Felix Salmon gets to what I think is the key point in the recent Atlantic piece on transglobal Galtism that mistermix wrote about:
It’s not that these people are utterly bereft of noblesse oblige: Chrystia points out that “in this age of elites who delight in such phrases as outside the box and killer app, arguably the most coveted status symbol isn’t a yacht, a racehorse, or a knighthood; it’s a philanthropic foundation.” But those philanthropies don’t benefit the left-behind middle classes: they tend to follow a barbell distribution, with the money going either to the world’s poorest or else to well-endowed universities and cultural institutions. The US middle class is sneered at for being fat and lazy and unworthy of their wealth.
Whereas once the problem was just welfare queens and strapping young bucks, now it’s the entire middle and lower classes, the lazy union members, the credit card deadbeats, the unemployed so content with their benefits that they don’t look for work.
Salmon doesn’t see this being reversed anytime soon and I don’t either. Conservative myths have divided us moochers and looters against ourselves.
SFAW
OK, so if I’m a moocher AND a looter, do I need to have someone saw me in half? Or can I just develop a split personality instead (which is usually less bloody)?
And will I need to start trolling RedStoat, along with my “work” here?
Inquiring minds – both halves – want to know.
Violet
Limbaugh and his ilk constantly slam the unions. It’s a knee-jerk response at this point. I wonder how many of their listeners had good union jobs before Reaganomics started the gutting.
slag
I blame the Clenis.
But seriously, I’m all about jumping on the bandwagon decrying the death of the middle class here, DougJ, but still, I have a hard time not seeing this shift as an improvement–from a purely cultural perspective.
Nathanlindquist
Sure you can blame the elites for dividing us….I think we did a great job dividing ourselves thank you very much. American society has no unifying culture; we are not all french the way everyone in france has that to share. Instead we middle classers tend to each love our own niche, whether its Nascar, hipsterism, the 2nd presbyterian church of smithville, or whatever it might be, and we just don’t like middle classers of another niche that much. An empire with only 300 odd years of history has difficulty being much more than that.
Brian S (formerly Incertus)
Seems to me like someone needs to update Bill Hicks’ famous rant against advertisers to make it about these fuckers.
SFAW
On a (slightly) more serious note: had the banksters and Santelli acolytes actually had to feel some pain over their driving the country almost-to-destruction, some of them might actually had an epiphany or two, and become more attentive to the needs of persons not as wealthy as themselves. This would have the potential of them doing some REAL good works.
Of course, the rest of them – which probably hits the 90% mark – would become embittered at Obama and the Dems. But since they appear to be that way, anyway, after getting their sorry asses bailed out, I don’t see a problem.
The “solution” to those Masters of the Universe who still believe the world owes them something might be a new institution. Since Debtors’ Prisons don’t really exist anymore, maybe something new could be constructed – SCUM prison? (for Self-Centered Unapologetic Mofos). Might work.
SFAW
Perhaps, but I think we had a lot of help from Nixon, Reagan, Atwater, Rove, and the rest of the criminals.
Belafon (formerly anonevent)
@Violet: Most of these people don’t realize that the 40 hour week, paid vacation, and paid sick time are due to unions, and it’s no coincidence that the weakening of the unions has corresponded to the “relaxation” of these benefits.
david mizner
I think one of the problems is that because these people didn’t inherit the money, they actually think they deserve a zillion dollars. These entitled new-money globe-trotting assholes make me almost miss good old-fashioned trust-fund babies.
“The clincher, Peterson says, came from the wife: “She turns to me and she goes, ‘You know, the thing about 20’”—by this, she meant $20 million a year—“‘is 20 is only 10 after taxes.’ And everyone at the table is nodding.”
jcricket
we’re doing it to ourselves (with their prodding). I can’t count the number of times I’ve heard middle class or upper-middle class (but not Galtian overlord-level) whites rail not just against the typical “lazy ” but also about how the social safety net (unemployment insurance) or the “right” to healthcare is making everyone lazy.
