Economic anxiety, for real this time

One thing zealous ideology does is make people stupid. I’ve been thinking about stupidity a lot lately, and here’s a classic bit of intellectual stupidity: the unwillingness to hold two thoughts in one’s head at the same time. For example: support for Donald Trump and Trumpism is a product of both racism and genuine economic anxiety.

Both/and not either/or. It’s not real complicated, but plenty of progressives have spent the last eight years in something close to complete denial about this.

Some figures:

Real median price of a single family house in the US in constant 2024 dollars:

1990: $280,000

2024: $420,000

Real median household income, 2023 dollars

1990: $63K

2023: 80K

So over the course of the last generation the median price of a house has gone up twice as fast as median household income (50% and 25% respectively).

Of course these are national averages, and the problem is much worse in the areas where the Elites Meet to Eat Gluten-free Treats.

Let’s look at some more fun statistical facts:

I guess all that “cultural Marxism” hasn’t produced a whole lot of the non-cultural kind now has it comrades?

Continuing The Love Song of J. Alfred Plutocrat in chart form:

I’m taking these charts from Bill Henderson’s Legal Evolution. Henderson, who was one of the very first people in the legal academy to notice that the cost of becoming a lawyer and the compensation for people with law degrees were moving in problematic directions relative to each other, has just decided to make a career turn:

 For 15 years, I’ve taught legal ethics and professional responsibility. This body of law includes an affirmative duty on lawyers to “further the public’s understanding of and confidence in the rule of law” because “legal institutions in a constitutional democracy depend on popular participation and support to maintain their authority.” ABA Preamble, ¶6. Three years ago, I was so troubled by the aftermath of January 6, and therefore, what it seemed to require of lawyers, that I started digging for answers. This resulted in two years of learning and reflection, which I documented in a series of detailed essays that included the above four charts and accompanying conclusions.

In the last reflective essay, Post 350, published last December, I announced that I was shutting down a 20-year chapter in my professional career (research and writing on law firms, legal innovation, and lawyer development—all the original content of Legal Evolution) to redirect my efforts to building new infrastructure for the broken, byzantine, and unaffordable legal system for ordinary people. I reasoned that if my analysis was correct, it didn’t matter who won the 2024 election, as the consequences of further delay were intolerable.

Of course it matters in a million ways who won the election, but the fact that incumbents identified as the elite establishment are getting killed at the polls all across the developed world, and populist demagogues are coming to power in so many places, is a product of economic conditions that are creating ever-more intense feelings of precarity and resentment, even as they generate ever-more fabulous wealth for those at the top of the system, along with all those renovated designer kitchens for the stratum one level below the plutocracy itself.

In the United States at the moment there are two political parties, one of which is totally dedicated to celebrating and accelerating this process, and the other which features a spectrum of opinions that range from an ambivalent desire to ameliorate it, to active opposition to the devastation it’s wreaking on, for example, the 85 million Americans who live in households with an average negative net worth.

That the former party has just been put back in power via, among other things, a wave of populist resentment against the very things that this party exists to protect and further (massive wealth inequality, unfettered corporate power, and an obscenely bare bones welfare state) represents a catastrophic failure of education, culture, media, and ultimately democracy.