The Tyranny of the Wealthy – The USA and the Great Equality Lie
I’ve always said that New York City is my favourite place in the world.
It is sensational. Mesmeric and beguiling. Anarchic and unique. No other city feels as sentient, as if the essence of life itself courses up its streets and down its avenues. Citizens and streets alike are instantaneously imbued with an energy that makes the Duracell bunny look like a wet plastic bag.
However, regardless of its fantastic criss-cross of cultures and creeds, NYC remains an exceedingly American city. Such a melting pot could not be fostered anywhere else in the world, where market capitalism and open borders have historically allowed people the world over to arrive, strive and thrive in the Land of the Free. It is a richer place for it. Inconceivably so. For centuries people have been awestruck by the USA’s elaborate form of democracy, its devotion to capitalism and of course by that unbridled faith in the future which the American Dream constitutes. Anyone that has holidayed or lived there will be familiar with each of these, indeed many fall in love with them and can never leave. But the perils and painful contradictions of the USA are just as obvious to anyone that does.
Here is a country founded on slavery but which declared that ‘all men are created equal’ in its Declaration of Independence. A nation that has forever prized obscene wealth creation to the point that many are left in poverty, often destitute. From the era of slavery, when the country’s Original Sin was institutionalised and brutally executed for the benefit of the elite, through the Gilded Age which saw the legal landscape cleared for Jim Crow laws just as men like John D. Rockfeller and Cornelius Vanderbilt amassed fortunes which have yet to be surpassed. Little has changed today. As of 2018, the three richest men in the USA controlled more wealth than the bottom 50% of Americans and the wealth of an average white household was $146,984. The comparative figure for an African American family was just $3,557.
Such inequality often manifests in truly bizarre ways. In his 2019 book ‘The Meritocracy Trap’, Daniel Markovitz pointed out that the entire menus of two Californian eateries, Taco Bell (a fast food chain) and The French Landry (a fine dining restaurant) do not share a single ingredient. Not even salt.
Such pointed inequality has recently been ignited by the highly publicized death of George Floyd, a victim of despicable and visceral police brutality. The fact that more white US citizens are killed by police each year is indeed true, and it’s worth noting that the names of these white victims almost never enter the public discourse, but such issues are for a different piece. Ultimately, in the most heavily armed nation the world has ever seen, police confrontations resulting in death is a depressing but omnipresent possibility. One may even argue that some deaths are inevitable given the US police force makes in excess of 10 million arrests a year. And due to a variety of complex issues, not least the wealth disparities I have detailed above, African Americans are overwhelmingly more likely to be involved in such confrontations.
Only the delusional would describe recent events as surprising or devoid from the country’s history, a history which has been extolled and examined ad infinitum in recent weeks. A jaunt through the tremendous range of literature that the nation has both fostered and inspired offers a fresh lens through which to study it.
The Statue of Liberty is a poignant but appropriate place to begin. The poetry of Emma Lazarus is carved on its base, imploring the nations of the world to “Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free”. Read against the backdrop of the death of George Floyd, and many before him, such sentiments drip with an irony so caustic it could sear through the rock onto which it is engraved.
John Steinbeck’s words assume a similarly tragic import today. The Grapes of Wrath remains my favourite novel, a powerful but tragic depiction of a tenant family in Dust Bowl America. The life of the Joads is harsh, unrelenting and bedecked by grief and tragedy but Steinbeck manages to leave the reader hopeful that they will know better days. Such sentiments may seem odd given the wearying poverty the book portrays but they are consistent with the sympathies of Steinbeck. The Noble Laureate famously asserted that in the USA “the poor see themselves not as an exploited proletariat, but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires”. Perhaps the Joads would meet their end in the barn in which the poignant final scene is set. But maybe not. Maybe theirs would be a future of fortune and fame. Even at such a striking nadir, the possibilities of the American Dream could never be ignored. Optimism outlasted oppression. Today, as cities across the USA are looted and pillaged on a daily basis, African Americans feel increasingly certain that serious change is needed for them to remain similarly sanguine about their own chances in 21st Century America.