I once stared in disbelief when a “liberal” lawyer friend of mine ($500k+ annual income, not counting her husband’s 6-figure salary in middle management) said that she didn’t think healthcare should be a right b/c people like her brother (organic farmer, income of <$50k/year) would be encouraged take jobs that don't make a lot of money (like organic farming) if they could get healthcare. It's mind-boggling how these people think a society would work when the only viable careers are lawyer, medical specialist and high-finance (ok, maybe software engineer too).
I think the problem is that people believe Ayn Rand's conclusions about Galt. We all know that if our Galtian overlords did go to Galt's Guch, society would get along just fine, b/c it's the rest of us that fuel society, not them. And for every "important" Galt we lost, there's an "almost-Galt" who is waiting to take his/her place.
NonyNony
@SFAW:
They’re good at exploiting what’s there and driving wedges in the right places, but Americans in general through our history have rarely been good about uniting towards their own ends. We started out with more of a “if you don’t like it, pack it up and move West” culture and even though the “West” to move to is gone, it’s still there. There was a brief few decades in there of “common cause” in the labor movement, but the eventual corruption of the leadership of labor (combined with some few well-placed wedges) has tarnished that kind of solidarity among people who work. These days I’m more likely to hear about how useless someone’s union rep is than I am to hear about how great it is to work in a union shop.
RSR
Let’s see–who gets blamed for not handling a blizzard correctly? Absentee billionaire mayor, or unionized sanitation department which had 10% of its workforce cut by said mayor?
General Stuck
We are increasingly in political times untethered from reality. Reading the liberal blogs, even after the progressive cause triumphs of the Lame Duck Congress, Obama is something of a cross between Herbert Hoover and Richard Nixon. And on the wingnut side, he is the devil spawn of Che Guevara. Everyone seems to have rented their own room with a view of their own version of reality, self contained and impervious to any fact based. or nuanced analysis about much of anything. I just want to know the raw info of what happens these days, without any filter, other than my own, and a few people on this particular blog, and maybe a handful of others. The rest is a gumbo of posturing bullshit.
Violet
@Belafon (formerly anonevent):
Yep. In December I was listening to Limbaugh’s program. A guy called in and said, “I had a good job doing [some form of blue-collar work, can’t remember exactly what]. It was full time and I got benefits. Then in this recession I got laid off. Just recently I got hired back by a temp company. I’m doing the same job for less money and with no benefits. I’ve got no health insurance!”
I could tell Limbaugh was struggling trying to figure out how he could make this Obama’s and the Dem’s fault because he wasn’t saying much. The guy kind of went on about how it was wrong that he was doing the same job for less and they didn’t even offer benefits. He asked Limbaugh why this sort of thing was happening. Limbaugh didn’t really have a good answer.
Eventually the caller said, “They told us the reason they couldn’t offer us health insurance was because of Obamacare!” Limbaugh pounced, repeated that “Obamacare” was to blame for lower paying jobs and no benefits and then cut to commercial.
The ignorance of the caller was staggering. That’s who listens to Rush Limbaugh. They should be voting for Dems, they clearly benefit from Dem policies, yet “it’s all Obama’s fault.”
Cat Lady
Someone in a much earlier thread here (probably beltane who is always hitting something deserving on the head with a blunt object) suggested that the worst thing that ever happened to our middle class was the fall of the Soviet Union and the attendant scare of creeping communism and its theoretical appeal to workers. That event appears to have been the last brake on the runaway train that is the global capitalism we’re
enjoyingsuffering from today. Thanks Gorby!WereBear
We simply live in unreal times. We have a primitive switch in our brain which worked well for millions of years… the one that says, “I saw it, it’s real.”
I think we have created an incredible pressure on minds with imagination difficulties; there’s all kinds of “seeing things that aren’t real” and vulnerable crazies are more common than we ever dreamed.
