This just in: The History Matters

So Nate Silver's fivethirtyeight.com just published these two really groovy charts, and they are so nifty that I felt I had to share them with you...and talk about what I see.

Check these out! First is a chart of the shifting balance of power in the Senate since 1924:


Source: https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/2018-midterm-election-forecast/senate/?ex_cid=rrpromo

And then the same thing, only for the House of Representatives:


Source: https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/2018-midterm-election-forecast/house/?ex_cid=rrpromo

Now they* say there are "lies, damned lies and statistics", but numbers do tell a compelling tale, and it is hard not to arrive at some kind of conclusion from them.

The Big Blue Bump between 1930 and 1948 is of course the Great Depression and WWII, when Americans roundly rejected the GOP, for the obvious reason that their leadership had brought on the Depression in the first place. 

Clearly that was an anomaly...except we should note that it was those same Democrat-controlled houses of Congress that tried to force a balanced budget in the mid-1930s, which brought the recovery to a crashing halt. Austerity has not always been solely a Republican thing!

But check this out: Between 1954 and 1994 (beginning in the midst of the longest era of sustained economic growth and prosperity in American history), Congress was mostly dominated by the Democrats — the House completely and the Senate for all but a brief patch there during Reagan.

This is significant in a couple of ways. 

For one thing, the history of the GOP has been one of resisting stereotypically "liberal" policies such as the social safety net, environmental protection, civil rights and so on. These charts suggest that such "Democratic" policies, have historically been very popular among most Americans.

AND YET, it was during Reagan's term that the huge shift of wealth out of the hands of the middle class and into the Upper Crust began. Economists cite 1980 as the year when income and wealth disparity shifted into high gear, while wages for the middle and working classes went into neutral. 

Democrats controlled the House during Reagan's term, and yet they went along with a gigantic sell-off of the American Dream! 

Now since 1994, both houses have been considerably redder. The GOP has had unprecedented control of Congress since Clinton, riding on nonsensical rhetoric like "fiscal responsibility" (which in fact has meant continuing to hand the economy over to the super-wealthy) and "traditional values" and "making America great again".

Has this led to any slackening of the pace of decline in most Americans' standard of living? Far from it!

But notice also that the worst of it has not been only a Republican project. The stage was set in the early 80s, with a divided Congress, and periods of Democratic control since then have not led to any stemming of the tide of thievery. The middle class is effectively gone; the super-wealthy now control ungodly amounts of wealth and income — the worst such situation since the Gilded Age of the late 1800s (when there were almost no restraints on Capital), and by far the worst of any of the industrialized nations today.**

Clearly it is a very bad idea to vote GOP if your income is less than, say, $250,000/year. They are not looking at you — they are looking at your pockets.

But don't imagine for a moment that a Blue Wave will automatically return America to the days of shared prosperity, when the American Dream was within reach of tens of millions of us.

The problem is bigger, much bigger than we want to admit.



* This was not Mark Twain, by the way: https://www.york.ac.uk/depts/maths/histstat/lies.htm.
** https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-american-economy-is-rigged/?fbclid=IwAR2CVSy5Pp35CLM6pEC9wm3NzZL88YJPI9-9ItygZG8Jf5qVpnQKmrTAzb4