There Is Nothing for You Here, page 20
In America, the first sign of things to come was during the Great Recession, with the emergence of the Tea Party movement in the Republican Party, inside and outside Congress. The movement formed in reaction to the efforts by the administration of Barack Obama to bail out the U.S. financial sector in the midst of the economic crisis. Its members initially presented themselves as fiscal conservatives, calling for the kind of lower taxes and limited government spending espoused by Ronald Reagan. They quickly moved on to oppose the administration’s promotion of universal health care and other social policies, and soon morphed into an activist protest movement supporting new candidates for office with a mixture of conservative, libertarian, and right-wing populist credentials. Many of these Tea Party candidates would later support Donald Trump’s election in 2016.
Populist politicians in both the United States and the United Kingdom were given a further boost by large-scale demographic change, which came on top of the long-standing postindustrial economic dislocation and in tandem with the crisis of the Great Recession. The composition of the population began to change just as all the jobs that had previously anchored people to their specific communities seemed to disappear beneath them.
In the United States, migration within the country as well as immigration from outside have tended to be constants throughout the country’s history—unlike in the United Kingdom, whose modern demographic diversification only truly began with the Second World War and the postwar dissolution of the British empire. The embrace of mass immigration from the European Union produced further rapid change in both the composition and the size of the population in the 2000s. In America, however, demographic change did take on a new character beginning in the 1960s. Specifically, it began to go hand in hand with generational change.
Consider that baby boomers, the generation of Americans born between World War II and the mid-1960s, are 82 percent white. Now consider the fact that within a century of this generation’s starting point, the nation will have undergone a demographic sea change. By 2045, if demographic trends across the subsequent generations adhere to current projections, the United States will be overall “majority minority.” But this is not happening for the reason that many people think: according to U.S. Census Bureau data, the Pew Research Center, and my colleagues at the Brookings Institution, the racial shifts of the most diverse recent cohort, Generation Z, born after the mid-1990s, are driven by domestic, internal, and personal factors such as interracial marriage and birthrates; they are not the result of immigration, which has been increasingly restricted by government policy in recent years.
Critically, some regions’ populations have been changing more quickly than others. Younger people have tended to leave hollowed-out postindustrial regions if they can, and the people without jobs or with precarious finances who still live there have frequently chosen not to have children, or certainly to have fewer children (as was the case with my own family in North East England).
Thus, generational and racial diversity have become increasingly uneven across the United States. Some people have found themselves in places with little demographic diversity as well as fewer educational opportunities and jobs. Others live in vibrant diverse, multicultural communities with plenty of access to opportunity. They all have different perspectives on what it means to be American and where the country is headed.
In the 2000s, in short, uneven distribution of opportunity in the United States dovetailed with uneven demographic changes. Americans in deindustrialized regions wondered if the rest of the country was leaving them behind. Books like Amy Goldstein’s Janesville and Jennifer Silva’s We’re Still Here, among many others, recounted the predicament of distressed towns across the United States and the growing socioeconomic, health, and identity crises of the marginalized postindustrial white American working class.
Those who were attracted to the Tea Party and other populist movements were reacting to, and hoping to counter and even reverse, the effects of economic crises and demographic changes. The populists’ supporters were also reacting to and seeking a salve for the intense emotions that these changes and challenges elicited. Major societal changes, especially when they happen rapidly and in combination, help fuel what celebrated scholars of the twentieth century like Fritz Stern called “cultural despair.” Cultural despair is the sense of loss, grievance, and anxiety that occurs when people feel dislocated from their communities and broader society as everything and everyone shifts around them. Especially when the sense of identity that develops from working in a particular job or industry, like my father’s image of himself as a coal miner, also recedes or is abruptly removed, people lose their grasp of the familiar. They can then easily fall prey to those who promise to put things—including jobs, people, or even entire countries—back in “their rightful place.”
Stern was looking at the confluence of economic and social developments that engendered National Socialism in Germany in the 1920s and 1930s, after World War I and during the Great Depression. But his observations are universal and help to explain why the appeal of populists spiked when it did.
Separate and Unequal
Americans at the dawn of the twenty-first century could be excused for feeling a particularly acute despair. By early 2020, inequality in the United States had grown to such an extent that it mirrored the circumstances of the 1930s even more than my experience of the 1980s. The facts were sobering. Every newspaper and book that I picked up described how incomes had stagnated for all but the top 10 percent, which was where I now fell, thanks to my opportunities for higher education and career advancement since 1989. Fewer than 8 percent of American children from the bottom fifth of the income pile could reasonably expect to make their way to the top, as I had.
The United States also had the most persistent and widespread poverty rates among similar countries. Poverty experts noted that almost 60 percent of Americans aged twenty to seventy-five nationally—across all urban, suburban, and rural areas—could expect to spend at least one year below the official poverty line. The negative statistical divergence in individuals’ incomes and their life outcomes could even be traced directly on a graph to 1980, around the time when I started my own journey out of poverty in the UK.
