POLITICS AUGUST 16, 2011
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The scenes of violence that emerged from London last week—the burning buildings and rampant looting, the police and firefighters under attack—were undeniably upsetting, but that’s not to say they were unfamiliar. The riots not only bore a strong resemblance to several recent instances of violent crime in the United States, they hearkened directly to the incendiary outbursts of racial violence that plagued this country from 1965 to 1968—from Watts in Los Angeles, to Detroit, to the H Street corridor in Washington D.C. But if the expressions of unrest are following the pattern from that previous era, the policy responses likely won’t be—and that bodes poorly for any hopes of sustainably ending the violence sometime soon.
Governments of the 1960s and 1970s were quick to respond to their restive populations with renewed investments in the social safety net and in low-skill job programs. Cash was channeled from the federal government to beleaguered cities through programs like the Neighborhood Youth Corps, a government job program for 16 to 21-year-olds; Job Corps, which trained youths of the same age; Model Cities, a program of grants to cities distributed locally by boards made up of representatives from poor neighborhoods; and Community Action Programs, which were used to hire organizers to encourage political activism in such areas. Higher courts ordered, and a government regulatory apparatus enforced, tough civil rights and affirmative actions remedies. Government at all levels began hiring greater numbers of blacks and other minorities into secure civil service positions with reliable access to upward promotion.
Today, our public officials are more apt to respond in a spirit of moral condemnation than social generosity. On August 11, when British Prime Minister David Cameron went before parliament to address the unrest, he offered only outrage. “It is criminality pure simple,” he said. “We will not allow a culture of fear to exist on our streets.” It’s a response that strongly resembled the speech given by Michael Nutter, the African-American mayor of Philadelphia, on August 7, in response to a recent spate of street violence there. “If you want to act like an idiot, move. Move out of this city,” he told the congregation at Carmel Baptist Church. “We don’t want you here anymore.”
There are a few factors contributing to this impoverished policy response. The first is that we are living through an age of austerity. England’s conservative government immediately adopted sharp spending cuts and tax hikes upon taking office. The cuts reduce housing and welfare benefits for the poor and eliminate government jobs. In the United States, the most immediate effects of austerity are being felt at the state level. A July 28 survey by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities found 38 of the 47 states that finished budgeting had enacted “deep, identifiable cuts in K-12 education, higher education, health care, or other key areas” in setting spending for fiscal year 2012. Social condemnation is a conveniently cheap solution at a time of dwindling tax receipts.
Our contemporary belt-tightening, however, is also matched by a constriction of society’s moral imagination—an ethical corollary to our fiscal impoverishment. That’s most acutely apparent in attitudes towards race. In the 1960s and 1970s, white Americans were acutely aware of the legacy of injustice inflicted on African Americans, from slavery to Jim Crow. Now, the civil rights movement is largely a spent force. Polls show a growing belief among whites that anti-white discrimination is as strong or stronger than anti-black discrimination. Take, for example, a recent survey conducted by the Public Religion Research Institute, which asked respondents whether they agreed with the statement: “Today discrimination against whites has become as big a problem as discrimination against blacks and other minorities.” White respondents were almost evenly divided—48 percent agreeing, 50 percent disagreeing.
Unsurprisingly, perhaps, the statement received its strongest support from those identifying with the Tea Party (61 percent), Republicans (56 percent) and white evangelicals (57 percent). The Republican Party in the U.S. has accordingly aligned itself dogmatically against any support for spending to boost minority employment. (Even the Obama administration has generally acceded to an agenda of deficit reduction without tax hikes. Though the unemployment rate for 16 to 19 year old American blacks was 39.2 percent in July, 2010, compared to 23 percent for whites of the same age, no government-supported job programs are in sight.) Moreover, these issues of race track closely with immigration policies. State legislatures from Arizona to Georgia are passing tough anti-immigration laws, a reflection of growing white majoritarian opposition to new claimants for government benefits and resources.
The same populist anger is reflected in all austerity-stricken societies. Even in European countries with long traditions of multiculturalism, right-wing parties are on the rise. The murderous rampage committed by Andres Behring Breivik in Norway in July in the name of white supremacism was enabled by the harsh rhetoric not only in online forums, but mainstream publications. The resentment against immigrants is palpable even in proudly tolerant Amsterdam, where a resident recently complained to a New York Times reporter about her non-Dutch neighbors: “He doesn’t work. I work. I work all shifts. I pay taxes. I work for them.”
