The American Straitjacket
Here are a couple of quick plugs/recommendations.
Check out this new article in the latest Atlantic Monthly: "How a New Jobless Era Will Transform America." The author Don Peck makes a compelling and distressing case that the base unemployment line is not going to return to 'natural' rates of 5 or 6%, but will instead oscillate around the higher numbers we're seeing today (8 to 10% or higher) for many years to come. This higher baseline rate will wreak havoc on the culture of work and our social fabric, and will be especially damaging to the psyches of the unskilled, older men, and new entrants to the workforce. In usual liberal fashion, Peck does not advocate any kind of change to the overall American social form (One Person-One Job/One Family-One Dwelling), as this blog does. Rather, he looks for a return to a "more normal jobs environment," even though his own article points to that not being a real possibility. But it's a compelling piece nonetheless, so check it out.
Also, I highly recommend Neal Gabler's book from 1998, Life: The Movie: How Entertainment Conquered Reality (paperback is from 2000). Gabler offers an ambitious but spot-on thesis about the gradual emergence of entertainment as the dominant cultural force in America. He ranges across the history of print and visual media, showing how the production and consumption of entertainment have seeped into our news, our politics, and most frighteningly, our personality-formation itself. He is a little light on the interaction of entertainment with consumption and the consumer-based psyche, but it is an impressive work, and definitely worth your time. I was reading this both before and after my recent. first-ever visit to Los Angeles, so it provided an interesting backdrop for seeing the spiritual center of American entertainment. I hope to have a posting on my California trip sometime soon, if I can get my thoughts together.
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Turning to the current economic and political situation, we continue to flail around as winter comes to a close, amidst earthquakes, balmy Olympic games, and the eternal wrangling over health care. There is a kind of strange, dreamlike quality to the last several weeks, as real lives stand still or deteriorate, while world events course around with apocalyptic theatricality. Regular families on the ground desperately need help, or at least a narrative that makes sense of our problems. Instead, we get more staged outrage from our politicians, more escapism from our culture, and more dire warnings from our media, sprinkled with the usual lifestyle set-pieces that are becoming more surreal by the day. Meanwhile, the Long Emergency tightens its fingers around our throats.
Why can't we get any honest discussion or action from our political leaders and our media figures? Why is everything still cast along the same talking points like consumer confidence, housing starts, daily DOW and Nasdaq movements, interest rate changes, and the like? Why is our historically-unique situation being addressed with the same tired tools and tirades that have been floating around for decades?
The uncomfortable answer is that we are wrapped tightly in an ideological and systemic straitjacket, many years in the making. And even more disturbingly, there will be no wriggling out of this thing if we listen to the same people and institutions that stitched it up in the first place. Times are unusual, so business as-usual, no matter how spruced-up for a 'new millennium,' will prove utterly useless in tackling the emerging realities. There is a lot of rage out there, best exemplified by the Tea Partiers. But we better get used to NOT getting help from the 'normal' places, no matter how new the packaging.
So continuing our stretched metaphor, what are the main threads of this American Straitjacket? What are the primary straps, and where did they come from? Why can't we expect help from the traditional sources?
- Economics: As we have highlighted many times previously, but particularly here, the Post-War economic climate in America really starting changing in the mid-70s, when overall productivity and growth started to diverge from worker pay. Due to many factors (globalization, de-skilling of labor, technological changes in finance, legal changes in corporate structure), the main fruits of American capitalism started to drift upwards to a small elite. Completely aside from whose 'fault' this is, we're just talking objectively about a massive increase in economic inequality in America (I am currently making my way through the groundbreaking book The Spirit Level: Why Greater Equality Makes Societies Stronger, so look out for a coming post on the real social costs of inequality). The brute fact is that the top 1% of households in America probably control more wealth than the bottom 90% of the population (exact wealth measurements are tricky, since 'wealth' is not subject to the same reporting requirements as income, and much of it gets off-shored). But again, completely aside from the moral 'rightness' of such an arrangement, it cannot be disputed that magnitudes of economic inequality like this sharply reduce our flexibility in tackling a broad recession. Most families have virtually no breathing room to handle long-term economic deterioration. They are leveraged to the hilt, living one paycheck to the next, with most of their money-streams locked up in rising living, health care, and educational costs. The American economic dividend from decades of growth has been spirited away to elite corporate and individual coffers, and will thus not be available for addressing our great recession. The only quick economic option left in America is a top-down restructuring of the federal tax structure, one that would massively tax the rich and redistribute the wealth to the lower classes. However, this won't happen, because.....
