When listening to Mr Biden’s acceptance speech I was reassured by its dignity and inclusiveness. These are surely desirable qualities in what an outsider observer might see as overheated politics. One phrase, however, I found jarring: ‘I sought this office to restore the soul of America. To rebuild the backbone of the nation — the middle class’. The priority given to the middle class was not new — Biden stressed it in speeches through the primaries and again as a candidate. And it is no doubt important. But when seen in the light of the passionate polarisation of the campaign, the closeness of the results and the continuing mutual antipathy of the supporters of each party, rebuilding the middle class seems an unlikely source of healing.
To this outsider, the source of the rage picked up and encouraged by President Trump in his social media and other communications lies less in the pressure endured by the middle class than in the exclusion from social participation of the working and lower classes. This group included people who had lost manufacturing jobs, lived in neighbourhoods characterised by poverty, lack of services and a high rate of addiction, lacked the education and skills necessary in order to find work in the digital era, and so lived without hope for the future. Their caricatures were captured on the photos of his supporters at protests: filled with rage, sometimes with guns and intimidating. They recalled the ‘mob’ so dreaded by earlier political observers in classical Greece and Rome.
These people, and a growing number of white collar workers, including people from minority cultures whose jobs were also threatened by technological change, were united in anger against the articulate and privileged people with a high education who worked in government and media and profited from the changes in society that disenfranchised others. The latter were seen to have no comprehension of the lives endured by people outside the large cities.
If this account is accurate, Biden’s project of rebuilding and restoring the security of the middle class, while admirable, will not touch the roots of alienation in American society. Indeed, it may only exacerbate it by further excluding people thrust into the underclass.
Any adequate policy must do more than deal with the living conditions of people on the margins of society and rescue those who have been newly excluded. It must also dismantle the engine that excludes, isolates people