….The great hidden issue in America is the scandal that tens of millions of Americans who work full time — often more than full time — barely get by and can’t get ahead, while CEOs get zillions. The blue-collar middle class jobs are vanishing; what’s taking their place are retail and service jobs that top out at $10 an hour or less. You can’t live decently on that.America’s hidden issue of poverty –
By Robert Kuttner | June 16, 2004
For chapter and verse, read Barbara Ehrenreich’s modern classic, “Nickeled and Dimed.” She recounts trying to survive on take-home pay of about $1,200 a month when rent consumes $800. It can’t be done. Many of her co-workers, clinging to middle-class work ethic values, live in their cars.
Bernie Sanders, the lefty Vermont congressman, recently told me something interesting. He gets a lot of his votes not from the Birkenstock crowd but from lower income, blue-collar men — the very voters many Democrats consider hopelessly lost to NASCAR, Limbaugh, flag-waving, and fundamentalism.
Why do they support a militant like Sanders? Because he engages their pocketbook issues — fighting for ground rules that enable working people to make a decent living, get good health care, and live in affordable housing. “I’m not a liberal,” says Sanders. “I’m a progressive.”
Progressive politics is not about charity and soup kitchens. It’s about power, and putting issues considered almost unspeakable in polite company back into the national conversation.
The people Barbara Ehrenreich interviewed for “Nickeled and Dimed” have pretty much given up on politics — because politics has given up on them. Few big-league politicians are talking about subjects that could make a real difference in their lives, like maybe a $12 minimum wage or universal health insurance.
The bipartisan elite has convinced itself that the main challenge for the next generation is reducing the federal deficit. That’s what passes for courage in Beltway Washington, as it has for two decades. No wonder voters are tuning out.
Let me amend that. Potentially progressive voters like those Sanders supporters tune out. Wall Street voters are entirely tuned in, to an insider debate between those who would cut taxes and not worry about deficits (Bush) and those who would cut deficits and give up on all but token social investment (the fiscal conservatives advising Kerry). Some debate.
Lately, Washington sages have been promoting a new and entirely misleading conceit about what ails American politics — polarization: Pundit John Tierney wrote, “It’s not voters but the political elite of both parties who have become more narrow minded and polarized.” Columnist David Brooks sniffed, “You can’t understand the current bitter polarization without appreciating how it is inflamed or even driven by the civil war within the educated class.”
To read these guys, you’d think Republican leaders were charging to the right and Democrats to the left. But the Democratic Party has become steadily more centrist, especially on pocketbook issues, as the GOP has become more radical. By making the problem seem like a symmetrical polarization, these right-wing pundits give a free pass to both Bush’s plain extremism and the Democrats’ capture.
A vibrant politics has to be about making sure that capitalism gives ordinary people a fair shake. Otherwise regular people turn to spectacle rather than democracy, politics becomes a sport for the elite, and the best we can hope for is charity.
So the problem, with all due respect to WBUR, isn’t that school is out. It’s that class is out.
Robert Kuttner is co-editor of The American Prospect. His column appears regularly in the Globe.
Tags: Poverty Analysis
