America's Condition: Progressively Worse

Rich Man Poor Woman by Vincent Rodriquez

Progressivism works! For the upper crust and the professional metrosexual class...

For the rest of us, it ain't so good. Obama has brought us more poverty and less people working. Despite this, progressivism appears to be surging ascendent, but Joel Kotkin says not so fast...

The Holy Places of urbanism such as New York, San Francisco, Washington DC also suffer some of the worst income inequality, and poverty, of any places in the country. (Kotkin)

He points out that progressives themselves contribute to John Edwards' Two Americas...

the now triumphant urban gentry have their townhouses and high-rise lofts, but the service workers who do their dirty work have to log their way by bus or car from the vast American banlieues, either in peripheral parts of the city (think of Brooklyn’s impoverished fringes) or the poorer close-in suburbs. This progressive economy works for the well-placed academics, the trustfunders and hedge funders, but produces little opportunity for a better life for the vast majority of the middle and working class.
(Kotkin)

Anyone who goes skiing here in Colorado can see this in the Latte Liberal ski areas. The cooks, janitors and other manual laborers cannot afford to live among the progressive snobocracy who purports to stand up for them, so they are relegated to little shanty towns of huddled together trailers or cramped, run-down apartments far from the sparkling slopes and trendy coffee shops they work at.

Kotkin goes on to caution progressives that unless they can deliver a good economy, jobs and upward mobility for the hoi polloi in the hinterlands, they too will be doomed. He notes that middle class and working class people are not moving to the progressive urban meccas, but rather...

... now tend towards low-cost, lower-density regions like Dallas-Fort Worth, Houston, Atlanta, Austin, Charlotte and Raleigh. Even while voting blue, they seem to be migrating to red places. Once there, one has to doubt whether they are simply biding their time for Oklahoma City to morph into San Francisco. 

In this respect, the class issue so cleverly exploited by the President in the election could prove the potential Achilles heel of today’s gentry progressivism. The Obama-Bernanke-Geithner economy has done little to reverse the relative decline of the middle and working class, whose their share of national income have fallen to record lows.

If you don’t work for venture-backed tech firms, coddled, money-for-nearly-free Wall Street or for the government, your income and standard of living has probably declined since the middle of the last decade. (Kotkin)

Mr. Kotkin issues a cautionary message, freely admitting that he could be wrong and America could indeed be turning indelibly blue, but all I know is that at some point Democrats are going to have to deliver. I predict that in four years they will still be blaming Bush, but Hope and Change voters, now 30-somethings with new families, won't be buying it anymore.