I suppose it is a
good thing when even Ted Cruz is talking about economic inequality.
Politicians
of all ideological stripes are acknowledging the growing financial gap between
the very few haves and the many have-nots. The solutions posed, however, fit a
predictable pattern. The recent Republican budget, for example, contains a
series of cuts to social programs while proposing tax cuts that will yield big
benefits to the wealthy, who, the one-percent logic goes, will grow the economy
and create jobs.
One strand in the
GOP economic narrative is the celebration of individual initiative as the key
to social mobility—and one favored public illustration of such initiative is
the Republican politician who has risen from modest means: John Boehner, Rick
Perry, Scott Walker, and the newly elected senator from Iowa, Joni Ernst, who
on the campaign trail told of a childhood when she had to put plastic bags over
her worn-out shoes. Senator Ernst’s family might well have had a hard time of
it—so, too, the families of Messrs. Boehner, Perry, and Walker. The problem
lies—as commentator Timothy Egan trenchantly argued a few weeks back [see
article here]—in these politicians’ romanticized rendering of their family
histories and the harsh public policies they justify with that rendering.
Ten
years ago, President Bush was successfully spinning rags-to-riches narratives
in his nomination of two men for positions in his cabinet: Carlos Gutierrez for
Secretary of Commerce and Alberto Gonzales for Attorney General. I wrote the
commentary below for Salon, and I revived it for this blog during the
last presidential campaign season, for it remained relevant. Well, here we are again, entering a campaign that
will be humming with talk about economic inequality and mobility. Excuse me for reprising the essay, but, well,
the more things change, the more they remain the same.
I
edit the commentary where I can to reduce some of the 2005 specifics; as you
read it, substitute a contemporary political figure—let’s say Governor Walker
or Speaker Boehner—for the two Bush cabinet appointees mentioned in the first
few paragraphs. You’ll see why I can’t
help but replay this record.
***
In
Ragged Dick, Horatio Alger's novel about an enterprising bootblack, one
of the author's fictitious benefactors offers the following rosy observation of
upward mobility in America: "In this free country poverty is no bar to a
man's advancement." The belief that individual effort can override social
circumstances runs deep in the national psyche. It's in Ben Franklin, in
Alger's immensely popular 19th-century novels – and most recently in the
official speeches and well-publicized personal stories of two of George W.
Bush's Cabinet nominees, Carlos Gutierrez and Alberto Gonzales.
Indeed,
Republican strategists have long sought candidates and nominees with
up-from-the-bootstraps personal histories – an observation made nearly 50 years
ago by New York Times columnist James Reston – and in Gutierrez and Gonzales,
they have two exemplars. At Gonzales' Senate confirmation hearing, Sen. Arlen
Specter called the judge's life a "Horatio Alger story." By now, his
and Gutierrez' stories are well known. Gonzales was born the son of migrant
farmworkers, one of seven siblings living in a two-bedroom house with no hot
water and phone. He took his first job at 12, eventually went to Harvard Law
School and rose through Texas politics to become Bush's White House counsel.
Gutierrez, a Cuban refugee who was 6-years-old when his family fled to the
States with little money, learned English from a Miami bellhop. He began his business career selling Kellogg's
Frosted Flakes from a van in Mexico, and nearly 25 years later ascended to CEO.
Gutierrez
and Gonzales are clearly exceptional men, and their inspiring stories are
served up as evidence of their character and worthiness to serve the nation. [Gonzales
would later resign over controversies involving surveillance, “enhanced
interrogation techniques,” and politically motivated firings of U.S.
Attornies.] Yet Bush's selection of them for Cabinet posts, shrewd on several
levels, also warrants examination as cunning political strategy. In choosing
them, Bush appeals to Cuban-American and Mexican-American constituencies. And
in celebrating these rags-to-riches stories, Bush offers the promise of upward
mobility. When Bush named Gutierrez, he called him "a great American
success story" and "an inspiration to millions of men and women who
dream of a better life." By association, the administration counters the
perception that the GOP is the party of privilege, and suggests that with
Republicans in charge, even people of modest means can prosper and ascend to
power: Cabinet member as Everyman. This message is hugely important as the
Republican Party continues to court lower and middle-income voters.
