When the Politics of Anger Prevail
Why low wages in America are at the root of the Trump presidency
Visit any small town in the US, and you’ll no longer ask yourself why rural America bubbles away with resentment. People living in rural communities, on average, are poorer than they were a decade ago, when Wall Street plunged the global economy into chaos. And despite the ostensible economic recovery, the improvements haven’t really trickled through to small communities.
Nominal wage growth since the recovery officially began in mid-2009 has been low and has almost completely stalled. Indeed, the top one percent grabbed 95 percent of all the gains during the recovery’s first three years. And no, this crisis didn’t start under the Obama administration: since the early nineteen-seventies, wages began to stagnate or fall for the bottom half of the underpaid American workforce. Over three decades of decline have left the poor in America simmering with anger and frustration.
The story behind Trump’s rise to power is a tale of competing and contradictory narratives. Many low-paid workers opted to support Trump; millions of neglected Americans with no real economic prospects, like those I met in the downscale city of Steubenville, Ohio, opted not to vote. Older Americans with no real economic grievances openly support Donald Trump…
