How Faith in Meritocracy Undermines Meritocracy

I spent some time this morning involved in another debate at Ethics Alarms, once again arguing that it might be wrong to tell people who are struggling to find employment that their problems can only be the result of their being stupid, or lazy, or just plain not knowing how to look for a job.  Yet precisely those kinds of accusations continue to fly freely in the commentary of people who have no idea what the conditions on the ground are like for young people today.  People like Jack Marshall have no qualms about casting aspersions on the character of bright, earnest, committed, hardworking people, because as far as the accusers are concerned, if you’d done things right you would have gotten what you wanted.

It’s not as though such people – generally middle-aged and middle class – start out with the conviction that their younger and poorer targets are good for nothing, and then construct the meritocratic myth as an explanation for why.  Quite the opposite; they believe so firmly in the perfection of the system through which kids acquire training and education and employment prospects that it only allows one explanation for most people’s failure.  That’s the very problem with their view.  If you are to convince them that an unemployed law school graduate is unemployed by no fault of his own, you must first compel them to abandon their entire way of perceiving American society.

People who are currently in their forties or fifties and have attained middle class status came up through a much different reality than what is faced by young adults in the twenty-first century.  So it is with every generation.  The trends, experiences, and rules of one can’t be expected to apply to the next.  That doesn’t stop anybody from judging the present as if they were interpreting the past.

Yet obviously there are some things about the circumstances surrounding today’s graduates that are wildly different from the situation that was faced by graduates twenty or thirty years ago.  For one thing, there’s a goddamn lot more of them.  For another, they’re carrying a staggeringly higher average debt load.  Obviously, the current global economic crisis is of issue, as well.  Add to that that between then and now, the overall structure of the economy has been transformed, with the death of manufacturing industries, the consolidation of corporate ownership into fewer and fewer hands, and so forth.

Whether the United States has ever possessed a true meritocracy is up for debate, but even if it has, amidst all those changes it can’t rationally be asserted that the same merits today gain the same outcomes that they would have a generation or two prior.  In fact, most people seem to acknowledge this.  There’s little doubt that the Bachelor’s degree has been devalued by its ubiquity, and it seems like this is common knowledge.  Yet that doesn’t stop the accusations of laziness and stupidity from being thrown at unemployed graduates either.

I’ve tended to think that such accusations are just insulting and oblivious to the reality faced by many people like myself today.  But having given the perspective of people like Jack Marshall more thought today, I think it quite possible that negative attitudes towards struggling graduates are much more than that.  They may actually be indicative of a significant part of the reason why all the nation’s unemployed lawyers face so much hardship in the modern job market.

It’s worth considering with what kind of people I and other bright, yet invisible job seekers are applying.  Who is in charge of corporate human resources today if not middle-aged, middle class individuals who came up through life in a time when college degrees were rare and valuable, and the world prosperous for people who held them?  I dare say that most of these people have perspectives like that of Jack Marshall.  I’m sure that most of them believe that today’s America is a perfect meritocracy, because that’s what it was when they were kids, and as far as their concerned that ‘s all that it ever was or ever could be.

That perspective can’t be undermined by anything, no matter how many over-educated applicants come slinking to their offices in pursuit of entry level jobs outside of their chosen fields.  Based on all the anecdotal evidence I’ve come across, certainly including depressingly much of my own, these people are almost universally turned away.  I had long supposed that the reasons for this are that employers expect such people to want too much money, not take an interest in the job, and leave as soon as something better comes along.

I still see it that way, but with new and potentially meaningful nuance.  Low-level employers are probably right when they assume that NYU grads, or engineers, or lawyers who apply with them aren’t pursuing what they want.  If American society is a meritocracy, then intelligent, talented, qualified individuals who pursue what they want get what they want.  Individuals who believe this and are in a position to hire an overqualified applicant won’t accept that the application is the result of them being genuinely short on options.  Instead, they will assume that something must be wrong.

I shudder to think how many people have been shut out from gainful employment because of the reasoning that says, “With this person’s background, either he’s too unmotivated to apply for a job in his field, or his despicable character prevents him from being a good employee anywhere.”  It’s not a malicious sentiment.  Quite the contrary, it’s perfectly altruistic; it emphasizes that if the person is good he will find his way to the better job that suits him, and need never waste his time on something that he doesn’t want to do, is overqualified for, and will not make enough money doing.