SFAW
Perhaps you’re right. And certainly there has been a long history – worldwide, not just the US – of demonizing the “other”. (Jews, Chinese, Sunnis, Shia, etc.) But after MLK and the gains made on Civil Rights, it seemed (for a too-brief period) that we had moved somewhat past that. The Vietnam-related fights were vicious at times, but I don’t recall it rising to the all-hate-all-the-time level of the modern-day hate-fest which is the hallmark of the Rethugs and their followers.
There has always been anger/hatred just below the surface, but most people were able to keep it in check. Now, the only check on it has been the “difficulty” in trying to find yet another group to hate or to blame for our problems.
Ash Can
I agree with slag that this is an improvement over crass conspicuous consumption, but Salmon’s basic point about the plight of the middle class still stands, of course. What far too few people of any “class” realize is that the middle class is the engine of economic growth, not the upper class of which Ayn Rand, in her poor deranged way, was so enamored. The nations that recognize this are the ones to prosper over the long term; those that ignore it are doomed to stagnation or worse.
UofAZGrad
Same as it ever was. The Galtian masters of the 19th and early 20th century didn’t have any different attitude towards the American rabble than the current stock. They left their money to wealthy universities and cultural institutions too (or started their own like Carnegie and the U of Chicago, Duke or Stanford). Even in the golden age of postwar wealth distribution, the elites felt under siege by the rabble (Mad Men does a very good job of showing this).
Helping the poor in Africa is a new twist but doesn’t change their entitled mindset – it is just the chic thing to do at the moment. The difference is getting the American poor and middle class to vote against their own economic interests. I haven’t checked into church sermons from the 1940s and 50s but I’m pretty sure tax cuts wasn’t a major theme in religious circles like it is today.
schrodinger's cat
@Cat Lady: I have to agree. The so called “Golden Age” of capitalism was post World War II to the 70’s. The hey day of the Soviet Union. The threat of communism kept the capitalists in check I think. They knew they had to treat their workers well or else…
CDT
“. . .with the money going either to the world’s poorest or else to well-endowed universities and cultural institutions. The US middle class is sneered at for being fat and lazy and unworthy of their wealth.”
Not to worry: this is a problem that solves itself. In another generation, the current American middle class will be among the world’s poorest. Voila!
dcdl
I was talking to a friend yesterday about unions. She was trying to tell me unions are bad and it’s not fair they make so much money and get great benefits unlike our husbands. Then she said if they got rid of the unions where our husbands work then our husbands and everybody could make more money. I just looked at her and tried to point out some of the flaws in her ‘logic’. We ended up agreeing to disagree. But then this is somebody who doesn’t believe in Global Warming because her husband doesn’t and her husband would know since he is a manager in an environmental department and has a degree in Environmental Science or so she tells me.
Dennis SGMM
It may be that one of the unintended consequences of the Wall Street bailout was to convince these people that they are the Masters of the Universe. Imagine that your actions contributed to a catastrophe. Now imagine that instead of being punished you are made whole and paid more than ever.
We may have saved ourselves in the short run and doomed ourselves in the long run.
Capri
@Ash Can:
Even Rand knew better than that. This quote isn’t used much, but from Ayn Rand’s “The Dead End”:
“A nation’s productive—and moral, and intellectual—top is the middle class. It is a broad reservoir of energy, it is a country’s motor and lifeblood, which feeds the rest. The common denominator of its members, on their various levels of ability, is: independence. The upper classes are merely a nation’s past; the middle class is its future.”
Ash Can
@Capri: I stand corrected. Thanks for the quote.
JohnR
@General Stuck:
I suppose it depends a good deal on how you define those terms. When one person’s ‘facts’ are another’s ‘opinion’, and one persons ‘nuance’ is another’s ‘irrational bias’, there’s not much way to communicate.
