Moving Beyond Fear

Upending the Security Tales in Capitalism, Fascism, and Democracy

Charles Derber, Yale R. Magrass

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• eBook ISBN: 9781317220954
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

While security stories often point to real threats, the narratives of leaders are as much about legitimating the power of rulers and the political and economic system that brought them to power. Derber and Magrass offer a penetrating examination of this phenomenon across history and types of societies. Their analysis reveals the great irony about security stories: they historically increase insecurity, imperiling citizens and nation. In the US today, the contradiction is especially acute, as security stories told by Trump divide US citizens against one another.

The book builds from an analysis of the extreme dangers of the prevailing security stories to a new paradigm of true security. The authors develop new approaches as our best hope for avoiding catastrophe and creating a socially just society based on real security for a nation and for humans across the planet.

1
The Upstairs/Downstairs House

Selling Capitalism in an Age of Extreme Inequality

Inequality is as dear to the American heart as Liberty itself.

—William Dean Howells

Girls: Free to be anything you choose

Boys: Free to wait tables and shine shoes

—Verse from the song, “America,” West Side Story

We googled “inequality” in May 2018, and found over 85 million search items. Now, admittedly, that is only about half of the number of searches for the pop icon, Lady Gaga. But you won’t find many words that generate almost 100 million search items. It’s a sign that inequality, if not exactly as popular as pop culture, interests almost everyone who thinks about society—and has economic, political, social, military, cultural and psychological effects on all of us, rich or poor. As inequality has become more extreme, and because it is rooted in the DNA of our economies and societies, more and more people realize we may have to rethink such notions as capitalism and the American Dream, because they can morph into something darker and scarier.

Economist Thomas Piketty, the leading global scholar on inequality, offers a very simple explanation for why 85 million people might google inequality. The inequality gap has become unbelievably extreme, in the US and the entire world. Piketty, a sober, data-driven academic, who has collected more data than anyone else on inequality, says this:

Income from labor [in the United States] is about as unequally distributed as has ever been observed anywhere.¹

In other words, we live in a society where income inequality is greater than ever before experienced in human history.

Consider a few more of the most striking illustrations of our extreme and deepening inequality in the US house:

• In 2017, three white men in the US owned as much wealth as the bottom half of the population or 160 million people.²
• In 2014, the top .1% owned as much wealth as the bottom 90%.³
• In 2014, 30% of US households had zero or negative wealth.⁴
• Income inequality is higher in the US than in any other developed nation—with a Gini coefficient (a measure of inequality) of .40.⁵
• The top 10% of US families own $51 trillion in wealth or about 75% of total household US wealth.⁶
• According to Thomas Piketty, the bottom half of the US population owns just 2% of the nation’s wealth.⁷
• Based on IRS figures, summarized by University of California economists, 95% of the income gains reported in the US from 2009 to 2013 went to the top 1%, a pattern consistent during recent decades of the wealthiest Americans capturing almost all the growth in the nation’s income and capital stock.⁸
• According to empirical data collected by the Institute for Policy Studies and the Poor People’s campaign, 140 million Americans in 2017 are poor or low-income, living in the basement or the decaying first floor rooms of the downstairs.

Of course, our society is a capitalist one—and it’s not entirely surprising to find that inequality is a big deal in capitalism. If we think of capitalist societies as houses, what would they look like? All of them would be “upstairs-downstairs” structures, though the floors and staircases would differ in their design. If we looked at the world as a global capitalist system, we would see a huge neighborhood of different styles of homes, but all of them would be some version of upstairs-downstairs architecture, reflecting structural inequality in the capitalist DNA.

Upstairs-downstairs will remind many of Downton Abbey, the PBS television hit series about the British aristocracy and their servants. It followed an earlier BBC series, Upstairs Downstairs. It was even more popular than Downton Abbey, with seven Emmys and viewed by an average of 9 million people each episode, and a billion people worldwide.⁹ In both shows, the aristocracy and servants occupied two interdependent worlds—of luxury and power upstairs and indentured servitude downstairs. The shows describe the economically and emotionally inter-tangled lives both within and across the upstairs and downstairs in a late 19th-century Gilded Age of lords and servants, a residue of feudalism in capitalist Britain during the two World Wars.

When a noble lady in the series Upstairs Downstairs once gets into the front seat of her chauffeur’s car, he asks her to go back because she and he must abide by the rules. “Their relationship is where the two sides—upstairs and downstairs—meet,” the actor playing the chauffeur told a journalist.

