Musings Report #4 01-21-12 The New American Divide
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The New American Divide
The Wall Street Journal featured an article entitled The New American Divide by demographer Charles Murray which outlines a widening cultural divide between the "haves" (the upper middle class, roughly the top 20% managerial/creative class) and everyone else.
Murray chose to focus on Caucasian Americans to avoid all the issues and emotions of ethnicity, but I think we can apply some of his class-based observations to ethnic minority populations in the U.S. as well.
I am recommending this article (based on a forthcoming book) not because it covers everything of importance about this tangled subject, but because it offers a well-researched first step to a much broader spectrum of issues that the author touches upon in passing.
I think the cultural divide the author cites is symptomatic of powerful financial and social forces that operate well below the surface of everyday life. I don't claim to have "answers" to these issues, but I find it remarkable that the author ends up concluding that community has been displaced by the Savior State, and the ultimate solution is to return to a life based on community rather than handouts and subsidies from the Savior State.
This aligns with my own conclusions stated in my books "Survival+," "An Unconventional Guide to Investing in Troubled Times" and the forthcoming "Resistance, Revolution, Liberation." That said, I think there is much that was left out of his carefully apolitical exploration of class in America and much left out of his general explanation for the widening divide betweem the "haves" and the "have-nots."
I think he is correct in fingering Savior State "free money" as the primary cause of the dissolution of working-class America's communities and households: with welfare, Section 8, food stamps, etc. then working-class women no longer need a husband to afford children, and men can scam the system for benefits and avoid working altogether.
He is also correct in pointing out the self-sustaining feedback loops created by Savior State support and Power Elite membership: both groups' children grow up in worlds where welfare or Elite perquisites are the expected norm. In this profound way, people grow up in completely different Americas, and these culturally inherited mindsets are very difficult to pierce and change.
What he delicately avoids exploring is the reality that the Status Quo works very well not just for the top 1% but also for the top 20% that forms what I call the Upper Caste of American society: the technocrat, managerial, creative class that does the heavy lifting for the top 1% who own most of the assets and income streams.
The bottom 80% is employed as service workers or bought off with bread-and-circus welfare to keep them quiet and passive. The system doesn't have to work for the bottom 80%, it just has to sustain them at a level that doesn't spark revolt.
The housing bubble was a gigantic scam foisted on the top layer of the working class and the lower layer of the middle class as a "sure-fire way" to join the speculative financial frenzy that has so enriched the top 1% and their enablers, the Upper Caste technocrat class. When the bubble burst, so did fantasies of living the Upper Caste lifestyle without the hard slog to a meaningful university degree and long hours slaving away for Corporate America to join the Upper Caste.
This notion that America no longer works for the bottom 80% (I would even say the bottom 90%) is something that standard-issue pundits like Murray cannot speak of or even admit. His "solution" is ultimately for the 80% to get on with life as an underclass and make the best of living in an economy which serves their interests only enough to avoid open insurrection.
I also think that Murray, a media-pundit superstar in his field, studiously avoids the role of mass media in the creation of the divide. He touches briefly on the fact that we all once watched the same TV shows, a unifying cultral factor, but only because they were the only shows on TV. What I see, and what I believe research supports, is a vast chasm between the media the Upper Caste consumes and what the "have-nots" consume.
The really creative class is too busy to watch much TV or many films, or while away time texting and talking on cellphones. Rather, they create the context and content for these media and devices, and do so by avoiding addiction to their own creations--much like drug pushers never sample their own wares.
The managerial Upper Caste have all the devices and services, but their workload limits the amount of time they have to consume "entertainment" and communicate with text, twitter, email, etc. for amusement. But it is not just a matter of time constraints; they are highly conscious of the fact that consuming media and "entertainment" in quantity does not further their career. What provides the elitist sheen they desire to "fit in" to the upper tier of their caste?
The signifiers of membership in this Corporate/Federal/academic/NGO High-Caste status are leisurely foreign travel in prestigious cities or exotic areas, foreign postings, study abroad, the ability to speak a foreign language, tasteful art in the home and office, facility with corporate-speak, participation in High-Caste cultural events such as the symphony, art-house foreign films or theater, a confident knowledge of wine, being a "foodie" of the Chez Panisse sort, an association (however flimsy) with an Elite university or other respected institution, and last but not least, a network of associates and "friends" (real friendship being an increasingly rare commodity in America) who can be mentioned in conversation as owning/participating in these same high-caste signifiers.
