Jim Geraghty:

Barack Obama, in a recent interview with CNN’s Christiane Amanpour, said:

It’s very hard to sustain a democracy when you have such massive concentrations of wealth. And so, part of my argument has been that unless we attend to that, unless we make people feel more economically secure and we’re taking more seriously the need to create ladders of opportunity and a stronger safety net that’s adapted to these new technologies and the displacements that are taking place around the world, if we don’t take care of that, that’s also going to fuel the kind of mostly far-right populism, but it can also potentially come from the left, that is undermining democracy because it makes people angry and resentful and scared.

The obvious criticism of Obama here is that he and his wife are walking, talking, “massive concentrations of wealth.”

Obama and his wife signed the largest book deal in history, $65 million, for their memoirs. The Obamas signed a separate production deal with Netflix worth an estimated $50 million. The Obamas’ production company, Higher Ground, signed a $25 million deal with Spotify that lasted three years. Barack Obama reportedly makes as much as $400,000 per speech, but reportedly made almost $600,000 for speaking at a conference in Colombia. Michelle Obama makes $200,000 per appearance.

The Obamas rent a mansion in Kalorama (a neighborhood in Washington, D.C.); bought a mansion and estate in Martha’s Vineyard, Mass.; bought another house in Rancho Mirage, Calif.; and still have their old home in the Hyde Park neighborhood of Chicago.

In April 2010, then-president Obama declared, “At a certain point, you’ve made enough money.” Apparently, Obama hasn’t reached that point yet.

But it’s not just that Obama is objecting to the concentration of wealth while becoming fabulously wealthy himself. It’s that Obama’s assessment of what is driving modern American populism is likely quite wrong. He’s attempting to shoehorn a cliched left-wing progressive complaint about America to fit as an explanation for the current popularity of right-wing populism.

Perhaps some American populists on the Left are driven by an objection to massive concentrations of wealth. But right-wing populists in the United States adore a man who lives in a mansion in Mar-a-Lago and who brags about how wealthy he is. American populists may well sneer about the out-of-touch wealthy elites rigging the system, but they largely nodded when Trump named Steven Mnuchin as Secretary of the Treasury, Wilbur Ross as Secretary of Commerce, and Betsy DeVos as Secretary of Education. Trump’s cabinet featured 17 millionaires, two centimillionaires, and one billionaire.

Tucker Carlson made $20 million per year at Fox News, and few populists on the right saw that as any kind of problem. Populists have little objection to anybody being super rich, as long as those rich people tell them what they want to hear. And what populists particularly love hearing is that they’re being dissed.

Keep in mind, most Trump supporters aren’t poor, or even necessarily on the bottom half of the nation’s income scale. In the 2016 Republican primaries, Trump voters’ median income exceeded the overall statewide median, sometimes narrowly but sometimes substantially. In the general election, like the primary, “About two thirds of Trump supporters came from the better-off half of the economy.” Further analysis found “support for Trump was strongest among the locally rich — that is, white voters with incomes that are high for their area, though not necessarily for the country as a whole.” Polling in 2020 found that the higher a person’s income, the more likely they were to say the economy would improve more in a second term of Trump than under Joe Biden. In the 2020 election, Trump did better among voters making more than $50,000 per year than he did among voters making less than $50,000 per year.

(I should pause to remind readers that back in 2016, Michael Brendan Dougherty pointed out the limitations of measuring a person’s wealth by self-reported income level, without taking the local cost of living into account. The average household income in Staten Island is $113,335, but that doesn’t make it a particularly high-status place to live by the standards of New York City.)

So why is Obama looking at MAGA America and concluding that what truly drives its members is “massive concentrations of wealth” and economic insecurity? Because Obama’s assessment of Americans in flyover country hasn’t changed much since 2008, when he declared:

You go into these small towns in Pennsylvania and, like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing’s replaced them. And they fell through the Clinton administration, and the Bush administration, and each successive administration has said that somehow these communities are gonna regenerate and they have not. And it’s not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy toward people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.

Obama has his explanation for why many religious, gun-owning, and working-class Americans have their views, and he’s not interested in updating or revising his assessment. Inherent but unspoken in his conclusion is that his own presidency didn’t do much to change the conditions of these voters, leading them to vote for Donald Trump over Hillary Clinton.

I would argue that America’s right-of-center populists aren’t all that driven by resentment or a lack of opportunity (more on this below). They’re often most driven by a perceived lack of respect.

They didn’t go to the right schools, they don’t work in professions that are glamorous or celebrated, their religious faith is mocked and derided, and Hollywood portrays them as a bunch of ignorant hicks. Many of them live in “flyover country,” which is seen as culturally backwards, easily and justifiably ignored. They work for a living and do not benefit from affirmative action, but they’re told that they have it easy because of “white privilege.” A lot of government officials treat their constitutionally protected ownership of a gun as a major problem to be solved, but shrug their shoulders at the insecure border and illegal immigration. Lots of Americans see a criminal-justice system that comes down like a ton of bricks on pro-life protesters while prominent big-city district attorneys declare they won’t prosecute whole classes of crimes.

The Obama team openly spoke about how its voters were a “coalition of the ascendant” — minorities, the millennial generation, and socially liberal upscale whites, especially women. This term means there must be a corresponding “coalition of the descendant” — whites, older Americans, social conservatives, married couples, and men. No one likes hearing that they’re outdated, sinking, or losing importance or relevance. Run around boasting that you don’t need certain demographics of voters long enough, and those demographics will conclude that they don’t need you, either.