Where the riots of the 1960s were a challenge to the prevailing spirit of optimism, today they are of a piece with our cultural pessimism. Our age of austerity is not only a time of low economic growth and high unemployment—it is a time when most people sense that there’s simply not enough to go around. The middle and working classes in the West are sensing, not incorrectly, that the globalized economic order is leaving them behind. As Tom Friedman noted recently, “for the 50 years after World War II, to be president, mayor, governor or university president meant more often than not, giving things away to people. Today, it means taking this away from people.”
As long as this age of austerity endures, the West won’t make much progress—economically or socially. Optimism will remain the scarcest resource of all. And the only thing we might have an abundance of, unfortunately, is the sort of violence we saw last week in London.
Thomas Edsall is author of the forthcoming book The Age of Scarcity, to be published by Doubleday in January.
10 comments
But there is no scarcity. Not in this country. There is only a hugely lopsided distribution of income that has not been seen in nearly 100 years. THAT is our major problem, and it is only exacerbated by eliminating all measures that mitigate that skewness. The rich can keep it up for a while, but, eventually, there will be a revolution. That's why Bismarck, no liberal, invented social security, to prevent just that outcome.
- roidubouloi
August 16, 2011 at 12:21am
I've made the counter-intuitive case that the election of Rick Perry as president is the best hope for the adoption of aggressive counter-cyclical fiscal and monetary measures. Why? Because after an initial round of extreme austerity measures, President Perry would most like experience a conversion equivalent to Saul's conversion to Messiah Jesus, that is a conversion to Keynes as Perry comes to the realization that economic recovery is his only path to re-election and that Keynes is his only guarantee for salvation.
- rayward
August 16, 2011 at 7:42am
Re: rayward That's not true in the way you'd want it to be. Perry would just push for huge tax cuts on rich people, which is the least effective way to do Keynesian stimulus. And it would ruin our credit rating further, as well as our currency and ability to pay for government. Of course, if your aim is to use the Tenth Amendment to force the federal government to be rolled back to its pre-1912 state, then sure, Perryite Keynesianism isn't too bad a compromise to brook.
- chaitless
August 16, 2011 at 8:18am
What violence? There is no street violence in the U.S., nor is there any hint of any. The European reactions against the fatuous doctrines of "multiculturalism" have nothing to do with a competition for scarce economic resources and everything to do with the desire of people to feel culturally at home in their own countries. In the U.S. some aging Sixties people sense hopefully an opportunity for a set of new Great Society programs, but it's not even almost going to happen. There is no socialism in the U.S. for the same reason there never has been any: Americans want wealth for themselves and/or their children, not new welfare programs.
- westendorf
August 16, 2011 at 12:08pm
This ignores the really big difference between the racial climates in the 60's and now. Then blacks could not eat at lunch counters, move into neighborhoods, even play football in colleges in the South. Now the mayor of Philadelphia and most of the city council are African-American. Then there were many obvious steps to take. Violence now is not a response to discrimination, or to budget cuts. It is lack of civility. The authors forgets what it was like then, or just ignores it.
- bwickes
August 16, 2011 at 1:39pm
"As long as this age of austerity endures, the West won’t make much progress—economically or socially." This isn't just a Western thing. It's a global issue. There is civil unrest all over the place and it appears that there is a lack of either trying to understand or wanting to understand why the undercurrent of social unrest that exists. It isn't the hackneyed view of the Right that those protesting the economic austerity are pining for or wishing for some Socialist utopia or some finally reached grievance against multiculturalism. Nor is necessarily the underprivileged shaking their fists at the austerity cuts per se. Those are simply symptoms of the larger issue. The undercurrent is driven from a socio-ecnomic viewpoint. The widening gap between the rich and the rest of us is unsustainable, untenable and immoral. Do people honestly think that once these "austerity" measures end that things will return to normal or the way they were? They won't. The world has entered the phase of chasing its tail or as it's called in some circles...the tipping point. The race for finite resources, near zero economic growth, famine, severe economic stratification, etc. As Roi alluded to above, the biggest issue isn't scarcity in the US but a retrenchment of the "oligarchic" wealthy class and the political muscle they use to squeeze the bottom 95%. The leveling off of the wealth-gap isn't the simplified "wealth distribution" that the Right call it, it is a systematic restructuring of the culture to ensure that the wealth disparity is minimized to such a degree that we don't see this huge gap. Whereby the underclass are distracted by fake crises like illegal immigration, debt ceilings, individual mandates. That vast amounts of resources are not pillaged for profit sake only or wasted away for short-term economic growth. There is a great need to concentrate on the real problem facing the future of America and just as important, the rest of the world, since we are increasingly interlinked. I can't say that I'm overly optimistic that Society will discover the temerity to finally recognize let alone truly address the issue of the growing wealth gap.