- Politics: As John Dewey famously said, "Politics is the shadow cast on society by big business." We all know it, but it is seldom called out in such precise terms. Corporate elites have become the federal government. As we have noted before, a major myth in political discourse is that private and public power are separate. In reality, inequalities in the economy have allowed for moneyed interests to completely capture the electoral and policy-making processes of the government. Big Corporate and Big Government power go together like couches and asses, and our national politicians are almost all corporate lawyers or businesspeople. We have covered this before, so we don't need to rehash here. But suffice it to say, our two major parties are not designed to cope with changing conditions. They are designed for winning elections, raising money for those elections, and then serving the funders of those campaigns. Ideologically, the purpose of contemporary politics is to sound like you are serving a wide range of people, while in reality hewing to an extremely narrow view of society, which is.....
- Neoliberalism: Amidst all of the conservative bullshit bluster about Obama's creeping socialism, it needs to be endlessly pointed out that, to update Richard Nixon ("we are all Keynesians now"), we are all neoliberals now. In the broad landscape of economic theory, contemporary "conservatives" and "liberals" are both part of the same family, called "neoliberalism." Roughly, neoliberalism holds that society is best served by maximum market freedom and minimal interference by the government. The role of government is to create or bolster legal and economic frameworks, both national and international, in which private free markets can flourish. In regards to individuals, families, and communities, neoliberalism sees people as maximizers of self-interest via market choices (i.e., consumption), as opposed to political citizens per se. So again, the government's role vis-a-vis actual people is to create frameworks in which people can maximize their financial earnings potential, for discharge into free markets. In this wide view, Democrats and Conservatives simply disagree on how to maximize support for private businesses and free markets. Dems tend to push for more support on the individual-earnings side of things (better schools, more unemployment support, legs up for the disadvantaged), whereas the GOP would rather beef up the direct support for businesses. But neither side doubts the overall neoliberal project: economic growth, government support for free markets. maximum economic output, full employment, privatized morality, economic efficiency as the highest social goal, maximum legal protection of corporate property rights, etc. Nowhere in popular political discourse are these tenets challenged; or at least, challenges don't get much attention. Why? Well, .......
- Mainstream Media: In the points above, what is starting to emerge is an interlocking system for support of the status quo. Economic inequality creates political centralization, which spawns similar justifying ideologies, which then lend structural support back to the very conditions creating the inequality in the first place. It's a kind of feedback loop of power, and we can envision this loop as the tightening straps of the American Straitjacket. And like a constricting snake, as the loops draw tighter, less outside air can get into the trapped body. In our metaphor, the outside air that is being blocked can be see as alternative ways of organizing our collective life. Into this mix, the mainstream media fits nicely as another constricting band. We don't need to dwell on the media too long here, because the relationships are simple. Inequality in the economic sphere has produced hyper-concentration in the media. We all know the background. Big companies gobble up TV stations, networks, radio stations, newspapers, and magazines. Most mainstream media outlets are now part of much larger corporate conglomerates, and are thus simply one investment area among many. Like any other cultural product, the media must sell advertising space by getting good ratings or circulation numbers. And as Neal Gabler detailed in Life: The Movie (see link above), the relentless logic of the entertainment business reshapes the media into a grand amusement edifice. Gabler relates this from Nixon speechwriter Raymond Price, on the relation of media and politics: "Voters are basically lazy, basically uninterested in making an effort to understand what we're talking about. Reason requires a high degree of discipline of concentration; impression is easier. Reason pushes the viewer back, it assaults him, it demands that he agree or disagree; impression can envelop him, invite him in, without making an intellectual demand....The emotions are more easily roused, closer to the surface, more malleable" (Gabler, p. 103). Thus the horserace motif in politics. Entertainment sells, and since entertainment is highly concentrated into a few behemoth outlets, politics enters the game of selling itself. The Campaign-Entertainment Complex becomes king. And because the mainstream media are themselves businesses, they convey the same overall neoliberal support for maximum consumption, economic growth, full employment, etc. Alternative messages about reducing consumption for environmental reasons, or purposely constricting the economy to de-marketize functions that can be handled outside financial transactions, or overhauling property laws to maximize non-corporate collective ownership patterns -- these things will never get airtime in a corporatized media environment. This is why mainstream media coverage of our current economic crises, even in the most 'serious' venues, never strays beyond the boilerplate neoliberal ideas about how to 'get the economy' moving again with jobs programs and 'getting people back to work,' or getting investments rolling again, or growing consumer confidence, etc. Different answers are difficult to come by inside the straitjacket.
