Mechele Dickerson

I viewed the 2016 election as the middle-class primal scream.

And it's but it was the white middle class primal scream because it was the first time I think that white Americans realized, oh, something is wrong here.

And they didn't exactly know how to react, but they knew it in their heart, their soul and their pockets that something is happening to us now that isn't supposed to be happening to us.

I think it's less than definitely less than 20 years.

I would say it's less than 10 years.

One of the reasons I would say it's less than 10 years is because even the younger boomers are going to be retiring soon or thinking about retiring and they're going to freak out and panic because they can't retire.

Their children are going to increasingly have to subsidize their housing and their living expenses.

And so I totally agree with you.

We need to look a little bit to the history, though I want to focus going forward to say, how do these economies end?

They don't end well.

So the fact that there was a great Gatsby party at Mar-a-Lago over Christmas, I thought, oh, that is a symbol that you perhaps really don't want to have.

Oh, they've done some things.

Yeah, and you probably want to hide that from the 80% of the people in this country that are terrified that they're going to end up- It's shocking that they didn't hide it.

Maybe they're all in an echo chamber and they really don't talk to anybody that earns like $90,000 or even $100,000 a year.

Well, and one of the things that really scares me, and again, it's because I have a 22 and a 25-year-old, and I also teach students sort of ranging from 22 to 30, is there's sort of this economic nihilism, which terrifies me, where they don't think things are going to get better, where they are angry at older people.

We've got to fix that.

If we want this country to remain normal and stable economically and politically to the point that you've just made, we have got to make young people believe that if they work hard, they try hard, things will be good for them or things will get better.

Well, for him, it was key because not only could he talk about the middle class, he could talk to the middle class because there was a point in his life when he was poor.

And so when you have gone, when you understand the importance of upward mobility,

that you were a poor kid in Hope, Arkansas, who ultimately occupied 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.