On some level, I’ve always recognized that about my situation.  I’ve gotten the sense that many of the people who slip my resume soundlessly into the trash imagine that I’ll be fine, that I didn’t need their job, that the right alternative will be just around the corner if I’m willing to look for it.  It simply isn’t the case.  There are times when bright men and women have to settle for less.  There are times when talents have to be misplaced just to get oneself out of an awful situation.  You can’t recognize that if you believe that America is, always has been, and always will be a pure meritocracy.  And yet you have to recognize it if you’re in a position to help people by hiring them into just such a situation.

Young people’s fates are held now by people who cannot recognize that which they must recognize in order to handle those fates properly.  In this way, faith in meritocracy undermines meritocracy.

Shocking Common Financial Realities

Bill Cimbrelo directed me to a CNN Money story titled “Retirement Shocker: 60% of Workers Have Less Than $25,000 Saved.”  To my mind, the main question that this raises is for whom is this a “shocker”?  If the cited fact applies to more than half of the people concerned, isn’t it safe to assume that the majority of people should be unsurprised by the information?  The only reason that I see why a person would be surprised by statistics that affirm the day-to-day reality of his life is if he thinks his own experience is somehow anomalous, somehow out of keeping with the daily experience of other people like him.  Unfortunately, this is almost certainly the situation with most lower-middle class and poor individuals.

So here’s a breaking point that I’m looking forward to, and it’s one that’s on my mind often, and that I’ve brought up earlier and elsewhere.  The news media and society in general needs to stop presenting affluence as the default state of life in America.  It’s not correct, and more than that it can be damaging to policy and social discourse.  Our collective understanding of income disparity is distressingly skewed by a distinctly hopeful presentation of American life in most media, whether fiction or non-fiction.  As with all things, failure to accurately recognize the problem makes failure to craft solutions almost certain.

 People should never be shocked by information that’s right under their noses all the time.  If they are, then it’s pretty clear that something had been wildly misrepresented in the past.  You might object that it’s not as though people walk around with their total retirement savings tattooed on their heads.  Why should we have any idea what sort of figures apply to the majority.  You shouldn’t, of course.  And if you’re not a meteorologist you shouldn’t know exactly how much rain your area has gotten this month.  But when somebody tells you that figure would you be shocked?  If so, surely you’re either terrible at estimating rainfall or you haven’t been looking outside very much.  And if you weren’t paying attention, in order to be shocked you have to have made some groundless assumption about what the amount might be, which will then be contradicted by the facts.

There’s a lot of information that casual observers can’t be expected to know about people, about the economy, about the world.  But learning something new is not the same as learning something shocking.  Yet I don’t dispute that the headline for the given story was accurate and that a great many people were shocked by the revelation.  They wouldn’t have been if they hadn’t concluded on the basis of nothing whatsoever that the majority of Americans are well prepared for a comfortable retirement.  I put forth that this sort of thing reveals the entire perception of income demographics in America to be pure fantasy.

Such a fantasy promotes a victim-blaming mentality.  And it promotes that not just among the beneficiaries of income inequality but among the victims of it, too, as they may tend to be surprised by information that shows their experience to be firmly in the majority.  And yet even the recognition of that information is not in itself enough to move commentators towards the idea that financial difficulty is an endemic problem and not a personal one.  The language applied to stories about the plight of the masses still suggests that the simple fact of their being a part of the masses is in some measure attributable to their own negligence, sloth, or ignorance.

The CNN article takes pains to spin the subject in a certain direction that is at once optimistic about general patterns and unfair to individuals.  It points out, “While workers' lack of saving and confidence in their ability to retire comfortably is troubling, [Employee Benefit Research Institute director Jack] VanDerhei said it's good that people are becoming more realistic about their financial situations.”  Sure, maybe, but there’s an enormously significant dimension of this story that stretches beyond the personal responsibilities of the people who are negatively affected.  At the same time that those people exhibit realism about that, how about analysts, media, and society as a whole become more realistic about the financial situations of people other than themselves?

