I’ve
been writing about what we politely call “inequality” since the
mid-1990s, but one day about ten years ago, when I was traveling the
country lecturing about the toxic curlicues of right-wing culture, it
dawned on me that maybe I had been getting the entire story wrong. All
the economic developments that I spent my days bemoaning—the obscene
enrichment of the CEO class, the assault on the regulatory state, the
ruination of average people—were very possibly not what I thought they
were. When I talked about these things, I assumed they were an outrage,
an affront to the affluent nation I still believed we were; once the
scales fell from our eyes and Americans figured out what was happening, I
argued, we would yell “stop,” bring this age of folly to a close, and
get back to middle-class prosperity as usual.
What hit me that day
was the possibility that my happy, postwar middle-class world was the
exception, and that the plutocracy we were gradually becoming was the
norm. Maybe what was happening to us was a colossal reversion to a
pre-Rooseveltian mean, and all the trappings of ordinary life that had
seemed so solid and so permanent when I was young—the vast suburbs and
the anchorman’s reassuring baritone and the nice appliances that filled
the houses of the working class—were aberrations made possible by an
unusual balance of political forces maintained only by the enormous
political efforts of its beneficiaries.
Maybe the gravity of
history pulled in the exact opposite direction of what I had always
believed. If so, the question was not, “When will we get back to the
right order of things,” but rather, “Would we ever stop falling?”
Today,
of course, the situation has grown vastly worse. The subject of
inequality is discussed everywhere; there are think tanks and academic
conferences dedicated to it; it has become socially permissible for
polite people to wonder about the obscene gorging of those at the top.
Sooner or later the question that everyone asks, upon discovering just
how much of what Americans produce goes to the imbeciles in the
penthouses and executive suites, is this:
How much further can this thing go?
The
One Percent have already broken every record for wealth-hogging set by
their ancestors, going back to the dawn of record-keeping in 1913. But
what if it all just keeps going? How much fatter can the fat cats get
before they hit some kind of natural limit? Before the invisible thumb
of history presses down on the other side of the scale and restores
balance?
That
we are very close to such a limit—that the contradictions inherent in
the system will automatically be its undoing—is an idea much in the air
of late. Not many still subscribe to Marx’s dialectical vision of
history, in which inevitable worker immiseration would be followed, also
inevitably, by a revolutionary explosion, but there are other
inevitabilities that seem equally persuasive today. We hear much, for
example, about how inequality
contributed to the housing bubble and the financial crisis, how it has brought us an imbalanced economy that
cannot survive.
It
reminds me of the once-influential theory of inequality advanced by the
economist Simon Kuznets, who thought that capitalist societies simply
became more egalitarian as they matured—a theory that is carefully
debunked by economist Thomas Piketty in his new
book,
“Capital in the Twenty-First Century.” It also reminds me of the
theories of the economist Ravi Batra, who in 1987 predicted a
“Great Depression of 1990” because (among other things) inequality would have by then had reached what he believed to be unsustainable levels.
It
is an attractive fantasy, this faith that some kind of built-in
restraint will stop all this from going too far. Unfortunately, what it
reminds me of the most are the similar mechanisms that Democrats like to
dream about on those occasions when the Republican Party has won
another election. As the triumphant wingers stand athwart the
unconscious bodies of their opponents, beating their chests and
bellowing for some new and awesomely destructive tax cut, a liberal’s
heart turns longingly to such chimera as pendulum theory, or
thirty-year-cycle theory, or the theory of the inevitable triumph of the
center.
Some great force will fix those guys, we mumble.
One of these days, they’ll get their comeuppance.
But
the cosmic cavalry never shows up. No deus ex machina will arrive to
rescue the middle-class society, either. The economic system is
always in some sort of crisis or another; somehow it always manages to survive.
One
of the ways it manages to survive, in fact, is by working the public
into paroxysms of fear at those who proclaim the inevitable destruction
of the system. I refer here not only to the Republicans’ routine
deploring of “class war,” by which they mean any criticism of
plutocracy, but also to the once-influential right-wing radio host Glenn
Beck, who in 2009 and 2010 was just about the only one in America who
thought to take seriously the obscure French anarchist tract, “The
Coming Insurrection.” Night after night in those dark days, Beck would
use the book to terrify his vast audience of seniors and
goldbugs—anarchy was right around the corner!—and to this day you can
still find the tract on the reading lists of 9/12 clubs across the
country.
Let us not forget that it was thanks to the energetic
activity of those 9/12 clubs and the closely aligned Tea Party that the
obvious and conventional — and maybe even
inevitable — response to the 2008 catastrophe was
not the response the public chose. According to an important recent
paper by
the sociologists Clem Brooks and Jeff Manza, the orthodox poli-sci
theory of economic downturn holds that voters “turn away from
unregulated markets and demand more government in times of economic
downturn and rising unemployment.” But in the downturn of the last few
years, people reacted differently: “Rather than the recession
stimulating new public demands for governent, Americans gravitated
toward lower support for government responsibility for social and
economic problems.” And they swept in the Republican Congress of 2010, a
result that, according to Brooks and Manza, has much to do with the
hyperbolic conservatism of partisan organizations like Fox News.
A
second irony, worth noting in passing, is that the right-wing offensive
against public pensions, which began as soon as the Republican wave
landed, has been carried on under the banner of historical determinism,
with everyone agreeing that the rich are going to get their way with the
unions and that no alternative exists. (“Detroit pension cuts were
inevitable, city consultant testifies,” screams a typical
headline on the subject.)
*
None
of this is to deny, of course, that concentrated wealth will have
certain predictable social effects, in addition to the brutal primary
effect of screwing you and yours permanently. Inequality will most
definitely bring further corruption of our political system, which will
in turn lead to further deregulation and bailouts, which will eventually
allow epidemics of fraud and failure. It will definitely bring an
aggravated business cycle, with crazy booms and awful busts. We know
these things will happen because this is what has happened in our own
time. But that doesn’t mean the situation will somehow cease to function
as a matter of course, or that leading capitalists will be converted to
Keynesianism en masse and start insisting on better oversight of Wall
Street.
The ugly fact that we must face is that this thing can go
much farther still.
Plutocracy shocks us every day with its viciousness, but that doesn’t
mean God will strike it down. The middle-class model worked much better
for about ninety-nine percent of the population, but that doesn’t make
it some kind of dialectic inevitability. You can build a plutocratic
model that will stumble along just fine, like it did in the nineteenth
century. It requires different things: instead of refrigerators for all,
it needs bought legislatures and armies of strikebreakers—plus bailouts
for the big banks when they collapse under the weight of their stupid
loans, an innovation of our own time. All this may be hurtful,
inefficient, and undemocratic, but it won’t dismantle itself all on its
own.
That is our job. No one else is going to do it for us.
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