,000.And that’s just the first year.Think of it: make a bag and then do whatever you really want to do without ever again worrying about money. Make a bag and support whatever good causes you believe in without having to work at social change. Make a bag and you’ll never have to grovel to those with wealth and power.When I graduated Dartmouth College in 1968, almost no one I knew went into finance or consulting. In those days, inequalities were minuscule compared with now. The bags at that time could have fit into a glove compartment.One of the least-discussed but most profound consequences of America’s surging inequality is the number of talented young people now devoting themselves to making bags.Remarkably, though, most talented young people are not yet in the bag.For most of the last 43 years I’ve taught at several of America’s most prestigious universities. The biggest change I’ve seen over the years isn’t how starry-eyed students have become about finance and consulting.It’s how passionate they’ve become about making the world better.Sure, I’ve noticed the mini-stampede into finance and consulting. But graduates out to make a bag are still the minority.Most graduates are joining non-profits, entering politics or becoming community organizers, public defenders, teachers, healthcare workers, diplomats, staffers on congressional committees, union organizers and environmental activists.The conservative columnist David Brooks bemoans this trend. In a recent column he laments that at elite universities “the share of progressive students and professors has steadily risen, and the share of conservatives has approached zero”.He cites a May 2023 survey of Harvard’s graduating class showing 65% identifying as progressive or very progressive.Why is this happening? Brooks thinks the gen Z cohort at prestigious universities is so tormented by the cognitive dissonance between their positions of privilege and their commitments to social justice that they must “prove to themselves and others” that they’re “on the side of the oppressed”.It doesn’t seem to have dawned on Brooks that, at least since the start of Donald Trump’s presidency in January 2017, the meaning of “progressive” has shifted from someone who wants a more just society to someone who simply wants to preserve democracy.To be a “progressive” at a prestigious university these days – indeed, to be a progressive anywhere in America – is no longer to be on the political left as the left used to be defined. It’s to be on the side of the constitution, the rule of law, and a modicum of decency.This is why so many more undergraduates and professors now deem themselves progressive.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionI agree with Brooks that elite universities should dismantle arrangements that let the privileged members of society pass down their educational privileges to their children, while locking out most everyone else – for example, by ending affirmative action for legacies and calling on the private sector to remove college prerequisites for decent-paying jobs.But Brooks and other conservatives are dead wrong about which elite is holding back the rest of America. It’s not the educated class. It’s the moneyed class.America’s corporate and financial elites have flooded American politics with money in order to receive government subsidies, bailouts, tax cuts and regulatory rollbacks – all of which ratchet up their wealth, entrench their power and make it harder for average working people to advance.Trump and much of his Republican party are deploying criticisms of the educated class to pose as populists on the side of the people.Consider Elise Stefanik, Harvard class of ’06 and chair of the House Republican Conference, who doesn’t miss an opportunity to attack elite universities and their presidents. Or Senator Josh Hawley, Stanford class of ’02 and Yale Law ’06, who calls the recent student demonstrations signs of “moral rot”.It’s all a thinly veiled cover for their efforts to help the wealthy make even bigger bags while keeping everyone else – especially average workers – down.At this moment, Republicans are promising the moneyed class that in return for financial backing in the upcoming election, they’ll get an extension of Trump’s 2017 tax cuts – which disproportionately boosted the wealth of big corporations and the rich – plus additional tax cuts and regulatory rollbacks.This could expand the national debt by roughly $1tn over the next decade, rendering it impossible for the government to invest in things average Americans desperately need – such as childcare, eldercare, affordable housing, and, yes, affordable higher education.Brooks thinks that if present trends continue, there will be a populist uprising – “a multiracial, multiprong, right/left alliance against the educated class”.For Brooks, the lesson is that the educated class must “seriously reform the system or be prepared to be run over”.He’s wrong. The real lesson is we must reform the system created by the moneyed class – or be prepared to run the moneyed class over.
