Inequality

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      The Guardian view on Dominic Cummings: voting to leave | Editorial

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      Boris Johnson should have asked his chief adviser, Dominic Cummings, to resign months ago when he broke the first coronavirus lockdown and showed no regret afterwards. Perhaps Mr Johnson thought he could not do without the architect of his election victory and his ally in pursuing a hardline Brexit. But the damage was done. Public confidence in the government’s handling of coronavirus fell and has not stopping falling since.Mr Cummings walked out of Downing Street, in an act of theatrical defiance, on Friday. It is a mark of the tragicomic nature of Mr Johnson’s government that a week of infighting within No 10 dominates the news at a time of national emergency when hundreds are dying every day from a dangerous disease. Mr Cummings gets to walk away while Britain is stuck with the damage he has wrought.He won the Brexit referendum by spreading lies, unconcerned about damaging public trust. He has snubbed parliament, weaponised populist sentiment against state institutions and played fast and loose with the constitution. He may say that unconventional times needed unconventional ideas. But he seemed to enjoy his war too much. He picked, and lost, too many fights for his own good. A swirling cast of characters was drawn in. Even Carrie Symonds, Mr Johnson’s fiancee, got involved.Mr Cummings was edged out of power before he could flounce out. This tawdry episode demonstrates two things. One is Mr Johnson’s palpable lack of leadership in a crisis. He encouraged his chief adviser to embrace his inner Leninism — where the end justifies the means. Second is the government’s well-deserved reputation for incompetence. The prime minister over-centralised Downing Street and let Mr Cummings ride roughshod over a weak cabinet that he had hand-picked but which lacked the confidence or foresight to predict problems.Mr Cummings’ plans have gone awry thanks to the unpredictability of politics. After the US election his ideas for a hard Brexit were going nowhere. A Biden White House would have little time for the UK if it turned its back on Europe. Mr Cummings’ departure is a clear indication that the prime minister is ready to make the compromises needed to strike a deal with the EU.Coronavirus required bigger government. Fiscal conservatives like the chancellor, Rishi Sunak, and many other Tory MPs worried that once voters understood that big spending would not bankrupt the economy they might get a taste for decent public services. Mr Sunak wanted to balance the books, Mr Cummings wanted to blow them up. He agitated for the un-Tory idea that state power could turbocharge the economy, making powerful enemies in No 11.Resentments have built like sediment on the river bed of Conservatism and threatened to choke the flow of government. Backbench MPs see Mr Cummings’ contempt for them as symptomatic of a high-handed Downing Street and have rebelled in such numbers that it threatens the stability of a government that, paradoxically, won a landslide largely thanks to Mr Cummings.Mr Johnson might think that, without his adviser, his ungovernable party becomes governable. But he might find that elections become unwinnable. Some of this is more about style than substance. Mr Johnson still has to make good on his promise to “level up” Britain, especially since north-south divisions have been dramatically exposed by coronavirus. The prime minister needs to up his game. Once gained, a reputation for incompetence is hard to shift. Too often with Mr Johnson the buck stops somewhere else and blame is dumped on someone else. With Mr Cummings out, there is no hiding place for Mr Johnson. More

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      Donald Trump has lost the election – yet Trumpland is here to stay | Aditya Chakrabortty

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      Perhaps one day Donald Trump will be dragged out of the Oval Office, his tiny fingernails still dug deep into that fat oak desk. But Trumpland, the country that ignored the politicians and the pollsters and the pundits and gave him the White House in 2016, will outlast him; just as it emerged before he even thought of becoming a candidate. And for as long as it is here it will warp politics and destabilise the US.
      I first stumbled upon Trumpland in 2012, a time when it bore no such name and appeared on no maps.
      I was reporting in Pittsburgh that autumn, as Barack Obama crushed Mitt Romney while cruising to a second term as president. The big US broadsheets wrote up the Republicans as if they were an endangered species , while thirtysomethings in DC gazed deep into their spreadsheets or West Wing boxsets and foretold permanent Democratic majorities, gaily handed to them by a rainbow coalition of black, Latino and granola-chewing graduate voters.
      Except I kept meeting people who lived in an alternative country. People like Mike Stout and his family. He’d worked for decades in the local steel mills and had been a fiery union leader. Now he spent every spare hour as a reincarnation of Woody Guthrie, carrying a guitar along with memories of standing in 2009 on Washington’s Mall to watch Obama’s inauguration, his breath freezing in the January air as the first black president was sworn in . “It was like a new world had opened up, just for an afternoon,” said his wife, Steffi.
      But it was their far more subdued daughter, Maura, who troubled me. The steelworks of her dad’s day was long gone, so she’d gone to university and then spent two years hunting for a job. Now the 23-year-old was doing the accounts for a hotel, a non-graduate position paying $14 an hour, which Mike recalled as the same rate he’d earned at the steelworks in 1978 – without, of course, three decades of inflation. Among Maura’s year of about 500 graduates, she counted as one of the lucky ones.
      “I don’t think I’m ever going to earn as much as my parents,” she said. “I don’t think my husband and I will ever have the same life as they did.”
      We were in Pennsylvania, often painted as a land of blue-collar aristocracy and true-blue Democrats. But the political economy that had underpinned those ballot-box majorities was as rusted as an abandoned factory. Instead, Maura saw a political system that had failed her and her generation, in which every new day was worse than yesterday. And while the Stouts were leftwing, they had little in common with the party they supported. In their eyes, their home had been gutted of manufacturing and bilked by foreign trade deals, and appeared nowhere on the Clinton/Obama ideological map.

