How the Democrats are Kept Impotent

Lies, damned lies, and statistics -Benjamin Disraeli/Mark Twain

In an April 2025 broadcast, (repeated by The Washington Post) Fareed Zakaria — net worth $15 million, annual salary $5 million (Celebrity Net Worth) — looked bewildered. He couldn’t understand how there were so many disgruntled Americans when the economy under Biden had improved their situation so well:

“When Donald Trump was inaugurated, by most measures, the United States was the strongest major economy in the world. Growth was robust, unemployment was at historic lows, inflation had fallen to a manageable level, and productivity, the elixir of economics, had picked up.”

The New York Times was happy to publish economist Paul Krugman’s column — net worth $5 million (Celebrity Net Worth) — who also found the American response bewildering. After all, job creation is up, inflation is heading down, and wages have just about kept pace with prices said Krugman. He recited these economic statistics in support telling Americans that, in fact, their situation is better than it ever has been and yet they don’t seem to understand it. Krugman tried to delicately imply Americans who think the economy is bad are ignorant of the real facts:

“This is a touchy subject, albeit one I’ve commented on before. You don’t want to say that Americans are stupid; you certainly don’t want to sound like that John McCain adviser who insisted that America was a “nation of whiners” who were experiencing only a “mental recession.” (NYT, May 15, 2023).

In his, The Forgotten Victims of America’s Class War, Pulitzer Prize winning author and independent journalist, Chris Hedges, reported something quite different: a desperate and angry America (The Chris Hedges Report, Jul 30, 2023).

The difference between Hedges and the Zakaria-Krugman conclusions stems directly from the difference in their approach. Zakaria and Krugman stayed in their comfortable offices and read what economists reported from their comfortable offices. Hedges got out of his office and visited the people in his hometown that was once Democrat but was now solidly behind Trump. He described signs of economic despair:

• On the outskirts of town, weed-choked foundations of old factories, forgotten and neglected.

• In town, burnt out buildings whose charred remains have never been razed.

• Trump support everywhere.

The Deception

The increase in the GDP is a misleading figure because that statistic does not account for the distribution of that increased wealth because that goes mostly to the upper 10%. ​​Research from the Rand Corporation shows: “If you earn below the 90th percentile, the relentlessly upward redistribution of income since 1975 is coming out of your pocket.” [Emphasis added].

Employment increase is a misleading figure because it does not reflect that wage increases when adjusted for inflation have been stagnant since the 1970s while the cost of housing has increased substantially (Pew Research, Aug 07,2018).

There was a brilliant meme circulating on the Internet showing a worker in a fast-food uniform replying to a politician in a suit who had just announced favourable job statistics. The worker was saying, “And I have three of those jobs and still cannot pay my rent.”

Productivity increase is a misleading figure. While productivity increase was once shared more evenly with workers’ wages, that stopped in the 1970s. From that time on, workers’ wages got little of the increase in productivity: that went mostly to executive pay (Economic Policy Institute, Ap, 2025).

Reports of a booming stock market are misleading. While the stock market is certainly outperforming expectations, a Gallop survey reveals the upper 10% own 89% of the stocks.

It’s Not the One Percent; it’s the Upper 10%.

The economy is doing quite well for some. For some, luxury stores are thriving, yacht sales are up. After covid passed, the US regained world top spot for the purchase of luxury stuff (Bain& Co, Ap, 2024). So why all this hubbub about the poor state of the economy?

That’s the mindset of the upper 10% from their daily experience of their world.

The same is true of the upcoming generation, but even more so:

• For the millennials (now in the age range of 29 to 44), while the poorest have less, the wealthiest have more. Their top 10% owns even more than the boomers did in their day (American Journal of Sociology, Sept, 2023).

• Millennials and Generation Z (ages 13–28), accounted for all the luxury market’s growth last year.

• This wealth surge among these two groups is so great it is creating new markets for wealth management firms, luxury goods, travel and real estate (Bain& Co, Ap, 2024).

While the upper 10% may have liberal views on social and cultural issues — and some may even have been part of the Occupy Wall Street Movement in their younger days — they now fool themselves by adopting the term ‘centrists’. But that term means conservative on financial policies, with committed resistance against taxation of the rich.

The New Class Divide

This elite, the upper 10%, in the Democratic Party has rendered that party more impotent than attacks from the far right. UCLA media professor Christine Liu characterizes them as the professional management class (PMC) and describes the damage they have done to that party.

“After the victory of Donald Trump in the 2024 presidential election, the liberal PMC blame “people who are concerned with bread and butter issues for the defeat of these candidates that have been promoted by [Democrats,] a party completely captured by one segment of capital who are trying to show the American worker that they are idiots, they are racist, they’re anti-immigrant, they’re transphobic, they’re homophobic, they’re sexist,”

And well that unflattering description may be true of a certain sector of the working class, a significant number of this group of ‘deplorables’ voted for Obama and then came back to Biden. Having been disappointed by both these presidents, they are now firmly hoping for relief from Trump.

Liu confirms that the problem with the disconnect between the PMC and the average worker is “They [the PMC] were in a box. They didn’t go outside. They didn’t talk to Americans. They didn’t talk to people. They don’t know people.” (The Hedges Report, Feb 12, 2015)

As Abraham Maslow showed us in his concept of the hierarchy of human needs, the basic need for financial security must be satisfied before there can be acceptance of higher values. As Maslow phrased it, “a hungry man cannot love.”

Focussing on these despised ‘bread and butter issues’ would unite the coastal and rural areas and give the working class financial security so they would be more open to discussing cultural issues. It would stop the divisive name-calling. Hedges sees this cooperation is the only way to wrest control of the US from the predatory rich:

“We cannot dismiss and demonize rural white Americans. The class war waged by corporations and the ruling oligarchs has devastated their lives and communities. They have been betrayed. They have every right to be angry. That anger can sometimes be expressed in inappropriate ways, but they are not the enemy. They too are victims. In my case, they are family. I come from here. Our fight for economic justice must include them. We will wrest back control of our nation together or not at all” [Emphasis added] (The Hedges Report, Jul 30, 2023).