Cadillac Cons, Limo Libs & Blaming the Poor for Being Poor

In my upcoming book Hostitle Takeover, I have an entire section on one of the most virulent myths that the wealthy and powerful have spent years spreading around: the idea that people choose what economic position in society to hold, and more specifically, that the poor choose to be poor. The rationale for pushing this propaganda is obvious: the wealthy and powerful create a rhetorical framework for an economic agenda that is aimed at delivering more and more public assets to fewer and fewer private interests. If the poor choose to be poor, after all, why spend any resources trying to improve their lives?

Today, right-wing columnist George Will provides us with a pristine example of how mainstream this line of thinking is within the media/political Establishment. Will, you may recall, is the pundit whose gloss-shiny skin and hair makes him look like he lives in a display case at Madame Tussaud's Wax Museum. His speaking inflections ooze the kind of elitism and arrogance that many thought went out with the Great Gatsby era. Here's what he had to say today:

"The new paradigm is of behavior-driven poverty that results from individuals' nonmaterial deficits. It results from a scarcity of certain habits and mores -- punctuality, hygiene, industriousness, deferral of gratification, etc. -- that are not developed in disorganized homes."

This kind of fact-free statement by an upper-crust Washington pundit is rarely delivered in so blunt a manner. So Will should get some credit for just coming out and acknowledging his class warrior tendencies. Politicians usually package this sentiment like Vice President Dick Cheney did a few days ago, when he said the Americans were creating their own economic problems because they simply are deciding not to save enough. Right-wing ideologues, meanwhile, usually couch the "poverty occurs because of choices/behavior" idea in seemingly academic terms, which are nonetheless just as disgusting. For proof of that, just check out the Heritage Foundation's "study" claiming that people in poverty in America aren't poor.

What this logic expects us to forget, of course, is that most often economic status is determined by forces out of the ordinary person's control. Wages in America are stagnating, pensions are being slashed, big companies are laying off thousands of workers, and health care premiums are skyrocketing. All of these phenomena are directly related to driving people into poverty. Yet, Will and his ideological bretheren sipping chardonnay at their Georgetown cocktail parties expect us to believe those phenomena have something to do with citizens' behavior and choices - and they don't want us to ever consider that they have a lot to do with the public policy choices of the politicians that Will's class warriors bought and paid for with their cash and with their well-funded propaganda.

Make no mistake about it - this kind of elitism isn't limited to Cadillac Conservatives like Will. As I have noted before, it is also highly prevalent in many Limosene Liberal circles, though it comes out in a different way. Many "center-left" spokespeople both within the Democratic Party and in the media repeat the claim that if people just obtained a better education, they would do better economically. These folks, happily insulated in their gated communities, see themselves as educated, look at themselves as having done well, and have concluded that if only more workers just had the tenacity to get as educated as them, those workers would do better. These are, of course, the same people who have supported the free trade policies that have undermined Americans' core economic security - the trade policies that has often eliminated the power of education in raising people's economic situations because the jobs that would have been available have been shipped off to cheap overseas labor markets.

There is a silver lining in all of this. The more the elitist economic policies crush ordinary Americans and economically polarize the country to Gilded Age proportions, the more people are going to realize that the elitists who spew this nonsense are attacking not just some poor "other" - but attacking the average citizen. Put another way, there is going to be a serious backlash. And the political movement that represents that backlash is going to be the one that finally starts rejuvenating our country.

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