The Land of Limited Opportunity

Until now, “class warfare” was considered a dirty word in the United States, but the growing chasm between rich and poor is even beginning to make conservative voters uncomfortable.

Republican presidential candidate Newt Gingrich projects a confusing image these days. One minute he seems to be adhering strictly to the party line, complaining that the opposition is trying to foment class warfare across the country. Pitting low-earning Americans against the wealthy, he says, is simply un-American, and it drives a wedge between the people.

In that respect, he’s in full agreement with Mitt Romney, who recently claimed that successful people like himself were suddenly being demonized. Americans, he claimed, were traditionally not an envious people, and they knew that anyone who worked hard could succeed; that successful people had at one time been role models and not the objects of hate. People might discuss sensitive subjects such as higher taxes for wealthier people, but, please, that should be done discreetly behind closed doors in small groups and not out in public during an election campaign.

When it comes to the possibility that Romney might be cadging votes, Gingrich just can’t resist the temptation to direct his populist rage against financial capitalism, especially since the Occupy Wall Street movement has gotten so popular in America. So Gingrich produced a documentary film especially for the South Carolina primary election exposing Romney’s deeds as CEO of the hedge fund company Bain Capital. The anti-capitalist rhetoric in the film is so blatant that it drew high praise even from filmmaker Michael Moore.

Gingrich’s maneuvering reflects an uncertainty that has afflicted not only Republican politicians in the face of this amazing novelty that has befallen America. Last week, the New York Times published the results of a study that showed that Americans currently believe that the tension between rich and poor is the greatest problem the nation faces. Two-thirds of the people believe there are “strong conflicts” between the rich and the poor – an increase of 50 percent over the course of 2009. Among conservatives, the percentage is somewhat less, but 55 percent of Republicans are nonetheless of the opinion that the two classes no longer get along with one another.

These results mark a stunning turnaround. Around Christmas, the liberal journalist Thomas Frank expressed despair that the economic crisis had driven the voters of 2008 into the conservative camp on a large scale. Above all, the classic swing voters, the white middle class in rural areas who had voted for Bush in 2004 and Obama in 2008, had now landed firmly back in the conservative camp. And they did so despite conservative plans to ease tax burdens on the wealthy and their blockade of Obama’s healthcare reform plans, both of which were so obviously against [the middle class’s] own best interests.

Frank’s frustration is the frustration of the American left ever since the development of large modern capitalistic structures in the 19th century. Genuine class consciousness never really took root despite the economic realities. Social scientists explain that phenomenon by the fact that America made a project of turning its back on a layered society.

The United States was still considered the land of unlimited opportunity after it had long since ceased to be so. After the Great Depression of the 1930s, the New Deal’s massive government intervention created a middle class so broad that everyone believed that they could be a part of it. But according to Andrew Ross, head of New York University’s American Studies program, that middle class was an artificial construct that required the assistance of long-term credit to make possible all the middle class status symbols like owning a home or an automobile.

Now with the collapse of the middle class, people are slowly beginning to realize that limitless social mobility was a national myth all along. Shortly before Christmas, another study was released showing that it had become more difficult to climb the social ladder from generation to generation in the United States than it was in Europe. Those born poor in the United States generally tend to remain poor.

This new consciousness is unlikely to have much effect on the coming election. Even Obama will avoid talking too openly about class — if for no other reason than to keep the Republicans from screaming “class warfare!” The fear of alienating those who still choose to believe in a classless American society is also far too great. But the subject, once as studiously avoided as the plague, won’t disappear very quickly from people’s everyday lives.