America after Tucson: Those Who Sow Inequality …

The reason for the escalating radicalization in the U.S. lies in its precarious economic situation. Political divisions accompany economic and social divisions.

Barack Obama went back into the pulpit. In delivering the speech in Tucson on Wednesday at the memorial service for the shooting victims, he once again demonstrated how well he handles the emotional needs of his countrymen. He honored each individual victim personally and appealed to American values such as confidence and a sense of family; he serenely rose above the new debate just getting underway concerning whether a possible connection existed between hate-filled political and media rhetoric and the shooter’s motivation. “Rather than pointing fingers or assigning blame, let us use this occasion to expand our moral imaginations, to listen to each other more carefully, to sharpen our instincts for empathy, and remind ourselves of all the ways our hopes and dreams are bound together,” he said, and the managers of public opinion applauded him for it.

This presidential assessment may have been absolutely necessary for America’s citizens, but whether such soothing balm for a national soul so battered by crisis will really help is highly doubtful.

The fruitless debate over whether the perpetrator was just a psychopath or was actually influenced by America’s hate-filled media and political rhetoric needs to be replaced by a discussion of why political discourse in the United States has deteriorated so far in the first place. And it shouldn’t revolve around why politicians like Sarah Palin show their political opponents in a rifle sight’s crosshairs nor the fact that right-wing radical Glenn Beck prompt his audience to “drive a stake through the heart of the bloodsuckers” in the Democratic party. This sort of thing is said aloud in public every day, and not just in the United States. The really important question is why such populist appeals to people’s lowest instincts succeed among millions of otherwise well-behaved, normal Americans.

The main reason is the precarious economic situation in which increasing numbers of Americans find themselves. The aggressive political schisms tearing the country apart come accompanied by no less radical economic and social schisms — and not just since the financial crisis. Wealth in America has been distributed increasingly unequally for more than thirty years now. The U.S. economy grew by some 60 percent between 1990 and 2008. But in the same period, the median income — the line dividing the wealthiest from the poorest people — rose by only 10 percent. And within this group, the inequality has escalated. The quality of life for the lowest one-third of earners has been constantly declining for a long time. The top one percent of earners, meanwhile, saw their incomes more than double, rising from $800,000 to $1,800,000 over the same period. And one-tenth of one percent of the population — the nation’s 300,000 super-wealthy — get more than the 120 million Americans in the bottom one-third of the income scale combined.

None of this was a quasi-natural development arising from the globalization of the economy as some economists and liberal Democrats like to claim. It was due far more to the fact that since the Reagan administration, America has pursued tax policies and subsidy programs that contributed to the current situation while simultaneously ignoring education and marginalizing labor unions, as social scientists Jacob Hacker and Paul Piersson convincingly point out in their recent book “Winner Take All Politics.”

This led only to a drastic increase in poverty. People’s chances of pulling themselves up by their own bootstraps were lessened. Social mobility, i.e. the chances of ascending the earnings ladder, is worse in the United States today than in any other industrialized nation. On the contrary, American workers 30 years of age earn, on average, less than their fathers did. Large segments of the American middle class are experiencing economic strangulation, as the Washington bureau chief of the Financial Times put it. In past decades, people were able to compensate by taking on second jobs; they also had the comfort of knowing that the homes they owned were steadily increasing in value, a fact which led to many people increasing their personal indebtedness. But the bursting of the mortgage bubble and the sudden rise in unemployment to near 10 percent have cut that avenue off for most people. Millions of Americans had to give up their homes and now see their life’s work in ruins.

Millions of Americans now live with the feeling that everything is going downhill, and many of them are frightened by that prospect. That has to have serious political consequences. Those who feel themselves threatened by social exclusion and degradation often seek to exclude others in order to validate their own identities. This historical constant applies to all cultures throughout history and has always provided impetus for radical deceivers of all persuasions, and not just in America but also in Europe, where we’re seeing in the rise of xenophobic right-wing populists. In the United States, however, where failure is still regarded as self-inflicted, this mechanism has even more disastrous consequences. As the recent election there shows, it drives voters into the arms of those who seek to block rational solutions. It is responsible for the extension of tax breaks for the wealthy and now seeks to sabotage Obama’s tentative reforms of an overpriced healthcare system and a bloated financial industry. It’s entirely foreseeable that inequalities of income and opportunity will become even worse.

Up to now, Obama has always tried to get the small minority of “haves” on his side to prevent confrontations. But in so doing, he has lost his ability to convince the many “have nots” that he can help them. If he refuses to go the same way his opponents have chosen, he will have no alternative but to resort to his outstanding ability to mobilize the public against these extreme inequalities, just as he did during his campaign for the presidency. If he’s unsuccessful, he will be a one-term president and America’s tragedy will further intensify.