Defeat Right-wing Populism with a Foreign Policy for the Middle Class
Biden's "foreign policy for the middle class" is already reaping benefits. A key goal is to diminish toxic populism in our politics.
The land that both sets of my grandparents farmed has reverted to brushland and wilderness. They never made it to the middle class, though most of their children and grandchildren did. Vast swathes of once productive agricultural land are now the domains of recovering wild forest creatures once driven almost to extinction. Furthermore, great manufacturing corporations that helped build 20th century America and our Upstate New York region — Carrier, General Electric, Polaroid, Kodak, Xerox — have either moved to the Sunbelt, offshored or atrophied altogether. Gone too are the well-paying jobs with pensions and benefits, proud employment that didn’t require a college degree. And every census for decades has had the state losing another seat or two in Congress as rural New York depopulates.
When I was growing up, doctors and lawyers had factory workers and tradesmen as neighbors. And I counted as classmates farm kids, children of blue collar workers as well as those of small businessmen and educated professionals. There was no economic apartheid with walled off McMansion neighborhoods and elite public school districts. We all sang the national anthem together in sync (more or less) at ball games and graduation ceremonies.
But the middle class has steadily contracted over the past half century. Middle class households have fallen from 61 percent in 1971 to 50 percent in 2021, according to a Pew Research Center analysis.
Today, the gap between the rich and everyone else is even greater than it was during the first Gilded Age when the wealthiest two percent of Americans owned more than a third of the nation’s wealth. Now, the top one percent owns almost 40 percent of the nation’s wealth, or more than the bottom 90 percent combined, according the Federal Reserve.
Accompanying the wealth re-sorting has been a class realignment. French economist Thomas Picketty has identified a disturbing trend: a “complete realignment of the party system along a ‘globalists’ (high-education, high-income) vs ‘nativists’ (low education, low-income) cleavage” that is bringing a “return to class-based redistributive conflict,” aka class warfare. As a result, millions of citizens now feel marginalized and view the political parties as being in thrall to the rich and powerful.
This gives rise to populism — “a political approach that strives to appeal to ordinary people who feel that their concerns are disregarded by established elite groups.”
Populism appeals to the “left behinds” in “flyover country,” folks who struggle to get by working multiple jobs with few or no benefits, whose kids will be lucky if they achieve a better life than their hard-working parents. The left-behinds, searching for answers to their problems, become vulnerable to conspiracy theories like QAnon and to scapegoating others — racial minorities, immigrants, Jews, name-your-villain. They become enthralled to self-serving pied pipers like Donald Trump.
I’ve reported on stepped-up activities by the Ku Klux Klan and neo-Nazis to recruit followers in Upstate New York. The region was a bastion of KKK activity in the past. The Southern Poverty Law Center ranks overwhelmingly liberal New York as fostering the third most number of hate groups, many of which are clustered Upstate, in heavily red Trump country.
Since 2016, the region has elected a number of Trumpist politicians to Congress, notably the politically shape-shifting, principle-free Elise Stefanik, whose sprawling North Country congressional district encompasses wilderness tracts that include moribund farmland like that of my grandparents’. (For an entertaining read: “Elise Stefanik's Glass Eyes.”)
These meretricious politicians’ days, however, may be numbered as transformative landmark legislation kicks in.
President Joe Biden’s legislative achievements rival those of Lyndon Johnson and Franklin Roosevelt, successes that, frankly, are under-appreciated by Americans. Three laws, in particular, have the potential for turbo-charging a 21st century economy: the CHIPS and Science Act, American Rescue Plan (ARP) and the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act.
Their impact will take years, if not decades, to take full effect. I predict that future historians will place Joe Biden as one of our most accomplished presidents not only for his legislative successes, but also for his vision.
Few have taken notice of a novel twist in the Biden administration’s foreign policy: explicitly integrating domestic goals with those of national security, what the White House, in its National Security Strategy, calls, “foreign policy for the middle class.” A brainchild of Biden’s highly capable National Security Advisor, Jake Sullivan, this concept calls for strengthening —
our middle class, which is critical to our national security as an engine of economic growth and a key source of democratic vibrance and cohesion. The reverse is also true. Our success at home requires robust and strategic engagement in the world in line with our interests and values to make life better, safer, and fairer for the American people. That is why we must make far-reaching investments in the sources of our natural strength while building our resilience.
The $52 billion-funded Chips and Science Act particularly embodies: 1) growing our industrial base, 2) enhancing national security, and 3) buttressing the middle class through secure, well-paying jobs of the future.
This act has a clear national security focus by reducing our dependence on foreign sources for semiconductors (the U.S. accounts for only about 12 percent of global chip production) and positioning the U.S. to compete more strongly with China.
Tangible results are already beginning to take root. Twenty-five miles from my family’s derelict farmlands, Micron will construct the nation’s largest memory chip plant, a $100 billion investment that will employ up to 50,000 people directly and indirectly at an average salary of more than $100,000 per year. Importantly, 20 percent of the new jobs will not require a college education. Furthermore, the plan includes $500 million in community development projects, including educational opportunities for underserved communities.
Intel has broken ground for a $20 billion chips plant in another Rustbelt area — Columbus, Ohio — which will create 7,000 union construction jobs and 3,000 full-time jobs that will pay an average of $135,000 a year.
As government-supported infrastructure projects take off throughout the country, we can expect more job-creation, more opportunities for families to realize financial security and higher expectations for their children’s future. But it must be accompanied by much-needed tax reform and other measures aimed at reducing the wealth and income disparities that feed the toxic populism behind our social divisions and strained politics, and potentially weakens us abroad.
Understanding this, Theodore Roosevelt warned, “There can be no real political democracy unless there is something approaching economic democracy.” His “Square Deal” made bold reforms in the American workplace, government regulation of industry and consumer protection which ended up benefiting all Americans. Against daunting odds, President Biden has managed to put in place overdue catalysts for economic and job growth with the added benefit of protecting the nation. But much more needs to be done.
Because, frankly, as I pass through the hard knocks area where my antecedents tilled the land, I’d like to see Confederate battle flags and MAGA banners replaced by Micron signs.