Hacker points out that, while the regularly cited growth metrics like unemployment and stock market activity are better than they have been, the numbers conceal broad insecurity felt by many Americans. While the economic situation has improved overall, the population is still at the mercy of rising prices, wage stagnation, and the gross injustice that is the US healthcare system. As Hacker states,
In the mid-20th century, American corporations came to be seen as mini-welfare states, providing workers not only with job security and continuous training but also with generous health benefits and a secure retirement income. That world is gone, and it's not coming back.
What will be required is what many Democratic candidates are (finally) talking about and pushing for, namely, moving the United States in the direction of the rest of the developed world. The present so-called conservative/libertarian approach to governance—"minimal government," privatization, tax cuts, and deregulation—is not sustainable for the country. Or the environment.
For that matter, demographic and voting trends signal a dim future for the Republican Party and its legislative agenda. The Democrats, as reality moves them leftward toward the political center, are finding themselves having to actually operate as a labor party. It's been a long time coming.
Of course, public-opinion polls (a long list of them) show that most Americans are on-board with this kind of development. But the GOP will do what it can to fight this trend with rhetoric and ideology, in order to preserve its largely aging voting base. And sadly, many working class Americans will continue to subscribe to the thinking that legislation and public policy amount to a zero-sum game—with race at the center of the calculation. There will be resistance. As Hacker observes:
... it’s still far too easy to scare Americans into thinking that extending security to those historically denied it will make them worse off, rather than better protected.
Quite right. But the shifting demographic and voting trends indicate that it will soon become increasingly difficult to do so.