Last Monday, as I sat before the president of the United States in a live TV audience, a recent law school graduate posed a question to him. Speaking of his dashed hopes of finding employment, disappointment at having to move back home, failure to make student loan interest payments and doubts about affording a home and family, he described his generation’s rapidly dissipating faith in the administration. He then poignantly asked Barack Obama, “Is the American dream dead?”
Although the potentially turbulent future ahead is a relatively new realization for many young Americans, in truth, the American dream has long been in jeopardy. Monday’s question reveals not only the expectation among some that Obama can restore the American dream but also the disappointment that he hasn’t done so already.
Such desires are understandable but nonetheless ignorant of the long-standing trends that brought about the precipitous decline of the American middle class. To fully understand the America of 2010, it is necessary to revisit the America of 1980, when a weak economy and a hostage crisis in Iran helped Ronald Reagan win a landslide electoral victory. The support he garnered from previously Democratic blue-collar workers — dubbed “Reagan Democrats” — was significant. In bringing these voters to the Republicans’ side, Reagan realigned American politics and sounded the death knell for the New Deal coalition that had previously expanded the middle class through Social Security, the GI Bill, Medicare, Medicaid, the Civil Rights Act and the Pell Grant.
Despite Reagan’s popularity, the benefits of his supply-side economic policies failed to “trickle down” to the workers who have, over the years, come to favor his political party at the polls. In 1980, the richest 1 percent of Americans earned just 9 percent of the nation’s wealth. By 2007, that portion had risen to 23.5 percent. This dramatic consolidation of wealth was highlighted by Obama, who pointed out that in 2009, amid the Great Recession, each of America’s 25 highest paid hedge-fund managers took home an average of $1 billion. Our nation’s yawning wealth gap, spawned in part by the discredited ideology of the president’s fiercest critics on the right, has created a chasm into which the middle class continues to fall.
Obama hinted at the irony of an electorate that frequently votes against its own class interests when he told Monday’s audience that he personally stands to benefit from the renewal of the Bush-era tax cuts that he now seeks to abolish. His opposition to the cuts, part of the first Oval Office effort in nearly a decade to boost the diminished prospects for the American dream, is commendable. The current era of Democratic leadership on both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue has yielded real benefits for working Americans that include a higher minimum wage, the guarantee of health insurance, protection from predatory lenders and an overhaul of federal student financial aid.
Yet, to expect the administration to reverse a 30-year-old trend or to reject the president’s congressional allies on the grounds that Obama has failed to transform our country and its capital city during his 21 months in office is every bit as unfair as the very injustices that enrage voters. Flowing from both ends of the political spectrum (Jon Stewart told Bill O’Reilly days ago that he is “saddened” by Obama), such sentiment fails to grasp the magnitude or historical context of the challenges at hand.
The profound confusion over who is responsible for the fading of the American dream shouldn’t obfuscate the frustrations its elusiveness has generated among voters. Indeed, such frustrations are clearly justified. However, the anger directed at the president and members of his party is deeply misplaced. The decline of America’s middle class has been 30 years in the making; an informed perspective suggests a restoration may take just as long.
Rennie Silva is a graduate student in international security and economic policy. He can be reached at Rennie.Silva at gmail dot com.