Race in the United States added an extra and distinct dimension of disadvantage for poor Americans. In some research, American fathers passed on about 50 percent of their income advantage to their sons. Generational wealth had a major impact on children’s prospects, as was the case for me back in the United Kingdom. But in the United States, the average Black family had ten times less accumulated wealth than the average white family. And they were far less likely to own a home. This was often due to the legacy and persistence of restrictive zoning laws, tax code biases, and mortgage lending prohibitions dating from before the 1960s and the Civil Rights Act.
Within and across generations, inequality, poverty, and discrimination shape an individual’s prospects for wealth and prosperity—and health and well-being. While the United States has the largest health-care spending of any country, life expectancy has fallen for lower-income Americans in the past two decades. In 2019, only the well-insured rich lived seven years longer than they used to. Thirty million people had no health insurance, and many more were classed as underinsured.
Every analysis of health discrepancy further underscored that much of this inequality was rooted in education—or rather the lack of access to a good education or higher education. Those without a college degree were the hardest hit by every negative metric. Americans without a college degree tended to be concentrated in rural areas, traditional Black communities, and urban areas that had lost the previous mainstays of their economies, where the tax base and house values plummeted and educational, health, and other basic services were degraded.
The North East of England had a parallel experience when I was growing up in the 1970s and 1980s and the major industries closed. Just as I had seen drugs and alcohol consume Britain and Russia in the 1980s and 1990s, the United States was engulfed by the opioid crisis after mass closures hit the U.S. coal, steel, and manufacturing sectors. As the basic welfare provisions and safety net—initially enshrined in President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal to reconstruct the U.S. after the Great Depression of the 1930s—were steadily chipped away, colleagues at the Brookings Institution and leading American economists catalogued the “deaths of despair” from the loss of personal identity tied to meaningful jobs and the death toll from poor access to basic medical care.
In short, the economic geographies of both the United Kingdom and the United States were askew. Wealth and opportunity were concentrated in certain cities and postal codes. They were no longer spread around. And although white American families in aggregate terms had more wealth and assets and better health, this was in large part because their numbers were greater in the population, and because upper-income whites tended to be so much richer and better off on every measure than everyone else.
National statistics masked the plight of poor whites in America’s forgotten towns and deindustrialized regions. They had far more in common with Black and other minority group Americans than they might have thought. Inequality was a calamity for all the lower income brackets of the U.S. population. Americans were suffering regardless of their race.
The UN Arrives
In the 1980s in Bishop Auckland, we were well aware of the calamity that had befallen us. Dad had joked that we needed to call in the United Nations to take a look at Roddymoor and all the other godforsaken parts of the North East. In fact, thirty years later and a decade after the Great Recession, both the UK and the U.S. governments did invite the UN to come in as part of a larger UN investigation into poverty and human rights. By this time conditions in parts of both countries mirrored the deprivation when I was growing up in Bishop Auckland, and in some places were even worse.
In the UK, ten years of austerity policies, imposed by the Conservative Party government to stabilize the macroeconomy after the global financial crisis and the Great Recession, had slashed local council budgets. Government policies had also further eroded the postwar safety nets, already under assault from Margaret Thatcher in the 1980s, in the process exacerbating the North East’s by now deeply entrenched economic and social crisis. Can you even be in a state of permanent crisis? Dad used to wonder back in the 1980s. When does that just become normal life rather than something that’s going to go away or be solved? By the start of the 2020s, the state of crisis was indeed normal life for some people.
The UN named Philip Alston, an Australian independent expert on human rights law and a professor at New York University, as special rapporteur on extreme poverty for the UN high commissioner on human rights. In the UK, Alston was specifically asked to examine the impact of the government’s social service cuts since 2010 on the country’s most vulnerable populations. He visited the North East of England as well as other deprived regions. And what he found there was brutal—a crisis reminiscent of that of Russia in the 1990s, when the whole country had fallen off a cliff and spiraled into poverty after the dissolution of the Soviet Union.
The budgetary retreat from the UK’s postwar welfare system had had the same effect on the country’s most vulnerable regions and populations as the USSR’s wholesale collapse and ten years of shock therapy. Indeed, the policies of the post–Great Recession British and post-Soviet Russian governments were similar, as were their goals: cut government spending to the bare minimum, restore fiscal discipline, and hopefully, eventually, at some point, boost the country’s economic competitiveness.
