SOCIAL DECLINE, DONALD TRUMP, AND THE SNAKE

HANDLER’S BRAIN
by Daniel Lesnick 01/24/2021 (revised 06/07/2022)

THE ISSUE

It seems odd that sensible people could ever be ardent supporters of Donald Trump. Indeed,
over the last five years, many Americans, as well as much of the rest of the world, have been
asking telling questions about the 45th President of the United States of America.
• How could Donald Trump have received 62 million votes in the 2016 U.S. presidential election
and 74 million in 2020?
• And how is it possible that even as recently as June 2022, 35%-40% of Americans still believe
that the 2020 presidential election was stolen from Trump – despite no evidence of widespread
voter fraud?

One needn’t be a genius to see that he’s been a narcissist, a racist, and a grifter his entire life.
And we’ve all seen or read about Trump’s lying. According to the Washington Post Fact
Checker, as of January 20, 2021 (the day the presidential office transitioned from Trump to Joe
Biden), Trump had made 30,573 false or misleading claims (i.e., lies) since he had taken office
on January 20, 2017.1 And when his supporters defend his lies, they routinely explain them
away by saying he’s been quoted out of context.2

I suggest that the adoption of non-rational reasoning by an overwhelming number of Trump

voters comes as a kind of last resort, a back-against-the-wall way of dealing with feelings of
powerlessness in the face of vast social and economic corrosion. It is an overwhelmingly
pessimistic3 outlook born of four major factors:
• Persistent economic stagnation and social decline of the middle and lower classes for the last
half century.
• A deeply embedded sense of one’s inability to change that decline.
• Feelings of social isolation.
• A tacit belief, based on experience, that rationality does not solve such enormous problems in
general.

1
“Trump Made 30,573 False or Misleading Claims as President”, https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/how-
fact-checker-tracked-trump-claims/2021/01/23/ad04b69a-5c1d-11eb-a976-bad6431e03e2_story.html?
utm_campaign=wp_post_most&utm_medium=email&utm_source=newsletter&wpisrc=nl_most&carta-url=https
%3A%2F%2Fs2.washingtonpost.com%2Fcar-ln-tr%2F2edd9cf
%2F600da33e9d2fda0efbbef8d4%2F5c7d081c9bbc0f61498c9017%2F9%2F66%2F600da33e9d2fda0efbbef8d4
2
See, most famously, “White House accuses media of taking Trump ‘out of context’ on disinfectant comments”,
https://www.foxnews.com/politics/White-house-accuses-media-of-taking-trump-out-of-context-on-disinfectant-
comments/.
Also, “Trump's Charlottesville comments twisted by Joe Biden and the media”,
https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2019/04/26/joe-biden-donald-trump-charlotttesville-fine-people-neo-nazis-
column/3588970002/.
3
pessimism: an inclination to emphasize adverse aspects, conditions, and possibilities or to expect the worst possible
outcome (Merriam-Webster Dictionary)
In the face of increasingly adverse conditions, people tend to look to assistance from sources
not dependent on logic or even material reality. Democracy loses its relevance and even its
meaning. When human society has failed, people invest more of themselves in solutions
beyond the humanly rational.

Such situations and their non-rational responses have occurred throughout history. Perhaps
one of the most striking and most familiar in the modern western world is the coming to power
of Adolf Hitler. Germans came to embrace Hitler as a consequence of two decades of
unrelenting impoverishment and social deterioration. 4 Just as Hitler’s coming to power did not
happen overnight nor because of the power of his personality, so too Donald Trump gained
tens of millions of supporters because of long-term negative change in economic and social
conditions in the U.S.

But before the economic and social decline that led to Trump’s ascendency, the middle and
lower classes in the U.S. went through three decades of increased prosperity, well-being, and
optimism.

BEFORE “THE FALL” – THE HEYDAY OF THE MIDDLE CLASS

(early 1940s-early 1970s)

Initially fueled by military and industrial manpower demands of World War II (1941-1945), the
U.S. emerged from the Great Depression of 1929-1941 into an extended era of general
prosperity. From 1942 into the early 1970s, unemployment figures reached all-time lows, real
wages grew, the size of the middle class increased, and the size of the lower class declined. 5
This period was characterized by heavy federal spending, full employment, and widening
educational and vocational opportunities. All of this contributed mightily to widespread
prosperity and a general sense of well-being and optimism. 6