F. Scott Fitzgerald’s take looks more prescient. The author penned perhaps the most famous novel of all, The Great Gatsby, in which he tells the tale of a millionaire pre-occupied with excess, decadence and the primacy of appearance over substance. Gatsby transpires to be a bootlegger-made-good, desperately clamouring to engage with the social circles of the Yale Old Boys and the delectable Daisy Buchanan. Such posturing, such relentless devotion to chasing the American Dream, hardly proves a smooth endeavour as the protagonist is routinely on edge, saturated in nerves and ultimately does not survive the end of the book. Unlike in The Grapes of Wrath, hope does not extend beyond the final page. Debauchery degenerates into death and despair. Fitzgerald’s aphorism that “America does not give second chances” feels as applicable to Gatsby as it is to African Americans today, a people that feel condemned to a life defined by racial bias and prejudice from birth.
While Gatsby lived his life in elaborate country estates while attending and hosting wondrous parties, the Joads roamed the Dust Bowl interminably, struggling for work and survival. The books could not depict more divergent lives although, remarkably, both were published in the same year, 1925. 95 years later, the lives of US citizens of different demographics are just as disparate.
To the outsider looking in, the great American lie of equality rarely convinced. Writing following his visit in 1842, Charles Dickens believed it to be a nation devoid of morals, eager to place greed and wealth above any semblance of moral rectitude. The rampant exploitation that slavery enabled was anachronistic to Dickens even then, the Abolition of Slavery Act having been passed by Britain almost 10 years prior. He would hardly be surprised at the racial inequality that ladens American life today. The ebullient Mark Tapley in Dickens’ 1844 novel Martin Chuzzlewit claimed that;
“if I was a painter, and was to paint the American Eagle, how should I do it?…I should want to draw it like a Bat, for its short-sightedness; like a Bantam, for its bragging; …. ; like a Peacock, for its vanity; like an Ostrich, for putting its head in the mud, and thinking nobody sees it -“.
Mark Tapley, Martin Chuzzlewit
Perhaps even Alexis De Tocqueville, the writer most enamoured by America’s elaborate form of democracy, would today toy with tribulation. Writing in the 1830s, he saw a nation which was ostensibly wretched and callow but fundamentally was underpinned by an intriguing brand of self-regulating government. He believed that the ‘balance of power’ system enshrined in the US Constitution could provide the USA sufficient stability to overcome slavery and its associated societal difficulties. Such stability was particularly prized in Europe at the time, as the traditional powers struggled to recover from the Napoleonic Wars.
De Tocqueville did not believe that ‘checks and balances’ guaranteed success however, identifying what he labeled “The Tyranny of the Majority” as a major threat. Perhaps ‘The Tyranny of the Wealthy” would be more applicable to the United States today. The French aristocrat feared that, in a land where everything was dictated by the majority, politics and government would become boring. Predictable. Staid. People would disengage, the electorate would lose interest and society would recuse itself from political discourse. Elements of this can be seen today as change is increasingly sought through protest rather than the ballot box. Just this year US citizens were subjected to an impeachment trial with a peculiar propensity for pomp and palaver despite the President’s acquittal appearing inevitable before proceedings had even begun. For decades the US Presidential election has been an event of more glitz and commercial extravagance than any Super Bowl but repeatedly, regardless of the winner, the wealthy remain. Change is averted. The rich get richer. And the poor are left to make-do with empty promises and tawdry campaign slogans;
“Kinder, Gentler Nation”. “Change We Can Believe In”. “Make America Great Again”. Each have fallen short in their own pathetic and inevitable way.
When writing “Democracy in America”, De Tocqueville surmised his overarching faith in American democracy when he said that “more fires get started in America, but more fires get put out too”. It’s very unlikely that the USA’s current implosion constitutes the final fire, but given the inequality that has forever bedecked the United States of America, it may be instructive as to what such a fire could look like.
