What Elon Musk reaching trillionaire status says about America ｜ The Excerpt

Elon Musk becoming the world's first trillionaire is the kind of milestone that says something about making it in America. After all, this is a country that's long celebrated outsized success, but it's impossible to ignore. This moment arrives when many working Americans say simply affording a home feels out of reach. What happens when the promise of opportunity becomes less certain in a country built on the idea of opportunity? Hello, and welcome to USA Today's The Excerpt. I'm Dana Taylor. For a look at what happens to faith in democratic institutions as unprecedented wealth becomes more concentrated, I'm joined by Susan Stokes, the Distinguished Service Professor of Political Science at the University of Chicago and Director of the Chicago Center on Democracy. So good to have you here, Susan. Thank you. It's lovely to be here, Dana. The trillionaire headline is striking, but is the bigger story about the reality of staggering economic success challenging the legitimacy of democracy? At what point does extraordinary wealth become a political issue rather than just an economic one? So there's a phenomenon around the world of which we call democratic erosion or democratic backsliding, where people elect a prime minister or president who then undermines their own democracies, badmouthing the press, harassing, undermining independence of the courts, undermining confidence in elections, and so on. And those kinds of leaders are more prone to be elected, more prone to be in power in democracies where income is very, very polarized, very unequal. The scale of private power is off the charts. When private fortunes become large enough to shape markets and public policy, how should democracies think about accountability? It's hard to have accountability when there are, in reality, people whose wealth is so vast that they can protect themselves from accountability. Of course, if they commit crimes, it's always the possibility that they will be prosecuted and so forth. But the reality is that great wealth tends to translate into protection, a lack of accountability. 20 or 25 of the most wealthy individuals have the wealth at the equivalent of half of the American population. So that's an enormous level of income inequality. The level of income inequality in the United States today makes us look much more like Brazil than France. I want to stick with that. I think it's important that we don't start and stop with Elon Musk and looking at what the current distribution of wealth in America actually looks like and just how wide is the gap, not only between the wealthy and the rest of us, but the wealthy, the middle class, and then those struggling to get by. Those gaps are wide and they've become wider. And again, this is not just the U.S., the wealth gaps, which we generally measure with something called the Gini Index, those wealth gaps have grown since about the 1980s in many advanced industrial countries. But they've become more gaping in the U.S. than in many other countries because, in part, we do less to use our tax system and social policy to close those gaps. So it's harder and harder for people to see their way from a lot of Americans just barely getting by to even a sort of stable middle class existence, much less thinking about moving from the middle class to a kind of affluent class. And unfortunately, the impact of the very wealthy on democratic politics, it goes in different directions. But many of the very wealthy are somewhat hostile toward inclusion, toward participation, people who they view as much less confident than themselves and are sometimes openly hostile toward democracy itself. Susan, when distinguishing between inequality backed by data and people's perceptions of fairness, how important is it that we believe the system gives ordinary people an honest chance at getting ahead? It's very important. And of course, those two things sort of go together. That is, if you live in a place where the gaps are really, really large, and you're sort of on the bottom of those extremes, you're going to view your chances of ascending as perhaps less plausible than in a country where the gaps aren't so large and there's more possibility of upward mobility. We have stories of rags to riches, and we have a kind of national self-image as a place where people can work hard and make their way up. But in fact, income class mobility or socioeconomic strata mobility in the United States is not very good. We actually have a country in which it's not that easy. Even if you work very hard and save and do all the right things, you often will be set back by things like medical debt or bad luck of some kind to where all that hard work is for naught. So it's the source of a great deal of frustration. Now, the political world can channel that frustration in different directions. And one of the things that we see, and this is a longstanding aspect of American political culture, is we have politicians who direct our frustration at the lack of upward mobility or competition for jobs at certain groups, ethnic minorities, racial minorities, immigrants. So instead of their pushing for maybe a more equitable kind of tax burden, a more progressive tax system, people who would benefit from such a system, their kind of attention can be directed toward a kind of anti-immigrant sentiment or resentment against racial minorities, or it's been well-documented in this country that there are a fair amount of resentment against a sort of mythical idea of a woman who's upwardly mobile because she's had access to education that others haven't had. Many are now entering adulthood during a period of enormous wealth creation. And yet, as I mentioned, housing and long-term financial security feel increasingly out of reach. How is that shaping expectations about opportunity and the overall economy in America? So our young people face enormous challenges. I have three sons myself, and I know how it looks to them. They're facing uncertain job market. There's a lot of uncertainty about the impact of AI on the structure of the labor markets. There's a lot of uncertainty about climate change and the impact that it may be having, and of course, the economy and the threat of inflation, which is something that Americans didn't face really very seriously until after the pandemic. And I think what we see is that young people have different reactions to these uncertainties. Some of them become much more interested in politics. Others feel a kind of growing cynicism or kind of skepticism about the institutions around them. They see them as poised against them. They see them as elitist and kind of blocking their access. They are very sensitive to corruption, to powerful people