World on Fire - Brownstein, Michael [102]
Why? Part of the answer is the American Dream. Significant numbers of Americans believe that anyone, high or low, can move up the economic ladder as long as they are talented, hardworking, entrepreneurial, and not too unlucky. A driven Vietnamese-immigrant student once explained to me, “I may be poor now, but the reason I vote Republican is because I don’t plan to be poor for very much longer.” And recently from Forbes:
America has created a system in which anyone with talent and energy has access to the financial resources needed for success. . . .
Today banks, venture capitalists, underwriters and stock brokers here don’t much care who your grandfather was or whether you went to a prep school or dropped out of college. All they care about is: Can we make some bucks by backing this guy (or gal)?
This is not true in Japan. It is not true in Brazil. It is not even true in France or Germany. . . . In Germany, Bill Gates might well have had to go to work for Siemens. In Japan, Gates most certainly would have ended up as salaryman for Hitachi. . . .
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The belief in the possibility of upward mobility has characterized America since its inception. No doubt it reflects in part our history of westward expansion and our distinctive immigrant foundations. More fundamentally, it is sustained by an impressive number of actual rags-to-riches stories. American literature, for example, is filled with such stories: from Horatio Alger’s Ragged Dick to F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby to the recent biographies of Lee Iacocca, Arnold Schwarzenegger, and Oprah Winfrey, not to mention Bill Clinton and Bill Gates.
Ideally, the American Dream gives everyone a psychological stake in the continuing success of the market economy. At its extreme, the American Dream teaches the worse-off that their plight is the result not of an unfair or invidious economic system, but rather of their own deficiencies. In both these ways, the American Dream helps make acceptable the extreme wealth disparities inevitably produced in a capitalist economy.
It is important to recognize that the belief that anyone has a shot at fame and fortune is in some ways idiosyncratic to the United States. It has no real analogue even in the high-income countries of Western Europe, let alone the chronically poor, malnourished societies of the developing world.
Outside the West, in countries with widespread poverty and a market-dominant minority, the dream of upward mobility is largely a nonstarter. It is extremely difficult to believe in the possibility of market-generated upward mobility if you and everyone around you is mired in intractable poverty and the only wealthy people in the country appear to be members of a different ethnic group. (In the United States, African-Americans are probably the group who least credit the idea that in America anyone with talent and industry can “make it.”) The truth is that among the impoverished indigenous majorities of the developing world, exceedingly few believe that free markets will enable them to go “from rags to riches.” For this reason, anti-market backlashes are much more common outside the West than in the United States or Europe.
Racism in America: Fracturing the Poor Majority
Finally, in the United States, racism has arguably helped neutralize the conflict between markets and democracy, essentially by fracturing the poor majority. As a historical matter, it is well-established that racism hindered the formation of political alliances between poor and working-class whites on one hand, and poor and working-class minorities on the other hand. After the Second World War, for example, the CIO’s mass unionization campaign in the Southern states known as “Operation