4
A brief listing of some major events setting groundwork for Hitler coming to power:
 1914-1918 – Germany’s physical destruction and defeat in World War I
 1919 – Treaty of Versailles: economy-crippling reparations imposed on Germany by Great Britain, France, the
U.S., and Italy in the Treaty of Versailles. Effects lasted throughout the 1920s
 1919-1923 – Hyperinflation to pay reparations, but causing prices within Germany to skyrocket out of control.
 1920s – “Social spending” to battle the increasing unemployment rate. Created transportation projects,
modernization of power plants and gas works. Ended up bankrupting the government.
 early 1930s – The Great Depression travels to Germany.
 1933 – Hitler becomes Chancellor of Germany. Introduces censorship. Abolishes civil liberties.
 1934 – Hitler merges the posts of chancellor and president, becoming the supreme leader of Germany.
5
The unemployment rate during the years of the Great Depression ranged from 8.7% to 24.9%. In 1942 it went
down to 4.7%; by 1944 it was down to 1.2%; and in the 1950s and 1960s it stayed in the 3%-5% range.
https://www.thebalance.com/unemployment-rate-by-year-3305506
During the depression years the middle class accounted for only 15%-20% of the population.
https://academic.mu.edu/meissnerd/depression.htm
By the end of the 1950s, about two-thirds of Americans were comfortably middle class. Prosperity gave people the
space to improve education, civil rights, and medical care.
https://ebrary.net/11453/history/prosperous_1950s/.
6
optimism: an inclination to put the most favorable construction upon actions and events or to anticipate the best
possible outcome (Merriam-Webster Dictionary)

2
• In January 1942 – a month after the attack on Pearl Harbor, Hawaii – President Franklin D.
Roosevelt ordered the establishment of the War Production Board. Its purpose was to convert
the factories of peacetime industries into manufacturing plants for weapons and military
equipment. Besides turning industries around to wartime production, U.S. industries also
supplied much of the military equipment needed by the Allies, including the United Kingdom
and the Soviet Union. Repurposed and expanded industrial production in the U.S. provided
plentiful jobs with good, steady incomes. After the war, these factories easily turned from
producing tanks, for example, to automobile production, and remained productive. 7

• While U.S. factories remained intact, refurbished, and productive, the industrial
infrastructures of Asian and European nations (enemies and allies alike) involved in WWII had
been destroyed, leaving the U.S. without serious market competition.

• In 1944 Congress passed the GI Bill of Rights. In addition to providing education funds for
soldiers returning from the World War, it established hospitals, low cost mortgages, low
interest loans to start business, and one year of unemployment compensation for the
veterans.8

• Because U.S. production and employment remained robust and there was assistance for
returning servicemen, factory workers and veterans with little or no education could now afford
to buy their own homes – thus, massively stimulating housing construction.

Thirteen million new homes were built in the 1950s, and 85% were in the suburbs. By the early
1960s, new suburbs surrounded every city. The suburbs grew rapidly, and cars became a
necessity.

Prosperous times for the middle class afforded easy credit and facilitated a huge increase in car
purchases. The number of cars on the road leaped from 40 million in 1950 to 60 million in 1960.
The Federal Highway Act of 1956 created the Interstate Highway System, a 42,500-mile
network of limited-access highways. This system spurred further suburban growth.

Middle-class families could afford not only homes and cars but also greater educational
opportunities. Between 1940 and 1960, the percentage of college-age Americans who attended
college almost doubled. Again, the federal government played a role. In 1958 Congress passed
the National Defense Education Act, which provided loans to college students and funds for
teacher training and instructional materials.9

7
“During WWII, Industries Transitioned from Peacetime to Wartime Production,” David Vergun, in DOD News,
March 27, 2020. https://www.defense.gov/Explore/Features/Story/Article/2128446/during-wwii-industries-
transitioned-from-peacetime-to-wartime-production/
8
G.I. Bill of Rights, National Archives Foundation. https://www.archivesfoundation.org/documents/g-i-bill-rights/
9
Signed into law by President Dwight D. Eisenhower on September 2, 1958.

3
We Dared to Dream

The Allies’ victory in 1945 and incredible post-WWII social and economic growth nourished a
profound and growing optimism in the U.S. through the 1950s, ‘60s, and early ‘70s.

• We dared to dream... as President John F. Kennedy did when on May 25, 1961, he announced
before a special joint session of congress the ambitious goal of sending an American safely to
the Moon before the end of the decade. And, in fact, just eight years later, on July 20, 1969,
American astronauts Neil Armstrong and "Buzz" Aldrin became the first humans ever to set foot
on the moon.

Blacks were optimistic enough to dream as well. The changes described above benefitted not
only the White population, but Blacks as well. Although the plague of racism remained, and
Black gains did not bring them to the same economic levels as Whites in the same jobs,
nonetheless there were substantial improvements.

