Editor’s note: David Moats, an author and journalist who lives in Salisbury, is a regular columnist for VTDigger. He is editorial page editor emeritus of the Rutland Herald, where he won the 2001 Pulitzer Prize for a series of editorials on Vermont’s civil union law. This column is an adaptation of a speech he gave at the Basin Harbor Club in Addison County last month for friends of HOPE, the Addison County community action group charged with combatting the effects of poverty in the region.
I paid a visit several weeks ago to Jeanne Montross, director of HOPE, and she reacquainted me with the work that HOPE does — the food shelf, the recycling and re-use operation and so much more. I first visited the agency 40 years ago, but it is clear the challenges remain the same: struggles with housing, health care, hunger, unemployment, addiction. We may be a richer nation, but in some ways it seems these problems have gotten worse.
Here some numbers that show why. They come from a recent article in The Atlantic magazine by Matthew Stewart.
Stewart tells us that a new aristocracy has taken hold in America. He’s not talking about the top 0.1 percent — the highest level of extremely wealthy people. They consist of 160,000 households, and their share of the nation’s wealth grew between 1963 and 2012 from 10 percent to 22 percent — a gain of about 12 percent.
Stewart shows that that gain came almost entirely from the bottom 90 percent — whose share of the nation’s wealth fell between the 1980s and the 2010s from 35 percent to 23 percent. That’s a drop of about 12 percent.
Between the top 0.1 percent and the bottom 90 percent is the top 9.9 percent — and that, he says, is the new aristocracy. They possess more than half of the nation’s wealth, and they have been doing fine.
We know this group. Close friends and relatives of mine fall into this category.
To qualify as part of this group you must have net wealth of $1.2 million. It is a group that calls itself “middle class” but behaves the way aristocracies do, guarding and preserving its privileges at the expense of those below them.
But can we really say that people who have lucked out with the rising value of their homes or with a generous 401(k) in order to pass that magic $1.2 million threshold have gained their privileges at the expense of others?
I count myself as squarely middle class, and fortunate to be there. What advantages did I have? I had the benefit of a middle class upbringing and parents who could step in to help at crucial times. One of the great advantages my parents gave me was social capital — including the assumption that I would go to college and continue from there to the middle class.
A lot of us struggle when we’re young at low-wage jobs. We live paycheck to paycheck for a time, and we get a glimpse of what we think poverty must be like. Middle class kids sometimes get summer jobs with working class people, but usually we have a safety net, a helping hand, college to return to, and the middle class assumptions that plant in our minds the notion that education is important and high-level jobs will be within reach. If we live on low-wage jobs for a time, we see how much it helps if you have the hope that one day you will be able to improve your lot.
But what if we didn’t have that hope? What if our family background and circumstances meant that hope was absent? It’s important to have a little humility about this. We may know about poverty intellectually, without really knowing what it means to live without the hope that the middle class or the aristocracy enjoy as a matter of course. Numerous works have explored the trap of poverty — whether it’s George Orwell’s “Down and Out in Paris and London” or the more recent book “Evicted” — about the cycle of evictions that mires people in Milwaukee and elsewhere. You can see it all around Vermont.
So, in a real sense, what we’re talking about is class, a topic that makes many Americans uncomfortable — because it contradicts our notion of social mobility. It so happens, however, that the growth of the new aristocracy, the widening inequality and the concentration of wealth make the issue of class inescapable. In recent conversations with two leading Vermont journalists, they both acknowledged to me that they thought class was the great unaddressed issue in Vermont.
What does this new aristocracy look like from below? My place on the ladder is a bit below the net worth demarcation described by Stewart’s article, but even I can sometimes feel twinges of envy. Some of my friends are freer than I about going out to dinner for expensive meals; they are more readily able to take off on excursions to Europe or elsewhere. I have no complaints — I have managed to visit my son each year in Hawaii — but I can see around me what Stewart is talking about. Many of the college parents who flock into Middlebury at graduation time come from a different social and economic world. I recently took a long driving trip through some extremely poor regions of the American South. Occasionally, someone would drive by in a Mercedes or BMW, and it was as if I was in Dickens’ England, and a carriage with a footman and a team of four had just rolled by.