Oh, come now. You know perfectly well about eye-witness inaccuracies. The only way to get “raw info” is to actually experience it yourself. As soon as you’re dealing with even a single middle-man the subjective factor overwhelms anything else. The best you can do is to get as many different eye-witnesses as possible and try to make a best-guess effort to estimate the most likely “facts”. Once you get more than a couple of intermediates between the event and you, the “objective accuracy” level drops to some unknown but usually pretty small amount. When you depend on ‘reporting’ to inform you, you’re always and invariably going to be playing the old ‘telephone’ game, where each person hears a sentence from the person on one side of him and then tells it to the person on the other side around the circle. You know how that works. Used to be that you could read a selection of news and analysis reports from all sides of the political spectrum and get a reasonably good idea of how things were happening. No more. The only thing you can really count on anymore is that anything any right-wing figure claims, is going to be essentially 180 degrees from objective reality. Even then, once in a while one will cross you up and say something accurate. Left-wingers, as usual, are all over the ‘accuracy’ map when it comes to reflecting reality. I find the only relatively reliable sources of news any more are foreign – at least their biases are pretty consistent and relatively transparent.
General Stuck
@WereBear:
A case in point. Following this shit may well cause permanent brain damage. i want to smash my computer sometimes.
SFAW
They believed that well before the bailout, you know.
UofAZGrad
@schrodinger’s cat, I don’t agree with that at all. The titans of the 20th century considered every concession to be a slippery slope on the road to communism. Strong unions didn’t arise in the 1920s panic over communist Russia, they were constantly beaten down with strike breakers and lockouts.
What changed everything was the Great Depression and a Congress/President that could pass laws protecting collective bargaining from the Galtian overlords. Some of those overlords found to their surprise that negotiating with a union made things smoother over the long term and produced better profits but most of them still earned for short-sided gains of busting them up.
The fall of unions coincides more with the politicians who lived through the Depression retiring and dying in the 1980s and 90s than the fall of the Soviet Union.
General Stuck
@JohnR:
Thank you, Dr Pedant
TheMightyTrowel
@WereBear: a while back and under a different name i posted about this – usually, it’s called Future Shock.
timb
@Cat Lady: there were checks before (see 1928-1940) and it will happen again. Maybe this spoiled little bitches believe that society is ordained to steal from everyone so they can have a mansion in the Hamptons, but that’s not really the way a democratic republic works……
and if it does, then the ambition of the people of the top cause something akin tot he Fall of the Roman Republic (one of its many weaknesses was a ridiculous income disparity)
Mattminus
@Brian S (formerly Incertus):
While we’re updating Bill Hicks, could we also make the rant funny?
JohnR
huh- I “do not have permission to edit [my own] comment”. [shakes fist at sky] Curse you Obamaaaaaaaaa!
Anyway, Werebear makes the necessary point that what we see is surprisingly often not what actually happened. This is what I meant by “eyewitness inaccuracy”. We see what we expect to see or what we want to see. Sometimes we see what we fear, sometimes what we desire. It’s rare that we see only what is there. Part of being human – we are built to process information as fast as possible so that we can act on it, and concern for accuracy is not a big part of the system.
SFAW also makes the good point about the weakness of our Irish stew nation – we’re groupers, we humans (not the fish). we like to live in small homogeneous groups, and tend to distrust anyone not like us (mainly because we don’t necessarily understand them). We’re full of “isms”; racism, ageism, sexism, wealthism, cultureism, religionism, beautyism, heightism, ad nauseum. Being a mixed bag of fragmented groups doesn’t seem to give us a mongrel strength as much as an increased hate for the ‘other’ when times are tough. We’re not a very smart animal, after all – short-term thinkers, willing to jump into a shark’s mouth to retrieve a piece of candy, that’s us. We’re basically more vicious, less skeptical rats with vivid imagination.
@ Gen. Stuck: You’re more than welcome, Enlightened One.
Dennis SGMM
@SFAW:
Of course they believed it. Lamentably, when they massively failed the gov did everything it could to make certain that their belief in their superiority was reinforced.
Citizen_X
@Mattminus:
You mean this rant? The one where part of the joke is “There is no joke”? ‘Cause I thought that was pretty damned funny. Then again, I’m part of “the Anger market.”
Perry Como
The solution remains the same. When the Pete Petersons of the world are swinging from lamp posts we’ll see real change. For a few decades at least.