Although Blacks who migrated north for industrial jobs were underpaid compared to Whites,
they were nonetheless earning almost twice as much as Blacks remaining in the South.
Additionally, Black life expectancy at birth went up quite dramatically by 16 years from 1930 to
1970, from 48.1 years to 64.1 years. (This improvement exceeded that among Whites during
the same period, 10.3 years – from 61.4 years to 71.7 years.) 10

Anyone who lived in the midst of, and personally experienced, these improvements had reason
to be optimistic. That optimism was foundational in the civil rights movement of the 1950s and
1960s.11

• We dared to dream... in 1961, when Black civil rights Freedom Rides resulted in vicious
beatings and death for many participants but also prompted the Interstate Commerce
Commission ruling that ended the practice of segregation on buses and in bus stations.
Not long after that, the civil rights campaign in the spring of 1963 challenged Birmingham,
Alabama’s segregationist policies and produced the searing images of demonstrators being
beaten, attacked by dogs, and blasted with high-powered water hoses.

10
“Beginning in the 1940s... southern blacks in search of jobs boarded trains and buses in a Great Migration that
lasted through the mid-1960s. They found what they were looking for: wages so strikingly high – compared to what
they'd been used to – that in 1953 the average income for a black family in the North was almost twice that of those
who remained in the South. And through much of the 1950s wages rose steadily and unemployment was low....
From 1940 to 1970, black men cut the income gap by about a third, and by 1970 they were earning (on average)
roughly 60% of what white men took in. The advancement of black women was even more impressive. Black life
expectancy went up dramatically, as did black homeownership rates. Black college enrollment also rose – by 1970,
to about 10% of the total, three times the prewar figure.”
https://www.brookings.edu/articles/black-progress-how-far-weve-come-and-how-far-we-have-to-go/.
https://qz.com/1368251/black-income-is-half-that-of-white-households-just-like-it-was-in-the-1950s/
https://www.infoplease.com/us/population/life-expectancy-birth-race-and-sex-1930-2010/. And
https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/hus/2017/015.pdf/.
11
For a compact but inclusive overview of the major events of the Black Civil Rights Movement in the U.S.,
https://www.history.com/topics/black-history/civil-rights-movement/.

4
Then, just a few months later, in August 1963, the March on Washington produced an
estimated 250,000 people to participate in what was then the largest gathering for an event in
the history of the nation’s capital. And this was when the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. gave his “I
Have a Dream...” speech. He offered up hope that,
my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the
color of their skin but by the content of their character... and when we allow freedom to
ring, when we let it ring from every village and every hamlet, from every state and every
city, we will be able to speed up that day when all of God’s children, Black men and
White men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, will be able to join hands and
sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual: ‘Free at last! Free at last! Thank God
Almighty, we are free at last!'12
(Tragically, King’s dream still has not been realized. Travel to the moon turned out to be an
easier accomplishment.)

Personal Experience

My generation grew up in the atmosphere of optimism to which I’ve been referring. I was born
in 1946 and was therefore, both directly and indirectly, a beneficiary of the U.S. social and
economic growth sketched above. While my family could not afford to buy a house and always
had to rent when I was growing up, my mother (the sole source of family income) would move
us every few years into better and better public-school neighborhoods/suburbs. In fact, during
my last 3 years of pre-college education, I was able to attend one of the top ten public high
schools in the U.S.

Even earlier though, I can recall that in 7th grade we had an English class assignment to write an
essay on “What I Want to Be/Do When I Grow Up”. The pervasive understanding was that it
would be our choice. The world was ours for the taking. Our biggest issue was deciding what we
wanted!

CRISES OF THE 1970s & 1980s

The economic and social climate began to change in the mid-1970s. Two oil crises of the 1970s
changed everything. These crises were brought about by two specific events occurring in the
Middle-east. First came the Yom Kippur War of 1973: Israel fought Syria and Egypt, and the U.S.
supported Israel and supplied them with arms. Second was the Iranian Revolution of 1979, in
which the U.S. supported the Shah of Iran against the Muslim revolutionaries. In both events,
the U.S. chose the wrong side, politically and economically speaking. In both cases, the
Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) punished the U.S. by greatly reducing
the amount of oil they supplied to us. Not only did this cause seemingly interminable lines of
cars waiting to get gas and some gas rationing, but the cost of oil and gasoline more than
quadrupled.

12
To read and hear Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech in its entirety:
https://www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/mlkihaveadream.htm

5
The OPEC embargos hurt not only the ordinary consumer of gasoline but manufacturing
industries as well. A prime case in point, the oil crises significantly increased the cost of
producing steel in America.