When Professor Alston showed up in the UK in 2018, austerity policies had left the unlucky generations in Bishop Auckland subsisting on handouts from community crisis centers and food banks, including one in the Woodhouse Close Community Church, where my elderly mother volunteered. Some parts of the neighborhood around the church had been recorded among the most deprived and destitute areas in the UK for decades, certainly since the 1970s and 1980s. Mam would recount weekly stories of desperation that reminded her of some of the worst living conditions she had seen as a midwife in her early days on the district in Teesside in the 1950s, immediately after World War II. At least ninety local families, and at times as many as six hundred people individually, were dependent on the center and its limited resources for some kind of social and economic assistance.
According to Professor Alston’s report from his UK visit, 20 percent of the British population—fourteen million people—were living in poverty, with 1.5 million facing absolute destitution (subsisting on less than £10, or about $13, a day). Around 30 percent of the nation’s children, in his assessment, were living in relative or absolute poverty. Professor Alston noted that during his interviews he had heard harrowing tales of homelessness and suicide provoked by poverty and despair.
The UN rapporteur commended voluntary organizations like Woodhouse Close Community Church for stepping in to help address this crisis, but he also urged immediate state action. His conclusion was that almost a decade of deliberate government disinvestment in the UK’s social safety net had created a colossal social and political crisis. This could not be overcome by existing employment opportunities in places like the North East of England. Something new and drastic would have to be done in order to rescue Britain’s neediest from a state of permanent crisis.
Professor Alston conducted a similar visit to the United States and several other countries between 2017 and 2019. In the U.S. he noted the roughly thirty million people living in relative poverty. He observed that, unlike other Western and European countries (including the UK after World War II), the United States did not enshrine citizens’ access to health care or housing as a basic right. In an October 2019 interview with the International Bar Association, Professor Alston stated his conclusion that “in terms of social mobility, the sad reality of the ‘Great American Dream’ . . . is that statistically the U.S. is less [socially] mobile than almost any other developed country.” There were so many impediments to moving from a low-income group to another in the U.S.—ranging from poor health and inadequate health care to unequal access to food, limited job opportunities in blighted regions, and the consequences of accidents and sheer bad luck—that it was almost impossible to do it alone.
Professor Alston also drew a direct link, in both the United States and the United Kingdom, between poverty and a poor education. The two were inextricably intertwined—a lesson that I had absorbed firsthand during my upbringing in County Durham, and which I was reminded of each time I returned on a visit to the land of my birth.
Unteachable?
In the early 2000s, wanting to give something back in return for all the educational opportunities that I had benefited from in both the U.S. and the UK, I served as the president of the St. Andrews American Foundation. This is an alumni and donor body, established to raise money to help less privileged American students attend the university in Scotland. But my tenure on the foundation ended up highlighting the disadvantages that students face even after gaining admission to elite universities such as St. Andrews—and the level of intervention required to assist them.
For part of my tenure, beginning in 2009, the principal of St. Andrews was Louise Richardson, an Irish political scientist, former professor at Harvard, and executive dean of the Radcliffe Institute of Advanced Study. Dr. Richardson left St. Andrews to become the chancellor of Oxford University in 2015. We had overlapped at Harvard in the 1990s, but I had not had much interaction with her until my time on the St. Andrews American Foundation.
One conversation with Dr. Richardson stuck with me. While access to the university had improved for students from comprehensive schools and less economically advantaged backgrounds since I had graduated in 1989, I wondered what the university was doing to recruit more low-income students. I put this question to Dr. Richardson, who was, I thought at the time, surprisingly dismissive of the general endeavor. She noted that St. Andrews had in fact stepped up its recruitment efforts, but in her experience, low-income students struggled when they got to St. Andrews. They often dropped out.
Dr. Richardson went on to explain that the university had had to lower its standards and make extra accommodations because low-income state school students’ grades and general grasp of their chosen subject matter often weren’t “good enough” in the first instance for them to be admitted. They were simply not prepared for college, she asserted. When I suggested (feeling somewhat affronted, given my own background and experience) that this might be because of deficiencies in their secondary school education, Dr. Richardson countered that it should not be the role of St. Andrews, or universities in general, to fix the problems of the UK secondary school system. This was the responsibility of the central government and local education authorities.
Dr. Richardson in fact made a valid point. She was highlighting a persistent problem in the elementary and secondary school system in the UK, and by extension in the United States: children from disadvantaged backgrounds who make it into elite colleges often struggle because of a lack of preparation and support. I had learned this the hard way as a student in Bishop Auckland: just because an opportunity presented itself didn’t mean that I could necessarily seize it (like the chance to apply to Oxford). Dr. Richardson was right too in arguing that individual institutions would have considerable difficulty solving this problem on their own without leadership from the government.
The experience of one of my clever-lass cousins, Julia Magill, further underscores this problem—and also demonstrates the importance of government or some other form of sustained outside intervention to assist students in completing school and positioning themselves for further education. When the government (both local and central) does intervene on behalf of needy students, she showed, the results can be remarkable.
