-Caveat Lector-
THE CLINTON LEGACY
President Paradox
It's been another decade of greed. But this time it was OK to
feel good about it.
BY FRANCIS FUKUYAMA Thursday, January 18, 2001 12:01 a.m. EST
Now that the New York Times has weighed in with another of its
interminable series on the "Clinton Legacy," what more is there
to be said about the eight years that are now coming to a close?
Perhaps it is best to drop down below the level of the North
American Free Trade Agreement, of welfare reform or the peace
process, and look at how the social and cultural texture of
America has changed under the presidency now ending.
Social statistics tell us that things have gotten better. The
relentless cultural decline that at the beginning of the 1990s
seemed like a fact of nature ground to a halt and, miraculously,
reversed direction while Bill Clinton was president. As most
Americans are well aware, crime rates have gone down by about 20%
nationally and much more steeply in individual cities like New
York.
Lower crime rates had a variety of positive spillover effects in
terms of great social trust: Urban spaces could be reclaimed for
urbane uses by the middle class, rather than being dominated by
the extremely rich and extremely poor. The proportion of unwed
mothers stopped increasing by 1994 and even declined slightly
thereafter. Teenage pregnancy rates dropped more dramatically,
and the rate of divorce drifted downward.
So far so good. But the social reality of what Tom Wolfe calls
our "wild, bizarre, unpredictable, Hog-stomping Baroque country"
during the Clinton years can be unbelievably contradictory and
complex. Ballroom dancing, home schooling, and sexual abstinence
can all be major trends next to body piercing and downing ecstasy
pills. This contradictory reality is probably better described
by a novelist (as Mr. Wolfe himself has done effectively) than
by a social scientist armed with statistics.
Take the question of class. It is true that income inequality
slowed its rate of increase in the 1990s. But it didn't decline,
either, and the meaning of working class, middle class, and rich
all changed.
Back in the 1950s, America's sizable working class--people who
work in factories, build houses, or police the streets--could
think of itself as middle class because class was defined in
terms of ownership of assets like a home, a car, and a washing
machine.
One consequence of the 1990s "knowledge economy" was the
emergence of a new economic gulf, as the working class, now a
much smaller part of the labor force, moved downward in status
and income, and the middle and professional classes moved up.
The latter reconciled themselves to Reaganite economics as half
of all households came to own equities by the late 1990s.
Liberals in this group were taken aback by the anger of working
Americans over Nafta, China and globalization. But culturally,
there was a convergence as the working class drifted to the left
while prosperous baby boomers now raising families became more
traditional.
Better-educated people who still thought of themselves as middle
class changed as well. With so many women moving into the work
force, it once again became a common experience for people who
didn't think of themselves as rich to have servants. There is in
Colorado a new school for servants that teaches its female
students not to be too pretty, lest they threaten the lady of the
house. Its graduates work for people who, by and large, have not
grown up with servants themselves, and who try to be on a
first-name basis with their butlers. This sort of
egalitarianism, it turns out, doesn't work any better in the
1990s than in the 1890s.
In the Clinton years, the rich got unbelievably rich. In the
1980s, having a net worth in multiples of $100 million seemed
like a lot of money. Today, that's a technology baron's chump
change. The areas surrounding New York, Boston, San Francisco
and Washington are now filled in with new subdivisions of trophy
homes where a husband, wife (perhaps herself a trophy), and a
child or two occupy a minimum of 10,000 square feet.
It is amazing what happens when a society of well-educated people
has money to burn. The high end of everything exploded during
the 1990s. Cigars, microbrew beers, camping gear, gas barbecues,
home theaters, and mountain bikes now all have legions of
devotees. There are firms that specialize in refurbishing
antique license plates, or that manufacture vacuum tubes out of
production since the 1930s. In today's America, you can easily
pay $10,000 for a pair of wires to connect your high-end CD
player to your high-end amplifier, and read reviews of how they
"sound" compared to other five-figure cables.
The self-perception of the newly rich changed in significant
ways. The media managed to label the Reagan years the "decade of
greed," symbolized by corporate takeovers, a booming stock market
and Nancy Reagan's dresses. The Clinton years, which have seen
even larger corporate takeovers, a headier stock market, and
Monica Lewinsky's stained dress, thought much better of itself
and its own "remarkable," even "exuberant," prosperity. This
contrast is due in part to the fact that the baby boom
generation, which includes much of the media and the opinion
leaders of the chattering classes, themselves got rich only in
the 1990s and could no longer point a resentful finger at other
people who were making off like bandits.
But there is something more at work here. The newly well-to-do
could feel good about themselves because they had morphed into
what David Brooks calls a "bobo," or the bohemian-bourgeoisie.
The basic idea is that it's OK to be crassly materialistic and
ill-behaved as long as you have good intentions, which by the
1990s meant having the right opinions about the environment,
race, gender and poverty. The Clintons are perfect exemplars of
this trend, since they quite honestly seemed to think that the
goodness of their intentions justified their commodity deals,
lying under oath, and astronomical book deals. Those who got
rich off the tech boom could think of themselves as pioneers on
the new "electronic frontier."
Another area of contradictory social trends is race. In their
book "America in Black and White," Stephan and Abigail Thernstrom
presented an overwhelming statistical case that while inequality
still remained a stubborn fact, African-Americans over the past
generation had improved their material and social situation
relative to whites in virtually every respect. But as the
objective differences narrow, the perceived injustice of those
inequalities still remaining seem to become all the more
unbearable.
To hear many black leaders talk in the wake of the Florida
recount, the current situation is not all that different from
Selma, 1963. For all of Mr. Clinton's gestures toward racial
healing, the distinctiveness of black perceptions of events has
grown. This became painfully evident during the O.J. Simpson
trial, when liberal white women expected their black sisters to
denounce male violence, only to find one well-educated black
talking head after another taking O.J.'s side. While whites were
sharply divided over the Clinton impeachment, blacks were
monolithically on his side; Al Gore got an even higher proportion
of the black vote than did our first "black" president. The gulf
that separates blacks and whites is increasingly a cultural
rather than socio-economic one.
All of these trends indicate that the most important changes of
the Clinton years were in the end cultural rather than economic.
This explains the central political paradox of this period: Why
it is that one of the most conservative presidents from the
Democratic Party could have ended up being so intensely hated by
the right, and polarized American politics like no other?
The reason was that the Clintons were quintessential "bobos":
crudely materialistic, self-absorbed, and power-hungry, but at
the same time unable to admit any of this to themselves because
they believed their intelligence, education and sophistication
entitled them to a higher level of respect. Like others in his
generation, the man presiding over America's most recent decade
of greed could look himself in the mirror and pronounce himself
satisfied with what he saw.
Mr. Fukuyama is a professor of public policy at George Mason
University.
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Kadosh, Kadosh, Kadosh, YHVH, TZEVAOT
FROM THE DESK OF:
*Michael Spitzer* <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
The Best Way To Destroy Enemies Is To Change Them To Friends
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