Fred Thompson, in his new commercial showing in South Carolina, says that he has been a conservative all of his life. He says that he supports conservative principles. This is a commercial for which Fred paid a lot of money, and I’m sure its purpose is to encourage the conservative Republican base to experience warm and fuzzy feelings toward Fred.
But certainly, Thompson must have pondered all of the few words of this commercial carefully. It seems to me that two statements deserve a closer look. Fred said,
“In this country, if you play by the rules, you‘ve got a fair chance to live the American Dream.”
“Our basic rights comes from God, not from government.”
What in the world is Fred saying? I’m guessing the American Dream that Fred refers to is a dream centered on achieving material prosperity, a dream centered on financial security sufficient to enjoy the freedom that America gives to those with money — for example, the freedom to pay for your medical expenses, the freedom to send your kids to college, the freedom to take a vacation.
There are many Americans who are far from enjoying the American Dream — even though they are playing by the rules of going to school, working hard, obeying authority, paying taxes, etc. Fred says they have a “fair chance.” But many Americans feel they have not been given a fair chance at all.
Fred and our whole political process should honestly try to analyze why some Americans are prosperous and why some are not prosperous. It is an important topic that, for the sake of our social fabric, we need to understand. Living the American Dream is not simply a matter of playing by the rules — because, the rules themselves are skewed and unfair. As a country we need to look at this question of how the American Dream can be put within the reach of every American. It is a topic that should be center stage as part of our political discourse.
I earlier attempted an analysis of this general question in this post: Why Are We Rich?
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-mF_gyb7MkE[/youtube]
Interesting article, as is the one linked to that only got a few comments. One problem with the American dream is that we don’t have an American economy but a global one. Note how international capitalists (and communists if you count the Chinese government) are bailing out , or exploiting depending on your viewpoint, the US financial services people who brought us the subprime mortgage debacle. Actually they were there before. Look at all the foreclosures being filed in the name of Deutsche Bank, which is also the lead defendant in the City of Cleveland’s predatory finance lawsuit.
A major issue we are facing is that West consumes and pollutes an unsustainably high proportion of the world’s resources, and places like India and China are moving up. In the US the Bush resdistribution of wealth to the wealthy has exascerbated a trend. Thus the lifestyle of the rich portion of Americans is not something we can share with our own people, let alone the whole world.
So what plugs people into a chance to do well in the economy? The writer points out that education is only helpful if there are productive jobs for the educated to do. Thus even if we invested in the greatest schools for all the young African American men headed along the school to prison pipeline, we would also need jobs for them paying a at least a living wage, let alone a comfortable one. Dayton of course feels the loss of manufacturing jobs where unions fought for and won middle class wages. Poor people will work more cheaply elsewhere and those jobs are gone.
These days we spend little time thinking about or justifying the distribution of wealth, other than to blame poverty on the behaviors of the poor. Why do hedge fund managers make gazillions while teachers struggle with salaries at the blue collar level? Why do people on the lower class rungs deserve the fragile and contingent jobs in the service and food service industries? Ehrenreich in “Nickled and Dimed” showed that Walmart employees are actually highly skilled at what they do, which is doing what Walmart tells them. But their skills do them little good. A lot of it has to do with whether you can work the system or whether the system works you. A lot has to do with the comparable bargaining power and mobility of capital and cheap labor. And that transfers into the relative political power of votes and campaign contributions. But a lot has to do with the social norms and the amount of solidarity we see, where the rich have a huge advantage over the less rich in protecting their interests.
The economy is a moving target which few can understand. In the absence of understanding we have anxiety. Right now much of this anxiety is focussed on the many immigrants who risk their lives to cross borders and deserts hoping to make, and usually send home, the meager livings denied to them at home. This has resulted in a conflict between businesspeople and consumers seeking cheap labor and people who feel both their life status and values threatened by immigrants who will work harder for less. We also see in the subprime debacle the way the “innovation” of securitiziation, touted as a cornucopia that would bring a rush of capital to promote homeownership, official steppingstone to the American Dream, instead became a vat of snake oil as unregulated and often predatory lending has cost more homeownership than it has produced. The lie, cheat and steal side of a complex market economy easily runs amok.
