The rise of Newt Gingrich is extraordinary: a card-carrying member of the permanent governing class in Washington embraced by the conservative base of the Republican Party. I would have never imagined it possible.
But these are remarkable, even desperate times. Many Republican Party voters feel that when it comes to government spending we have reached a now-or-never moment. Thus the urgency of the Tea Party, which has shaken the Republican Party Establishment with its take-no-prisoners approach and summary electoral executions.
A politically antithetical but similar sense of urgency has taken hold in the core constituencies of the Democratic Party. Few ended up camping out in public parks as part of the Occupy movement, but polls show that many voters were sympathetic. Unemployment, foreclosures, student loan debt, spending cuts, and more: things seem about to explode.
Perhaps the economy will take off next year, and the political fog will lift. I don’t think so. We are experiencing very deep and fundamental crisis in the American democratic project. The unifying myth of the middle class seems to have passed its use-by date.
During the first century of the American Republic, the yeoman farmer served as the mythic ideal citizen. Thomas Jefferson trumpeted him as the foundation of democracy. His vocation, wrote Horace Greeley, “conduces most directly and palpably to a reverence for Honesty and Truth,” and thus “leads to manliness of character.” Too busy breaking sod to enter into political plots, his can-do mentality shuns political machinations, and his independence makes him an enemy of tyranny.
But America changed. By the end of Horace Greeley’s life, men were flocking to cities and factories to find work. Whether on the South Side of Chicago or Squirrel Hill in Pittsburgh, the yeoman farmer of old was replaced by a new kind of man—the worker. And a new class emerged—the working class.
Then came the global economic crises of the 1930s, a decade when everything seemed about to explode—and a great deal did. Both nineteenth century liberalism and older forms of elite paternalism lost their constituencies. In their places emerged new ideologies: Marxism and fascism at first, and then the approach that succeeded in defining the second half of the twentieth century: social democracy.
With social democracy—the successful combination of large-scale government with free enterprise—came a new social reality, a middle class
The very name evokes its political significance. Neither high nor low, neither rapacious industrialists nor striking workers, this new class provided America with its new democratic myth.
Whether or not this myth was ever entirely true is of little moment. It is sufficient to acknowledge its power over the American imagination, so much so that sociologists formulated terms like “lower middle class” and “upper middle class” to do justice to the fact that in recent decades the overwhelming majority of Americans thought of themselves as being middle class.
Since World War II our political culture has been organized around a contest for the loyalty of the middle class, which meant that, however partisan, both parties served the same constituency. This created the unity necessary to broker deals to meet many crises, some of which were very severe, as anyone who was alive in the sixties will remember.
Today the middle class myth seems less and less believable. Globalization has led to profound economic changes. Chinese workers now compete with people in North Carolina who work in furniture factories and textile mills. The consequences have not been good for high school educated Americans. And it’s not just economic stress. Divorce, serial cohabitation, out of wedlock children: middle class family life is now more difficult to manage and sustain.
The middle class has been eroded from the top as well. The 1 percent singled out by the Occupy Wall Street is actually about 20 percent. They and their children are well positioned to staff and profit from increasingly international markets and bureaucracies, features of globalization likely to become more and more important in the future. Moreover, for all the moral relativism abroad in elite culture, the top 20 percent have largely preserved the family-sustaining mores of the old bourgeois morality.
Like the yeoman farmers a hundred years or so ago who rallied behind William Jennings Bryan, middle class conservatives intuitively know that their era is ending. Today their cross of gold is the cross of government: regulation, taxes, spending, and deficits. They will rally behind any preacher, no matter how improbable, who sermonizes against these evils, as the serial enthusiasms for Rick Perry, then Herman Cain, and now Gingrich demonstrates.
The Democrats have their own difficulties. Poll data shows the hardcore liberals are frustrated with Obama. Like the Republican Party, the Democratic Party has been built around the now failing middle class myth, and it’s Establishment, which is insulated from social reality, as all Establishment are, is also being disoriented by voters who are living that failure. Everybody cannot be a government employee.
Without a unifying myth, which requires at least a plausible basis in social reality, our democratic mode of government tends toward intense conflicts, and only pragmatic, temporary truces, for the ideological and social bases for lasting compromise becomes weak. This is what we see happening today. Both parties are devolving toward constituencies that have less and less overlap.
Today’s political polarization may continue for a long time. Unifying myths cannot be made to order. They are not invented but minted, shaped and formed out of pre-existing social realities by the sharp blows of political rhetoric.
