Frank Rich wrote an interesting article, today, in The New York Times, Who Will Stand Up to the Superrich?
Rich tells us that Americans don’t hate the rich; in some cases even admire the rich. The wealthy who lost elections, he goes on, also provided jobs for people. Rich, though, tells us that we should worry about another kind of rich American, the unseen:
The wealthy Americans we should worry about instead are the ones who implicitly won the election — those who take far more from America than they give back. They were not on the ballot, and most of them are not household names. Unlike Whitman and the other defeated self-financing candidates, they are all but certain to cash in on the Nov. 2 results. There’s no one in Washington in either party with the fortitude to try to stop them from grabbing anything that’s not nailed down.
This is serious because a democracy requires an informed citizenry; however, if this citizenry can’t see, we therefore aren’t ever sure where ideas and their motivations come from, thus trust suffers a serious blow.
As Rich suggests, “The bigger issue is whether the country can afford the systemic damage being done by the ever-growing income inequality between the wealthiest Americans and everyone else, whether poor, middle class or even rich.” Are we prepared to live in a country where the evidence — physical and otherwise — will uncover an abyss between the superrich and rich and the working class, and by working class I mean, as is evident in Rich’s column, people earning less than $200,000 and below? (Believe me, this isn’t a lot of money)
What happens in this world, this “new normal,” as we like to say, is that we lose our narrative, we can’t trust it; we also begin to sense that perhaps it’s never exited. Rich says, “That burden is inflicted not just on the debt but on the very idea of America — our Horatio Alger faith in social mobility over plutocracy, our belief that our brand of can-do capitalism brings about innovation and growth, and our fundamental sense of fairness. Incredibly, the top 1 percent of Americans now have tax rates a third lower than the same top percentile had in 1970.” The entire American concept is Romantic — it’s a romantic story that grows out of Enlightenment thinking. The trick, actually, is to reach for the Romantic sense of authenticity that shuns aristocratic values for real experience but never quite really getting there; this keeps us going or moving towards a vision of what’s real, what’s truthful. In my mind, this is what Rich is pointing to — the erosion of this Romance with the real, the lived experience, the authentic self and the journey towards that self.
I read Rich’s editorial as an explanation of the law of unintended consequences — that is, as the rich, those unseen ones especially, continue to garner more of our resources to sustain their lives, we, the workers of America, begin to realize that we’re in fact working to sustain that small percentage of citizens that reap the rewards of our labors. Thus, a percentage, an increasingly larger percentage of our value — our worth — is determined, according to Rich, by people we don’t know and people who are pulling at strings we don’t see.
How do we work through this? What do we have to do to better understand our roles in the world of labor (yet to come for you)? How does Rich make you feel? What is the relationship between Rich’s editorial and McKibben’s Eaarth?