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>> 155 Conclusion: A Cultural Politics of Love and Solidarity Room to Move The period since World War II is very telling when it comes to the story of changes in cumulative income growth in the United States. According to Larry M. Bartels (2008), Princeton professor of public and international affairs, the postwar period is not one of uniform upward distribution, where growth is concentrated at the top of the heap; instead, from 1947 to 1974, incomes grew in the lowest (the 20th) percentile by 97.5 percent, in the 60th percentile by 97.6 percent, and in the 95th percentile by 89.1 percent. Contrast the similarity of these rates with those in the same percentiles from 1974 to 2005: in the 20th, growth was a devastating 10.3 percent, in the 80th it was 42.9 percent, and in the 95th it was 62.9 percent. Rates of growth in this second period were slower overall than in the first, but that’s not the real story: the relative egalitarianism in income growth (not salaries or wages) in the first period is replaced by deep upward concentration in the second, when the rich got exponentially richer at the expense of the poor.1 As Bartels additionally points out, none of these census data reflect income growth for the superrich top 1 or 2 percent of income earners in the United States. From 1945 to 1974, top real incomes in the 95th, 99th, 99.5th, 99.9th, and 99.99th percentiles are fairly close; between 1975 and 2005, however, the 99.9th and 99.99th percentile groups break away in a dramatic pattern of income expansion. “What is most striking,” says Bartels, “is that, even at this elevated income level, income growth over the past 25 years has accelerated with every additional step up the economic ladder. For example, while the real income of the taxpayers at the 99th percentile doubled between 1981 and 2005, the real income of taxpayers at the 99.9th percentile nearly tripled, and the real income of taxpayers at the 99.99th percentile—a hyper-rich stratum comprising about 13,000 taxpayers—increased fivefold” (2008, 11). The source of the big difference between periods came as a surprise to me when I read Bartels’s analysis. Escalating economic inequality is in large measure a political outcome; it matters who is in power in Washington. Democratic administrations are more likely—much more likely—than Republican 156 > 157 that most of us couldn’t dream up at gunpoint. The socialization of loss on Wall Street through tax-financed bailouts, moreover, has done little to stem greed as first principle in the finance sector, and nothing, yet, to change income tax policy.2 But my impulse to start with Bartels in concluding Love and Money is not simply to reassert indignation. It is to remind myself, first, that thirty years of queer politics and culture in the United States have taken shape amid socially and politically crippling economic policy and a national culture of hyperaccumulation; second, that the market fundamentalism that underwrote such rates and forms of accumulation is—as I write—in tatters (even as capitalism itself is not), though its effects will long be felt; and, third, as Bartels’s analysis of party policy tells us, it matters who does politics and how. Together, these are reminders that now is a critical time to rethink queer formation as a class project that can challenge wealth and class arrival as measures of legitimacy and liberation. The tatter phase does not make us an egalitarian nation overnight. But the state of the market nation does mean that it’s a good time to take stock of our queer future and the terms in which we want to cast it. My wish, in saying this, is not to be moralistic or scolding. That is hard to avoid, however, when cultural politics and criticism have lost track of a language of accountability to class hierarchy rooted in wealth. Take me, for example. Writing in 2011, I am an employed, fifty-three-year-old, tenured academic with no dependents. I own outright a faded car, a faded retirement account, my domestic stuff, and my education. I have never expected an inheritance, though I may receive one, nor do I have to financially support aging parents or other relatives. At different points, I have bought plane tickets and visited places at great distances from where I live, and I feel rich in...

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