By Alan Wolfe
September 22, 1999
Chestnut Hill, Mass. -- If anything is a truism in American politics, it is that people do not care about income inequality. And as most such truisms eventually are, this one may be about to be contradicted.
The 1990's will be remembered as a time of Reaganism without Reagan. In an ironic confirmation of the conservative dictum that most consequences are unplanned, President Reagan's deliberate attempts to redistribute wealth to the rich now appear puny compared with what stock options and C.E.O. compensation have done under President Clinton.
Economists love to argue about numbers, but no study has disputed, because no study can dispute, that the boom of the past decade has widened an already large gap between rich and poor. The incomes of the best-off Americans have risen twice as fast as those of middle-class Americans, according to data from the Congressional Budget Office. The gap between the rich and the working class has grown even more. A study sponsored by the left-leaning Institute for Policy Studies in Washington showed that executives made 419 times more than factory workers in 1998, compared with 42 times more in 1980. But up to this point, the wealth gap has not captured widespread public interest. That is partly because income inequality is still viewed as a cause of zealots out to redistribute the nation's wealth.
Some leftists are indeed behind efforts to bring the issue to public consciousness; activists in Santa Monica, Calif., for example, have proposed a law mandating a "living wage" in their town. Most Americans are not prepared to follow them. For one thing, this economic boom, unlike the one in the 1980's, is increasing incomes across the board, if at differing rates. Yet candidates of both parties would be complacent if they dismissed the cause of income inequality as a fringe concern.
Luxury is a losing game. The fact that Americans hope to become rich does not mean that they admire the rich. Their acceptance of other people's financial good fortune all comes down to how people make their money. When I talked to middle-class Americans around the country in the mid-1990's, they did not like welfare recipients because they did not think that their income was properly earned. In a similar way, excessive C.E.O. salaries and stock options bothered the people I interviewed because such rewards have become disconnected from the efforts that go into earning them.
Without the negative stereotype of welfare queens to stir up resentment, and with couples holding three or four jobs to scrape by, the idle rich who make themselves even richer may inspire increasing resentment. Republicans may be identified with unfettered capitalism, but there are conservative strains in American politics -- one evolving from British Toryism (in its pre-Thatcher, landed-aristocracy incarnation) and the other rooted in Roman Catholicism -- that are identified with a distaste for the wealth gap. In good conservative fashion, the Tories insisted that tolerating gross differences in income was a formula for social instability. It was the Tory Benjamin Disraeli who, in 1845, coined the phrase "two nations" to describe the impact industrial capitalism was having on his country.
Our Tory conservatives have belonged to both parties, and their names have generally been Roosevelt. Teddy, the Republican, attacked monopolies in ways not unfamiliar to European conservatives, and Franklin and Eleanor, the Democrats, spoke for the conscience of the nation. Today George W. Bush inherits the mantle of aristocratic conservatism. He finds himself uttering a word like "compassion" not generally found in his party's vocabulary, even if, given his record, his conviction is doubted. "The purpose of prosperity is to leave no one out, to leave no one behind," Mr. Bush said in announcing his candidacy.
The conservative who most speaks for economic justice, unfortunately, is Patrick Buchanan, who won the Republican primary in New Hampshire in 1996 with his attacks on Wall Street. Though his fellow Roman Catholics may find many of his other views highly offensive, they do understand the doctrine of a just wage: principles of economic justice have been at the center of Catholic social teachings for over a century. In a series of turn-of-the-century papal encyclicals, the Vatican accepted the legitimacy of labor unions and tried to develop a non-socialist justification for what would become the European welfare state.
In the United States, if it takes demagogy of the sort associated with Mr. Buchanan to verify that hard-working Americans may well feel a sense of injustice as they watch the building of ever more trophy homes for the stock-market rich, that is only because, with a few exceptions, other politicians have failed to take up the issue. One possible exception is another Catholic politician, Mayor Richard Riordan of Los Angeles, a Republican who supports pro-business policies but who nevertheless pays employees at his own restaurant a living wage and stresses society's obligation to help the poor.
But Democrats who think they have the issue of economic justice locked up by default should think again. The problem is that for the party's liberal wing, any focus on the plight of the working poor and lower middle class would have implications that would be difficult to accept. It would constitute an implicit confession that Democrats are paying less attention to the nonworking poor. The Democrats need to understand that majority sentiment in this country insists that people be eligible for help only when they demonstrate that they deserve help. No longer can Democrats listen to the message of liberal academics who believe it is morally wrong to use a world like "morality" in discussing the plight of the poor.
There is something that politicians of both parties can do about this issue: they can speak about it. On the subject of economic justice, a little rhetoric can go a long way. Under Bill Clinton, the Democrats moved away from welfare and toward helping the working poor and the middle class. Now Republicans might find that voters would like a privileged candidate courageous enough to shame the rich for their greed. Alan Wolfe is the director of the Center for Religion and American Public Life at Boston College and the author of "One Nation, After All."
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