      Robert Reich, a former US secretary of labor, is a professor of public policy at the University of California, Berkeley, and the author of Saving Capitalism: For the Many, Not the Few and The Common Good. His newest book, The System: Who Rigged It, How We Fix It, is out now. He is a Guardian US columnist. His newsletter is at robertreich.substack.com More

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      Put yourself in the shoes of a Donald Trump voter – and understand what drives his success | Simon Jenkins

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      Donald Trump is certain to be the Republican candidate in this year’s election for US president. He is also currently favourite to win. To most readers of the Guardian, I am sure this prospect is appalling, as it is to most Britons. The nation to which they gave birth and language, that has been their friend and protector down the ages, seems to be going mad.Britons who know the US are amazed that, however reluctantly, enough of its voters might again choose Trump to rule over them after the experience of 2017 to 2021. Who are these Americans? How can they be so blind to his faults, with the law hounding him, gossip ridiculing him and commentators pouring scorn and derision on his every word?The answer is that the Americans who support Trump are not those whom most Britons know. They are elderly and rural: they are often, but by no means solely, working class and/or non-graduates. But, above all, they love Trump because they, too, are hostile to the Americans that he purports to hate.These hated Americans – the language of Trump’s rallies is visceral – mostly live in big cities down the east and west coasts. They favour federal government, identity politics, social liberalism and free trade. They are led by a college-educated, liberal establishment. Of course, these are generalisations – but that is what Trump trades in.His claim is that over the past two decades this establishment has corrupted the nation’s identity and bruised its essence. Using the rhetoric of a mafia boss, he declares he will smash these enemies of America. He will stop Mexicans crossing the border, with guns if need be. He will execute drug dealers, protect American families from gender politics, leave idiot Europeans to their petty wars and end Biden’s crazy foreign interventions.Trump is the braggart of every bar-room brawl. Most democratic leaders come to power with their rough edges softened through climbing the ladder of party politics. Not so Trump. The only experience he brought to the White House was that of New York’s property jungle, a world of rivalry, double-dealing and revenge; his favourite motto is the phrase he used in January towards his now fallen rival Nikki Haley: “I don’t get too angry, I get even.”A large amount of the abuse that Trump attracts from his critics disappointingly relies on raw snobbery. It comprises attacks on his dress, his manners, his vulgar houses and his coarse turn of phrase – and echoes the remarks of English toffs on the arrival of the first Labour government in Downing Street. They do him no harm in the eyes of his fans. Early comparisons with Mussolini played to his self-image as a warrior taking on an entrenched elite.See it through their eyes: the US did not collapse into dictatorship under Trump. Enemies were not arrested nor hostile media shut down. Since leaving office, though, his own enemies have not stopped trying to convict and imprison him, even as the trials merely aid his cause. Colorado’s attempt to stop him running for office was as legally wrongheaded as it was counterproductive.The US economy did well under Trump, better than Britain’s. He made a genuine if futile attempt to find peace in Korea. Vladimir Putin, with whom his relations remain obscure, did not invade Ukraine while he was in the White House. His recent demand that Nato and Europe reassess both their strategy and their forces was hardly unreasonable, if poorly expressed. His fixation with immigration is hardly confined to the American continent.That is why Trump’s enemies would do well to look to the causes of their own unpopularity. Democracy gives no quarter. It is one person, one vote, and its believers cannot complain when the arithmetic goes against them. Trump complains that the US ruling class and its media – apart from the bits he controls – are governed by new ideologies based on gender and race. He claims they want to ban conservatism from campuses, “defund” the police and flood the country with Mexican labour and Chinese goods. There is just enough truth in these accusations to have his supporters cheering him on.A prominent US senator recently assured a private gathering in London that Americans would never return Trump to the White House. It was inconceivable. Those declaring for him were just “just trying to give us a fright”.I can only hope he is right. With the present state of things in the world, the erratic Trump should never be in a position to lead what is still, tenuously, the free world. But those who oppose him should study what makes him so popular in the eyes of most Americans – and makes them less so.
