Most Americans are optimistic about their futures—but poor and working-class whites are not. According to a recent analysis published by the Brookings Institution, poor Hispanics are almost a third more likely than their white counterparts to imagine a better future. And poor African Americans—who face far higher rates of incarceration and unemployment and who fall victim far more frequently to both violent crime and police brutality—are nearly three times as optimistic as poor whites. Carol Graham, the economist who oversaw the analysis, concluded that poor whites suffer less from direct material deprivation than from the intangible but profound problems of “unhappiness, stress, and lack of hope.” That might explain why the slogan of the Republican presidential candidate, Donald Trump—“Make America Great Again!”—sounds so good to so many of them. [...]
Trump also loves to tell his audiences that they are victims of a “rigged” political system that empowers elites at their expense. On that count, the evidence supports him. Consider, for example, the findings of a widely cited 2014 study by the political scientists Martin Gilens and Benjamin Page, who researched public opinion on approximately 1,800 policy proposals (as captured by surveys taken between 1981 and 2002) and found that only those ideas endorsed by the wealthiest ten percent of Americans became law. This domination of politics by economic elites has produced the de facto disenfranchisement of everyone else—a burden experienced by the entire remaining 90 percent, of course, but perhaps felt most acutely by those who have fallen the furthest. [...]
In Isenberg’s telling, the Puritan leader John Winthrop—whose image of the Massachusetts Bay Colony as a charitable, compassionate “city upon a hill” has become a leitmotif of American exceptionalism—was no democrat; rather, he was an elitist who felt no pity for the poor, whom he termed the “scum of the land.” Winthrop’s colony, Isenberg writes, was not an incubator of egalitarianism but a repressive, insular community obsessed with the maintenance of a class hierarchy. She also casts a critical eye on the ideas of a number of figures who shaped the American Revolution, including John Locke and Thomas Paine, who were both dismissive when it came to the plight of the poor. The central figure of early American mythology is the landowning yeoman, most prominently hailed by Thomas Jefferson. But during its first few decades of existence, the United States offered little to the poor and landless, scratching out lives on the margins.
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