      Sure enough, four years later Pennsylvania became one of the rustbelt states that won Trump the White House.
      Trumpland is not the same as the old Republican heartlands, even if they overlap. What the dealmaker saw more clearly than the Bushes, the Romneys and the McCains was that there was a new electoral coalition to be forged out of downwardly mobile white voters. “The people that have been ignored, neglected and abandoned,” he called them in Ohio in 2016. “I am your voice.”
      And so he completed the great inversion of American politics: he turned the Republicans into a party whose future is tied to Trumpland. Even Trump’s rivals accept that. This summer, Texas senator Ted Cruz said: “The big lie in politics is that Republicans are the party of the rich and Democrats are the party of the poor. That just ain’t true. Today’s Republican party are Ohio steelworkers, today’s Republican party are single mums waiting tables…”
      Whatever promises Trump made on the threshold of the White House, once inside he spent four years giving billions in tax cuts to rich people and trying to deprive millions of low-paid Americans of decent healthcare. For the poor whites who put him in power, Trump had nothing to offer apart from racism.
      However grossly used by its leader, Trumpland is more than an imagined community. It has its own society and economics and politics ­– and they barely resemble the rest of the US. The 477 large and densely populated counties won by Biden account for 70% of America’s economy, according to new calculations by the Brookings Institute ; Trump’s base of 2,497 counties amount to just 29% (a further 1% is still to be counted). Brookings describes Trumpland as “whiter, less-educated and … situated in the nation’s struggling small towns and rural areas. Prosperity there remains out of reach for many.”
      These people haven’t been left behind so much as cut loose from the US. Between 2010 and 2019, the US created nearly 16m new jobs but only 55,000 of them were suitable for those who left school at 16. Inequality this deep is not just economic, it is social and psychological. It is also lethal.
      Two economists, Anne Case and Angus Deaton, have found that working-age white men and women without degrees are dying of drug overdoses, alcohol-related liver disease and suicide at unprecedented rates . In 2017 alone, they calculated that there were 158,000 of these “deaths of despair” ­– equal to “three fully loaded Boeing 737s falling out of the sky every day for a year”.
      As Case and Deaton point out, African Americans have still harder lives. They die younger, and are less likely to go to college or get a job. Yet over decades their prospects are improving. For poor white Americans, on the other hand, the trends point straight down. The result, according to a new study by Andrew Oswald and former Bank of England rate-setter David Blanchflower, is that middle-aged, white American school leavers are now suffering an epidemic of “extreme mental distress”.
      When you live in a zero-sum economy, in which you always lose while the other guy wins, then you too might subscribe to zero-sum politics – in which the Democrats aren’t just opponents but enemies, and democratic norms are there to be broken. “These people are hurting,” says Blanchflower. “And when you’re hurting you’ll buy what looks like medicine, even if it’s from a snake-oil merchant.”This is where Biden’s kumbaya politics, all his pleas to Americans to join hands and sing, looks laughably hollow. You can’t drain the toxicity of Trumpism without tackling the toxic economics of Trumpland. And for as long as Trumpland exists, it will need a Trump. Even if the 45th president is turfed out, he will carry on issuing edicts and exercising power from the studio set of any TV station that will have him.
      Eight years after meeting Mike Stout, I spoke to him this week. He didn’t have much good news for me. Maura lost her hotel position last year and is now working from home in the pandemic, phoning up people deep in debt and pressing them to repay their loans. His son, Mike, lost his job just a few weeks ago for the second time in five years, and now has no medical insurance while his wife has stage-4 cancer.
      “They’ve been pushed off the shelf straight into the gutter,” he told me. “I don’t see any party out there willing to protect my children’s lives: not Democrat, not Republican.”
      • Aditya Chakrabortty is a Guardian columnist More

