“He grimly observes that in 2022, the top 1% of earners controlled about 26% of the wealth in the United States—a “radically disproportionate share” that has grown dramatically since the late 1980s.”
This is not a grim statistic unless one holds equality as his highest (or one of his highest) values. Capitalism organizes production mainly for the masses. According to economic historian Deirdre McCloskey, real wages have risen 1000 fold since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution and the development of bourgeois morality. An increase in ownership of capital among the 1% is not evidence of a zero sum economy.
Money, itself, is not goods or services. It is the mechanism by which goods and services are distributed, including housing, education, and healthcare. Economic inequality means that goods and services and generated and delivered to the those with the greatest wealth. For those goods which can be produced more cheaply with new methods - television sets, mobile phones, plastic goods - there can be a rising tide which raises all boats. Where supply is far less elastic - health care, homes, education, and increasingly food - the result is the de facto impoverishment of those with less, as the wealthy simply outbid everyone else, and then resort to rentierism. The growing work on the economics of inequality explains this well.
Is there a percentage, roughly, where you too would say “grim”. And what has convinced you that the 1%’s share of wealth is a necessary condition for the 1000 fold increase in real wages? I’ve seen no evidence (comparing cross countries and over time) that to attain the latter you need to accept the former.
“America is not a country where people have ever had anywhere near equal opportunities for social mobility.”
As Freddie DeBoer points out, there isn’t much difference between equality of outcome and equality of opportunity because to achieve one means basically achieving the other. But neither are remotely realistic. What is realistic is allowing liberty for everyone and liberty includes freedom of association.
The balance of power and wealth between elites and the workers are important topics but they are not wokeness. I am sure that if you asked people struggling to afford a home and people who don't know how they are going to afford their groceries whether a lack of wokeness was their problem, they would laugh in your face.
Socialism has been around for 150 years but wokeness is new. Wokeness is the fight against cultural appropriation, it’s diversity and equality training in corporations, it’s land acknowledgement, it’s gender-neutral bathrooms, it’s transwomen competing in women’s sports, it’s declaring pronouns, it’s taking offence at jokes that allude to racial or sexual differences, it’s chestfeeding and birthing parents, it is multiculturism and it is social justice. All of those issues that seemingly sprang from nowhere over the last fifteen years. Those are the reasons that working people are switching in their millions to conservative parties in Europe and America and are voting against their own interests.
I haven't read Musa al-Gharbi’s important book but if it is anything like this article, it is using the word ‘wokeness’ when it really means socialism or social democracy. If we continue to use the wrong words for what are very serious issues, we’ll still be wondering why working people are still switching to the other side after the next election. It just shows that we still don't understand the problem.
"Hirschman noted that conservatives have long tried to negate the left’s calls for equality by asserting or arguing that they are futile. Inequality was simply baked into the fabric of society, nature, and perhaps even God’s cosmic order and wasn’t going to change, in this view."
The only equality that society should demand from the state is "Equality before the Law" and it is the failure of providing this where more harm has been done to lower classes. The justice system should have equal access to the "court of equity" for the rich and the poor alike but the legal preferential option for the rich has all but barred access to civil litigation by the poor.
As of late with the entire Trump legal wrangling we know that if you are rich you can delay and even escape from criminal prosecution and punishment. Any ordinary citizen without huge resources, would have been judged, convicted and serving time for far less serious crimes.
So our society cannot provide even a baseline of objective equality before the law why on earth would we expect an economic system to deliver income equality and the social equality that follows that? It never has before in history been so. Why do we think it is possible now or in the future? Sure, we can redistribute wealth from some so as to make conditions less harsh for others in order to increase social stability but in the end the economic conditions remain the same.
"There are some respects in which I think al-Gharbi’s thesis is overstated. For instance, very real and tangible gains have been made by and for women and LGBTQ persons in the last few decades, which do indeed look dangerously at risk of a backlash."
Mostly for elite white women and elite LGBTQ persons. Trans persons, especially middle and lower class trans persons, are already being signaled out for backlash.
Elites would do well to study mobile home parks in the exurbs of most American cities. Here one will find a lot more actual social integration than in either the poor urban centers or the suburbs. I suspect it may be in these areas where MAGA support has grown among Blacks and Hispanics. The rate of gun ownership is high. There are more mixed race couples and children. Many residents work at the same places. If people are willing to be "good neighbors" by minding their own business and speaking English and being friendly they will fit in fine regardless of race, ethnicity or religion.
