I read this by Judith Warner in the New York Times, an article about the allegedly divisive, polarizing Hillary Clinton's surprising strength in this campaign, even when head-to-head against Rudy! Giuliani. I've never been quite as surprised as everyone else is that she might prove to be more popular than the punditocracy would believe-they mostly could never get their minds around the fact Bill Clinton was popular, either. While I don't plan to vote for her myself due to the fact I find her far too hawkish in her foreign policy, I can certainly see where she might be better liked by others.
There were a couple of things that stood out in the entry. There was this:
The “we” world of Tucker Carlson knew what they knew about Hillary Clinton — right up until about this week, I think — because they spend an awful lot of time talking to, socializing with and interviewing one another.
What they don’t do all that much is venture outside of a certain set of zip codes to get a feel for the way most people are actually living. They don’t sign up for adjustable rate mortgages, visit emergency rooms to get their primary health care, leave their children in unlicensed day care or lose their jobs because they have to drive their mothers home from the hospital after hip replacement surgery.
Hillary Clinton’s supporters, it turns out, do.
Alongside the newest set of poll results showing Clinton’s surprising levels of popularity among lower- and middle-class women, white moderate women, even black voters, was another story this week, based on a new set of data from the I.R.S.
It showed that America’s most wealthy earn an even greater share of the nation’s income than they did in 2000, at the peak of the tech boom. The wealthiest 1 percent of Americans, the Wall Street Journal reported, earned 21.2 percent of all income in 2005 (the latest date for which these data are available), up from the high of 20.8 percent they’d reached in the bull market of 2000. The bottom 50 percent of people earned 12.8 percent of all income, compared with 13 percent in 2000. And the median tax filer’s income fell 2 percent when adjusted for inflation (to about $31,000) between 2000 and 2005.
More and more people are being priced out of a middle class existence. Because of housing prices, because of health care costs, because of tax policy, because of the cost of child care, The Good Life – a life of relative comfort and financial security – is now, in many parts of the country, an upper-middle-class luxury.
Given all this, you would think that Clinton’s big policy announcement this week on improving life for working families would have been big news.
After all, it contained a number of huge new middle class entitlements: paid family leave and sick leave, most notably. There were a number of tried-and-true triggers for outrage from the right wing and the business community like government standards and quality controls for child care. There could have been debate stoked among the many childless workers who now feel parents are getting too much “special treatment” in the workplace (Clinton supports legislation to protect parents and pregnant women from job discrimination). At the very least, someone could have accused Clinton of trying to bring back welfare. (She supports subsidies for low-income parents who wish to stay home to raise their children.) Or someone could have questioned how realistic it really is to pay for all that – to the tune of $1.75 billion per year – simply by cracking down on the “abusive” use of tax shelters, as Clinton proposes to do.
snip
(“I do see you and I do hear you,” Clinton said in a speech on “rebuilding the middle class” earlier this month. “You’re not invisible to me.”)
In contemplating the disconnect, as I often have done, between Hillary and her upper-middle-class peers, I find myself thinking of psychologist Abraham Maslow’s hierarchy of needs.
In Maslow’s theory of human motivation, needs were mapped out in a pyramid form. The broad array of physiological needs was at the bottom, followed by the almost equally wide range of safety needs: things like bodily and financial security, secure physical health and work, and property ownership. Transcendent needs, like truth, justice, wisdom and self-actualization, were in the tiniest triangle up at the top. As their “lower-level” needs were met, Maslow theorized, people moved up the pyramid; they did not – unless the material circumstances of their lives changed dramatically – move back.
The American middle class, it seems to me, is looking to politicians now to satisfy a pretty basic – and urgent – level of need. Yet people in the upper middle class — with their excellent health benefits, schools, salaries, retirement plans, nannies and private afterschool programs — have journeyed so far from that level of need that, it often seems to me, they literally cannot hear what resonates with the middle class. That creates a problematic blind spot for those who write, edit or produce what comes to be known about our politicians and their policies.
Okay, I really pulled a lot from that. But the connection of ideas needed to be seen. The disconnect between the punditocracy, mostly upper middle to upper class, and the wider world outside of Washington is very real. It's utterly impossible to them to believe that Hillary Clinton might not be a harpy villainess in the eyes of the exalted salt-of-the-earth middle America. Nor are the upper classes classes going to be wildly thrilled with Hillary's appeal to lower middle class voters. Neither of those groups like her, in fact they tend to despise her, and yet there she is, positioned to win, pulling away against her Democratic foes and even, according to polling, winning in a general election, against all the conventional wisdom. Hillary is supposed to be a polarizing, unelectable bitch, and here she is, the strongest contender. It can't be explained as identity politics alone, since she leads Obama amongst African-Americans, and it can't be explained by anti-war sentiment alone, since she's always been rather hawkish and supported the Iraq war a long time, and remains hawkish towards Iran. It has to be, at least in part, because she's making her appeal to those caught trying to make it in a hardening economy, and it's working, in a way that it has not for, say, John Edwards. (All those stupid stories about Edward's haircuts seemed to work, except that they benefited not Rudy! or Mitt or St. McCain, they helped Hillary, who is hitting on some of those same two Americas themes. I can't tell you how funny I find that).