      Simon Jenkins is a Guardian columnist More

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      in US Politics

      Billionaires are lining up to eagerly fund Trump’s anti-democratic agenda | Robert Reich

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      As an ever-greater portion of the nation’s total wealth goes to the top, it’s hardly surprising that ever more of that wealth is corrupting US politics.In the 2020 presidential election cycle, more than $14bn went to federal candidates, party committees, and Super Pacs – double the $7bn doled out in the 2016 cycle. Total giving in 2024 is bound to be much higher.That money is not supporting US democracy. If anything, that money is contributing to rising Trumpism and neofascism.There is a certain logic to this.As more and more wealth concentrates at the top, the moneyed interests rationally fear that democratic majorities will take it away through higher taxes, stricter regulations (on everything from trade to climate change), enforcement of anti-monopoly laws, pro-union initiatives and price controls.So they’re sinking ever more of their wealth into anti-democracy candidates.Donald Trump is going full fascist these days and gaining the backing of prominent billionaires.Earlier this month, on Veterans Day, Trump pledged to “root out the communists, Marxists, fascists and the radical-left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country”, whom he accused of doing anything “to destroy America and to destroy the American dream”. (Notably, he read these words from a teleprompter, meaning that they were intentional rather than part of another impromptu Trump rant.)Days before, Trump claimed that undocumented immigrants were “poisoning the blood of our country”. The New York Times reported that he was planning to round up millions of undocumented immigrants and detain them in sprawling camps while they wait to be expelled.Trump has publicly vowed to appoint a special prosecutor to “go after” Joe Biden and his family, and has told advisers and friends that he wants the justice department to investigate officials who have criticized his time in office.This is, quite simply, full-throated neofascism.Who’s bankrolling all this? While Trump’s base is making small contributions, the big money is coming from some of the richest people in the US.During the first half of the year, multiple billionaires donated to the Trump-aligned Make America Great Again, Inc Super Pac.Phil Ruffin (net worth of $3.4bn), the 88-year-old casino and hotel mogul, has given multiple $1m donations.Charles Kushner (family net worth of $1.8bn), the real estate mogul and father of Jared, who received a late-term pardon from Trump in December 2020, contributed $1m in June.Robert “Woody” Johnson (net worth of $3.7bn), Trump’s former ambassador to the United Kingdom and co-owner of the New York Jets, donated $1m to the Maga Pac in April.And so on.But Trump is not the only extremist pulling in big dollars.Nikki Haley – who appears moderate only relative to Trump’s blatant neofascism – claimed in her campaign launch that Biden was promoting a “socialist” agenda.During her two years as UN ambassador under Trump, Haley was a strong proponent of his so-called “zero tolerance” policy under which thousands of migrant children were separated from their parents and guardians.She supported Trump’s decision to pull out of the UN human rights council and to withdraw from the Iran nuclear deal.Though she briefly criticized Trump for inciting the mob that attacked the US Capitol on 6 January 2021, Haley soon defended Trump and called on Democratic lawmakers to “give the man a break” when they impeached him for a second time.Haley recently told Kristen Welker of NBC’s Meet the Press that while Trump’s floating the idea of executing retired Gen Mark Milley might be “irresponsible”, it is not enough to disqualify Trump from running for the White House again.Haley’s billionaire supporters include Stanley Druckenmiller and Eric LeVine. The Republican mega-donor Ken Griffin has said he is “actively contemplating” supporting Haley.Notably, Haley has also gained the support of JPMorgan Chase’s chief executive, Jamie Dimon, who’s about as close as anyone in the US comes to being a spokesperson for the business establishment. Dimon admires Haley’s recognition of the role that “business and government can play in driving growth by working together”.The moneyed interests have been placing big bets on other Trumpist Republicans.Peter Thiel, the multibillionaire tech financier who once wrote that “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible,” contributed more than $35m to 16 federal-level Republican candidates in the 2022 campaign cycle, making him the 10th largest individual donor to either party.Twelve of Thiel’s candidates won, including Ohio’s now-senator JD Vance, who alleged that the 2020 election was stolen and that Biden’s immigration policy has meant “more Democrat voters pouring into this country”.The Republican House majority leader, Steve Scalise, is creating a new fundraising committee which will be soliciting contributions of up to $586,200 a pop.Elon Musk is not a major financial contributor to Trump nor other anti-democracy candidates, but his power over one of the most influential megaphones in the US gives him inordinate clout – which he is using to further the neofascist cause.Witness Musk’s solicitude of Trump, his seeming endorsement of antisemitic posts, his embrace of Tucker Carlson and “great replacement” theory, and his avowed skepticism towards democracy.Democracy is compatible with capitalism only if democracy is in the driver’s seat, so it can rein in capitalism’s excesses.But if capitalism and its moneyed interests are in charge, those excesses inevitably grow to the point where they are able to extinguish democracy and ride roughshod over the common good.That’s why Trump’s neofascism – and the complicity of today’s Republican party with it – are attracting the backing of some of the richest people in the US.What’s the alternative? A loud pro-democracy movement that fights against concentrated wealth at the top, humongous CEO pay packages, a politically powerful financial sector, and tax cuts for the wealthy and large corporations.And fights for higher taxes on the top (including a wealth tax) to finance Medicare for all, affordable housing, and accessible childcare and eldercare.The willingness to make this a fight – to name the moneyed interests backing neofascism, explain why they’re doing this, and mobilize and energize the US against their agenda and in favor of democracy – is critical to winning the 2024 election and preserving and rebuilding US democracy.Biden and the Democrats must take this on, loudly and clearly.