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      Young voters are disconnecting from democracy – but who can blame them? | Daniella Wenger and Roberto Foa

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      Across the world, and above all in Britain, the Americas and southern Europe, recent research shows that millennials are more dissatisfied with the performance of democracy than previous generations. Moreover, the gap has only worsened with time. When Generation X hit 35, the majority were satisfied with how democracy worked. Most millennials today take the contrary view.Inevitably, our findings have proved something of a Rorschach test for commentators who enjoy speculating about the attitudes of younger generations – including the usual mix of patronising condescension and disbelief. And yes, it is true, in developed democracies such as the US, the UK and Australia, millennials are less likely to join political parties or vote in elections, yet more likely to complain about the results. In the 2016 election, only 46% of young Americans voted, and that hasn’t added legitimacy to millennial objections against the current administration’s actions on the climate changecrisis, student loans or housing affordability.Yet an examination of millennial life trajectories makes clear the reasons for this generational disconnect. In the US, millennials aged 30 make up close to a quarter of the population yet own just 3% of the wealth, while baby boomers held 21% at the same age. In Britain, millennials are the first generation to earn less than their parents and grandparents. In Greece, Italy, and Spain, youth unemployment is approximately three times the national rate.If the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result, millennials can hardly be blamed for checking out from mainstream democratic politics. Hence young people are moving away from the political centre. All the enthusiasm with which young voters once backed moderates such as Barack Obama or Justin Trudeau has morphed into anger over unsustainable debt, high rent and low-paying lobs.And yet we also find that there is nothing inevitable about this youth disconnect from democracy. Our research shows that in countries such as Norway or South Korea, where jobs are plentiful and education and housing affordable, millennials can even be more satisfied with their political institutions than older generations are.Meanwhile, when leaders take measures to reverse youth economic exclusion, the democratic disconnect can be bridged. During Latin America’s “pink tide” of the 2000s, for instance, leaders such as Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva in Brazil or Michelle Bachelet in Chile helped boost youth satisfaction with democracy by extending social benefits to poorer citizens. On average, across all pink tide administrations, young people’s satisfaction with democracy rose 12 percentage points by the end of the first term in office.Travelling further back in time, the election of François Mitterrand in France and Andreas Papandreou in Greece in the 1980s suggest that populism of the left can be a vehicle for young people’s re-engagement with political life. Populist rhetoric has in the past brought young people into the political fold, and continues to do so. Yet faced with this insurgency, the response of the politicians of yesteryear has been to attempt a revival of the political centre, citing Emmanuel Macron’s La République En Marche! or Matteo Renzi as examples of the new way forward.Alas, it doesn’t work: there are few signs of a reversal in youth dissatisfaction when “moderate” candidates beat “populists” into office. In France there may have been relief among the middle classes when Macron won the presidency in 2017, but youth discontent reached fresh levels little more than a year later amid the gilets jaunes protests. Today, the latest opinion polls show far-right candidate Marine Le Pen on course to beat Macron in the first round of the 2022 election, with her National Rally party gathering disproportionate support from disaffected French youth.Meanwhile in Italy, the relatively youthful Matteo Renzi proved a similarly damp squib as younger voters flocked instead towards the amorphous populism of Beppe Grillo’s Five Star Movement. Elsewhere, moderates have fared little better. In Argentina, Mauricio Macri’s 2015 victory over Cristina Fernández de Kirchner’s successor might have brought realistic economics and calmer rhetoric to a country long accustomed to neither, but it did little to revive youth enthusiasm for the democratic process – or Macri’s prospects for re-election, as he was booted from office four years later.In the long run, populists offer few solutions to democracy’s current malaise. That is clear from political and economic crises engulfing countries like Venezuela and Turkey today, as well as more accelerated crises such as Greece’s abortive 2015 effort to revise the terms of its eurozone membership. As we show in our report, when populist parties of either left or right hold office for long enough to undermine democracy and economic prosperity, youth satisfaction declines precipitously.Yet despite their dangers, populists respond to real anger and frustration in society in a way that conventional politicians do not. For as long as this remains true, the populist brand of anti-politics will continue to thrive. So perhaps a paradigm shift is in order. Instead of becoming distracted by the “threat” of populism, we should do more to deliver on democracy’s founding promise – to represent the concerns of citizens and to deliver effective and timely policy solutions.If the populist challenge can shock moderate parties and leaders into taking measures to reverse the true causes of our democratic disconnect– ranging from wealth inequalities between successful and left-behind regions, to the growing intergenerational divide and the toxic nexus of money and politics – then it may yet prompt a democratic rebirth. But if all that mainstream parties can offer is a cosmetic rebrand of the politics of the past, then we should not be surprised if younger citizens continue disconnecting from democracy.Daniella Wenger is research associate at the Bennett Institute for Public Policy, Cambridge University; Roberto Foa is lecturer at Cambridge University and director of the YouGov-Cambridge Centre for Public Opinion Research More

