We Don’t Need More Moral Elites. We Need Less Powerful Ones.

[RoosGirl]

http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/01/davos-david-brooks-the-rich-have-become-too-powerful.html#comments

We Don’t Need More Moral Elites. We Need Less Powerful Ones.
By Eric Levitz

Four decades ago, America’s rapacious capitalists and conservative moralists were singing in harmony. As the former lamented liberalism’s assault on free enterprise (i.e., their own power and profitability), the latter decried its corruption of the urban poor’s moral rectitude. In their collective telling, the welfare state didn’t just crowd out private investment or burden taxpayers — it also fostered a culture of single-motherhood, idleness, and instant gratification; a.k.a. a “culture of poverty.”

Thus, the goals of revitalizing public morality and liberating private economic power were in perfect concert. Slashing the safety net would facilitate tax cuts for the rich, and a rediscovery of the Protestant work ethic for the inner cities’ indigent. Curbing inflation would restore capital’s profitability, and discourage workers’ profligacy. And as poor men returned to work, and poor women lost their handouts, the patriarchal family would rise from the ashes of the welfare state — and social reproduction would once again be financed by women’s uncompensated labor, instead of the progressive income tax. Free market dynamism and moral traditionalism would go together like Ronald Reagan and Pat Robertson.

Alas, the “invisible hand” had other plans. In reality, the one percent’s ascent coincided with the traditional family’s decline. Deregulated markets didn’t reinforce conservative moral values — they sucked capital from the most conservative parts of America, and concentrated it in coastal Gomorrahs. Breaking inflation broke the labor movement — and thus, the single-income family. Male wages fell, women’s liberation continued apace, and marriage rates plummeted. Adding insult to injury, the corporate titans of the second Gilded Age stopped feigning solidarity with the moral majority, and started getting “woke.”
Now, the face of the long-term underemployed has white skin and a rural zip code — and the base of the Republican Party has grown less affluent and suburban. And all of this has led some conservatives to voice a heretical thought: If “big government” can induce moral degeneracy and cultural decline, perhaps big business can do the same?

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