 There are some truths so hard to face, so
ugly and so at odds with how we imagine the world should be,
that nobody can accept them. Here's one: It is obvious that a
class system has arrived in America — a recent study of the
thirty-four countries in the Organization for Economic
Cooperation and Development found that only Italy and Great
Britain have less social mobility. But nobody wants to admit: If
your daddy was rich, you're gonna stay rich, and if your daddy
was poor, you're gonna stay poor. Every instinct in the American
gut, every institution, every national symbol, runs on the idea
that anybody can make it; the only limits are your own limits.
Which is an amazing idea, a gift to the world — just no longer
true. Culturally, and in their daily lives, Americans continue
to glide through a ghostly land of opportunity they can't bear
to tell themselves isn't real. It's the most dangerous lie the
country tells itself.
More than anything else, class now determines Americans' fates.
The old inequalities — racism, sexism, homophobia — are
increasingly antiquated. Women are threatening to overwhelm men
in the workplace, and the utter collapse of the black lower
middle class in the age of Obama — a catastrophe for the
African-American community — has little to do with prejudice and
everything to do with brute economics. Who wins and who loses
has become simplified, purified: those who own and those who
don't. Meanwhile Great Britain, the source of the class system,
has returned, plain and simple, to its old aristocratic masters.
Reverting to type, the overlords and the underclass seem little
removed from their eighteenth-century predecessors. The
overlords preach shared sacrifice from their palaces and the
underclass riots and the middle classes quietly judge. Everybody
knows where he stands.
Not in America. In the United States, the emerging aristocracy
remains staunchly convinced that it is not an aristocracy, that
it's the result of hard work and talent. The permanent working
poor refuse to accept that their poverty is permanent. The class
system is clandestine.
And yet the most cherished dreams are the hardest to awaken
from. The best-made shows on television now — some of the most
beautifully shot, most beautifully articulated television shows
ever made — capture in achingly precise detail the era that
economists call the Great Compression, that shimmering, virtuous
period before the 1970s when the middle class swelled so much
that it came to believe it could never stop swelling — the
original dangerous illusion. Pan Am is an unlikely parable of
American fluidity. Being stuck in a tube in the air, serving
coffee, and having your ass grabbed achieves glamour by virtue
of the characters' ease of movement. Don Draper is a new Gatsby
— he transforms himself from penniless vet to salesclerk to
partner in an ad firm. Meanwhile, in Sitcomland, Modern Family
has replaced working-class heroes like Homer Simpson and Ralph
Kramden with the top 1 percent, and yet everyone, including the
audience, seems to accept them as representative.
Meaningful, substantive approaches to class are going to have to
come from elsewhere. This month, the second season of Downton
Abbey returns to PBS, and we may as well all have a look,
because if we are going to have a European-style class system,
we better begin to import their values. The scenery is extremely
lovely. The arrangements are very cozy. British aristocrats
always look like they're daring the world to line them all up
against a wall and erase the entire parasitical group of them,
but at Downton, at least, the ruling class is somewhat aware of
the arbitrary nature of its status. The American ruling class
could learn from their humility. At Downton Abbey, where
everyone has a place, at least the boy who cleans the boots and
knives isn't a bad person because of his job.
Herman Cain's comment in a recent interview on the Occupy Wall
Street movement, which is by no means an uncommon opinion, was
this: "If you're not rich, blame yourself." The old Calvinist
strain that connects prosperity to divine election runs deep.
Work hard and stay late and you get to be a banker or doctor;
drop out of high school or start using drugs and you'll end up
at McDonald's. Even among liberals, the new trend toward
behavioral economics demonstrates how poor people fare worse on
tests requiring self-control, how their personal weaknesses
create cycles of poverty. You don't have to be on talk radio to
believe that the poor must be doing something wrong.
The Great Outcry that has filled the country with inchoate rage
is the bloody mess of this fundamental belief in the justice of
American outcomes crashing headfirst into the new reality. The
majority of new college grads in the United States today are
either unemployed or working jobs that don't require a degree.
Roughly 85 percent of them moved back home in 2011, where they
sit on an average debt of $27,200. The youth unemployment rate
in general is 18.1 percent. Are these all bad people? None of us
— not Generation Y, not Generation X, and certainly not the
Boomers — have ever faced anything like it. The Tea Partiers
blame the government. The Occupiers blame the financial
industry. Both are really mourning the arrival of a new social
order, one not defined by opportunity but by preexisting
structures of wealth. At least the ranters are mourning. Those
who are not screaming or in drum circles mostly pretend that the
change isn't happening.
Post-hope, it is hard to imagine even any temporary regression
back to the days of the swelling American middle class. The
forces of inequality are simply too powerful and the forces
against inequality too weak. But at least we can end the
hypocrisy. In ten years, the next generation will no longer have
the faintest illusion that the United States is a country with
equality of opportunity. The least they're entitled to is some
honesty about why. |
