Tue May 21 2013

A "conservative solution to inequality" or, what they really think!
by Bruce Bostick
January 31, 2012

Last week’s Newsweek magazine contained a truly amazing piece, (“Rich America, Poor America,” Niall Ferguson, 1/23/12). Billed as a “conservative historian’s solution” to the issue of growing inequality in our nation, this piece stands out not because of any true “solution” that is offered here, but for the real peek at how the wealthy actually look at us and the world they live in.

The issue of inequality isn’t seen as a great mystery, most might point to the capitalist class structure of our nation and the ongoing class struggle. There, according to Ferguson, is where you’d be wrong. Not so, he says! The rising inequality has its source in the fact that the “upper class has gotten rich because of the financial returns on brain-power,” and they “produce a disproportionate number of the smartest children.”

If that formulation just slapped you in the face with its open arrogance, Ferguson is just getting started.

Ferguson, in touting the book “Coming Apart,” by Charles Murray, speaks of America as “two emblematic communities.” The first is “Belmont, where everyone has a degree” and the other “Fishtown, or Trashtown.” Give you just one guess where it is that you, I, all our neighbors, friends and families live? Righto! Trashtown, where according to Ferguson/Murray, “industriousness has plummeted.” That is opposed to wonderful Belmont, his fictional ruling class community, where “industriousness has scarcely declined!” Not only this, but, of course, “crime is much worse in Fishtown,” because “religiosity has declined much more steeply in Fishtown/Trashtown.” “Fishtown/Trashtown is a wretched dump”, says Ferguson, “the kind of blighted place where gangs of feral teens hang around on the street corner trying to figure out what part of the local infrastructure they hadn’t yet vandalized!”

You see, as opposed to out here in ‘Realityville’ where jobs, or mainly the lack of them, are the actual, really big problem, in Ferguson’s capitalist ruling class fantasy world “the big problem is not so much a lack of jobs as a new leisure preference, goofing off and watching daytime TV.” Boy, I know I never had that much fun before, how about you? As unbelievably insulting as this truly bizarre picture of the world is, this twisted picture IS reality to some of those obscenely wealthy parasites that make up Ferguson’s class of “elites.”

According to Ferguson, in our American “Belmonts” these new “Cognitive Elites,” (I suppose as opposed to the non-cognitive ones), live in “SuperZips” and are “markedly more liberal than the national average!” Ferguson offered no more support to this absurd proposition than for any of his other equally ridiculous conclusions.

In Ferguson’s America, we “need to steer clear of Europe” and should “scrap the institutions of the New Deal and the Great Society,” instead depending on the “Traditional pillars of the American way of life: family, vocation, community and faith!”

His “solution,” of course is none at all! New Deal & Great Society are rich folk’s code for Social Security & Medicare. The most successful national programs in our nation’s history, which have pulled seniors out of poverty, never missed a payment and have provided much-needed health care to millions. According to Ferguson, we should just take the leap and replace those pillars of American retiree security and working class prosperity with “faith!” Just try to buy groceries with that one!

This article is outrageous not due to any “solution” offered here. There is nothing new here. It is truly amazing because of the outright open ruling class arrogance presented here. Rarely, if ever, do we get a peek at the true life-view, the real and open arrogance through which the wealthy view the world, the actual contempt in which the rest of us, those who do the work, are truly held by these wealthy parasites. For this, Ferguson is owed a real debt of gratitude for letting us look, if even just for a minute, behind the curtain of hypocrisy that normally covers their true feelings.

Ferguson closes by urging his guy, Romney, to read “Coming Apart, (before his campaign comes apart).” I was going to say that Romney wrote that book, but the truth is he paid someone to write it, then fired them!