Mickey Kaus Hits Social Inequality (And Misses One Aspect…)

Mickey Kaus, one of the last liberals who has the courage to say many things that conservatives can appreciate, has written long (see The End of Equality, 1982) and well about the perils of social inequality. He does so again today in a Wall Street Journal OpEd, “The Other Kind of Inequality,” where he argues forcefully, and persuasively, that “[t]he decline of American social egalitarianism is more worrisome than differences in how much people earn.”

Kaus points out that income inequality, the current fixation of the Democrats, “seems to be driven largely by deep tectonic forces within the economy: global trade, which has devalued the labor of unskilled Americans, and technology, which has replaced labor with machines while empowering (and rewarding) those with skills.” It follows that tinkering around the edges will have very little effect: “Raising the minimum wage may be a good idea, but it affects a sliver of the labor market. It’s not going to stop the top 10% from taking home 50% of the nation’s income, or 51%. The same goes for extending unemployment compensation. Even the tax increases fought for by Mr. Obama are a blip. On paper they might cut the incomes of the very richest Americans by 6%—until the rich find ways to avoid them.” What the poor need to get ahead, Kaus concludes, is not economic tinkering by the government but more skills.

Kaus’s main point, however, is that economic inequality is not the main problem; social inequality is.

When we think honestly about why we really hate growing inequality, I suspect it won’t boil down to economics but to sentiments. No, we don’t want to “punish success”—the typical Democratic disclaimer. But we do want to make sure the rich don’t start feeling they’re better than the rest of us ….

“Whether we come from poverty or wealth,” President Reagan said, “we are all equal in the eyes of God. But as Americans that is not enough. We must be equal in the eyes of each other.” Worry about this social equality lies at the root of our worry about economic equality.

Good point. But if what we really want (or should want) is not economic equality but “[s]ocial equality — ‘equality of respect,’ as economist Noah Smith puts it” — and if what the poor most importantly lack is not income but skills, then the most pressing source of social inequality is not that the rich feel and act as though they’re better than the rest of us but that the highly educated do. You know, Ivy League snobs and their first cousins from the public Ivies.

Remember, in case you’ve forgotten, the shuddering response of the knowledge elite to Sarah Palin. Here’s how that looked, and looks, to a knowledgeable and impartial foreign observer, Palash Ghosh, a business journalist at International Business Times:

… Sarah Palin will probably never become President of the U.S. because she does not have an Ivy League education.

In fact, the last President to lack such an elite degree was Ronald Reagan – but he was kind of an exception. He already had wide name recognition as a Hollywood actor and even then he had to spend years building his political career in California, struggling long and hard to make it to the White House. Reagan was almost a septuagenarian when he first assumed office.

Otherwise, consider the four most recent occupants of 1600 Pennsylvania Ave.: Barack Obama (Columbia, Harvard); George W. Bush (Yale); Bill Clinton (Yale, Oxford); and George H.W. Bush (Yale).

What is striking about this list is that the two Democrats were born in modest circumstances and still attained the coveted Ivy League degrees – seemingly, a prerequisite to a career in high political office.

Moreover, two other “near-miss” Presidents (Hilary Clinton and Al Gore) also boast Ivy League pedigrees.

However, Sarah Palin comes from a far different background – the child of schoolteachers in remote Alaska, former beauty queen, sportscaster, moose-hunter and one who attended a plethora of no-name, obscure colleges in the Northwest and Hawaii.

No ivy in sight.

It is precisely because of her modest upbringing and “ordinariness” (i.e. lack of pretension and/or urban sophistication) that attracts Palin’s supporters and repels her detractors.

Kaus is certainly right that significant income redistribution will (or would) be quite difficult, but it would be even more difficult for Democrats to attempt to do anything about rampant cultural snobbism because those at the top of the educational and cultural heap in this country, those who look down with scorn at the “ordinariness” of their inferiors, are virtually all Democrats. A little class-based affirmative action at selective universities will do as little to affect this cultural snobbery as raising the minimum wage will to reduce income inequality (and may actually make it worse, since the now well-known “mismatch” effects would surely appear if the preferences were as great as racial preferences are now).

The cultural and educational elitism of liberals, and their disdain for working and middle-class Americans, is not a new phenomenon, as Fred Siegel explains in his important new book, The Revolt Against the Masses: How Liberalism Has Undermined the Middle Class, about which I’ll have more to say in a later post.