When Matt Drudge had the nerve — unlike the mainstream media — to remind the world that not only BP’s CEO, but the federal government’s Chief Executive, too, was enjoying high-class leisure this weekend instead of donning sackcloth and ashes — or using them to wick up some of the oil in the gulf — I think he was saying something like what columnist Mat Bai wrote in in last week’s NewYork Times. Bai lays out the heretical notion that as mad-as-hell-and-not-going-to-take-it-any-more Mr. and Mrs. America are today, it’s not the kind of mad that you cure by dusting off your Woody Guthrie records:
[T]oday’s only viable brand of populism, the same strain that Ross Perot expertly tapped as an independent presidential candidate in 1992, is not principally about the struggling worker versus his corporate master. It is about the individual versus the institution — not only business, but also government and large media and elite universities, too.
You do not have to be working for the minimum wage, after all, to seethe about the effects of the Wall Street meltdown on your retirement savings or the spilled oil creeping toward your shores. You simply have to fear that large institutions generally exercise too much power and too little responsibility in society.
This new American populism is why the federal deficit has emerged as a chief concern for voters, as it did in Mr. Perot’s era — not because it presents an imminent crisis of its own, necessarily, but because it signifies a kind of institutional recklessness, a disconnectedness from the reality of daily life.
The same dynamic explains the current spate of questions over the composition of the Supreme Court, which may soon consist entirely of lawyers trained at Harvard and Yale. It does not seem to matter that virtually all of those justices advanced from the middle class, rather than through inheritance. The pervasive reach of exclusive educational institutions is unnerving to some Americans now, and it helps inspire the caustic brand of populism that Sarah Palin and others have made central to their political identities.
What this means for Mr. Obama is that an anxious populace is now less likely to see his clash with BP as an instance of government’s standing up to a venal corporation, but rather as an instance of both sprawling institutions having once again failed to protect them. . . .
In other words, voters perceive both business and government as part of an interdependent system, and it is hard for them to separate out the culpability of either.
It’s not just that the President of the United States was enjoying a leisure-time activity when somewhere in the country of which he is the head of state and government something awful is happening that he, as a non-technically educated, delicate, middle-aged man couldn’t really do anything about. It’s that, well, he was golfing. Yes, folks, golf — that demanding, expensive and elite game that most black people (and plenty of white people) don’t even think is a real sport.
The fact that the Obamas, in many ways, have more in common with their fellow Ivy leaguers than they do with most regular folks, regardless of race, is a missing grace note to Bai’s essay. For this too suggests that it is not only the Democratic Party’s ossified mythology of class, but its long-outdated orthodoxy regarding race, that are utterly out of step with the reality known by the “people” who make populism popular.
The only thing that can perpetuate this political class in the long run is that class of true fat cats, meaning the gummint kind, helped along by their mewling spawn — socialized mainstream education, from primary through “higher.” Getting their spray off the water will make the Oil Spill of 2010 look an overturned bottle of 10W40.
UPDATE: I guess I just caught up to this: $16 million dollars in three years as an “investment banker” for Rahm Emanuel? He must really fell the pain of the little people in a way Republican suckers like me can’t even imagine.
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The President gets about as much sympathy from me on this as previous Presidents have gotten in similar circumstances.
Is that a cryptic statement? Why yes it is.
Part of it is something that looks like an iron triangle between Big Education, Big Government, and Big Business. How many people hop between government, academia, and stints at companies like Goldman Sachs? Given the vast amount of cash BP has dumped on Obama, why would things be any different there?
When you’ve got crony capitalism going full-bore, it’s hard for people to buy the idea that one piece of the triangle doesn’t like the other and will somehow do them right by the others.
Of course big business and big government are in bed together. It’s how the system operates. And apparently, that’s how people want it, because conservatives and liberals both have huge interest in these things and sway all sorts of benefits in their direction.
Oh how I wish we were back in the day when it was conservatives who were naturally suspicious of these unnatural entities, viewing them as trusts and as bizarre creations of the state. But now we view them as essential, even as “individuals” with “rights” and those who head them wield enormous political clout. While the owners–the stockholders–almost invariably are so diffuse they have no real power.
I suppose the answer is “less government.” Resulting in, what? Even more power and freedom for multinational conglomerates to do whatever they want?
Sure, the President of the United States and of BP should go on vacation. Why not? None of this affects them directly, really.
How can we critisize the people we put into power as being out of touch with the middle class, or ordinary people? We can’t get upset if they live the lives of those with high incomes. for that is the system we have. No ordinary citizen can get to be a leader of a political party unless they “bring in the money” fundraising for the campaigne. To raise the money needed you have to move in the cicles where the money is. To move in these cicles, you must be in these circles. If you are not to be seen as being bought, you must have so much yourself.
Now with a crisis that affects us ordinary people, we are going to see the kind of response that money buys. Don’t be mad at the people that we chose. The system made it that that was the kind of person we were going to get. Either party, Corporation, Non-government-organization, you name it.
I frankly don’t mind if they’re accomplished people. You expect that of an elite, and every society will end up being run by one.
What I don’t like is that many of them have never lived their adult lives outside of Washington, New York, or Cambridge (or places so nearly identical in outlook that they may as well be one of these three). They all have pretty much scripted lives that are nearly identical, particularly once they’re 16 or so: work your butt off to get into Harvard/Yale, major in something non-challenging to get good grades, get law/MBA/econ PhD (the hardest of the three), go into Wall Street or the bureaucracy, pop back and forth a bit, rise to the top, and you’re a fully-credentialed Member.
This will produce nice, boring, well-educated “establishment” types who are very risk-averse and clannish. They may claim to be “progressive”, but somehow all their ideas aim to increase their own power.
If you aren’t in this loop, you can break in, but you have to be a billionaire or something.
You can’t have a society without elites. The problem is that the *multiple* ladders of success we have had in American society are at risk of being collapsed into a single ladder, with access tightly controlled via credentials.
Benjamin Franklin warned about the dangers of having the desire for money too closely linked with the desire for power. The extreme politicization of the economy does exactly that.
Kudos to David Foster! This is a great sentence:
“The problem is that the *multiple* ladders of success we have had in American society are at risk of being collapsed into a single ladder, with access tightly controlled via credentials.”
Some of this problem can be laid at the feet of the EEOC and the law surrounding it. Employment through merit testing, in particular, has been severely discouraged by current EEO law.
Yours,
Wince
Of course, if my Ivy League credentials had resulted in me being in charge, I’d be totally cool with this.
But I still wouldn’t golf.
Now bowling — that’s a sport!
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