Competition from Japanese and German steel manufacturers added insult to injury. U.S. steel
manufacturing plants had been built mostly before and during World War II and were left
undamaged by warfare since there was no military combat and attendant destruction here.
However, by the 1970s, these plants were old, relatively inefficient, and costly to operate.

On the other hand, Japan and Germany had suffered great destruction from Allied bombing
(especially involving militarily crucial industrial plants) and rebuilt new, modern plants in the
1950s and 1960s. By the mid-1970s and into the mid-1980s, it was cheaper world-wide
(including within the U.S.!) to buy high quality steel from Japan and Germany than from U.S.
companies. Consequently, from 1974 to 1986, the American steel industry was mired in a deep
depression. U.S. steel production fell from 111.4 million tons in 1973 to only 70 million tons in
1984.

The decline in employment numbers in American steel production during this period was even
more dramatic.
1974 – 512,000 steel workers
1984 – 236,000 steel workers

The U.S. response in the later 1980s and moving forward was to refurbish or build new steel
plants and other manufacturing plants that were now computerized and robotized. This
dramatically increased efficiency. In 1980, with outdated machinery and production methods, it
took 10.1 man-hours to produce 1 ton of steel. By 2017, innovations with computerized
technology and robotry had brought production time down to 1.5 man-hours per 1 ton of steel.
Of course, this drastically reduced production costs, and that brought colossal profits to the
major company stock-holders.

For the small number of workers who remained in their jobs in the steel industry, the up side of
all this has been that today they earn more than their predecessors. The down side has been
that the rest of the workforce was virtually eliminated. 13
1984 – 236,000 workers
1999 – 153,000 workers
2015 – 142,000 workers

These crises of the 1970s and 1980s brought economic ruin for much of the middle class across
America. U.S. unemployment went as high as 16.3%. Inflation reached 13.5%. Fed rates
skyrocketed to 21.5% in 1982. All of this meant that fewer people could afford to buy homes. In
fact, inflation of housing prices for home-buyers and renters alike skyrocketed in the decade

13
https://www.bdo.com/insights/business-financial-advisory/valuation-business-analytics/the-steel-industry-and-its-
place-in-the-american-e/
https://tradingeconomics.com/united-states/steel-production/
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:USGS_Iron-Steel_1900-2014.png/

6
from 1974 through 1983. This brought a huge decline in the home-building industry which,
consequently, caused another massive loss of jobs through the ‘80s. 14

Source: https://www.in2013dollars.com/Housing/price-inflation

THE “COME-BACK”
(1990s to the present)

The U.S. economy swelled during the 1990s and appeared to represent a “come-back”.
However, not all boats rose during the surge of the ‘90s; many of the more fragile ones crashed
and sank.

14
https://www.investopedia.com/articles/economics/09/1970s-great-inflation.asp/
http://www.dollarsandsense.org/archives/2009/1109reuss.html/
https://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/21/business/economy/21leonhardt.html/

7
Tax “reforms” of the last forty years began early during the presidency of Ronald Reagan in
order to combat the economic crises of the 1970s and 1980s by stimulating the U.S. economy.
At the heart of these reforms was the “Trickle-Down Theory of Economics” (often referred to as
“Reganomics”), which has remained the mainstay of Republican economics to this day.

The Trickle-Down Theory holds that as society’s wealthiest members become wealthier and
wealthier, they will spend more and more of their money on more and more goods and
services, which will in turn put more and more money into the pockets of the middle and lower
classes who provide those goods and services. The major way (or, at least, most apparent way)
to feed this economic system would be to lower the high taxes on the rich so they would have
more to spend.
• Step 1 – Lower the tax for those at the highest echelon of the progressive tax system.
• Step 2 – Allow exclusions and deductions for categories proper to the wealthy and of
relatively little, or no, relevance to the middle or lower classes – e.g., interest paid on state and
local government bonds, capital gains and dividends, and some business expenses.

When Regan came to the presidency the tax rate for individuals in the highest income bracket
was 70%. By 1988 he had brought it down to 38.5%. Moreover, the additional exemptions and
deductions lowered the actual amounts owed, so that billionaires like Warren Buffet would be
paying only 17% – the same tax percentage as the middle class was paying – and Donald Trump
could end up claiming he owed only a few hundred dollars.15

This has created an ever-widening economic chasm between the classes and belied the
American mythos of upward economic and social mobility. Today, in the midst of the nation’s
longest economic expansion, the separation between rich and poor is at a five-decade high.

