Part One of a series.
When George W. Bush first spoke of “the ownership society,” he led most Americans to believe, and many did believe, that he was talking about them. Now, four years later, it’s easy to conclude that the president, his party and conservatism itself has failed to deliver the ownership society.
But the very crises now described and decried in both the new media and the old can actually be taken as signs of conservatism’s success, depending on one thing: identifying who really belongs to the ownership society. Conservatism, depending on how you look at it, has successfully built the ownership society — a very small, narrowly defined one — and strengthened it by building or expanding its essential support: the society of the owned.
The term “owned” has its origins in the realms of hacking and gaming, but I’m only partly borrowing the slang definitions — “To dominate another person or thing so completely as to humiliate them” and “To be made a fool of; To make a fool of” — here.
As the grandson of sharecroppers, I grew up hearing stories about how the system of sharecropping worked. Farmers worked all season, buying the goods they needed — food and clothing for their families — from the plantation owner, always on credit and always at high interest. By harvest, they always owed more than their work ended up being worth, often due to the various adjustments of the plantation owner.
The bottom line was, as long as they were in debt they couldn’t leave. And the system all but assured they never got out of debt. Sharecropping was post-slavery, so they weren’t literally owned; just nearly so. They worked hard, but in the end had nothing to show for it; nothing of their own, at least, because they owned almost nothing. Sharecropping itself died with the the advent of farm machinery, but there’s a lot going on in America today that looks an awful lot like it.
After the State of the Union Address, Naomi Klein noted that the “ownership society”—so often mentioned at the beginning of Bush’s presidency—didn’t even rate a mention in the final address of his presidency. “Bush,” Klein wrote, “has turned out to be ownership society’s undertaker.” Again, that depends on how you define the ownership society, and how you identify the owners; something Bush did as early as the 2000 campaign when he addressed a fundraiser audience, saying, “This is an impressive crowd of the haves and have mores. Some people call you the elite, I call you my base.”
Whether or not, in that particular incident, Bush was “mocking” his image of catering to the wealthy, Paul Krugman pointed out — in a 2006 Rolling Stone article, “The Great Wealth Transfer” — that the wealthiest are truly Bush’s “base,” as they are at every juncture the main beneficiaries of the Bush administration’s economic policies and the economic philosophy of conservatism itself.
During the 2000 election campaign, George W. Bush joked that his base consisted of the “haves and the have mores.” But it wasn’t much of a joke. Not only has the Bush administration favored the interests of the wealthiest few Americans over those of the middle class, it has consistently shown a preference for people who get their income from dividends and capital gains, rather than those who work for a living.
After rattling off the various ways the Bush administration has favored the economic interests of the wealthiest few while ignoring or opposing the interests working Americans, Krugman spotlighted what might be the cut-off point for membership in the ownership society or, more precisely, the ownership class.
Finally, there’s the government’s most direct method of affecting incomes: taxes. In this arena, Bush has made sure that the rich pay lower taxes than they have in decades. According to the latest estimates, once the Bush tax cuts have taken full effect, more than a third of the cash will go to people making more than $500,000 a year — a mere 0.8 percent of the population.
We’ll meet a few of them later in this series, but if their numbers are so small and their economic class so narrowly defined, how can most people be convinced or expect that they can join the ranks of “the ownership society”? Klein wrote:
The idea was simple: if working-class people owned a small piece of the market–a home mortgage, a stock portfolio, a private pension–they would cease to identify as workers and start to see themselves as owners, with the same interests as their bosses. That meant they could vote for politicians promising to improve stock performance rather than job conditions. Class consciousness would be a relic.
It was always tempting to dismiss the ownership society as an empty slogan–“hokum” as former Labor Secretary Robert Reich put it. But the ownership society was quite real. It was the answer to a roadblock long faced by politicians favoring policies to benefit the wealthy. The problem boiled down to this: people tend to vote their economic interests. Even in the wealthy United States, most people earn less than the average income. That means it is in the interest of the majority to vote for politicians promising to redistribute wealth from the top down.
