A Brutal Reminder
Chapter 38 of “Revenge of America’s Unemployed” and originally published in 2017
Found below is the final chapter of “Revenge of America’s Unemployed.” I am posting it today (9/8/2020) so we can better understand how we got to this point, politically, and how we might avoid the self-defeating notion that the more than 30 million Americans who are now unemployed, underemployed, and uncounted cannot be ignored for next fifty days, five months, or even five years.
For you can be certain that Donald Trump, as he did in 2016, will pick at the scar tissue covering those jobless households until it bleeds. And if we, as Democrats, cannot speak directly to their plight and their delayed, if not deferred, dreams of a better, richer life, then the advantages Joe Biden now enjoys in battleground states will evaporate.
Frankly, it is a long read — 2,000 words — but please pass it along to friends and colleagues running Democratic presidential, Senate, congressional and gubernatorial campaigns. They are the ones who have to craft the messaging to move those 30 million Americans decisively in our direction. And they need to read A Brutal Reminder from almost four years ago:
Thirty-one million Americans shared the experience of being laid off, working part-time because they had to or remaining uncounted owing to statistical decisions by their government. That number was never static. Men and women moved between the various categories as the Great Recession unfolded. Some found work, often at much lower pay rates or salaries. Others prematurely retired or left the workforce entirely.
Over the last decade, those 31 million Americans were seared by the loss of self-identity that comes with not having a job. Some were out of work for months, others for years and years. To varying degrees, they cut back on expenses, tapped their savings, borrowed from friends and family. Some eventually lost their homes, their marriages, their self-confidence. For the first time in history, the death rate of white Americans, particularly those in working class communities, soared. Alcohol, drugs, depression, and suicide were the grim reapers let loose by the Great Recession.
When they turned to their government for help, fewer than half of them qualified for unemployment insurance (UI). Others did qualify and, depending on which state they lived in and its rate of unemployment, they received $230 to $350 per week. The 99ers spent months trying to extend those UI benefits to a Tier 5 only to see a GOP-controlled Congress use unemployment as a bargaining chip for their wealthy contributors’ tax cuts.
As the years wore on and the promised recovery sputtered along slowly but never really took off nor touched them, those 31 million Americans became more discouraged, more depressed and more cynical. The brief unemployed stories found at the beginning of each chapter [of Revenge] were replicated in houses and apartments all across the land. The growing levels of tension, frustration and anger in those jobless households altered family dynamics—the older generation offered what help they could, the younger generation feared the outbursts but no one was left untouched by the experience.
Much like the assassinations of President John F. Kennedy, Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., and Senator Robert F. Kennedy, everyone in those jobless households knew where they were the day when one of the family’s breadwinners was laid off, downsized or right-sized. But the impact of that shared experience was dulled because the emotional pain—that sense of failure or that it was somehow “my fault”—was internalized and seldom verbalized to the outside world.
That sense of isolation that the Union of Unemployed [or UCubed] tried to break grew with every minute spent surfing the Internet looking for work. It grew with every resume sent out and every screamingly silent rejection. It grew with every passing day until it became overpowering, until it colored every decision these men and women faced, until it became their entire lives and they withdrew from the personal connections they had enjoyed in better times.
The unemployed, underemployed and uncounted, eventually but never all at once, became the “necessitous men” that Franklin Delano Roosevelt spoke about in 1944. His State of the Union speech reminded Americans in his day (and ours) that,
“We cannot be content, no matter how high that general standard of living may be, if some fraction of our people—whether it be one-third or one-fifth or one-tenth—is ill-fed, ill-clothed, ill-housed, and insecure.
“This Republic had its beginning, and grew to its present strength, under the protection of certain inalienable political rights—among them the right of free speech, free press, free worship, trial by jury, freedom from unreasonable searches and seizures. They were our rights to life and liberty.
“As our nation has grown in size and stature, however—as our industrial economy expanded—these political rights proved inadequate to assure us equality in the pursuit of happiness.
“We have come to a clear realization of the fact that true individual freedom cannot exist without economic security and independence.
“‘Necessitous men are not free men’. People who are hungry and out of a job are the stuff of which dictatorships are made.”
In our day these economic truths have become accepted as self-evident. We have accepted, so to speak, a second Bill of Rights under which a new basis of security and prosperity can be established for all—regardless of station, race, or creed.
FDR then reminded Americans that “among these are the following rights:
“The right to a useful and remunerative job in the industries or shops or farms or mines of the nation;
“The right to earn enough to provide adequate food and clothing and recreation;
“The right of every farmer to raise and sell his products at a return which will give him and his family a decent living;
“The right of every businessman, large and small, to trade in an atmosphere of freedom from unfair competition and domination by monopolies at home or abroad;
“The right of every family to a decent home;
“The right to adequate medical care and the opportunity to achieve and enjoy good health;
“The right to adequate protection from the economic fears of old age, sickness, accident, and unemployment;
“The right to a good education.