The gap between the haves and have-nots in the United States has grown over the last few
years. In 2018 the nation’s median household income topped $63,000 for the first time.
However, after adjusting for inflation, it’s roughly the same as it was 20 years earlier.

For huge investors, the economy was growing rapidly. With the fall of the Soviet Union and
Eastern European communism in the late 1980s, U.S. trade opportunities expanded greatly.
Rapidly developing technological innovations in telecommunications and computer networking
spawned exponential growth in computer hardware and the software industry and
revolutionized the way many industries operated. Corporate earnings rose rapidly. Combined
with low inflation and lowered taxes, strong profits for investors sent the stock markets surging;
the Dow Jones Industrial Average, which had stood at just 1,000 in the late 1970s, hit the
11,000 mark in 1999.

15
https://www.businessinsider.com/personal-finance/how-progressive-taxes-work-united-states-income-tax?op=1/
https://www.investopedia.com/articles/personal-finance/082415/whats-wrong-american-tax-system.asp#higher-
benefits-for-higher-tax-brackets/
https://www.cbpp.org/research/poverty-and-inequality/a-guide-to-statistics-on-historical-trends-in-income-
inequality/

8
In the 1990s and into the 2000s, the stock markets climbed. This was mostly to the advantage
of big investors, and America's middle and lower classes paid the price. American
manufacturing companies moved their production to countries where labor was cheaper and
government oversight was less “obtrusive”. And with skyrocketing modernization and
computerization in most of the manufacturing sector that remained here, the demand for
factory workers continued to decline, along with the number of American workers with well-
paying jobs.

A Case in Point – The Great Recession of 2008

The Great Recession of 2008 is perhaps the most visible or well-known sign of this is. During the
first years of the 2000s, nurtured by the misunderstanding or illusion that rapidly growing stock
markets would also bring them growing income – you’d think we would have gotten over
“Trickle-Down Economics”! – middle-class families took out Adjustable Rate Mortgages (ARMs)
to buy homes above their means. The ARM would initially have a relatively low interest rate
with low monthly payments for the first months or years (for example, the first 6 years on a 30-
year mortgage). But when the initial period was up, the interest rate and the monthly payments
would go up. Moreover, mortgage loans were often recklessly being given with no money down
or just with stated (i.e., unverified) income.

The problem was that middle-class incomes did not grow commensurate to increased mortgage
payments as they came due. The result: mortgage-loan defaults on an unprecedented scale.

The housing/mortgage crisis was a root precipitator of the Great Recession. Here is just a glance
into the financial devastation that occurred during the Great Recession:
• Foreclosures: An estimated 3 million households were foreclosed on from 2005 through 2009.
• Stock markets: The Dow Jones Industrial Average declined by 50% in 2007, plummeting more
in the following years, and the S&P 500 declined by 57.8% from 2007 to 2009.
• Mass layoffs: E.g., 326,392 workers were laid off just in February of 2009.
• Unemployment: The national unemployment rate rose from 5% in December 2007, to 10% in
October 2009.
• Gross Domestic Product: GDP declined by 4.3% from 2007 to 2009.

President George W. Bush responded to the crash with the Troubled Asset Relief Program
(TARP) in October of 2008, hoping to allocate some $700 billion in funds to buying assets from
struggling companies in order to keep them afloat. Funds from TARP were used to bailout the
likes of General Motors and Chrysler (together, some $80 billion), while a hefty $125 billion was
used to help out Bank of America.

The stock market had actually reached market highs in 2007, with the Dow Jones Industrial
Average exceeding 14,000; by the next year it lost more than half of its value due to the
untenable stock market, resting at just 6,547. This cost thousands upon thousands of middle-
class Americans enormous amounts invested in the stock market for their retirement. American
households and non-profits reportedly lost around $14 trillion in net worth.

9
ECONOMY & SOCIETY TODAY

By the 2010s up until early 2020, when the Covid-19 Pandemic hit, the U.S. economy was
“coming back” and “overall” was thriving. But the overwhelmingly biggest winners were those
in the top 5%, and, even much more so, those in the top 0.01%. Meanwhile, those in the middle
and lower classes grew more numerous and with smaller and smaller real incomes.

10
Wall Street soared in 2020 as millions were hungry or out of work. Since the 1970s, the top 1%
of earners in the U.S. has roughly doubled its share of the total American income pie to nearly
20% from about 10%. This gain in the U.S. is by far the largest among all developed countries.

Over most of the last five decades, U.S. workers have been losing well-paying jobs and have had
to move into lower-paying jobs with few-to-zero benefits, or they go onto the unemployment
rolls. A greater and greater share of jobs has shifted to the service sector – with former
manufacturing and white-collar employees working as store clerks, fast-food workers, Uber and
Lyft rideshare drivers, etc.

