Via the Atlantic comes a superb analysis of America’s version of the Fake Left and its supporters. You could basically just run through and change “America” for “Australia” in this and you;d be exactly right. A must read:
Over the past 40 or so years, the U.S. has been fragmenting into two parallel societies, which I’ll call Trickle-Down America and Stagnant America. Each one looks upon the other with suspicion and hostility. Trickle-Down America is the America of our biggest metropolitan areas, and it is defined by comparatively high levels of density, diversity, and economic inequality. Importantly, the richest people in Trickle-Down America are typically white, while the service-sector workers who enable them to work longer hours are disproportionately brown and black. Stagnant America can be found in rural regions, small cities and towns, and outer suburbs across the country. This America is largely white and relatively equal, though it too is scarred by poverty, particularly among Hispanics and blacks. America’s most and least educated workers are concentrated in Trickle-Down America, while Stagnant America is home to most of America’s working- and middle-class white voters.
Is Trickle-Down America morally superior to Stagnant America? A good starting point is to reflect on the sources of Trickle-Down America’s wealth. In New York City, my hometown, the local economy has long been dominated by the financial-services sector, which has grown mightily in recent decades. Has the financialization of the U.S. economy been an unadulterated good for the country as a whole? There are many thoughtful people who’d argue otherwise. Indeed, some argue that rents flowing to the financial sector have badly distorted the U.S. economy, and have contributed to the devastation of tradeable sector employment in Stagnant America. Corporations headquartered in America’s cosmopolitan cities have profited immensely from the emergence of a globalized division of labor. Yet many of these same multinationals have pioneered tax-avoidance strategies that have made it harder for the federal government to compensate those who’ve lost out with globalization, all while deploying their considerable influence to get the U.S. government to pressure other countries to adopt intellectual-property protections that serve their interests. And then there is the federal government itself, and its vast, growing army of private administrative proxies—contractors, non-profits dependent on public subsidies, and the like—that has helped make Washington, D.C., and its environs one of the country’s most affluent and educated regions. It’s hard to disentangle exactly how much of Trickle-Down America’s success relative to Stagnant America is a product of straightforward rent-seeking. I certainly doubt that it accounts for all of it, or even most. But surely it accounts for some, and that should give Trickle-Down America’s champions pause.
One important thing to keep in mind is that Trickle-Down America is, overall, characterized by more stringent land-use limits than Stagnant America. These limits have raised housing costs in affluent coastal regions, which has redounded to the benefit of incumbent homeowners. Yet high housing costs have deterredinward domestic migration while driving out large numbers of working-and middle-class residents.At the same time, these regions have been a magnet for international migrants, many of whom find themselves living in dangerously crowded conditions. In effect, one could say that Trickle-Down America has been swapping out one working class, consisting of established Americans with voting rights, who’ve come to expect a rising standard of living, with another, increasingly dominated by newcomers. Openness to immigration is Exhibit A in the case for Trickle-Down America’s moral superiority, so it’s worth a careful examination.
The great appeal of newcomers as workers is that they often have somewhat lower expectations when it comes to their living conditions and terms of employment. This is especially true of low-skill immigrants, who greatly increase their incomes by moving to the U.S., even when they find themselves at the bottom of the U.S. household income distribution. Yet the political influence of the newcomer working class is muted as compared to the established working class, as low-income immigrants tend to naturalize at low levels, in part because many are so poor that the cost of naturalization is daunting, and naturalized citizens vote at lower rates than the native-born. Needless to say, unauthorized immigrants have even less influence. The relative powerlessness of Trickle-Down America’s foreign-born workers is a big part of what’s made its cosmopolitan cities so attractive to high-skill professionals. Because low-skill immigrant workers are willing to work for such low wages, they lower the cost to skilled professionals of outsourcing various household tasks, and so they make it easier for these skilled professionals to work longer hours.…What might the future hold? Recently, Andrew Romano and Garance Franke-Ruta of Yahoo News offered a vivid portrait of anti-gentrification radicalism. They point to anger and disaffection among “poorer, nonwhite millennials who tend to live in major cities,” and the soaring poverty rate among those with no more than a high school education. “Ultimately,” Romano and Franke-Ruta warn, “the fight over gentrification is what the fight over income inequality in America looks like up close today: a clash between the economic forces transforming our cities and a young, diverse, debt-saddled generation that is losing faith in capitalism itself.”
It’s not at all clear that working-class young people in Trickle-Down America feel as though they’re moving forward, nor do they sound terribly optimistic. And as someone born and raised in neighborhoods transformed by low-skill immigration, I can attest to the fact that the children of low-skill immigrants are not quite as quiescent as their parents: “Well, gosh. You’re better off than you would have been had you been born in the Third World!” “Gee, thanks. I also can’t afford my rent.” That’s part of why Clinton’s self-congratulatory tendency doesn’t seem to mesh all that well with the more hard-edged politics of the millennial left, which is emerging from the very same cities that she calls out for their productivity and prosperity, and for their virtue.
Anti-gentrification radicalism. Love it! Read it all…
