In a post-9/11 America that no longer "does" irony — or nuance, for that matter — it's not surprising that one of the most significant ironies of the George W. Bush era went largely unnoticed. Plainly put, policies that were supposed to create more stakeholders in the U.S. economy actually pushed more people to its margins, and many out of it entirely.
Remember subprime mortgages? They've been nudged out of the headlines by gas prices lately, but they — and the crisis catalyzed by the collapse of the subprime market — are still news.
"Socialized health care" scares the bejeezus out of conservatives. Socialized wealth-care — which apparently means shared risk for American tax-payers, but no shared responsibility on the other side — is getting more popular by the day.
When free market fundamentalists like those in the Bush administration start at federal government action, after two interest rate cuts didn't do much to stall stop the economy sliding into recession, you know things have reached a crisis point. By the time they start taking baby steps towards a bailout, you can bet that — as with another disaster — many people are well underwater, some have drowned, and some aren't so much saving themselves as letting the tide carry them.
Something's happening out there. It's happening quietly in some places and not-so-quietly in others. It's happening around kitchen tables and in living rooms across the country, as Americans come to grips with new — or, to them, newly-revealed — economic realities. For some, it's just impossible to deny or ignore what most have known for weeks about the economy. Even the Bush administration — famous for simply ignoring reality (see part two of this series), as the president himself recently demonstrated by denying we're in a recession — is showing vague signs of concern.
Upward mobility in the American economy has always been something like the popular 1980s computer game, "Frogger," in which players had to maneuver their frogs across a busy street. Doing so successfully often meant taking two hops backward of sideways for every one hop forward. Failure to move fast enough meant getting squashed flat by oncoming traffic. Today, after hopping sideways for as long as possible, America's middle class is getting flattened, or — for the lucky — taking several hops backwards.
There's another lending crisis that's gone on for a while now, making far fewer headlines than the subprime crisis, the credit crunch, or the housing slump—because of the people it affected. But as those crises intensify and affect more and more people, this one may become even bigger news than it has been so far.
Imagine you're standing at a busy street corner, when you see someone about to step off the curb right into the path of an oncoming bus. You have just enough time and you're close enough to reach out and stop them before it's too late. Do you? Conservatism says, no.
Conservatism, depending on how you look at it, has successfully built the ownership society—albeit a very small, narrowly defined ownership society—and strengthened it by building or expanding its essential support: the society of the owned.
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