The New York Times’ Frank Rich: Obama is right—the people are to blame
By David Walsh
26 January 2009
Barack Obama's inauguration has brought out the worst in a good many
people, especially from within the environs of American liberalism.
The liberal pundits either invent an imaginary ‘progressive' Obama or
come forward to express agreement with his fundamentally right-wing
views and policies.
In his weekly comment Sunday, New York Times columnist Frank Rich,
taking his cue from Obama's inauguration speech, asserts that the
American people share the blame for the financial crisis. Rich writes
that "Obama wasn't just rebuking the outgoing administration. He was
delicately but unmistakably calling out the rest of us who went along
for the ride as America swerved into the dangerous place we find
ourselves now."
Rich continues: "Feckless as it was for Bush to ask Americans to go
shopping after 9/11, we all too enthusiastically followed his lead,
whether we were wealthy, working-class or in between. We spent a
decade feasting on easy money, don't-pay-as-you-go consumerism and a
metastasizing celebrity culture."
After enumerating a number of crimes of the financial elite, Rich
returns to his theme: "In less lofty precincts of the American
economic spectrum, the numbers may be different but the ethos has
often been similar... [R]egular Americans took on all kinds of debt
wildly disproportionate to their assets and income. The nearly $1
trillion in unpaid credit-card balances is now on deck to be the next
big crash."
He notes that in his inaugural speech Obama issued a "somber" call for
sacrifice, and, after citing the president's reference to "workers who
would rather cut their hours than see a friend lose their job," Rich
adds, "There will be-there must be-far larger sacrifices in that vein
yet to come." He concludes: "While it's become a Beltway cliché that
America's new young president has yet to be tested, it is past time
for us to realize that our own test is also about to begin."
This is extraordinary stuff. Aside from its sycophancy and the excuses
it offers for Obama's banal and empty speech, Rich's column gives
genuine voice to the sentiments of selfish, upper-middle-class
circles.
(New York Times columnists couldn't agree on the literary quality of
Obama's inaugural. While Rich headlined his piece "No Time for Poetry"
and argued that "this speech was austere, not pretty," Times op-ed
writer Stanley Fish opined that Obama "carries us from meditative bead
to meditative bead, and invites us to contemplate." The prose style,
Fish tells us, "lends itself to leisurely and loving study." While the
aesthetic evaluations differ, there is a similar degree of groveling
in both cases.)
According to Rich and his ilk, the American people share
responsibility for the policies of the financial elite. Presumably
then, the various equally guilty social elements should all have
benefited.
In reality, the American working class has suffered a protracted,
decades-long decline in its social position, while the very rich have
engorged themselves on the nation's wealth, much of it by semi-
criminal means, opening up a vast social chasm.
University of California Berkeley economist Emmanuel Saez has pointed
out that in 2006 the richest one-tenth of American families accounted
for 49.7 percent of all income that year, the highest share since
1917. From 1993 to 2006, the top 1 percent of American families
captured about half of the nation's overall income growth, and from
2002 to 2006 "the top 1 percent captured almost three-quarters of
income growth." ("Striking it Richer: The Evolution of Top Incomes in
the United States")
The notion that the vast majority of the American people ‘went along
for the ride' and feasted ‘on easy money' alongside investment
bankers, hedge fund managers and Wall Street brokers is libelous and
absurd. Bernie Madoff or John Thain as Everyman?
Apart from the fact that such lucrative opportunities were not open to
'regular Americans' if they had wanted to take advantage of them,
there is both a social and a moral divide in the US. The financial
swindlers at the top of American society do not speak to the average
moral level of the country. Most Americans do not spend every waking
moment devising means of accumulating greater personal wealth; they
donate money to charity, they volunteer, they help others and they
care for their families.
As for the accumulation of debt, this was not some collective act of
recklessness or immaturity, as it was in fact a desperate effort by
millions of families to keep their heads above water. As former
secretary of labor Robert Reich has pointed out, working class and
middle class families tried numerous "coping mechanisms" over the
course of decades to get by on stagnating or declining incomes.
Reich pointed out in the Financial Times a year ago, "Male wages today
are in fact lower than they were then [in 1970]: the income of a young
man in his 30s is now 12 per cent below that of a man his age three
decades ago."
The first "coping mechanism" was "moving more women into work." A
second was working longer: The average American works two weeks more
each year than 30 years ago and 350 more hours a year than the typical
European.
The third such mechanism was borrowing and raising money through home
equity loans. Reich pointed out, "Americans got nearly $250 billion
worth of home equity every quarter in second mortgages and
refinancings." Astronomical credit card debt is an expression of the
same phenomenon. Last winter, some 27 million Americans had to borrow
money simply to pay their heating bills.
Well-heeled and complacent, Frank Rich is a million miles from this
reality. As the vast majority of Americans have endured a declining
living standard, a small portion of society, those at the top and
sections of the upper middle class, have done very well for
themselves. Is Rich in the same financial position as he was 20 years
ago, as New York Times drama critic? Today, in addition to his pay at
the Times, Rich writes books (the film rights to one of which, Ghost
Light, were acquired by Storyline Entertainment), pens articles for
other publications, delivers lectures and, in May 2008, became a
‘creative consultant' for HBO, the pay television network.
Under the Bush administration, Rich could sometimes be quite scathing.
His comments, however, were generally directed toward the most obvious
excesses and stupidities of Bush and company, and never answered any
of the more complex and fundamental questions about social development
and politics in the US. In the end, he personifies a flabby, self-
indulgent liberalism. Distant from the working class, circulating
among the semi-intellectual and semi-serious in Manhattan, Rich has
now determined that the American population must make "far larger
sacrifices."
He writes that "Obama couldn't give us FDR's first inaugural address
because we are not yet where America was in 1933." No, in fact, Obama
gave the opposite of Roosevelt's speech. The 1933 speech was an
explicit indictment of the financial aristocracy and an appeal to
democratic and egalitarian traditions. Obama's speech evaded the issue
of the real responsibility of specific class forces and invoked the
mirage of collective responsibility. The latter, as in post-war
Germany, lets the genuinely guilty off the hook.
Rich imagines himself to be terribly progressive and sensitive to
human problems. In truth, he articulates the outlook of an
increasingly narrow, self-centered layer. Such people might be
irritated at times that they couldn't afford the condos and summer
homes reserved for the top one-tenth of one percent of the population.
That fueled a degree of resentment, and they wouldn't mind seeing
their social superiors taken down a notch or two. But they have no
interest in anything that smacks of socialism or serious wealth
redistribution. On the contrary, on the life-and-death social
questions, they see eye-to-eye and make common cause with Obama and
his policies of austerity for ‘regular Americans.' It's not unexpected
and not very edifying, except for the light it sheds on the
increasingly reactionary social outlook of contemporary American
liberalism.
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