Chris Lehmann, like many a son of the benighted de-industrialized Midwest, has cobbled together a living as a casualized knowledge worker. He is employed, ever precariously, as an editor for Yahoo! News, BookForum and the Baffler, while dissecting the excesses of his social betters on a still-more marginal moonlighting basis for The Awl.com. He lives in Washington, DC, with his wife, Ana Marie Cox, and a quartet of excellent pets.

Peter Arkle lives in New York, where he’s a freelance illustrator of books, magazines and ads (his clients include at least a couple of the rich people’s things featured in this book). He occasionally publishes a newspaper, Peter Arkle News, containing stories and drawings about everyday life.

Slog, January 26th 2011

GRITv, December 3rd 2010

Reason TV, November 8th 2010

The Phoenix, November 2nd 2010

Mother Jones, October 18th 2010

Concurring Opinions, October 17th 2010

Talking Points Memo, October 6th 2010

bookforum.com, September 13th 2010

Mediaite.com, August 24th 2010

The Awl, August 20th 2010

TVrealist.com, August 20th 2010

Introduction

By Chris Lehmann

American class privilege is very much like the idea of sex in a Catholic school—it’s not supposed to exist in the first place, but once it presents itself in your mind’s eye, you realize that it’s everywhere. And as with the upholders of adolescent propriety for the Mother Church, the forces of repression in our political economy are well armed with orthodox articles of faith. Social critics and academicians have expended heroic amounts of ink to explain America’s “exceptionalist” indifference to the distinctions of class—from the absence of a feudal tradition to the frontier thesis to the convulsions of upward social mobility across the generations. Scholars appealing to these forces have all preached, in one way or another, that the condition of wage earning in the New World is but a passing way station on the path to real wealth and entitlement. Why, after all, should anyone militate on behalf of the interests of an American working class when no one intends to remain within its ranks for very long? And, conversely, why should anyone insist there’s anything amiss with a society that lavishly coddles those who are fabulously well-to-do when we all long to be borne aloft in their company?

These are, to be sure, compelling explanations of our country’s curiously complacent outlook on the politics of wealth and privilege— but they also seem more than a little pat. Canada, after all, had a western frontier and no strong attachment to feudal tradition, and has nonetheless spawned a robust labor-led politics, a single-payer health-care system, and a rather hale welfare state securing basic income supports and social equality. Social mobility has of late been higher in the allegedly fusty Old World social orders of Britain, Denmark, and Sweden—places that can lay a far more legitimate claim to the conservative epithet “socialist” than the business-friendly centrism of the Obama Democratic policy elite—than in the deindustrializing, debt-ridden United States.

If we’re to understand the stubborn resistance to the idea of social class—especially in the wake of the Great Recession of 2008, which all too plainly elevated the fortunes of the financial elite over the notional prosperity of America’s declining middle orders—we’d do well to relax our fealty to the ironclad determinism of past explanations. In the spirit of the suggestible Catholic student, we should recur instead to the piecemeal psychology of the absent presence—to look more closely at the freestanding institutions that reinforce and strategically update the coordinates of the reigning social consensus on economic reward and punishment.

From this vantage, the lionization of wealth becomes less a fixed catechism in the American creed than a contingent set of post hoc rationalizations— attached here to the idea of undeviatingly gargantuan executive compensation for the financial elite, and there to the business press’s delusional romance with the ever-mythical free market. Th is outlook has the advantage of making our state of chronic class denial much less forbidding than it would be as a destiny-shaping verdict handed down from our colonial past. But neither is that to say that its social power is diluted by virtue of its comparative rootlessness. Quite the contrary, in fact—the paper-thin and amnesiac way that we continue to reckon with questions of wealth and power accounts in large part for its staying power. Writing in 1956 of the formative consensus that took shape on these issues during the Cold War, C. Wright Mills observed that it hinged on a PR vision of elite achievement, whereby liberals and conservatives alike found the power elite “to be diversified to the point of powerlessness. So far as power is concerned, nobody really makes decisions; let us fall back upon official and formal images of representative government. So far as wealth or high income is concerned, that is without decisive consequence, although it does perhaps affect the tone of society at large. Besides, everybody in America is rich nowadays. This unserious liberalism is the nerve-center of the present-day conservative mood.”

