Letters to the Editor
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Why Nobody Cares
There is a much easier to understand reason why people don't care about the latest "gilded" age.
People aren't that bad off.
If you spend your time worrying about income inequality you miss the central point of human desire. People don't worry about others having more than them, so long as they have enough.
Median household income has been stable in the United States since about the 1970's. It hasn't grown as dramaticly as the wealth of the richest, but it is stable. That may be changing as our economic fortunes collide with various current peak commodity fears, and if it does, then comes the revolution, but just the fact that a small group of people are very rich doesn't really bother people with food on the table, a roof, over their head, and various home appliances.
There was a time when workers longed for a fair days work for a fair days pay. People have that for the most part, so the outrage people feel about the richest 1-10% is mittigated by their own creature comforts.
People seem to forget that during the last gilded age, union organizers were murdered, children worked in factories, and no social safteynet existed to care for those who fell on hard times. That is a very differnt world than the one we occupy today.
Once a fair days work for a fair days pay is achieved, the rich have no futher obligation to their workers to share the fruits of their risk. The working class can demand more, but will likely not since they have achieved wealth comenserate with thier efforts. If people are content, then wealth inequality is irrelivant.
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The class struggle
Like it or not the problems facing us are a manifestation of the class struggle. This should be required reading for every high school child. The idea that someone can make money by exploiting their workers, is anethema, or why is that everytime IBM announces a layoff, their stock goes up?
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“If people are content” . . .
then please provide explanations for current levels of incidence of pathological use of: food, nicotine, methamphetamine, domestic violence, child abuse and neglect, Republicanism, aggression, religious practice, alcohol, patriotism, gambling, Prozac, sport, Xanax, consumerism, gun ownership, television viewing, and (more to the point) idiocy.
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democracy & capitalism
Even while decrying the emergence of the new Gilded Age, Fraser repeats one our favorite myths- that capitalism and democracy go hand in hand. Contrary to what they told you in school, this has never been the case. In a democracy the people vote; in capitalism, money votes. Unchallenged, it eventually dictates. I would think this would be self-evident by now- certainly both the current economic and political powers-that-be make absolutely no bones about it, and as Fraser points out popular culture celebrates it. This explains why the neo-cons hate government so much- in theory at least the popular will expressed at the ballot box can trump money's unchallenged hegemony under unregulated capitalism. It is also why they dismiss anyone who opposes the modern plutocracy as proponents of class warfare. They get away with it by presenting themselves as exemplars of working class virtue.
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In the old days...
(responding to J.C. Miller) ...people didn't have methamphetamine (or crack) or Prozac and television, but alcohol, domestic violence and child abuse were big problems (and often ignored, as "private matters" - now that our viewpoint has changed, it SEEMS to us that there's a lot more of it). And Religion was a lot bigger then than now (opium of the masses and all that).
I think Mr. C. Smurf has a good point. I keep hearing about how bad things are, and I live in an officially poor district, but I see people with new vehicles and off-road-vehicles and satellite dishes... There ARE very poor people who are suffering, but the proportion is smaller now, and the middle class is only feeling a few pinches - so far - not the kind of battering that was 24/7 lifelong for workers at one time... (The Daily Show bit about Americans only being able to buy 80 lbs of rice at a time due to world shortages was right on the mark...)
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Agree with Wychwood
When people can no longer come home, sit alone in a room, switch off their brain and be passively entertained, then maybe they might start caring.
I don't want to get all "television ruined America!" but really, haven't we stopped talking to each other? Haven't we stopped seeking each other out for entertainment via conversation? It's hard to generate collective outrage when nobody knows what anybody else is thinking.
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caring
Actually, Fraser's article does not say that no one cares. That's merely the tagline, probably written by someone else.
And plenty of people do care. It is a mistake to assume that lack of power and lack of caring are the same. It is also a mistake, as the article points out, to assume that the resistance will come in the same form as it did last time.
The greedy and dishonest will always, like mutating disease organisms, seek new pathways to exert their destructive dominance. It will always require new strategies to defeat them.
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this was not a well-written article
Could your prose be any more purple? Geez what a lot of slop to wade through. Like jargon much? And where's the central point? There seem to be about five, duking it out for dominance.
I see that this first appeared on TomDispatch.com. May I suggest that in future, Salon should only pick up articles which are competently written?
If the point was supposed to be that we're mad as hell and we aren't going to take it anymore, I have to disagree. And there's no need to go into all that fooforaw to explain it. The taser changed all that. When police firing into a crowd of protesters had to deal with the outrage over several deaths, change was possible. Now, inconvenient protests can be ended before they begin.
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Economics is not first and foremost a social engine
I know you've all been schooled in the steady diet of Howard Zinn and western style faux Marxist twaddle. But Capitalism is neither good nor bad. It's a tool. If this is intended as a polemic against capitalism then I would point out all the collapsing states founded on some flavor of small c communism, Marxism and the like. I would, and I think you would rather live in South Korea or Uruguay than Egypt or Ukraine.