- Consumer Culture: Of course, it would be a miracle if the vast interlocking institutions and systems detailed above were not ultimately mirrored within the hearts and minds of actual people. But of course, they are. As consumer capitalism has reached full-stride, Americans are now born and raised in the incubator of The Product. Children are exposed to epic levels of advertising, especially television, with obvious implications for learning and psychological development. People who are awash in electronic commercial communication will obviously develop short attention spans. We become desensitized to all manner of stimuli, especially violence and sexual titillation. The psychology of advertising has made us profoundly narcissistic and unable to empathize with others. Conservatives are on target when they attack contemporary culture as debased, offensive, materialistic, and godless. They just lay the blame at the wrong doorstep (college professors, atheists, PC-police and feminists), instead of acknowledging that successful corporations themselves are responsible for undermining the virtue of the traditional. The triumph of consumer culture is devastating for any alternative ideology that challenges economic growth and maximum consumption. The possibility that a society could decide that non-economic values were worth pursuing through political action is, in the current climate, bordering on ridiculous. After all, what else is there besides getting Paid in Full? People express their values in the marketplace only, and consumption is thus our highest form of worship. It's not difficult to see how this consumption-centered view of personal existence is spiritually stultifying, psychologically-numbing, and ultimately empty. But inside the American Straitjacket, there is little alternative.
So this is where we are right now. We live inside an interlocking straitjacket of economy and culture. All of the major institutions through which we operate are part of this very narrow view of the world. Markets are good. Production and consumption are good. The government exists to maximize individual's access to the marketplace, and their ability to contribute to it. From the other end, the government's role is to grease the skids for businesses to provide energy to the markets. If all of this is humming along nicely, there is little for citizens to do, except vote for the party that has kept the system going well. When times get tough, like they are now, our duty is to keep throwing people out until we get dudes in there who get things 'back on track'. The media and the people are expected to shout their scripted outrages until somebody gets in there and starts getting things pumping again.
What's missing inside this tight ideological system is a broader view of things, like the natural world in which we actually exist. Note how rapidly the climate change debate has subsided, now that our neoliberal system is in tatters. It's not that we're no longer in danger of massive catastrophe. It's just that there is no wiggle room for people in a massively-unequal economic system, one that depends on maximum consumption and full employment, to talk about voluntarily reducing their throughput of anything.
Or what about a larger discussion on property-ownership, land-use, outdated and harmful zoning, and tax policies to support non-corporate but cooperative ventures of all kinds? The country is now awash in the detritus of residential and commercial construction bubbles. There are empty buildings all all kinds sitting all over the country. There are huge parts of entire cities (Detroit, anyone?) lying unused and useless. How about a massive, local government seizure of land and property via eminent domain, with redistribution to people who will actually do things with the resources? Again, because these people would probably not contribute anything substantial to the hyper-concentrated consumer economy, there are no discussions of this sort.
Our straitjacket prevents the inhalation of any novel air from outside the system itself. But we're going to need as many new approaches as possible as this long national decline continues. The more we struggle to make the straps of our outdated garments fit over the bulgings of new realities, the more valuable time we will lose. I guess we need a sort of Houdini Project to get out of the whole damn thing once and for all.
Posted by Jeremy Raymondjack at 2/28/2010 10:56 AM 
Categories: Politics and Economics,Culture and Society
Tags: liberal ideology Neal Gabler consumerism economic growth consumer society economic contraction conservative ideology economic recession Don Peck
Categories: Politics and Economics,Culture and Society
Tags: liberal ideology Neal Gabler consumerism economic growth consumer society economic contraction conservative ideology economic recession Don Peck
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