Thomas Edsall’s latest article in the New York Times, How The Other Fifth Lives, nicely adds some data to what is usually an over-moralized subject. But unfortunately not a lot.
Analysis of a disease — at least clarification of its key terms — should precede condemnation of it. Sometimes Edsall succeeds are this rare skill, but not this time: the weakness of his analysis is that to properly condemn the filthy fifth — the “self-segregating” segment of the population he calls “privileged” — Edsall must attribute agency to them. They need to actively self-segregate owing to their implied moral weakness and greed, and not because their mass movement is rooted in any external sociological causes.
But, in fact, they’re the fruit of a rather obvious sociological process: balkanization. And what fosters balkanization? Studies suggest diversity. Notes the Boston Globe of Harvard political scientist Robert Putnam’s massive 15-year studies of the phenomenon, “the greater the diversity in a community, the fewer people vote and the less they volunteer, the less they give to charity and work on community projects. In the most diverse communities, neighbors trust one another about half as much as they do in the most homogenous settings. The study, the largest ever on civic engagement in America, found that virtually all measures of civic health are lower in more diverse settings.” Other studies confirm that the most diverse societies are often the most segregated.
Since “Diversity is Our Strength” — let us retain our tenure and continued employment by chanting it in unison, everyone! — we will of course continue to diversify our brains out. (It provides the 1% dirt cheap labor, after all), But what will we get in the end? Unfortunately the data suggests ever deepening fragmentation. Thus we pass from Mayberry to Sarajevo.
An interesting alt-right take on all this is provided by the leprous David Cole, who in a Takimag piece on the roots of various positions on abortion, takes up the work of Martin Gilens, a political science professor at Princeton, who argues, not distantly from Edsall, that the U.S. is essentially an oligarchy: “We are controlled by the moneymen, the “1%,” and any claim that our “democracy” is participatory or inclusive is illusory. “Affluence and influence—that’s what makes the U.S. economic system go ’round,” summarizes Cole. “The deck is stacked… ”
But what’s interesting is not that Gilens puts a great deal of data-based meat on Edsall’s moralistic bones: it’s the confirmation Gilens’s studies provide for Edsall’s observation that ” …the priorities of the truly advantaged wing — voters with annual incomes in the top quintile, who now make up an estimated 26 percent of the Democratic general election vote [my italics] — are focused on social and environmental issues [again, my italics]: the protection and advancement of women’s rights, reproductive rights, gay and transgender rights and climate change, and less on redistributive economic issues.”
In other words: the horrible, self-segregating, rich, wealthy, dominant elite is liberal! (Except when it come to issues that directly impact on their finances, of course, like immigration.) The addicted, the homeless, the Bible-thumping Appalachian poor, African villagers disdaining birth control, Muslims snipping off clitori and tossing gays off buildings, Louis Farrakhan praising the Holocaust, Donald Trump supporters — all the truly illiberal that the revolted elite hold at arm’s length do not care about their carbon footprint!
If manipulation by the dominant elite were to falter, the right-wing attitudes and practices of this sorry lumpenproletariat would flourish — nay, explode! The rich are our vanguard party, a Leninist wall, saving progressive mankind from becoming Duck Dynasty. Cole summarizes it nicely: “Sanders’ followers might give good lip service to the concept of empowering the working poor, but in the end, as Professor Gilens so astutely points out, to do so would work against the priorities of today’s Democrats. As long as there is even one abortion going unperformed, one man in a wig barred from the women’s bathroom, and one white guy who dares to think he can wear dreadlocks, the fight against the 1% can wait.”
Curiously, the link to Edsall’s article was sent to me by a reader who added a note that the rise of Trump is a ominous “symptom” of the cancerous growth of this new and increasingly separate 1%. And how exactly is Trump’s war on the elites a “symptom” of it? I wasn’t told. Which is no surprise, since it isn’t. That’s just the perfunctory Trump-bashing one needs to go through to establish that one is a good person, and not vulgar low-life like The Donald and his trailer-trash supporters. Dumping on The Don is the upper middle-class way of sharing the self-segregation of the highly privileged: a quiet way of suggesting oneness with that elite.
But The Don himself is not a symptom — he’s an antibody. Apres Don, le deluge!