Imprimis September
2016 • Volume 45, Number 9
In the Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engels wrote that “the
history of all hitherto existing societies is the history of class struggles.”
Today the story of American politics is the story of class struggles. It wasn’t
supposed to be that way. We didn’t think we were divided into different
classes. Neither did Marx.
America was an exception to Marx’s theory of social progress. By
that theory, societies were supposed to move from feudalism to capitalism to
communism. But the America of the 1850s, the most capitalist society around,
was not turning communist. Marx had an explanation for that. “True enough, the
classes already exist,” he wrote of the United States, but they “are in
constant flux and reflux, constantly changing their elements and yielding them
up to one another.” In other words, when you have economic and social mobility,
you don’t go communist.
That is the country in which some imagine we still live, Horatio
Alger’s America—a country defined by the promise that whoever you are, you have
the same chance as anyone else to rise, with pluck, industry, and talent. But
they imagine wrong. The U.S. today lags behind many of its First World rivals
in terms of mobility. A class society has inserted itself within the folds of
what was once a classless country, and a dominant New Class—as social critic
Christopher Lasch called it—has pulled up the ladder of social advancement behind
it.
One can measure these things empirically by comparing the
correlation between the earnings of fathers and sons. Pew’s Economic Mobility
Project ranks Britain at 0.5, which means that if a father earns £100,000 more
than the median, his son will earn £50,000 more than the average member of his
cohort. That’s pretty aristocratic. On the other end of the scale, the most
economically mobile society is Denmark, with a correlation of 0.15. The U.S. is
at 0.47, almost as immobile as Britain.
A complacent Republican establishment denies this change has
occurred. If they don’t get it, however, American voters do. For the first time,
Americans don’t believe their children will be as well off as they have been. They
see an economy that’s stalled, one in which jobs are moving offshore. In the
first decade of this century, U.S. multinationals shed 2.9 million U.S. jobs while
increasing employment overseas by 2.4 million. General Electric provides a
striking example. Jeffrey Immelt became the company’s CEO in 2001, with a
mission to advance stock price. He did this in part by reducing GE’s U.S.
workforce by 34,000 jobs. During the same period, the company added 25,000 jobs
overseas. Ironically, President Obama chose Immelt to head his Jobs Council.
According to establishment Republicans, none of this can be
helped. We are losing middle-class jobs because of the move to a high-tech
world that creates jobs for a cognitive elite and destroys them for everyone
else. But that doesn’t describe what’s happening. We are losing middle-class
jobs, but lower-class jobs are expanding. Automation is changing the way we
make cars, but the rich still need their maids and gardeners. Middle-class jobs
are also lost as a result of regulatory and environmental barriers, especially
in the energy sector. And the skills-based technological change argument is
entirely implausible: countries that beat us hands down on mobility are just as
technologically advanced. Folks in Denmark aren’t exactly living in the Stone
Age.
This is why voters across the spectrum began to demand radical
change. What did the Republican elite offer in response? At a time of maximal crisis
they have been content with minimal goals, like Mitt Romney’s 59-point plan in
2012. How many Americans remember even one of those points? What we remember
instead is Romney’s remark about 47 percent of Americans being takers. That was
Romney’s way of recognizing the class divide—and in the election, Americans
took notice and paid him back with interest.
Since 2012, establishment Republicans have continued to be less
than concerned for the plight of ordinary Americans. Sure, they want economic
growth, but it doesn’t seem to matter into whose pockets the money flows. There
are even the “conservative” pundits who offer the pious hope that drug-addicted
Trump supporters will hurry up and die. That’s one way to ameliorate the class
struggle, but it doesn’t exactly endear anyone to the establishment.
The southern writer Flannery O’Connor once attended a dinner
party in New York given for her and liberal intellectual Mary McCarthy. At one
point the issue of Catholicism came up, and McCarthy offered the opinion that
the Eucharist is “just a symbol,” albeit “a pretty one.” O’Connor, a pious Catholic,
bristled: “Well, if it’s just a symbol, to Hell with it.” Likewise, the
principles held up as sacrosanct by establishment Republicans might be
logically unassailable, derived like theorems from a set of axioms based on a
pure theory of natural rights. But if I don’t see them making people better off,
I say to Hell with them. And so do the voters this year. What the establishment
Republicans should ask themselves is Anton Chigurh’s question in No Country for Old Men: If you followed your principles, and your
principles brought you to this, what good are your principles?
