Don’t Blame the Workers

The trade union movement has been flat on its back for some time and shows little sign of resuscitation. Working-class wages have declined precipitously, and U.S. workers clock in longer hours than in any other industrialized nation.

What really gets under my skin, though, is that workers are blamed for this mess. The ideological class warfare my father taught me about in the 1960s not only persists, it has gotten worse. As economic inequality has reached unprecedented, even obscene, levels, particularly in the United States and Britain, an elaborate ideological justification has grown up alongside it, what we could call a new Social Darwinism. Just as slavery needed racism to prop it up, the new plutocracy requires classism. Workers who were once mocked for overreaching and assuming too much power are now ridiculed for their weaknesses and failures. The new Social Darwinism is clear about who does and doesn’t deserve respect. Those at the bottom, white and nonwhite, waged and wageless, are there because of their own personal failings. And those at the top deserve their disproportionate share because of their supposed talent, intelligence, or some other innate quality marking their superior “fitness” for the competitive battle. It’s a post hoc world governed by so-called natural laws and biological drives. Wherever you end up is where you should be. The meritocratic myth is sustained by a culture rife with unrepresentative rags-to-riches tales but largely silent on the diminishing prospects for such mobility.