The Broken Contract: Inequality and American Decline
The persistence of this trend toward greater inequality over the past 30 years suggests a kind of feedback loop that cannot be broken by the usual political means. The more wealth accumulates in a few hands at the top, the more influence and favor the well-connected rich acquire, which makes it easier for them and their political allies to cast off restraint without paying a social price. That, in turn, frees them up to amass more money, until cause and effect become impossible to distinguish. Nothing seems to slow this process down-not wars, not technology, not a recession, not a historic election. Perhaps, out of a well-founded fear that the country is coming apart at the seams, the wealthy and their political allies will finally have to rein themselves in, and, for example, start thinking about their taxes less like Stephen Schwarzman and more like Warren Buffett.
In the meantime, inequality will continue to mock the American promise of opportunity for all. Inequality creates a lopsided economy, which leaves the rich with so much money that they can binge on speculation, and leaves the middle class without enough money to buy the things they think they deserve, which leads them to borrow and go into debt. These were among the long-term causes of the financial crisis and the Great Recession. Inequality hardens society into a class system, imprisoning people in the circumstances of their birth-a rebuke to the very idea of the American dream. Inequality divides us from one another in schools, in neighborhoods, at work, on airplanes, in hospitals, in what we eat, in the condition of our bodies, in what we think, in our children’s futures, in how we die. Inequality makes it harder to imagine the lives of others-which is one reason why the fate of over 14 million more or less permanently unemployed Americans leaves so little impression in the country’s political and media capitals. Inequality corrodes trust among fellow citizens, making it seem as if the game is rigged. Inequality provokes a generalized anger that finds targets where it can-immigrants, foreign countries, American elites, government in all forms-and it rewards demagogues while discrediting reformers. Inequality saps the will to conceive of ambitious solutions to large collective problems, because those problems no longer seem very collective. Inequality undermines democracy.
George Packer is a staff writer at The New Yorker. This essay is adapted from a Joanna Jackson Goldman Memorial Lecture on American Civilization and Government that he delivered earlier this year at the New York Public Library’s Cullman Center for Scholars & Writers.
Copyright Council on Foreign Relations NY Nov/Dec 2011
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