America as an Ancien Regime

This ain’t the way our Founding Fathers planned it: a runaway wealthy mini-minority, a burgeoning underclass of nobodies with nothing invested in the system but their misery, and an increasingly squeezed middle class. Jefferson’s model American of the fee-simple yeoman farmer with his own plot to make him a reasonable participant in the democratic process is going the way of Corporate Farming, reduced to being mere open air drudges slaving away for some accountant overseer in Omaha or Minneapolis. Outsourcing is a slippery neologism for farming out formerly expensive manufacturing operations to some Third World country and multiplying minimum wage service jobs for the bitterly reduced American blue collar.
 
Kevin Phillips’ remarkable book, “The Politics of Rich and Poor: Wealth and the American Electorate Aftermath” (Random House, $19.95) has got all the bad news down in grim chapter and verse, or should we say poll and sound byte television. “This book is about the redistribution of power and wealth during the 1980s: who got it, who lost it, and through what policies.

It is also about the extent to which these changes, insofar as they reflected familiar conservative economic and demographic patterns of preferment, prepared the ground for a progressive or populist reaction. Politics is a process of movement and countermovement. Only for so long will strung-out $35,000-a-year families enjoy magazine articles about the hundred most successful businessmen in Dallas or television programs about the life-styles of the rich and famous. And the discontents that arise go well beyond lower-class envy or the anticommercial bias of academe.” (p.xx.)
 
Phillips’ analysis of how we’ve become economically is especially interesting because of the way he puts it in historical perspective. A century ago patrician landowner families and other old-money families whose sons were the country’s established lawyers, diplomats, doctors and bank presidents led a political revolt against the “muddy-booted nouveau riche railroad barons and stockrobbers,” the so-called Progressive movement which crested when TR ran for president in 1912 on the Bull Moose ticket. Teddy was old money in search of respect for a revival of old values—activist idealism, hard work, reverence for the land so that it would be useable by future generations.

Yet George Bush’s wimpy pleas to be considered the Education President, the Environmental President, the kinder, gentler poll reader President seems flabby indeed compared with TR’s bully pulpit fulminations. The “Vision Thing” seems laughably inadequate by comparison. Bush’s Willie Horton-exploiting, wrap ourselves in the Flag level patriotism appears to be Speaking Loudly while Carrying a Balsa Truncheon. The term millionaire, coined during the Gilded Age to twit the emerging “malefactors of great wealth,” seems strangely quaint in a decade that has spewed out nearly a hundred thousand “decamillionaires.” The coexistence of Progress and Poverty is of course not an entirely new American problem.

It was the title of Henry George’s 1871 classic that explored the paradox of millionaires and mendicants proliferating in he same economy. Nor are the structural problems of the underclasses really addressed by the appearance of a new cadre of kinder, gentler millionaires who grab the headlines for a day by adopting an elementary school class in the slum. How hard will it be to redirect public expenditures in a kinder, gentler direction is evident from the Florio Flub.

For at least a generation it has been a commonplace in teachers’ break rooms that the suburbs were getting more and more educational investment and the center cities less and less. But try to tell that to a suburban resident who is flailing away at meeting escalating college tuition costs for his kids and higher real estate taxes, and you are immediately talking to a victim of Compassion Fatigue. To them, giving more money to Camden and Newark is like backing a dump truck up to a black hole. Why put more money in a bottomless pit when what has already gone there has done so little good. So Kevin Phillips’ populist agenda has its work cut out for it. In a shrinking economic pie, everyone is desperate to see that his slice doesn’t get too much smaller.
 
I would find this formula extremely dispiriting if I hadn’t read another book while still under its aura, Benjamin DeMott’s “The Imperial Middle: Why Americans Can’t Think Straight About Class” (William Morrow & Co., $18.95). I have always admired DeMott, the Mellon Professor of the Humanities at Amherst, especially since 1966 when I watched him operate as a member of the Dartmouth Conference, a group of English professors assembled to plot grand strategies in the subject for the next generation. (Alas, I realize as I write that this generation is ending!)

