If the story of middle-class income has been grim, the story of middle-class wealth has been downright stunning. New York University economist Edward N. Wolff has offered some numbers that have received too little notice. By 2010, the blow of the Great Recession had been so hard that median wealth, in real terms, had fallen to below what it had been in 1969. By 2016, mean wealth had recovered to pre-recession 2007 levels, but that was because rich Americans had recovered. Median total wealth among Americans in 2016 was still 34% below what it had been in 2007. The average wealth of the poorest 40% of Americans was already low in 1983, at about $7,000 in today’s dollars, but by 2016, with spiraling debt, it had gone thousands below zero, to minus $8,900.

Most of us have seen big-ticket statistical shockers about wealth inequality today, so hearing that the net worth of Bill Gates, Warren Buffett, and Jeff Bezos exceeds that of the bottom half of Americans put together has become a refrain of sorts. Also, the rise of hyper-billionaires does not bother everyone in itself, since it can be a sign of overall national vitality, as was the case in the Gilded Age. But we’re far less prepared to accept a broad-based decline of fortunes. Most Americans are poorer than they used to be.

To put it gently, this has implications. Radicalism will be a potent strain of our politics for decades to come. If you’re fine with where the ship is going, overall, then the question of whether your captain steers a bit left or right doesn’t feel urgent. If you hate where it’s going, however, and taps of the wheel fail to change it, then you look for someone who promises to cut it hard.

Resentment toward an elite expresses itself in populism, the variety of which will be up for grabs. In his book The Populist Explosion, John B. Judis distinguishes between left wing populism and right wing populism, noting that the former pits the lower and the middle against an elite, while the latter pits the middle against an elite that is coddling a third group, such as immigrants. “Left wing populism is dyadic,” he writes. “Right wing populism is triadic.”

You could say, therefore, that left wing populism seems kinder. At the same time, it may be a tougher sell. Resentment of the poor isn’t something that politicians create among those in the working class but rather something that grows out of proximity and a sense of unfairness. As University of California law professor Joan C. Williams has pointed out in her book about the white working class, people struggling to make ends meet on a working income can get angry about benefits (such as childcare subsidies) that are denied to them but made available to people in a lower income bracket. Some of the bigotry on display at Trump rallies, which many on the left refuse to see as economic in origin, can be tied to this phenomenon, a belief that those who, in the words of Bill Clinton, “work hard and play by the rules” are the last to get help and those who take advantage of the system (welfare recipients, asylum seekers, etc.) are the first.

If there is any cause for hope, it’s that economic problems tend to have economic solutions, unlike problems of identity or faith, which are often all or nothing. Currently, a lot of trends prevent us from making deals on any divisive question. On the left, a lot of populist energy has been lost because of infighting over identity. The same is true on the right, as Trump makes up for his ineffectuality by stoking cultural grievances as much as possible. But Americans are better than their ruling class, an assertion that sounds like reverse snobbery but, with the evidence at hand, is something more like the truth, and our financial divides have left us less miserable than you might think on other measures. A 2019 survey from the right-leaning American Enterprise Institute found that about three quarters of Americans are still happy with life in their communities, which suggests that we have an incentive to make things work and not just break them.

With a sunny radical who played to our better angels, perhaps we could escape the jam we’re in. That’s one reason why lesser-known figures like Pete Buttigieg and Andrew Yang have had made waves and why Bernie Sanders remains potent. Until the right person comes along, though, we’ll have to keep ourselves together. The times may require a healthy respect for the necessity of a sharp turn, but they require an even healthier respect for the necessity of keeping the peace when deciding how to make it.

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