On the menu today: An examination of former president Barack Obama’s assessment that “massive concentrations of wealth” threaten democracy, and his wildly inaccurate assessment of what drives populists, Donald Trump supporters, and the MAGA movement. Oh, and the king of the gerrymanderers now laments that the political opposition has learned the same tricks.
Barack Obama Denounces ‘Massive Concentrations of Wealth’
Barack Obama, in a recent interview with CNN’s Christiane Amanpour, said:
It’s very hard to sustain a democracy when you have such massive concentrations of wealth. And so, part of my argument has been that unless we attend to that, unless we make people feel more economically secure and we’re taking more seriously the need to create ladders of opportunity and a stronger safety net that’s adapted to these new technologies and the displacements that are taking place around the world, if we don’t take care of that, that’s also going to fuel the kind of mostly far-right populism, but it can also potentially come from the left, that is undermining democracy because it makes people angry and resentful and scared.
The obvious criticism of Obama here is that he and his wife are walking, talking, “massive concentrations of wealth.”
Obama and his wife signed the largest book deal in history, $65 million, for their memoirs. The Obamas signed a separate production deal with Netflix worth an estimated $50 million. The Obamas’ production company, Higher Ground, signed a $25 million deal with Spotify that lasted three years. Barack Obama reportedly makes as much as $400,000 per speech, but reportedly made almost $600,000 for speaking at a conference in Colombia. Michelle Obama makes $200,000 per appearance.
The Obamas rent a mansion in Kalorama (a neighborhood in Washington, D.C.); bought a mansion and estate in Martha’s Vineyard, Mass.; bought another house in Rancho Mirage, Calif.; and still have their old home in the Hyde Park neighborhood of Chicago.
In April 2010, then-president Obama declared, “At a certain point, you’ve made enough money.” Apparently, Obama hasn’t reached that point yet.
But it’s not just that Obama is objecting to the concentration of wealth while becoming fabulously wealthy himself. It’s that Obama’s assessment of what is driving modern American populism is likely quite wrong. He’s attempting to shoehorn a cliched left-wing progressive complaint about America to fit as an explanation for the current popularity of right-wing populism.
Perhaps some American populists on the Left are driven by an objection to massive concentrations of wealth. But right-wing populists in the United States adore a man who lives in a mansion in Mar-a-Lago and who brags about how wealthy he is. American populists may well sneer about the out-of-touch wealthy elites rigging the system, but they largely nodded when Trump named Steven Mnuchin as Secretary of the Treasury, Wilbur Ross as Secretary of Commerce, and Betsy DeVos as Secretary of Education. Trump’s cabinet featured 17 millionaires, two centimillionaires, and one billionaire.
Tucker Carlson made $20 million per year at Fox News, and few populists on the right saw that as any kind of problem. Populists have little objection to anybody being super rich, as long as those rich people tell them what they want to hear. And what populists particularly love hearing is that they’re being dissed.
Keep in mind, most Trump supporters aren’t poor, or even necessarily on the bottom half of the nation’s income scale. In the 2016 Republican primaries, Trump voters’ median income exceeded the overall statewide median, sometimes narrowly but sometimes substantially. In the general election, like the primary, “About two thirds of Trump supporters came from the better-off half of the economy.” Further analysis found “support for Trump was strongest among the locally rich — that is, white voters with incomes that are high for their area, though not necessarily for the country as a whole.” Polling in 2020 found that the higher a person’s income, the more likely they were to say the economy would improve more in a second term of Trump than under Joe Biden. In the 2020 election, Trump did better among voters making more than $50,000 per year than he did among voters making less than $50,000 per year.
(I should pause to remind readers that back in 2016, Michael Brendan Dougherty pointed out the limitations of measuring a person’s wealth by self-reported income level, without taking the local cost of living into account. The average household income in Staten Island is $113,335, but that doesn’t make it a particularly high-status place to live by the standards of New York City.)