WereBear
@TheMightyTrowel: There’s a good deal of that, too, of course (and I felt my mind expanding as I read that, it rang so true to me at the time.)
What else is going on is how people believe their own fantasies because so many others do!
GeneJockey
@Capri:
Great. The middle class is the future, and the middle class is being decimated.
ThresherK
@UofAZGrad: Remember when Reagan felt the need to pay lip-service to poor people (of the proper variety)? I miss that old collectivist’s unwavering dedication to wealth confiscation.
Nathanlindquist
I am of a bleak persuasion because even though conservative ideology is the road to ruin, you just can’t implement liberal ideology in a culture where people just can’t play well together.
Rugged Individualism, fuck yeh!
Comrade Dread
A few things have changed…
1. We’ve become far more individualistic and less community oriented, thus there is less of a social instinct in the hearts of humanity to pursue policies for the common good if it means personal sacrifice.
Religion, to a degree, has also become more individualistic and self-oriented, with less of an emphasis on what you can do for your community and church and more on what you can get out of it.
2. I think technological improvements have made people more complacent about politics. People have more distractions and comfort than their ancestors did a hundred years ago, so there is less of an urgency to get further reforms passed, as long as the current system still functions and we can get our internet, cable, and enjoy a basic existence.
And, if we can’t, there is more of a tendency to ascribe blame to the individual for not being able to scrimp together enough money to take advantage of the technology.
Thus, none of the modern robber barons (far more soulless creatures than their forebearers) has even the slightest fear of an armed revolution.
(The old conservative/libertarian in me, wants to also blame the public schools for emphasizing conformity, obedience, and good citizenship (which was often portrayed as shutting up and doing what you were told), but your mileage may vary.)
3. The myth of the wealthy superman pervades our cultural ethos from the time when the robber barons first appeared. It is a part of the American myth, where any schlub can become super wealthy through sheer gumption. That this rarely happens only reinforces how amazing the people who do this are and how much they’re better than the rest of us.
4. Lastly, there is far less appreciation for the benefits that others have won for us. There is no appreciation for the infrastructure that supports business, the generous policies that provided a free (or subsidized) education to citizens, nor is there any sense that anyone owes at least some of their success to the fact that they grew up in America where these benefits were provided to them.
Hence, there is no civic responsibility beyond meeting the bare minimum requirements to avoid legal ramification.
I need a drink.
Alwhite
@jcricket:
Alwhite
@Capri:
WOW! That is a great quote – after reading Atlas I couldn’t stomach the thought of another word from Rand. Interesting how the Rand society does not push that book.
mm
@RSR: Amen brother.
Amanda in the South Bay
@jcricket:
As your lawyer friend shows, I think the biggest problem will be convincing the large chunk of nominally liberal, affluent by any sane stretch of the imagination crowd (though still hardly masters of the Galtverse) to not be so goddamn selfish and short sighted.
Judas Escargot
@Ash Can:
The middle class isn’t just the engine of growth: You also need some kind of middle class to make liberal (in the 18th cent. sense) democracy work well.
You can’t have a republic without solid-but-flexible institutions forming the ‘bones’ of its structure: Schools, universities, the legal system, hospitals, libraries, and yes, corporations. But you can’t have solid-but-flexible institutions without the professional classes needed to man and manage those institutions in a competent, reality-based manner.
Gut the middle class, and you gut the various professions, which inevitably leads to a decline in those institutions. Since these institutions are essentially the load-beating walls of our society… well, the society itself will suffer long-term consequences.
The Nietzsches and Napoleans of the world always sneered at the “nation of shopkeepers” model of the Anglo-democracies. But those countries kept winning their wars against countries based on other social models for a reason.
lllphd
fwiw, sully continues to reference this freeland article, and someone out there had the presence of mind to ask the good question. here is the email i could not stop myself from sending:
So, the question from Avent is, “What does this concentration of wealth mean?”
Mercy, the inanity of the question! The patently obvious answers too numerous to list! Just to suggest a couple:
The fates of virtually all the historical wealth hoarders from history; France of the late 18th century leaps to mind, the Gilded Age, the Great Depression.