“All of these rights spell security. And after this war is won we must be prepared to move forward, in the implementation of these rights, to new goals of human happiness and well-being.
“America's own rightful place in the world depends in large part upon how fully these and similar rights have been carried into practice for all our citizens. For unless there is security here at home there cannot be lasting peace in the world.”
FDR knew that his Second Bill of Rights would not be adopted in his lifetime. Nor have any of his amendments to the US Constitution been officially proposed and placed before state legislatures for ratification or state ratifying conventions in the seven decades since his speech.
Those were FDR’s ideals and ideas that had welded the generations of Americans who experienced the Great Depression to the Democratic Party. One shudders to think of the dressing down any political strategist would have received from Roosevelt for suggesting that his base be ignored in favor of a “rising American electorate.”
These were the same New Deal principles that jobless households of the last decade needed to have reaffirmed. Precisely nuanced words did not matter to them, but the willingness of a president or even their party’s presidential nominee to stand with them could have generated the smallest glimmer of hope.
The presidential elections of 2008, 2012 and 2016 played out against a background of widespread economic turmoil. So, too, did the midterm elections of 2010 and 2014. And voters from jobless households made up at least one-third to two-fifths of the turnout depending on the year and the state. Unemployment might not have been the issue that campaign consultants focused on but it was the issue that drove millions of Americans to the polls.
When their hopes were dashed, those now necessitous men and women sought revenge. It was an all-too natural reaction when your family has been harmed. It was not something you shared with pollsters or exit poll interviewers. It was, however, something that you brooded about and contemplated in isolation. Or, as Charles Dickens put it in A Tale of Two Cities, “Vengeance and retribution require a long time; it is the rule.”
Dickens’ rule complimented another immutable rule of politics. Loyalty is a two-way street. When both those rules are ignored, disaster strikes, as it did in 2010, 2014 and again in 2016.
Democratic candidates, instead of following FDR’s lead, had turned their backs on those voters who, after the waves of WARN notices started arriving in 2007 and Lehman Brothers collapsed in 2008, produced the surge that made Barack Obama president, increased Democratic majorities in the House and Senate and drove up the number of Democratic governors, state senators and state reps. Those surge voters were middle class and working class Democrats—whites, blacks, Latinos, Asians and Millennials. And each demographic found themselves hammered by the Great Recession.
They hailed his American Recovery and [the subsequent] Reinvestment Act but were dismayed by the lack of a second stimulus. When all the focus shifted to the Affordable Care Act, many, far too many, began having second thoughts about the party of Franklin Delano Roosevelt. It required a heavy lift—and a huge miscue by Mitt Romney—to shift jobless households back to President Obama in 2012.
By 2016, the unemployed, underemployed and uncounted became the new “invisibles.” They were not part of the “rising America electorate” that so captivated the strategists of Hillary Clinton’s campaign. Nor were they worth considering for admission in the “coalition of the ascendant” for they were obviously on a downward trajectory. Even the exit polls ignored them; work status including being unemployed vanished from the questionnaire in 2016.
Donald Trump, however, scratched at the scab tissue that nearly a decade of joblessness had left on those 31 million Americans. With every tweet and rally, he picked at that wound until it bled. His opponents, Democratic and Republican alike, forgot FDR’s warning that “people who are hungry and out of a job are the stuff of which dictatorships are made.” They forgot that hunger and joblessness is what motivates men and women to take revenge on their tormentors.
So now, the dish best served cold is empty. The revenge of America’s unemployed helped elect a raging narcissist, an economic royalist of the first order, and an incipient monarchy of one to the presidency.
Only time will tell if his incomprehensible and indefensible policies will trigger a second recession, an even graver recession that buries the last vestiges of our democracy.
According to George Orwell, the author of 1984 and somewhat of an expert on authoritarian regimes, the revenge impulse recedes quickly. “The whole idea of revenge and punishment is a childish day-dream. Properly speaking, there is no such thing as revenge. Revenge is an act which you want to commit when you are powerless and because you are powerless; as soon as the sense of impotence is removed, the desire evaporates also.”
Let us hold on to that thought even as we resist the Trump tantrums at every turn. Let us rely on the nemesis of authoritarian regimes, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, to guide us in a different direction. His State of the Union speech offers us reassurance and a compelling strategy going forward.
For it is within our power to turn those necessitous men and women into small-d democrats again, address their sense of economic insecurity, and guarantee them that “prosperity can be established for all—regardless of station, race, or creed.”
Then and only then, will they look to us for a champion.