Category: Democracy

U.S. Imperial Expansion and the Degradation of U.S. Middle Class Life

The opportunities, conveniences, amenities, and privileges that underpin middle class life in the U.S. and many other affluent nations peaked in the late 20th century.  They are now being degraded not only in the U.S. but in many parts of the affluent world.  These features of middle class life are not simply features of individuals and households per se; they are deeply embedded in the extensive fabric of institutions and agencies that make up an affluent nation like the United States.  The vast array of public and private institutions and agencies create and sustain the opportunities, conveniences, amenities, and privileges that define U.S. middle class life and organize access to them. 

The dependence of middle class life on a vast array of public and private institutions and agencies gives the people who run them and the people who control their funding (foundations set up by the rich, corporate leaders, and government officials) the power to instill them with policies and actions that can support or degrade middle class life.  This power is now being used to disrupt and degrade middle class life by rendering key institutions and agencies dysfunctional.  Steps in this direction have been underway for several decades, with both Democratic and Republican administrations backing away from commitments that go back to the 1950s and earlier.  Now, U.S. middle class life is being degraded more quickly and more openly than ever before.  

The U.S. ruling class and Trump administration have set about radically defunding the institutional and agency supports for middle class life in the U.S.  Corporate taxes that are essential to sustaining middle class institutions are slashed to the bone.  Government agencies are empowered to surveil anyone on the slightest pretext.  The institutions of democratic elections are being actively undermined.  Wage growth is held below the inflation rate to subsidize corporations and government agencies.  Employment protections are being gutted.  Regulatory agencies are hemorrhaging personnel and regulations that protect middle class life are eliminated, weakened, or not enforced.  Other institutions and agencies that pay middle class wages and benefits are being radically downsized. Speculative enterprises (e.g. cryptocurrency businesses) are promoted by the federal government to expand opportunities for the rich to transfer wealth from the middle class through what is essentially rigged gambling.

Underpinning this accelerating degradation of U.S. middle class life are ruling class decisions to  increase the capital available to U.S. corporations and defend and expand the U.S. global empire using much more economic coercion and military force.  This strategy is a response to an extensively changed global environment that puts the U.S. empire in jeopardy.   U.S. corporations are up against intense economic assertiveness from India, China, Europe, and other nations.  The U.S. state is up against geopolitical and military resistance from some of the most powerful nations in the world.  This combination deeply threatens U.S. dominance over the world-economy.

By the end of the 20th century confronting these forces of resistance was becoming increasingly costly.  The September 11, 2001 attacks on U.S. soil were deemed an existential threat to the U.S. empire, becoming the impetus for the U.S. ruling class to set about a massive expansion of military spending and spending on both global and domestic surveillance and on a campaign of wars.  All of this has been more costly than a U.S. federal government deeply in debt and committed to giving corporations greater control over flows and uses of wealth (by cutting taxes and regulations) can manage.  A radical transfer of wealth to the ruling class and its political allies became necessary.  Given that the pool of wealth held by the working poor and destitute in the U.S. is extremely limited, perhaps even negative, most of the transfer of wealth would have to come from the U.S. middle class and from other nations.  Defunding many of the public and private institutional supports for middle class life combined with changes in tax law changes that give with one hand and take with the other became a key part of the sleight of hand strategy for carrying out the domestic transfer of wealth.  Economic coercion and wars are the strategy for transferring wealth to the U.S. from other nations. 

The breaking point in this grand strategy for further enriching the wealthy and funding the U.S. imperialist expansion will come in time.  But it will not come before much more damage is done to middle class Americans and middle class people around the world.  U.S. imperialist expansion will almost certainly foment more resistance from abroad and result in more and more violent attacks on the American people wherever they are.  Military, policing, and surveillance spending in the U.S. will keep increasing (perhaps exponentially), accelerating the transfer of wealth from the middle class and driving up the costs for middle class families to protect their homes and for businesses to protect their employees and customers.  Personal and family privacy will further erode.  Middle class wages, benefits, and job security will further erode.  Until domestic and international resistance grows strong enough to break the momentum of this phase of domestic wealth theft and militarizing U.S. expansionism, the U.S. middle class is in for a rough ride.