- singlspeed
August 16, 2011 at 7:01pm
I am no fan of the far right and no applauder of the Tea Party nonsense, but many of the comments to this post are about as convincing to me as if someone said that Santa Claus was storing a secret horde of food at the North Pole, and if he just distributed it from his sleigh (while wearing a Franklin Roosevelt mask), no one would go hungry. Next you will tell me that if we had just followed Debs, or Teddy Roosevelt, or La Follette or Henry Wallace, or pick your favorite "progressive" from American history, we would now be living in a happy meal land of equality and prosperity and fairness? On the Waterfront: " You don't understand. I coulda had class. I coulda been a contender. I coulda been somebody, instead of a bum, which is what I am... "
- skahn
August 17, 2011 at 12:33am
Do you think the ability to convince you important, skahn? It is not as if you offer any substantive point of any kind that shows us you yourself have any sound understanding of these issues. I suspect you are indeed convinced by lots of Tea party nonsense. So, convincing you doesn't seem like a worthwhile goal.
- roidubouloi
August 17, 2011 at 12:47am
skahn... Your post perfectly represents the exact stance I am pointing out. The culture of "money" has inculcated even those that suffer from the Grand Canyonesque Wealth Gap into accepting the state of affairs because "that's the way it is." Somehow that conviction is so strong that you will insist that it's raining on your head and ignoring the fact that it's someone pissing on you. Therein lies the problem. Instead of admitting there is indeed an income disparity gap that exists you instead give us throw-away retorts about believing in Santa or believing in Teddy Roosevelt would mean we would be "living in a happy meal land of equality and prosperity and fairness". You can't even muster the courage to admit there is a problem but simply insist that "it" can't be fixed.
- singlspeed
August 17, 2011 at 12:49pm
westendorf - The riots in England were certainly not a protest against multiculturalism, or anything else for that matter. Events snowballed from the shooting of a black man by London police, who have adopted aggressive and controversial tactics in the capital's deprived areas. Besides this initial trigger, there was no consistent reason or focus to events. Sadly, there is a racial component to almost anything that happens anywhere, but these riots were not a protest with any coherent or decipherable agenda, racial or otherwise. The riots in Manchester, for example, were led by thugs and petty criminals looking to get involved in a bonafide national media event, and grab some loot in the process. Local gangs exploited the national pressure on police and ran a well organised operation to loot the city centre's shops, knowing that police would not risk inflaming the situation with an aggressive response (at one point a group of kids set fire to a women's clothing shop, while more experienced crooks ransacked unguarded jewellers across town). Any political will has been imputed after the fact, by media groups and politicians looking to further their won agenda, and laughably inept groups such as the English Defence League trying with little or no succes to turn it into a race war. The riots were a remarkably multicultural event, with members of all races at times joining together in what might have been a quite heartening show of racial solidarity (notwithstanding a few isolated incidents of undeniably racial violence), had they not been throwing concrete blocks through windows and setting fire to shops. In common with the US, our society has high and rising levels of income inequality at a time of economic depression. The burden for this recession has largely fallen to frontline services and benefits relied upon by the poorest in society. This has occurred concurrently with the stark exposition of white-collar looting: politicians looting expenses; bankers looting the economy and public purse; and our largest 'news' organisation looting whatever and whomever they want, encouraged in their efforts by endemic cronyism and cowardice at the highest levels of policing and government. The actions of those involved in the riots were in no way organised to protest or better this malaise, but were the perfectly apposite expression of it. Everyone's having a go. Whatever your views on how best to remedy the situation, they should not be imputed to these ultimately meaningless and sad events.
- samsar
August 19, 2011 at 1:18pm