Except, the reality is that it is in the interest of the real ownership society to vote for (and write checks to), and have rest of us to vote for politicians who will, if not actively redistribute wealth from the bottom to the top, at least stand out of the way while the ownership society itself implements that transfer of wealth. It goes without saying, of course, that it’s in the interest of the ownership society to get the rest of us to vote the same way. That’s accomplished by making us think we’ve joined the ranks of the ownership class, until we find out otherwise, at which point it might be too late anyway.
In every system in which a narrow few live and grow wealthy on the work and worries of many, from slavery to sharecropping, it is always a great benefit to get the many to identify with the few. In this case, urging them to forget, as F.Scott Fitzgerald said, the rich really are “different from you and me.”
The shift is psychological, but not intended to actually shift the economic realities of those targeted. Just our loyalties, which would shift to politicians who would actually vote in the interests of the members of the real ownership society. Membership has its privileges, and also its price. Entry into the ownership society comes not when you buy a house, but when you buy a member of the House or the Senate, or even an occupant of the White House.
The bifurcation is merely a dissolution of the mirage of belonging to the “ownership society.” Remember, the attendant who hands out towels in the executive restroom also has a key to the executive restroom. But that doesn’t make him/her and executive. It never has.
The ownership society that has always been is simply more clearly identified than before, as is the society of the owned now. The trick, and it worked for a while, was to convince the society of the owned that it too was part of the ownership society. But when bubbles inevitably burst, we remember (too late, in many cases) what we’d been convinced to forget: that the rich really are different from you and me. This becomes clear as the curtain falls away and the ownership society itself is glimpsed.
Bumping this back to the top because its well written, thoughtful, and I can’t believe no one here has commented on it before. Are we all so consumed by the Clinton Obama fight that we forget about the reasons they are fighting?
I don’t think we have seen any data yet on continuing shift of wealth resulting from Bush administration policies. But I do recall roughly the position that the wealthy started at before Bush was elected president.
Edward Wolf, NYU economist, published the results of a survey of wealth distribution in the country based on 1998 data (name of publication and its date not recalled). At that time, the top 10% of families in the US owned 85% of the stock market and 90% of all business assets.
I also don’t know why America’s great wealth and income disparity doesn’t trouble average Americans.
It started with Reagan. The Carter administration was the high water mark for the middle class in terms of their share of national income.
Because we have a view that the rich are our “betters” and aspire to be like them. I don’t want the rich to be fairly assessed because I’m gonna be just like Trump when my ship comes in.
Also, folks may not have a pot to piss in or a window to throw it out of, but as long as they can look down their noses at someone because of skin color/religion/orientation/add other bullshit classifications here, they will happily ignore how they are being screwed.
There are still millions who haven’t figured out that they can’t eat patriotism, religion, color and sexual orientation. And the politicians play on that psyche.
Today I heard that the number of late auto payments and repossessions is at its highest rate for 10 years. But I’m sure it was an undocumented worker’s fault.
That encouragement of “regular” people to buy houses, stocks, private pension funds, etc. had deeper motives. In addition to temporarily feeling like they were “owners” and voting against their own interests, they were suckered into inflating the bubbles that are now bursting. They put their money into pyramid schemes of financial enterprises. Those at the top walk away with billion dollar bonuses while those at the bottom get foreclosures, stock portfolios worth pennies and pension funds that are busted by investing in the same Ponzi scheme.
Over the last twenty years, we’ve witnessed the biggest swindle in history. People put their money into the system and the system sucked it up and gave it to the crooks running the scam. Now, most of us are owned by our debts, our mortgages and/or stagnant incomes. And it wasn’t just the working poor that got taken. They raped the middle class, too.
Depending on whether or not a change of presidents can turn this around, we should be heading for a revolution. I say “should” because most Americans are too blind to focus on the true cause of their misforture. It’s “them immigrants that are doing us in,” ya know.