Only Taxing the Rich is Bad, Says O'Driscoll

The Yahoo! Finance web series the Daily Ticker today consisted of an interview with Gerald O’Driscoll, former Vice President and economic advisor at the Dallas Federal Reserve, and a senior fellow at Cato Institute. He was asked whether there was anything that either the Fed or Washington could do to spur job creation, and naturally O’Driscoll quickly turned to criticizing President Obama’s tax policies, describing the raising of marginal tax rates on millionaires and billionaires as economically destructive.

The interviewer reminded O’Driscoll of the counter-arguments that would come from the presidential administration and its supporters, then asked: “Do you make a distinction between taxes whether they’re aimed at individuals or corporations, or is it – bottom line – raising taxes on anybody is bad for the economy?”

I think that question presented O’Driscoll with a pretty clear choice: is the problem simply taxation in general within a weak economy, or is it taxation of businesses? Yet O’Driscoll appears to have avoided that simple choice and opted to advance an entirely different perspective.

He began, “Well I would say that raising taxes on the…” and then paused at length, searching for the right synonym for “wealthiest Americans.” I found that pause very telling. He knew about whom he was talking, but he needed to phrase it in a way that served his ends. Using the phrase “the rich” is perfectly clear to every viewer, but using the phrase “the source of savings and investment” obfuscates what we’re talking about and makes it harder to attach an image to the subject, but easier to affix it to a concept. So that was the phrase that O’Driscoll settled on, saying that raising taxes on the source of savings and investment is bad for the economy.

Now, did you notice how that avoids the simple one-or-the-other choice that he was given with the question? For simplicity, let’s drop the more pleasant synonym and just acknowledge that he’s talking about the rich. So when he’s asked whether it’s bad, in a weak economy, to raise taxes full-stop, O’Driscoll’s answer is really no, it’s bad to raise taxes on the rich in particular. Theoretically, his point of view leaves open the possibility of raising taxes on the poorest American’s without expectation of consequence. Of course, this is something that several Republicans have actually advocated, but it’s quite amazing to see that such callous initiatives have a theoretical underpinning.

O’Driscoll continues by rebuking the president for ostensibly failing to understand that most business are not C Corporations and thus are not taxed separately from their owners, “So when you raise taxes on individuals, you’re raising taxes on the business, and hence… you’re inhibiting job creation.”

I almost admire how the language of this quotation allows O’Driscoll to exclusively designate millionaire business owners as “individuals.” Raising taxes on lower or middle class workers doesn’t raise taxes on business. Even raising taxes on millionaires who primarily earn their income from things like investments in businesses they don’t own is not equivalent to raising taxes on businesses. Do neither of these groups count towards the discussion? That seems suspiciously convenient for O’Driscoll’s argument.

Essentially, that argument seems to be that it’s destructive to raise taxes on extremely wealthy individuals, because they might use some of their own wealth to invest in the businesses they own or from which they profit. Meanwhile, by this line of thinking, there is no particular problem with raising taxes on people who will definitely use a portion of their slight income to purchase things like food, clothing, and gas.

I admit that my understanding of economics is rather rudimentary, but it seems to me that a sure-fire way to create jobs is by raising demands for goods and services, thus increasing the size of the workforce required to supply that demand. Unless I’m wrong about that, it’s pretty asinine to suggest that allowing the wealthy to hoard their money while thinking nothing of depriving the poor of theirs is the best way to stimulate the economy. Sure, business owners need personal wealth to invest in their industries. But why on Earth would they do so if demand for what they’re offering remains flat.

By contrast, if a wealthy American is legitimately interested in earning the highest margins from his business, he would be a fool not to make investments to match growing demand, unless of course his wealth has been taxed out of existence. But I hardly think anybody’s proposing that, and I certainly don’t think that paying a thirty-five percent marginal rate would cripple a billionaire’s investment capabilities.

Presidential Charity is Misplaced

Back in 2009, some young man at a town hall meeting with president Obama earned his fifteen minutes of fame by standing up and expressing his frustration at the depleted job market he had faced after graduating college. I don’t remember what the president’s response on the spot, in front of the cameras was, but his ultimate response, and the one that caught the media’s attention and was remembered in the following days was that he got personally involved in that individual’s struggle and had his staff find the young man a job. At the time, the comedian Marc Maron was part of a web series that was being broadcast from the husk that then remained of Air America Media. The day after this story he joked that President Obama was going to fix the economy, and that he was going to do it one person at a time.