Fading Middle Class Jobs and Decline of Representative Democracy

The institutions of representative democracy and middle class jobs are deeply entwined, so much so that the diminishing of one is accompanied by the diminishing of the other.  This entwinement is rooted in the rise of middle class populations in Europe and North American over the course of the Industrial Revolution (roughly 1700s through 1900s).  The rising affluence of those middle class populations shifted the balances of power between and among ruling class populations and middle class populations and gave rise to the formation of new nation-based political coalitions. 

When the Industrial Revolution kicked off in England in the early 1700s (with the invention of a usable steam engine), achieving affluence became available to a growing proportion of England’s population.  Expanding populations of owners of capital, agricultural lands and new industries and expanding populations of agricultural, manufacturing, industrial, service, and government workers created new flows of income and new and expanding stocks of modern wealth.  Demands for and conflicts over the expanding flows of income and wealth spread and intensified.  Representative democracy was an institutional compromise among the ruling classes and the emerging classes of middle affluence worker/consumer populations.  The royalty gave up a bit of their claimed total control of wealth and the rising middle class populations obtained institutional mechanisms for redressing grievances and making demands.

As the wealth producing technologies and cultural practices of the Industrial Revolution spread to the Americas and then other parts of the world, the world’s middle class populations formed, diversified, and grew in more and more nations, eventually to include populations of high wage industry, government, and science workers.  Popular demands for participation in the high level decisions about producing and distributing wealth came with those trends.  Middle class populations that formed in the world’s colonies not only agitated and fought for representative democracy institutions they also agitated and fought for national independence.  By the middle of the 20th century, demands for representative democracy were global and almost every government on the planet claimed to be a representative democracy, even though many of those claimed democracies were clearly shams and worse.  Despite the growth of popular demands for participation in government decision making, well functioning representative democracies never became the dominant forms of government for the world’s people. 

The Accumulating Costs of Representative Democracy

As middle class populations gained representational footholds in national governments, the costs for maintaining well functioning representative democracy institutions increased and increasingly fell on ruling class populations.  The expenses tied to assembling representatives and paying their salaries and expenses are not a problem for ruling class populations.  Those costs are easily passed along to the middle and poverty class populations in a nation.  Rather, the major expenses for ruling class populations are the income and wealth redistributions required to maintain the contentment of the very large populations of middle and poverty class populations represented in the institutions of government while still holding onto sufficient control over wealth production and distribution institutions (including government institutions) to ensure that their shares of income and wealth meet their growing expectations for income, accumulated wealth, domestic and geopolitical power, and status enhancement.  Satisfying these two competing worlds of expectations is enormously costly, so only the more affluent nation-based ruling class populations have been willing to tolerate a functioning representative democracy for very long.[1]

The Decline of Representative Democracies in the 21st Century

It is widely observed that the institutions of representative democracy are in trouble, not only in the weaker nations where they have always been fragile, but now in the affluent nations of Western Europe and North America.  Given the association of the growth of middle class populations (and the increasing affluence of those populations) with the spread of representative democracies since the 1700s, this should not be surprising.  The world’s middle class populations are no longer growing and most of the existing middle class populations are no longer obtaining real improvements in their standards of living.  A growing number of those populations are experiencing net losses of income and wealth.[2]  The response of many in those populations is not unusual in the history of the modern world-economy: a turn against the time consuming practices of democracy and to the promises of a quick restoration of income and wealth growth made by proponents of authoritarian rule.  Needless to say, the spread of those promises is paid for by the ruling class populations that have only tolerated the institutions of democracy and now see that if they actively and successfully subvert popular belief in democracy, they won’t have to.  

Just as the Great Depression intensified conflict over incomes and wealth that resulted in governmental upheavals (e.g., the New Deal in the U.S. and fascism in Germany, Italy, Spain and elsewhere in Europe), the expanding domain of necessary expenses relative to incomes and wealth for the world’s middle class populations has intensified conflict and governmental upheavals in our own time.  However, unlike the income and wealth recoveries of middle class populations after the Great Depression and WWII and the return to a long phase of growth of middle class populations in the world, no such recoveries will happen this time. 