      Robert Reich, a former US secretary of labor, is a professor of public policy at the University of California, Berkeley, and the author of Saving Capitalism: For the Many, Not the Few and The Common Good. His newest book, The System: Who Rigged It, How We Fix It, is out now. He is a Guardian US columnist. His newsletter is at robertreich.substack.com
      This article was amended on 21 November 2023 to clarify Ken Griffin’s position More

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      in US Politics

      A capitalist cheerleader wrote the US’s hottest new self-help book. Surprised? | Adam H Johnson and David Sirota

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      As economic misery in the US persists, the country’s self-help industry has become a multibillion-dollar bonanza. If one reads enough of that industry’s happiness catechism – including its latest bestseller, Build the Life You Want – one realizes that all of the advice revolves around a core set of directives: focus on the self rather than the collective, redeploy hours to different priorities, spend less time at work, build deeper personal relationships – and, by implication, buy more self-help books.But if “time is money”, then in America’s survival-of-the-richest form of capitalism, time-intensive remedies are mostly for the affluent – that is, those with a big enough savings account to de-risk career changes; those with enough income to afford gym memberships, hobbies and excursions; those with enough paid leave and cash to enjoy the best vacations; those with enough resources to employ personal aides to do paperwork, chores and cleaning; those with enough workplace leverage to secure more hours off for introspection, friend time and outdoor adventures.Erasure of privilege disparity and presumption of wealth has turned most self-help products into a series of Stuart Smalley affirmations for the already and nearly comfortable. But while such class bias pervades the happiness industry, it is particularly egregious coming from the author of the aforementioned Build the Life You Want: Arthur Brooks, hardly a disinterested bystander in this epoch of economic anxiety and its attendant unhappiness.As the former $2.7m-a-year head of the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) – one of the country’s most prominent conservative thinktanks – Brooks spent a decade sowing the despair he now insists he is here to cure.Brooks’ career turn from let-them-eat-cake ideologue to I-feel-your-pain happiness prophet may seem bizarre. But he is walking the well-trodden – and lucrative – path from arsonist to firefighter. It is a trail previously blazed by financial crisis-era deregulators now platformed as credible economic experts, and by Iraq war proponents reimagined as leaders of a pro-democracy resistance.In Brooks’ case, he led an organization that repeatedly worked to help its billionaire and corporate donors prevent working-class Americans from securing the better standard of living, universal benefits and leisure time that undergird the countries consistently reporting the world’s highest levels of happiness.Citing a colleague’s book deriding Americans as “takers”, Brooks insisted the central crisis facing the nation is not a notoriously thin social safety net – but politicians who “offer one government benefit after another to our citizens”, complaining that this “has made a majority of Americans into net beneficiaries of the welfare state”.He declared war on “labor unions and state employees demanding that others pay for their early retirements, lifetime benefits, and lavish state pensions”. Under his leadership, the AEI railed against “entitlement” programs, tried to privatize and gut social security, opposed Medicaid expansion, opposed free college, opposed rent control and fought against free healthcare.Now, Brooks’ pivot to happiness guru is disseminating that political agenda via the soft agitprop of self-discovery and self-improvement. Along the way, Brooks is being boosted by (among others) the Atlantic, NPR and Oprah Winfrey (who is listed as co-author of the book, although in reality she only writes a handful of introductory paragraphs to each chapter) – together the most coveted media seals of approval for liberal readers whose purported ideals Brooks spent his career grinding into political dust, but who are now enriching him with $30 book purchases.On its face, Build the Life You Want offers a mix of reasonable – if banal – life advice, parables, reasonably clear distillations of complex philosophical and linguistic concepts, and synthesized academic research. The book engages in pop metaphysics that limits its ambition for the more science- and liberal-minded from the get-go, letting us know that achieving “happiness” – as some final stage of contentment – is impossible. But, Brooks insists, “we can be happier” in relative terms.