In promoting a new book by one of its reporters, Eli Saslow, the Washington Post recently reported that President Obama has written personal checks to some of the American citizens who have written to him detailing the problems they were facing. No doubt many will read this and take heart at the implication that the president is in touch with the common person, and that he genuinely cares about the struggles of his constituents, to the extent that he is willing to engage in a little bit of self-sacrifice to help them out.

I do not find this story inspiring. In fact, I think that such person-to-person humanitarianism from the president sends a terrible message. It is very specifically not the job of the government to help people on an individual basis. Perhaps the principal reason for government’s very existence is the notion that we can collectively solve those problems which we cannot solve individually. There’s a division between the two that needs to be recognized and respected, and I think that just about anything that cuts against it justifies and worsens the weakness of our government.

I assume and I hope that people who write to the president do so because they feel the need to weigh in on an issue of broad social significance. No doubt there are crackpots and self-important individuals who write to describe problems that are perfectly unique to them, but with ten letters selected for President Obama to personally read each day, I would hope that only the ones that frame the personal narrative in terms of why it’s significant to an issue that’s important to the country at large would make the final cut.

If I’m right in all of this, then the authors of these letters are generally trying to prompt the president to take action that will help those who are in their position, and not strictly them as individuals. Even if that’s not the case, that damn well should be exactly the lens through which the president views each letter. If one impacts him, he should set it down upon his desk and ask a simple question: “What can I, as the president, do to help Americans in the situation this letter describes?” When he is seated in the Oval Office, the question should never be, “What can I do to personally help the author of this letter?” That isn’t the president’s role, and it shouldn’t be.

I don’t want to think that any of my president’s energies are going into improving the lots of singular constituents when those constituents are individuals among massive collectives of people facing the same or worse difficulties. It would be heart wrenching to turn away from the individual, and it may even be wrong, but only if one believes that there are situations in which no course of action is the right one. Turning away from the individual is sadly necessary when your every purpose is to pursue and execute what is best for the good of an entire country. If the authors of letters to the president wanted someone to address their personal struggles directly, it would have been better of them to write to charitable organizations, or old acquaintances, or reality television producers. Writing the president for personal help risks a conflict of interest with the entire country, in that the interests of the collective society may sometime abut against the interests of the individual with that collective. The president’s focus belongs on one side of this and it should be exclusive.

This may sound callous, and some may get the impression that I am asserting that the president should be somehow disallowed from acting on the impulse of personal conscience and offering resources that he can afford to give to a place where they are needed. But I am certainly not claiming that the president should avoid charity in his capacity as leader of the nation. What I am suggesting is that if a letter deeply affects the president and fills him with a sense of urgency about getting involved, he ought to take any money that he would have offered to the individuals involved an instead give it to some sort of organization with the task of helping people facing the associated difficulties.

Solving individual problems is actually insufficiently ambitious for the president. There are other individuals and organizations that do or could have that as their particular function, and for such people solving the problem of one would be a sublime accomplishment. For the president, solving one person’s problem and failing to address the root cause of it is abject failure. Part of the symbolism of cutting a check to a specific individual is that the president is effectively acknowledging that he doesn’t have the tools at his disposal to fix the problem on a broader basis. If I were to ever receive a reply letter from the president, I would much prefer to read a note that says “Sit tight, the country is about to get better,” than to receive a check with a memo that says, “Momentary, personal fix.”

I remember actually being quite angry when that young man got a job by way of the good fortune of having Obama visit his town and being handed the microphone during the Q & A. My first impulse was to wonder about what the president was going to do now for the thousands of other college graduates, me among them, who couldn’t find work. Despite the human interest story of this one solitary man’s struggles being over, the fact was that the situation that created those struggles hadn’t changed a whit. And that being the case, on a certain level of analysis, the effect of helping that one man to find a job was that that job wasn’t available to someone else who needed one, and perhaps just as desperately.

