Divisions among Democrats are showing

Ideological splits among Republicans have been part of the fun of the American political fair for more than 50 years now, but what of potential divisions on the Left? When President Barack Obama departs the White House in 2016, the question already being asked is whether Democrats will now suffer the same kind of upheaval that the Tea Party inflicted on Republicans after George W. Bush left office in 2009.

Last week in Washington DC it was possible to hear the opening shots of what some left-wing Democrats hope will become a similarly fierce fight for the ideological soul of their own party. They were fired up by Elizabeth Warren, a banker-bashing Massachusetts senator who has been a darling of the American left ever since the financial crisis, when she championed the rights of let-down consumers over the bailed-out bankers.

A 65-year-old former Harvard law professor from working-class roots, Warren achieved sudden prominence in 2011 after a speech about how wealthy Americans owed much of their success to the state went viral online. But even by her strident standards, this 30-minute speech to a summit organised by the US labour unions’ umbrella group the AFL-CIO, was a doozy: Warren raged against rising wealth inequality, greedy bankers, stagnant wages and the establishment’s wholesale “rigging” of the system in the favour of the “one per cent”.

Quoting numbers that will be familiar to readers of Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century, she lamented that since 1980, the top 10 per cent of earners had taken 100 per cent of income-growth in the US. The bottom 10 per cent of earners got nothing.

But statistics alone can’t convey her bitter, insurgent tone: America’s middle class is in “deep trouble”, she warned, while blaming the rich who had “gobbled up” more than their share. She attacked Walmart, the stock-markets and the “big corporations” who “juiced short-term profits... at the expense of working families” and lashed out at both parties for three decades of tax-cuts and “voodoo economics” that had “rigged the game” against the ordinary Joe.

Politics of discontent

Bread and circuses this may be, and it is no doubt frustrating to Warren that America’s middle classes cannot seem to have their class-consciousness awakened, but those on the left who hope to foment an uprising are likely to be extremely disappointed. Incomes are stagnant, true, but that ignores the fact that well-being is often a relative thing.

Last week the Gallup US Standard of Living Index hit a seven-year high, with 81 per cent “satisfied” by their standard of living and 61 per cent saying that they believed it was “getting better”. Warren is not entirely wrong when she warns that the American dream is in “trouble” from rising education costs and falling social mobility. Her problem is that not enough of the American public want to believe her. The country’s ideological politics might be more starkly divided than ever, but on the question of the American dream, most Americans still believe they have a shot, even when far too many don’t.

— The Telegraph Group Limited, London 2015