Revolutionizing the economy has not gotten much serious discussion since the capitalists defeated the Marxists. Technology has advanced communications and produced various gadgets, creating some additional opportunity, but it has not done much about the overall division of wealth. If any thing we are producing more insecurity, in the mess we are making of health care, pensions and other forms of social safety net. And of course more people are further in debt, as we borrow to consume as well as to make war.
If you believe that neither meaning nor happiness result from consuming stuff or from the status we get from a stuff based economy, you must also ask how well we are doing there. Many feel that we are spending more time working and otherwise getting by, that the quality of relationships between people is down, that we have less community in the age of “bowling alone,” less security and satisfaction, more wariness, less intimacy, less that is really enjoyable, less sense of meaning. Perhaps what we get is more anxiety about our worth and acceptability, more judgmentalism about those around us and more anxiety about “others” who are out to take away what we need.
A lot of this gets manipulated by politicians. In an era where politicians market themselves like new reality TV shows, Fred Thompson does not seem to have been a hit this season. The hits in different parts of the electorate seem to be Huckabee and Obama, and a lesser extent Paul, all of whom remain decided underdogs to candidates connected to more traditional political organizations. All of these three are more spiritual candidates than candidates with programs. It remains unclear what if anything we can do to make some semblance of the American dream something that is attainable throughout the society, as opposed to some zero sum game where winners get lots but losers get little.
Too bad this article is irrelevant now. You should have seen this one coming. Next time, try McCain, Huckabee, or Romney. Giuliani’s star is fading as well.
D. Greene — What makes the article interesting, to me, is that Fred says he is speaking as a conservative and as such brings up the topic of living the American Dream. How do conservatives feel about what constitutes the American Dream? And what are the rules one should play by so that one has a “fair chance” to live it? It seems doubtful that the free market / small government approach will ever deliver to the average American what European socialism has delivered to the citizens of France or Germany. It would seem like a dream, indeed, the way that conservatives of the Bush or Reagan mindset would take up, that all Americans could expect to have five weeks of vacation and paid-up health care. Many Americans — maybe most Americans, in fact — are convinced that the system that Fred and his buddies like to talk about will never give them a “fair chance” to really share in the bounty that is America.
Stan — thanks for your extended response. I’ve read it twice. You write,
What is interesting to consider is how different the world today is from the world that Marx knew. We live in a era where the potential to produce wealth seems practically limitless via new technologies and improved productivities. Our huge challenge today is one that Marx could probably never have imagined — the challenge of unused potential. We have the capacity to do so much much more than what we do. We have the capacity to produce the food, the housing, the education that could not only change our country, but could change the world. It is outrageous that there are citizens in this country who have We inadequate housing, food, education. It is outrageous because if our democracy was working as it should be working, as a system, as a nation, we would have a completely different way of acting to promote the common good. And it is nothing less than criminal the poverty and suffering that we condone within the world as a whole.
We are far from living the America about which I dream. We are far from the American Dream. We are suffering from a lack of good ideas, from a lack of vision, a lack of passion for justice, a lack of truth.
“We are suffering from a lack of good ideas, from a lack of vision, a lack of passion for justice, a lack of truth.” This is true. However one thing that is not true is that “the potential to produce wealth seems practically limitless.” We are fstaring environmental limitations in the face, depleting the stored up energy of fossil fuels, running out of places to put the waste including carbin dioxide, running out of places period for an increasing population, and of course lacking the psychology to deal with change, either social or climatic. There once was a book about “spaceship earth” meaning that the imminent fact was that resources are limited. But people here today are more into “no boundaries” (more accurately no boundaries in some areas, such as the accumulation of wealth and stuff. Other boundaries of some sort generally matter a lot.) Whether you live in an Esrati Dayton house or a Mike Turner suburban house (allusion to Esrati’s campaign video posted on this page) such a house is still more than can be produced for the hundreds of millions of Chinese and Indians who are starting to emulate us, drive cars and use up gasoline. James Fallows writes in the Atlantic about the way China is actually supporting the US’s lifestyle by lending us money instead of using it themselves, a state of affairs that is unlikely to continue forever. And of course the American economy of borrow and spend (including spending $285 million a day on a war that is both destructive and self destructive) is not sustainable either. A sustainable environment may be like a peacetime economy, somehow we do not do it well enough to keep it going at the rate we are accustomed . Americans do not do well when their sense of material well being is threatened ,and we lose tolerance for things like strangers in our midst. Instead we are all searching for the luxuries that the wealthiest among us are getting.
