Ronald Inglehart :
(From previous issue)
The problem is not aggregate growth in the economy. During these years, U.S. GDP increased significantly. So where did the money go? To the elite of the elite, such as the CEOs of the country’s largest corporations.
During a period in which the real incomes of even highly educated professionals, such as doctors, lawyers, professors, engineers, and scientists, were essentially flat, the real incomes of CEOs more than tripled. The pattern is even starker over a longer timeframe. In 1965, CEO pay at the largest 350 U.S. companies was 20 times as high as the pay of the average worker; in 1989, it was 58 times as high; and in 2012, it was 273 times as high.
Globalization is enabling half of the world’s population to escape subsistence-level poverty but weakening the bargaining position of workers in developed countries. The rise of the knowledge society, meanwhile, is helping divide the economy into a small pool of elite winners and vast numbers of precariously employed workers. Market forces show no signs of reversing these trends on their own. But politics might do so, as growing insecurity and relative immiseration gradually reshape citizens’ attitudes, creating greater support for government policies designed to alter the picture.
There are indications that the citizens of many countries are becoming sensitized to this problem. Concern over income inequality has increased dramatically during the past three decades. In surveys carried out from 1989 to 2014, respondents around the world were asked whether their views came closer to the statement “Incomes should be made more equal” or “Income differences should be larger to provide incentives for individual effort.” In the earliest polls, majorities in four-fifths of the 65 countries surveyed believed that greater incentives for individual effort were needed. By the most recent surveys, however, that figure had dropped by half, with majorities in only two-fifths of the countries favoring that. Over a 25-year period in which income inequality increased dramatically, publics in 80 percent of the countries surveyed, including the United States, grew more supportive of actions to reduce inequality, and those beliefs are likely to intensify over time.
New political alignments, in short, might once again readjust the balance of power between elites and masses in the developed world, with the emerging struggle being between a tiny group at the top and a heterogeneous majority below. For the industrial society’s working-class coalition to become effective, lengthy processes of social and cognitive mobilization had to be completed. In today’s postindustrial society, however, a large share of the population is already highly educated, well informed, and in possession of political skills; all it needs to become politically effective is the development of an awareness of common interest. Will enough of today’s dispossessed develop what Marx might have called “class consciousness” to become a decisive political force? In the short run, probably not, because of the presence of various hot-button cultural issues cutting across economic lines. Over the long run, however, they probably will, as economic inequality and the resentment of it are likely to continue to intensify.
It was the rise of postmaterialist values, together with a backlash against the changes that the postmaterialists spearheaded, that helped topple economic issues from their central role in partisan political mobilization and install cultural issues in their place. But the continued spread of postmaterialist values is draining much of the passion from the cultural conflict, even as the continued rise of inequality is pushing economic issues back to the top of the political agenda.
During the 2004 U.S. presidential election, for example, same-sex marriage was so unpopular in some quarters that Republican strategists deliberately put referendums banning it on the ballot in crucial swing states in the hope of increasing turnout among social conservatives in the middle and lower echelons of the income distribution. And they were smart to do so, for the measures passed in every case-as did virtually all others like them put forward from 1998 to 2008. In 2012, however, there were five new statewide referendums on the topic, and in four of them, the public voted in favor of legalization. Crosscutting cultural divisions still exist and can still divert attention from common economic interests, but the former no longer trump the latter as reliably as they used to. And the fact that not just all the Democrats but even several 2016 Republican presidential candidates have pledged to abolish the tax break on “carried interest” benefiting elite financiers might well be a portent of things to come.
The essence of modernization is the linkages among economic, social, ideational, and political trends. As changes ripple through the system, developments in one sphere can drive developments in the others. But the process doesn’t work in just one direction, with economic trends driving everything else, for example. Social forces and ideas can drive political actions that reshape the economic landscape. Will that happen once again, with popular majorities mobilizing to reverse the trend toward economic inequality? In the long run, probably: publics around the world increasingly favor reducing inequality, and the societies that survive are the ones that successfully adapt to changing conditions and pressures. Despite current signs of paralysis, democracies still have the vitality to do so.
(Ronald F. Inglehart is a political scientist at the University of Michigan.)
(Concluded)