That statement serves as a letter-perfect diagnosis of our socioeconomic plight more than half a century later—save that it’s now a tad harder for consensus thinkers to insist that every American is rich. Nonetheless, it’s been striking to observe just how little the present crisis has altered the basic terms of political engagement on all sides. When the US economy veered toward cataclysm in the 1890s and the 1930s, mass political movements registered a new national distemper. The People’s Party of the late nineteenth century went so far as to advocate an alternate production-based system of currency and exchange, known as the Subtreasury, a reform that eventually got watered down into the Free Silverite attack on the gold standard when the party fused with the Democrats in 1896. And the thirties, of course, witnessed the enactment of many of the core reforms first advanced during the populist and Progressive eras——public ownership of utilities, federally funded income support and retirement plans, enormous national public works projects, and the like. One might reasonably ask what it would take for the basic truths of class division to sink in on today’s American scene, aft er the reckless expansion of our paper economy has consigned entire productive sectors of business enterprise into the dustbin of history; aft er the bailed-out financier class continues to rack up obscene performance bonuses on the government dime; after the securitization of debt has left millions of American homes foreclosed, and millions more underwater. Instead, we remain in thrall to an unserious liberalism that continues to entrust most major economic policy decisions to career investment bankers, and to a conservative movement rhetoric that equates “populism” with heartland-approved consumption habits and evangelical culture-wars posturing.

In this deeply incoherent state of affairs, it’s little wonder that conservatives were able to oppose a stimulus plan that actually lowered taxes for the vast majority of Americans by characterizing it as a feckless big-government tax increase. Or that the anemic fi nal version of health-care reform—larded with massive giveaways to the insurance and pharmaceutical lobbies—can be widely depicted as a “government takeover” of American medicine or, indeed, as full-blown “socialism.” We appear to have descended to the point where political economy, formerly the central organizing force in our national politics, has become a floating signifier, intended to say more about the demographic profile of individual political actors than anything about the collective cast of our productive lives, and how the rewards for our labor can be distributed more fairly and equitably. Among other things, this state of affairs leaves leaders and policy makers unable to offer coherent accounts of whom is meant to benefit from efforts to revive and revamp our financial sector, our rights to form unions, or our system of health care delivery. If such incremental reforms come across in much of political discourse as perverse and sweeping expressions of an undifferentiated liberal lust for power, then prospects for meaningful change—truly nationalized health care, finance overhauls that reward productive industry ahead of speculation in the paper economy, dismantling of the savage inequalities that still govern housing markets, and education funding— seem like nothing more than utopian fantasy.

* * * *

When I began writing Rich People Things, I had nothing quite so sweeping—or so dispiriting—in mind. Indeed, the whole thing came about by accident. In early 2009, a couple of old laid-off editor friends emailed me about a Web site they were launching (called the Awl, for some reason) and invited me to contribute. At the time, I fi led the idea pretty far back in my memory bank—especially since, as my friends explained in their pitch letter, they’d be unable to pay their writers. But a few weeks after the project launched, another friend directed me to a cover story that ran in my former workplace, New York magazine, itemizing the widespread sense of grievance and entitlement among the city’s lords of finance in the wake of public outrage over the Troubled Asset Relief Program’s no-strings giveaways to the financial sector.

Since I knew all too well the inside-the-bubble mindset behind this quisling dispatch from the money wars—the celebration of the money culture being the de facto mission statement for Adam Moss’s New York magazine—I knew I couldn’t stay quiet. And I also knew, the deferential politics of the publishing world being what they are, that whatever I wrote could only see the light of day at a place like the Awl. So I wrote my friends, duly submitted a piece, and just as it was about to go live, coeditor Alex Balk wrote to explain that his colleague, Choire Sicha, “designed a graphic for this with the rubric, ‘Rich People Things.’ Does that work for you?” To which I replied, ‘um, sure?’ ” It was a fait accompli in any event, Alex replied, since Choire had “gallivanted off to lunch”—though they could easily just erase the rubric when he got back.