These workers increasingly have found that while being counted in employment figures (thus
making the economy look healthier than it actually is), they are now in jobs that are much
lower-paying. Plus, they receive fewer working hours per week so that they will not qualify for
fringe benefits – e.g., employer-paid vacation, employer-paid sick leave, or employer-paid
health insurance. Many work more than a single job in order to make ends meet. And even in
the remaining industrial jobs, wages, as adjusted for inflation, have stagnated from the early
1970s to the present.

Meanwhile, the stock market has been climbing astronomically high; as of January 2022, the
DOW was over 36,000! The large American companies and their major stock-holders have been
making an awful lot of money, but the middle class and lower class are still sinking... sinking...

Despite the ongoing public health and economic crises, the markets’ comeback has further
enriched the wealthy, while the covid-19 pandemic has claimed the lives of more than
1,000,000 Americans (as of June 2022) and left millions jobless and without enough to eat.

The average annual income of the top 1% of the population is $717,000, compared to the
average income of the remaining 99% of the population, which is around $51,000. The really.
telling disparity between the classes isn't in income, however, but in net value: The members of
the top 1% are worth about $8.4 million, or 70 times the worth of members of the lower
classes.

The top 1% are executives, doctors, lawyers and politicians, among other things. Within this
group of people is an even smaller and wealthier subset of people, 1% of the top 1%, or .01% of
the entire nation. Those people have annual incomes of over $27 million, or roughly 540 times
the national average income. Altogether, the top 1% control 43% of the wealth in the nation;
the next 4% control an additional 29%. It's historically common for a powerful minority to
control a majority of finances, but Americans haven't seen a disparity this wide since before the
Great Depression – and the disparity keeps growing.

It's an American mythos that all people have the same opportunity for success as the top 1%.
Most people consider success to be a by-product of hard work, and hard work is something that
Americans are extremely familiar with. In fact, Americans have increased productivity by 80%
since 1979; unfortunately, their income hasn't risen accordingly, if at all.

11
The average worker in an American company makes substantially less than supervisors and
executives. In fact, corporate executives make 62 times more money than an average worker in
bonuses alone, not counting the executive's actual salary. Put another way, for every corporate
bonus, the company could have paid 62 employees. In fact, incentive pay actually rose 30%
from years before the recession.

Results: Those in the top 5% have become extremely well off, and those at the very top (i.e.,
the top 0.01% of the U.S. population) have become astronomically wealthy. But most middle-
class families cannot afford to save very much money, if any, for the future. And members of
the ever-growing lower class often find it difficult to survive, often having to choose between
paying the rent and buying food.

Won’t Congress Fix This Mess?

Fifty-seven members of Congress, or roughly 11%, are members of the financial super elite (i.e.,
the top 0.01% of the U.S. population), with around $5.2 million to $7.5 million income each
year on average, and with some people making closer to a billion. Overall, 250 members of
Congress are millionaires, and their median net worth is roughly $891,000, or nine times that of
the average American.16

It's little wonder, then, that tax cuts for the wealthy are repeatedly enacted while the reverse is
so rarely true. People with high incomes naturally want to keep the money that they have
made, and this includes the men and women in public offices.

It's also important to remember that politicians are supported financially by the wealthy. In
order to be elected, politicians of all levels require financial backing, and that backing generally
comes from corporations. It's impossible to deny the link between politicians and corporations,
and the link is consistent regardless of a person's political leanings. Right or left, big or small,
politicians rely on corporations; more importantly, they rely on the extremely wealthy
executives of those corporations.

With the majority of tax income coming in from the middle class – despite the progressive tax –
and the government's interests mingling with those of the upper class, it’s clear why the income
disparity continues to grow.

16
https://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/10/us/politics/more-than-half-the-members-of-congress-are-millionaires-
analysis-finds.html
https://time.com/373/congress-is-now-mostly-a-millionaires-club/
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/factcheck/2021/06/08/fact-check-meme-partly-false-millionaires-u-s-
congress/7589391002/

12
HOW THE MIDDLE AND LOWER CLASSES HAVE RESPONDED

Dual Income Households

Middle-class married couples addressed

the problem of stagnating or falling
incomes by shifting from one
“breadwinner” to two. In 1960, 72% of
families of married couples with
children under 18, were able to enjoy
the benefits of the post-WW2 economic
resurgence – their own home, cars,
higher education, etc. – with only one of
the parents (overwhelmingly, the
father) earning an income. Since 1990
about 60% of such households have had
both parents working.
There were definitely positive
consequences to this shift. For example,
the middle-class family could now have
a more elevated living style, with 2 cars
(or more), larger homes, multiple
televisions, costly travel vacations, etc.
And women, who in earlier generations would have found themselves relegated to the role of
“housewife”, have now joined the wage-earning workforce in huge numbers.

