The Way Back. F. H. Buckley
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later, on his way to his inauguration in Washington, he told a gathering at Independence Hall in Philadelphia that “I have never had a feeling politically that did not spring from the sentiments embodied in the Declaration of Independence.”26 Jefferson had introduced an abstract truth about equality, applicable to all men and all times. What Lincoln had done, however, was to give new meaning to the Declaration. First, and most obviously, Lincoln understood that Jefferson’s egalitarianism was incompatible with the institution of slavery. In addition, Lincoln had a different understanding about why equality mattered. More than an abstract truth, it was also a guarantee of social mobility.
This progress by which the poor, honest, industrious, and resolute man raises himself, that he may work on his own account . . . is that progress that human nature is entitled to, is that improvement in condition that is intended to be secured by those institutions under which we live, is the great principle for which this government was really formed.27
Jefferson had spoken of a natural aristocracy in which the most gifted and able might rise to the top, but this was simply a happy by-product of equality. For Lincoln, however, it was more than that. Rather, the central idea of America, as expressed in the Declaration, became through Lincoln the promise of income mobility and a faith in the ability of people to rise to a higher station in life. There was nothing base about labor, as Fitzhugh had thought. Instead, what was ignoble was an aristocratic disdain for work and the failure to attempt to better oneself. That was his idea of what America meant, and his ideal of self-improvement and mobility has come down to us as the American Dream.
That was our dream—but has our dream now fled?
I no longer wished for a better world, because I was thinking of the whole of creation, and in the light of this clearer discernment I had come to see that, though the higher things are better than the lower, the sum of all creation is better than the higher things alone.
—ST. AUGSTINE, Confessions, Book VII
IN 2008, BARACK OBAMA WAS ELECTED PRESIDENT AFTER a largely issue-free campaign. There were serious issues out there, to be sure. The war in Iraq continued, but after the surge U.S. combat fatalities had fallen from 126 in May 2007 to thirteen in July 2008. The military mission would be scaled back, whoever won the election. The financial crisis, which began with the bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers in 2007, would turn out to be a defining challenge for the Obama administration; but it was not an issue that much divided the parties the next year, and the government bailout was authorized by legislation signed by George W. Bush.
The principal issue of the campaign was nothing so boring as that. Instead, the issue was the candidates, and in particular Obama, who ran as a charismatic leader. He had virtually nothing by way of legislative background, but offered hope and change and the promise that his election would signal “the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal.” There was also the prospect of absolution for America’s historical racial injustices, coupled with the sly suggestion that his opponents were tinged with racism. They would dwell on his faults, he said, and then they would add, “Did I mention he was black?”
To many pundits, the election of a rock star president in 2008 seemed a one-off, not to be repeated. In future elections, Democrats would not be faced by a tired John McCain and life and politics would go on, not much changed. “This was a good Democratic year,” observed Bill Kristol, “but it is still a center-right country.”1 Within two years, however, Democratic majorities in the House and Senate had passed far-reaching progressive legislation: the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (Obamacare) and the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act.
The Tea Party irruption and the 2010 Congressional election, which returned control of the House to Republicans, might have seemed to evidence Kristol’s beliefs about a conservative country, but if so the 2012 presidential election would have been a rude awakening. If the 2008 election was largely content-free, the 2012 election was fought over a single issue, that of income inequality and immobility, in which Obama and the Democrats employed the rhetoric of class warfare to pit the bottom 99 percent against the top one percent. The 2014 mid-term elections were again a turn to the Right, but the impuissance of Congress in a country with an increasingly presidential form of government focuses attention on 2016, and the prospect of another election for the highest office fought over income disparities by candidates both Left and Right.
In a signature 2011 speech in Osawatomie, Kansas, Obama described income inequality as the defining issue of our time. America’s grand bargain, he said, was that those who contribute to the country should share in its wealth. That bargain had made the country great, the envy of the world, but now it was betrayed by the “breathtaking greed” of the super-rich.
Look at the statistics. In the last few decades, the average income of the top 1 percent has gone up by more than 250 percent to $1.2 million per year. . . . And yet, over the last decade the incomes of most Americans have actually fallen by about 6 percent.2
The problem was worsened, he said, by a tax system whose shelters and loopholes gave the super-rich lower rates than the middle class. “Some billionaires have a tax rate as low as 1 percent. One percent. That is the height of unfairness. It is wrong.” And how did this happen? Because inequality gave the superrich who contribute to political parties an outsized voice in the way in which tax and other laws are written. Worse still, he said, the promise of income mobility, that a child born in poverty might through his own efforts rise to the middle class, had been broken.
Mitt Romney sought to deflect Obama’s message with a promise of a more entrepreneurial society, but this failed to arouse much enthusiasm. The Republican candidate, with his 59-point recovery plan, didn’t connect with the voters. What they wanted instead was a candidate who would speak to the issues of income inequality and income immobility. The Republicans weren’t interested in inequality—but inequality was interested in them. And so Romney lost, and this at a time when the economy was so weak that pundit George F. Will opined that, if Obama won, the Republicans should find another line of work.
The voters’ concerns were magnified by the severe job losses of the Great Recession. In the twenty-six months between December 2007 and January 2010, the economy shed 7.2 million jobs and those with a high school education or less accounted for four-fifths of the job losses.3 The community organizer—Obama—told them he had their back, while the asset fund manager—Romney—came across as the boss who was about to give them the pink slip.
The Great Recession of 2007–09, and the job losses that ensued, threatened a core belief of ordinary Americans, the idea that this is a country of economic promise where everyone can get ahead. If that’s no longer the case something seems drastically wrong. Let’s start, then, by asking whether income inequality is really the problem it’s cracked up to be. We’ll never have perfect income equality, so long as people sort themselves out by their industry and talents, and any government that tried to mandate it would, if successful, deprive its citizens of the incentive to produce wealth. Everyone would be equal, but they’d also be very, very poor. Income disparities in themselves are not a problem, then, unless they rise to the levels described so effectively by Obama, where we’ve become immobile, where the rich shape the contours of the laws and prevent those at the bottom of the ladder from getting ahead. Is Obama’s America our America, then?