I wonder, though, whether the president and his staff felt accomplished and satisfied when they helped that one individual. I suppose you have to hold onto those things when you have the world’s problems weighing on you personally every day. But there can be no justification for taking the optimistic view that comes of a narrow focus and thereby losing an appropriate sense of urgency about what needs to be done on a legislative level. The unfortunate truth is that when we’re all waiting for the social change that will take this overarching conditions away, doing individual good is sometimes a matter of just shuffling the misery around.

If that’s what you and I have to do, then so be it. We make the best of a bad situation. But the president, and especially this president, should be far better than that. There are a precious few people in the country who actually have the power to fix the conditions that keep the rest of us sharing that misery. If I am to have any faith in them whatsoever, I need to believe that they are not playing favorites among us and that escape from those conditions is not award by lottery to people who’ve had their letters read by the highest office in the land, while the rest of us wait for change forever.

The Obama Jobs Plan: Last Stop for Compromise

I must say that I was intrigued by the strategy behind the jobs plan that the President unveiled in his speech last night. I can’t exactly say that I was inspired or impressed, though. I don’t think it’s the strategy that I’d have liked to see, but it is a strategy, and a proactive one, and that’s saying something. I listened to the speech on NPR, and the broadcasters who covered it seemed to have a fair sense of what was coming before the President took the podium. There was some alternative speculation about how the bill would be structured, but the dominant theory seemed to be that it would consist entirely of initiatives that had been supported by both Democrats and Republicans in the past. That turned out to be exactly the case, the strategy being to present something that could not possibly meet with partisan opposition unless the Republican Party was prepared to explain why it had changed its view on a series of positions it had formerly supported.

It’s a clever approach, and it may succeed in its goal, but there are two serious questions in my mind: is that goal ambitious enough, and what if it doesn’t succeed? I admire the effort and sacrifice that must have gone into identifying and advancing all of the points of demonstrated overlap between Republican and Democratic policies on jobs and the economy. But as far as I’m concerned, the main reason why there is so little progress in American politics today is that the Republican Party has an uncompromising political will while the Democrats have an obsession with compromise at the expense of any will whatsoever.

I value compromise myself. I’m not so naïve and egotistical that I think I think government policy and the future of America can be built according to my own narrow vision. I am a firm believer in incremental change, and I know that the very process of positive change sometimes requires a great deal of patience and a lot of frustration. Yet, in a situation where the most regressive elements of public policy provide an unmovable defense against even the most modest applications of liberal ideas, I don’t want more compromise. I want a stronger offense. I want a reason to believe that liberal ideas aren’t dying because all political resources are being directed to efforts at obtaining cooperation with people who see any Congressional action whatsoever as an unacceptable political defeat.

It seems to me that that is what the president and much of the Democratic Party have been doing. I fear that they are losing sight of the dividing line between compromise and capitulation. In fact, I think both parties lost sight of that line a long time ago. The clearest ideological difference between the two is that Republicans believe that giving up anything is capitulation, while Democrats think that giving up everything is compromise.

And what if the Republican Congress doesn’t pass a plan consisting entirely of initiatives formerly supported by both parties? What will be the new strategy, the next step towards gaining their cooperation? Introducing a jobs bill comprised entirely of initiatives supported only by Republicans? The current strategy absolutely has to be successful. But if it is, I hope that Democrats understand that there is nowhere left to go in the interest of establishing a common vision. They have already gone well past the center of the aisle, and it would make no sense to reach any farther without simply joining the Republican Party. Instead of that, if this strategy of asking the wall to move fails yet again, perhaps it will finally come time for the Democratic Party to regroup and begin assembling the machinery to tear through that wall. Perhaps then they will at least try to stand up for underrepresented liberal ideals. That may bear with it the risk of making little progress, but the Republican strategy has already guaranteed that, and no one seems to worry about the political consequences of that. If it’s impossible for anyone to take the right action, I’d at least like the right ideas to be in the public record.

Beyond Statistics and Statements

Last night, I was listening to a news and talk radio program that I'd never heard before. It began with a segment detailing the persistently negative news regarding the United States job market. I was struck by the piece’s reporting style, not because it was unusual, but precisely because I took it to be commonplace. I have often found news coverage in the popular media to be formulaic, and given what a horrible state that media has been in for most of my life, the fact that every segment seems to be a parody of the last severely limits the chances of meaningful progress and innovation. Plugging the days variables into an established and tired equation for how to present information to the public does very little to advance that public’s understanding of the facts or the issues.