But there have also been serious negative aspects of the shift to dual income households.
Today women are paid only 80% of what men are paid for the same jobs. Appetites for more
material things keep growing despite income stagnation and are fed by the easy availability of
credit – thus creating a house of cards. And with both parents working to pay for middle-class
luxuries, the price is often paid with much of the comfort and sense of security of family life
(including childcare).

We might also add that, with employers having the upper hand over their middle- and lower-
class employees, plus a strong influence over legislators, paid parental leave from work remains
part of the unattained American Dream. Paid parental leave is good for families, good for
children and good for working parents. Yet, among the world’s 41 wealthiest countries, the
United States is the only one that doesn’t mandate paid parental leave.

Buying on Credit

So far, the “remedy” to keep the economy rolling has been to financially bolster the huge
industrial companies and financial institutions while fostering increasing consumer spending
and consequent debt – e.g., home mortgages, credit cards, student loans, etc.

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Debt to income ratio (DTI) is a key indicator of financial health. It’s determined by taking your
expenditures for a specific period (e.g., a month or a year) and dividing that number by your
income for that same period. For instance, if your bills amount to $5,000 a month and you
make $7,500 a month, your monthly DTI is 66%. Or if your bills amount to $2,000 and you make
$7,500 a month, your DTI is 27%.

The ratios of debt-to-income have now been rising for decades. A 2018 Federal Reserve report
showed a slow but steady rise from 1980s, then a sharp increase during the housing boom of
the early 2000s. (It dropped with the financial crisis of 2007-2009, which indicated many
households cut consumption or defaulted on loans.)

In 1950 the average American household held $533 in debt and earned $30,300; thus, their DTI
was 1.76%. In 2018, average households had $31,428 of debt relative to a median income of
$78,646 – a DTI of 39.95%!17

Paying for college has turned into a long-term burden for millions of Americans. The total bill as
of November 2018 was $1.56 trillion, which was more than double what it was a decade earlier.
About 66% of students who earned four-year degrees in 2017 took out loans and, on average,
owed $28,500 when they got their caps and gowns. Of the 42.2 million people with federal
student loans, 2.7 million owed at least $100,000.18

The Fed’s Survey of Consumer Finances shows that 22.4% of families had student loan debt in
2016. Only 8.9% had been paying such loans in 1989. The average family owed $5,400 in 1989.
That ballooned to $34,200 in 2016.

Thus, taken in total – whether for home mortgages, or student college loans, or credit cards
used to pay for vacations or groceries – the debt repayment burdens of average Americans
have gone up and up and up over the last several decades.

Escalating Drug Abuse

Another response in the U.S., for people who have already suffered paying the way for those at
the top and see no way out for themselves, has been desperate refuge in drugs. The chart
immediately below shows the steady, unchecked climb in drug-related deaths, a function of
similarly increased drug use, over the last 50 years.

Although drug use (and related drug deaths) are not economic indicators, the middle- and
lower-class populations most heavily affected and the coincidence of increasing drug use and
deaths with economic decline is unmistakably tragic.

17
https://listwithclever.com/research/history-debt-to-income-ratio/
18
https://www.expectakeaway.com/longterm-investments-debt-reality-check/

14
 Deaths by drug overdose (unintentional) in the U.S.
from 1950 to 2017 (per 100,000 population)

Source: https://www.statista.com/statistics/184603/deaths-by-unintentional-poisoning-in-the-
us-since-1950/

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TRUMP’S VOTERS & THE SNAKE HANDLER’S BRAIN

Finally, we come to Donald Trump and those who support him. The vast majority of Trump
supporters have what I call “the snake handler’s brain”.

When I’m musing over it all, I ask myself if it’s likely, or even possible, that 74 million people
who voted for Trump in the 2020 presidential election could be a) just plain evil or b) really
stupid. And I keep answering myself that neither is possible.

It has been estimated that perhaps as much as 5% of the population in the U.S. is sociopathic or
psychopathic.19 Assuming that sociopaths and psychopaths are equally present in all age groups
and among voters as with the full population of the U.S., this would mean that in this election
with 159.6 million voters – 74.2 million of whom voted for Trump – as many as 7.98 million
sociopaths and psychopaths may have voted for Trump. That would leave over 66 million who
voted for Trump for others reasons. And it's hard to imagine that people are so stupid as to
rationally think that Trump has really fixed any of their, or the nation’s, problems. Just consider
his response (or lack of response) to the Covid-19 pandemic.

