Demonstrators with ShutDown DC hold a protest to promote the counting of all votes, in Washington, D.C., on Thursday. (Saul Loeb/Getty Images)
Despite U.S. President Donald Trump’s brazen attempts to lie, cheat and bully his way into a second term, the 2020 presidential election has demonstrated that America is changing and that a once silent and oppressed segment of society is finally finding its voice.
John Kenneth Galbraith — the late, great Canadian-born economist — observed in his 1992 treatise, “The Culture of Contentment,” the majority of Americans who actually bother to vote tend to be “economically and socially fortunate.” And Galbraith dubbed this group of politically engaged Americans the “contented electoral majority.” He pointed out that while they do not make up the majority of people who are entitled to vote, these privileged people consistently vote and therefore “rule under the rich cloak of democracy in which the less fortunate do not participate.”
While income tends to define the contented electoral majority, they are not a homogenous bloc. “It includes the people who manage or otherwise staff the middle and upper reaches of the great financial and industrial firms, independent businessmen and businesswomen and those whose compensation is more or less guaranteed,” wrote Galbraith, who became a U.S. citizen in 1937 and eventually served in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations.
The contented electoral majority also includes the modern professional class, such as doctors, lawyers, scientists, engineers, accountants, etc. Galbraith also placed some working-class families with dual incomes within the contented electoral majority, because they “find life reasonably secure.” In addition, he maintained that those farmers who receive government subsidies and price supports are also members of the contented electoral majority.
According to Galbraith, the privileged classes display their anger “only when there is a threat or possible threat to present well-being and future prospect — when government and the seemingly less deserving intrude or threaten to intrude on their needs or demands.” And the contented electoral majority is especially prone to evident displays of anger “if such action suggests higher taxes.”
However, Galbraith acknowledged that some members of the privileged classes “look beyond personal contentment to a concern for those who do not share in the comparative well-being.” This altruistic group perceives “the more distant dangers that will result from a short-run preoccupation with individual comfort.”
Despite the altruism of the minority within the dominant group, Galbraith concluded that “self-regard is, and predictably, the dominant, indeed the controlling mood of the contented majority.” And he asserted the group’s selfishness becomes evident when public action on behalf of the have-nots is at issue, because such action is “invariably” underwritten by the taxpayer. “Accordingly, it is regularly resisted as a matter of high, if sometimes rather visibly contrived principle,” he observed.
Characteristics
The contented electoral majority is defined by a number of characteristics, including “its affirmation that those who compose it are receiving their just deserts,” Galbraith explained. However, he noted that there are journalists, scholars and dissidents who advocate on behalf of the disadvantaged — “often from positions of relative personal comfort.” As a result, this political advocacy brings them into conflict with the contented electoral majority.
“But they are not a serious threat to the electoral majority,” Galbraith wrote of those who engage in advocacy. In fact, their dissent tends to legitimize a democratic system controlled by society’s fortunate members. “Their writing and rhetoric give hope to the excluded and, at a minimum, assure that they are not both excluded and ignored.”
Another characteristic of the contented electoral majority is its preference for long-run commitments over immediate action. “The cost of today’s action falls or could fall on the favoured community; taxes could be increased,” Galbraith said. “The ruling elite instead tend to prefer symbolic action to problems, such as climate change,” Galbraith wrote 28 years ago.
A third characteristic is that the contented electoral majority tend to view government as a burden. “The need to lighten or remove this burden and therewith, agreeably, the supporting taxes is an article of high faith for the comfortable or contented majority.”
The final characteristic of the contented electoral majority is its tolerance of income disparities in society. Galbraith reasoned that “the price of prevention of any aggression against one’s own income is tolerance of the greater amount for others.” Indeed, he pointed out that “indignation at, and advocacy of, redistribution of income from the very rich, inevitably by taxes, opens the door for consideration of higher taxes for the comfortable but less endowed.” And any protest from the fortunate class “could only focus attention on the far inferior position of the lower half.”
Galbraith concluded that the privileged positions of the contented electoral majority is “supported and enhanced by the presence in the modern economy of a large, highly useful, even essential class that does not share in the agreeable existence of the favoured community.” And he referred to the less fortunate as the “functional underclass.”
Health and economic crises
The global COVID-19 pandemic has pushed the United States to the brink of mass death and a second Great Depression. Almost overnight, the U.S. economy contracted and tens of millions of people lost their jobs — and their employment-linked health-care plans. Out-of-work Americans, unable to afford groceries, have turned to food banks in record numbers in order to survive.