One of the problems that I have with news regarding the various economic indicators is that, though the public is selectively given reason to be apprehensive about the economy, they are also encouraged to perceive the problem as merely a set of mathematical figures. This is never truer than when the stock market faces a downturn – an event that has no clear connection to real world consequences in the minds of the average American. But even when we are given the numbers for job creation, such as the number zero associated with the month of August, the information is presented as just some vagary of current history, not as what it truly is: people’s lives and futures. There is a constant back-and-forth in the media narrative of the economy, and it gives the impression that when jobs are being created the situation is good, and when they are being cut the situation is bad. It turns the perception of the economy into a comparison of averages, divorced from the nuance of there being victims and beneficiaries in every climate, as well as lingering effects on many people of difficulties that the numbers may suggest have passed.

Obviously, the public knows that people are deeply affected when jobs are lost, when salaries are cut, and so on. Still, when the measure of that effect is purely numeric, it is easy for the public to lose sight of those effects. If you don’t have personal experience with the associated hardships, and if you don’t think very hard about it, you might allow yourself the indulgence of assuming that the difficulties faced by individuals have been, by and large, short lived.

Of course, the media does not exclusively present economic news as a set of statistics. That is precisely what I noticed in the radio segment I heard last night. The formula they follow seems to be aimed at counterbalancing the almost esoteric quality of large-scale assessments of economic indicators. They do this by introducing interviewees who are suffering the consequences of those more impersonal trends and figures. In last night’s case, they spoke to a woman who had been laid off from her job, which provided half of the income for a family of five, who were now not able to make their bills without relying on savings. Bits of that family’s story were interspersed with quotations from experts and excerpts from economic reports, in the same fashion that personal stories are always built into news stories of broader significance.

At the end of the piece, they tied the broader and narrower narratives together with a final thought that displayed shortsightedness and deeply flawed copywriting. They play a quotation from the woman, explaining that she felt that she was facing much greater competition in the current job market than she would have under more normal economic circumstances. The reporter took the reins for the last word, adding to her commentary that in her family’s current situation, that competition is one that she cannot afford to lose. That, I think, is remarkably irresponsible phrasing. It reflects the entire problem of constructing news reports according to this formula, a problem which is far from obvious, but which I think can be quite serious.

Who is it that can’t afford to lose the competition for jobs, according to the reporter? The woman he was interviewing? What about the people with whom she is competing? Saying that she specifically cannot lose that competition suggests that other people can, that she is unique, and that the problem being presented is her problem, not society’s. It is a very subtle outgrowth of the terribly common mentality of blaming the victim, in that that kind of phrasing seems to imply that the overall situation remains a fair competition, and that it is up to the families that are struggling the most to see to it that they win in a competition with people who can better absorb the setback.

The problem with presenting stories like that of the economy as a series of statistics and figures is that it prevents the story from being humanized. Leveraging in reference to one or two people experiencing the associated hardship succeeds at humanizing the problem for one or two people. It does not give the story a genuine sense of urgency for those who are not directly affected. Rather than presenting the public with one story about a series of economic indicators and their effect on entire segments of the American population, this sort of journalism presents two separate news stories in one piece: one bit of reporting about a set of vaguely significant calculations, and one human interest story about the brave struggles of a specific family in a specific region.

These stories need to be connected in a way that is meaningful to people who are not exactly like the ones being profiled in the human interest segment. The impulse to balance a detached perspective on the facts with a normative presentation of their effects and consequences is a good impulse, but its execution is lacking. The news media knows how to present both cold, dispassionate facts and charming personal narratives. It also knows how to speculate wildly on topics such as politics. But what it generally does not seem to have a talent for is the crucial application of reason to situations that warrant more than observation and ideological guesswork. That is what it would take to show economic facts in a light that shines evenly upon everyone who stands to be affected by it. Reporters should sometimes be willing to conclude from the esoteric facts what is happening in society as a whole. Facts speak for themselves, and so do individuals, but the collective experience has no voice. A good reporter should do the work of saying on air what has not been said for them. But there’s no formula for that, and so I have little expectation of hearing such a report any time soon.

