The freedom to be afraid
by Tom Sullivan
Wolfe at the White House in 2004. (Public domain)
Maybe it is coincidence. Or maybe shifts in thinking across large swaths of society simply take time to become visible. People’s unconscious frustration with their standing under metastasized capitalism has been bubbling around society’s edges long enough that lately it is breaking out into the open. Brexit was a clue. So were the 2016 campaigns of Sen. Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump. Sanders pointed to shortcomings in how the economy as presently configured treats ordinary people. Trump blamed brown-skinned Others, because as a member of the class benefiting most from today’s economy, of course he did.
Bottom line? This ain’t working and people feel it.
Noah Smith argues Americans still reel from “half-century of wealth destruction and stagnation.” He writes at Bloomberg:
The government’s failure to bail out underwater homeowners — recall that the Tea Party was inspired by an on-air rant against the idea of aiding struggling mortgage borrowers — was a fateful error whose economic and social consequences are still being felt.
Wealth inequality eats at the core of a society. But as long as the wealth of the middle and lower classes is growing — as it was up until 2006 — the corrosive effect of inequality will be limited. For half of the country, the housing collapse destroyed a 60-year story of the American dream — no wonder so many people are turning to populism and socialism.
To restore that dream, wealth will have to grow again for a broader swath of Americans. In a country with slow productivity growth and an aging population, that probably would require redistribution of wealth.
We have yet to decide on how. But as with treating any ailment, identifying the disease helps in defining a course of treatment.
Economic historian Louis Hyman of Cornell University argues in the New York Times that the insecure nature of our work is not driven by “the inexorable march of technology,” but by decisions from business and policymakers. The Industrial Revolution did not take place because of technology, Hyman writes. Rather, changes that had already occurred in how people organized their work made it possible for technological advances to build on it.
Prior to the Industrial Revolution came an “industrious revolution” in which independent networks of farmers spun fibers and wove cloth. Manufacturers gathering those workers under one roof as paid employees was a cultural change and a precondition for the Industrial Revolution:
The same goes for today’s digital revolution. While often described as a second machine age, our current historical moment is better understood as a second industrious revolution. It has been underway for at least 40 years, encompassing the collapse, since the 1970s, of the relatively secure wage-work economy of the postwar era — and the rise of post-industrialism and the service economy.
Corporations began to abandon the old model, Hyman writes, in favor of “a new, strictly financial view of corporations, a philosophy that favored stock and bond prices over production, of short-term gains over long-term investment.” This approach, he asserts, not technology, made employees more disposable and jobs more tenuous. The technology behind the gig economy simply accelerated the change in work culture resulting from corporate and policy decisions:
I am neither for nor against temping (or consulting, or freelancing). If this emergent flexible economy were all bad or all good, there would be no need to make a choice about it. For some, the rise of the gig economy represents liberation from the stifled world of corporate America.
But for the vast majority of workers, the “freedom” of the gig economy is just the freedom to be afraid. It is the severing of obligations between businesses and employees. It is the collapse of the protections that the people of the United States, in our laws and our customs, once fought hard to enshrine.
The late Tom Wolfe famously mocked the 1970s as the “Me” Decade, one of self-infatuation as self-enlightenment, of personal transformation, a third religious Great Awakening. If people felt it, so did the business world. In a world no longer defined by an us, infatuation with maximizing one’s wealth drove corporations to become the vehicle for self-realization either through entrepreneurship or boosting stock value. Any balance between the interests of capital and labor broke down along with the very idea of a social contract. Self-maximalization through politics came through winning by any means necessary.
Stunned by the number of people, including Rudy Giuliani, who confess the belief that anyone in politics would take stolen information from an adversarial foreign government to win an election. In this view, there are no means to victory that are not justified by victory.— Jonathan Allen (@jonallendc) August 19, 2018
What Wolfe wrote of the new seekers is true of the period of vast wealth disparity that decisions since the 1970s have led us to, “There is no ecumenical spirit within this Third Great Awakening. If anything, there is a spirit of schism.”
So, it is welcome to see Sen. Elizabeth Warren fighting to save capitalism from the worst excesses maximized by our own choices.
Forty years ago, Wolfe wrote:
And now many dare it! In Democracy in America, Tocqueville (the inevitable and ubiquitous Tocqueville) saw the American sense of equality itself as disrupting the stream, which he called “time’s pattern”: “Not only does democracy make each man forget his ancestors, it hides his descendants from him, and divides him from his contemporaries; it continually turns him back into himself, and threatens, at last, to enclose him entirely in the solitude of his own heart.” A grim prospect to the good Alexis de T.—but what did he know about . . . Let’s talk about Me!
Now the Great Me is President of the United States, and the greater we are free to be afraid.
[h/t MPW for Bloomberg]
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