NeighborScapes

This is the “what’s the matter with Kansas?” point.  In that noteworthy book, Thomas Frank explores the ways in which the economic policies of the Republican Party are wrecking the livelihoods and communities of Kansans, who are overwhelmingly working class, while benefiting the very wealthy in America.  And yet Kansans support the GOP in great numbers based on allegiance to hot-button social issues like gay rights, abortion and crime.  Kansans either don’t care about inequitable economic policies, or believe that they are likely to achieve wealth anyway.  Rags to riches is a popular strain of American thought, owing much to the novels written by Horatio Alger in the early 20^th Century and the “up-by-the-bootstraps” mythology that arose from them. 

As a result of this ethos, we have developed a political economy that places more faith in bootstraps than in a social safety net.  This may owe something to America’s history as a land of manifest destiny, a place where our westward expansion could create a great nation by tapping untapped natural resources and colonize supposedly open spaces.  This is tied to the notion, captured in Frederick Jackson Turner’s frontier thesis, that the frontier was one of the defining factors in the development of the nation’s character. 

From Teddy Roosevelt through George W. Bush, we have been in significant part a cowboy nation with a frontier mentality – eat what you kill, only the strong survive, devil take the hindmost.  But it is time for America to look around and grow up.  The frontier is gone – and with it, the opportunity to farm new fields and dig new wells and mines.  Now, wealth and value are not discovered so much as they are created by building onto a foundation that has been laid down by our predecessors and is maintained by society as a whole.  Americans need to look around and understand this, and see that if the ladders of opportunity do not have lower rungs to enable the poor in America to get onto the lower floors of this edifice, the next rungs that get knocked off the ladder will immobilize the working class, and then the middle class. 

In an age where economic innovation has largely to do with service between persons, management of information flow and communication, and management and manipulation of financial assets, attainment of wealth is more of a zero-sum game than it ever was when there were unplowed fields and untapped mines in the West.  That is to say, those who get fabulously wealthy off of information, services and asset management do so by benefiting from a tax an opportunity structure that leave many more wanting. 

This is tough medicine to swallow, but growing up means that after looking around and seeing how the modern economy works, we need to learn how to share.  That’s what it means to grow up.  America needs to create a national health care system, commit to effective public education nationwide, and agree on an equitable taxation policy while overcoming the socio-political equivalent of tantrums: tea parties, talk radio rants, accusations of creeping socialism, and gated communities with security guards out front.  So long as too many Americans believe they can get rich, and that the road to that wealth lies in unregulated markets and small government, too many Americans will remain poor.  A decent social safety net is not incompatible with Democratic Capitalism.