Democrats' Notions of Dealmaking

As appalling as was the discourse surrounding the efforts to raise the debt ceiling, I am far more appalled by the dialogue that I’ve been witnessing since the bill passed the House. It disgusts me when I see this measure referred to as a “deal,” and I’m positively sickened when it’s referred to as a “compromise.” I know by now that to expect Democrats to stand up for a cause, to be proactive and take an aggressive lead in lawmaking would be asking too much, but is it really unrealistic to imagine that they might come away from one of their terrific capitulations and express a little outrage, a little anger, or even just a little definite opposition?

Instead of any of that, virtually all of the Democrats I’ve seen commenting on this 100% Republican plan talk about it as if it’s a good thing. They use those words, like “compromise,” implying that both sides gave up a little something for the greater good. But the reality is an increasingly familiar story, in which the legislators who present themselves as being a little bit closer to sharing my views give up the very essence of their position, and all of the preceding debate and rancor comes to look like nothing more than an elaborate show designed to maintain the illusion that there is an opposition party. Why doesn’t that illusion instantly fall apart when we consider that that would-be opposition party still holds control over the majority of the government, but none of the policy discussions?

Only six Democratic senators voted against a debt ceiling increase that includes trillions in spending cuts and absolutely no revenue increase. How can that be explained other than by supposing that they either tacitly accept the positions of the Republican party or that they just don’t care enough about their contrary views to fight for them or even to register them publicly. Republicans have no qualms whatsoever about casting purely symbolic votes. Why do Democrats refuse to do the same, opting instead to demonstrate complete support for legislation crafted entirely by their so-called opponents? Twenty-eight Tea Party Republicans voted against this bill, and that suggests that there are nearly five times as many senators in the minority party who are in opposition because the completely conservative measure is not conservative enough than there are Democratic senators against it because no aspect of it is liberal in any way, shape, or form. Does the Democratic Party stand for anything whatsoever?

My representative in the House voted in favor of the bill, and his subsequent remarks reflect an unwillingness to so much as discuss what went wrong, or to acknowledge that this was anything less than the best thing for the country. Representative Brian Higgins has said that what is important now is moving forward and addressing job creation. I wonder if he believes that the two issues are unrelated. I agree that job creation is of paramount importance, but I think it was important before this fiasco was completed. As a matter of fact, that’s a significant part of the reason why the means by which we raised the debt ceiling was so important in the first place. If legislators continue to push for cuts without revenue, the support apparatus for the unemployed and impoverished can’t escape the chopping block forever, and the government will have no means by which to institute genuine job creation measures. Now that a lack of compromise has been turned into a bipartisan congressional act, it’s not appropriate for Democrats with an active conscience to leave it at their backs and call the issue settled. It’s not appropriate to forget that this is a terrible deal, and to suppress anger and avoid blame. And it’s not appropriate to describe this as a compromise, as even the President has been doing.

I’m pleased that one of the senators from my home state of New York, Kirsten E. Gillibrand, voted against the Budget Control Act, but given the fact that her voice is such a small, ineffectual minority in the party that controls her chamber of Congress, she is one of the very few major party candidates who retains my support after the passage of this act. This is a breaking point for me. I never considered myself a Democrat, but naturally I voted that way more often than not. From this point on, however, I will vote for neither Democrat nor Republican unless I have a damn good reason to believe that that label does not fit the particular candidate. The very best thing that can be said of Democrats in recent years is that they’ve attached such high value to compromise that they’ve made an ideology of capitulation. I’m not interested in voting for congressional representatives whose primary legislative goals are to present an image of bipartisan agreement at all costs. I want representatives who will fight tooth and nail to pass laws that they, and hopefully by extension I, think are best for the country. Is that too much to ask?

The Class Warfare Brand

One of the things that bother me most about American politics and the news media is that conservative forces always seem to be controlling the narrative. As bad as Republicans tend to be at policy, compassion, moderation, and common sense, you’ve got to admit that they’re great at branding. Terminology and concepts that should have equal weight on either side of an issue have a tendency to become tethered to purely conservative ideologies. The phrase “class warfare” is a terrific example of this, and it tends to come up every time policy debates turn toward exploration of the possibility of raising the marginal tax rate on the top one percent of income earners, or of eliminating tax breaks on things like corporate jets. Somehow, that same term doesn’t gain as much popular traction when certain politicians stonewall efforts to extend unemployment benefits, or when unions are stripped of their collective bargaining powers. “Class warfare,” we are evidently meant to conclude, can only be conducted by the poor against the rich, never the other way around.

