How Many Americas Was That?

RALEIGH — Do we really live in a country of “two Americas”?

Senator and presidential candidate John Edwards has been saying so at every opportunity during the past year. In their own way, though with less rhetorical skill, Howard Dean, Dick Gerphardt, and even blue-blood John Kerry have been sounding the same tired refrain. I call it tired because it’s merely a variation of a line that populist and left-wing politicians have been feeding voters for decades, probably even centuries.

Remember Al Gore’s prattle about “the people vs. the powerful”? Remember Jimmy Carter talking about representing “people like you” in the White House? Remember Harry S. Truman’s “Give ’em hell, Harry” pose?

Here’s a speech Truman gave in New Jersey during his famous election campaign against Thomas Dewey in 1948:

The Republicans are trying to hide the truth from you in a great many ways. They don’t want you to know the truth about the issues in this campaign. The big fundamental issue in this campaign is the people against the special interests. The Democratic party stands for the people.

Franklin Roosevelt railed against the monied interests and promised to help ordinary citizens “effectively control the mighty commercial forces.” In the early 20th century, Populist and Progressive demagogues stoked the fires of envy and resentment and embraced a false but politically useful picture of the previous decades of the so-called “Gilded Age.”

Today’s champions of the “working class” — really a Marxist term that has no useful meaning since virtually no non-elderly person who earns an income isn’t engaged much of the day in work — point to what they think is evidence that the rich are getting richer, the poor are getting poorer, and the middle class is disappearing. Sometimes I think they know they are telling a fib. Sometimes I think they don’t.

The reality is far different. Americans have never before in their history enjoyed the level of prosperity, health, consumer choice, and homeownership that they do today. Simplistic studies of income trends over time are woefully inadequate to the task of exploring and explaining this economic reality. As columnist Alan Reynolds explained in a recent piece, these studies typically employ misleading statistics, ignore changes over time in the size and structure of families, ignore the impact of age and educational attainment on the data, ignore the impact of the underground economy and government benefits on the real standard-of-living of the bottom quintile of the income distribution, ignore the fact that many Americans move up and down the income ladder over their lifetimes, and use inexact and often wildly inaccurate adjustments for “inflation” that fail to account for increases in the quality of goods and services that far outpace increases in their nominal price.

One of my Carolina Journal colleagues found flaws of precisely this sort in a report released by our friends over at the N.C. Justice and Community Development Center last year. Entitled Working Hard Is Still Not Enough, the paper purported to suggest that 60 percent of North Carolina families were not earning enough income each year to live on, inviting the question of how they seemed to be getting by and why they haven’t all fled the state screaming or charged the rest of us with sharpened pitchforks. Even if the specific problems with this sort of analysis escaped attention, I would think that the conclusion would have failed the reasonability test.

But if the populist/progressive/Goreist critique of capitalist society fails the reasonability test, why are politicians deploying it so effectively in the political season of 2004? Because there is a constituency for a message that absolves people of responsibility for their own mistakes and adverse fortunes, that fingers villains to blame for painful economic changes (even when those changes bring net benefits, as increasing international trade does), and that reduces complex phenomena to simple, emotional language.

Polls show that the vast majority Americans are personally optimistic, fairly well-satisfied with their jobs and economic prospects, and expect their lives to continue to improve. These same polls find that Americans often think the country as a whole is going to hell in a handbasket, particularly when asked during a (usually brief) period of economic recession. The difference is personal experience — the more they learn about the world directly, rather than indirectly through media sob stories and political flim-flammery, the better.

Hood is president of the John Locke Foundation and publisher of Carolina Journal.