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Leonard Quart
Elizabeth Warren
There probably is no point at this late date analysing the Democratic convention in depth, but I had some reactions to the proceedings, including Massachusetts’s senatorial candidate, Elizabeth Warren’s speech, that I would like to share.
I understand that for many of the speakers – like Michelle Obama – it was important to invoke, as she did, in her artfully and movingly shaped and delivered speech, the promise of America. To affirm the ‘Dream’ is both a political necessity, and a belief doubtless genuinely held by the speakers. Michelle stated in her speech that her parents believed ‘in that fundamental American promise — that even if you don’t start out with much, if you work hard and do what you are supposed to do, you should be able to build a decent life for yourself and an even better life for your kids and grandkids’.
The ‘American Dream’ clearly is not always an illusion. One can easily provide examples of people who started with little or nothing and achieved great success, or, at least, achieved comfortable lives. And from Horatio Alger Jr’s ‘Ragged Dick’ to ‘The Great Gatsby’ to Miller’s ‘Death of a Salesman’, Phillip Roth’s ‘American Pastoral’ – countless American novels and plays have explored the pursuit of the ‘Dream’, and also its dark underside. And many immigrants have struggled and endured all sorts of painful obstacles to reach and adapt to this country, because the dream of a new, better life goaded them on. Immigrants have often viewed America as a place where one could leave social class, tradition, political violence and tyranny and economic deprivation behind – a veritable ‘Promised Land’.
However, the path to success in the US has always been skewed in favour of those born with money and social status, advantages, especially today, reinforced by attending elite schools. Obviously, true equal opportunity doesn’t exist except as an empty abstraction or a rhetorical political device. Sadly, for a great many Americans the ‘Dream’ is a phantasm never to be realised. We live in a country where the overall poverty rate stands at 15% – the highest level since 1993; high school dropout rates, especially black and Hispanic ones, though declining, are still high; and little change in the economic situation of the poor can be expected in the near future.
The Republicans also used the ‘Dream’ of upward mobility and success as a mantra in their convention addresses. Many of their key speeches offered tales of how speakers like Chris Christie and Paul Ryan rose to their elevated status and power from supposed humble circumstances.
But the difference between Democratic and Republican use of ‘Dream’ imagery is that the Democrats support the government’s role (albeit insufficiently) in both helping people who break down along the road, and in granting greater opportunity to people who are in pursuit of the ‘Dream’. Romney, on the other hand, had spoken before the convention pandering to the wealthy part of his base (or is this one of the rare moments where he espoused a position he truly believes in?) about wanting to dismantle the safety net and viewing with contempt the 47% of ‘dependent’ people who purportedly don’t pay taxes as ‘moochers’, diluting the wealth of the ‘givers’, the moneyed, who are his key to America’s prosperity.
Romney also has stated that Americans shouldn’t ‘become dependent upon redistribution, it will kill American entrepreneurship’. It’s an assertion oblivious to the fact that most hard-working and striving Americans (eg police, students, teachers, veterans, farmers) and believers in the ‘Dream’ are dependent on some form of indirect or direct government subsidy. For the ‘Dream’ is not only about achieving great power and wealth, but living a comfortable life, often with a house of one’s own. And Republicans, though hypocritically ready to offer concessions and aid to their corporate base, continue to run on the belief that Americans must stand on their own, taking on responsibility for their lives without appreciable government help.
Elizabeth Warren, the tough-minded, courageously left/liberal candidate for the Massachusetts Senate (whom the right sees as ‘strident’ and ‘demagogic’) also gave a convention speech in prime time that invoked her modest beginnings – waiting tables at 13, attending public schools, early marriage, and teaching elementary school.
Before the campaign Warren was best known as a watchdog of the government’s corporate bailout program, a top financial adviser to Obama, and the main force behind a high-profile agency born from the 2010 Wall Street reform legislation, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. But little of her accomplishments seem to matter in the campaign. It was more important for her to be convincingly folksy in her convention speech.
Warren chose to highlight the fact that she could not be pegged as an elitist Harvard academic, out of touch with the people, ‘a professor’, as her opponent, the supposedly affable Tufts-graduate everyman, Scott Brown, called her in practically every campaign ad and speech. So, she did what all politicians must do to avoid alienating the American public, allude to her modest origins (even millionaire Romney and his wife informed us that they ate pasta and tuna fish as students), in a society where egalitarianism is pre-eminent in our speech and style.
Warren has had to endure Brown’s attacks labeling her as the candidate of ‘Washington insiders, celebrities, elites, occupiers, and leftists’. But Warren is an unusual candidate, who has the intellectual substance and political guts that Brown, whose prime attraction is his regular-guy persona, sorely lacks. In the Senate, Brown’s record is generally bland and blurry, supporting the Republican agenda and Wall Street most of the time, but clocking enough bipartisan votes to provide a patina of independence from the party.
Warren in her convention speech also conveyed her trenchant economic critique, declaring: ‘For many years now, our middle class has been chipped, squeezed, and hammered. People feel like the system is rigged against them. And here’s the painful part: They’re right. The system is rigged’. She is one of the few Democrats who has been willing to directly take on the large corporations, especially Wall Street and their dominant role in this country. And bankers, hedge fund managers, and private equity executives are pouring funds into Brown’s campaign to stop her. Clearly, they see Warren as their greatest political threat to pursuing business as usual.
What strikes me is that, like every other politician, Warren must convince the public that though she may be a Harvard academic, she is just ‘ordinary folks’. It’s a cardinal rule of the political game that however intellectually gifted the candidate, she must mute the fact, so that she too can be seen as just another driver of that mythic pick-up truck that Scott Brown built his political career on.
Leonard Quart is a professor emeritus of American studies
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