Closing the American dream

Aziz Rana, in his n+1 article Obama and the Closing of the American Dream, argues not that Barack Obama is elitist but that he represents the dominance of the professional class at the expense of the working class.

Throughout our history there have always been multiple versions of the American dream. These accounts held in common the hope that hard work, discipline, and self-reliance would allow those recognized as citizens not only to improve their economic lot and achieve personal happiness, but to participate fully in political life. Today, however, only one version of the dream continues to make sense as a sustainable personal project. This is the dream exemplified by Barack and Michelle Obama�as well as by their former rivals Hillary and Bill Clinton�a dream of success through higher education and a life in professional work. It is a vision of social advancement that leaves little room for historically important narratives of blue-collar respectability.

I had hoped to do a better job talking about this because I think this article addresses ideas we need to wrap our heads around. It gets to the heart of what makes sense to me about why Barack Obama and other Democrats before him have failed to win over the working class that was once their loyal base.

But I am tired this morning. I need a little time to digest the very intensive Kentucky Women Writers Conference I attended this weekend. Lots of energy there, lots of good words, good talk, leaving me as overstimulated as a child after a birthday party.

Some of that talk, by the way, dealt with how the only way to get out of having to work in the chicken plant is to go to work for Wal-Mart. Or how Immigration raids that shut down plants deport/disappear illegal workers but leave marginal white workers homeless.

So, Rana argues:

At the time [1905] when [Louis] Brandeis was describing the promise of professionalism, three earlier accounts of the American dream not only survived but were real competitors for social preeminence. In Thomas Jefferson’s founding republican vision, yeoman farmers were “the most valuable citizens . . . the most vigorous, the most independent, the most virtuous, . . . tied to their country and wedded to its liberty and interest by the most lasting bonds.” To this Jeffersonian vision of “the cultivators of the earth,” a rapidly urbanizing nineteenth century added the small-business owner and the unionized industrial worker. The former aspired to the same freedom as the farmer by cultivating a shop instead of acreage; the latter strove (with mixed results) to achieve economic independence through collective political activity. In Brandeis’s time, these three versions of the American dream each still constituted a viable route to meaningful political and social life.

Today, by contrast, all such dreams are essentially foreclosed. The independent farmer lives on in the national imagination, but industrial farming has rendered him marginal both politically and socially. The quantity of small businesses begun each year suggests that the aspiration of having one’s own shop persists. Yet for the past half-century bankruptcy has been more likely than success. Statistics cited by Bush’s own Small Business Administration (SBA) show that more than half of small businesses close within four years and more than 60 percent within six. The title of the SBA article, “Redefining Business Success: Distinguishing Between Failure and Closure,” perfectly captures the difficulty of sustaining optimism, even for propaganda purposes, about the vitality of small-scale entrepreneurship. As for blue-collar workers, deindustrialization and the weakening of the labor movement have made the wage earner’s dream of middle-class respectability less and less tenable. Real incomes for working-class families have been declining for three decades, and highly skilled jobs once available to high school graduates are now memories from a previous era.

Yesterday after I left the Carnegie Center for Literacy and Learning, I switched on the car radio to Weekend All Things Considered. In a feature about the election and the economy, Jackie Lyden went to Ohio to interview a laid-off industrial worker and a small business owner and then talked to economic advisers for Barack Obama and John McCain about how their proposed policies would benefit these folk.

Molly Dullae has owned a small historic hotel for 5 years, so she is right at the cusp of her viability. In the interview, she said she is probably going to go back to work as a critical care nurse so she can afford to pay her staff.

So what was the first thing the Obama adviser said? Obama is going to reduce the capitol gains tax so that when she sells that small business, she’ll realize the profits.

That struck me as one of the most tone-deaf remarks I’ve heard in a while.

Meanwhile McCain’s man offered the same old package of lowered taxes and more free trade.

As for the laid-off factory worker, well, at least Obama’s man held out the prospect of creating jobs in green industries.

But they both sounded like snake-oil salesmen to me, trying to cover our gaping social wounds with brightly-printed band-aids.

What has happened to what Aziz describes as our classless universality — “the hope that every American citizen, through free labor, could enjoy middle-class respectability, economic freedom, and the intellectual benefits of education”?

Instead we have been left with the professional ideal, which values only certain types of work and thus implicitly disdains the rest. It is an inherently exclusive ideal, structured around a divide between those engaged in high-status work and those confined to task execution. The political theorist Iris Marion Young writes, “Today equal opportunity has come to mean only that no one is barred from entering competition for a relatively few privileged positions.” The idea of exclusivity is a necessary structural feature of professionalization. As a model for society, however, it validates an economic and cultural divide between those with meaningful access to social respectability and the vast majority of Americans, who remain consigned to low status and low-income employment.

This divide is antithetical to democracy.

…

Malcolm X, and Martin Luther King Jr. argued that our social problems were structural, the result of fundamental disagreements between the haves and the have-nots. These disagreements could not be papered over by talk of consensus, because the interests of the culturally privileged rested on continuing a politics of exclusion. As King often maintained, freedom requires making democracy a general way of life. This means more than integrating liberal society; it entails eliminating the basic economic and political hierarchies on which postwar liberalism rests. Today’s professional creed�while undoubtedly better than the Bush administration’s culture of cronyism, corporate profiteering, and rejection of expertise�remains a long way from these aspirations.

Look guys, you need to go read this whole article. It’s never fair to an argument to pull stuff out of context like I’m doing, and I do think these are very important ideas if you want to understand why Sarah Palin resonates with voters when it seems to those of us on the intellectual left that she is a disastrous choice. He is also very good on the Civil Rights movement and why it is that Obama appeals so much to black voters. It is not, he argues, just a matter of skin color.

One last quote:

Political pundits like Tom Frank and Paul Krugman commonly ask why low-income constituents seem to vote less and less with their pocketbooks. This question suggests that the New Deal coalition was built primarily on a social welfare agenda. While such programs have been essential to providing millions of American with economic security, the heart of the New Deal lay elsewhere.

From 1932 until 1968, the Democratic Party rested on two descriptions of American life�the American dream as embodied by the rural farmer and the industrial worker. It gained sustenance from a respect for these accounts of middle-class achievement, economic independence, and democratic inclusion. Today’s party, however, has given up on establishing new forms of solidarity for nonprofessional citizens. All it has to offer is a lose-lose proposition: join the competition for professional status and cultural privilege at a severe disadvantage, or don’t join it at all.

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