Readers of the 2008 Almanac of American Politics encounter fascinating paragraphs such as these:
Almost none of today's voters remember the 1930s and fewer than half of them remember the 1970s. In the quarter-century since 1983, Americans have lived in a country that has enjoyed non-inflationary economic growth 95 percent of the time. They have come to think of this as the norm. They give politicians, particularly Bush, no credit when the economy performs this way, and they complain querulously about the slightest irritations, such as gasoline prices that in real dollar terms are far lower than they were in the early 1980s.
Polls show that public opinion on the state of the economy is so highly correlated with party identification that one must conclude it is less an assessment of objective conditions and more a matter of supporting the home team. Republicans complained about the vibrant economy in Clinton's second term; Democrats complained about the vibrant economy in Bush's second term. Macroeconomic numbers no longer move political numbers.
A similar partisan divide can be seen in foreign policy polling. Overall, however, the staggering statistic I take away from the above passage is that the United States has experienced noninflationary economic growth in 95 percent of the last 25 years. And yet we see the reemergence of "inequality" rhetoric. Why? Something tells me it has more than a little to do with political polarization.
