Opportunity Class

America is in such a funk nowadays that sometimes it can get exasperating. The disconnect between what average people believe and hope for, and what seems to dominate our political class is gaping wide open. To me the cause for this disconnect is obvious, and our rampant inequality sits squarely at the heart of the problem. Yet getting some of my erstwhile progressive friends to utter the word inequality has proven to be extremely difficult.

Why?

Because, to their ear it renders a harsh image of envy. And, as we are all taught, since America has no class system, and since America is the land of opportunity, and since in America hard work can get you anything, envy is simply that: a venal sentiment that debases the person harboring it and signifies that they are, somehow, un-American.

This is, of course, twaddle.

Until we are able to talk about inequality without immediately plunging into apologies for being envious we are stuck with what appears to be our favorite surrogate: opportunity. We need, apparently, to restore opportunity in this land of opportunity. Presumably between now and that restoration we are the land of something else, but we won’t give it a name just in case it sounds bad.

So we will talk opportunity.

And just how is it that someone who works a full work week and still fails to pay the bills is going to leap up the socio-economic ladder? Education. That’s how. By getting an education. This may prove to be expensive however. So getting a leg up requires taking on a boat load of debt. Which, naturally, anyone at the bottom of the heap is just happy to do. Maybe not. And maybe they don’t have the time, after all most are barely scraping by right now with a full time job, so finding the extra hours to go to school is no easy task. Then there’s the small problem of the backlog of recent graduates who are radically underemployed already. Anyone getting an education now is simply swelling the ranks of the underemployed. Unless they have connections. We all have connections don’t we?

This reminds me of Mitt Romney’s advice to kids who want to become an entrepreneur: ask your parents for a loan to get started. We all have parents with spare capital, don’t we?

Which gets us to the  nub of the problem: the people who don’t want to talk about inequality and are deeply scared by the implications that naughty word has of envy, tend to be safely ensconced in the warm embrace of our elite. Where connections and spare capital are more abundant. Perhaps too abundant. These are the people who think all we need to do us open up the spigot of opportunity. That, they say, will take care of things without anyone having to do nasty stuff like actually diminish the incomes of the elite; shut down all those cozy loopholes through which spare capital seems to leak in floods; undo and disentangle the incestuous monster that is Wall Street; and generally level things out a bit so that our relative starting points are at least on the same planet. Which right now they are not.

How anyone can claim that it is only hard work that separates the future fortunes of two New York City kids, one born in Harlem and one born on the Upper East Side, is beyond me. Said person would be deliberately ignoring the rapidly congealing class system that three decades and counting of widely disparate incomes is begetting us all.

So few are the perceived number of true, reliable, opportunities that even well off parents are risking ruin in order to send their kids to the best possible schools. Ordinary school just won’t do. Unless the kids get into the correct – which means ridiculously expensive – pre-school they won’t get into the correct and even more expensive grade school, high school and thus university. So it appears you can be doomed, in these diminished times, by the age of three simply because your parents failed to have the requisite few grand of cash available to set you on your way.

This is the land of opportunity of which policy makers are prone to speak.

It’s all bit like quicksand. The more these families work and invest in trying to secure a little piece of the great opportunity that is the US economy, the more likely it is they sink deeper into debt and ultimately fail to succeed.

And that is the sharpest edge of inequality. No matter the effort, the risk, the long hours or the sacrifice, the reward is still negligible. All that effort, risk, those hours, and the sacrifices are now necessary to stay exactly where you started. It used to get you ahead. Now it is a requirement of hanging in and hoping not to get sucked down. This is why our social mobility is the worst amongst western nations. It is why someone born in the lower reaches of the income scale here in the US is more likely to stay there than their peers abroad. We are a society riddled through with the classic symptoms of class.

This may offend. It may upset your sense of American being. It may contradict the rosy Disney-esque image of American mythology. But it is the harsh contemporary truth. Like it or not that’s where we are. It would help if we could call it by its proper name. Then we could fix it.

And it has nothing, nothing whatever to do with envy. Instead it has a lot to do with fairness. It has a lot to do with un-rigging the rigged game so that even the poorest or the weakest amongst us has a fair shot at a good life, and even at great success, here in America.

Yes, even here in America. Land of inequality opportunity.