The Peculiar Politics of American Insecurity

• In Event: Difference, Solidarity, and Redistribution in Twenty-First Century America

Abstract

The growing insecurity of American households is often seen as an exogenous economic change beyond political control—a result of deep shifts in technology, finance, and the global economy. We argue that, as important as these exogenous changes have been, the Great Risk Shift is to a very large extent a result of endogenous political and policy developments. Moreover, we suggest that many, though certainly not all, of these developments are specific to the United States—which is why both the politics and the experience of American insecurity stand out in cross-national perspective. In particular, we focus on three fundamental developments: (1) the erosion of America’s distinctive framework of social provision, which is uniquely reliant on private risk-pooling by employers—risk-pooling that has become less and less attractive to American business in a financialized, globalized economy with weak labor power; (2) the weakness of social solidarity and resonance of racial (rather than class) appeals in our increasingly geographically, racially, and politically polarized society; and (3) the growing extremism of the Republican Party, enabled and propelled by its capacity to maintain (at least until now) an uneasy “plutocratic-populist” coalition of upscale economic conservatives and downscale social conservatives. Understanding these three developments—the retrenchment of private provision, the resurgent impact of racial resentment, and the radicalization of the GOP—is essential to grasping not just how America insecurity arose but also whether it might yet be addressed.

Authors

• Jacob S. Hacker, Yale University

• Paul Pierson, University of California, Berkeley