Effluence Peddling

Thank God another election season and its torrent of advertising effluvia has ended, so that I can get back to reviling people I actually know. The outcome was a foregone conclusion for months, with the same electorate that resoundingly rejected the Republicans in 2008 resoundingly rejecting the Democrats two years later. It’s official: the some-of-the-people-you-can-fool-all-of-the-time is now the swing vote.

We Americans are not long on memory or delayed gratification. When things go wrong we expect them to be fixed, and pronto. And so after sending Obama to Washington as if he was Harry Potter or some other wizard capable of saving us all from reaping the harvest of years of magical thinking, we are now sending the Tea Party to Washington to burn the place down.

It’s an interesting choice; to take the only institution in our Republic part of whose expressed mission is to check the powerful and protect the powerless – our government – and instead of reforming or rebuilding it, castrate it.  How this is expected to return any real power to the average American is anyone’s guess. But at least it’s a mission possible.

I understand the urge to just tear everything down and start over. It’s an alluring fantasy. I felt the same way when I was fifteen. I didn’t much care for the choices and responsibilities in front of me, so I daydreamed of hiding a row boat somewhere on the southern shores of Lake Erie, then going for a swim one day and faking my own death by drowning; only to row off to a brand new life in Canada. Some of my more liberal friends are undoubtedly considering a similar plan right now.

As for me, I’m not going anywhere soon. One thing I’ve always admired about conservatives is that when they are in the minority they band together and fight like hell, whereas liberals tend to move to Paris and whine. I fervently disagree, however, with much of what those conservatives are fighting for, especially when the predictable result will be to continue redistributing America’s wealth to its wealthiest.

This is tricky turf for discussion. Most Americans see the accumulation of great wealth as proof of the American Dream, with close to 70% believing they have a real shot to reach the uppermost rung on the ladder. That mathematical impossibility aside, the facts are that social mobility in America is at historic lows. The signature result of the economic policies of both Republicans and Democrats over the last 30 years is a wealth distribution curve that’s beginning to look like Zimbabwe’s.

Every major economic metric from percentages of earned income, investment income, and GDP growth to property ownership and the accumulation of other real assets, shows a steady climb in the share of the nation’s bounty that’s under the control of the top 3%. Meanwhile the middle class is doing slightly better than the polar bear at staving off extinction, while poverty soars and the bottom 50% coagulates into a permanent underclass.

It’s no wonder so many people are feeling oppressed and angry with their government.

Unfortunately, they’re targeting the puppet while the puppeteers laugh all the way to their too-big-to-fail banks. The real culprit undermining individual liberty and opportunity in America is not government. It’s this ever-increasing consolidation of wealth.

Such concentrations of power are inherently abusive to individual liberty and opportunity. That’s just the way power acts, whether it’s political, religious, military, or economic. It’s also why the founders created a political system of checks and balances: to blunt the abuses of unrestrained power so the average individual could be free to flourish.

Now that system itself has been captured by a moneyed aristocracy, through multi-billion dollar election cycles like the one we’ve just gone through that make a mockery of the term “free speech.” The vast majority of this money funds negative advertising, corroding the body politic. The outcome is a “Party of Washington” political class beholden to that money, and a general electorate either enraged or disengaged with the whole idea of government; a win-win for the already disproportionate influence of our super-wealthy elite.

Understandably, most among the super-wealthy disagree with this analysis. They claim that they are the oppressed, not the oppressors, victimized by a progressive tax system that forces them to pay almost as great a share of the nation’s taxes as the share of its assets that they control. They argue that they should be the first in line for a tax cut, if not just for the sake of “fairness”, then because they clearly understand best what to do with the money, which is why they are super-wealthy to begin with.

This explains perfectly Meg Whitman’s decision to spend $140 million of her own cash in her attempt to become California’s governor, a job that pays $206,000 a year. In case  the fiscal hubris of such an expenditure wasn’t blatant enough, she didn’t even get the job. She’d have been better off waiting until the state is forced to auction itself off on eBay. Still, Ms. Whitman did manage to remind a lot of people of the good old days in America, when the poor were blessed and the rich were filthy. So it wasn’t a total loss.

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Meanwhile a far different narrative about wealth and power and the role of government is unfolding in my wife Daisy’s native land, Brazil. It’s been a fascinating tale of two countries during our marriage. For one thing, having suffered – and I mean real suffering, not just the psychological kind – for so long under the indifference of a ruling elite, Brazilians do not share our illusion that great wealth is necessarily a sign of superior intelligence, competence, merit, or morality.

In the last half of the 20^th century, while Americans were enjoying the most prosperous fifty years of any people in history, Brazil was experiencing a coup d’etat, followed by 20 years of a military dictatorship that gutted the middle class, followed by another 10 years of  hyperinflation that flattened everyone else except those at the top that were running the show. In the 1990’s alone, the country created and abandoned four different currencies as it struggled to its feet.

Then came the first ten years of the 21^st century, when America suddenly devolved into the world’s largest debtor nation with one of its slowest growth rates, while Brazil prospered, paying off her international debts thanks to a booming economy. Ironically, from our limited American ideological perspective anyway, this turnaround was accomplished under Brazil’s first working class/leftist/socialist leader, President Lula da Silva.

Brazil’s story is not all sweetness and light. Much to the disgust of his people, Lula’s presidency was also marked by constant corruption scandals similar to its aristocratic predecessors. But in contrast to the cronyism of those elites, his party’s decidedly non-ideological economic policies helped lift 20 million Brazilians out of poverty, and 30 million more into the middle class.

Having lived through every imaginable shell game, Brazilians view this progress with a sophisticated cynicism. They don’t believe in their government any more than we believe in ours. Days after Lula was elected to his second term, the people let it be known that they were not pleased and not fooled by all the corruption, booing him heartily when he presided over the opening of the Pan-American Games. They’d voted him back into office because for the first time in half a century their nation’s wealth was spreading outward and downward, not just to the top, but they made it clear it was a vote about those results, not of trust or confidence. At this point in their history, most Brazilians believe only in themselves. Not the party, not the government, not the markets, and least of all the upper 3%.

Less than a week ago, just days before Americans chose the Party of Really Big Money over the Party of Just Big Money, Brazilians elected their first woman president. Dilma Rousseff’s resume is even more strikingly leftist than Lula’s, including a decade spent in a guerilla group that fought against the military dictatorship. She is said to know her way around an AK-47. She also knows what real tyranny is firsthand, having been captured, imprisoned, and tortured for several years during that struggle. While Brazilians are decidedly skeptical about her promise to reign in her own party’s corruption, and continue to make it known that they are watching, no one questions her love of country.

But then, that wouldn’t occur to a Brazilian. They all love their country, or to be more precise they all love being Brazilian. It’s an emotion far different from what we call patriotism, bigger and simpler than any political or religious or ethnic identity – in a country as wildly diverse as America in all these areas – and completely free of ideology.

It’s just something they all own, individually and collectively, forged in the crucible of the last 40-50 years, which is untouchable and truly indivisible.

Not that Brazilians aren’t as contentious and argumentative as Americans. If anything they are more so. It’s a highly volatile and passionate culture. But they also have this unspoken connection that brought them through those dark and troubled times together. A spirit of unity that doesn’t expect or require unanimity. In a word, they have a “we”.

As long as they maintain that spirit, Brazil is likely to continue its rise. And as long as we remain hooked on the addictive fury of us-versus-them, with its nonsense battle cry of “taking our country back” from each other, the indifferent elite who actually run this place will keep egging us on from the comfort and safety of their luxury skyboxes, placing wagers on a contest that only we can lose.