Matt Taibbi, the incomparable Matt Taibbi, future recipient in the Nobel category of Channeling the Id of Radicalized Econ Nobel Laureates, had a great column the other day. He pointed out that the total segregation of rich and poor in this country is a major factor in white revanchists’ legitimate but woefully misplaced anger:
Many of the people who make big six-figure incomes consider themselves middle class. A University of Chicago professor arguing against the repeal of the Bush tax cuts made waves by saying he was “just getting by” with his $250,000 income…
All of this is a testament to the amazing (and rapidly expanding) cultural divide that exists in this country, where the poor and the rich seldom cross paths at all, and the rich, in particular, simply have no concept what being broke and poor really means. It is true that if you make $300,000 in America, you won’t feel like you’re so very rich once you get finished paying your taxes, your mortgage, your medical bills and so on.
For this reason, a lot of people who make that kind of money believe they are the modern middle class: house in the burbs, a car, a kid in college, a trip to Europe once a year, what’s the big deal? Wealth…is rapidly becoming defined as belonging to anyone who has any form of job security at all…
That the Tea Party and their Republican allies in congress have so successfully made government workers with their New Deal benefits out to be the kulak class of modern America says a lot about the unique brand of two-way class blindness we have in this country. It’s not just that the rich don’t know the poor exist…It also works the other way — the poor have no idea what real rich people are like. They apparently never see them.
What does it even mean to be ‘middle class’ if affluent people with jobs on television can claim the mantle and get away with it? (It means the term has become as meaningless as terrorism, for starters). It also means that
It’s also an unintended consequence of the decline of the WASP elite. The fact that there isn’t a Boston Brahmin named Peabody Saltonstall representing Massachusetts in the Senate as a patrician Republican from that Old Money bastion cloaks the fact that there is a greater concentration of wealth than ever. It’s just not held in trusts by the Social Directory.
You’d think demography would be on the good side. The 2008 election, when Indiana and North Carolina (and Dallas County, and nearly all of Northern Virginia) went blue wasn’t only supposed to represent the Great Middle coming to its senses after 8 years of Bush. It was also a tipping point for the clout of young and/or non-white voters, whom the Obama campaign courted assiduously–not just for their one time votes–but to enfranchise them fully, to stanch the self-fulfilling bleeding that their lackluster participation in the political process created.
These were the people the least invested in hedge funds, least invested in the idea of hedge funds and their purported utility, their beneficence, their alleged genius in allocating capital and making the creaking system right itself. These were the people least invested in the system altogether. What happened to them? Why is the white-picket fortress surrounding the very wealthiest Americans adding a moat?
Four years later, the elderly white people trounced that coalition and we have lurched so violently rightward that the George W. Bush of 2004 would have a hard time emerging from a primary battle.
Yet there are more Latinos and Asians than ever, right? There’s probably more single women (a Democratic demo for sure) as the primacy of the nuclear family continues to plunge. The conservative nightmare, where the U.S. spirals into a post-Christian dystopia full of atheists and lesbians and a trillion Mexicans has a tiny grain of truth to it (although I’d add that we’ll eventually be left with Mormons, Hasidim and unemployed graphic designers only, like the last clumps of matter which will inherit the universe in its final stages of expansion as it all flies apart).
But how many more McCain voters have died off, relative to Obama voters, in the interim? Why isn’t this translating into, well, revolution?
Always at the forefront, California is on the cusp of permanent Republican minority–perhaps even permanent Republican “super-minority” wherein the intransigent bastards can no longer use the power given to them by quirks in the state constitution to thwart the voters in this overwhelmingly blue state. Then why does it sometimes feel like we’re 500,000 Latinos away from becoming the Christian Iran? Why is our once and future governor so tepid?
Why is everything red-shifting away from us like distant galaxies in spite of the incoming permanent Democratic majority (no one talks about that thesis anymore, do they?) The most depressing fact about the rightward lurch is that the best models couldn’t predict it and can’t explain it.
To go back to the universe-as-metaphor one last time, there must be some kind of dark energy holding these trends together, because they’re accelerating when they should be reversing. That dark matter is eviscerating the republic.
Suck the Rainbow 