***
Had Marx been asked what would happen to America if it ever
became economically immobile, we know what his answer would be: Bernie Sanders
and Hillary Clinton. And also Donald Trump. The anger expressed by the voters in
2016—their support for candidates from far outside the traditional political class—has
little parallel in American history. We are accustomed to protest movements on
the Left, but the wholesale repudiation of the establishment on the Right is
something new. All that was solid has melted into air, and what has taken its
place is a kind of rightwing Marxism, scornful of Washington power brokers and
sneering pundits and repelled by America’s immobile, class-ridden society.
Establishment Republicans came up with the “right-wing Marxist”
label when House Speaker John Boehner was deposed, and labels stick when they
have the ring of truth. So it is with the right-wing Marxist. He is rightwing because
he seeks to return to an America of economic mobility. He has seen how broken
education and immigration systems, the decline of the rule of law, and the rise
of a supercharged regulatory state serve as barriers to economic improvement.
And he is a Marxist to the extent that he sees our current politics as the
politics of class struggle, with an insurgent middle class that seeks to
surmount the barriers to mobility erected by an aristocratic New Class. In his
passion, he is also a revolutionary. He has little time for a Republican elite
that smirks at his heroes—heroes who communicate through their brashness and
rudeness the fact that our country is in a crisis. To his more polite critics,
the right-wing Marxist says: We are not so nice as you!
The right-wing Marxist notes that establishment Republicans who
decry crony capitalism are often surrounded by lobbyists and funded by the
Chamber of Commerce. He is unpersuaded when they argue that government subsidies
are needed for their friends. He does not believe that the federal bailouts of
the 2008-2012 TARP program and the Federal Reserve’s zero-interest and quantitative
easing policies were justified. He sees that they doubled the size of public
debt over an eight-year period, and that our experiment in consumer protection
for billionaires took the oxygen out of the economy and produced a jobless Wall
Street recovery.
The right-wing Marxist’s vision of the good society is not so
very different from that of the JFK-era liberal; it is a vision of a society
where all have the opportunity to rise, where people are judged by the content
of their character, and where class distinctions are a thing of the past. But
for the right-wing Marxist, the best way to reach the goal of a good society is
through free markets, open competition, and the removal of wasteful government
barriers.
***
Readers of Umberto Eco’s The
Name of the Rose will have encountered the
word palimpsest, used to describe a manuscript in which one text has been written
over another, and in which traces of the original remain. So it is with Canada,
a country that beats the U.S. hands down on economic mobility. Canada has the
reputation of being more liberal than the U.S., but in reality it is more
conservative because its liberal policies are written over a page of deep conservatism.
Whereas the U.S. comes in at a highly immobile 0.47 on the Pew
mobility scale, Canada is at 0.19, very close to Denmark’s 0.15. What is
further remarkable about Canada is that the difference is mostly at the top and
bottom of the distribution. Between the tenth and 90th deciles there isn’t much
difference between the two countries. The difference is in the bottom and top
ten percent, where the poorest parents raise the poorest kids and the richest
parents raise the richest kids.
For parents in the top U.S. decile, 46 percent of their kids
will end up in the top two deciles and only 2 percent in the bottom decile. The
members of the top decile comprise a New Class of lawyers, academics, trust-fund
babies, and media types—a group that wields undue influence in both political parties
and dominates our culture. These are the people who said yes, there is an
immigration crisis—but it’s caused by our failure to give illegals a pathway to
citizenship!
There’s a top ten percent in Canada, of course, but its children
are far more likely to descend into the middle or lower classes. There’s also a
bottom ten percent, but its children are far more likely to rise to the top.
