In his alarming
online essay “Can
America Survive What Our 1% and Their Useful Idiots, the GOP and the
Dems, Have Done to Us?”, Evert Cilliers answers his own question
with a resounding no. In his own words, “You and I are screwed
forevermore." Cilliers argues that American workers have become
impoverished “peasants” living marginal lives in the world's
richest country, slaving away for a pittance while their corporate
masters take home all of the profits from three decades of
productivity gains. The U.S. government has been completely captured
by the rich, who use their Democratic and Republican lackeys to
reduce their own taxes and to assail what's left of the
99-percenters' social safety net. The only way to fix the problem,
Cilliers concludes, is to revive labor unions and restore
progressivism to the Democratic Party, and both changes are
impossible. “The 1% have won, and the 99% are too powerless to
reverse a process that has now stultified into an oppressive,
predatory, corrupt status quo. We're a plutocracy, plain and
simple...The fix is in. We the 99% are powerless to change it.”
Shorter version: Embrace despair, and
drink yourself to death, because you are a peasant forevermore and
your children will all be slaves.
I find this type of essay fascinating,
but also useless. As my sister might say, when I follow
this line of doom-saying myself, “What are you going to do about
that?” What indeed? Que faire?
To answer that question, I think we
first need to look at two important reasons why Americans have
allowed their government to enrich the one percent and engineer such alarming
economic inequality. First of all, since the 1960s voting Americans
– the people who actually vote the “useful idiots” into office
– have tended to emphasize social issues rather than economic
equality when they go to the polls. Thomas Frank, in What's
The Matter With Kansas?, argued that this was the key to the
Republicans' capture of the same poor white voters their economic
policies tended to screw. However, it is also true of progressives.
We acknowledge that the gap between the 1 percent and the 99 percent
corrodes our democracy, but we are much more incensed by attacks on
individual rights, such as the right of gay people to marry, the
right of poor and minority citizens to vote, the right of women to
control their own bodies, and the right of immigrant children to go
to school. All of these rights remain under active threat in 2013,
and I would not suggest we sideline them in favor of focusing on
economic inequality, even if they do tend to distract us from the
huge wealth and income gaps in this country. President Obama's
supporters aren't pathetic dupes; many of us recognize he has been
overly friendly to the malefactors of great wealth, but we give him
credit for the social positions he has taken and give other Democratic lawmakers credit for defending us against Dominionist Republicans who
want to enact The Handmaid's Tale. There are worse monsters
than investment bankers in our country.
Incidentally, the social issues just
mentioned were on very few Americans' radar in the 1950s, the golden
age of American economic redistributionism. Gay Americans were considered
mentally ill and probable national security risks; they were expected
to stay in the closet and marry someone of the opposite sex, however
repugnant the prospect. Immigration was nearly as
restrictive in the 1950s as in the 1920s, and Eisenhower deported
about one million Mexicans during his presidency. Voter suppression
and Jim Crow were the laws of the land in the South. Birth control
was illegal or heavily controlled in some states, abortion was illegal in all of them (even
though middle-class women with discreet doctors often used it as
birth control), and women were expected to stay home and raise
babies; most were unable even to take out a loan or start a business
without their husbands' permission. It was also an era of strong
labor unions, political party membership, bowling leagues, and civic
participation, a consequence, I suspect, of a stronger sense of
American fraternal solidarity. But that fraternal unity was only
really among white men, and it rested on the marginalization of
women, gay people, racial minorities, immigrants, and in fact of most
of the population. Also, there was a perceived need for Americans to
hang together against the Red Menace, the evil Soviet super-villain
that threatened to conquer the world and make everyone wear ugly
suits. That, too, is part of the past. In the 2010s we have less
fraternity and a lot less economic equality, but we do have more
social equality and most of us have more liberty.
Returning to the twenty-first
century, we should note that some of the most important Republican
battles against economic equality (and they are primarily driven by
Republicans) are being fought in state legislatures, which American
progressives have tended to ignore during the last 30 years while the
Democrats struggled to control the White House and Congress.
Cilliers is guilty of the same problem: he excoriates President Obama
and wishes for progressive new U.S. Senators to lead us out of our
current dilemma, without focusing on the conservative takeover of the
states. Statehouses have a huge impact on regional economies,
and the Republicans who control most of them are determined to use
that power against their perceived enemies – basically, anyone who
isn't white and male and wealthy. GOP governors and legislatures cut
aid to public and higher education, refuse federal infrastructure
money that might benefit Democratic cities, pass right-to-work laws,
break public unions, shift the tax burden to regressive sales taxes
and fees, and draw Congressional district boundaries that will
probably ensure GOP control of the U.S. House of Representatives
until 2022, if not 2032. I like Senator Elizabeth Warren very much,
and think she could be a perfectly good president, but control of the
presidency won't do much for progressives if the rest of the U.S.
government is gridlocked by the Tea Party and the states have reduced
public spending to eighteenth-century levels. Progressives need to worry
more about what's going on at the state level, hard as it may be to
focus on Lansing or Tallahassee rather than DC.
Finally, American workers, if their
resistance to exploitation and falling real wages seems “pathetic,”
have reached that point in part because they identify more with their
individual jobs than with their social class (because we don't have
social classes in America, after all [note sarcasm]), and have been
willing to listen to the demand that they “do more with less”
because they consider that job part of their core identity. Our
national cult of individualism also discourages Americans from
associating economic misfortune with malfeasance by the rich; when
someone suffers a demotion or loses a job, they try to figure out
what they, as individuals, have done wrong, because if they assume
individual responsibility for their misfortune they can perhaps fix
it themselves. Moreover, as Mssr. Cilliers notes, Americans have been
able to counteract stagnant wages, for several decades at least, by
relying on women's earnings after they entered (or, rather,
re-entered) the workplace in the 1970s and '80s, and by using the old
standby of credit, particularly home-equity loans. These standbys
are no longer useful, because housing prices have collapsed and most
American women work if they can. But empowering workers to address
economic misfortune on their own remains useful, if only because our
social safety net can only cover so much and because most of us
prefer to work. American workers have generally stopped regarding
their jobs as a lifetime commitment, as IBM and other salarymen
regarded theirs in the 1950s, and all of us need to ready ourselves to
switch jobs if our employers make conditions intolerable. This means
we all need to update or improve our educations, build our savings,
keep an eye open for better employment elsewhere, and not behave like
serfs. Many American workers are doing all of these things already,
but it would be helpful to receive more federal, state, and
not-for-profit aid. We may be less able or willing collectively to pressure
our bosses, but we can still vote with our feet.
One more thing: the idea that the GOP
and Democrats are ready to dismantle what's left of the American
social safety net on behalf of their wealthy masters is only half
right. In 2005 Democrats proved themselves willing, even as a badly
demoralized minority party, to take on a popular president to protect
Social Security, and they won. Dubya did not mess with them on this
issue again. Medicaid has actually undergone significant expansion
since 1996, and there are powerful forces militating against its
elimination; Wal-Mart, as Cilliers knows, tells many of its underpaid
employees to sign up for Medicaid, and the nation's nursing homes would have to
dump tens of thousands of enfeebled geezers on their families if
Medicaid were eliminated (and I think the geezers' children, most of
whom are older Americans themselves, already know this). We will see
how proposals to raise the Medicare age fare in the current round of
budget negotiations, but I suspect they won't go far. On most
economic issues there isn't a dime's worth of difference between the
parties, but there's at least a half-dollar's worth of difference on
the matter of keystone entitlement
programs.
