2017 ends tonight, and apparently a fair number of people in the U.S. are bidding it farewell with a grumbled "Good riddance."
You'd expect it from those who are at all left of center; for them, the only good parts of the past year were the ones where Congress couldn't get its shit together enough to enact key parts of the conservative agenda. But a significant portion of conservatives weren't impressed by the year's (lack of) accomplishments, while others were shocked by how thoroughly the Trump administration has succeeded the late Barnum & Bailey and Ringling Bros. Circus as the world's most head-spinning three-ring collection of sideshows. Neither populists nor economists are optimistic that the recently enacted tax "reform" plan will achieve anything its sponsors claim it will, other than pay off the legislators' most well-heeled campaign donors. The culture wars have been at fever pitch, and even outside the political realm, people feel things have been off; I've lost count of how many online writers have apologized for their lower word count for 2017 and blamed it on despondency over the course of modern events. (Seeing my own five-months-plus gap in writing here, I should probably avail myself of the same excuse...)
Older politics-watchers will remember when, back in 1979, rookie President Jimmy Carter proclaimed America was suffering from a national malaise; contrasting then and now makes me wonder what the modern equivalent would be if the same speech were given today: a national Lyme disease? America's bout of severe clinical depression?
I've written a lot here about my opinion that one way to cool down our political knife fights would be to shift the battlegrounds from the winner-take-all federal level to local forums where each community could separately tailor its solutions to its own needs and values. And I'll no doubt expand on that in the future. But let's face it: All that would do, even if we can accomplish it, is reduce the levels of political enmity — we'd be screaming at each other less, but we wouldn't actually solve any of the genuine problems we share, particularly the economic ones like how, in an increasingly automated world, we'll still have jobs tomorrow to pay the bills.
The definition of poverty keeps changing from generation to generation, at least on the level of "how much stuff can a poor person have" — where once it meant living and working on land you didn't own, huddled with your few possessions in a dirt-floor shack that you could be ejected from the moment you pissed off the local minor noble, now you can have a home with utilities, food, even your basic set of home electronics (TV, smartphone, etc.)1 and still not be making it. But it's still possible to define poverty in a way not connected to personal inventories: It's the state of having the literal necessities for survival but with little or no guarantee that you'll continue to have those necessities in the future. With "poverty" defined that way, "falling below poverty level" is better known as "dying" (you didn't have what you needed to survive), and you "get out of poverty" when you have a better than 50-50 likelihood of being able to maintain the necessities (e.g., you have a stable job and/or are confident you can get another one if that one goes away; you own some assets and have some rainy-day savings set aside, etc.)
Likewise, you can define being "wealthy" as the state where you're certain you have, and will continue to have, what you need to survive and can devote as much of your remainder of money, time and energy as you choose to nonsurvival activities ("I've always wanted a yacht. Now my only worry is how big a boat to get.")
In between those extremes is the multitude we call the middle class, the majority (at least in the Western world) of people, who have achieved some level of security in their survival, but not an absolute security. It's a very half-assed way to define such a large group — "those people who can't be described as either poor or rich" — but it's a very muddled group, with people whose biggest financial worry is not being able to afford imported stone for their countertops still likely to insist that they're middle-class too. (No, guys, check out how your income compares to national averages; with worries like that, you're probably at least in the top fifth of earners.) But one thing is a constant for this muddled "middle class" group: when times are good with no financial clouds on the horizon, they're able to prop up their security levels and indulge in their own nonsurvival activities (vacations, entertainment, not-strictly-functional goods like "nicer" furniture, etc.) But when those clouds start blotting out your sunlight, now you'll be worrying about how long and how well that job, those savings, your home equity and other assets will act as bulwarks against the total insecurity of poverty.
And a lot of people have been seeing dark clouds hovering in their financial skies for a good long time now. You want an explanation for the popularity of both Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders in the 2016 races — including the significant number of people who thought well of both of them — "increasing levels of insecurity among the electorate" is as good a reason as any of the other ones out there.
But even though voters have spent the past several years insisting to pollsters how important an issue the economy is for them, and showering candidates with more devotion than they deserve because they talk that economic talk, they're still waiting for the Powers That Be to finally acknowledge out loud that the status quo is showing cracks and that an entirely new political track may need to be taken. Instead it's the same old shticks: From the left, it's "Prop up the labor unions that hardly anyone even belongs to anymore; whip up some regulations that we lack the resources to enforce, so they'll only be good for pissing off employers and consumer financers; encourage people to leave their rusty, dying towns for our vibrant cities where, when they can't get jobs there either, they can sign up for free job retraining programs that have never had much in the way of demonstrated success. Now go away so we can worry about genuinely poor and downtrodden people some more." From the right, we're still getting "don't worry, we're funneling more money to rich businesspeople so they'll be more effective Job Creators and their money will revitalize the economy as it trickles down to you, even though the supply-side economic theories we use to prop this idea up haven't ever actually resulted in these outcomes. Now go away; we're busy figuring out other ways to remove your oppressive loser boot from the necks of the deservedly wealthy and ease the suffering you've caused them with your neediness."
This is not something that can be solved at local levels, not in an age where money, jobs and entire industries can hop around the country — hell, across the entire globe — in a way that the workforce will never be able to match. Well, maybe that's not entirely true. The rational, peaceful solutions we need are only possible on a national level. Unrest, riots and revolutions can happen wherever people are pissed off enough. It's happened in many different places and times when a population has thoroughly lost its sense of stability and security. How about we don't try to find out whether that can happen here and now?
1 People of Certain Socio-Political Persuasions point to these kinds of goods as a sign that the people who have them aren't really poor and are just conning the welfare agencies, or else as proof that the people are poor because they willingly mismanage what money they have. To the first argument, I'd just point out that you're obviously not the sort of person who's ever needed to walk in the door of the local Rent-A-Center to get some appliance for a low monthly rate that's payable forever, or to buy your stuff outside stores altogether ("I can sell you one of these TVs that just 'fell off a truck' for a real low price; whaddya say?"). To the second argument, of course many poor people mismanage money; where are they going to learn how to manage it well? Save that contempt for people who make a good chunk of cash and still mismanage it; there's no shortage of rich people who've fallen into, or flirted with, bankruptcy.