“Unlike other books you may have read,” he tells us, “this one is not going to exhort you to pull yourself up by your bootstraps. This isn’t a book about willpower ​​– it’s about knowledge, and how to use it.”Which is all to say, this book is absolutely about how to pull yourself up by your bootstraps and follow concrete steps to self-contentment, but doing so with some reputable sociology and psychology studies as your guide rather than the quasi-fascist bromides about being an alpha dog one typically hears from the likes of Jordan Peterson. But the general motivational tone and reactionary political premises are the same.The book kicks off in earnest with a scrappy, can-do story of self-determination on the part of Brooks’ Spanish mother-in-law, “Albina”, who is used as a template for self-fulfillment.In the introduction, titled Albina’s Secret, we are told that, after years of living with an abusive husband and a fraught domestic life, “One day, when Albina was forty-five, something changed for her. For reasons that were not clear to her friends and family, her outlook on life seemed to shift. It’s not that she was suddenly less lonely, or that she mysteriously came into money, but for some reason, she stopped waiting for the world to change and took control of her life. The most obvious change she made was to enroll in college to become a teacher.”Brooks asserts that the primary change that propelled Albina toward midlife happiness was her shift from worrying about “the outside world” to looking inward.“She switched,” Brooks tells us, from “wishing others were different, to working on the one person she could control: herself.”Personal responsibility is a hallmark of the self-help genre, and Brooks’ breezy title has this convention in spades. In his telling, changing “the outside world” as a pathway to peace and happiness is a fool’s errand. Like virtually all self-help books, we are told the road to self-satisfaction is found within – not with our circumstances, but how we respond to our circumstances.This is a convention of the capitalist self-help genre for one obvious reason: it requires nothing in the “outside world” to change. And once one gets into the messiness of “changing the outside world”, one ventures into political theory. This is uncomfortable and can’t be put into an earth-toned 700-page book that rich Atlantic subscribers will want to buy.Albina’s solution, Brooks tells us, wasn’t to find her local underground socialist party or union headquarters and join a political movement to combat the Franco regime, or to try to materially improve the lot of other women sharing her gender-based suffering – it was to ignore “the outside world” and instead focus on a career shift and a switch in attitude.Like a lot of self-help advice, this works on a micro scale. Surely, it’s too great an ask to demand a middle-aged mother in an economically precarious situation join the fight against the Franco regime. But Brooks is constitutionally uninterested in the forces of patriarchy and capitalism that co-authored the misery – not because they’re irrelevant to his self-help brand of anti-politics, but because of it.Self-help makes grand claims about human progress, it offers advice to the masses on how they can improve their lot – it is inherently political by its nature. But Brooks does not tell us that we can be empowered by making demands of the powerful, or joining a union or a political movement, but – how else – by buying his book.This is Brooks’ big trick: his happiness recommendations presume a society that can and will never change from the one he helped craft in Washington.In today’s AEI-sculpted America, millions are deprived of the building blocks of happiness such as guaranteed healthcare, free higher education, paid family leave, workplace empowerment, retirement security and a host of other social democratic pillars that sustain the world’s happiest societies. Unwilling to allow for the possibility that such conditions can or should change in the United States, Brooks nonetheless presents happiness as an achievable self-centric project inside the dystopia he helped create.Build the Life You Want follows Brooks’ first foray into the happiness industry – a book called From Strength to Strength that is about “finding success, happiness, and deep purpose in the second half of life”.That monograph argues that because of the way humans’ brains change, one’s professional decline begins much earlier than we expect. The book suggests that workers in midlife should therefore move into work roles that require less cognitive innovation (fluid intelligence) and more teaching of acquired wisdom (crystallized intelligence).It is an important finding that might prompt a broader discussion of policies that could account for this inevitability – retraining programs, funding for midlife career education, universal portable benefits that allow for job switches and earlier retirement ages. But ever the conservative ideologue, Brooks eschews all that, instead channeling the old conservative trope that failing to change professional trajectory – or being demoralized by the work treadmill – is just a mental flaw in one’s personal outlook.“Satisfaction comes not from chasing bigger and bigger things, but paying attention to smaller and smaller things,” he writes, in a call for a mass change of attitude.What prevents necessary career shifts that might lead to happiness, Brooks asserts, is “self-objectification, workaholism, and most of all success addiction that chain us to our declining fluid intelligence curve.”