As middle- and working-class people have fallen behind over the last decades, many who struggle for the daily bread have become less motivated to vote, petition, speak out, organize or otherwise exercise the American birthright.

As middle- and working-class people have fallen behind over the last decades, many who struggle for the daily bread have become less motivated to vote, petition, speak out, organize or otherwise exercise the American birthright.

A growing sense of cynicism, felt by many citizens on the right, left and center, threatens to erode basic tenets of our democracy � and the situation is compounded by the vast power that big-dollar donors now wield, economists and political scientists tell The Providence Journal.

�Increasingly, the large amounts of money coming into the political process may have some people asking themselves: �Why should I participate? I can go stand in line and vote, but my vote is essentially canceled out by the guy who just wrote that huge check,�� says Rich Holtzman, Bryant University associate professor of political science and a member of the Hassenfeld Institute for Public Leadership.

University of Rhode Island economics Prof. Richard McIntyre cites factors underlying the discouragement many families experience as they work hard � longer hours, second jobs, both parents in the labor force � without getting ahead, a theme readers of the Middle Class Squeeze series have struck in letters, emails and phone calls to The Journal.

In a nutshell: due to advances in automation, globalization and other factors, work force productivity has risen while wages have been throttled, shattering the postwar American Dream.

Rhode Island�s median wage grew only 0.2 percent from 2003 to 2013, a Journal analysis of federal data shows, while annual household income when adjusted for inflation from 1990 to 2010 showed a decline of 2.4 percent for the middle 20 percent and a nearly 8-percent decline for the next lowest fifth. The poor, those at the bottom fifth � households with yearly income of under $20,241 � suffered the worst, with a decline of 11 percent.

�It�s pretty commonly understood now that the real wage effectively has not risen in 30 years nationally � and yet productivity has grown quite dramatically,� McIntyre says. �It doesn�t take a Ph.D. in economics to figure out that if people are producing more and they�re not getting paid more, then that income is going somewhere else.

�And it went to profits, especially to large corporations � who then went on a spending spree buying each other out and lending money to working-class people who wanted to raise their standard of living but could not because their wages hadn�t grown.� Home-equity loans and credit-card debt are examples of how corporations lent money to ordinary consumers.

Citizens United

Some of those profits, the economist argues, also went to candidates and causes that favor the wealthy. The floodgates opened in 2010, when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in the Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission case that the First Amendment prohibits government restrictions on campaign contributions by corporations, associations and unions, whether Democrat, Republican or other affiliation. Super PACs became super weapons.

[poll-squeeze]

According to the Center for Responsive Politics, Opensecrets.org, which analyzes data from the FEC, $6.2 billion was spent on the 2012 congressional and presidential races � $1 billion more than in 2008 and more than double the 2000 total. Both major parties spent heavily: $2.7 billion by Democrats and $3.2 billion by Republicans.

�If income is redistributed upward, then the people who are receiving it can buy more politicians,� McIntyre says. �Not that they weren�t buying them before but now they can really buy them � Any even attempt to control big money in politics is now just gone.�

This, too, favors the big-money donors, the professor maintains.

�There�s a cynicism which is actually productive for those very same people who got the income redistributed to them,� McIntyre says. �The less that working-class people vote, the easier it is to do what they want to do.�

Edward Hudgins, senior scholar at the libertarian-leaning Atlas Society, headquartered in Washington, agrees:

�As politics becomes the coin of the realm, more businesses and other interest groups � Wall Street banks, �clean� energy businesses, you name it � benefit not by offering goods and services to paying customers but, rather, support to politicians. This �crony capitalism� system is perceived by most citizens as inherently unfair.�

Is the game rigged?

Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren, daughter of a working-class family and one of the few national politicians to highlight these issues, has brought that message to Washington, where it has not been welcomed by those politicians, lobbyists and donors on both sides of the aisle whom disparity favors. The U.S. Senate�s refusal to even consider Warren as head of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which she essentially created before running for office, amply demonstrates that, supporters say.

Critics dismiss her as a rabble-rousing populist or socialist. But criticism has not dissuaded her.

�Today, the game is rigged � rigged to those who have money and power,� Warren writes in her recently published book, the best-selling �A Fighting Chance.� �Big corporations hire armies of lobbyists to get billion-dollar loopholes into the tax system and persuade their friends in Congress to support laws that keep the playing field tilted in their favor.

�Meanwhile, hardworking families are told they�ll just have to live with smaller dreams for their children � The optimism that defines us as a people has been beaten and bruised.�

Who votes?