Can we re-engineer social democracy to protect and sustain the now fragile middle class? Is there a new social reality around that will provide a new basis for social stability? I don’t know, but of this I’m sure: You can win elections with 51 percent of the vote, but in a democratic culture you can’t rule without a unifying myth that commands the assent of a super-majority.
R.R. Reno is Editor of First Things. He is the general editor of the Brazos Theological Commentary on the Bible and author of the volume on Genesis. His previous “On the Square” articles can be found here.
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Comments:
Romney is the best bet for fixing things economically...but woefully short on the intellectual, "in-yer-face" bravado that Gingrich seems to exude. Hence, the vast number of frustrated voters are swinging wildly to ANYONE that can take the wood to the enemy...and we will finally settle for a bit of a deer-in-the headlights politician like Romney...when all of Newt's weaknesses are made clear.
When are those Christians who denounce the "dictatorship of relativism" finally going to recognize that the fundamental source of corruption in political discourse and the exercise of political power is precisely the absence of truth - usually in the form of lies, self-serving distortions, etc.? One would think that their professed and self-consciously counter-cultural commitment to objective truth would make this obvious.
http://www.firstthings.com/blogs/firstthoughts/2011/12/19/the-economic-condition-and-fates-lead-pipe/#more-37855
The myth of the middle class will return when middle class security and upward mobility return. The polarization is not directly because of economic problems. It started long before, and accelerated when the presidency and Congress turned sharply to the left in 2008. The left's prescriptions are failures, and are hated by the majority of Americans. Yet the left has, over the last decades, taken over most institutions -- the media, the government bureaucracy, the unions, the colleges and universities, K-12 education, Hollywood, the professional associations, etc., etc., etc. When ordinary Americans started objecting in a visible way, that made the polarization visible, as if it were something new.
We are indeed in a bad way, but I don't think re-engineering social democracy is the answer. For who is to do the engineering? If there were an answer to that we wouldn't be polarized. One side has to win -- well, probably not fully win, but to come to predominate. The rhetoric is so passionate and nasty because the stakes are so high.
Out of worthiness (best case), or shamelessness, or cluelessness, the Republican candidates decide to put their whole life out on the table for everyone to see. That limits the field a bit. I hope Santorum is the one who emerges from the sorting, but whoever it is, we'll know who the Republican candidate pushed down the stairs in kindergarten before before it's all over. The press, who are about 85% Democrats, will see to that. Don't worry.
Newt may have faults, but not believing in truth and morality does not appear to be one of them. His lack of cynicism removes him from the dominant political culture, no matter what his other ties.
To some extent, the problem is as simple as the bulk of Americans wanting to go back to having Christian presidents. It's not often said, but in Obama we have our first atheist president. Romney may suffer from a justifiable question about whether or not he passes that test.
How sad, I thought, that all that is gone now. Only truculence, mistrust, and vituperation remain in our political establishment, and Gingrich is the Emperor of Vituperation. He occasionally has good ideas, but is incapable of holding them for more than a few seconds in the rush of a multitude of other ideas. He is hypnotized by the brilliance of his own thinking--a walking monument to sheer, grandiose vanity.
Reno is exactly on target. This is no business cycle. This is an epic revolution, and America may end up being redefined by it. But America has always been a "work in progress", and we could hope that, with God's help, we may still be a strong and virtuous society.
About the decline of the family...yes it is in some serious trouble here, but at least we are keeping up a reasonable birth rate, with the help of immigrants. I just spoke online with one of my students in Italy. When she was young and married her husband, they had a circle of about ten couples who married around the same time. Out of the ten, she said, only three (including her) ever had children. Seven couples were childless by their own choice. Why? "Selfishness," she said. They didn't want to make the sacrifices required for parenthood. These people have chosen to commit national suicide, but we may still be able to avoid the same fate. (By the way, an article yesterday in the NY Times about Irish emigration features a photo of an Irish woman on the deck of a ship arriving in New York in 1928 with "ten of her 21 children"!)
"There are plenty of myths in politics, but, that the current administration is a disaster is no myth. That's the only driving narrative here on the ground where I am. And primaries are exactly for separating the wheat from the chaff."
What would you recommend we do then? I mean who do we vote for? It seems both democrats AND republicans have strayed from their ideals. Is there a candidate out there that will actually follow through on their promises?
The track record of people with Obama's ideology runs a very specific gamut between failure and catastrophe, usually the latter. Anyone who does not recognize the hallmark of liberalism in the unceasing economic deterioration and escalating global upheaval that he has promoted, if not unleashed, is living in an alternate universe. Which, of course, liberalism is, resting as it does on the learned helplessness, dependency, and fantasy based solutions that the tyranny of relativism entails.