“What do I want to do with my time this week to cultivate the relationships that will result in that end scenario?” Brooks says he asks himself in order to imagine an existence of stronger personal bonds. “I might make the decision to leave work on time, leave my work at the office, get home for dinner, and watch a movie after dinner with my family.”In this dreamscape, most Americans get to choose when they work, and under what conditions. Nowhere in Brooks’ world of lanyards does he consider that Americans working ever-longer hours and ever-more jobs may have less to do with career ambition than with simply trying to earn enough to pay the ever-increasing bills – bills that fund the ballooning profits of the kind of donors who can pay Brooks’ upwards of $125,000 speaking fee or write six-figure checks to outfits like the AEI.This same ideology carries into Build the Life You Want, where Brooks repeatedly hints at a deeper theme of overwork and soul-sucking labor, but avoids the obvious indicators and instead moves on to sell his brand of self-analysis – with little consideration of systemic problems.Recapping researchers documenting how humans are usually good at categorizing their own positive associations, Brooks notes that “activities that were most negative and least positive were commuting and spending time with one’s boss”.He caps this off with a joke: “Obviously, then, it’s definitely best not to commute with your boss.” It’s clear that people’s least favorite activities are related to working dreary, miserable jobs.Does this prompt Brooks to apologize for leading the fight against proposals for government-sponsored healthcare that could end the employer-based system and free Americans to search for more fulfilling jobs without fear of losing access to medical services?No, it’s the subject of a wisecrack and he moves on.This isn’t to say the book is uninterested in “careers” – it very much is. It just doesn’t care much for jobs, or the masses who occupy work for work’s sake, to stave off starvation and homelessness – what novelist Ursula K Le Guin called kleggich, or “drudgery”, work that the vast majority of people do day in and day out for survival.The target demographic for Brooks is the aggressively middle and upper class, so what matters is how “happy” the job makes them rather than whether the worker has carpal tunnel syndrome or is subject to sexual harassment, precarity and a host of problems that affect anyone who can’t afford the luxury of lifehacking their happiness as Brooks prescribes.In its characteristically fawning profile of Brooks as “part social scientist, part self-help coach, part motivational speaker, and part spiritual guru”, Politico recently cast his journey as a departure from politics and ideology.“Brooks has undergone one of the more unusual professional transformations that Washington has witnessed in recent decades,” the Beltway news outlet wrote. “His most recent transformation also represents a type of retreat – away from a conservative movement that once held him up as a model of its future.”Brooks himself leans into this assertion, arguing that “I’m not a player in the conservative movement” and adding that his career in the conservative movement “is just not relevant – this stuff isn’t relevant anymore”.But Brooks’ professional trek is less a “transformation” – and less shocking – if one considers that his happiness books are ideological manifestos shrouded in the veil of social science. His new literature is the kind of academia-flavored politics that has long been the central product – and sleight of hand – of the almost $70m thinktank that Brooks ran for a decade. (The AEI still lists Brooks as one of its scholars.)From its origin, the AEI has depicted itself as a staid, nonpartisan, quasi-academic institution, even though it has always been a lobbying front for rightwing forces – a one-stop shop where corporate America can advance its ideological and political interests under the auspices of academic research and policy-shaping.Though not mentioned in the AEI’s official history, President Harry Truman shut down the organization in 1949 because it was illegally operating as a lobbying front for the railroad industry. It falsely called itself an “educational association” while sharing a physical address with a rail lobby. Though the AEI’s donors remain anonymous to this day (a practice frowned upon in the non-profit world for obvious reasons), the donors that have been revealed through reporting include fossil fuel extractors, labor abusers, opioid pushers, dictators, weapons makers and big tech giants – all of which have an interest in shaping US political discourse, under the guise of seemingly nonpartisan empiricism.The bulk of Build the Life You Want is harmless enough, synthesizing sociological and psychological theories and studies from the past 50 years or so, from personality sorting questionnaires to scientifically suspect, but persistently popular, reliance on brain activity research. But Brooks then weaponizes that research and scholarship to create ideological storylines.The book stresses the importance of “earned success”, which is Brooks’ personal conservative spin on “learned helplessness” – a concept popularized in the 1970s by Martin Seligman, the so-called “father of positive psychology”.“Earned success instead gives you a sense of accomplishment and professional efficacy,” Brooks writes. “The best way to enjoy earned success is to find ways to get better at your job, whether that leads to promotions and higher pay or not.”Hard work for its own sake will make us happier is a storyline that couldn’t have been better articulated by AEI scholars, who insinuate that Americans’ big problem is their alleged lack of work ethic, not the rapaciousness of the thinktank’s donors.Paraphrasing – or rather, misreading – Viktor Frankl, the author of the 1946 Holocaust memoir and social psychology text Man’s Search for Meaning, Brooks writes that “the common strategy of trying to eliminate suffering from life to get happier is futile and mistaken; we must instead look for the why of life to make pain an opportunity for growth.”Later, building off Frankl’s works, Brooks repeats a major theme of the book: circumstances aren’t what matter, our response to them is.