IN DEFENSE OF CLASS RESENTMENT
As a teacher of courses on inequality and justice, I've often speculated about why Americans put up with so much economic unfairness. Media misdirection, the Horatio Alger fantasy, learned helplessness, false consciousness, psychological miscalculation, historical ignorance, moral blinders--there's always some supposed explanation for why the income and wealth gap between the top of the economic pyramid and the broader base fails to generate a sense of public urgency. But I just don't get it. Where's the mobilization of class resentment when you really need it?
The gap is real, and growing. Since 1977, average real income for the poorest fifth of US households has decreased by almost 10%, and the middle fifth has increased just 8%; but the income of the richest 1% has more than doubled. Corporate CEOs now make 419 times as much as the average worker--up tenfold from the 1980s 42:1 ratio. In booming Massachusetts, 6 of the 10 fastest-growing occupations pay under $19,000 a year. These facts are consistent with other trends: mind-boggling housing prices force longtime residents out of the neighborhoods they were born in. Poverty persists and even worsens despite the decline in welfare rolls. Journalists salivate over a bounding stock market, failing to ask presidential candidates what they propose for those without portfolios.
What saddens me most is that so many people grow up aiming for privileged lives. We don't have just an income and resource gap. We have an expectations gap. Inflated expectations are everywhere. Twenty-something entrepreneurs aim to retire at 50 with enough money socked away to spend more years in retirement than on the job. Finance columnists advise parents on which kid-friendly websites will best teach children how to invest their money. The newly rich tear down half-million-dollar houses to build bigger ones, and the butler business is booming. The next President's salary will double to $400,000 a year, and some people think it's not enough. We all lose when society routinely legitimizes desires such as these.
The fantasy misdirects us. It entices us to play the market, to aim for the high-paying career regardless of its human cost, to define the American Dream as a golden parachute rather than a better life. It encourages politicians committed to those at the top rather than to the majority. And it reinforces both institutional and personal disregard of those whose lives have worsened, people dismissed as just too lazy or too stupid to log on to ETrade.
During preliminary discussions of competing views of capitalism, I offer my students a simplified discussion of competing political philosophies:
The traditional conservative believes that life is always a struggle, a fight among people with inherently unequal strengths. Life's like a Monopoly game, but with a difference--the winners keep their property at the end, and start the next game already ahead.
Liberalism at least tries to turn capitalism into a reasonably fair fight. There are still winners and losers, but that's tolerable if education and other factors are somehow equalized, and if the state offers the victims enough support to keep the winners from feeling too guilty. In the idealized liberal world and in the real Monopoly game--but not in the real world--winnings go back into the pot and the game starts afresh each time.
Radicals propose something different: life doesn't have to be a fight for survival, especially in societies such as ours where there's more than enough to go around. For anarchists and anti-WTO activists, Marxists, and populists, for many feminists and environmentalists and new agers, Monopoly is an exercise in selfishness rather than foresight.
We can choose instead to construct a society not defined as a war of all against all. We can construct a society in which the rich and power- hungry can no longer depend on societal institutions to protect their suspect winnings. That should be our goal. But where are the mainstream presidential candidates tapping into justified class bitterness and calling on people to vote for a more egalitarian society? Do we all suspect that the old anarchist slogan--if voting could change the system, it would be illegal--makes even more sense today than in the past?
If it takes the threat of class warfare to force a change, what will it take to start the mobilization?
--Dennis Fox is Associate Professor of Legal Studies and Psychology at the University of Illinois at Springfield, co-editor of Critical Psychology: An Introduction, and co-founder of RadPsyNet: The Radical Psychology Network. He can be reached at <dennisfox@mail.com> or at <http://www.uis.edu/~fox>. He writes a regular column for the Brookline TAB.