Anyway, the first thing we need to do is stop slashing our wrists. Gingrich, Romney, even Ron Paul will do the trick in that regard. The other thing we need to do is not let the perfect be the enemy of the good. And the wreckage of Obama's presidency, even if we limit it to one term, is going to make "the good" look pretty paltry indeed for a couple of generations.
But if you're a Catholic, you'll be well prepared for what we're going to go through for the rest of our lives. You can offer it up.
Good article. Perhaps seeds of the myth can be found in the writings of Chesterton and Belloc. Maybe those sympathetic with OWS are aware of this. At a Chesterton conference, David Andrews quoted Mathew Lamb: "State socialism and capitalism are mirror images of each other. A monopoly-controlled state and a state controlled monopoly look very similar...Plutocracy is not democracy." Republican/Tea Party goes for rule by cartels; Democrats by the government. Both cartels and the government have bloated bureaucracies, ruin economies, and invade our privacy.
We hear a lot of macroeconomic chatter (Economics I) but little if anything about microeconomics (Economics II) which studies producing/encouraging markets and competition, neither of which exists in socialistic and monopolistic economies. For example, many if not most of the high-tech digital patents were purchased by two or three corporations with no plans to put these ideas in effect and thereby produce a middle class. Chesterton reportedly said 'too much capitalism does not mean too many capitalists, but too few capitalists." St. Bernard reportedly said: "Discipline produces wealth and Wealth produces undisciplined citizens." Yes, maybe there is something of the myth in OWS.
Obama's alleged atheism is a red herring. What matters is what we know of him by his fruits. They're not particularly in accord with Christian culture in anything more than an intermittent, superficial way.
Finally, "Unifying myths cannot be made to order. They are not invented but minted, shaped and formed out of pre-existing social realities by the sharp blows of political rhetoric." ------------------ YES. And it seems that these myths are minted by people who know very little about what is good. So let's get to work, Christians. Not in a Social-Gospel-Progressive way. But in a Gospel way.
The 20% worldwide will, as Reno points out, fair well in the endlessly repetitive year-of-the gouge and disenfranchisement of the middle class, although apparently a segment of the latter group made up of government workers will be the last to succumb. Those 20% will be a new global class (already many see themselves as global citizens) that will have the power to forge a new unifying myth that we in our fears will most likely not be able to resist. Our best hope is for a global economic leveling, engendering a path toward global economic equality that hopefully will transpire without destructive social upheavals that will insure new forms of dictatorship, for it will be a time of an ever-present danger of democracy falling to the wayside. If democracy survives, we might end up with the greatest democratic system in all of history, if we can only resist the demagogues, and hopefully still our fears with some wise words from Augustine, from his "On Free Choice of the Will" (p 104):
"You should not search any further than the root of the issue. Take care that you believe in the unsurpassable truth of the saying that the root of all evils is greed (1 Timothy 6:10), that is, willing to have more than enough. Enough means whatever is necessary to preserve a nature according to its kind [which, in my view, includes basic material needs, religious life (essential for the survival of culture), leisure (Josef Pieper makes this clear in “Leisure: the Basis of Culture”), private property, and the arts]. But greed, which in Greek is called 'philarguria' [silver/money], does not merely have to do with the silver or coins from which the word is derived ... Rather, it should be understood to apply to any object of immoderate desire, in any case where someone wills to have more than enough. Such greed is cupidity, and cupidity is a perverse will."
"Ronald Reagan was continually on the receiving end of vituperation from much of the media and from many of the Democrats, as well as others on the Left. Back then, what we call the Mainstream Media today was just about the only media in America, and it was heavily, loudly biased against Reagan. I was there, and I remember O'Neill as heavily partisan, and far from being some kind of warm and fuzzy person of the opposition as you suggest."
Point well made. I probably overstated my case if I implied that all was friendly collegiality between Reagan and Tip. But the difference is that there was much more common ground then and less extreme polarization. Today, the center seems to have collapsed. I fear our society and political system is losing its redoubtable stability, which has long been based, as Reno said, on the relative stability and prosperity of the middle class. As he said, almost no-one in America will admit to being "working class." It would be interpreted as failure.
So, back then we only had the liberal mainstream media, and today we have more variety? But I thought nothing was improving? That's sounds like progress to me!
@ Bill Dodd
"...many if not most of the high-tech digital patents were purchased by two or three corporations with no plans to put these ideas in effect and thereby produce a middle class."
Exactly! The patent industry in high-tech fields has become shamelessly corrupted. Corporations acquire patents in order to suppress potential competition and to protect themselves from lawsuits. The entire system needs to be overhauled to promote innovation.