The essential lesson that evolution has taught "the trailer tribe" is that survival is not about being the fittest but about being the most adaptable. They see someone like Trump as cunning, wily, savvy and adaptable. It isn't his wealth that impresses them it is the freedom with which he operates in the world.
One has to wonder how many of these folks have had their doors knocked on by campaign canvassers?
As a liberal in symbolic economy profession, "making plans to go see the next New Yorker-recommended indie film" really hurt my feelings...totally accurate, but, still, geez, you didn't have to be so mean 🤔 😆
Lack of any belief in, let alone action on, a better future for all, particularly the young, has created democratic apathy at best, at worst nostalgic reaction everywhere. It’s terrible and threatens actual security everywhere.
Can't really argue within anything you've written here. We're all human which means, despite our best intentions, we fall victim to human delusions and contradictions. This is why we venerate actual saints.
"America has more formal equality and has made more advances in delivering real equality than (...) practically any other liberal democracy"
Really? Maybe more than aristocratic Europe, but more than post-WW2 western Europe, where social democracies and even communist parties (I'm Italian) meant welfare state, healthcare for all, worker's rights (including paid holidays), women's rights (divorce, abortion, maternity paid leave)?
One of the small critiques I have for Gharbi is that we actually need someone with his wit and approach to extend the analysis to Europe. Symbolic capitalists aren't the same, society isn't the same, wokism is an eminently US product, and still we fell for it all the same. It seems ideology has a power and an appeal that extends over material reality.
I agree with that. The Nordic social democracies are clearly doing better in the regard, while maintaining or even expanding liberal rights. My short thoughts on what Sejersted called the "Scandinavian variant of socialism."
"Given his concerns with equality, al-Gharbi might benefit from a more vigorous social-democratic commitment to help us think through how to walk the walk. As Marx would put it, ideas become material forces when they are gripped by movements that want to implement them. But to do so we need those ideas."
If you review the current history of the US since Clinton and of almost all other liberal democratic countries in the world, I think you'll see that, except in bits and pieces (eg things like the Inflation Reduction Act), nobody, nowhere has been able to enact anything they thought might significantly alter their country for the better. Or if they did (Macron) they paid for it by losing next time. It's ruling-party-ping-pong every 2-4 years, or even sooner in some. Lots of treading water, not much swimming. So part of the "answer" is not necessarily down to SCs and their confreres not wanting to do things; they were often prevented from doing them by "the other guys" who wanted to be back in power, so better to have failure ("so we can win next time"--Mitch McConnell) than governance. Don't blame the SCs for not being able to control congress! To paraphrase an old joke, "They're so damn smart but they're not running things."
The corollary is that there are no "those ideas". What might help to get us through the horrible, rapid, atomizing turmoil of the digital industrial revolution is unclear. EVERYTHING is "uncertain". Lots of guesses, lots of things to try, nothing remotely guaranteed, and (absent a direct conflict with China that would cause us to gain focus more quickly) it's gonna' take some time. Uncertainty begets a conservative retreat to a seemingly rosier, safer territory of old (MAGA; see also Brexit). But because it's emotional it's not easily solved by any rational means, and we have no rational means anyway! Batten the hatches and prepare for turbulence.
McManus wrote: "There are some respects in which I think al-Gharbi’s thesis is overstated. For instance, very real and tangible gains have been made by and for women and LGBTQ persons in the last few decades, which do indeed look dangerously at risk of a backlash."
But this is the exception that proves the rule. Women and sexual minorities are as likely to be upper-class as anyone else, so to the extent upper-class symbolic-capitalists are going to favor policies that benefit them, OF COURSE they are going to be more likely to favor tangible benefits for women and sexual minorities than for a predominantly low-income ethnic group. So if al-Gharbi's thesis is: "affluent people favor policies that benefit them", the rise of feminism and sexual liberation is consistent with that thesis rather than an exception.
A slight correction to: "Women and sexual minorities are as likely to be upper-class as anyone else." The Upper class contains a sizable population of woman and sexual minorities but in the larger society, women and certain sexual minorities (which these days is a broad definition) are more likely to be poorer than the average. However, I think your argument still useful.