According to the U.S. Census Bureau, 80.2 percent of adult American citizens with family incomes of at least $150,000 cast ballots in the 2012 presidential election � but fewer than two-thirds of adult citizens, 63.0 percent, with family incomes from $40,000 to $49,999 voted that year. Just 45.8 percent of adult citizens with family income of $10,000 to $14,999 cast ballots.

�When people feel that sense of disconnection,� says Bryant�s Holtzman, �they don�t participate.�

Which contributes to what he describes as �almost like a spiraling cycle.�

�It�s a two-way street here,� Holtzman says. �When folks are not participating � when they�re not voting and their voices are not being heard � there�s absolutely no incentive for our elected officials to speak for them in the policy-making process.�

Nationally, voter turnout in 2012 of just 58.2 percent of registered voters was the lowest since the 2000 presidential year, despite what the Washington-based Bipartisan Policy Center described as �a cliff-hanger presidential election [with] major issues at stake ��

Overall turnout in 2012 in Rhode Island was 58.6 percent, 35th in the nation, down from 61.8 percent in 2008. Many factors, of course, can inhibit civic participation, but disillusionment discourages many.

�The view of the public about our public officials in Rhode Island is pretty negative, to say the least,� says Holtzman. �Part of that, I would have to imagine, is connected to why we have a very low voter turnout in this state.�

Political extremism

The potential danger extends beyond apathy to political �extremism,� says Luigi Bradizza, professor of American studies and political science at Salve Regina University and a faculty fellow of the Pell Center for International Relations and Public Policy.

Bradizza points to last month�s European Parliament elections, in which the far-right National Front won a leading quarter of the French vote. Bradizza attributes the National Front�s strong showing to the anger and frustration of working-class people whose income has stagnated, declined or been lost to unemployment.

�Year after year, they don�t see themselves getting ahead, going anywhere,� he says.

Inevitably, he says, they look for blame.

�When people feel themselves to be at the losing end of the socioeconomic continuum, they�re going to have one of two reactions quite typically. One is, �What can I do to improve my situation?� And the second reaction � a very unhealthy reaction � is �Who did this to me?�� That typifies supporters of the National Front, who blame �elites� and immigrants for their difficulties, Bradizza says.

Looking at America�s past, Bradizza draws a parallel with the Jim Crow era, when many poor Southern whites blamed blacks for their economic difficulties. And while he sees no such severely reactionary movements of great prominence today, �you do have elements in American society that think this way,� blaming non-natives and others for their woes, he says.

If lower-income people believe they can�t advance economically, they are �going to be open to demagogic appeals of the sort that have activated the National Front voters,� Bradizza says.

The Atlas Society�s Hudgins sees �a very deep polarization and a politicization of more and more aspects of society and culture� in America today.

�The middle class thus finds that they are not advancing, and the prospects for their children look grim,� he says. �Neither Democrats nor Republicans have been able to effectively articulate an easily understandable explanation of the current situation, much less long-term solutions.�

No easy solution

Rebuilding the working and middle classes defies easy solution, Salve�s Bradizza argues.

�No longer can you get a high school diploma, go off to work in a factory and support a family,� he says. �You need to use your head � but in order to use your head, you need to train it, which means you�ve got to go to college.�

Making that universal will prove vexing, Bradizza says.

�How do you get people who weren�t paying attention in high school � maybe because they were in a bad high school, maybe because of their bad family circumstances or certain other limitations � how do you get these people a good education? This sort of a problem is deeply cultural. I don�t see a straightforward answer.�

And when money is scarce and basic survival requires an exhausting expenditure of time, democracy may take a back seat.

�You can�t attend a city council meeting if you�ve got to pull an extra shift that night so you can pay the rent,� says Christopher J. Galdieri, assistant professor of politics at Saint Anselm College in Manchester, N.H. �You can�t coach soccer if your only pair of sneakers is falling apart. But these sorts of day-to-day interactions and connections have traditionally been key to sustaining civic engagement and democracy.�

Says URI�s McIntyre: �People have busy lives and it�s easy to check out, especially when there is so much cynicism.�

And, he says, �sometimes there�s an exaggerated notion of what state and local politicians can do in terms of people�s economic livelihood. That�s driven so powerfully by global and national forces.� A politician McIntyre knew once likened being governor of Rhode Island to �captain of a boat going down the Colorado River. On the boat, you�re very powerful, but the fact is you have almost no control over where the boat will go.�

Nonetheless, McIntyre maintains, ordinary citizens have not lost the potential power the Founding Fathers decreed as their birthright.

�Vote, of course,� he says. �Join organizations. This is what the labor movement and some of the church groups and the civil-rights movement were good for: it got people out of their houses, they went somewhere, they engaged, they met like-minded people. When you do that, things are not so hopeless.�

More: providencejournal.com/middleclasssqueeze