I’m the general contractor and main laborer on renovations of my new house, and the job has brought me into contact with working-class Americans. I enjoy this, and experience it as a privilege: it’s part of the economy that my natural world, the upper-middle class media, shuts itself off from.
The experience has offered lessons about the meritocracy. First off, there’s a certain type of personal freedom in the working class that simply doesn’t exist in the elite. A lot of the guys I’ve worked with are wild characters. Full of strange opinion and personal eccentricity that wouldn’t be tolerated in the professional world. Working class life has always been more colorful and alive, but these guys express political ideas that would be self-censored in good jobs, and they indulge odd habits that wouldn’t work in professional life. A few years ago my wife noticed this trend and said the culture was dividing into "fuckups" and "suckups." The fuckups are more interesting, but they get nowhere. The suckups make a lot of money, but then they have to have meetings with other super-educated people to argue over one word in an article, or an ad campaign, or a press release. No freedom at all. (I just got a phone call from a well-paid publicist berating me for one phrase I used in an article in an important publication; there’s just so much riding on elite media…)
All the working guys are living near the edge. The insulators have tattoos and an attitude. The taper lives in a trailer park and stutters. The movers were most of them missing teeth. The sheetrocker has a drug problem and has a brilliant-self-destructive gleam. None of them is making out. When I gave guys a $20 or $40 tip, they always accepted it quickly and gratefully, and sometimes brought it up before they left the job.
The large issue this speaks to is the widening divide between the rich and poor. There are more rich than ever, and they’re ever more distant from the working class. There is no sense of a continuity of experience, let alone unity. The middle class is pulverized, and of course hardly any one who pushed for the Iraq war has a child serving there. Tony Judt has a fascinating review in NYRB of Robert Reich’s new book on "Supercapitalism," headlined, the "Wrecking Ball of Innovation." Judt notes that Reich, like other meritocrats, is complacent about the effects of globalization. Hey, that’s just the way technology and capitalism work. There’s no human choice or culture in Reich’s equation, there aren’t even politics, Judt notes: for Reich, this is the natural order of things. Judt points out that "super-capitalism" tends to undermine "the noncommercial institutions and relations–of cohesion, trust, custom, restrain, obligation, morality, authority–that it inherited." Economic growth has little connection to democracy; look at China.
It’s interesting that Alan Greenspan has shown more of a moral take on these issues than Reich. He has said that the loss of a common American experience, the division into two Americas, could lead to civil unrest. Judt hints at the same when he suggests that Reich’s worldview points to "an incipient collapse of the core values and institutions of the republic….In Reich’s many examples it is the modern international corporation, its overpaid executives, and its ‘value-obsessed’ shareholders who seem to incarnate the breakdown of civic values." Pat Buchanan is more alive to this than any hundred meritocrats.
Working on my house, I’ve seen this other America first-hand. I relish the culture; but then I have the freedom to do so. When I’m exhausted, I just step back into elite culture. Right now I’m staying at a friends’ house in Garrison, New York, a fancy community, and the guys have arrived to blow the leaves, three guys in dingy uniforms. Look what the meritocracy has done: turned the other half of society into a servant class.