The country of opportunity, the country we’ve imagined ourselves to be, isn’t
dead—it moved to Canada, a country that ranks higher than the U.S. on measures
of economic freedom. Yes, Canada has its much-vaunted Medicare system, but cross-border
differences in health care don’t explain the mobility levels. And when you add
it all up, America has a more generous welfare system than Canada or just about
anywhere else. To explain Canada’s higher mobility levels, one has to turn to
differences in education systems, immigration laws, regulatory burdens, the
rule of law, and corruption—on all of which counts, Canada is a more
conservative country.
America’s K-12 public schools perform poorly, relative to the
rest of the First World. Its universities are great fun for the kids, but many
students emerge on graduation no better educated than when they arrived. What
should be an elevator to the upper class is stalled on the ground floor. One
study has concluded that if American public school students were magically
raised to Canadian levels, the economic gain would amount to a 20 percent
annual pay increase for the average American worker.
The U.S. has a two-tiered educational system: a superb set of
schools and colleges for the upper classes and a mediocre set for everyone
else. The best of our colleges are the best anywhere, but the average Canadian
school is better than the average American one. At both the K-12 and college
levels, Canadian schools have adhered more closely to a traditional,
conservative set of offerings. For K-12, a principal reason for the difference
is the greater competition offered in Canada, with its publicly-supported church-affiliated
schools. With barriers like America’s Blaine Amendments—state laws preventing
public funding of religious schools—lower-class students in the U.S. must enjoy
the dubious blessing of a public school education.
What about immigration? Canada doesn’t have a problem with
illegal aliens—it deports them. As for the legal intake, Canadian policies have
a strong bias towards admitting immigrants who will confer a benefit on
Canadian citizens. Even in absolute numbers, Canada admits more immigrants
under economic categories than the U.S., where most legal immigrants qualify
instead under family preference categories. As a result, on average, immigrants
to the U.S. are less educated than U.S. natives, and unlike in Canada, second-
and third-generation U.S. immigrants earn less than their native-born
counterparts. In short, the U.S. immigration system imports inequality and
immobility. If immigration isn’t an issue in Canada, that’s because it’s a
system Trump voters would love.
For those at the bottom of the social and economic ladder who
seek to rise, nothing is more important than the rule of law, property rights,
and the sanctity of contract provided by a mature and efficient legal system.
The alternative—in place today in America—is a network of elites whose personal
bonds supply the trust that is needed before deals can be done and promises
relied on. With its more traditional legal system, Canada better respects the sanctity
of contract and is less likely to weaken property rights with an American-style
civil justice system which at times resembles a slot machine of
judicially-sanctioned theft. Americans are great at talking about the rule of
law, but in reality we don’t have much standing to do so.
Then there’s corruption. As ranked by Transparency
International’s Corruption Perceptions Index, America is considerably more
corrupt than most of the rest of the First World. With our K Street lobbyists and
our donor class, we’ve spawned the greatest concentration of money and influence
ever. And corruption costs. In a regression model, the average family’s earnings
would increase from $55,000 to $60,000 were we to ascend to Canada’s level of
non-corruption, and to $68,000 if we moved to Denmark’s level.
In a corrupt country, trust is a rare commodity. That’s America
today. Only 19 percent of Americans say they trust the government most of the
time, down from 73 percent in 1958 according to the Pew Research Center. Sadly,
that is a rational response to the way things are. America is a different
country today, and a much nastier one. For politically engaged Republicans, the
figure is six percent. That in a nutshell explains the Trump phenomenon and the
disintegration of the Republican establishment. If the people don’t trust the
government, tinkering with entitlement reform is like rearranging deck chairs
on the Titanic.
American legal institutions are consistently more liberal than
those in Canada, and they are biased towards a privileged class of insiders who
are better educated and wealthier than the average American. That’s why America
has become an aristocracy.
By contrast, Canadian legal institutions aren’t slanted to an
aristocracy. The paradox is that Canadians employ conservative, free market
means to achieve the liberal end of economic mobility. And that points to
America’s way back: acknowledge that the promise of America has diminished, then
emulate Canada.
Frank Buckley
Author, The Way Back: Restoring the Promise of
America
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