Class is back in the US as the ownership society crumbles
Bush hoped to be proud father of the rightwing economic revolution's grand project. Instead, he is its undertaker
Naomi Klein
Friday February 1, 2008
The Guardian
Remember the "ownership society", fixture of major George Bush addresses for the first four years of his presidency? "We're creating ... an ownership society in this country, where more Americans than ever will be able to open up their door where they live and say, welcome to my house, welcome to my piece of property," Bush said in October 2004.
Washington thinktanker Grover Norquist predicted that the ownership society would be this president's greatest legacy, remembered "long after people can no longer pronounce or spell Falluja". Yet in Bush's final state of the union address this week, the once-ubiquitous phrase was conspicuously absent. And little wonder: rather than its proud father, Bush has turned out to be the ownership society's undertaker.
Well before the ownership society had a neat label, its creation was central to the success of the rightwing economic revolution around the world. 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 themselves 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 Robert Reich, labour secretary during Bill Clinton's presidency, put it. But the ownership society was quite real. It was the answer to a roadblock long faced by politicians favouring policies to benefit the wealthy. The problem boiled down to this: people tend to vote according to 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.
So what to do? It was Margaret Thatcher who pioneered a solution. The effort centred on Britain's council estates, which were filled with diehard Labour party supporters. In a bold move, Thatcher offered strong incentives to residents to buy their council-estate flats at reduced rates (much as Bush did decades later by promoting sub-prime mortgages). Those who could afford it became homeowners while those who couldn't faced rents almost twice as high as before, leading to an explosion of homelessness.
As a political strategy, it worked: the renters continued to oppose Thatcher, but polls showed that more than half of the newly minted owners did indeed switch their party affiliation to the Tories. The key was a psychological shift: they now thought like owners, and owners tend to vote Tory. The ownership society as a political project was born.
Across the Atlantic, Ronald Reagan ushered in a range of policies that similarly convinced the public that class divisions no longer existed. In 1988, only 26% of Americans told pollsters that they lived in a society bifurcated into haves and have-nots - 71% rejected the whole idea of class. The real breakthrough, however, came in the 1990s, with the "democratisation" of stock ownership, eventually leading to nearly half of American households owning shares. Stock-watching became a national pastime, with tickers on TV screens becoming more common than weather forecasts. Main Street, we were told, had stormed the elite enclaves of Wall Street...[Open in new window]
Bush hoped to be proud father of the rightwing economic revolution's grand project. Instead, he is its undertaker
Naomi Klein
Friday February 1, 2008
The Guardian
Remember the "ownership society", fixture of major George Bush addresses for the first four years of his presidency? "We're creating ... an ownership society in this country, where more Americans than ever will be able to open up their door where they live and say, welcome to my house, welcome to my piece of property," Bush said in October 2004.
Washington thinktanker Grover Norquist predicted that the ownership society would be this president's greatest legacy, remembered "long after people can no longer pronounce or spell Falluja". Yet in Bush's final state of the union address this week, the once-ubiquitous phrase was conspicuously absent. And little wonder: rather than its proud father, Bush has turned out to be the ownership society's undertaker.
Well before the ownership society had a neat label, its creation was central to the success of the rightwing economic revolution around the world. 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 themselves 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 Robert Reich, labour secretary during Bill Clinton's presidency, put it. But the ownership society was quite real. It was the answer to a roadblock long faced by politicians favouring policies to benefit the wealthy. The problem boiled down to this: people tend to vote according to 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.
So what to do? It was Margaret Thatcher who pioneered a solution. The effort centred on Britain's council estates, which were filled with diehard Labour party supporters. In a bold move, Thatcher offered strong incentives to residents to buy their council-estate flats at reduced rates (much as Bush did decades later by promoting sub-prime mortgages). Those who could afford it became homeowners while those who couldn't faced rents almost twice as high as before, leading to an explosion of homelessness.
As a political strategy, it worked: the renters continued to oppose Thatcher, but polls showed that more than half of the newly minted owners did indeed switch their party affiliation to the Tories. The key was a psychological shift: they now thought like owners, and owners tend to vote Tory. The ownership society as a political project was born.
Across the Atlantic, Ronald Reagan ushered in a range of policies that similarly convinced the public that class divisions no longer existed. In 1988, only 26% of Americans told pollsters that they lived in a society bifurcated into haves and have-nots - 71% rejected the whole idea of class. The real breakthrough, however, came in the 1990s, with the "democratisation" of stock ownership, eventually leading to nearly half of American households owning shares. Stock-watching became a national pastime, with tickers on TV screens becoming more common than weather forecasts. Main Street, we were told, had stormed the elite enclaves of Wall Street...[Open in new window]
posted by Dan at 9:22 AM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home