I don’t know when Choire returned, but by that time, we’d all moved on to other things, and in the next week or so, I didn’t give “Rich People Things” much thought, either as a column title or an ongoing writing project. Thanks to another friend, though, I came across another dispatch that showcased unthinking press fealty to economic privilege—this time, a Washington Post front page piece about how the Obama administration’s spending priorities would unduly punish taxpayers earning more than $250,000 a year. This prospect, as the Post correspondents saw it, could well place small-business owners and upward-striving professionals—two plum political constituencies that broke for Obama in 2008—at odds with the allegedly ambitious social agenda of the fledgling Obama administration. As both tax analysis and political kibitzing, the article reeked of horseshit— especially since a number of the items on Obama’s ambitious social agenda, such as federally backed health insurance, would significantly aid the bottom lines for small-business entrepreneurs.

Once my eye had grown sufficiently jaundiced I started to see material for the column everywhere—in lunatic manifestos from Steve Forbes on corporate leadership and entire cover packages in major newsweeklies addressing the future of work without containing so much as a single passing mention of labor unions. Even though the United States was enduring its worst economic crisis since the Great Depression, our major outlets of opinion, most of the leadership in Congress and the regulatory world, and nearly all the major outlets of the business press were carrying on serenely as though American society remained more a study in moneyed abandon than abandoned money.

I fancy myself a fairly practiced cynic, but it struck me that my randomly acquired beat was profoundly out of sync with the state of the real economy, so much so that the familiar run of business coverage and economic commentary started to strike my ear as exceedingly strange. It all seemed not so much a hard-nosed appraisal of the way the world really works as a species of magical incantation, worthy of the witches in the opening scene of Macbeth. From the point of view of my own journalistic production, this was a great boon; finding suitable column fare was generally not much more arduous than taking in a Money magazine feature on, say, the damage the downturn had wrought on exclusive golf clubs, letting the outrage sink in, and opening up a fresh Word document on the computer. Slowly, though, it dawned on me that the odd pleasure of putting the column together each week served as a footnote of sorts to the more-or-less permanent character of these United States. The omission of real economic conditions from the accounting of the republic’s collective life was something that ran very deep—if also very diffusely— in our history. Unbidden, long-dormant snatches of my graduate history education started to tug at me and worked their way into the margins of the column. It became starkly evident, for instance, that one couldn’t snipe at Newsweek's saucer-eyed speculations about whether the new generation of young workers would be unduly stingy about floating more of their incomes into the consumer economy in order to jumpstart still-skittish demand without also noting that the last generation of deeply traumatized American savers—those who came of working age during the Great Depression—had the assurance of a robust public sector, a fairly militant labor movement, and the informal social contract binding together business, labor, and government in common aims of enterprise. All these factors helped ensure that the wages of Depression-era wageworkers at least kept pace with the inflationary pressures that came with economic growth, once it finally arrived. All today’s young workers had, by contrast, were the rancid leavings of the Reagan-inspired war on New Deal social protections—together with the banker-friendly policy initiatives of a craven “New Democrat” leadership on the other side of the partisan aisle.

Rich People Things began life as an afterthought title for a column without any particular mission statement to push it forward; but I later realized that this pointedly dismissive phrase took in a good many more trends, movements, and institutions than I’d fi rst assumed. What were the US Constitution, the perpetual campaign and- election season, the civic religion of celebrity worship, urban development policies, and the cloistered state of high-literary debate, if not also Rich People Things in their own right? Why not, then, widen the aperture of my accidental column to take in more of the long view of the American scene? This is not to advance, mind you, any overarching materialist explanation of our past—strict economic determinism isn’t an especially persuasive vision of history, and anything but a lively one. Rather, it’s something infinitely more modest—an effort to apply the roving one-hit methodology of an online column, typically composed with the phrase, “Can you believe this shit?” ringing in my ears, to somewhat sturdier features of our common life. In the impressionistic tract that follows, I’ve occasionally cannibalized my other published work, both in the Awl and elsewhere, as it pertains to the expanding Rich People Things waterfront, but mainly I’ve just sought to imagine how the writing persona I’ve developed in the post-meltdown aughts would be provoked, baffled, and generally trigger happy if the Doc’s time machine plunked him back down in the US history colloquia that formed the backbone of his long-ago graduate instruction. It’s been cathartic, if nothing else, and I trust that you, dear reader, might find a similar tonic effect in these wayward musings.

Original illustrations for Rich People Things

By Peter Arkle

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