Progressive World Review

Recently I wrote about the .  About how in the fifties and sixties not only did we enjoy a great deal of prosperity but that prosperity was widely distributed, at least among whites, and that all in all public policy was geared toward expanding the middle class.  While these days we’re experiencing stagnating wages, jobs shipped overseas and a crumbling infrastructure.  Over the past thirty-five years or so this country has taken a sharp turn to the right.  We’ve been through Reaganomics, deregulation and now a right wing Supreme Court seemingly poised to overturn Roe vs. Wade.  All of this has resulted in the savings and loan fiasco, the Enron and World Com collapses, the sub-prime meltdown and credit crunch and a general contraction of the middle class. 

So, after all that has happened, where is the outrage?  We’re in the midst of a very unpopular war and Bush’s approval ratings are even lower than the credit scores of those who’ve recently lost their homes and yet the presumed Republican presidential nominee appears to have at least an even chance of winning the presidency even though he’s virtually indistinguishable from the current office holder.  What is going on here?  As we watch the American dream slip away it would seem obvious that the right has failed to deliver on their promises and that the rich have only gotten richer at the expense of everyone else.  So why then, hasn’t this resulted in more than the usual whimpers for “change?”

A recent Salon article titled, The Gilded Age, past and present, written by Steve Fraser, may provide some clues to this puzzle.  It starts out by examining the similarities of today with the Gilded Age of the late 1800′s,

Google “second Gilded Age” and you will get ferried to 7,000 possible sites where you can learn more about what you already instinctively know. That we are living through a gilded age has become a journalistic commonplace. The unmistakable drift of all the talk about it is a Yogi Berra-ism: It’s a matter of déjá vu all over again. But is it? Is turn-of-the-century America a replica of the world Mark Twain first christened “gilded” in his debut bestseller back in the 1870s?

Certainly, Twain would feel right at home today. Crony capitalism, the main object of his satirical wit in “The Gilded Age,” is thriving. Incestuous plots as outsize as the one in which the Union Pacific Railroad’s chief investors conspired with a wagon-load of government officials, including Ulysses S. Grant’s vice president, to loot the federal Treasury once again lubricate the machinery of public policymaking. A cronyism that would have been familiar to Twain has made the wheels go ’round in these terminal years of the Bush administration. Even the invasion and decimation of Iraq were conceived and carried out as an exercise in grand strategic cronyism; call it cronyism with a vengeance. All of this has been going on since Ronald Reagan brought back morning to America.

But as troubling as these similarities are, it’s the differences that prove to be of greater concern.  According to Fraser, the first Gilded Age was characterized by, among other things, an extreme exploitation of labor while in present times hardship and poverty are more or less the result of exclusion and marginalization,

Disaccumulating capitalism also undermined the political gravitas of poverty. In the first Gilded Age, poverty was a function of exploitation; in the second, of exclusion or marginalization. When we think about poverty, what come to mind are welfare and race. The first Gilded Age visualized instead coal miners, child labor, tenement workshops and the shantytowns that clustered around the steel mills of Aliquippa and Homestead.

Poverty arising out of exploitation ignited widespread moral revulsion and a robust political assault on the power of the exploiters. The perpetrators of the poverty of exclusion of our own time have been trickier to identify. In his 1962 book, “The Other America,” Michael Harrington noted the invisibility of poverty. That was half a century ago and misery still lives in the shadows. Helped along by an ingrained racism, poverty in the second Gilded Age was politically neutered … or worse.

The article makes several interesting comparisons between past and present.  For example, the dress and mannerisms of the rich during the first Gilded Age were specifically for the purpose of emulating the European aristocracies, aristocrats being the very antithesis of the founding principles of this country, while modern entrepreneurs are far more likely to be low key, favoring blue jeans over spats.  But it’s the manner in which the working class is treated that I believe is most significant.  When children are exploited in factories, when coal miners are risking their lives for paltry wages etc., it’s far easier to see where the blame lies.  But as Fraser points out, the exclusion and marginalization of today not only makes it harder to identify the perpetrators it also makes it easier to scapegoat the victims.  Blaming poverty on the poor is nothing new but it’s far easier to do when the class divisions are along easily defined lines such as race.  And when the rest of the would-be middle class struggles to achieve the American dream on Wal-Mart wages, it’s easy to blame them for their own stupidity when their houses are foreclosed on.

The question now is; how do we turn this around.  How do we stop blaming ourselves for the plight that faces us?  How do we make this country work for the majority of its inhabitants rather than just the privileged few?

–Paul Wilden

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