She shuns the archetype of who she’s supposed to be, and he shuns having to bow down to authority.¹⁰

This is extremely upsetting and dangerous. Authority is everything. Those upstairs and downstairs know the rules well and violate them at their risk.

The upstairs/downstairs double worlds have not gone away—they just seem to be less rigid and more democratic today, disguising the persisting enormous chasms in wealth and power. Many of us think we have moved beyond such fossilized class-bound worlds. But despite economic growth spurred by new technology and progressive reforms, Upstairs Downstairs and Downton Abbey became huge hits partly because they shocked us with a certain unexpected familiarity, giving us a sub-conscious recognition of how little has changed. As one reviewer says of Sarah, a maid in the Upstairs Downstairs series:

Like us (the TV audience), she’s forced to accept stark social divisions in the same house as perfectly normal.¹¹

In other words, the billion viewers of the show see how our current world takes for granted its own upstairs/downstairs reality, and “normalizes” and perpetuates ancient patterns of inequality and injustice, in new modern dress.

Critics and backers of capitalism both see that the upstairs/downstairs great divides are wired into the capitalism order. The greatest critic, Karl Marx, argued that capitalism is a permanent upstairs/downstairs system in which the upstairs capitalist class—the owners of factories, banks and other “means of production”—squeeze profit from the vast, exploited working class on the first floor. Anti-Marxist champions of capitalism—from Adam Smith to Milton Friedman, from Teddy Roosevelt to George W. Bush—strongly agree with Marx on one thing: inequality is baked into the system. But they view the house as beautifully designed, with the upstairs/downstairs architecture essential for prosperity, freedom and justice, since it allows the most productive and worthy people—the “creatives” as novelist and capitalist champion Ayn Rand put it—to move up the staircases based on their merit and hard work, while the lazy “parasites,” Rand’s term for the rest of the population, get their just retribution in the drab first floor or dirty basement. Here is Rand unabashed on why the “creatives” belong upstairs and the “parasites” downstairs:

The creator stands on his own judgment. The parasite follows the opinions of others. The creator thinks, the parasite copies. The creator produces, the parasite loots.¹²

What does the US capitalist house look like? It has a lavish upstairs, where Donald Trump, Steve Forbes, Charles and David Koch, Jeff Bezos and all the other “creative” capitalists—now dubbed the 1%—live luxuriously and can push buttons that control the societal house. The top .01%—16,000 households led by CEOs, hedge fund managers and multi-millionaires with minimum wealth over $100 million—are the true capitalist aristocrats living at the very top of the house, led in 2018 by over 400 billionaires.¹³ They fund both our political parties, and pass their riches on to their heirs—in what Piketty calls “patrimonial capitalism” where inherited wealth exceeds earned wealth. These “aristocratic capitalists” thereby inherit the keys to running America.

Inequality analyst Chuck Collins writes that we have very ambivalent views of the upstairs rich:

At one talk I gave, I asked the audience “How many of you feel rage toward the wealthiest 1%?” Almost everyone in a room of 350 people raised a hand. There was nervous laughter.

“How many of you have admiration for some of things wealthy people have to done to make our society better?”

About two-thirds of the people raised their hands.

“How many of you wish you were in the wealthiest 1%?”

Again, almost everyone raised a hand, laughing.

“So you feel enraged, admiring and wish to be the object of your own anger?” I observed. See, I told you it was complicated.¹⁴

But our mixed-up feelings—and our partial beliefs in Ayn Rand’s ideas—shouldn’t obscure the stark realities of the house architecture. Beneath the opulent quarters of the multi-millionaires, the house has a huge downstairs, with many different rooms and partitions on the first floor, where the working class (which includes blue-collar, pink-collar and white-collar employees comprising perhaps 70% of Americans) lives under a wide degree of economically insecure, indebted and declining conditions. Nearly half of all Americans, or 155 million people, lived within 200% of the official poverty line in 2011, which many economists define as the most accurate measure of poverty. Many of these people live in the downstairs basement but a much higher percentage live on the first floor and are mis-named middle class.¹⁵

