President Obama made history on Tuesday.
It was only the second time since Harry S. Truman’s State of the Union address in 1948 that such a speech by a Democratic president did not include a single mention of poverty or the plight of the poor.
In the ongoing discussion I've had with several people about, er... this stuff, one of the issues that's been put in stark relief is the tangled conditions of income inequality and deep poverty in America that are so much a part of our economic reality today. The sense that politicians are out of touch, the complaints that that the "mainstream media" is complicit in silence about people's suffering, the anger with corporate profiteering, especially with financial institutions... the things that drive the "Versailles" argument are in many ways symptomatic of a discussion about poverty that we're not having but exists, quite squarely, in the center of our political and eocnomic issues.
One reason I think we're not putting the poverty problem front and center - where it belongs - is because so many people se the problem as so blindingly obvious. Unemployment is spectacularly high. Home foreclosures are rampant. We've been in a terrible recession. Demand for government services is increasing. Surely, it seems, everybody knows there's a poverty problem. Don't they?
Well... do they?
It's long past time, I think, that someone - and a lot of someones - concerned about poverty put it out in public more starkly and far more directly than has been thus far, certainly since the recession began. Not an argument about who is out of touch. Not more polemics about how terrible rich people are. But someone to say, clearly and up front, that our society has to do something about poverty. And income inequality. And it has to be done right away. Seems obvious... but so far, it mostly hasn't happened. And I don't think it's a mystery as to why.
- Most of our current political debates are among the privileged and the comfortable. There is almost no one speaking for people in poverty, certainly no one to give voice to the actual experience and concerns of living in poverty day to day. We have experts, we have studies... and mostly, we have a professional, educated elite that likes to view poverty from a distance and talk about almost anything else.
- Actually dealing with poverty and income inequality doesn't mean poverty will go away. We will always be a nation where some have more and some have less. The challenge is to be a nation where our institutions do more for people with less, and our focus is not on giving more to people who have more.
- Taking stepes to reduce income inequality and better address poverty means many people will have to sacrifice and give things up. This is unpopular, and isn't helped by presentations, especially from the left, that put 80-90% of people into the "Middle Class" and thus somehow exempt from sacrifice. Until we - progressives, liberals, concerned antipoverty advocates - can tell more people that "shared sacrifice" means "most of us", there's little change for the kind of changes needed.
It's depressing, and frustrating, that President Obama has turned out mostly to be a President of and for the upper middle class, educated. professional elite. It's not necessarily surprising - though, as Charles Blow notes, the President won more votes from lower income voters and the less educated - given that the President's base of support within the Democratic Party began with college students and their parents, but even his base, I think, felt that he was a President who would advocate for help for those actually in need far more than he has.
That the President hasn't been the kind of advocate many Democrats expected probably goes a long way - longer than his continued supporters might like to face - to explaining why his Presidency has been, at best, a middling success (or, to many, something of a puzzling failure). Though Democrats in Congress, working with the President, managed to pass a number of major pieces of legislation, the past two years of his Presidency showed an indifference to issues of poverty, and a preference for economic policies that often made bad situations worse - a Medicaid expansion in healthcare reform that is unrealistic, "Financial reforms" that don't do much to help individuals vis-a-vis banks, a general lack of practical solutions to address practical problems. Yes, the Congress extended unemployment benefits and beefed up fod stamp funds and showed some creativity on the margins; but the painful half measures on things like foreclosure protections and lack of affordable housing reforms were more indicative of the lack of priority given to helping those most in need.
This is why, for months, I've been most frustrated with the failure to develop a "Tea Party" movement on the left, a moment where frustration and anger with inaction in Washington by long serving Democrats would force intraparty challenges to the status quo. It's not the nation that needs a reviolution, and it's not the right wing that needs to throw out its RINOs. Progressives who are concerned with traditional notions of what a left wing party should be - focused on the working class, concerned most with policies and practical ways to help those most in need - ought to find much of the current Democratic leadership seriously wanting, and worth replacing. Yet, year after year, we stand by while the same people (Nancy Pelosi? Still?) do the smae things, getting much the same results.
This is the time when the case could be made to energize poor people, working class voters; this time, in the next few months, is the moment when a substantive challenge to a sitting President would need to take shape to have a serious hope of affecting change. It won't happen, I don't think, and many on the left will simply throw up their hands, complain about "Versailles", and grouse that Obama was not the one they wanted in the first place. And Republicans? At some point, the angry white working class of Tea Partiers is either going to notice that they've hitched their wagon to the people even less interested in income inequality and poverty... or they will continue to dream the dream that Stopping the Liberal Menace is the key to solving their problems, that sacrifice is for other people, and it's okay if poor people suffer... so long as it's not you.
Like many, I'm sure that the problems we have are largely unsustainable, that soemthing will have to give. And while I wouldn't entirely rule out the potential for uprisings... that seems a lot less in the cards than other, less extreme options. One of which is that, in the near term, poverty and income inequality simply get worse, and the opportunities for many simply shrink. We have a long way to go, and many people have pretty far to fall (including many who think it can't happen to them, and others who think it can't possibly be worse than it is already). I'd like to think we, as a society, don't want that to happen. But if we don't make dealing with the problems of income inequality and poverty more central soon and actually address things that can be addressed... things will get worse, for a lot of people.
Comments
You can follow this conversation by subscribing to the comment feed for this post.