Stealing Our Future II: Democracy, Fear, and the War on the Middle Class
By Sara Robinson
Most government investment in planning, foresight, and creating new infrastructure is made with one of three goals in mind: to improve future quality of life, expand future economic opportunity, or minimize future exposure to risk. Peace, prosperity, and good order follow when everybody has clean water, nutritious food, and safe housing. Business thrives when workers have a basic education, goods arrive on reliable transportation networks, currency is stable, and contracts and property rights are consistently enforced. Our national well-being is secured by a sane defense and strong relationships with other nations; and our foresight in preventing or mitigating famine, blight, epidemics, and natural disasters.
On fronts large and small, Americans have always used government as an instrument to gather necessary information, make long-range plans, detect and respond to possible threats, explore new opportunities, and create the conditions that would allow as many of us to prosper as possible.
For most of the 20th century, all of these goals were pursued out of the common conviction that (as Jim Hightower puts it) everybody does better when everybody does better. But the ones who've done the very best, invariably, have been the middle class — the business and tradespeople, employees and professionals whose jobs depended on the scores of government ventures that were set up to shelter them from all the unthinkable mishaps that can kill a thriving business overnight.
It's not an accident that the rise of America's culture of foresight and planning went hand-in-hand with the rise of the greatest middle class the world has ever seen. In fact, it was a necessary precondition for that class's emergence. Furthermore, political philosophers since Plato have understood that democracy, in turn, depends on a healthy middle class. As long as we kept investing in the common good, the American middle class returned the investment over and over by looking ahead, pushing toward the future -- and also providing the economic, cultural, and political ballast for the entire country.
Middle Class and Democracy
Social classes have remained an important component of political philosophy and sociology. Max Weber, in describing the new born capitalist society, made distinctions separating class, social status and power. Weber’s presents his definition of class by the following words:
We may speak of a “class” when (1) a number of people have in common a specific causal component of their life chances, in so far as (2) this component is represented exclusively by economic interests in the possession of goods and opportunities for income, and (3) is represented
under the conditions of the commodity or labor markets.
[Weber 1958:181]. (Chilcote: 110).
Marx’s first linked social classes to the political development of the human society and attached ultimate importance to social classes by stating that class struggle is the locomotive of the evolution of human history(Johnson:22). His definition of class is based on people’s relation with production. His theory presents bipolarization class categories: the bourgeoisie, “the class of modern capitalists, owners of the means of the social production and employers of wage-labor,” and the proletariat, “the class of modern wage laborers who, having no means of production of
their own, are reduced to selling their labor power in order to live” (Chilcote: 108).
The relation between class and democratization remains a key issue in political science. Both Aristotle and Machiavellie mentioned the relation between class distribution and democracy (Diamond: xi).
In different ways, the role of the middle class in fostering liberty and democracy was also emphasized by the laissez-faire disciples of Adam Smith and by the Marxists (Diamond: ibid.). Liberal theory, which was originated from the 18th-19th European capitalist revolution, designated middle class as the major champion for political liberalization. Following this tradition, many authors did research on the relationship between the middle class and democratization. Huntington mentioned that the causality between the middle-class and democratization is especially relevant in the third wave of democratizations (Huntington). Almond and Verba talk about the “growth of a vigorous and numerous middle class”, among other factors, is vital to the
development of stable democratic institutions in Britain, the Old Commonwealth, and the United States (Almond & Verba:8). Lipset, in his path-breaking work “Political Man”, stresses the importance of a well-educated middle class in maintaining political stability in democracy.
The term “middle class” was coined in the early years of the Industrial Revolution (Raynor:12). Traditionally, “middle class” refers to the social class positioning between the nobility and common people, and thus “middle-class” as a concept implies both wealth and social status.
Weber’s definition on class also brings to light the importance of both “economic interest” and “social opportunities” shared among a group of people. Middle class does not automatically equal “middle-income” class because it has both social and economic implications. In line with Weber’s
definition of class, middle class should be defined both in terms of wealth (income) and the social opportunities open to them as a result of the group of people’s education and occupation.
A Declaration of Rights for the 21st Century
(I pulled these comments from a list of topics Thom Hartmann believes needs to be fixed. These two deal with a middle class and the importance of education in society. What do you think?)
A strong middle class is vital to democracy.
In 1792, James Madison defined government's role in promoting an American middle class, "By the silent operation of the laws, which, without violating the rights of property, reduce extreme wealth towards a state of mediocrity, and raise extreme indigence toward a state of comfort." To say that somebody who earns millions a year by arbitrage "works that much harder" than a middle-class wage earner is simple nonsense. We recommend restoring inflation-indexed income tax and inheritance tax rates to those that were extant from the 1930s to the 1960s - during the golden era of the American middle class. We also recommend that government become the "employer of last resort" by taking on public works projects and supporting the arts, as it did during that era, and establishing a truly livable minimum wage.
Education is a human right, regardless of station of birth.
When Thomas Jefferson founded the University of Virginia, his vision was to provide a free education to every person interested in and capable of participating. The Founders knew that classroom education is a right - and not a requirement - for life in a democracy. Therefore, university education should be free to all who academically qualify, and primary school education should not be compulsory but neither should it be provided by for-profit corporations.
There's Nothing "Normal" About A Middle Class
Thom Hartmann
There is nothing "normal" about a nation having a middle class, even though it is vital to the survival of democracy.
As twenty-three years of conservative economic policies have now shown millions of un- and underemployed Americans, what's "normal" in a "free and unfettered" economy is the rapid evolution of a small but fabulously wealthy ownership class, and a large but poor working class. In the entire history of civilization, outside of a small mercantilist class and the very few skilled tradesmen who'd managed to organize in guilds (the earliest unions) like the ancient Masons, the middle class was an aberration.
A middle class can only come about in one of two ways.
The first is by a sudden change in the relationship between population and resources. After the Black Death wiped out more than a third of the population in 14th century Europe, the increased demand for labor drove up the price of labor to the point when a middle class emerged in some places. Many historians identify this as one of the factors that brought about the Renaissance.
Another example came four hundred years later, when a second European middle class (and the first European middle class in North America) emerged because of the "discovery" of "resources" (e.g. "we can steal gold, wood, furs, and land from Native Americans) in The Americas. Some historians suggest that increasing the overall wealth of Europe (and Europeans living in North America) while the overall population was relatively stable produced not just a second middle class, but brought about The Enlightenment and the American Revolution as well.
To stimulate our economy after the collapse of the Great Depression, FDR also instituted progressive taxation, which gave workers more to spend, thus stimulating demand for more goods and services.
Progressive taxation, too, has a long history: As Jefferson said in a 1785 letter to James Madison, "Another means of silently lessening the inequality of property is to exempt all from taxation below a certain point, and to tax the higher portions of property in geometrical progression as they rise."
As Jefferson realized, and FDR proved, with no government "interference" by setting the rules of the game of business and fair taxation, there will be no middle class.
And as history around the world proves, when the middle class vanishes, democracy often goes with it.