Class War!

Molly Ivins’ recent article on “class warfare” brought to mind Neal Gabler’s op-ed piece from the 27 January 2002 LA Times, in which he wrote,

If Americans believed there was systemic inequality, there could be class warfare. What Reaganism did--and this may have been its signal accomplishment--was convince the average American that equal opportunity already existed, and that anyone who didn't succeed had only himself to blame, not the inequities of the system. This was the grand psychological transformation, and though it played on Americans' predisposition both to credit and to reprove themselves for their own situation, it succeeded largely by steadily redirecting attention from the macro to the micro, from economics to anecdote. While the macro story was that wealth was being massively redistributed from the middle class to the upper class, the micro story that Ronald Reagan and other conservatives--and even many liberals, for that matter--kept pushing incessantly was that of the small, intrepid entrepreneur who made a million dollars out of some invention or brainstorm. There were literally thousands of these stories--Reagan loved to tell the one about the fellow who reaped a fortune by inventing a beer-can holder--and they had the advantage of being media-friendly. What they suggested was that America had reached the point at which you either decided to make a fortune or you didn't, with the promise that your own windfall might be just around the corner. This was the new economic myth that trumped economic truth…

It remains a potent idea, because people want to believe it--certainly more than they want to believe that the U.S. economy distributes its rewards unfairly. As Ronald Reagan no doubt realized, it is also a lot easier to identify with a rich entrepreneur than to understand the welter of statistics that show the more frightening face of the economy. At the same time, having convinced people that wealth is a function of brains and gumption, rather than of inheritance or influence, conservatives effectively removed the rich as a target of class warfare and replaced them with another target of ideological warfare: government. By this new reasoning, when the government claimed that it wanted to redress the inequities of the economy, it was really just angling to take more money from its citizens. Government, the only instrumentality that could possibly remedy unfairness, was a lot easier to hate than a guy who invented a beer-can holder or even a guy who invented a computer operating system and became a billionaire.

After 20 years of inspirational tales of wealth, and as many years of government-bashing, this is where we find ourselves now. Most of us believe fervently in the American Dream. Most of us believe that the rich are deserving and that, with a few breaks, we might get ours, too. Most of us believe that taxes are some kind of confiscatory scheme rather than a tool for correcting an imbalance. And most of us believe that to think in terms of class under these circumstances is to deny the ideal of individual responsibility that is the very basis of America. That's why the rich will keep getting richer, the middle class will keep losing ground, the poor will keep getting ignored, and no one will say a single word about it.

Also of note: Brian Oliver Sheppard has approached this issue with his typical, uncompromising flair on more than one occasion. Of course, he writes from an anarchist perspective.