From King George to “that man” (FDR) to our own era’s Newt Gingrich, there have always been plenty of individuals in high places to blame not only for their own indisputable faults, but also for just about everything else. But the far more common phenomenon has been blame of groups–real and unreal, seen and unseen–for whatever is ailing the electorate. Classically these malign forces are believed to be vast, intricately structured, enormously powerful and corrupt and greedy beyond describing. All are accused of getting something they don’t deserve at the expense of those who do. Publics rely on such assumptions to explain their own failures and miseries. Politicians rely on them to mobilize the angry publics who will then catapult them into office. Thus throughout our history we have had surges of well-organized political hatred of Catholics and Jews and immigrants; we have heard about “the yellow peril” and the “we]fare queens’ who were threatening our economic well-being; we have said the whole damn thing was the fault of the banks and the economic royalists and the Eastern establishment and the military industrial complex and liberal elites and, most recently incorporating many of the above culprits in one category, “Washington.”
Given that the anti-Washington, anti-establishment, anti-politician feeling is so intense at the moment, it may seem cockeyed to suggest that we are coming to the end of that particular cycle. I don’t expect the nation to fall in love with the Washington devil any time soon. But I do think those who ran against Washington and won are in the market for a villain to replace the one they kicked out. Washington after all now means them. And if they are unable to produce the results they promised, after a while anyway they will need to find some other collectivity whose fault it is.
In fact, the signs are everywhere that large numbers of people in political groupings from left to right are ready for a new national heavy. That is because the old heavies have either been retired or have vanished in a maze of political complexity that no longer allows the luxury of simple good-versus-evil, yes-versus-no politics. The Soviet Union and its beastly commissars are no longer available for duty, for example. And, on another front–the anti-racism front–listening to many white liberals you get the idea that they have finally found racial politics disappointing: too complicated, too ambiguous, too likely to go unrewarded either by the blacks they rather condescendingly thought they were championing or other white liberals who have recently gone AWOL on the cause.
At the same time, I believe, a substitute movement of some consequence can be seen forming around animosity toward the fat cats–the corporate executives and top-level managers and investment bankers and other movers and shakers and deal-makers in the burgeoning new business universe. Many things are happening in that universe that only the specialist can understand, especially as you have to add great technological obscurity to the financial obscurity of the new arrangements we read about daily in the papers as these industry mammoths arrange and rearrange their relationships. But the arcaneness of what is happening only adds to the sense of its being terminally sinister. And, in any event, there are some things that everyone can understand, such as layoffs, for example, even when layoffs are called “downsizing” and are said to be the fruit of necessary “restructuring.” Just as in the old days, when strangers called “efficiency experts” would come to do a survey of your office, people understand what these measurements and inquiries can mean at the simplest level for them. People also have grown accustomed, though not, I should think, particularly happy, to read about the gargantuan incomes of the rich and famous, whether CEOs or professional ballplayers, whose take-home pay makes their own look pitiful, antlike and–above all–unjust.
It is the case that in the new Republican-led Congress, representatives of business have enjoyed even greater sway as lobbyists for their legislative interest than they did in the heyday of a pretty compliant Democratic Hill. At the same time, however, there has been a growing strain in the GOP of economic bomb-throwing, anti-establishment feeling in which the targeted establishment dearly includes many of the country’s industrial giants. In the Pat Buchanan candidacy you can see it being played out. There, as elsewhere, it takes the form of insurgent Republican disdain for the cultural liberalism of many of the big shots of big business whose economics are conservative but whose social outlook is not. On the other side, liberals who have come to a dead end on so many other causes seem to be re-enlisting in the the economic wars. There is a new interest in and evident enthusiasm for the reconstruction of the labor movement. There is ever more talk in the journals of economic injustice and redress. And the dumbness with which some business and industry leaders are approaching the change–ignoring the human cost of technological upheaval, regarding the layoff of thousands as a statistical rather than real misfortune, and abdicating responsibility for the consequences of their business brilliance in the lives of their employees–can only fuel the cause. Economic class warfare may sound like the past but just now it feels like the future.
