Here’s an excerpt from Paul Krugman’s Common Dreams essay, “Wobbled by Wealth.” [1]
One of the saddest stories I tell in my book is that of Al Smith, the great reformist governor of New York, who gradually turned into a narrow-minded economic conservative and bitter critic of F.D.R. H. L. Mencken explained it thusly: “His association with the rich has apparently wobbled him and changed him. He has become a golf player.”
How do you change the system as a poor person looking in from the outside? You likely don’t. Because you lack money, you don’t have access to the deep structures of power. For instance, what chance do people who march on Washington have of implementing universal health care? They don’t have a chance, because they have no money to reach the politicians who can really make a difference.
To make fundamental changes to the system, you need more than protesters. To really change the system, you need a large band of committed insiders who are willing to buck the system, even at their own expense. How often do you find such a committed insider? Not every day. How often do you find a critical mass of knowledgeable and committed insiders ready and willing to tip over an established institution that employs them? Almost never.
Why would that be? I suspect that it’s because so many of us who successfully “work our way up” eventually succumb to the system (just like Al Smith). How many people want to believe that they are progressives, but really aren’t anymore? Most of them have succumbed to expensive temptations. These temptations are everywhere for anyone who has accrued any wealth and power. You want—and eventually “need”— [2]the nice house, clothes, amusements, and retirement. It actually turns out that no amount of money will ever be enough for you. [3]
If that is not bad enough, stir children into the mix. Then you have the world’s best excuse for being abjectly self-centered as a family. You can justify very expensive schools, vacations “for the kids”, and an even bigger house “for the kids.” It is true that children make you more conscious of our country’s economic, social and moral failings. But having children also makes it much less likely to risk the financial security he or she has in order to buck the system. Anyone who’s willing to lose his or her good job and risk making only 1/2 of that nice salary to do some social justice, raise your hand! Ah, I do see a couple hands, but not many. The ones with the most promise are those social-justice minded spouses of some of those encrusted capitalists. Interesting.
What this shows me is that most people, and this includes most people with children, have positioned themselves such that they are not willing to take social stands that are economically detrimental to themselves. They won’t do it (they say they “can’t do it). As most people see it, they won’t (can’t) bite off their own arm to help their extended community.
Poor people can’t reform the system (for the most part) because they are cut off from the power base that runs the system. That power base, in these especially crass times, understands only money. On the other hand, too many well-intentioned financially successful people succumb to the temptations of the money world and are thus not willing to make any moves that jeopardize their 401K’s, etc. That leaves the well-entrenched immoral and amoral to step up to do serious self-sacrificing for the benefit of the poor and disenfranchised. I’m not holding my breath.
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