Thus we have Rush Limbaugh responding to the president’s mention of those tax breaks on corporate jet owners by calling it “dangerous!” and “full-fledged demagoguery!” and claiming that Obama’s “aim is for one group of Americans to hate and despise another!”

How can the effort at narrowing the gap between rich and poor be class warfare if decades of efforts at widening that gap weren’t? What could the president possibly be doing here to make one group of Americans despise another? He’s not changing the landscape of class distinctions in America; he’s just bringing attention to some of its features. If Limbaugh’s concern is that hatred will arise from nothing other than more information, there’s probably something wrong with the reality that is being described. If anything is going to breed hatred and despisal by one group against another, it’s not going to be successful efforts to make the rich take up a fair share of the tax burden. Rather, what will breed hatred is being witness to rich people repelling those efforts and holding fast to the most inequitable elements of American society.

Warfare, you see, is something that happens between two different nations or groups of people. If anyone wants to breed hatred and promote class warfare, it’s people like Rush Limbaugh who seem hell-bent on making the differences between the two groups of people in the United States as stark as possible – one group owning everything, the other nothing. So it is outrageous that he is able to throw those pejorative terms entirely onto the other side of the issue and paint multi-millionaires as the sole victims of unprovoked class warfare.

How are Republicans able to get away with this at every mention of labor policy or class inequality when the claim is so patently absurd? Skillful branding and manipulation of language can go a long way towards making simple acts of conscience appear to be villainous and persecutory. Does the Democratic Party have no public relations people whatsoever, no one who can introduce vivid and effective language on the right side of a topic before it is co-opted by the political right? How awful they must be at PR by comparison when they can’t even use it to promote the truth or the action that better advances the public good, while their opponents can paint lead to look like gold and then sell it to a desperately impoverished metallurgist.

All right, so once again the conservative wing has established the narrative and decided the course of the conversation. This is where it’s time to become proactive and change what it is they’re saying, so they look like the manipulative misers they are, rather than noble martyrs. Glenn Beck has described the corporate jet tax conversation as “unprecedented class warfare!” I would like to see someone respond, “You’re goddamn right it is!” It’s a war we’re engaged in, and you know what? That has great potential to be a good thing in the mind of the public. My dictionary shows that “war” can be defined as “a sustained effort to deal with or end a particular unpleasant or undesirable situation or condition.” How about we put the bitter, self-serving complaints of the right in that context? That would be good branding, and then Beck and Limbaugh would be decrying an unprecedented effort to deal with the unpleasant condition of a broadening gulf between rich and poor, the undesirable situation whereby the rich are given every effort to deepen and extend their wealth, while the poor struggle fruitlessly to find work and keep in their homes.

Being more of the latter class myself, I am afraid I can’t bring myself to be so nuanced, though, in response to the rest of Glenn Beck’s comments about the president’s discussion of corporate jet tax breaks, so don’t read on if you’re offended by strong language. Beck has said that it shows Obama’s “sheer, unadulterated disgust for the wealthy, the successful and anyone who’s ever tried to do anything with their life here in America”

Fuck you, Glenn Beck! How dare you indict anyone else for not inhabiting the same deluded fantasy-land that you’ve built with your $65 million personal wealth? As someone who’s trying desperately to do something with my life here in America and finding that my constant, crushing poverty adds more than a few layers of difficulty to my struggle, I powerfully resent the implication that an effort to get the most obscenely rich members of our society to give back something substantial constitutes a punishment of the ambitious. Your greed and that of those like you is what punishes my ambition, and what’s more, it makes my own personal promotion of class warfare seem ever so justified. Fuck you, Glenn Beck, if you think your success is a testament purely to your hard work and that the poverty of 36 million Americans is underpinned by laziness, and if they all just stepped up their efforts, they could have an eventually-disgraced television show and earnings of up to $11 million a year. Fuck you and your brand of class warfare.