(June 2005) Has anyone else been following the New York Times series on class or the Wall Street Journal’s series on social mobility? Interesting stuff that is definitely limited by the writers’ own class perceptions.
Apparently, we operate under the assumption that the so-called self-made man can still strike it rich by pulling up those proverbial bootstraps, despite the fact that class inflexibility has grown steadily over the past thirty years.
The bottom 90 percent of American earners experienced a drop in real income from 1980 to 2002 while the income of the top 0.1 percent—the folks who earn $1.6 billion or more—rose 2.5 times before taxes. Add Bush’s tax cuts for the wealthy to this equation and the gap is even larger.
Okay. You’ve read the facts. Now get this: a recent poll indicates that a whopping 39 percent of Americans believe that they are either in the wealthiest one percent of earners or that they soon will be.
Are these folks delusional or pie-in-the-sky dreamers or both (and does this finally explain who buys all those lottery tickets)?
I have worked with more than one man who announced, with utter conviction, that he could have been a professional football (or basketball or) player if he had chosen that path (even though he either never played the sport or never even made the varsity team). Yet, there they are, Exhibit A of America’s collective fantasy-driven personality type.
The Times poll is slightly less optimistic: only 11 percent believe that it is very likely that they will become super-wealthy, while another 34 percent believe that this is somewhat likely.
Sooooo ... in a country where actual class disparity is blatant, we have a populace watching Dallas and Life Styles of the Rich and Famous while poring over Billionaire magazine and running up credit-card debt so that we can share a little of that love ... and now we actually BELIEVE that our desire for the lush life will somehow translate into untold wealth?
Evangelicals assert that their God wants his followers to be rich, that he will reward his followers with riches (if only you, um, send their preachers your money). And maybe more people than I believed buy this line.
So what do you think? Are we suffering from collective delusions of grandeur? Have we opted for full-time fantasy? And where does the rise in fundamentalism fall in this mix? Is marketing to blame? Jingoistic speechwriters? Willful ignorance? Poor schooling?
And why do we keep spending money that we don’t have?
David Moberg of In These Times states the obvious when he notes that, when “the income from growth is captured by the very rich, as it largely has been for a couple of decades, this path to prosperity offers little to most people.”
He also notes that, currently, “the realm of freedom for most Americans remains constricted to the shopping mall, where they can buy their identities.”
(Hi. I’m patriotic. I wear Tommy.)
But “class ultimately has more to do with who has the power to make such decisions and [with] the powerlessness of the majority” (as Moberg points out). And he points out that what's missing from these 2 newspaper series is a critical looks at social, political, and economic power, the critical aspects of class.
His suggestion? The Times should run excerpts from Michael Graetz and Ian Shapiro’s new book Death by a Thousand Cuts, which recounts
how the super-rich worked with ultra-conservatives to demonize and possibly eliminate the estate tax, which they renamed the ‘death tax.’ [But, as] William Gates Sr, father of Microsoft Bill, often argued on behalf of the tax, the very rich accumulate their wealth not simply because of what they did but because of the society in which they lived, and they have a debt to that society. And the heirs of such wealth are the antithesis of self-made men.
“The rich used their political power, their money and the right’s shameless, mendacious hucksters to protect their riches, at the expense of society” Moberg says, and this myth of the self-made man—“abetted by the feckless incompetence of Democratic opposition” makes too many ordinary people suckers for the right-wing pitch.
Damn it, class matters. And awareness of our actual place in this ever-more-rigid economy—divorced from the nice fictions and fantasies and those proverbial streets of gold—matters.
The Times notes that the affluent consistently refer to the choices they make—to take an unpaid internship or attend a university that best fits their goals or spend a year in Europe or a year playing the fricking kazoo and growing dreadlocks before returning to Duke for your Brooks Brothers MBA.
THAT’s what I never felt growing up and that's what most working-class individuals did not feel—that we had choices. Instead, we felt trapped and were always struggling, wondering what to put off and for how long while waiting for the other shoe to drop.
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