A recent Quinnipiac University poll has Donald Trump caught up with Hilary Clinton in some key industrial states, including Ohio and Pennsylvania. While the pundits have had a field day analyzing why he's doing better than expected there, I feel like we keep missing a key point. It's still the economy, stupid.
We've talked a lot about the "working class" in this election - mostly in terms of demographics such as gender and race. As a friend of mine said recently, though, the key to that phrase is the word "working." He's right. "Working" is the identity a broad base of people are trying to preserve, and which feels under threat.
It feels under threat because it is. For far too much of America - today's diverse America as well as yesterday's more white male version - work is just plain going away. Or, the investment required to get good work - in education, extracurricular involvement, advanced social networks, etc. - is too far out of reach. You're stuck and there's no way up, or out.
According to a recent report by the Pew Research Center, America's middle class is getting squeezed. Some people are becoming upper class, and others are getting stuck in the lower income tiers. While general middle class decline is happening everywhere, want to know who's moving disproportionately to the lower tiers? People who live in former working class communities and parts of the country that haven't cornered a piece of the "knowledge economy."
As Pew put it, "The economies...with the greatest losses in income status from 2000 to 2014 shared a greater-than-average reliance on manufacturing." Rocky Mountain, NC lost 10% of its middle income families to the lower income bracket. For Jackson, MI and Springfield, OH it was 14% and 16% respectively. In a place like Massachusetts, however, knowledge hub of the East Coast, people are moving up. In "Boston-Cambridge-Newton," median household income sat at just under $80,000.
There's not a new job waiting in the communities who are losing. And for families working two or three jobs to break even, no amount of compounded savings is going to bring relief, no comfortable retirement is going to bring rest. That's your life today, tomorrow and every day. That's a very, very hard place to be.
Angry "working class" voters - whether they've followed Donald Trump or Bernie Sanders -- rightly see an American economic future that threatens not to include them, either in work, or in economic supports for people who will be left out of the future workforce. They also see a culture that used to celebrate them but no longer does. Gone are the days of John Lennon's "Working Class Hero" or composer Aaron Copeland's, "Fanfare for the Common Man." Today, we celebrate Zuckerberg and Gates. Today, it seems like dignity is in being a "tech bro," but not in being a truck driver.
This isn't just a practical issue. It's also a moral one. Work is fundamental to human dignity. We can't just curate growth and profitability in our economy. We also must curate real work for everyone, across race and gender.
In his well-known environmental encyclical, Laudato Si, Pope Francis said about the moral teachings on work, "in the reality of today's global society, it is essential that 'we continue to prioritize the goal of access to steady employment for everyone.'" Can I get an amen? Regardless of politics or personal belief, we must take seriously the "work" in "working class."