I don't think, at all, that the disconnect between the perception of upper class folk and lower class folk of Hillary, or any Democrat, is because of a wealth gap producing a blind spot, as Judith Warner puts it. A blind spot implies that if you merely could get such people to understand what it is like to live in harder circumstances, they would be less likely to dismiss politicians that appeal to people under duress. They might even develop sympathy for them. I see zero evidence of this. As the Frost family fiasco showed, even when presented with clear facts of the difficulties faced by middle and lower-middle income families, the right still reacts with crude, ugly personal attacks and claims that these "other" people are taking something that is rightfully the property of the elite. No, the disconnect stems from the great conservative myth of the Elite as Meritocracy.
I'm about to use anecdotal evidence to help make my point, so take that with the generous helping of salt it deserves. I grew up in an upper class community in the midwest (they do exist there). My own family is upper middle class, and certain branches of it fit into the upper class top 5% section of the economy. (I guess this makes me a limousine liberal or some such shit). I have seen, my whole life, this group of people as they are, not as they like to present themselves in public. A large proportion of the kids I grew up with stand to inherit large sums of money. Many of them were able, without any particularly special achievements, to go to elite universities, with all that entails. Some were accepted to these universities simply due to legacy, since they were not terribly high academic performers in high school. Many would have nice jobs waiting for them when they were done, either through family or connections with family or friends. Essentially, most of them were mini-George Bushes-not terribly talented, not terribly hard working, not terribly motivated born-on-third-basers. The one thing that really struck me about these people wasn't that they didn't understand the lives of less well-off people, though indeed they didn't (neither did I, at the time)-it was that they didn't understand they had not EARNED this lifestyle.
This is the wellspring from which this mentality really flows, an ignorance of their own passive acceptance of wealth with no work. They simply cannot accept the fact that they did not make this all happen, and thus feel that it is all deserved, as opposed to it being a gift. They really, really believe that their elite status stems from hard work and general personal worthiness, not lucky birth.
This misconception of their toil allows them to believe that they don't need to bother with those other people who haven't reached such heights. "Those people aren't rich, they aren't successful, they didn't go to the really good schools, etc...well, that's because they didn't work hard enough," they think. "Not like me. I did what needed to be done, and that's why I'm here." Thus rolls on the myth in their own mind.
I think that is what many liberals really don't get about these people. We tend to think they are nefarious plotters hatching manipulative schemes. And they often do. What we miss, though, is that they are also true believers-they really think their crony capitalism, avaricious tax cuts, corporate welfare, etc. are all the righteous and just rewards for the hard, hard work they put in to get there. This true belief has helped conservatives build the myth of the self-made bootstrapper, much to the Republican party's benefit. Ideologically, they have used it to manipulate middle and lower middle class voters, telling them that if they just work hard enough they can grab the brass ring--then, more importantly, telling them when they CAN'T that it's because some "other" person is TAKING it from them. That thief can be an immigrant, a woman, a black person through affirmative action, a lib'rul who taxes them, a commie, a feminazi, but someone is always ruining it for those people, who could have joined the elite if it weren't for those meddling darkies/women/immigrants/liberals/commies/feminazis/whoever. This is how they were even able to sweep up formerly Democratic constituencies like labor, selling them lies about how their success was being stunted by dark skinned devils and welfare queens, the lib'ruls are helping them do it, drop your union, vote Republican, tax cuts for the rich, this will help YOU succeed.
It's been difficult to pierce this haze. John Edwards has tried and tried and been childishly mocked for it, but the growing gap between the rich and poor, the disappearing middle class, the health care crisis and the failure of "movement" conservatism to improve life on a widespread scale are all combining to change people's minds about what the Elite as Meritocracy and Bootstrapper myths can really do for them.
And of course, there is the war. Not only is it bad and failing in and of itself, it also, as the most important manifestation of "movement" conservatism ever, calls into question the entire "movement" conservatism enterprise. And it is hard to position yourself as a supporter of regular, salt-of-the-earth people when your "movement" cuts veteran's benefits, or lets the VA hospital become a run-down hellhole, or keeps extending soldiers tours, or lets out of control mercenaries threaten soldiers, or loses millions of taxpayer dollars, all while being run by a fat, pear-shaped "elite" who will never face a shot fired in anger in their entire lives.
Yet this elite's self-image remains as it ever was; deserving, hard-working, and heroic, thus beyond any self-reflection. And so there is this disconnect, where people in this upper strata cannot for the life of them understand why Obama, or Edwards, or especially Hillary might actually appeal to people in, say, middle America. So, sure, maybe it is a blind spot. But if it is, it's a purposeful one. Calling it that gives them a little too much credit.
Then there was this:
Given all this, you would think that Clinton’s big policy announcement this week on improving life for working families would have been big news.
snip
But there was none of this. Clinton’s family policy speech in New Hampshire all but sank like a stone. If it was covered at all, it was often packaged as part of a feature on her attempts to curry favor with female voters. (“Clinton shows femininity,” read a Boston Globe headline.) It was as though the opinion-makers and agenda-setters, waiting with bated breath for Bill to slip up, just one more time, couldn’t see or hear the message to middle-class voters.
Well, anyone who has followed along with the news over the last 15 or so years would be familiar with that scenario. When it comes to reporting on politics, the "liberal" media cannot wait to disparage Democrats, and is impossibly vapid and out of touch. I urge anyone who is reading my incoherent tripe to read this. It is much better and covers most of this territory very well.