Dec 10, 2023
The 1950's and 60's were an age of widely shared prosperity in the U.S. — across class and economic lines — that have never quite returned. Things were improving for all parts of society during the post-war period, and for all groups including Black Americans, despite the real presence of racial bias and discrimination against them. And things have not improved equally in recent decades. Things have improved since then. But the rate of steady and ongoing improvement and progress has slowed in many ways, and stalled in some.
All this is the subject of today's episode, an interview with journalist David Leonhardt of the New York Times. You may know David from the daily newsletter for the Times that he writes, which is the Times' flagship newsletter, The Morning. David's new book is called "Ours Was the Shining Future: The Story of the American Dream." It was recently named one of the year's top 10 books by The Atlantic magazine.
"The economy has grown more slowly than it did in the postwar decades," Leonhardt writes, "producing less bounty for the population to share." And, he adds, "the economy has become more unequal, with a declining share of that bounty available to most Americans, because it is flowing to a relatively small percentage of affluent households" (xxiii).
This is a problem for democracy, Leonhardt writes. His book is one of several recently that are, together, sending a loud signal to Democrats that they have become too strident and purist in ways that alienate large numbers of voters who they need to win elections. These books are imploring Democrats to focus on helping working class voters economically and to cast a wider and more tolerant tent on social and cultural issues.
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