The view of the top 20 percent income bracket: the great American twenty first century

  An interesting variable in U.S. elections is that the top 20 % does most of the talking - the media, the politicians, the "experts" - but the bottom 80 % does the deciding. The top 20 % is happy with their stocks, but appalled by Trump's boorishness. The bottom 80 % is unhappy with all of it.

For the top 20 percent, this has been a very good century. Their stock portfolios have made them rich. After an oopsy moment that spanned the 2007-2010 period, they were on the road to wealth once again, and have stayed on it for a remarkable 16 years.

Among those people, politics really is a return of the same: a sort of cartoon band of the same figures going around and around, and you could be fans of one or the other. And their political spokesmen - their pundits and pollers, their Nate Silvers and Matt Yglesiases - all agreed that what you do, if you do politics, is you looked at polls - to figure out what the underling class thought - and then you figured out messaging, and then the game went on. A serious game, absolutely removed from historical context or any perspective that would make the great 21st century they experienced as anything more than a grand success.

The 20 percent have had a lot of success slowing politics until it reflected this pivot: keep the means the wealthy use to get wealthier, and bend everything else to that. This is now called the Abundance ideology, before it was the third way, but its posiitional/class character is all about the same configuration.

The crushing of labor in the final stage of the Cold War and the post-Cold War neoliberalism created the social environment in which this 20 percent could talk aloud, one to the other, and call this politics. Now one part of this discourse is fraying - the alt-right is going back to its old openly racist, sexist, lbgt-phobic ways. The liberal gaze that once made overt racism a no-no even while instituting neo-Jim Crow jailing policies and the like has broken down. But the 20 percent is still having the best time.

Most of our analysis will continue to be milled by these people. But the collapse of the liberal gaze is a symptom that underneath, there are anxieties that all the stuff that was put away - for instance, the threat of an international labor movement, or the threat of street activism, etc. - are not so put away.

Oh Saul Alinsky - America turns its lonely eyes to you!

"The despair is there; now it's up to us to go in and rub raw the sores of discontent, galvanize them for radical social change. We'll give them a way to participate in the democratic process, a way to exercise their rights as citizens and strike back at the establishment that oppresses them, instead of giving in to apathy. We'll start with specific issues -- taxes, jobs, consumer problems, pollution -- and from there move on to the larger issues: pollution in the Pentagon and the Congress and the board rooms of the megacorporations. Once you organize people, they'll keep advancing from issue to issue toward the ultimate objective: people power. We'll not only give them a cause, we'll make life goddamn exciting for them again -- life instead of existence. We'll turn them on."