The Way Back. F. H. Buckley

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СКАЧАТЬ wields a vastly disproportionate political power, almost unmatched in the First World, and supports policies that burden the Ragged Dicks. If we’re less mobile than we used to be, that’s importantly the reason. Technological change, globalization, genetic advantages, even greed, are to be found everywhere, and can’t explain why we are more immobile than the rest of the First World. What those countries lack, however, is an elite with the clout of America’s New Class.

      The New Class is apt to think it has earned its privileges through its merits, that America is still the kind of meritocracy that it was in Ragged Dick’s day, where anyone could rise from the very bottom through his talents and efforts. Today’s meritocracy is very different, however. Meritocratic parents raise meritocratic children in a highly immobile country, and the Ragged Dicks are going to stay where they are. We are meritocratic in name only. What we’ve become is Legacy Nation, a society of inherited privilege and frozen classes.

      I do not say that America’s aristocrats consciously seek to live in an immobile society, but only that they act so as to bring it about. Between our desires and our actions a curtain is demurely drawn, and to know ourselves requires what Alain Finkielkraut calls La Rochefoucauld’s pitiless ne ques.⁴ What we take for virtue is frequently nothing else but the concurrence of several actions which our own industry or fortune contrives to bring together. Humility is often nothing else but a false submission that we employ to dominate others. What men call friendship is often nothing else but a prudent reciprocity of interests. While he loudly decries immobility, the self-satisfied member of the New Class nevertheless supports policies that make us less mobile. That’s bad enough, but his self-deception only makes it worse.

Things We Can Change

      With greater self-awareness, the American aristocrat might recognize that the barriers we have erected to income mobility are often unjust. The most obvious of these is a broken educational system. Our K–12 public schools perform poorly, relative to the rest of the First World. As for our universities, they’re great fun for the kids, but many students emerge on graduation no better educated than when they first walked in the classroom door. What should be an elevator to the upper class is stalled on the ground floor. Part of the fault for this may be laid at the feet of the system’s entrenched interests: the teachers’ unions and the professoriate of higher education. Our schools and universities are like the old Soviet department stores whose mission was to serve the interests of the sales clerks and not the customers. Why the sales clerks should want to keep things that way is perfectly understandable. The question, however, is why this is permitted to continue, why reform efforts meet with such opposition, especially from America’s elites. The answer is that aristocracy is society’s default position. For those who stand at America’s commanding heights, social and income mobility is precisely what must be opposed, and a broken educational system wonderfully serves the purpose.

      America prides itself on being the country of immigrants. There’s a bit of puffery in this, since there’s a higher percent of foreign-born residents in Australia and Canada, and America ranks only a little ahead of Great Britain and France. Still, the country historically has been the principal haven for waves of immigrants (not to mention the 15 percent of people who were here already here as Native Americans or who were brought here as slaves). Before the Immigration Reform Act of 1965, the new arrivals added immeasurably to the country’s economy, culture, and well-being. Since then, however, the quality of the America’s immigrant intake has declined. We’re still admitting the stellar scientists of years gone by, but on average immigrants are less educated than they were in the past, or even than Americans are today (not the highest of bars). We’re also incurring the opportunity cost of a broken immigration system, in the high quality immigrants we don’t admit, and who either stay home or move to more immigrant-friendly countries. That burdens the country, but it’s very Heaven for an American aristocracy, which can hire cheap household labor without worrying about competition from high-skilled immigrants.

      For the Ragged Dicks who seek to rise, nothing is more important than the rule of law, the security of property rights, and sanctity of contract provided by a mature and efficient legal system. The alternative, contract law in the state of nature, is the old boy network composed of America’s aristocrats. They know each other, and their personal bonds supply the trust that is needed before deals can be done and promises can be relied on. We’re all made worse off when the rule of law is weak, when promises meant to be legally binding are imperfectly enforced by the courts, but then the costs of inefficient departures from the rule of law are borne disproportionately by the Ragged Dicks who begin without the benefit of an old boy network.

      For all these barriers to mobility we can thank the members of the New Class, which dominates America’s politics and constrains our policy choices. It is they who can be blamed for the recent run-up in American income inequality, more than anything else. The economy has become sclerotic, and the path to advancement over the last 40 and 50 years has been blocked by a profusion of new legal and regulatory barriers, all of which they have supported. The terrible schools, the broken immigration system, the decline in the rule of law—all of that is recent, and the member of the New Class who professes to be surprised by the rise in inequality seems a wee bit hypocritical.

      Of the New Class, I can write with some authority, since as a lawyer and a tenured academic I am one of its members. But then I aspire to be, like Franklin Roosevelt, a traitor to my class, and will seek to explain how the land of opportunity became class-ridden. How did it happen that, while this country became immobile, the American Dream is alive and well in Denmark? In particular, why is there such an enormous difference in mobility rates between the United States and the country it most resembles, Canada?

      One can’t account for the rise of an American aristocracy without answering these questions, and the reasons most often given aren’t up to the task. Did the move to a high-tech world make the difference? But then it’s not as though the rest of the First World is living in the Stone Age. As for globalization, that’s by definition a worldwide phenomenon. America’s growing inequality has been blamed on the disappearance of manufacturing jobs, lost to automation and globalization, but the manufacturing sector is larger in the U.S. (one in six jobs) than in, say, Canada (one in ten jobs).

      We need to pay attention to cross-border differences. Those who tell us that inequality and immobility are our most pressing problems seem not to care overmuch why the rest of the world fares better. And that’s taking American Exceptionalism a bit too far. If we seek to return to Ragged Dick’s America, we need to know precisely why other countries are more mobile, and how we might follow their example.

      That’s where I am headed. To begin, however, let’s examine how America became the land of opportunity, how the promise of income mobility came to define the very idea of America.

       PART I

       The Idea of America

      A city ought to be composed, as far as possible, of equals and similars; and these are generally the middle classes. This is the class of citizens which is most secure in a state, for they do not, like the poor, covet their neighbors’ goods; nor do others covet theirs, as the poor covet the goods of the rich; and as they neither plot against others, nor are themselves plotted against, they pass through life safely.

      —ARISTOTLE, Politics

       CHAPTER

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