Class Dismissed

By NEAL GABLER Neal Gabler, a senior fellow at the Norman Lear Center at USC Annenberg, is the author of "Life

the Movie: How Entertainment Conquered Reality."

Los Angeles Times January 27 2002

AMAGANSETT, N.Y. -- More than 100 years ago, the "Great Commoner," William Jennings Bryan, whipped the Democratic National Convention into a frenzy and changed the party's politics for a generation when he declaimed against Eastern bankers, "You shall not press down upon the brow of labor this crown of thorns, you shall not crucify mankind upon a cross of gold." Less than a decade later, President Theodore Roosevelt inveighed against trusts that threatened to wrest power from the people, and three decades after that, President Franklin D. Roosevelt sneered at "economic royalists." This was the grand rhetoric of class conflict. How long ago it was. Despite the sudden erosion of the budget surplus in the face of a $1.3-trillion tax cut that largely favors the wealthiest Americans, you don't hear that kind of talk anymore. You are far more likely to hear dark warnings against invoking the issue of class. When Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle (D-S.D.) recently attempted to tie the current recession to the tax cut, he got little traction in the press or among the public. Similarly, when Republicans advocated dispensing huge refunds to some of America's largest corporations to reimburse them for the minimum corporate tax they had paid, while at the same time opposing expansion of health benefits to unemployed workers, there was an astonishing lack of umbrage. Not even the spectacle of Enron executives enriching themselves while their employees watched their life savings evaporate seems to have roused middle-class Americans from their stupor. Whatever happened to good old-fashioned class-based politics pitting haves against have-nots?

The short answer is that class warfare has been steadily subverted over the past 20 years by defenders of the status quo: Republicans have chiefly led the fight, but so have some Democrats, captains of industry, journalists, religious leaders, radio talk show hosts and cable television babblers. They have waged this campaign on the stump, in the media and, most effectively, in the popular culture. What they have achieved amounts to a psychological revolution in which Americans not only don't think in terms of class, they don't even recognize any economic force beyond their own labor. Class warfare has been destroyed through a kind of national brainwashing.

This certainly isn't the conventional answer for why ordinary citizens dodt seem terribly exercised about seeing money that could be used to finance schools, build roads or cure disease go instead to buy another luxury car or yacht for a multi-millionaire. The usual answer has been that a rising standard of living has neutralized class consciousness. When it seems that everyone has a house, two cars, three television sets and a closetful of designer clothes, no one really begrudges the rich for having more. Trickle-down may or may not be valid as an economic policy, but it has proved to be a great psychological policy. So long as people feet better off than they were, they apparently are in no mood to grumble over why they dorft have more of America's spoils.

The problem is, the standard of living for the vast majority of Americans hasn't risen all that dramatically over the last 20 years. According to a recent Congressional Budget Office study, income for middle-class families, adjusted for inflation, rose from $41,400 in 1979 to $45, 100 in 1997, or just 9%. In other words, the average American is only slightly better off now than he was then, despite unprecedented economic growth during this period.

Even so, one might understand the general reluctance to play the class card if all Americans were in the same boat. But they aren't. While the average American's income increased by 9%, that of the wealthiest 1 % rose 140% during the same period. Put another way, the wealthiest now have 23 times more than the annual income of the average American, up from 10 times more in 1979. Economic growth has been a kind of zero-sum game, and the gap between the middle class- no one even bothers to consider the poor- and the rich is getting bigger and bigger. It is a state of affairs that should have made Americans more class conscious, not less.

There are more satisfying explanations for the end of class warfare. For one, the United States is basically a conservative country in which class antagonisms have always been more the exception than the rule and in which practitioners of class warfare have been routinely branded "socialistic" or "foreign." Bryan, after all, lost three presidential elections to conservative opponents, and FDR, whose platform was hardly rabble-rousing, was elected only after President Herbert Hoover fiddled while America burned.

Another explanation is that sectional, cultural or racial disputes siphon off energy that might otherwise feed class conflict. One of the great political achievements of conservatives over the last 30 years or so has been to tie social welfare to race rather than class. As a result, poor and middle-class white Americans tend to neglect their own interests in the belief that policies of equalization and fairness are designed chiefly to aid minorities.

There have also been changes in the economy that have sapped class consciousness and thus class warfare. The decline of the trade-union movement and the rise of white-collar and service jobs as a proportion of the workforce have blunted the sense of a working class with a distinct set of interests. More recently, the infusion of ordinary Americans into the stock market has blurred the line between labor and capital- between those who work and those who own- and has consequently changed allegiances.

