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Why Americans Are Revolting Against The Ruling Class

This article was first published on robertreich.org

HillaryClinton“He can’t possibly win the nomination,” is the phrase heard most often when Washington insiders mention either Donald Trump or Bernie Sanders.

Yet as enthusiasm for the bombastic billionaire and the socialist senior continues to build within each party, the political establishment is mystified.

They don’t understand that the biggest political phenomenon in America today is a revolt against the “ruling class” of insiders that have dominated Washington for more than three decades.

In two very different ways, Trump and Sanders are agents of this revolt. I’ll explain the two ways in a moment.

Don’t confuse this for the public’s typical attraction to candidates posing as political outsiders who’ll clean up the mess, even when they’re really insiders who contributed to the mess.

What’s new is the degree of anger now focused on those who have had power over our economic and political system since the start of the 1980s.

Included are presidents and congressional leaders from both parties, along with their retinues of policy advisors, political strategists, and spin-doctors.

Most have remained in Washington even when not in power, as lobbyists, campaign consultants, go-to lawyers, financial bundlers, and power brokers.

The other half of the ruling class comprises the corporate executives, Wall Street chiefs, and multi-millionaires who have assisted and enabled these political leaders — and for whom the politicians have provided political favors in return.

America has long had a ruling class but the public was willing to tolerate it during the three decades after World War II, when prosperity was widely shared and when the Soviet Union posed a palpable threat. Then, the ruling class seemed benevolent and wise.

Yet in the last three decades — when almost all the nation’s economic gains have gone to the top while the wages of most people have gone nowhere — the ruling class has seemed to pad its own pockets at the expense of the rest of America.

We’ve witnessed self-dealing on a monumental scale — starting with the junk-bond takeovers of the 1980s, followed by the Savings and Loan crisis, the corporate scandals of the early 2000s (Enron, Adelphia, Global Crossing, Tyco, Worldcom), and culminating in the near meltdown of Wall Street in 2008 and the taxpayer-financed bailout.

Along the way, millions of Americans lost their jobs their savings, and their homes.

Meanwhile, the Supreme Court has opened the floodgates to big money in politics wider than ever. Taxes have been cut on top incomes, tax loopholes widened, government debt has grown, public services have been cut. And not a single Wall Street executive has gone to jail.

The game seems rigged — riddled with abuses of power, crony capitalism, and corporate welfare.

In 2001, a Gallup poll found 77 percent of Americans satisfied with opportunities to get ahead by working hard and 22 percent dissatisfied. By 2014, only 54 percent were satisfied and 45 percent dissatisfied.

The resulting fury at ruling class has taken two quite different forms.

On the right are the wreckers. The Tea Party, which emerged soon after the Wall Street bailout, has been intent on stopping government in its tracks and overthrowing a ruling class it sees as rotten to the core.

Its Republican protégés in Congress and state legislatures who have attacked the Republican establishment. And they’ve wielded the wrecking balls of government shutdowns, threats to default on public debt, gerrymandering, voter suppression through strict ID laws, and outright appeals to racism.

Donald Trump is their human wrecking ball. The more outrageous his rants and putdowns of other politicians, the more popular he becomes among this segment of the public that’s thrilled by a bombastic, racist, billionaire who sticks it to the ruling class.

On the left are the rebuilders. The Occupy movement, which also emerged from the Wall Street bailout, was intent on displacing the ruling class and rebuilding our political-economic system from the ground up.

Occupy didn’t last but it put inequality on map. And the sentiments that fueled Occupy are still boiling.

Bernie Sanders personifies them. The more he advocates a fundamental retooling of our economy and democracy in favor of average working people, the more popular he becomes among those who no longer trust the ruling class to bring about necessary change.

Yet despite the growing revolt against the ruling class, it seems likely that the nominees in 2016 will be Jeb Bush and Hillary Clinton. After all, the ruling class still controls America.

But the revolt against the ruling class won’t end with the 2016 election, regardless.

Which means the ruling class will have to change the way it rules America. Or it won’t rule too much longer.

ROBERT B. REICH, Chancellor’s Professor of Public Policy at the University of California at Berkeley and Senior Fellow at the Blum Center for Developing Economies, was Secretary of Labor in the Clinton administration. Time Magazine named him one of the ten most effective cabinet secretaries of the twentieth century.

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1 COMMENT

  1. The “Wreckers” continue to meet and make their voices heard while the “rebuilders” have passed into history. Choice propaganda words worthy of Lenin, Marx or Alinsky…. or Clinton (either one) or Obama for that matter. What’s interesting this the demagoguery used by Reich. Accusing the “Wreckers” of wanting to destroy the government and ruin the nations credit and engage in voter suppression.

    Let’s look at those claims contextually first and then a little more substantively after.

    Contextually the “Tea Party” wreckers as Reich vacuously denigrates them stand for 1) Constitutionally limited government; 2) Fiscal Responsibility and 3) free market solutions.

    Constitutionally the federal government long since broke it’s leash and the Tea Party wants the collar put back on it. Textually they are directly on point with the Federal government repeatedly having been found to have improperly extended its reach. Sometimes by outrageous extension of very limited authority, other times by using financial inducements to bribe state governments in a manner not unlike a heroin dealer giving free samples to secure a new market. No one serious disputes this. But the problem with the massive expansion of authority far beyond the grant of limited delegation of powers has resulted in massive fiscal irresponsibility.

    Reich drops the cliche about shutting down the government and threatening government default when the truth is that even with the “shutdown” some 70% of the government is on cruise control and not impacted seriously at all. As for the default, that would have to be a conscious decision by the Administration to choose to pay for programs and agency operations that are outside the Constitutional delegation of powers anyway, over the obligation to pay the debt service.

    It’s like the alcoholic that repeatedly says they will change, they will change, they will change. At some point you have to intervene and say no more promises it’s either enter rehab or you’re out the door. So the Tea Party are “wreckers” because they are the adults engaging in the intervention according to Reich. The level of arrogance and cognitive dissonance he must be beset with is without peer, well maybe Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama are in the same zip code. The point being that the position he condemns is fiscal responsibility. Consider that we’re on track to rack up yet another $400 Billion deficit and another $350 billion in INTEREST only payments on the accumulated debt. And that at record low rates of interest some 1/3 of the historic average. What does that last observation mean? It means when they return to norm, as they will, the INTEREST only payment will be over a Trillion. Where does that come from people?

    Both the Republicans and the Democratic Party are responsible for the debt. But as with the alcoholic when you are borrowing from MasterCard to pay the INTEREST ONLY payment on the Visa Card something is wrong.

    The Progressives have had some 60 years plus to run their experiment on social engineering. It’s failed every test yet we are to suspend common sense, training, experience and education to continue the same path with them. Einstein had an observation about insanity and that was a key element.

    As for that voter suppression issue, only Alinsky and Reich could change the subject when the facts on that issue are presented. There is voter fraud all over and picture ID’s are required for every other function in our society and you’re telling me that providing that minimal backstop to fraud is “suppression?” Try buying a bottle of liquor or exercising virtually any other commercial function in society today and then make that claim as you try to enter a Federal building, board an airplane or obtain a passport. Sophistry and vacuous are inadequate terms in reference to Reich. I have no respect for him at all for this piece of garbage.

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