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      The Guardian view on Trump’s tax take: only for the little people | Editorial

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      The emperor’s new clothes is a cautionary tale that politicians know well. A vain ruler who cannot resist buying new garments is sold an imaginary new suit. Out on a stroll in this “magical” attire, he is revealed to be naked by a little boy. Hans Christian Andersen’s exercise in groupthink has the emperor, despite the obvious, continuing to claim that he is garbed in finery. It is a subversive message; that power can bend the truth. Donald Trump thinks himself such a ruler.According to the New York Times, President Trump paid minuscule amounts of federal income tax – $750 in 2016 and 2017, and nothing in 10 of the previous 15 years. That’s because he had a reverse Midas touch with business. Rather than the self-made-billionaire image honed by The Apprentice, Mr Trump excelled at losing, not making, money. Mr Trump’s golf courses have lost $315m since 2000. This time it was the Old Grey Lady, not a child, who showed how Mr Trump was, figuratively, naked.The president’s reaction was to call the story “totally fake news”. He hopes this language resonates with his base and causes them to identify with him rather than listen to the facts. Mr Trump built a coalition by appealing more to conspiracy theory than to partisanship; and his strategy has been to supply his supporters with conspiracy theories to fight what they see as a conspiracy against them. He lies outrageously and often. His supporters may even appreciate his deceits. Many think all politicians are liars and consider those outraged by Mr Trump’s falsehoods to be hypocrites.But the New York Times story carries a sting in its long tail. Should Mr Trump win, he is liable for $300m in loans that will come due within four years. “His lenders could be placed,” the paper notes dryly, “in the unprecedented position of weighing whether to foreclose on a sitting president.” Being in hock to foreign entities would surely pose a major security risk. As the story is unfolding, its impact on the most important election in modern US history cannot be easily judged. The news arrived on the eve of the first presidential debate between the Democrats’ Joe Biden and Mr Trump. Mr Biden’s campaign was quick to cast the president as a leader who thought taxes were just for the little people, pointing out that teachers, nurses and firefighters all paid a lot more to the government than Mr Trump does.America seems broken by Covid-19 after four years of Mr Trump. Almost 30 million are claiming unemployment insurance. Hunger is growing. Two-thirds of households hit by coronavirus face financial hardship. Decades of worshipping greed has destabilised society. The lack of political pressure to compel Congress to extend the $600 per week additional jobless benefit when it expired in July was shocking – especially considering the Republican rush to push through Judge Amy Coney Barrett’s supreme court confirmation hearings. Inequality is a US national emergency. It ought to be addressed by increased taxes on the wealthy. Mr Trump won in 2016 by making promises to voters he was not going to keep. He cheated his working-class supporters, suggesting that many of their fears cannot be of concern. Mr Trump probably believed his own story. One hopes for the US’s sake that come November fewer people will trust him again. More

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      Could Dayton’s Black voters turn Ohio blue?

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      The mobilization of Black Daytonians could prove significant to the upcoming elections, as this battleground state becomes competitive again electorally Cars are a more common sight than people on Dayton’s West 3rd St , a major boulevard known as the heart of the Black community in this Ohio city. Once a bustling commercial corridor, West […] More

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      'Here's a bedsheet, make a parachute!' Republicans say, pushing us out of a plane | Hamilton Nolan

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      ‘Here’s a bedsheet, make a parachute!’ Republicans say, pushing us out of a plane Hamilton Nolan The heart of the Republican governing philosophy causes ludicrously insufficient responses to an existential crisis ‘The fundamental purpose of the Republican party is to cut taxes and otherwise serve the interests of the rich.’ Photograph: Vladimir Smirnov/Tass The Republican […] More