So starting with the objective part, with
the facts, the United States is a country
which is among the least equal in the world.
According to Credit Suisse, which is a Swiss
bank and not some kind of crazy left wing
organization, we are second in the world in
wealth inequality after the Russian Federation.
In the United States since the 1980s basically
90 percent of the American population has
seen no improvement in either wealth or income.
Almost all the improvement in wealth and income
has been in the top ten percent, and most
of that has been in the top one percent, and
most of that has been in the top .1 percent,
and most of that has been in the top .01 percent,
which means that not only are people not moving
forward objectively, but the way they experience
the world—and this is very powerful—is
that other people are on top.
So if you and I have the same thing over the
course of 30 years, but we watch as our neighbor
suddenly has 20 times as much, we’re not
going to say “Everything’s fine because
we have the same,” we’re going to say
“Gosh, our neighbor has more than we do,
and has so much more than we do he could probably
reach in and take everything we have away,”
which is, of course, true—and that’s the
condition that people call oligarchy.
So the politics of inevitability says “the
market has to lead to democracy, and therefore
there’s no reason to correct for what the
market does.”
If you don’t correct what the market does,
if you don’t support trade unions, if you
don’t build up some kind of a welfare state,
if you don’t support public education and
so on, then you’re going to have a situation
where citizens spread apart in wealth and
spread apart in income, which is what’s
happening.
And that in turn may be the most powerful
way that the politics of inevitability breaks
into the politics of eternity.
Because if there is massive inequality of
wealth and income, individuals and families
no longer think “I’ve got a bright future,”
they no longer believe—and this is something
Mr. Trump got right even if he has no solution
and he’s making things worse on purpose—they
no longer believe in the American dream, and
they’re correct not to do so.
If you were born in 1940 your chances of doing
better than your parents were about 90 percent.
If you were born in 1980 your chances were
about one in two, and it keeps going down.
So wealth inequality means the lack of social
events, it means a totally different horizon,
it means that you see life in a completely
different way.
You stop thinking time is an arrow which is
moving forward to something better and you
start thinking, “Maybe the good old days
were better.
Maybe we have to ‘make America great again,’”and
you get caught in these nostalgic loops.
You start thinking “it can’t be my fault
that I’m not doing better, so who’s fault
is it?”
And then the clever politicians instead of
providing policy for you provide enemies for
you, they provide language for you with which
you can explain why you’re not doing so
well.
They blame the Other, whether it’s the Chinese
or the Muslims or the Jews or the blacks or
the immigrants, and that allows you to think
“Okay time is a cycle, things used to be
better, but other people have come and they’ve
taken things away from me.”
And that’s how the politics of inevitability
becomes the politics of eternity: wealth inequality,
income inequality are one of the major channels
by which that happens.
So one of the fundamental problems with our
American right wing “politics of inevitability”
is that it generates income-and wealth-inequality
and it explains away income and wealth inequality.
And so you get this cycle where objectively
people are less and less well-off and subjectively
we keep telling ourselves this is somehow
okay, because in the grand scheme of things
this is somehow “necessary,” when it’s
not.