The working class, on the other hand, is a voracious consumer of all media and entertainment; the TV is often left on 24/7 in working-class households and merely muted at night, and an iPod or internet radio is always providing a soundtrack to every activity, while Facebook and/or texting is a near-obsession, interrupting or taking precedence over all other activities, including, research has found, sex. Social status is measured by signifiers such as owning the latest Hollywood film on bootleg DVD, higher priced alcohol (but not wine), massive collections of films and music (i.e. media), sports memorabilia, and in rural areas, fishing and hunting trophies.
When High-Caste politicos like Al Gore or Mitt Romney attempt to cross the divide and mimic working-class signifiers, their attempts are either comical, wooden or downright painful. They live in a completely different America from the voters they are clumsily appealing to.
This divide is very real to me as I am fortunate to have some experience on both sides of this divide, having attended public school but graduating from an Elite prep school and having earned a (non-Elite) university degree. I speak a bit of Japanese and French, have traveled enough to speak first-hand about various places people find of interest and I have long had season tickets to the symphony (I take my Mom, as my wife prefers classical Indian music and world music).
On the other hand, I treasure my Les Paul electric guitar, and worked in the construction/building field for many years alongside both deserters from Corporate/Central State America and working-class guys for whom construction was a relatively high-paying avenue to a middle-class life, if they saved their money (rare). I care about my tools and am happy to admire your motorbike, wood shop, truck, fishing or bird-hunting trophies, and I have fallen off a number of roofs and lived to continue doing that work from time to time. I played basketball and football in high school, both poorly, but lettered.
I suspect many of you also bridge the divide, but I also suspect the number pf people who do so is dwindling.
These years of experience sensitized me to another issue Murray dod not address directly, the "mancession"-- the trend toward an economy that values the "female" skills of communciation, cooperation and education, while the "male" virtues of a strong back and a physical-world skill have steadily lost value. This is a very complex set of issues, but we can "state the obvious" by noting that the decline in factory/manufacturing work, though equally filled by men and women alike, has apparently hurt males more than females, who have shifted to retail, healthcare, pink-collar and government work more readily than working-class males.
Another complex and knotty issue is declining marriage rates and soaring out-of-wedlock births. Are men simply no longer needed as breadwinners, or are they being "selected out" for other reasons? Could the mass media once again be a critical if unspoken factor, as it so often presents malehood as little more than an extended adolescence and fatherhood as a role for bumbling losers?
Yes, it's easy to "blame the media" but once again we must start by asking who is absorbing thousands of hours of this politically convenient (i.e. distracting and deranging) "entertainment" and who avoids it like the plague. How can ceaseless propaganda not influence those who watch it daily for hours on end?
As many oftwominds readers have noted, Step 1 in liberating oneself from propaganda is to stop watching broadcast TV.
This divide speaks very directly to the core problems we face, which are not simply financial or political. I plan on exploring these issues further in 2012.
From Left Field
Making It in America: In the past decade, the flow of goods emerging from U.S. factories has risen by about a third. Factory employment has fallen by roughly the same fraction. The story of Standard Motor Products, a 92-year-old, family-run manufacturer based in Queens, sheds light on both phenomena.
No One Is Above The Law (Simon Johnson): The system is so fragile, and trust and faith so precarious, that a single bad report could cause a bank run. So the "solution" is to transfer risk to the taxpayers, and protect the guilty, which completely undermines faith in the system.
An Ethnic War Is Rekindled in Myanmar: dictatorship doing what dictatorships do best, while the super-powers juggle for position and influence....
Bad Year for Wall St. Not Reflected in Chiefs' Pay: The disclosure of stock awards to Wall Street's top tier comes as lower-level employees are finding out that their own bonuses will be much smaller than a year ago.
(via Joel M.)
"A REFORM IS A CORRECTION OF ABUSES; A REVOLUTION IS A TRANSFER OF POWER." EDWARD G. BULWER-LYTTON (via Jesse)
Thanks for reading--
charles