The Earth’s Inescapable Growth Limits and the Impoverishment of Middle Class Jobs

The period in the history of the modern world-economy we are now entering will not be like the long period of recovery and renewal from the 1950s into the 1990s.  A fundamental characteristic of middle class jobs – the growth of income and wealth faster that the rising costs of living and working and the routine deterioration of tangible wealth (homes, cars, workplaces, equipment, etc.) cannot continue for all middle class populations.  In fact, that characteristic of middle class jobs is already history for large numbers of the world’s middle class people.  The inescapable reason is that the earth-system conditions that allowed the Industrial Revolution to produce increases in incomes and wealth by exploiting earth-system processes and shunting away costs over such a long expanse of time and over so much of the earth no longer exist. 

The carrying capacity of the earth-system is finite and global economic activities are now up against some of its most formidable carrying capacity limits.  Before the last quarter of the 20th century, those limits were generally thought to be finite supplies of resources such as oil, arable land, and certain rare minerals.  We have managed to outmaneuver those kinds of limits by deploying technological fixes and can probably continue to do so for a while longer.  However, technological fixes have brought us more rapidly up against much more intractable earth-system limits: the earth-system’s slow rates of processing the vast waste flows from human economic activities (e.g., carbon, industrial chemicals, spent nuclear fuel).  Those limits are not as easily overcome through the deployment of technological fixes.  Over time, successes with such fixes will become increasingly difficult to achieve because they add to the waste flows earth-system processes already cannot handle.  Rather than decreasing the number and scale of human encounters with earth-system limits, deploying those kinds of fixes add to their exponential growth. 

The Fate of Representative Democracies

The repercussions from our encounters with the carrying capacity limits inherent in the earth-system are rapidly rising expenses relative to the incomes and wealth savings of middle class populations.  Extreme weather events, more frequent and more devastating forest fires, massive rainstorms that generate instant floods, species kill-offs due to diseases (e.g., bird flu devastation of commercial chicken populations in the U.S.), losses of arable lands, and forced adaptations to changing agriculture conditions are adding rising costs to the costs of living for everyone faster than incomes can keep up.  Inevitably, standards of living are declining for many of the world’s populations, including middle class populations.

As costs are rising, ruling class populations are forging ways to shift those costs away from themselves.  They are doing this, in part, by taking advantage of the growing insecurities of middle class populations to organized ruling class-middle class coalitions of support for authoritarian government policies.  In general, most middle class people find it very difficult to accept the reality that adapting to earth-system limits requires middle class life to have fewer modern forms of comfort and convenience and to include more physical work both on the job and at home.  Consequently, those who are finding themselves on the slippery slope downward are susceptible to the arguments for authoritarian policies that accelerate government decision making and exclude certain populations from voting, access to good jobs, and rights to government assistance programs.  As always, the leaders of ruling class populations divide and conquer by identifying populations to include and exclude using identity characteristics (race, gender, nationality, religion, residence status, dialect, etc.) and promising the included populations that they get the spoils of the ensuing political battles while the excluded take the brunt of the general decline in living standards.

All is not lost.  While middle class jobs and representative democracies are very unlikely to survive in their current forms, ruling class authoritarian governments can only protect some middle class populations from rising costs and dramatic job changes over the short term.  During that time, the excluded populations will grow and become better organized and more powerful.  The domestic and geopolitical upheavals we are now experiencing will continue and probably become more widespread and intense.  Many will be very violent (like the wars in Ukraine, Gaza and the Democratic Republic of Congo) or marginally violent (like the political skirmishes with injuries and some deaths we have seen recently in affluent nations).  Eventually, the excluded populations will become well enough positioned to counter the power of ruling populations and create new forms of democracy and new forms of work that are well aligned with earth-system limits.

[1] The world’s ruling class populations are organized into numerous industry factions and nation-based coalitions.  The more affluent of those nation-based coalitions are the ones that have tolerated representative democracy institutions most successfully.  Being the most economically successful, they have been more inclined to accept the high costs required for representative democracies to function well.  Less affluent nation-based ruling class coalitions strenuously and often violently resist representation concessions because such concessions threaten their smaller shares of global income and wealth.

[2] Restoration phrases like Build Back Better and Make America Great Again recently used in political campaigns in the U.S. are not just political slogans, they are acknowledgements that middle class conditions of life are not meeting expectations.