“You can’t choose your feelings,” Brooks tells us. “But you can choose your reaction to your feelings. What [Frankl] was saying is … If someone you love gets sick, you will be afraid, but you can choose how you express this fear, and how it affects your life.”But if a loved one is sick, the most significant way one can choose how it “affects your life” is if said loved one has quality, inexpensive healthcare – something Brooks spent more than 10 years working to make sure the poor can’t have. What would the average person rather have in the face of an earth-shattering family illness: a squishy life guideline to managing emotions or quality healthcare?Obviously the latter, but for Brooks, only the former is on offer.This “tough it out” ethos is consistent with Brooks’ decades of advocating the evisceration of programs designed to help the poor survive – all to extend “happiness” and prosperity to the masses.“It is a simple fact that the United States is becoming an entitlement state,” he wrote in a 2012 Wall Street Journal op-ed that depicted social security, welfare programs and disability benefits as “impoverishing the lives of the growing millions dependent on unearned resources”.“The good news is that we have a golden opportunity to rein in entitlements,” he said, invoking Washington-speak for reducing social security benefits, which the AEI has proposed. “By reforming entitlements and the tax system instead of extracting more money with higher tax rates, the economy could be reoriented away from unearned transfers to earned wages. This would make the economy fairer and sounder. And in the process it could build a happier country for ourselves and our children.”If it seems deeply cynical to use pop psychology and pop morality of “earning” money and creating “happiness” to argue for lowering taxes for the rich and cutting social programs for the poor, that’s because it is.Brooks now insists he is no longer manufacturing such political opinion, but his old austerity activism shines through in his happiness literature.The most explicit example is in his book From Strength to Strength. As part of a passage headlined “The benefits of weakness, pain, and loss”, Brooks cites Frankl to suggest that a world of hardship may actually be desirable, because people “could find the meaning of their lives, and personal growth, in all kinds of suffering”.Perhaps this explains why Brooks’ new iteration as a happiness guru includes no mea culpa for his past career explicitly advocating for the austerity that sows so much desperation. If suffering is a catalyst for personal growth, then why should he offer contrition?The mystery, then, isn’t why he is so unapologetic and still on this trajectory (answer: it is lucrative). The most vexing question is: why are so many liberals falling for this act?This is a man who is deeply uninterested in – and, indeed, actively hostile to – creating the conditions that allow anyone who isn’t in his class status the capacity to be safe and secure, much less happy, and he is now one of the country’s most prominent gurus for finding “happiness”.For the better part of a decade, Brooks hired and curated the careers of documented racists like Charles Murray, climate denialists like Mark Perry and ”replacement theory” advocates such as JD Vance. Now he’s doing a calm, professorial routine about how we all need to take a practical, science-driven path to being happier?This should be a scandal, but Brooks frames it in the right Atlantic-ese, so most just nod along.For a book about a life well lived, Build the Life You Want is remarkably short on objective discussions of ethics or virtue. All moral content exists entirely inside the head of the reader or the authors’ examples of happy people (what makes you feel inspired, what our subject found fulfilling), with zero discussion about what is objectively virtuous or what can be done as a community rather than as an individual – fitting for a career funded by ExxonMobil, the Koch brothers and heirs to the Walmart fortune.Ultimately, this is where all of these class-flattening, middlebrow self-help discussions of happiness fall apart: they treat “happiness” as the center of the moral universe rather than virtue, which is to say, the politics of maximizing others’ happiness over one’s own in a systematic way, rather than as one-off instances of bourgeois charity.But, of course, serial killers are “happy” murdering, Charles Koch is “happy” extracting profit from low-wage workers, and Saudi dictators are “happy” hosting cocaine-fueled yacht parties and buying soccer teams. So what? Being happy is not inherently good or bad. What matters is building systems of justice, welfare and safety that allow the maximum number of people to be secure and healthy.If granting the average working person rights to a universal basic standard of living ends up creating more happiness, then all the better.But without such foundational rights – rights Brooks has spent his career opposing – what is “happiness” if not an abstract privilege of those who can afford it?
