November 23, 2010--Class Warfare: The New Mediocracy

To kill time last week while waiting for my coughing and wheezing to abate, I watched more daytime television in three days than I had during the past 10 years.

I kept switching around searching for distraction--MASH reruns, a few episodes of Hogan's Heroes, and if I got really lucky the Mary Tyler Moore Show. No such luck. All I could find were endless episodes of the Andy Griffith Show. I couldn't force myself to watch. That sick I wasn't.

I must confess that I did take in half an hour of The View, looked in on Martha, and spent some time with Oprah, including on Friday to witness the orgy of consumption she unleashed during her "biggest giveaway ever." More of this I could not take without the risk of turning my cold into something requiring hospitalization.

Instead, I overdosed on CNN, MSNBC, and even Fox News. They pretty much devoting all their air time to the flap about the TSA's rolling out its new full body scanning equipment and its enhanced pat-down procedures. All the polls cited indicate that more than 80 percent of the American public were OK with this (maybe even looking forward to some anonymous groping) and so I wondered why all the anguished discussion about something this popular? When was the last time 80 percent of us agreed about anything?

Also being discussed extensively was the Sarah Palin phenomenon. And a phenomenon it truly is. Have we even had a political figure anything like Palin? I can't recall anyone equivalent either from my lifetime of my reading of American history.

She has a new book coming out and with the success of the Republicans in the recent midterm elections all eyes are on the half-term governor of Alaska. Actually, there is something else 80 percent agree about--80 percent of Republicans have a positive view of Palin. Poor Mike Huckabee. While campaigning over the weekend in Iowa he was asked if he thought Palin could win the Republican nomination for 2012. He said, "In a runaway." Maybe he's already trying to position himself as her running mate.

Between sneezes, I used what little brain power was at my disposal to try to figure out why she is so popular and potentially so electable.

I came to conclude it is because of class warfare.

Traditionally it is Democrats who get accused of waging class warfare. They are labeled as redistributionists--wanting to adjust tax policy, for example, to raise tax rates for the wealthy while lowering them for the poor and middle class. Unspoken, but widely hinted at is that this reveals them to be socialists, even communists.

But in fact there is another kind of class warfare well underway that is being waged by Republicans.

Reagan and Bush tax policies were truly redistributionist. Though they claimed the benefit of tax cuts for America's wealthiest would trickle down to the poor and middle class, in other words shift wealth to them, in fact, in practice in both instances they redistributed wealth upwards. And of course doubled and then doubled again the debt since during both administrations the economy did not grow enough--things did not trickle down enough--for that growth to yield enough taxes to contract the debt.

This, ironically, had to wait for a Democrat president, Bill Clinton who presided over tax increases and spending cuts which in fact were stimulative. So much so that he left office with budget surpluses which would have stretched well into the future if not tampered with. This rosy economic future, we now know, was subverted by the Bush tax cuts. During Clinton's eight year in office 22 million jobs were created while only 1.0 million were created under Bush. And then all of these were wiped out during the first three months of the Obama administration which was and still is operating under Bush tax policy.

This economic aspect of Republican-engendered class warfare has lead to the ruination of much of our economy but does not explain Sarah Palin. What does is her version of cultural class warfare. And it too is redistributive in nature--

It calls for a shift in power from the educated to the marginally-literate class. From the coastal elites to those in rural communities and others struggling to stay afloat in middle class suburbs.

Her people (and they are very much her people) have had it up to here with the urbane and Ivy League educated Nancy Pelosis, Barack Obamas, Tina Feys, and most of the mainstream media. They are even casting blame at, and purging, the old go-along-get-along-big-spending members of the Republican establishment when they look for explanations about why they feel their own circumstances slipping backwards and see Americans unable any longer to have their way with the rest of the world, be it militarily or in global economic competition.

They don't blame Reagan and Bush in large part because they did an excellent job of connecting with them culturally. Forgotten was the fact that Bush came from the real eastern elite or that Reagan was propelled forward as a politician by many from America's corporate elite. In style and tone, in speech and swagger they both convincingly came across as regular folks.

Contrast that with the cool and urbane Pelosi and Obama who though they come from modest backgrounds prefer Armanis to Levis.

People like me are frustrated that a Sarah Palin, who knows nothing about history, public policy, and of course foreign affairs and world geography, who clearly reads nothing, is legitimately considered to have an odds-on chance of winning the Republican nomination and also might be able to unseat Obama if the economy isn't turned around in a couple of years.

Don't people see that she is an empty dress? Don't people understand that she hasn't the least understanding of the issues, the experience, or even the ability to speak coherently about anything more than what is scripted for her? And forget for the moment her gaffs and malaprops. Leave those for Saturday Night Live.

But isn't the point that it is precisely because she is so unabashedly the way she is that she has such a passionate following? Unlike Bush who pretended to be a good-old-boy, she is the real thing. And the more she, to the media's perception, screws up the more she endears herself to her supporters. In her they see themselves. "We don't read the New York Times either," they are saying, "so who cares if she doesn't. Actually, isn't that a good thing."

Her people are shouting--"It's now our turn!" They are sick and tired of being patronized and mocked by educated smart alecks who have for decades made them feel inferior and put down and told what's good for them. Just look what this has brought them--a declined standard of living, terrorism everywhere, a bankrupt treasury that has to turn to China to bail us out, 10 million illegal immigrants, and since Vietnam one lost war after another.

They want their America back. Their version of it and see their cultural equal, Sarah Palin, the Grizzly Mom, as best able to bring back the good old days. How does she put it? "It's time to reload."

America used to be thought of as a meritocracy. The land of opportunity where the best and brightest and hardest working would be the ones to succeed. But look what that brought us--a diminished place in the world and an economic collapse largely manipulated by Wall Street and government elites.

Through Sarah Palin many in America are now asserting something very different when they say it's our turn to run the country.

A mediocracy is coming into being. It is a society based on a quasi-egalitarian ideology in which words and ideas are redefined so as to appeal to average, disenfranchised-feeling people. Other classic symptoms include dumbing-down discourse, replacing thought with jargon, and instituting a phony form democratization that usually leads to authoritarianism. Not a pretty picture.

Also on my TV playlist while I was recovering from the flu was Dancing With the Stars, where the big story of the week was why Sarah Plain's daughter Bristol, who though by meritocratic standards was obviously and by far the worst of the remaining dancers, kept surviving. Why the "public," who by telephone, computer, and text message vote for their favorites kept voting for her in spite of her clumsy performances.

Easy--forget merit. It's reload time.