I don’t mean to get on a high horse about wealth. Most people aspire to it, and I’m no different. Many people, up and down the economic spectrum are aware of inequality and are generous in their response. But it’s important for everyone to recognize the effect of this hardening class structure on the people who are struggling to make ends meet. We individually may not have made it happen, but it’s happening nevertheless.
The concentration of wealth at the top means that opportunities become scarcer and ordinary needs are harder to meet. More and more people are having to take on two or three jobs, none of them with benefits, just to survive. Meanwhile, the aristocracy has become a club to which admission is harder and harder to gain. Top-tier colleges have become more selective, and bright young students at those colleges have pathways to important internships, overseas travel and good jobs. The good-paying jobs in the country are becoming more concentrated in areas where the new aristocracy has an increasingly firm grip. The ordinary person can hardly get by in San Francisco anymore, the place where I lived in a rented apartment as a young man during a time I worked in a factory. As for those towns I drove through in southwestern Arkansas, Amazon is not looking to put its new headquarters there.
At a recent high school reunion, I encountered someone I hadn’t spoken to since sixth grade. Her father’s name was Dud Steiner, and he ran a clothing store called Dud’s for Men. From that one store he raised a family in a nice suburb and was able to send his kids to college, which, in retrospect, astonished his daughter. Today’s economy would probably have shoved Dud down the economic ladder, putting him to work for some big box or chain store at far less than what he earned from his one small clothing store. Could he have sent his daughter to college at Berkeley? I have my doubts. The changes robbing people like Dud of the ability to make a comfortable living are global and complex, giving rise to the recent ferment that has been labeled populist.
Our laws make it worse. Our tax laws harden and perpetuate the class division, boosting the new aristocracy, limiting opportunity for people like Dud. Tax deductions for retirement earnings, mortgage interest, capital gains and other mostly middle class benefits help the new aristocracy and the middle class to the tune of $900 billion a year. Meanwhile, the rate of state and local taxes, combined, is twice as high for the bottom 20 percent as it is for the top 1 percent. And good affordable health care remains out of reach for many. These are inequities that we have allowed to take hold. Meanwhile, college is so expensive now that it’s likely Dud’s daughter Carol would have been out of luck today. And thus the class disparities harden.
So if this is the situation, what do we do about it?
First of all, humility demands that those lucky enough to have a middle class background need to open our eyes and learn. We learn from listening and watching and lending a hand where we can. Victories often are small, incremental and personal. There’s little glamour to it.
In a recent column in The New York Times, David Brooks tried to describe what he called moral heroes, people who dedicate their lives to helping the poor or to a similar cause. They don’t see themselves as heroes, he said. They are only doing what is in their nature to do. They are generally not interested in worldly success; it’s not important to them. They often have what he called an “insane level of optimism,” not that they are going to vanquish poverty, but that they are doing the right thing and good will come of it. He quoted one activist: “I … know that I am part of a struggle. I am not the struggle. I am not leading any struggle. I am there. And I have been there for a long time, and I’m going to be there for the rest of my life. So I have no unrealistic expectations. Therefore, I am not going to get fatigued.”
It’s happening all across the country. I’d call your attention to the work of the Rev. Dr. William Barber from North Carolina who is leading a new grass-roots movement, a new Poor People’s Campaign, fusing the civil rights movement from the days of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. with new social justice movements — black and white. They have launched a nationwide campaign of civil disobedience all across the nation, including in Vermont. Call up any speech by William Barber, and you will be moved.
Fighting for social justice is a constant duty in a democracy because the freedom we enjoy gives freedom also to powerful people working against social justice and in their own interests. An economic paradigm that pits all against all advantages the haves and leaves the have-nots further and further behind. A society of opportunity and broadly based prosperity requires solidarity, generosity and compassion. With these as the paradigm, the fight will advance everywhere, and awareness will grow. It’s already growing.