      Adam H Johnson is the co-host of the podcast Citations Needed and a writer for the Substack newsletter The Column
      David Sirota is a Guardian US columnist and an award-winning investigative journalist. He is an editor-at-large at Jacobin and the founder of the Lever. He served as Bernie Sanders’ presidential campaign speechwriter
      A version of this article first appeared in the Lever More

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      Strikes aren’t bad for the US economy. They’re the best thing that could happen | Robert Reich

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      America is in the midst of the biggest surge in labor activity in a quarter-century.The United Auto Workers (UAW), the Writers Guild of America, the actors’ union known as Sag-Aftra, Starbucks workers, Amazon workers, the Teamsters and UPS, flight attendants. The list goes on.More than 4.1m workdays were lost to stoppages last month, according to the labor department. That’s the most since 2000. And this was before the UAW struck the big three.Some worry about the effect of all this labor activism on the US economy, and view organized labor as a “special interest” demanding more than it deserves.Rubbish. Labor activism is good for the economy in the long run. And organized labor isn’t a special interest. It’s the leading edge of the American workforce.What accounts for this extraordinary moment of labor activity?Not that workers enjoy striking. Even where unions have funds to help striking workers offset lost wages, they rarely make up even half of what’s forgone. Large corporations whose operations are hobbled by strikes often lay off other workers, as the big three and their suppliers are now threatening to do.The reason workers go on strike is their expectation that the longer-term gains will be worth the sacrifices.Today’s labor market continues to be tight, despite efforts by the Fed to slow the economy and make it harder for workers to get raises. So employers (like UPS) are more inclined to give ground to avoid a prolonged strike.But something far more basic is going on here. As I travel around the country, I hear from average working people an anger and bitterness I haven’t heard for decades. It centers on several things.The first is that wages have barely increased while corporate profits are in the stratosphere.Average weekly non-supervisory wages, a measure of blue-collar earnings, were higher in 1969 (adjusted for inflation) than they are now.The American dream of upward mobility has turned into a nightmare of falling behind. Whereas 90% of American adults born in the early 1940s were earning more than their parents by the time they reached their prime earning years, this has steadily declined. Only half of adults born in the mid-1980s are now earning more than their parents by their prime earning years.Nearly one out of every five American workers is in a part-time job. Two-thirds are living paycheck to paycheck.Meanwhile, executive compensation has gone through the roof. In 1965, CEOs of America’s largest corporations were paid, on average, 20 times the pay of average workers. Today, the ratio is over 398 to 1.Not only has CEO pay exploded. So has the pay of top executives just below them. The share of corporate income devoted to compensating the five highest-paid executives of large corporations ballooned from an average of 5% in 1993 to more than 15% today.Corporate apologists claim CEOs and other top executives are worth these staggering sums because their corporations have performed so well. They compare star CEOs to star baseball players or movie stars.But most CEOs have simply ridden the stock market wave. Even if a company’s CEO had done nothing but play online solitaire, the company’s stock price would have soared.Stock buybacks have also soared – a huge subsidy to investors that further tips the scales against working people. The richest 1% of Americans owns about half the value of all shares of stock. The richest 10%, over 90%.Why don’t corporations devote more of their income to research and development, or to higher wages and benefits for average workers? In a word, greed.Small wonder that unions are more popular than they’ve been in a generation. A Gallup poll published in August found that 67% of Americans approve of unions, the fifth straight year such support has exceeded the long-term polling average of 62%.Joe Biden has pitched himself as the most pro-union president in recent history. More surprisingly, Republican politicians are trying to curry favor with union workers as well. Both parties know that much of the working class is up for grabs in 2024.American workers still have little to no countervailing power relative to large American corporations. Unionized workers now comprise only 6% of private-sector workforce – down from over a third in the 1960s.Which is why the activism of the UAW, the Writers Guild, Sag-Aftra, the Teamsters, flight attendants, Amazon warehouse workers and Starbucks workers is so important.In a very real sense, these workers are representing all American workers. If they win, they’ll energize other workers, even those who are not unionized. They’ll mobilize some to form or join unions.They’ll push non-union employers to raise wages and benefits out of a fear of becoming unionized if they don’t. They’ll galvanize other workers to stage wildcat strikes for better pay and working conditions.For far too long, America’s top executives, Wall Street traders and biggest investors have siphoned off almost all the economic gains. This is unsustainable, economically and politically.It’s not economically sustainable because the only way businesses can sell the goods and services American workers produce is if workers have enough money to buy them. If most gains continue to go to the top, the economy will become ever more susceptible to downdrafts and crashes.Today’s mainstream media emphasize the feared negative effects of the current wave of strike on the US economy, forgetting that the wave of strikes in the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s helped create the largest middle class the world had ever seen – the key to America’s postwar prosperity.Stagnant wages and widening inequality are politically unsustainable because they foster anger and bitterness that’s easily channeled by demagogic politicians (re: Donald Trump and his enablers in the Republican party) into bigotry, paranoia, xenophobia and authoritarianism.The current wave of strikes isn’t bad for America. It’s good for America.Labor is not a “special interest”. It is, in a real sense, all of us.
      Robert Reich, a former US secretary of labor, is a professor of public policy at the University of California, Berkeley, and the author of Saving Capitalism: For the Many, Not the Few and The Common Good. His newest book, The System: Who Rigged It, How We Fix It, is out now. He is a Guardian US columnist. His newsletter is at robertreich.substack.com More