“He grimly observes that in 2022, the top 1% of earners controlled about 26% of the wealth in the United States—a “radically disproportionate share” that has grown dramatically since the late 1980s.”
This is not a grim statistic unless one holds equality as his highest (or one of his highest) values. Capitalism organizes production mainly for the masses. According to economic historian Deirdre McCloskey, real wages have risen 1000 fold since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution and the development of bourgeois morality. An increase in ownership of capital among the 1% is not evidence of a zero sum economy.
Money, itself, is not goods or services. It is the mechanism by which goods and services are distributed, including housing, education, and healthcare. Economic inequality means that goods and services and generated and delivered to the those with the greatest wealth. For those goods which can be produced more cheaply with new methods - television sets, mobile phones, plastic goods - there can be a rising tide which raises all boats. Where supply is far less elastic - health care, homes, education, and increasingly food - the result is the de facto impoverishment of those with less, as the wealthy simply outbid everyone else, and then resort to rentierism. The growing work on the economics of inequality explains this well.
Is there a percentage, roughly, where you too would say “grim”. And what has convinced you that the 1%’s share of wealth is a necessary condition for the 1000 fold increase in real wages? I’ve seen no evidence (comparing cross countries and over time) that to attain the latter you need to accept the former.
“America is not a country where people have ever had anywhere near equal opportunities for social mobility.”
As Freddie DeBoer points out, there isn’t much difference between equality of outcome and equality of opportunity because to achieve one means basically achieving the other. But neither are remotely realistic. What is realistic is allowing liberty for everyone and liberty includes freedom of association.
The balance of power and wealth between elites and the workers are important topics but they are not wokeness. I am sure that if you asked people struggling to afford a home and people who don't know how they are going to afford their groceries whether a lack of wokeness was their problem, they would laugh in your face.
Socialism has been around for 150 years but wokeness is new. Wokeness is the fight against cultural appropriation, it’s diversity and equality training in corporations, it’s land acknowledgement, it’s gender-neutral bathrooms, it’s transwomen competing in women’s sports, it’s declaring pronouns, it’s taking offence at jokes that allude to racial or sexual differences, it’s chestfeeding and birthing parents, it is multiculturism and it is social justice. All of those issues that seemingly sprang from nowhere over the last fifteen years. Those are the reasons that working people are switching in their millions to conservative parties in Europe and America and are voting against their own interests.
I haven't read Musa al-Gharbi’s important book but if it is anything like this article, it is using the word ‘wokeness’ when it really means socialism or social democracy. If we continue to use the wrong words for what are very serious issues, we’ll still be wondering why working people are still switching to the other side after the next election. It just shows that we still don't understand the problem.
"Hirschman noted that conservatives have long tried to negate the left’s calls for equality by asserting or arguing that they are futile. Inequality was simply baked into the fabric of society, nature, and perhaps even God’s cosmic order and wasn’t going to change, in this view."
The only equality that society should demand from the state is "Equality before the Law" and it is the failure of providing this where more harm has been done to lower classes. The justice system should have equal access to the "court of equity" for the rich and the poor alike but the legal preferential option for the rich has all but barred access to civil litigation by the poor.
As of late with the entire Trump legal wrangling we know that if you are rich you can delay and even escape from criminal prosecution and punishment. Any ordinary citizen without huge resources, would have been judged, convicted and serving time for far less serious crimes.
So our society cannot provide even a baseline of objective equality before the law why on earth would we expect an economic system to deliver income equality and the social equality that follows that? It never has before in history been so. Why do we think it is possible now or in the future? Sure, we can redistribute wealth from some so as to make conditions less harsh for others in order to increase social stability but in the end the economic conditions remain the same.
"There are some respects in which I think al-Gharbi’s thesis is overstated. For instance, very real and tangible gains have been made by and for women and LGBTQ persons in the last few decades, which do indeed look dangerously at risk of a backlash."
Mostly for elite white women and elite LGBTQ persons. Trans persons, especially middle and lower class trans persons, are already being signaled out for backlash.
Elites would do well to study mobile home parks in the exurbs of most American cities. Here one will find a lot more actual social integration than in either the poor urban centers or the suburbs. I suspect it may be in these areas where MAGA support has grown among Blacks and Hispanics. The rate of gun ownership is high. There are more mixed race couples and children. Many residents work at the same places. If people are willing to be "good neighbors" by minding their own business and speaking English and being friendly they will fit in fine regardless of race, ethnicity or religion.