So sure we could have more good ideas, wisdom, justice and truth. We could feed the world’s hungry better than we do, make things more sustainable, build communities where people value each other and perhaps learn to live together without warplanes, bombs, guns, waterboards and machetes and the tendency of people who have them to find reasons to use them. We could probably get rid of the emotional toll that poverty as a status takes in much of our city. But we probably can’t have a world where everyone lives in Centerville.
Not everyone can become rich but almost all can avoid poverty. Here are some tips:
1. Work hard at school even if you are ridiculed
2. Do not do drugs, smoke, gamble, or drink
3. Do not have children out of wedlock
4. When you graduate work hard at your job
5. Try to better yourself at your job and work for promotions
6. Be a faithful spouse
7. Save money and live frugally
8. Be lawabiding
Stan, I wrote, “We live in a era where the potential to produce wealth seems practically limitless” and you disagreed, and you replied that, “we probably can’t have a world where everyone lives in Centerville.”
It is an interesting question: how much wealth could our nation produce if our goal as a nation was to produce wealth? We are proud that our system produces the wealth that it does produce. Certainly our system develops a larger part of our capacity to produce wealth than a centrally controlled system, like North Korea, would develop. But, as compared to its capacity to produce wealth, our system is producing wealth quite poorly.
We are producing only a tiny portion of the wealth that we could be producing. Yes, it seems to me feasible that everyone in our country, eventually, could have the equivalent of the material comforts and economic security of the typical Centerville resident — because, it seems to me, that our capacity to produce wealth is almost limitless. Yes, we have environmental and resource limitations — we can’t all have a five acre yard, we can’t keep burning oil like there is no tomorrow — but we have no limitations on our capacity to problem solve, our capacity to effectively use our imaginations, our capacity to invent. We seem to have limitations on our will to tackle the question of wealth creation in any serious manner.
It is a good question: how much wealth could our nation produce if our goal as a nation was to produce wealth? A better question is: why is it not our nation’s goal to produce wealth?
And if, as a democracy, we determine, yes, it would be nice if our system produced more wealth, then what must happen within the system so that such wealth is produced? How would be behave, how would we construct public policy if we had consensus, as reflected in a representative government, that the creation of wealth should be a priority?
The answer that Bush and the Republicans give to this question — how to produce wealth — is that more money and privilege should be given to the wealthy. Small government. Low Taxes. Under Republican control, wealth has been transferred to the wealthy and a hugely disproportionate amount of new wealth has gone to the already wealthy. But, regardless, it is plain that the Republican wealth creation plan is not effective in coming anywhere close to maximizing the capacity of the system. The Republican theory of how to create wealth has been pretty well vetted and the evidence seems pretty clear that implementing Republican theory will never succeed in maximizing the wealth creation potential of the system.
Shouldn’t the Democratic Party become the Party of Ideas? My question: What is the theory of wealth creation that should guide Democratic Party policy? McCain says that the transcendental issue for our time is the issue of Islamic radicalism. But, it seems to me, the transcendental issue of our time is how can we get this country to work? How can we have a country with freedom and justice for all — specifically economic justice for all? Aren’t we ready for some bold ideas? Shouldn’t this presidential campaign center on bold ideas for the future?
Go to Youtube – Living the American Dream – click on green line graph at top of page. About foreclosures……