But while these factors taken together provide a partial explanation of why Americans don't engage in class warfare anymore, they don't really explain why we dare not mention class disparities in U.S. politics today. For that, you have to go back to the campaign against class, a campaign that should rank among the most significant political developments of the last quarter century but has been little remarked upon.

The foundation of this campaign is the American Dream, which is one reason why populists have found it virtually impossible to combat. The dream proposes that anyone in America can succeed by dint of hard work. The opportunities are there; we simply have to seize them. Thus, to talk in terms of class is, in a sense, to betray the dream--the vital source of optimism in the nation. It is un-American.

The corollary to our faith in social mobility has been a kind of American Calvinism that has served the wealthy well. As Chauncey Depew, a 19th-century apologist for untrammeled wealth, once put it, the rich had become rich because they possessed "superior ability, foresight, and adaptability." They deserved their wealth. This has been the social gospel of American conservatism, and it was essentially George W. Bush's pitch last year when he defended his huge tax breaks: The rich deserve tax cuts because they pay more taxes, and they pay more taxes because they have earned more. Without coming right out and saying so, he was, like Depew, telling us, in effect, that the rich were better than the rest of us: smarter, tougher, harder working.

The American Dream and its Calvinist corollary have existed since the nation's beginning, and they didn't entirely foreclose class warfare. Even as they endorsed the dream, populists argued that mobility was predicated on opportunity, and that the system was rigged by the plutocrats to deny the common man the means to the good life so that plutocrats themselves could have more. As much as anything, populism aimed to provide opportunities to make the American Dream a reality for everyone. To the extent that class warfare ever existed in this country, that was its rationale: not to divide the pie evenly but to assure that everyone got invited to dinner.

If Americans believed there was systemic inequality, there could be class warfare. What Reaganism did--and this may have been its signal accomplishment--was convince the average American that equal opportunity already existed, and that anyone who didn't succeed had only himself to blame, not the inequities of the system. This was the grand psychological transformation, and though it played on Americans' predisposition both to credit and to reprove themselves for their own situation, it succeeded largely by steadily redirecting attention from the macro to the micro, from economics to anecdote. While the macro story was that wealth was being massively redistributed from the middle class to the upper class, the micro story that Ronald Reagan and other conservatives--and even many liberals, for that matter--kept pushing incessantly was that of the small, intrepid entrepreneur who made a million dollars out of some invention or brainstorm. There were literally thousands of these stories--Reagan loved to tell the one about the fellow who reaped a fortune by inventing a beer-can holder--and they had the advantage of being media-friendly. What they suggested was that America had reached the point at which you either decided to make a fortune or you didn't, with the promise that your own windfall might be just around the comer. This was the new economic myth that trumped economic truth.

But it wasn't only politicians and conservative pundits who promoted the idea that class was earned not ascribed. Dozens of movies, from "Rocky" to "Good Will Hunting" to "Ocean's Eleven" have pushed it. Advertisements have pushed it by showing the ready availability of material goods. How-to bestsellers have pushed it by advising how easily one can accumulate wealth. The lore of Ralph Lauren, Martha Stewart, Oprah Winfrey, Emeril Lagasse--of anyone who, Alger-like, had risen from poverty to prominence--have pushed it. You can't avoid it.

It remains a potent idea, because people want to believe it--certainly more than they want to believe that the U.S. economy distributes its rewards unfairly. As Ronald Reagan no doubt realized, it is also a lot easier to identify with a rich entrepreneur than to understand the welter of statistics that show the more frightening face of the economy. At the same time, having convinced people that wealth is a function of brains and gumption, rather than of inheritance or influence, conservatives effectively removed the rich as a target of class warfare and replaced them with another target of ideological warfare: government. By this new reasoning, when the government claimed that it wanted to redress the inequities of the economy, it was really just angling to take more money from its citizens. Government, the only instrumentality that could possibly remedy unfairness, was a lot easier to hate than a guy who invented a beer-can holder or even a guy who invented a computer operating system and became a billionaire.

After 20 years of inspirational tales of wealth, and as many years of govemment-bashing, this is where we find ourselves now. Most of us believe fervently in the American Dream. Most of us believe that the rich are deserving and that, with a few breaks, we might get ours, too. Most of us believe that taxes are some kind of confiscatory scheme rather than a tool for correcting an imbalance. And most of us believe that to think in terms of class under these circumstances is to deny the ideal of individual responsibility that is the very basis of America. That's why the rich will keep getting richer, the middle class will keep losing ground, the poor will keep getting ignored, and no one will say a single word about it.