Female, White and Dead

If there is one overriding trend in the United States that threatens the very democratic underpinnings of our form of government, it is increasing polarization. The numbers are everywhere. Our middle class has fewer members, by far (61% in 1970s, 51% today; they earned 62% of America’s wealth then, 45% now), than at any time since the expansion of that class post-World War II, mostly through the GI bill that educated millions, GI housing plus the growth of unions (and union pay) and solid manufacturing jobs. Today, the housing market has collapsed, taking millions of middle class constituents with that fall, unemployment is soaring, education has never been more expensive with fewer people able to afford the bill, unions represent a very small segment of working Americans, and 42% of this nation’s wealth is now concentrated in the hands of the top 1% of the population. And if you are rich, Citizens United now allows you to use those riches to influence elections in ways ordinary Americans cannot.

Who cares what the stock market does when you’ve lost your job and your home? Who cares that reduced educational opportunities save that top 1% billions in taxes… and so we move forward to compete in the world, having once been at the top in each of these categories among developed countries, sitting at 17^th place in science, 25^th in math and 16^th in the percentage of its population with college educations… and falling fast? When you combine all of these numbers, the trend is no longer upward mobility of succeeding generations, education is no longer the great leveler, and most children have expectations of living at a lower standard than their parents. Those who have will pass it on to succeeding generations… the rest, well, that’s just too bad.

If things are rough for the middle class, they are proportionately worse for those at the bottom. Dropout rates and a horrific economy pretty much send a message to the lower classes that they will have to make their way through life via social safety nets, an alternative (and often illegal) economy or through dumb luck. The track out of poverty has not been this difficult for Americans since The Great Depression. Born in a lower class? It’s overwhelmingly likely that is where you will stay. With nothing vested in “America” – betrayed by the “American Dream” – what are people likely to do to strengthen their country when they have no real stake in it?

Nothing screams polarization and the descent of the majority of American’s quality of life like mortality statistics, especially at the bottom of our socioeconomic strata (can’t call it a “ladder” anymore, because few will ever be allowed to climb). As America seems to explain itself to itself by trashing education and the educated in our society as elitist, the numbers tell a sadder story, the one where lack of education leads to hopelessness and depression, where health insurance is relegated to Medicaid. “For generations of Americans, it was a given that children would live longer than their parents. But there is now mounting evidence that this enduring trend has reversed itself for the country’s least-educated whites, an increasingly troubled group whose life expectancy has fallen by four years since 1990…

“The steepest declines were for white women without a high school diploma, who lost five years of life between 1990 and 2008 [before the big economic collapse!], said S. Jay Olshansky, a public health professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago and the lead investigator on the study, published last month in Health Affairs. By 2008, life expectancy for black women without a high school diploma had surpassed that of white women of the same education level, the study found…  White men lacking a high school diploma lost three years of life. Life expectancy for both blacks and Hispanics of the same education level rose, the data showed. But blacks over all do not live as long as whites, while Hispanics live longer than both whites and blacks.” New York Times, September 20^th.

And now we have an election, where the disenfranchised poor are being written off by many in the “other half.” Too many are dependent on safety nets and pay no taxes (the infamous 47%) say the pundits, yet there are no jobs, the educational system has failed them, not to mention many in that 47% are simply retirees or disabled. There actually is no realistic way for those at the bottom to reduce that dependency without an investment that society seems no longer willing to make in them.

Even assuming a strong desire to work for a living, exactly how do you get that job in this economy with a lack of skills? If you combine the rapid decline of opportunity and the middle class, over time, history teaches us that this is the fatal infection that leads to “regime change,” political upheaval, social unrest… and the end of the country that allowed these anomalies to occur. Those at the top will be the targets of those at the bottom – well-armed under the Second Amendment. Those with nothing left to lose, no hope for the future, can get powerfully angry at those who seem to be standing in their way. And with erosion of that middle class, there will be whole lot more people at the bottom.

I’m Peter Dekom, and I wonder what those who want to pull the rug out from under our working poor (or who want to be working) think the long-term prognosis for such an effort will be for their own lives.