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I am interrupting my series of essays on the history of the responsible business movement to make one point about the election results last week. Many of my closest friends are wringing their hands asking how America could elect a misogynist, racist, and convicted criminal as president. I share their disgust but I fear ethics and justice may actually have triumphed on an entirely different level. As many others have noted, economic change in the U.S. over the past 50 years has left a majority of Americans behind. While we have minted numerous billionaires and a highly educated professional class which enjoys lifestyles previously unknown in America, the incomes of 80% of Americans have stagnated and even declined. The 80% have faced loss of jobs, declining incomes and opportunity, and the erosion of hope for their children’s lives. The middle class has been hollowed out as mining and manufacturing jobs and opportunities for non-college workers have evaporated. The Democratic party, long the advocate for American workers, failed to protect the 80%, and many of those now vote for Republicans. Aid for remaindered miners and manufacturing workers has been meager. The educated class celebrated as their incomes soared and considered themselves the first “citizens of the world,” unmoored from local communities they grew up in. The 80% who remained saw their communities, their own economic prospects, and their children’s hopes erode. I believe it is possible that the growing income inequality of the 1975-2025 period may come to be seen as a second “Original Sin” of the American system. We have arguably finally made progress against the first original sin of slavery and racial discrimination. But we have not found the will to make progress against the inequality caused by accelerating economic and technological change and by the deliberate policies of the already wealthy. At the same time that we have added “equity” to our advocacy for DEI, we have been blind to the larger glaring inequity in front of us. The Democratic Party’s argument that the American economy and the stock market are robust, and that inflation is almost under control, fell on deaf ears, even for the Hispanic and Black voters who surprisingly voted for Trump in greater numbers than in 2016 and 2020. They identify more with the 80%, those left out of the global economy, than they do with their racial or immigrant origins. From an ethics standpoint, it is hard to understand how so many chose a deeply flawed Donald Trump as the vehicle for their protest, but they did. Despite Biden’s attempts to address the inequality through educational loan forgiveness, clean energy and chip incentives, it looked like too little too late. Bread and meat prices are still high, and many can no longer afford the weekly family dinner out. Enough voters simply could not vote for more of the same, more of their own families falling behind. That is the legacy of our second original sin. I know there is almost no chance a second Trump administration will make the lives of the 80% any better. It seems likely his plans for curtailing health insurance, for deporting immigrants, for eroding women’s rights, and for tax policies further favoring the rich will actually make their lives worse. But voting for him was one of the few chances they had to seize our attention to the inequity of today’s America. The challenge for all of us during the next four years is to develop policies and a vision of an America that renews the opportunities of those displaced by economic and technological change, a vision that keeps American workers employed at increasingly sophisticated jobs, that keeps communities together, and restores the 80%’s hope that their children’s lives can be better than their own. Meanwhile, we have the renewed challenge to fight the racism, sexism and discrimination unleashed by the election of a man such as Trump. Whichever party rises to these two challenges will be rewarded with electoral majorities in the future. There will come a moment during the next four years when the 80% will realize Trump’s policies have only made their lives worse. That will be the moment when a new vision for the 100% can take hold.
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