Bourgeois Concerns 2

When I was in college and in rebellion against the social class I grew up in, I believed the only important thing was to think big thoughts and that such trifling concerns as those discussed in my previous post were insufferably bourgeois.   But given the current state of income inequality in the US, affiliation with the middle class has come to seem something of a badge of honor.  The rich like to imagine they are the engine of the economy but they’re not, the middle class is.  A large and thriving middle class is the one social stratum an advanced industrial economy cannot do without, because without it, there would be no market, no demand for the goods such an economy produces.  The poor and the rich don’t consume at a high enough rate.  The larger the middle class is, the more stable the society is, and the more equitably the wealth is distributed.  The middle class is the glue that holds modern societies together, it’s the most law-abiding class.  The more polarized a society becomes, the more split into rich and poor, the more unstable it becomes, and the more likely it is that centrifugal forces will pull it apart.  Ideally, nearly everyone would be middle class, with just enough poor and rich to keep things interesting, enough for a soupçon of instability, if you will. 

But since the Reagan years the extremes have been expanding at the expense of the middle.  This phenomenon has become known as the Great Divergence.  While the number of poor has increased, the rich have gotten a whole lot richer.  Since 1979 the income of the top 1% has gained over 275%.  The United States now has one of the highest levels of income inequality of any of the high income nations.  At the same time the share of total income going to the middle class has declined from 62% in 1970 to 45% in 2010, while the share of the rich has gone from 29% to 46%.  The middle class has shrunk; its median income and median net worth have both fallen over the past decade.  Too many rich or, as in our case, a few too rich, is a drag on the economy, sucking the blood of demand from it, making it anemic. Extremes like this are a social distortion that cannot be sustained. 

The Republicans do not want to reverse this trend, far from it.  To raise taxes on the middle class in order to give the rich yet another tax cut, when the latter’s tax rates are already at historic lows, as Romney proposes to do, would be economic suicide.  Romney may actually believe in such voodoo economics (after all, he believes in all sorts of other nonsense), despite its having been proven decisively wrong over the past 40 years, but I think it’s actually more of a class loyalty thing.  He just wants to make himself and his rich cronies even richer, and to hell with the rest of us. 

It’s been said that Romney wants to return to the Gilded Age, the era over a century ago when super-rich industrialists and financiers rode roughshod across the economic landscape and lowly workers were grateful for any crumbs tossed their way. (Besides the abysmal business ethics, this was also an era of rampant political corruption.)  Ryan, his sidekick, gets his economic notions from sophomoric fantasy novels and wants to wind the clock back 2 centuries and reinstate the gold standard (which, btw, is a terrible idea).  But to me it seems that the Republicans really, in their heart of hearts, would like to turn back the clock 500 years to an era before the middle class even arose, an era when women were chattel and did as they were told, an era before science when religion and an hereditary aristocracy held sway and were supported by the sweat of a vast peasantry who didn’t ask troublesome questions of their betters because they knew their place as inferior beings.  That is the lost paradise the Republicans long to reinstate, with themselves as the aristocrats, of course.  They would like nothing better than to do away with modernity and all its trappings, and replace it with a new feudalism, a capitalistic feudalism.  They want to get rid of the state because the state is like the king in those old days, a check on their oligarchic power, which they wish to be as absolute as possible, and beyond the reach of the masses and their annoying vote.     

But surely, you say, they could never imagine this is a viable program.  Well of course, not if they were sane.  The trouble is, while their grip on reality wasn’t sure before, after a Black man was elected president the Republicans well and truly lost their minds.  The party was hijacked by its lunatic fringe and has now become the party of ignorance and superstition, the anti-science party.  Composed of people who imagine facts can be whatever they wish them to be, it has become utterly disconnected from reality.  Republicans have abandoned facts, evidence, and pragmatism, in favor of ideology, blind beliefs, and wild assertions.  Also, Romney and his cronies are contemptuous of anyone who’s not rich and convinced that such people are easily duped.  And, unfortunately, if the polls are accurate, they’ve managed to dupe a whole lot of them already. 

For the rich the Romney/Ryan ticket represents over-reach.  The rich have done exceedingly well over the past 4 decades, far better than everyone else.  But that’s not enough for them, of course.  Greed is their defining characteristic.  If, through a combination of misdirection, lies, voter suppression, fraud, and dirty tricks, they accomplish their coup of the few, and then proceed to carry out their program to push income inequality ever further, to unprecedented levels, the result won’t be good for anyone who values economic or political stability.