If the midterm elections in America were a movie, they’d be a psychological horror fetish flick. A hogtied electorate is approached by two parties, each promising freedom if only the bound electorate will pledge complete loyalty. One glance at the wrong “saviour” and the deal is off. Sadly the twist is that, in the end, neither party frees the captive. Is this analogy over the top? Of course. But so is the fact that working- and middle-class Americans are increasingly hogtied when it comes to wealth and social mobility, the foundations of the American dream. Family wealth for all races and ethnicities, but particularly for blacks and Latinos, has not recovered from the jab/uppercut combination of the Great Recession and the housing crisis. And while social mobility varies by region (America’s south-east is the least socially mobile, and also arguably the most racially segregated), it’s elusive for most working-class and poor Americans of any region or race. The midterm elections, a bloodbath for the Democratic party, have been interpreted as everything from the revenge of white men (who had high turnout and Republican loyalty) to a singular and specific repudiation of President Obama. Part of me wants to be happy that the Republicans decisively won. After all, anything has to be better than the current legislative gridlock. If the Republicans can quickly and decisively pass legislation then the president can just as quickly assent to or veto it. But on a state and local level, as well as a national one, I see a world of pain for the poor and working class, as well as Latinos, non-whites and gays and lesbians. Earlier this year the speaker of the House, John Boehner, said: “I think this idea that’s been borne out the last couple of years that, ‘you know, I really don’t have to work … I think I’d just rather sit around.’ This is a very sick idea for our country.” His statement simply doesn’t make sense. For example, in April, the Economic Policy Institute analysed Federal data from Jolts, the Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey. They found that month there were 4.5 million job openings, but 9.8 million jobseekers, meaning, they emphasised, “that more than half of jobseekers were not going to find a job in April, no matter what they did.” The implication is very often that these “lazy” people are also black and brown. And some politicians, like Sally Kern, a Republican representative in the Oklahoma state legislature, are all too happy to state so baldly. Kern said: “We have a high percentage of blacks in prison, and that’s tragic, but are they in prison just because they are black or because they don’t want to study as hard in school?”
On election day, I walked down the street to Brooklyn’s PS161, known as the Crown – an elementary and middle school working to turn itself around. This is a “transitional” neighbourhood, one gentrifying at a blistering pace, with googobs of investment money going to tearing down, for example, the old church between my apartment and the Crown in order to build condominiums.
When I moved here from Manhattan four years ago, I remember seeing virtually no white residents on my block. Now almost every new tenant, and many new homebuyers, are white or Asian, people priced out of gentrified neighbourhoods nearby. Most of the new arrivals don’t have kids, and if they do they do not want to send them to the local schools.
The families who send their kids to the Crown range from poor to middle-class, but like so many places in America – not just black and brown ones, either – public education is viewed more as a necessary evil by financially strapped parents than as a right or privilege.
The cost of private schools in New York City is astronomical. And while this city is an outlier in terms of expense, the conundrum of whether to pay for private education or advocate for better schools, as legislators sit on their hands, is a national crisis. And then there’s our two-party system, something I blame for a lack of legislative action and choice. I managed to vote for candidates from three different parties, for different reasons, in this midterm. I voted for the Republican challenger to Governor Mario Cuomo, knowing Cuomo would win but not wanting him to feel he had a strong mandate, given his refusal to decisively quash the idea of fracking in the Adirondack watershed upstate. I voted for the Green party for lieutenant governor. And for most other offices, I voted for Democrats. But it didn’t bring me a particular sense of satisfaction, because I knew my choices were awkward ways of working round a system with limited choice. For all the problems with multiparty democracies – and all the xenophobia we see currently expressed in European elections – I’d prefer a wider range of options. And I’m not alone. People who don’t vote are widely viewed as lazy or selfish. But in a country where a third of people consider themselves political independents, there is a cohort of citizens who are more akin to conscientious objectors than layabouts in the party wars. The thoughtful outliers include people like Philip McKenzie, a New Yorker who runs the roving, globally minded Influencer Conference. He previously worked as a trader for Goldman Sachs. Now he’s opted out of the finance industry, and, after helping raise money for Obama in 2008, he’s also opted out of a belief in most major-party candidates. He said that Democrats and Republicans “differ around the margins, and they differ in their branding but when it comes to actual policy they tend to fall into a range of moderate/conservative beliefs that I don’t believe represent me”. He’d like to see money and influence peddling removed from the system: “But the agenda is set by corporate interests and money.” Yes, the country is better off than it was when Obama took office. But as the reality sinks in that we are in an era of long-term low and slow growth, political anxiety and attendant xenophobia are building. The midterm elections are, I believe, a mixed blessing for both of America’s political parties. But what about the voters? And the families? And the kids in the Crown? Our choices and potential for growth are still artificially limited – and in our hearts we know it. Farai Chideya is an author and broadcaster, and the Distinguished Writer in Residence at New York University’s Journalism Institute
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