This ought to be grist for the mill>29>>30 for American conservatives. But Republicans have flunked the challenge. By failing to distinguish between inequality and mobility, they have allowed
Unit II. US: from Democracy to Empire?
Unit II. US: from Democracy to Empire?
Democrats, in effect, to equate the two, leaving the GOP looking like the party of the 1 percent — hardly an election-winning strategy.
To their cost, American conservatives have forgotten Winston Churchill's famous distinction between left and right — that the left favors the line, the right the ladder. Democrats do indeed support policies that encourage voters to line up for entitlements — policies that often have the unintended consequence of trapping recipients in dependency on the state. Republicans need to start reminding people that conservatism is about more than just cutting benefits. It's supposed to be about getting people to climb the ladder of opportunity.
Inequality and social immobility are, of course, related. But they're not the same, as liberals often claim.
Let's start with inequality. It's now well known that in the mid-2000s the share of income going to the top 1 percent of the population returned to where it was in the days of F. Scott Fitzgerald's Great Gatsby. The average income of the 1 percent was roughly 30 times higher than the average income of everyone else. The financial crisis reduced the gap, but only slightly — and temporarily. [...] The top 1 percent owns around 35 percent of the total net worth of the United States — and 42 percent of the financial wealth.
The American Dream has become a nightmare of social stasis>1. According to research by Pew, just under 60 percent of Americans raised in the top fifth of incomes end up staying in the top two fifths; a fractionally higher proportion of those born in the bottom fifth — 60.4 percent — end up staying in the bottom two fifths.
This is the America so vividly described by Charles Murray in his bestselling book Coming Apart. At one end of the social scale, living in places with names like “Belmont,” is Murray's “cognitive elite” of around 1.5 million people. They and their children dominate admissions to the country's top colleges. They marry one another and cluster together in fewer than a thousand.
At the other end, there are places like “Fishtown,” where nobody has more than a high school diploma; a rising share of children live with a single parent, often a young and poorly educated “never-married mother.” Not only has illegitimacy risen in such towns, so has the share of men unable to work because of illness or disability or who are unemployed or who work fewer than 40 hours a week. Crime is rampant; so is the rate of incarceration