not playing by the rules. I was very struck by the whole World Cup controversy over the red card of the World Cup player, the American World Cup player, and that I just from conversations that I heard around campus and in my own household, there was a sense of, oh, you know, yet again, the fix is in and they're powerful people who can make their way in the world by not playing by the rules. Your research explores why some voters become more receptive to leaders who challenge democratic norms. What did you find? Well, it's really interesting. I think it would be a mistake to look at the United States or the world around us and think, well, people are supporting apparently very kind of aggrandizing in terms of their power leaders because they don't believe in democracy anymore. That is not mostly what we find. There is still continued support for democracy as a system of government. But people are open to the argument that particular institutions and their democracies are corrupt, don't work well, are kind of pitted against them. Income inequality can contribute to their openness to that point of view. So they think of themselves as good Democrats, but they think of themselves as supporting leaders who are going to kind of clean out the system, burn it all to the ground and start over and presumably have a better democracy. Susan, can you share some of the clearest signals that in terms of wealth distribution, we're living in a healthy democracy? You know, it's interesting. I published a book last year called The Backsliders, which traces the kind of explains why we're seeing democratic erosion around the world. One of the interesting, important findings is that income inequality is a part of that story. And what I've found very interesting is that when you look closely at certain countries, they also have experienced a dramatic rise in income inequality, but they experience what we call market inequality. So what people are paid from their jobs can become very unequal. But then there's what we call post-fisc inequality, which is basically what is distribution of income look like after taxes have been collected and after social benefits of various kinds, government programs have been paid out. And in the United States, the latter doesn't do as much to correct for inequality in the former. That is, we don't use social and fiscal policy to correct for market inequality. Whereas in a country like Sweden, which I look at very closely, they also have seen the rise of income inequality, but government policy of various kinds is used to really tamp that down and to make people's felt existence much more equal. And then what are the warning signs that people are beginning to lose faith that the system will work for themselves and for the next generation? People are much more skeptical about political institutions. They're skeptical. They've lost confidence in the courts. They've lost confidence in Congress. They lose confidence in the press. They lose confidence in non-political organizations, in banks, in private companies, in universities, you name it. So I think that growing kind of almost nihilism, almost generalized skepticism, which can be very demobilizing and leave people just kind of isolated and insulated from the world around them and from collective action or just retreating into their very private lives. I think that's a sign of a not particularly healthy democracy. Now, let me add quickly that I don't think that's entirely where we are in the United States. I think we have a pretty healthy civil society and very active organizations and social movements and people remain very curious and they're anxious to find out about what's going on in the world. And so I think that it's a mixed picture. I think we have signs of an unhealthy democracy in that there is skepticism and cynicism and people turning off or people becoming more open to violence in political life. That's been a fact as well. But on the other hand, we have a very active civil society. Should we see today's levels of wealth concentration as simply a recurring challenge for democracies or as something genuinely new? The level of income concentration in the United States today is extreme. I would be surprised if it's not more extreme than even the period that we call the Gilded Age, where, you know, the sort of emerging fortunes around the turn of the 19th to 20th century and the early 20th century when you had great fortunes and you didn't have much of a taxation system. We're at a very extreme level today, really very extreme. And one of the things that's additionally of concern is that we have deregulated the involvement of money in politics. So we have, compared to other advanced democracies, very little control over campaign spending and donations. So that the combination of very extreme income inequality with very few weak regulatory controls of money in politics make for a very challenging scene on the ground in the United States today. It's fair to say we've historically been willing to tolerate significant inequality in part, as you mentioned, because of a belief in upward mobility. What happens when fewer people believe they'll ever catch up or ever have a shot at the American dream? Well, it's not a good thing. It's not a good thing when people lose hope, and particularly when they lose hope in the idea, maybe not that they need to become uber wealthy, you know, millionaires or billionaires. Of course, there are people, I know young people who have an ambition and more power to them. But if they lose their confidence in being able to live a decent middle class life, save for retirement, educate their children, own a home, be able to, you know, cover their costs and have some left over, if all those things really become untenable for large numbers of people, that is not a good thing. But I would also, just going back to the question of our tolerance for inequality and for the idea that a kind of rags to riches story is part of what animates our optimism historically, it's interesting that Americans' openness to higher levels of taxation on wealthy people has increased in recent years. Public opinion surveys indicate that Americans are more supportive of the idea of having very wealthy people pay, you know, substantial percentage of their wealth. In part, I think the extreme wealth gives people the sense that, you know, what can somebody do with that much money? You know, how many Ferraris can you own? And so it makes sense to have some of that sort of channeled back into programs, policies, and really for people who really are struggling. Appreciate your time, Susan. It was wonderful speaking with you today. Thank you so much, Dana. I appreciate your time, too. Thanks for watching. I'm Dana Taylor. I'll see you next time.