A long time ago, in a country far, far away, the leader of that country looked ominously over what he and his predecessors’ leadership had wrought. The country in question was the superpower of its era. Its army was widely considered to be the most powerful in the world – backed by an economy that was the biggest and richest among nations of importance. Its capital was a center of high culture and intellectual life, its language was that of diplomacy and art, its people fecund and productive. It was, in other words, a country on the make – sure of its place in the sun.
But, all was not actually well. Foreign wars that produced little beyond employment for soldiers and wealth for profiteers depleted the treasury. Its economy, though rich, was premised on a form of production that was to be shortly eclipsed by developments outside its borders. Its people, though ostensibly united under the government’s benevolent rule, were in fact increasingly worn down by an oppressive state and an ossified social system where inequality was getting worse, not better. Things were not fine at all – but very worrying to those with foresight enough to look ahead.
The country in question, of course, was France prior to its revolution, and though King Louis XV did not actually say the phrase, “after me, the deluge,” it became so widely attributed to him that it does not matter. The expression itself came to represent everything about an entrenched ruling class that was so incompetent and venal that it could not save itself even when all it could see ahead was the potential for catastrophe. Like Captain Smith’s nonchalant leadership of the Titanic, France’s Ancien Régime was incapable of averting disaster when the iceberg of social inequity appeared. When the iceberg hit, everyone in a position of authority, both in France and abroad, was surprised at the speed with which the good ship Monarchy foundered and sank on the rocks of torch-and-pitchfork wielding sans-culottes.
A version in the US
Here in the United States, a similar type of situation is brewing. We’ve seen rumblings of discontent ever since the Great Recession began in 2008 in the form of tea party activists and Occupy demonstrators, but both movements are reflections of a broader sense that something has gone terribly, terribly wrong. Though partisans on the left and the right disagree over the cause, its symptoms are well known; 30-year wage stagnation, increasing inequality, economic insecurity, the collapse of social mobility, increased poverty and people working harder to get nowhere fast. Average Americans not only are worse off than they were four years ago, but there is a good argument to be made that they are worse off than they were 30 years ago – when the great turn to neo-liberalism and supply-side economics began.
Another similarity between modern America and pre-Revolutionary France is the degree to which the elites that make decisions affecting most of the populace are isolated from average citizens. France had Versailles – playground of the Sun King – where courtiers and aristocrats congregated, conversed and conspired amongst themselves. So little comprehension did the denizens of this royal estate have of conditions outside the palace that Marie Antoinette erected a peasant village on its grounds so she and her maids could play at milking cows. Luckily, YouTube was not around then else her playacting peasant in the midst of penury and privation would have gone down like Mitt Romney’s quips about the 47 percent.
But, as those clips of Romney reveal, America, too, as its own versions of Versailles. The Washington Beltway, for instance, has remained rich even as much of the rest of the country has remained stagnant and mired in recession. Employment there for the educated and the elite is at an all time low, whereas it remains at a staggering 8 percent or more elsewhere if you believe the official statistics. Washington, though, is not alone.
It is mirrored around the country in the form of wealthy suburbs and elite playgrounds that are as isolated from rural and urban poverty as Versailles was from the Paris slums. Marie, if she were alive today and living in one of these enclaves of the American privileged, might well ask why the unhealthy poor do not eat organic, free-range beef from Whole Foods – unaware that millions of Americans live in food deserts where fresh vegetables are as rare and expensive as East Indies spices were in Antoinette’s day.
Of course, the rich and powerful have always been relatively isolated from the poor and the weak, but the end result of the Age of Revolutions – democracy – is at least in theory supposed to counteract that tendency. Indeed, democratic accountability in the form of elections and law are supposed to even the score and level the playing field. Popular will in the form of democratic majorities make law to which everyone, rich and poor, are alike beholden. Equality in the voting booth and equality in front of a magistrate work hand-in-hand to prevent elites from making choices that, though beneficial to themselves, are disastrous for the rest of society.
Unfortunately, American democracy is not working to inject popular interests into elite decision-making. Groundbreaking research conducted in the last decade by American political scientists – at least some of whom started out from a conservative background – demonstrate rather conclusively that our current system, on issue after issue, bends to the will of the wealthy. One book-length study, penned by Larry Bartels of Princeton University, demonstrates how, on issues ranging from tax cuts to abortion, members of the U.S. Senate consistently disregard the will of non-affluent voters by catering to the interests of their wealthy backers. His statistical analyses of Senate votes and public opinion show that it is not just that the wealthy are more effectively represented – e.g., that their voice is more equal than others – it is that the poor effectively get no representation whatsoever.