He exemplified for me the two aphorisms I picked up in graduate school to guide my own intellectual life: one was Emerson’s vow to call a popgun a popgun even though the ancient and honorable of the earth affirmed it to be the Crack of Doom. There has never been a shortage of Popguns among English professors, even that summer at Dartmouth. The other was the Unitarian divine Theodore Parker’s resolve to “Think with saint and sage, but speak with common men.” Unlike so much humanistic discourse which is Alexandrian in its hermetic commentaries on itself, DeMott uses his judgment, energized by the best that’s been thought and said, to bring a fresh stream of new ideas (that’s the neglected, even suppressed, half of the famous Matthew Arnold bromide) on our common agenda.
 
He does that in spades in “The Imperial Middle.” And it’s entirely characteristic of this man’s capacity to learn important things from any one and every one that the PBS / CPB censorship of his daughter’s 1981 film, “Seventeen,” (on the working class student culture of Muncie, Indiana) triggered this analysis of how defective our “vision thing” has been from he beginning over the reality of class in American life. There have been great, even permanently debilitating, costs of fostering the myth that we live in a classless society.

“My subject,” DeMott writes, “is a nation in shackles, its thought, character, and public policy locked in distortion and lies. The deceit I speak of corrodes every aspect of American life. It legitimizes, in war, arrangements exempting without cause, large sectors of the younger male population form the burdens and sacrifice of service. From Roger Rosenblatt to James Fallows we’ve been hearing a lot recently in the lee of the Saudi Arabia callup about yuppie guilt over having skipped Vietnam. It grants giant subsidies for housing, education, and health care in obedience to a single precept: benevolence is most deserved where least needed. It intimates in contempt of reality that whatever injustice exists in America resides on the margins and among the minorities, remote from the center of the majority.

And it produces a culture in which men and women of intellectual and artistic talent are persuaded that the highest cause such talent can serve is that of its own independence, and that disdain for the spirit of affiliation and solidarity is among the primary obligations of genius.” (p. 9) In short, from “Screw you, I’ve got mine” types in our entrepreneurial classes to Bartleby isolates in the arts, we think it’s better to go it alone.
 
DeMott argues that “social wrong is accepted in America partly because differences in knowledge about class help to obscure it, and the key to those differences is the degree of acceptance of the myth of classlessness.” (pp. 10-11) Some times the messages about differences get through to the intellectually curious, those who, like me, grew up pink collar in Detroit learned about “them,” very lower case “t,” from Joyce Carol Oates’ fine novel about the 1967 race riots of the same name. Or her latest, “Because It is Bitter and Because It is My Heart,” about the difficulties inherent in a black high school basketball star and a blue collar girl from a broken home bridging their differences.

It is entirely apt that Oates took her title form the poet Stephen Crane whose novel, “Maggie: A Girl of the Streets,” was an early effort to see the effects of class pressures on a working girl’s life. Dreiser soon made the message more general in “Sister Carrie.” But since we are blessed with the least read great literature in the history of mankind, most Americans are blissfully ignorant in their protected enclaves, tutored by Robin Leach’s fatuosities.
 
The marvelous thing about DeMott’s analysis is how he picks through the haystacks of confusion—Polish jokes, Cosby cosmetic sitcoms, political doubletalk—to find the needles of reality: class matters in America, always has, and more and more is creating a country where even the myth that everybody just wants to be assimilated into the middle muddle is becoming less and less possible. The dead giveaway was the way PBS and CPB (ever mindful of their classless sponsors such as Xerox and IBM) bridled at hearing the Muncie blues.

They said they bridled at the blue language but DeMott shows how they were threatened by the clear evidence that America had become an Ancien Regime, full of rigidities entrenched by such things as redlining, differential educational investment, home mortgage tax rebates for the middle. What I fear is that if enough Americans don’t begin to disavow the swindling lies about our being classless then Phillips’ bold call for another progressive, populist revolt will never be heard, let alone acted on. If you don’t believe that once vigorous societies can let bad ideas send them to the poorhouse, visit Peronist Argentina. From the third wealthiest country per capita in the world at the beginning of the century to the basket-case it is today. From “good” share the wealth ideas with bad consequences. It’s not the decamillionaires we envy.

It’s the cutting off of mobility that comes with their myths. The myths of classlessness have always been disorienting. DeMott proves to my satisfaction that they have become downright dangerous, even fatal. Get the banker, editor, or politician in your family these two for Christmas. And read themselves, to learn how to talk back to the mythmakers.