Revolutions can come from the right. In fact, I’d fear a fascist revolution in America more than I would any other kind.
All revolutions are — at their core — fascist. They all get going with cries of freedom for the down-trodden but they just end up replacing one set of rulers for another. A case could be made that the American Revolution was just a clever manipulation of the working and indentured classes to serve the interests of a select group of landed gentry.
As much as I would like to imagine that a revolution today would be about eating the rich. I’m pretty sure it would be about killing Hispanics, Blacks, gays, feminists and liberals in order to restore some illusion of how great life was in the 50’s. Besides all the rich would promptly decamp to armed compounds in Paraguay.
Great post. Just today we see a further example of what your point; the GSE that guarantees pensions for American workers doubles down on a losing bet in the equity markets:
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/51023502-de5e-11dc-9de3-0000779fd2ac.html
This “ownership society” marketing campaign sure was a weak attempt to put a human face on the Larry Kudlow/George Bush/WSJ editorial board et al. school of economic theory. I’m not surprised they’re dropping the populist appeal now. They are probably content to sit back and enjoy their successes the last few years and simply try to maintain their policy victories instead of seeking the diminishing returns of winning over “dumb suckers” (the working men and women that get fooled into believing Bush Supply Side Economics is good for them).
It is unbelievable to me that the Democrats haven’t been more effective in fighting this radical economic policy. In fact, the Democrats have ceded the fight on many fronts and have actually joined the enemy in many battles (e.g. bankruptcy “reform”).
At least the Democrats defeated Bush’s social security privatization scheme.
The monied interests have co-opted the Democratic Party leadership via the DLC. Unless populism regains sway (Hello, Obama!)the deal will remain: heads, they win; tails, we lose.
Eliminating the ability of corporations to buy the political process would be the empowerment of the REAL people.
All the doom and gloom on SS is also just part of the scam. When the boomers start retiring, the biggest impact is going to be on Wall Street. They will start drawing OUT all that money in their IRAs, 401s, etc., instead of putting money in. That’s why the Street is so intent on getting their hands on SS.
this problem will never go away (due to Darwinian pressures to cheat). the only solution is mitigation, which also carries Darwinian consequences, e.g., a reduction in hard selection against those who can obviously be taken advantage of, which happens on a sliding scale. Assuming we could stanch the worst abuses of nepotism, this argument also implies that increased social spending on the common good will necessarily increase non-merit-based selection, which it seems would reduce the overall fitness of the population. I have no answers to this dilemma. Do you?
I really hope that the Democrats don’t learn the wrong lessons from the failure of the ownership society as it relates to home “ownership”. What the Dem candidates are proposing so far scares me. Freezing mortgage rates is not the answer. Increasing the conforming loan limit was not the answer. Further government intervention in the housing market is not the answer.
We especially don’t need a government bailout for any of the market participants that bought into the “ownership society” hokus pokus. No bailouts for lenders or borrowers–or even those subsequent suckers that bought securitized mortgages. There should especially be no bailouts for financial institutions.
The Democrats need to get back to the basics on economic policy instead of trying to put their finger in the latest hole in the dyke that has sprung.
How about getting back to effectively regulating markets and prosecuting white collar criminals? How about supporting unions? How about restoring the government’s role in providing a safety net for our society and ensuring a basic retirement system? How about having a fair bankruptcy law and tax code?
As the great-grandchild of an indentured servant, I knew exactly what the neo-cons meant by “ownership society”: the monied classes owning everyone else.
They’ve kept the tune, but changed the words.
you almost have to laugh.
I come from a family that was destroyed by John D. Rockefeller over a century ago (accomplished in the usual way–unfair trade practices: Think Microsoft).
Did we learn ANYTHING? Four generations later, most of us still fall for the same old con, and never figure out that in an ownership society WE are the ones OWNED, NOT the ones doing the owning.