The fates of their victims so well-depicted in Dickens and Steinbeck.
Just to start.
But more generally, this concentration of wealth means the wealth is no longer common, and the “welfare” of the nation no longer considered “general,” but concentrated.
In short, concentration of wealth means democracy can no longer be supported; we have an oligarchy. Have had for quite some time.
The wealthy have become something of an uber-nation unto themselves. The laws do not apply to them. They are not required to be respectful, polite, empathic, or even humane. They thus lose the capacity to recognize the reason, and the conscience to feel the purpose, for democracy, that all of us truly are equal under the laws that we the people craft and enforce. Instead, they purchase the laws they want, and buy their way out of inconvenient laws that might catch them. This is simply the furthest thing from democracy.
These points are precisely why the upper brackets of income should be taxed to the max, back to the levels of the 50s when the infrastructure of this country was built and our education system flourished (granted, not for blacks or the poor, but for our additionally bloated military; still, one would hope we’ve learned….). And recall, that level of taxation was up to 90%.
The poor rich darling mentioned in Freeland’s article would then have to complain that her $20 mill was only $2 mill after taxes. Such a shabby annual income, I do feel such pity for her. But not for her “sacrificed” money. She and all those like her are the true leeches on society.
El Cid
In the good South American junta governments of the 1970s and their 1980s broke successors, you’d have a tiny slice of the ultra-rich and high position governing officials living in shining protected urban centers and gigantic ranch properties with small armies of protection, with close connections to international investors and trade offices of rich Western governments, and almost no connections to their own populations other than beating them up or shooting them when they got out of line, or to their neighbors.
A small professional and governing class was there to serve the ultra-rich. A larger class of workers who kept things going for the cities and for the economy as extracted from the majority and from nature.
And then you had a very large impoverished working class, and a somewhat smaller class of the desperately poor, including small farmers (‘campesinos’ or peasants) who survived off of subsistence crops and small trade.
They didn’t own homes, they didn’t have services such as water or trash or electricity or good roads, they had to survive completely uncontrolled pollution, those in the country were thrown off their lands by trickery or sheer violence, and they were the ones slaughtered in the various guerrilla movements and the anti-leftist hired terrorists from the US’ support.
The economy was focused on exports of raw materials and basic crops to foreign investors, and the idea of developing the national economy to export finished, value-added goods and to build and then serve a domestic market, was either non-existent or destroyed by the IMF and World Bank by economic ‘Austerity Programs’ where it did happen.
Our super-rich don’t understand why we can’t be more like those classic junta and subordinate client state stage, why they aren’t completely alien gods hovering above a large destitute and desperate class.
The domestic consumer market is still enormously enriching, but where possible they’d rather just play around with money separated entirely from a real economy, stealing it from the population which had it invested in housing and pensions and other nice bundles of resources to rob.
They don’t need the juntas, and instead of having Western lending institutions to impose ‘Austerity’ programs to smash social and domestic development programs from abroad, our own political class is more than happy to do both.
Barry
@Capri: “. The common denominator of its members, on their various levels of ability, is: independence”
Did Rand *ever* say anything true? Probably 80% of the middle class work for somebody else, and are subject to being fired at will; 10% are unionized, and 10% are small businessmen, only theoretically independent.
catclub
@WereBear:
As Twain put it: It ain’t the things that folks don’t know that are the problem. The problem is all the things they know that just ain’t so.
I hope my memory of the actual quote is faithful.
JBWoodford
@Alwhite:
Have you seen this? Short version: Atlas Shrugged was actually the first book of a trilogy, but Rand never wrote the middle volume.
AAA Bonds
Yeah, well, we used to have this thing that looked after the lower and middle classes. I remember we called it “the state”.
Jaim
Weird. Most of the people I know who brag about “killer apps” are unemployed web designers or soon-to-be unemployed grad. students.
alwhite
@JBWoodford:
CRAP! even my original ideas are not original!
Thanks for the link