Why Americans are angry

Last week, AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka went to Harvard to deliver a speech on why working people are angry. It's worth a read:

For a generation, our intellectual culture has suggested that in the new global age, work is something someone else does. Someone we never met far away in an export processing zone will make our clothes, immigrants with no rights in our political process or workplaces will cook our food and clean our clothes. And for the lucky top 10 percent of our society, that has been the reality of globalization — everything got cheaper and easier. But for the rest of the country, economic reality has been something entirely different. It has meant trying to hold on to a good job in a grim game of musical chairs where every time the music stopped, there were fewer good jobs and more people trying to get and keep one. Over the past decade, we lost more than 5 million manufacturing jobs — a million of them professional and design jobs. We lost 20 percent of our aerospace manufacturing jobs. We're losing high-tech jobs — the jobs we were supposed to keep. [...] The fact is that for a generation we have built our economy on a lie — that we can have a low-wage, high-consumption society and paper over the contradiction with cheap credit funded by our foreign trading partners and financial sector profits made by taking a cut of the flow of cheap credit.

To think about this slightly differently, consider the way elites have treated the decline of journalism jobs and the decline of manufacturing jobs. Both sectors are fundamentally suffering from the same thing: A technological revolution that has made the large, well-paid workforces of yesteryear into a competitive disadvantage in the modern economy. But where the decline of manufacturing was greeted with sanguine talk about "retraining," the decline of journalism has been greeted with something akin to grief.

People notice that. Now, this isn't to accuse anyone of heartlessness. But "creative destruction" isn't easy to explain, and it's not very comforting to the destroyed. The problem, however, is that it's a very comforting concept to the people watching the destruction. It's a license not to worry about the death of aging industries. And the massive bubbles of the past decade or two made it easier to ignore the country's economic problems, because the massive expansion of credit made people who weren't getting ahead feel more like they were, which blunted the sort of polling evidence and popular anger that could have gotten more elites worried about all this.

Meanwhile, when creative destruction came at a white-collar industry like journalism, people in the field justified their terror because journalism plays a more important function than simply giving people jobs. But a lot of that terror has been about jobs, and understandably so. And when it comes at other "knowledge" industries, you hear a lot of concern about America losing its edge in, say, green energy, or microchips. So that also gets a special exemption from being written off as "creative destruction." You don't want America to lose the future, do you?

Elites are much better at being afraid of job losses in their world, but that hasn't contributed to a broader sympathy or -- dare I say it? -- sense of solidarity. Meanwhile, the game in Washington proved itself rigged in favor of powerful interests when Wall Street cracked and the banks got bailed out. So the economy can batter the working class and it's all part of the natural order of things, but the rich seem to get saved when things don't go their way. Why shouldn't people be angry?

