Only Those Who Have Money
Published in Die Zeit
(Germany) on 29 January 2012
by Jan Ross (link to original)
Social inequality is a surprising topic for an American election campaign. In the Promised Land of capitalism, in the paradise of the free market, where one can be rich without a bad conscience and there has never been a strong socialist party, criticism of the market economy is normally not a strategy that promises success. Is this now different in 2012?
President Obama, who opened his campaign with a State of the Union address before Congress, will likely run a left-wing campaign: for the hard working middle class, against the excesses of Wall Street and the injustice of an unfettered marketplace. But what’s really shocking is that talk of class warfare is becoming acceptable on the right wing and the most promising Republican candidate, Mitt Romney, must justify his past as a funds manager — not in front of the Democratic competition, but in front of his own people.
His rival Next Gingrich not only attacked him as being an ideologically unreliable flip-flopper but also a representative of the out-of-touch upper class; only Republican voters with an annual income of more than $200,000 voted for Romney by a majority. Now, public pressure has forced him to disclose his financial circumstances. How can it be that a multimillionaire only pays 15 percent of his income in taxes? How can a man describe speaking fees in the hundreds of thousands of dollars as “not a lot?” These are all traditionally un-American questions. But all at once, they’re being asked.
The USA Will Never Be a European-style Welfare State
This has potentially far-reaching consequences for the political climate and distribution of power in the U.S. In short, the strength of the American right rests upon the neutralization of the equity question. It’s in no way a given that huge numbers of people with low incomes and precarious Social Security vote for Republicans, who are the party of big money. It happens because cultural motives in the United States are often much stronger than economic ones — because poor churchgoers prefer to vote for rich church friends over anticlerical re-distributors of wealth.
The elite who are rebelled against are not so much the big earners and the wealthy, as they are the intellectual liberals — the latte macchiato drinkers and lovers of Europe and the bureaucracy which they supposedly control. The most recent example for this direction of public anger is the tea party movement, which promotes as a lesson from the economic crisis not an active policy of reform, but rather more market and less government. In an astounding manner, capitalism has managed to remain popular in the U.S.
If inequality is now emerging as an election issue, this worldview of faith in the markets will be called into question. This is beneficial for Obama, whoever remains as the Republican candidate. The U.S. will never be a social democratic country, a welfare state based on European examples. But it’s by no means a law of nature that one may not take on the business elite in the U.S. In the 1930s, Franklin D. Roosevelt challenged the ruling economic interests with a radicalism that would be unheard of today. In doing so, he won majorities. The love of free enterprise is not the only thing that lies in the historical genes of America, but also an aversion to privileges, unfairness and pretenses of rule.
Obama remains a politically vulnerable president. As long as the economic recovery is fragile and unemployment is high, he must fear being voted out of office. Even Republican criticism of him is not completely unjustified. Indeed, there is no recognizably strong willingness of the Obama administration to save money or to intervene with the status quo, and its sociopolitical reflexes are not inventively bipartisan, as was promised during the 2008 election, but rather quite conventionally left-wing. That the president once courageously upset the public sector or some progressive lobby group is not particularly memorable.
Nevertheless, his accomplishments are considerable — far more considerable than the Obama haters on the right and those disappointed in him on the left want to believe, who don’t forgive the fact that he didn’t close Guantanamo or that he employs too many neoliberal economic advisers. If one is to come to a fair judgment of Obama’s first term, one must look at the big picture. Under the tremendous pressure from the crisis and the dangerous political frustration in his own country, he kept the U.S. globally competitive. He’s begun the dismantling of America’s position of superiority in the world. Now he has the chance to delineate his vision for the future model of American society. The debate about inequality is a good start.
President Obama, who opened his campaign with a State of the Union address before Congress, will likely run a left-wing campaign: for the hard working middle class, against the excesses of Wall Street and the injustice of an unfettered marketplace. But what’s really shocking is that talk of class warfare is becoming acceptable on the right wing and the most promising Republican candidate, Mitt Romney, must justify his past as a funds manager — not in front of the Democratic competition, but in front of his own people.
His rival Next Gingrich not only attacked him as being an ideologically unreliable flip-flopper but also a representative of the out-of-touch upper class; only Republican voters with an annual income of more than $200,000 voted for Romney by a majority. Now, public pressure has forced him to disclose his financial circumstances. How can it be that a multimillionaire only pays 15 percent of his income in taxes? How can a man describe speaking fees in the hundreds of thousands of dollars as “not a lot?” These are all traditionally un-American questions. But all at once, they’re being asked.
The USA Will Never Be a European-style Welfare State
This has potentially far-reaching consequences for the political climate and distribution of power in the U.S. In short, the strength of the American right rests upon the neutralization of the equity question. It’s in no way a given that huge numbers of people with low incomes and precarious Social Security vote for Republicans, who are the party of big money. It happens because cultural motives in the United States are often much stronger than economic ones — because poor churchgoers prefer to vote for rich church friends over anticlerical re-distributors of wealth.
The elite who are rebelled against are not so much the big earners and the wealthy, as they are the intellectual liberals — the latte macchiato drinkers and lovers of Europe and the bureaucracy which they supposedly control. The most recent example for this direction of public anger is the tea party movement, which promotes as a lesson from the economic crisis not an active policy of reform, but rather more market and less government. In an astounding manner, capitalism has managed to remain popular in the U.S.
If inequality is now emerging as an election issue, this worldview of faith in the markets will be called into question. This is beneficial for Obama, whoever remains as the Republican candidate. The U.S. will never be a social democratic country, a welfare state based on European examples. But it’s by no means a law of nature that one may not take on the business elite in the U.S. In the 1930s, Franklin D. Roosevelt challenged the ruling economic interests with a radicalism that would be unheard of today. In doing so, he won majorities. The love of free enterprise is not the only thing that lies in the historical genes of America, but also an aversion to privileges, unfairness and pretenses of rule.
Obama remains a politically vulnerable president. As long as the economic recovery is fragile and unemployment is high, he must fear being voted out of office. Even Republican criticism of him is not completely unjustified. Indeed, there is no recognizably strong willingness of the Obama administration to save money or to intervene with the status quo, and its sociopolitical reflexes are not inventively bipartisan, as was promised during the 2008 election, but rather quite conventionally left-wing. That the president once courageously upset the public sector or some progressive lobby group is not particularly memorable.
Nevertheless, his accomplishments are considerable — far more considerable than the Obama haters on the right and those disappointed in him on the left want to believe, who don’t forgive the fact that he didn’t close Guantanamo or that he employs too many neoliberal economic advisers. If one is to come to a fair judgment of Obama’s first term, one must look at the big picture. Under the tremendous pressure from the crisis and the dangerous political frustration in his own country, he kept the U.S. globally competitive. He’s begun the dismantling of America’s position of superiority in the world. Now he has the chance to delineate his vision for the future model of American society. The debate about inequality is a good start.
Until now, the US has always denied that it had a class system. Inequality was always blamed on race and the laziness of the poor. The current discussion of “class warfare” is probably only a blip in the history of American capitalism.
Obama may be the lesser of the evils in the upcoming election, but don’t look to him to prove his left-leaning credentials.
I would have to agree on Obama’s lack of left leaning credentials! I always laugh when the right wingers jump up and down about Obama being liberal! Where do they get that from?