The house also has a fashionable mezzanine, closer to the upstairs than the downstairs, inhabited by the generally well-off and culturally authoritative professional-managerial class (the PMC), a group of highly educated doctors, lawyers, professors, journalists and other professional or managerial employees numbering perhaps 10% of the population, dubbed the “new class” by the sociologist Alvin Gouldner.¹⁶ It has more wealth than the top .1% and the entire downstairs combined. If, in 2016, you were a typical working person in the bottom 90% in wealth, you would have to increase that wealth twelvefold (good luck with that!) to leapfrog on to the PMC mezzanine.¹⁷

The PMC has great authority as well as wealth and is increasingly recognized as its own kind of “aristocracy,” perpetuating itself through inbreeding, professional educational credentialing and residential segregation. The PMC is very important in our story; the different sectors of PMC help administer the house but in ways that both reinforce and challenge the capitalist elite above it upstairs, while also contradictorily helping and disrespecting the less-educated and much poorer people downstairs.

Journalist Matthew Stewart, a member in good standing of the PMC, says this about his class:

So what kind of characters are we… .? We are mostly not like those flamboyant political manipulators from the .1 percent. We’re a well-behaved, flannel-suited crowd of lawyers, doctors, dentists, mid-level investment banks, MBAs with opaque job titles and associated other professionals—the kind of people you might invite to dinner. In fact we’re so self-effacing, we deny our own existence. We keep insisting that we’re “middle class.”

As of 2016, it took $1.2 million in net worth to make it into (our class) … our necks get stuck in the upward position. We gaze upon the .1% with a mixture of awe, envy and eagerness to obey. As a consequence, we are missing the other big story of our time. We have left the 90 percent in the dust—and we’ve been quietly tossing down roadblocks behind us to make sure they never catch up.¹⁸

Those who almost never catch up live in a dark dirt-floor basement, where millions of unemployed and poor people have a miserable life, often hungry and sick. They are disproportionately people of color and undocumented immigrants, though the majority in the basement are native whites and rural. About 16% or about 55 million Americans are officially poor. Almost half of the nation (155 million people)—and 41% of US children in 2016 live “on the brink of poverty,” translating into 29.8 million children and 5 million toddlers under the age of three.¹⁹

The other key to the capitalist architecture is the much celebrated staircases, permitting people to move up and live the American Dream (but also to fall down). There is a long, winding staircase connecting the upstairs to the downstairs. The image of Donald Trump coming down the brilliantly lit gilded staircase (actually an escalator, symbolically suggesting the stairwell will move you up effortlessly) in Trump Tower when he announced his presidential candidacy is a perfect image for the house. The “people’s billionaire” inspires everyone with the grandeur of the house and how we can all dream of being him—because America is built around huge staircases of mobility that make everyone’s American Dream possible.

There are many staircases in the house. One connects the mezzanine to the upstairs, and another staircase goes from the first floor to the mezzanine, and both seem possible to climb but are, as we soon see, very steep climbs, something like going up Mt. Everest. And then there is a chute where people from the downstairs can fall down into the basement, but the Happy House tells us that those not lazy can easily climb out of the basement.

In any upstairs/downstairs societal architecture, the house needs a seductive and moralistic governing creed—or set of creeds—to survive. The folks upstairs—think Donald Trump or Jeff Bezos or the wealthiest people in your favorite big city—just live too much better and enjoy far more power than those stagnating downstairs despite working harder than ever. The cultural authority of the PMC on the mezzanine—helping define the good life for the working people downstairs—also creates a huge division, in which workers downstairs feel put down by the arrogance and cultural authority of the PMC. An architecture built to sustain such deep capitalist-driven economic inequality and PMC-driven cultural inequality can make anyone ask the big question: why such vast divisions should be allowed to persist or exist at all?

If no good, persuas...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• INTRODUCTION: THE SECURITY STORY: WHY IT ENDANGERS EVERYTHING AND HOW TO RESIST IT
• Chapter 1 The Upstairs/Downstairs House: Selling Capitalism in an Age of Extreme Inequality
• Chapter 2 Selling Security for Honor and Profit: The Story Linking Ancient With Capitalist Aristocracies
• Chapter 3 Trump-ing Freedom for Protection: How to Win Friends by Manufacturing Enemies
• Chapter 4 From Capitalism to Fascism: The Security Story and the Fall of Democracy
• Chapter 5 The Failings of the American Left: How to Be Your Own Worst Enemy
• Chapter 6 Saving Democracy: How to Create True Security
• NOTES
• INDEX