Chris Hayes of The Nation argues that the D.C. elite is disconnected from the suffering of unemployed Americans. As he notes, the unemployment rate for college-educated workers is 4.2 percent, well below the national average. And the metropolitan area centered on Washington, D.C. has an unemployment rate of 5.7 percent, also well below the national average.
There were already Two Americas before the Great Recession, but in the wake of that seismic disruption, those two continents have only moved further apart.
This manifests itself in our politics in two ways. For one, it just so happens that policy-makers, pundits and politicians are drawn from the classes that are in recovery, and they live in an area where new sushi restaurants are opening all the time. For even the best-intentioned and most conscientious staffers and aides this has, I think, a subconscious effect. …
The other problem is that our system is responsive only to voices at the top of the social pyramid—the bankers and businessmen who are raking in record bonuses and the professional upper middle class, which is recovering much faster than the nation as a whole. In a 2007 paper titled “Inequality and Democratic Responsiveness in the United States,” Princeton political scientist Martin Gilens analyzed 2,000 survey questions from 1981 to 2002, looking for the relationship between public opinion and policy outcomes. He found that “when Americans with different income levels differ in their policy preferences, actual policy outcomes strongly reflect the preferences of the most affluent but bear little relationship to the preferences of poor or middle income Americans.”
There is only so much social distance a society can take. The social science literature shows that as social distance increases, trust declines and aberrant and predatory behavior increases. The basic mechanisms of representation erode, and the social fabric tears. “An imbalance between rich and poor,” Plutarch warned, “is the oldest and most fatal ailment of all republics.”
I don’t doubt that there is something to Chris’s analysis, and any objection sounds like a cavil. When Chris writes the following
What these two numbers add up to is a governing elite that is profoundly alienated from the lived experiences of the millions of Americans who are barely surviving the ravages of the Great Recession. As much as the pernicious influence of big money and the plutocrats’ pseudo-obsession with budget deficits, it is this social distance between decision-makers and citizens that explains the almost surreal detachment of the current Washington political conversation from the economic realities working-class, middle-class and poor people face.
it is easy to understand why his columns resonate with so many people.
My view is somewhat different, and it is informed by my experience of how mental illness shapes life outcomes. Privileged families are better able to insulate themselves from the downsides of mental illness, drug addiction, family disruption, and other maladies that hit rich and poor alike. Yet it’s also true that poor people with stable extended families are in a better position than those without them, and it’s not obvious that well-funded social services can close the gap. One can point to northern Europe for a counterargument, but I’m afraid the contrasting experiences of disrupted families from immigrant backgrounds and non-disrupted families from native backgrounds suggests that those societies haven’t cracked the code.
That said, I strongly think that we need public services that work better so that we can meet the needs of the most vulnerable people. A key left-right divide is over how we make public services better. There are several axes of disagreement, two of which are particularly important: (a) How much should we spend? and (b) How should we spend? On (a) there are those who want to (i) spend more and those who want to (ii) spend the same or less. On (b) there are those who think we should (i) maintain existing structures while spending more on wages for public servants and those who want to (ii) find new institutional forms for delivering services. My view on (a) is it depends (sometimes i and sometimes ii) and on (b) I am strongly in favor of (ii). I’d suggest that (b) is actually a much more important axis of disagreement than (a), and I think that a lot of people in the (a)(i)(b)(i) camp don’t fully appreciate that. Indeed, I’d say that (a)(ii)(b)(ii) people and (a)(i)(b)(ii) people represent a natural alliance, because it is (b)(i) vs. (b)(ii) that is the defining debate of our time.
Whenever I read a clarion call to moral outrage, I always want to know who benefits. I think it’s fair to say that social distance of a certain kind can be a problem — the social distance of Americans from the world’s most truly impoverished people can lead middle-class schoolteachers to believe that paying more for more generous health benefits than for less generous health benefits is an unspeakable outrage that must be fought through direct street battles. I’m not sure that’s healthy for any of us.
Chris ends his column on the following note:
It’s against this backdrop of creeping dissolution that the word “union” takes on a renewed power. That’s why the struggles of the protesters in Wisconsin have resonated so profoundly. In banding together to oppose Republican Governor Scott Walker’s power grab, the students, teachers, cops, firefighters and neighbors have willed themselves to shrink the social distance those in power are cynically using to pit constituencies against one another. Walker exempted cops and firefighters from his bill’s radical limits on collective bargaining, but they joined the protests anyway. “An assault on one is an assault on all,” proclaimed Wisconsin Professional Firefighters Association president Mahlon Mitchell.
It’s in Wisconsin and across the Midwest that union members like Mitchell and his allies are showing us the antidote to the social distance that threatens the core of American democracy.
Note that Gov. Kasich’s proposal in Ohio doesn’t exempt public safety workers, a move that’s been praised by many conservatives. Gov. Walker observed that the vast majority of public safety unions opposed his election, which is why their presence at opposition protests is hardly surprising.
I take a different view of the social distance problem: middle-class public sector workers more closely resemble the median worker than the beneficiaries of public services. That is, there is less social distance between a middle-class voter and, say, a schoolteacher or firefighter than between that middle-class voter and a person living in a mental institution or a student attending a high-poverty public school. I have a social worker in my immediate family, and most of her clients haven’t been attached to the workforce in years. I have another person in my immediate family who hasn’t been able to work for years due to a combination of mental and physical illness. Seeing to it that she gets the best possible care consistent with public spending levels that working people can afford to sustain means that public officials will sometimes need flexibility from public workers — because it is the beneficiaries of public services that, in the final analysis, should be our first priority.
To reiterate, we can agree that social distance is a problem yet disagree on (b)(i) vs. (b)(ii). And it is (b)(i) vs. (b)(ii) that is most pressing.