Two years ago, many of you read my reaction to the election, where I admitted to living in a bubble. Privileged, upper-middle class, white, urban, male. And an academic to boot! But I have been watching, and listening, and thinking about what may be going on outside my bubble for the last two years, and I think I have a pretty good hypothesis of some of that activity. Here is what I believe. Am I right?
There is another bubble outside of mine, with almost no overlap, although there are a few points where they touch. Inside that bubble there are mostly middle class, mostly white folks who, for many years, are seeing their lives in decline. What used to be taken for granted, like my kids will be better off than I am, now seems out of reach. They work hard and play by the rules. But even though the stock market is booming, and the growth in GDP is healthy, not much of that wealth has made it into their bank accounts or onto their balance sheets. Many of them have to work two jobs to make ends meet and to send their kids to college.
And nobody seems to be talking about them and their problems. The news features a lot about blacks and Latinos and LGBTQ people and their problems. About immigrants and their problems. They know that their grandparents were immigrants, too, and are proud of the success their family made in this country, but it is not clear what that means when more and more people in town are black or brown or wearing odd clothes. The people inside this bubble don’t have anything against others having their problems addressed, but it has been a long time since it was their turn.
For years and years, the Republican party has been telling the people in this bubble that the GOP was going to make things right for the middle class. With tax cuts and less government regulation, the economy would boom and we would all be better off. After a while, though, it has become clear that those policies don’t seem to benefit the middle class. The rich keep getting richer. Nothing is trickling down.
The Democrats, who used to be the party of middle class white people, are reaching out to gays and people of color and immigrants. They haven’t addressed the economic inequality that the people in this bubble are living. The Democrats have said that they are worried about being accused of “class warfare,” but then they keep looking out for the underclass, as if the middle class had no problems.
At some point, they decided, “Enough. A pox on both your houses.” Screw the Bushes and the Clintons, both of which have been caught lying to our faces about economics, but also about other important things like war and like moral behavior. “We want,” they say, “to change this, and change it NOW!”
Was Trump going to make it worse? Well, what is worse than being ignored? Then seeing a steady lowering of your buying power and a decreasing ability to conjure up hope, with nobody paying attention? So, they voted for him, and he won. Maybe things will finally get better.
From inside my bubble, it seems to me that we have spent two years testing whether they were right. But things are pretty much the same. The kids are still going to have to work mighty hard to just break even with their parents. Republicans still pass tax cuts for the most wealthy and lie to us that this will redound to our benefit, running up a magnificent deficit in the process, a deficit that those kids will have to pay up. Trump is a pathological liar and a monumental narcissist, with no impulse control and no overall plan for anything, violating the most basic norms of governance and legality. Of civility.
And nobody in power is addressing the most pressing problem we face, the reality, not a hoax or a plot, that the climate is changing, that hurricanes will come quicker and harder, that winter will be deeper in some places, and, in others, summer will be unbearable, so hot that planes can’t fly. This really shouldn’t be talked about in future tense anymore. Climate change is here, now. The urgent question is can we stop it from getting much, much worse. If not, the ecological niche that human-kind evolved in will be closed, or, at best, deeply pinched. If we live long enough, we may look back on these days as the best in the lives of our children.
I don’t live within that other bubble. I think I get it – it was a bad couple of decades for America’s white middle class. But I just can’t believe that no one within that bubble doesn’t see pretty much the same awfulness that I have seen in the last two years. If you are one of those people, you have to speak up, to act up, to share your views with your bubble-mates. We have to learn to act together, or we are all in trouble. Together.
Am I wrong? What don’t I get about the lives in that other bubble? And why don’t you see the last two years as I do?