But
there is duplicity at the core of the message. Since Ronald Reagan’s presidency,
the nation has witnessed a rolling back of the social protections of the
welfare state, a carefully orchestrated opposition to safeguards against
inequality and, with that, a widening income gap. The rich – the very rich,
especially – are getting much richer; the middle stagnates, and the poor fall
off the charts. Opportunity is championed while unions are threatened,
workplace health and safety regulations eroded, and an increase in the minimum
wage stonewalled.
And
yet, one of the most striking things about rags-to-riches, Republican-style
tales is that they are accounts of hardship with almost no feel of hardship to
them. They reflect a kind of opportunity that exists only in a reactionary
fable. (And here they differ significantly from the Horatio Alger originals.)
Obstacles receive brief mention – if mentioned at all – and anger, doubt, or
despair are virtually absent. You won't see the female cannery worker with
injured hands or the guys at bitter loose ends when the factory closes. You
won't see people, exhausted, shuttling between two or more jobs to make a
living or the anxious scramble for minimal healthcare for their kids.
The
GOP stories present a world stripped of the physical and moral insult of
poverty, not just sanitized – a criticism often and legitimately made – but
also distilled, a clean pencil sketch of existence without complication. These
tales appear in the Republican rhetoric surrounding any issue dealing with poverty,
such as public housing, entitlement programs or health care. This erasure of
poverty's afflictions makes sense. To do otherwise is to make palpable the dark
side of capitalism and the injuries of social class. And conservative
strategists have been working very hard, and effectively, to bleach an
understanding of class from the public mind.
Along
the landscape of Republican rags-to-riches stories, characters move upward,
driven by self-reliance, optimism, faith, responsibility. Though there will be
occasional reference to teachers or employers who were impressed with the candidate's
qualities, the explanations for the candidate's achievements rest pretty much
within his or her individual spirit. The one exception is parents: They are
usually mentioned as the source of virtue. Family values as the core of
economic mobility.
In
the Alger originals, the lucky break, the fortuitous encounter is key to the
enterprising hero's ascent. There's little play of chance in the contemporary
Republican version. Luck's got nothing to do with it. Nor, it seems, does raw
ambition and deal-making. There is not a hint of the red tooth and claw of
organizational life in these tales. And you surely will not hear a whisper
about legislation or social movements that may have enhanced opportunity,
opened a door, or removed an obstacle. It would be hard to find a more
radically individual portrait of achievement. It should be said that social and
economic mobility is possible in the
United States, though it has been stalling for decades. But does it happen as
depicted in the Republican success stories?
The
stories of mobility I know differ greatly from the Republican script. To be
sure, there is hard work and perseverance and faith – sometimes deeply
religious faith. But many people with these same characteristics don't make it
out of poverty. Discrimination is intractable, or the local economy devastated
to the core, or the consequences of poor education cannot be overcome, or one's
health gives out, or family ties (and, often, tragedy) overwhelm.
The
people who do succeed – and their gains are typically modest – often tell
stories of success mixed with setbacks, of two steps forward and one back. Such
stories reveal anger and nagging worry, or compromise and ambivalence, or a
bruising confrontation with one's real or imagined inadequacies – "falling
down within me," as one woman in an adult literacy program put it. This is
the lived experience of social class. No wonder that these truer stories
typically give great significance to help of some kind, both private and
public. A relative, a friend, or a minister lends a hand. Family and community
social networks open up an opportunity. A local occupational center provides
training. The government's safety net – welfare, Medicaid, public housing –
shelters one from devastation.
It
is the Right's grand ambition, as political journalist William Greider observed
several years ago, to roll back the 20th century, to take us back, in policy
terms, to the McKinley era. That was a time before the protections of the New
Deal and the Great Society, a time of unregulated corporate power and a Social
Darwinist view of the social order. The conservatives would keep government out
and let the market determine the order of things.
This
is the ideological back-story to the feel-good celebrations of Republican leaders’
rise from hardship. Rags-to-riches stories have always been one part
possibility, two parts fantasy. Perhaps as antidote, following Greider's lead,
we should reread The Jungle or The Shame of The Cities, placing
those early-20th century accounts of industrial brutality and urban squalor
alongside Republican narratives of success. People like those I grew up with
and have worked with over the years will be terribly hurt in the world the GOP
is trying to create, the ladder of success kicked out from under them.
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