@Gil Costello
I have the feeling that you have leaped past everyone else and gone to the ethical heart of the issue. Congratulations on letting Augustine shine a light on our Culture of Consumerism!
I'm convinced, though, that what pundits have tended to call the "center ground" of our political life has continually drifted or been pulled further to the left, probably since the New Deal, and especially since the Sixties. This is what moral relativism and both the Old and New Left have wrought. Beyond just matters of the moment, there is a fundamental difference between those who were considered "moderates" in 1970 and those who wear that label now, especially in social and cultural issues, and in how one views the legitimacy of our founding documents. While I agree to some extent with R. R. Reno and some other commenters here about the importance of the middle class, I also think that the problem lies deeper--not so much amongst material matters but within our current culture and spiritual state. And besides, anyone who does the math can clearly see how versions of "social democracy" such as the New Deal, the Great Society and post-World War II Europe are unsustainable.
It is striking to me how, when one reads the comments of Americans from all walks of life up until the early 1900's or so, including many who would be considered destitute today, there was a very widely-held and deep respect for the Constitution, Declaration of Independence and the general ideas of the founding, along with a widespread reverence for God. Of course there were divisions amongst the founders, and we had our Civil War, but even in the midst of the latter tragedy, Yankees and Rebels tended to revere the American Revolution and the Constitution. That very general consensus has lessened, to where we now have disturbingly large numbers of mostly younger people who dismiss the founding principles for their supposed imperfections. Obama is in accord with this dismissal of the founding, no matter what lip service he pays to the Declaration, which, by the way he has misquoted more than once. And in his actions, Obama has been hard at work "fundamentally transforming" our country, as he stated he and his supporters would do.
No, I didn't think you were unreasonably strong in your first post! However, I believe the "drift to the left", while it can be documented in a convincing way, has been counterbalanced by a "drift to the right" since the 1960s. It is these two forces that have served to destabilize our political system:
I don't remember Eisenhower ever making his religious convictions a public political issue, but a presidential candidate today is obliged, more or less, to wear his faith on his arm and reassure the electorate of his beliefs. High schools today frequently have student religious groups and prayer groups meeting outside of class in rooms and halls. When I was in the public schools in the fifties, that was unheard of. But after all, America is still in the throes of its Fourth Great Awakening. (That is a movement that swept me into the Christian fold in the late sixties, by the way.)
Moreover, the hundreds of trillions of dollars in exotic derivatives that are still floating around mysteriously in the world's financial institutions like time bombs are opaque and untraceable due to the strong trend since the seventies towards financial deregulation. (Alan Greenspan was sworn in as chairman of the Federal Reserve with Ayn Rand standing next to him.) NO-ONE was watching or regulating these over-the-counter transactions as the derivatives traders got rich engineering multiple layers of leveraging into them. Funny thing...five layers of leveraging will magnify profits astronomically as long as the underlying capital asset is growing, but if it collapses, then the same leveraging magnifies losses just as astronomically. And here we are...paying for all that unregulated cupidity. Of course, it should be a matter of personal morals that avoids these situations, rather than government regulation, but too many mortals lose all moral restraints when huge profits are dangled in front of their noses.
Rather, the myths to which Reno refers very well may be true. Referring to the rise of the middle class, he writes, "Whether or not this myth was ever entirely true is of little moment," indicating that the idea may or may not be true. He then explains the profound effects of such a "myth" and the implications of not having one.
One can say without self-contradiction, "we need a unifying myth in order to endure as a nation" and, "our unifying myth must be true." Perhaps Reno does not say the latter. Perhaps exploring that idea, or the contrary idea, could be the subject of a next article.
God bless.
Reno supposedly cares about objective truth, and emphatically disclaims relativism. As such, the issue of whether the kind of "unifying myth" around which a nation organizes its public life ought to be the only issue that ultimately matters to him. If the truth does not admit of a satisfactory or appealing unifying myth, then he is morally obligated to acknowledge that to be the case. Fashioning a false myth on utilitarian grounds is immoral - especially for those who uphold objective truth.
But the macro-economy is not malfunctioning and it can't be "fixed." The economy is doing exactly what economies always do when vast numbers of people live beyond their means and run up huge debts for a prolonged period of time: it is forcing them to recalibrate their lifestyles and bring them back into equilibrium with their earning power.
Both parties peddle the idea that there is some easy way out. One side insists the answer is to tax the rich and the other insists the answer is to take away assistance from the poor. But the only real answer is for the vast middle to pay more taxes, receive fewer benefits, eschew luxuries they can't afford, and learn to live within their means.
It is hard to win elections on this program. But attempting to vote the laws of economics out of office makes about as much sense as attempting to vote the law of universal gravitation out of office.