The essential lesson that evolution has taught "the trailer tribe" is that survival is not about being the fittest but about being the most adaptable. They see someone like Trump as cunning, wily, savvy and adaptable. It isn't his wealth that impresses them it is the freedom with which he operates in the world.
One has to wonder how many of these folks have had their doors knocked on by campaign canvassers?
As a liberal in symbolic economy profession, "making plans to go see the next New Yorker-recommended indie film" really hurt my feelings...totally accurate, but, still, geez, you didn't have to be so mean 🤔 😆
Lack of any belief in, let alone action on, a better future for all, particularly the young, has created democratic apathy at best, at worst nostalgic reaction everywhere. It’s terrible and threatens actual security everywhere.
Can't really argue within anything you've written here. We're all human which means, despite our best intentions, we fall victim to human delusions and contradictions. This is why we venerate actual saints.
"America has more formal equality and has made more advances in delivering real equality than (...) practically any other liberal democracy"
Really? Maybe more than aristocratic Europe, but more than post-WW2 western Europe, where social democracies and even communist parties (I'm Italian) meant welfare state, healthcare for all, worker's rights (including paid holidays), women's rights (divorce, abortion, maternity paid leave)?
One of the small critiques I have for Gharbi is that we actually need someone with his wit and approach to extend the analysis to Europe. Symbolic capitalists aren't the same, society isn't the same, wokism is an eminently US product, and still we fell for it all the same. It seems ideology has a power and an appeal that extends over material reality.
I agree with that. The Nordic social democracies are clearly doing better in the regard, while maintaining or even expanding liberal rights. My short thoughts on what Sejersted called the "Scandinavian variant of socialism."
https://www.liberalcurrents.com/the-successes-and-failures-of-the-nordic-model-kjell-ostberg-on-swedish-social-democracy/
From the end of McManus' review:
"Given his concerns with equality, al-Gharbi might benefit from a more vigorous social-democratic commitment to help us think through how to walk the walk. As Marx would put it, ideas become material forces when they are gripped by movements that want to implement them. But to do so we need those ideas."
If you review the current history of the US since Clinton and of almost all other liberal democratic countries in the world, I think you'll see that, except in bits and pieces (eg things like the Inflation Reduction Act), nobody, nowhere has been able to enact anything they thought might significantly alter their country for the better. Or if they did (Macron) they paid for it by losing next time. It's ruling-party-ping-pong every 2-4 years, or even sooner in some. Lots of treading water, not much swimming. So part of the "answer" is not necessarily down to SCs and their confreres not wanting to do things; they were often prevented from doing them by "the other guys" who wanted to be back in power, so better to have failure ("so we can win next time"--Mitch McConnell) than governance. Don't blame the SCs for not being able to control congress! To paraphrase an old joke, "They're so damn smart but they're not running things."
The corollary is that there are no "those ideas". What might help to get us through the horrible, rapid, atomizing turmoil of the digital industrial revolution is unclear. EVERYTHING is "uncertain". Lots of guesses, lots of things to try, nothing remotely guaranteed, and (absent a direct conflict with China that would cause us to gain focus more quickly) it's gonna' take some time. Uncertainty begets a conservative retreat to a seemingly rosier, safer territory of old (MAGA; see also Brexit). But because it's emotional it's not easily solved by any rational means, and we have no rational means anyway! Batten the hatches and prepare for turbulence.
McManus wrote: "There are some respects in which I think al-Gharbi’s thesis is overstated. For instance, very real and tangible gains have been made by and for women and LGBTQ persons in the last few decades, which do indeed look dangerously at risk of a backlash."
But this is the exception that proves the rule. Women and sexual minorities are as likely to be upper-class as anyone else, so to the extent upper-class symbolic-capitalists are going to favor policies that benefit them, OF COURSE they are going to be more likely to favor tangible benefits for women and sexual minorities than for a predominantly low-income ethnic group. So if al-Gharbi's thesis is: "affluent people favor policies that benefit them", the rise of feminism and sexual liberation is consistent with that thesis rather than an exception.
A slight correction to: "Women and sexual minorities are as likely to be upper-class as anyone else." The Upper class contains a sizable population of woman and sexual minorities but in the larger society, women and certain sexual minorities (which these days is a broad definition) are more likely to be poorer than the average. However, I think your argument still useful.