So why is Obama looking at MAGA America and concluding that what truly drives its members is “massive concentrations of wealth” and economic insecurity? Because Obama’s assessment of Americans in flyover country hasn’t changed much since 2008, when he declared:
You go into these small towns in Pennsylvania and, like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing’s replaced them. And they fell through the Clinton administration, and the Bush administration, and each successive administration has said that somehow these communities are gonna regenerate and they have not. And it’s not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy toward people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.
Obama has his explanation for why many religious, gun-owning, and working-class Americans have their views, and he’s not interested in updating or revising his assessment. Inherent but unspoken in his conclusion is that his own presidency didn’t do much to change the conditions of these voters, leading them to vote for Donald Trump over Hillary Clinton.
I would argue that America’s right-of-center populists aren’t all that driven by resentment or a lack of opportunity (more on this below). They’re often most driven by a perceived lack of respect.
They didn’t go to the right schools, they don’t work in professions that are glamorous or celebrated, their religious faith is mocked and derided, and Hollywood portrays them as a bunch of ignorant hicks. Many of them live in “flyover country,” which is seen as culturally backwards, easily and justifiably ignored. They work for a living and do not benefit from affirmative action, but they’re told that they have it easy because of “white privilege.” A lot of government officials treat their constitutionally protected ownership of a gun as a major problem to be solved, but shrug their shoulders at the insecure border and illegal immigration. Lots of Americans see a criminal-justice system that comes down like a ton of bricks on pro-life protesters while prominent big-city district attorneys declare they won’t prosecute whole classes of crimes.
The Obama team openly spoke about how its voters were a “coalition of the ascendant” — minorities, the millennial generation, and socially liberal upscale whites, especially women. This term means there must be a corresponding “coalition of the descendant” — whites, older Americans, social conservatives, married couples, and men. No one likes hearing that they’re outdated, sinking, or losing importance or relevance. Run around boasting that you don’t need certain demographics of voters long enough, and those demographics will conclude that they don’t need you, either.
The old Arkansas “Bubba,” Bill Clinton, put his finger on it during the 2016 primary while campaigning for his wife. “Why is it such a wacky election? Because millions and millions and millions and millions of people look at that pretty picture of America [Obama] painted and they cannot find themselves in it to save their lives.” America’s populists felt themselves being cropped out of the elites’ portrait of the country. Physically, they stayed where they were, but culturally, they felt like they were being deported from the mainstream of American society.
This isn’t to say that populists don’t have any economic concerns. Trump was and is a protectionist on trade, although it’s easy to forget because he almost never talks about it anymore. Biden’s trade policies aren’t that different from Trump’s, and populists generally hate Biden and adore Trump, which suggests that their views are not based upon a detailed assessment of trade policies.
Populists love being told that the system is rigged. Because the more reasons they get to believe that the system is rigged, the less they must contemplate the possibility that the disappointments in their lives are the consequences of their own actions and decisions. Populists rarely want an explanation that involves taking responsibility for their own lives; they often want a scapegoat.
As for Obama’s call for “creating ladders of opportunity,” the U.S. has roughly 10 million unfilled jobs right now — down some from the record 12 million in March 2022, but still exceptionally high by historical standards. You still see “help wanted” signs in a lot of store windows, and some businesses are still asking customers to be patient because they’re understaffed. Almost every truck I passed on Interstate 95 driving up from South Carolina this weekend had a sign declaring the company was hiring licensed drivers. (One mind-boggling figure: “The average trucking company has a turnover rate of roughly 95 percent, meaning that it must replace nearly all of its work force in the course of a year.”)
America has ladders of opportunity — but it has solid and sturdy ladders for those who are born with certain advantages, and rickety and unstable ones for those who have made certain mistakes earlier in life or who are beset by particularly thorny problems. (And if you’re a son of a senator, there’s an escalator.)
