Perpetual Motion
Beyond an everyday attentiveness to providing for food, clothing, shelter, and recreation, economic self-interest has never seemed a very compelling force to me. Most people seem to pursue their ideas of success without much regard for the personal bottom line, and most people also strike me as not wanting to think very much about that line in the first place. I've known men who enjoyed turning profits well enough, but they always had, for me, the air of happy gardeners, delighted to see what seeds and soil turned up. The person who would abandon a job paying $150,000 for another paying $151,000 (other things being equal) must, I think, be extremely rare, and quite probably troubled.
So I don't expect dollars and cents to play much of a role in political calculations. When they appear to do so, it's a front for something else. When voters appear to get mad about taxes, for example, they're really angry about how they think their tax dollars are being spent - or upon whom - or about the arguable incompetence that would explain persistent tax hikes. In the right circumstances, people will happily pay high taxes. Westchester County, north of the City, contains more than few villages where high property taxes support excellent public schools. These school districts are cooperatives, effectually, for the parents of school-aged children. When your children have gone through the system, you can stay, if you like, but you can leave, too, and make room for a family like the one yours used to be.
A parent in one of these towns might very well argue that he is sending his children to good schools so that they will eventually win lucrative employment. But that is daydreaming, wishful thinking at best, and certainly not economic self-interest, narrowly conceived.
Free market economics are popular with Americans not because they benefit from them, but because free market economics militate against schemes for the redistribution of income, or welfare. When most people feel that their prosperity is in retreat, they are understandably unwilling to allow the government to appropriate any of their dwindling resources for the benefit of those less fortunate.
Anatol Lieven reviews Thomas Frank's What's the Matter with Kansas? in the 2 December issue of the London Review of Books. (In England, the book has been published as What's the Matter with America? The review is behind the LRB's paywall). On the whole, Mr Lieven likes the book, but he faults it for its economic naivete - its faith in economic self-interest. The book is in one of my many piles, but I haven't read it yet, not least because I wonder if I've really got to. I did read an excerpt somewhere, and the gist of it was a bemused incredulity at the stupidity of poor Americans who vote for policies that will make them poorer while making rich Americans richer. Don't they get it, Mr Frank seems to be asking. No, they don't, Mr Lieven replies, because they're not paying attention to being richer or poorer.
They're paying attention to being respectable. This means holding on to middle-class status by holding on to middle-class values. Away from the cities and big towns, in places where anonymity is both unthinkable and unattainable, shadings of personal virtue are more salient than shadings of personal property. If you are a sufficiently nice person, then it does not much matter what kind of car you drive (so long as you keep it clean and in safe repair). If you have to work two jobs and not just one in order to afford any car, that is all right, and certainly not the government's fault. The important thing is to be perceived as a good person. And the surest kind of good person is a traditional person. People who put being interesting ahead of being good had better head for the cities.
I don't think that it's possible for a woman's life to be traditional and interesting (even if only to herself) until she's middle-aged. For anybody, living an interesting life requires some serious disregard for tradition, at least temporarily. For a woman, it's arguably untraditional to seek to live an interesting life or to be an interesting person. To the extent that "interesting" means something more challenging than taking the kids to Orlando, it is probably to be avoided. For middle-class tradition is rooted in family life, in assuming one's God-given family role and, with luck (or grace), carrying the family onward through marriage and parenthood. To be interesting, you have to conceive of your life apart from that of your family. Not as against your family, necessarily, but simply with independence.
Thomas Frank isn't wrong to point out that most Kansans are worse off than they used to be. Where he errs (and I say this hypothetically, not having read his book) is in failing to see that this impoverishment is the very force that has pushed them into Republican arms. For although the Republican leadership is widening the gulf between rich and poor, it is also the party that upholds tradition. Its message is not so much that the middle class is the most important element in American life as it is that being middle-class - professing middle-class values - is the defining American pursuit. So long as one is middle class, and so long as being middle-class is championed, then one need not fear falling out of good society altogether and into what Mr Lieven calls the proletariat.
We in the cities don't see any of this. "Tradition," when used in New York, usually refers to cultures rooted elsewhere, whether as close as New England or as distant as Fujian. Traditions that aren't merely decorative, traditions with the kind of teeth in them that, say, force young women into arranged marriages, are regrettable in our eyes, bad habits that might, it is hoped, be eventually outgrown. We don't find meaning in the dictates of dead people whose claim upon us is mere ancestry. "Family," among the New Yorkers of my acquaintance, is an elective institution, built up over years out of friendships. Siblings are more likely to be troublesome sources of grievance than otherwise. How many people have come here simply to get away from their families? Perhaps not as many as you'd think, but life in the city is certainly flavored by the impulse.
This makes Mr Lieven's assessment all the more chilling:
If Middle America continues to crumble, one of the essential pillars of American political stability and moderation will have gone; and dreams of destroying America's enemies abroad, 'taking back' America at home and restoring the old moral, cultural and social order might well become more powerful and more disturbing. Three factors are critical. First, Frank's conservative-voting Kansans, like most American workers, define themselves not as working-class but as middle-class. Second, religious belief and practice of a 'Protestantoid' kind is at the heart of their conception both of their own identity and of the good society. Third, as Frank writes (echoing the conservative historian Walter Russell Mead), the combination of religious, middle-class and nationalist values has created among these people a view of themselves as something like a Volk - the 'real' or 'true' American people, as Republican campaign rhetoric in the heartland has continually stressed.
Frank deals with all these issues vividly and with great insight, but like much of the left he can't rid himself of the traditional materialist belief that economic interests determine political behaviour, and that if they don't, they should.
Reading Mr Lieven's review, I began to wonder if the Republicans haven't created a perpetual-motion machine. So long as Republican policies keep exurban Americans in a state of social anxiety, they will be guaranteed the support of exurban Americans. How odd it is to be obliged to find comfort in the Bush Administration's overriding characteristic: incompetence.