In the early spring of 2020, it was apparent, even to the reluctant Republican-controlled U.S. Senate, that the government had to step in and offer extraordinary social assistance to a nation on its knees. However, as the worst public health crisis in over a century wore on, the Republican majority made it clear that it was not interested in authorizing another round of massive fiscal stimulus and/or social assistance for Americans hit hard by the economic consequences of the pandemic. The Democratic-controlled House of Representatives put a stimulus bill forward for the Senate’s consideration in the summer, but Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell refused to even consider it.
Viewed through the lens of Galbraith’s analysis, the Senate’s refusal to pass a pandemic relief bill before the election reaffirmed the contented electoral majority’s commitment to avoiding additional public expenses incurred on behalf of the less fortunate in American society.
Election controversy
The 2020 elections marked a turning point in both U.S. politics and society — an American reckoning after hundreds of years of systemic racism and economic disparities. The elections witnessed an estimated 100 million Americans cast their votes in advance — either through in-person voting or by mail-in ballots — an American electoral record.
The pandemic, which had killed approximately 237,000 Americans by voting day, did not stop the functional underclass from casting their ballots. It is probably no coincidence that working-class people, who do not have the luxury of working from home during the worst public health crisis in over a century, risked their health in order to have their voices heard.
As Galbraith noted, the so-called underclass is essential to the modern economy. And this is especially true during the current pandemic. Society is dependent on the labour of grocery store clerks, truck drivers, cleaners and many other blue-collar heroes. They take huge risks for very little money and less than generous government assistance. And Black and Latinex workers make up much of the poorly paid underclass.
It is clear that America’s much-neglected and abused underclass was determined to force their concerns onto the national agenda by voting in the elections during a tumultuous era defined by a virus that has disproportionately sickened and killed racialized minorities and lower-income people in the United States. And this unsettled period has also been defined by a popular movement demanding an end to police brutality, systemic racism and inequality.
It is clear that Trump and the Republicans represent the interests of the contented electoral majority. And it was that privileged bloc of white voters that made Trump competitive against Democratic nominee Joe Biden in the 2020 race for the White House. During Trump’s first term, the Republicans advanced tax cuts for the very wealthy, weakened environmental regulations in order to benefit corporations, and pushed a law and order agenda that maintained the status quo.
It was not surprising that Trump and the Republicans used every dirty trick, legislative tactic and legal manoeuvre to make it harder for the vulnerable and marginalized to cast their votes. Voter suppression is an anti-democratic strategy used by the GOP to maintain the supremacy of the contented electoral majority.
Voter suppression tactics, combined with Trump’s pandering to the fears of the white middle class, seemed to be somewhat effective, helping the president, whose bungled pandemic response has caused hundreds of thousands deaths, remain within striking distance of possibly winning a second term. In other words, Trump understood and exploited the selfish interests and anxieties of the contented electoral majority.
While the votes were still being counted and the election results remained uncertain, Trump delivered a chilling speech from the White House. It was after two o’clock in the morning on Nov. 4 when the president of the United States declared that he was the winner of the election and demanded that the counting of ballots be halted.
Count the votes
“Let’s count the votes,” CNN journalist John King declared on air after Trump’s speech. “This is the United States, not Belarus. Let’s count the votes.”
King speaks for everyone who believes in democracy. If the United States is what it claims to be — the world’s greatest democracy and not a dictatorship like Belarus — all the ballots must be counted. The day after the Nov. 3 election, CBS News reported that Biden had received “70,470,207 votes (50.3 per cent of the total), and counting, in the 2020 election” — the most votes ever cast for a presidential candidate in U.S. history. At the time of writing, Biden was on the brink of winning the 270 Electoral College votes necessary to secure the presidency.
In the fullness of time, regardless of who is declared the winner, the dominance of the contented electoral majority will eventually come to an end. As demographic shifts change the face of America, the electoral power of privileged whites will decline as Black and brown people become increasingly engaged in the political process.
In the meantime, health care, racism, inequality and police brutality will remain on the political agenda, thanks to the activism of the functional underclass, which has gained political consciousness and has finally begun to exercise its political power.
The American reckoning is upon the contented electoral majority.
Follow Geoffrey P. Johnston on Twitter @GeoffyPJohnston.
