He was reacting to journalist and commentator David Brooks’s discussion of a recent basketball game between the Duke and Butler university teams in America. Brooks said that the game was widely set up as a class conflict: ‘the upper crust Dukies against the humble Midwestern farm boys.’ However, for Brooks, the Duke win did not come from privilege but through hard work on defence. He went on to add: ‘I was going to say that for the first time in human history, rich people work longer hours than middle class or poor people. How do you construct a rich versus poor narrative when the rich are more industrious?’ Taibbi’s reaction to the thought of rich people being more industrious was magnificent. He noted first that only a person who’d never held a real job could come up with something like that:
There is, of course, a huge difference between working 80 hours a week in a profession that you love and which promises you vast financial rewards, and working 80 hours a week digging ditches for a septic-tank company, or listening to impatient assholes scream at you at some airport ticket counter all day long, or even teaching disinterested, uncontrollable kids in some crappy school district with metal detectors on every door.I liked Taibbi’s remarks because he’s nailed it, and it’s not always easy to defend the low-waged or poor from criticism from the rich, or judgmental high-fliers. It’s also tough trying to argue with anyone who believes in the idea that, if you study and work hard, there’s nothing to stop you reaching for higher things, and certainly nothing to stop you from having enough to get by. It’s your own problem, not theirs, if you ignored all the opportunities and are poor, or struggling on a marginally better income. And it’s certainly not up to the government to interfere and spend public money on you.
Most of the work in this world completely sucks balls and the only reward most people get for their work is just barely enough money to survive, if that. The 95% of people out there who spend all day long shoveling [sic] the dogshit of life for subsistence wages are basically keeping things running just well enough so that David Brooks, me and the rest of that lucky 5% of mostly college-educated yuppies can live embarrassingly rewarding and interesting lives […] (Matt Taibbi, ‘Brooks: Let Them Eat Work,’ Taibblog, April 10th, 2010 <http://trueslant.com/matttaibbi/2010/04/10/brooks-let-them-eat-work/>)
The rhetoric of the right is always going to be more appealing than that of the left, which often gets tangled in arguments about how it offers more financial incentives to the unemployed than to those in work. Still, I used to struggle to understand the appeal of the right, despite its placating rhetoric of freedom from government control and freedom to pursue…whatever it is you do. I struggled because I think along the lines of Taibbi’s description up there. Surely, as most people don’t earn enough money to find living particularly easy (and even if they are quite comfortable, they know that everything depends on them staying in full time work), surely they would be put off by the self-congratulatory reading of the right by those who, economically, don’t know they’re born.
But then one of the changes brought over the last half-century or so has been how we see the rich. The affluent are no longer people with plummy voices, funny clothes and drinks cabinets; they now look like you and me—if we were able to buy everything we wanted. We all have phones, t-shirts and jeans, but the moneyed have THE phones, t-shirts and jeans. They have gone from enviably rich but unattractively square – stuffy, woollen-suited wonders with the solace of the rotary club and trust funds – to almost cool. Western cultural production presents houses and lifestyles that we all salivate over sometimes, but on sober reflection they portray an affluent, deliberately insular culture, atypical of most people’s experience. In British drama we get those loveable upper crust characters: rather arrogant, but frightfully funny and self-deprecating. It’s because there’s fun and funny carefully deployed in those rich lives that we don’t sit there thinking ‘toff’ or ‘wow, they spend more money on heating their drive than I earn in a tax year.’
I suppose rightism offers the freedom to enjoy that culture, or rather for everyone to enjoy whatever level of pay they receive, and to pursue their ideas for business or making money, without being told that they owe the unemployed or low waged something. As P.J. O’Rourke said of his conversion to the Republican Party as a faltering, nineteen-year-old Maoist: ‘I realized that communism meant giving my golf clubs to a family in Zaire. Also, I couldn’t bear the dreadful, glum earnestness of the left.’ [1]
O’Rourke is a very particular breed of Republican. Firstly, he’s funny. Secondly, he’s one of a select group who combine the party’s conservatism, deregulation and individualist beliefs with enjoying illicit hedonism. O’Rourke identified the full possibilities of life and maleness in the first world with his unsurpassed expression of liberal democracy: driving fast on drugs while getting your wang wang squeezed, and not spilling your drink [2]. Borrowing from O’Rourke’s line of argument, your right-winger will probably say that you shouldn’t do that, but if they happened to do it they’d probably have a ball. Your left-winger would say that you can’t do that, and if they happened to do it, they’d probably hate it. If I happened to try it, I’d probably be carsick.
In British politics these lefty/righty distinctions have been watered down somewhat. Gordon Brown likes to figure the difference between the Conservatives and Labour as one of style versus substance. Opposing the Conservatives’ style over substance is Labour’s substance over style. The substance is nu-Labour’s 13-year legacy, with the style perhaps lost under that glum, even dour, earnestness O’Rourke mentioned. But is the substance really leftist? I can’t help of thinking of Jonathan Meades, journeying around disused industrial sites in Scotland:
Further, the Finchley faith [as in ‘iron steel girder Margaret from Finchley’], which became the enthusiastically adopted cross-party consensus of the past twenty-five years, the faith that manufacturing industry was an irrelevance, and that an entire economy—a soufflé economy—might be founded on the no holds barred selflessness of deregulated debt rights peddling expensive money, proved to be just that: a faith, an expression of unfounded wishfulness. It goes without saying that there would be no reprieve; calloused hands and emphysema were so hopelessly old Labour. (Jonathan Meades: Off Kilter, episode three, BBC4, September 2009)That cross-party consensus leaves us in an awkward place now. When Michael Foot died, taking a large part of what remained of old labour with him, several voices in the media commented that the longest suicide note in history said some things about closer control of banks that seem quite prescient today, as the soufflé does the inevitable. Neil Clarke of the Guardian went as far as to say that it could have saved the country from disaster. Whatever the differences, I doubt New Labour feels much need to apologise for itself; it’s been too successful in getting the party into power and holding on to it for three terms. As to their consensual record, the Conservatives are looking forwards rather than backwards. Now I think we’re faced with finding the lesser of three evils, if you are thinking of voting for one of the big three that is.
Until this situation changes we have people like Taibbi, and our own consciences. The vast majority of people are indeed on subsistence wages. Whatever your political view, or level of apathy towards politicking, it is worth taking some time to consider what you think people need, and, from your voting options, who can offer the best chance of that.
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[1] P.J. O’Rourke, Republican Party Reptile, (London: Picador, 1987), p.xiv.
[2] ibid., pp.128-137.
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