So, something else is likely happening...

Back around 1996, while I was teaching at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, I met
Dennis Covington. The year before, he had published a book (subsequently nominated for the
National Book Award) entitled Salvation on Sand Mountain: Snake Handling and Redemption in
Southern Appalachia. It’s a true account of snake handlers in Scottsboro, a town in north
Alabama.

Dennis had first come into contact with these people and their church, the Church of Jesus with
Signs Following, back in 1991 when he was working on an article for the New York Times. (The
article was about the trial of the church's preacher, who was convicted of attempting to murder
his wife with rattlesnakes.)

Covington and I got along well, and he asked if I’d like to join him the next Friday night for a visit
to Scottsboro to attend a service at the church. He assured me that I would be warmly
welcomed and would not be in the least bit pressured to handle poisonous snakes. I readily
accepted, and Friday night I met, spoke with, and quietly observed a congregation of about 12-
15 men and women.

My understanding was that virtually all of them were lower-working-class people. On our drive
up to Scottsboro, Covington had explained to me that even though many of them initially had
found good jobs in the mills that made clothes, carpets, rugs, and tires, modernization plus the
movement of manufacturing in general out of the U.S. crushed their visions of a well-paid and

19
https://www.quora.com/What-percentage-of-people-are-psychopaths-sociopaths?share=1

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secure future. The dream they thought might be theirs lasted only a short while. Then they
were back where they had started, or worse.

Here's Covington's explanation in Salvation on Sand Mountain of what would make an

intelligent and reasonably rational person handle a poisonous snake.
Snake handling... didn’t originate back in the hills somewhere. It started when people
came down from the hills to discover they were surrounded by a hostile and spiritually
dead culture. All along their border with the modern world – in places like Newport,
Tennessee, and Sand Mountain, Alabama – they recoiled. They threw up defenses.
When their own resources failed, they called down the Holy Ghost. They put their hands
through fire. They drank poison. They took up serpents. They still do....20
They were refugees from a culture on the ropes. They spoke in tongues, anointed one
another with oil in order to be healed, and when instructed by the Holy Ghost, drank
poison, held fire, and took up poisonous snakes...21
[Italics added.]

Although few would recognize it or be willing to admit it, the experiences of an overwhelming
portion of authentic Trump supporters and those of the Scottsboro snake handlers were not
very different at all. There’s a sense that the world has failed them and that there is no rational,
humanly attainable means for remedying the dark present or for building a brighter future.

So, when their dreams for a better life in the middle class were shattered and politicians did
nothing but make matters worse by preaching Trickle Down Economics and overwhelmingly
supporting the top 5% and drastically weakening the middle and lower classes, they called
down the Holy Ghost put their faith in Trump. They put their hands through fire in his hands.
They drank poison Trump’s lies. Some of them even took up poisonous snakes automatic
weapons and threatened the lives of public officials. [Word cross-outs are intentional. – D.L.]

WHAT TO DO NOW?

Even as psychopathic and narcissistic as he is, I think that Trump is not the heart of the
problem. It’s much bigger than he, and, as I’ve tried to explain throughout this piece, it began
long before Trump took office.

These are some of the questions that must be addressed:

• Will anything be done to reduce the economic chasm between the upper class and the rest of
us? Will Trickle Down economic theory and practice be buried once and for all? Will an honest
graduated income tax be instituted to pay for infrastructure rebuilding and to let the middle
and lowers classes off the hook for government operating expenses?

20
Dennis Covington, Salvation on Sand Mountain. Snake Handling and Redemption in Southern Appalachia,
Boston, 1995, pp. xviii-xix.
21
Ibid., p. 24.

17
• Will Big Pharma and the insurance companies ever be properly restrained so we can have
universal health care?
• What can the U.S. government do to incentivize the return of manufacturing jobs back to the
U.S.?
• And what about manufacturing robotization, computer technology, and Artificial Intelligence
in the U.S. in the hands of the upper 0.01%?
• Is it possible to bring about some degree of governmental and impactful worker policy-
making so that more workers can be employed, have shorter work weeks, have more vacation
time, and have more family time?

Today’s middle- and lower-class economic dilemmas didn’t originate with Trump – or with
Obama, or with Bush the Younger... They’ve been in the making for a solid half century. And
going back to "normal" won’t fix much of anything. America needs new approaches to bring
new, long-lasting benefits and deep-seated, realistic optimism.

If some big changes do not occur soon, we’ll be in for someone else like Trump – but smarter.

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