Privileged Populists: Populism in the Conservative and Libertarian Working Class by Micah J. Fleck

Author:Micah J. Fleck [Fleck, Micah J.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Political Economy, Political Ideologies, Political Science, Conservatism & Liberalism, Libertarianism, General
ISBN: 9780755627400
Google: H8FPEAAAQBAJ
Goodreads: 59382224
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 2022-02-10T12:53:47+00:00

8

Systemic Deadfalls

In 2016, the year of Donald Trump’s election, the gross domestic product (GDP) in the United States was nearing the twenty trillion mark. Two years later, it had crossed that threshold. Also over that course of time, unemployment rates in America dropped to—and remained hovering around—just under 4 percent.1 It has been said as of this writing that there are not enough people to fill all the new jobs arriving on the market.2 Scads of liberal and neoliberal economic writings throughout the years have rushed to highlight the fact that ever since the boom of industry in the early 1800s, average earnings in the United States have skyrocketed.3 Innovation, technological advancement, scientific discovery, automation of various services, average income, GDP, job offerings, and so on are all various factors often cited as evidence for the veracity of the claim that capitalism, despite all its shortcomings, still lifts all boats. Yes, the rich are getting richer, but also, the claim goes, are the poor.4

Why, then, does working-class unrest continue to cycle back around and resurge in new forms every new generation, as this book has thus far demonstrated?5 How can numbers on the page appear to tell a story of success and wealth in the United States while real flesh-and-blood working people continue to feel financially forgotten and left behind? Are these numbers lying?

The answer to this question is mostly no—while it is true that numbers and statistics can be manipulated at times for nefarious reasons, most of the time the data that fuels the numbers listed earlier is correct and merely presents a surface-level summation of where the economy is as a whole. This is the problem, in that a surface-level measurement of a country’s overall and general economic condition is poised to lose sight of the very real lived-in daily realities of the average working person who has no connection to Wall Street. The numbers themselves aren’t incorrect, but they are woefully lacking in context and controls for various life factors that often contribute to a person’s overall well-being.

GDP, for instance, is itself an incredibly broad measurement of a given country’s overall economic activity that mainly is measured via summarizing the monetary value of all finished corporate goods put into the market within a set time frame. In the United States, GDP is calculated and publicly shared both on a quarterly and on an annual basis. What this amounts to in application is a measurement, taken very seriously by policy makers and citizens alike, that is virtually only really accounting for how much stuff is put up for sale per year—it is not accounting for many other things that compound together to account for a person’s everyday quality of life.6

This is because quality of life is a wholly human thing, and humanity exists way outside the lines that are drawn by an exclusively fiscal focus on the world. Psychology, for instance, as well as art, often gives deeper insight into the human condition than soulless numbers on a page ever could.

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