Our education system certainly doesn’t give every child an equal chance to thrive. If you’re lucky enough to live in a good school district with good teachers, you start life on the right track. If not, you’re on your own, kid. And more kids are falling through the cracks. Instead of test scores bouncing back from the pandemic, the most recent national test scores show “the single largest drop in math in 50 years and no signs of academic recovery following the disruptions of the pandemic.”
Few things can screw up your life faster, or leave you with more long-term problems, than addiction. Earlier this year, a Department of Health and Human Services survey calculated that 46.3 million Americans aged twelve or older met the criteria for having a substance-use disorder in the year 2021. Stunningly, 94 percent of the people aged twelve or older with a substance-use disorder said they did not receive any treatment for their addictions.
If you’ve done something stupid and committed a crime early in life, it’s tough to get hired. And these problems intertwine; an estimated 65 percent of the U.S. prison population has a substance-abuse disorder. Another 20 percent did not meet the official criteria for a substance-abuse disorder, but were under the influence of drugs or alcohol at the time of their crime. And the numbers are similar for teenagers: “Four out of every five juvenile offenders are under the influence while committing their crimes, test positive for drugs, admit having substance problems, are arrested for committing an alcohol or drug offense, or they exhibit some combination of these characteristics.”
Some teens get caught shoplifting and get a call to their parents and get scared straight. Others get arrested, charged with larceny, and start life with a criminal record. Two-thirds of colleges perform criminal-background checks on applicants, and 38 percent have said that a conviction does not automatically disqualify an applicant.
The people at the bottom of American life — not just in terms of income or wealth, but in terms of support networks and social capital and stable families — just have so little room for error, and the lasting consequences of their bad decisions are so much worse.
Oh, and on Gerrymandering . . .
Also in that CNN appearance, Obama lamented “the gerrymandering of districts.” Back in 2001, Obama literally redrew the lines of his own state senate district himself in order to enhance his political fortunes and set himself up for a statewide bid for office:
One day in the spring of 2001, about a year after the loss to Rush, Obama walked into the Stratton Office Building, in Springfield, a shabby nineteen-fifties government workspace for state officials next to the regal state capitol. He went upstairs to a room that Democrats in Springfield called “the inner sanctum.” Only about ten Democratic staffers had access; entry required an elaborate ritual — fingerprint scanners and codes punched into a keypad. The room was large, and unremarkable except for an enormous printer and an array of computers with big double monitors. On the screens that spring day were detailed maps of Chicago, and Obama and a Democratic consultant named John Corrigan sat in front of a terminal to draw Obama a new district. Corrigan was the Democrat in charge of drawing all Chicago districts, and he also happened to have volunteered for Obama in the campaign against Rush. . . .
Like every other Democratic legislator who entered the inner sanctum, Obama began working on his “ideal map.” Corrigan remembers two things about the district that he and Obama drew. First, it retained Obama’s Hyde Park base — he had managed to beat Rush in Hyde Park — then swooped upward along the lakefront and toward downtown. By the end of the final redistricting process, his new district bore little resemblance to his old one. Rather than jutting far to the west, like a long thin dagger, into a swath of poor black neighborhoods of bungalow homes, Obama’s map now shot north, encompassing about half of the Loop, whose southern portion was beginning to be transformed by developers like Tony Rezko, and stretched far up Michigan Avenue and into the Gold Coast, covering much of the city’s economic heart, its main retail thoroughfares, and its finest museums, parks, skyscrapers, and lakefront apartment buildings. African-Americans still were a majority, and the map contained some of the poorest sections of Chicago, but Obama’s new district was wealthier, whiter, more Jewish, less blue-collar, and better educated.
Today’s gerrymanderers are like the kid in the ’80s anti-drug commercial, justified in telling Obama, “I learned it by watching you!”
ADDENDUM: In case you missed it yesterday, we probably don’t have to worry about Russia’s loose nukes; President Biden’s pay-your-fair-share tax talk now looks ludicrously hypocritical; and the latest NBC poll shows that the general electorate is practically begging the Republican Party to give it an option beyond a Biden vs. Trump rematch.