US ‘top dogs’ in denial over public anger - by Chrystia Freeland
When Barack Obama, the president, meets the nation’s financial titans on Saturday, US populist rage should still be at the top of the agenda. This week was just a lull in the storm: the nation’s widespread and deeply felt anger at financial capitalists and capitalism remains the new and dominant fact of the country’s political life. So far, neither Washington nor Wall Street seems to have fully grasped this political sea-change, or figured how to deal with it. The US’s top dogs, they all would have us know, are meritocrats, not aristocrats. Their money, power and influence are the fruits of smarts, hard work and chutzpah, not an accident of birth. There is a lot of appeal – and some truth – to the country’s mass self-characterisation as a nation of Horatio Algers. But this populist iconography obscures the statistical fact that, over the past quarter century, US life has become much more stratified, especially at the very top. You may have gone to a public school and your parents may not have earned much more than the minimum wage, but if a combination of luck and talent have made you a plutocrat, your life experience is separated from that of ordinary citizens by a far wider gap than at any time since the Gilded Age.
Like all political revolutions, the privileged class is finding it hard adapting to this shift. But ignorance is dangerous: in the days after the Bolshevik revolution, Russia’s bourgeoisie didn’t think much had happened, either, and stock prices held steady on the Petrograd exchange.
No comments:
Post a Comment