This finding has been reinforced and replicated by other scholars. Bartels’ Princeton colleague Martin Gilens writes in, “Affluence and Influence: Economic Inequality and Political Power in America” that “under most circumstances, the preferences of the vast majority of Americans appear to have essentially no impact on which policies the government does or doesn’t adopt.” Whenever the rich and the poor differ on an issue, he explains, the poor, despite their numerical advantage, lose every time. Rather than being the product of democratic majorities, the conclusion here is that policy ultimately reflects the interests of whichever coalition of wealthy interests happens to be most politically powerful at the moment – pretty much what Karl Marx predicted would happen in all capitalist democracies. In the long run, what this has produced is a political system that has rigged economic life to such an extent that the United States is approaching levels of economic inequality mostly seen in places like Jamaica and other parts of the developing world.
What this means in concrete terms is that the wealthy can, for instance, effectively buy justice; or at least stave it off for years on end due to the high-cost of an effective legal defense. Much as French aristocrats did not deign to hold themselves accountable to the same laws as the peasantry, our wealthy can negotiate or litigate its way out of serious trouble most of the time. This is especially the case with white-collar crime and financial malpractice of the type that sank the markets in 2008. Rob a liquor joint and you go away for a few years. Rob pension funds or willingly defraud customers in a way that destroys the marketplace and, usually, nothing happens to you. Even in criminal cases involving violence and personal property, it is clear the system is heavily biased against the poor – who often understand they are being railroaded but cannot possibly sustain the legal fees necessary to stave off a conviction. The inequity of outcomes in the war on drugs, and the embarrassingly large number of innocent people let go from death row, is testament to this.
Passed down through generations
In terms of health and well-being, the disparities are even worse and more obvious – with inequality translating literally into many extra years of a high-quality life for those on top and reduced years of life and life quality for those on the bottom. Some of the reasons for this are obvious – differential access to health care, health information and so on, but an unappreciated factor is the psychological and physiological strain caused by living in a society that values nothing but financial success and conspicuous consumption. Indeed, research again shows that societies such as the United States that exhibit high degrees of income inequality fare terribly on nearly every measure of well-being, from physical and mental health to teenage pregnancy and crime. The U.S. is so sick compared to its peers, in other words, precisely because it is so unequal.
The worst aspect of inequality, however, is the way it remorselessly replicates itself across generations – most obviously through differential access to and belief in the benefits of educational opportunity. The well off intrinsically understand the value of a quality education – witness the high costs they are willing to pay to send their sons and daughters to elite kindergartens and colleges – and instill in their children the discipline, attitudes and behavioral norms necessary to replicate parental success. Even if children fail, either as youths or adults, family resources are available to pick them up, dust them off and re-launch even the most bumbling of prodigy on a flight path to success, with George W. Bush a prime example of how American princelings cannot fail no matter what they do.
Poor children, needless to say, very rarely have the support and parental guidance necessary to prepare them for long-term academic achievement and, even if they do, the patent inequalities of our property-value funded educational system means they are trapped within schools in which they are almost guaranteed, statistically, to fail. This, in turn, creates a cycle of failure where the sheer hopelessness of the situation leads to an inability to conceive of alternatives to present circumstances. Not seeing a viable way out, children adopt the norms, values and beliefs that keep people in.
The French Revolution began when, faced with such monstrous inequality, those made worse off by the system no longer bought into the ideological arguments made to justify it. Divine Right of Kings was nothing compared to what people confronted on a daily basis. So, too, in the United States the arguments in favor of keeping a system as blatantly unequal as ours in place are slowly being undermined by reality. Our system has categorically NOT produced more sustainable economic growth than alternatives. Our quality of life is NOT discernibly better than that found in peer states. Our system categorically does NOT provide more upward social mobility than alternatives. Our current system, in short, is not superior, is in many ways inferior and is sustained on myth, propaganda and the craven self-interest of a powerful few – like the heirs to the Wal-Mart empire who, between the whole six of them, are as wealthy as the bottom 30 percent of Americans combined.
Thankfully, more and more Americans are waking up to this fact and working to do something about it. Whether they are able to make themselves heard this November remains to be seen. Lets hope, for all out sakes, that they do. If they don’t, then … après moi le deluge.