A good friend of mine this morning had a conversation recently with her financial advisor. She is a person of means, not only fortunate but beneficent, generous, and committed in her pursuit of character and spirit.
Her advisor warned her that the election of Kamala Harris would be ruinous to her financial portfolio because the Democrats would instigate a radical redistribution of wealth that would not only ruin her but likely the country.
She took this advice seriously, as well she should. This financial advisor meant to look out for her interests. He had not the slightest care for her conscience or apparently his own. The matter of character or morality never came up and that too was telling.
That he thought it irrelevant, or worse, a matter either personal or fantastical (and therefore airy-fairy, “unrealistic,” etc.) is an important part of the story. That finance has nothing to do with ethics as such, only the law, advantages and liabilities is the current ethos, it substitutes or supplants the need for a conscience or character. What’s “practical” is what serves one’s interests and that suffices the soul or, at the very least, manages us to dismiss the question as to whether we have one or need one.
In reply to this advice I assured my friend that the wealthy will never permit any redistribution of wealth in America: at this point in our history we are a transactional oligarchy. We have culturally internalized our greed, no longer concerned with any Weberian Protestant Ethic to keep in check the spirit of capitalism. “Quiet luxury” instead substitutes as another attempt to make inconspicuous self-satisfaction less troublesome to one’s conscience. It’s not that people are less generous---there’s a charity auction for nearly every cause. Rather, it’s that we cannot as a society agree that being good can be difficult if it demands moral justice that taxes; conscience is thus reduced to neither necessity nor luxury. To live in a reflective conscience is now simply irrelevant unless it serves an ideological need to go about life without others who are other.
We can in true American entrepreneurial spirit dismiss conscience as a personal matter, free just as we are in religion not to insist upon a public conversation about the good that would deprive anyone of the fruits of their labor. Everyone need only go about their own business offering occasional salves to conscience with volunteerism and generosity when those virtues seem none too intrusive. Taking care of each other, not just our families but our society is leap too far because it would insist leadership confront their own corruptions not just ours.
No doubt, Americans seem to like their Social Security and Medicare, that so many are dependent on this income and service merely to survive is not what we would like to admit. These social programs for the social good can simultaneously be demonized as “communism” with the same superficiality that makes “socialism” or “liberal” a near-profanity because it is at best determined to be mere naivete, and at worst a threat to personal liberty.
I told my friend that her financial advisor is right to try to protect her finances. Trump will protect rich guys like him (just as Romney would have though Trump may not have any such ability); they will justify their choices in the now respectable and tired claim that trickle-down economics will do its job: the rich will get richer and the middle will be satisfied with the crumbs. As for the poor, they somehow deserve their lot.
I told my friend too that I understand this middle-class privilege because I’ve also been lucky: I have a job with a steady income (that did not keep up with inflation, so like all of the middle class) and have saved from day one for my retirement. Of course, without Social Security, even when the house and cars are paid off, I will have to sell just to survive or prevent bankruptcy. The scale down necessary to live may have to be made no matter what I do.
I try to imagine what will happen to say my pal Mike, a successful contractor who paid for his kid's college, and works hard every day---he’s my age, which is to say past the age of full Social Security. He has no retirement savings, having been an independent entrepreneur (while I had the luxury of an institutional job) and so has no recourse but to work so long as he literally can stand. That the Republicans have vowed openly to dismantle Social Security and the rest of our meager commie pinko safety net is not something my friend’s financial advisor would have to concern himself with. He’s not dealing with making ends meet; he’s about securing wealth. Mike is, as he puts it, one accident away from catastrophe but until then he’ll carry on.
Our middle class situation is in reality not different from the past when the wealthy evinced no concern for middles or bottoms. To put it plainly, the wealthy control our means of production and our outcomes, and we live on what is left, the crumbs. In a transactional world where there is no moral care we can elect Trump---a person so depraved, so venal and mendacious that it is beyond any dispute.
I wondered aloud to my friend if her financial advisor had any moral education and that was no accusation---almost no one has since Vietnam taught us the big lies and the 80s enshrined individualism without any moral determinant, to wit, caring about others doesn't qualify as a moral concern when it doesn't make "financial sense."
I assured my firend that Kamala will talk a good game about reversing the wealth inequities but she will accomplish almost nothing. The money wins, that is a lesson we would be naïve to reject as mere cynicism. You might pay a bit more in taxes, I told my friend, but Kamala’s not coming for your stuff. We’ll be lucky if she can stop the Republicans from eliminating the only safety nets that middle class folk have: without Social Security, Medicare, the crumbs of the Great Society, I will end up like Mikey, just an accident or malady from selling it all to survive. That is our system.
That is also the world that will not really change if Kamala Harris is elected. If Trump wins we will have told ourselves, America, a much simpler, clearer story: that nothing matters but selfishness, that moral turpitude is excusable because we love money and need not trouble ourselves with character. I could detest people like my friend’s financial advisor who seems to have assumed this world view but I'm still too busy trying to figure out how to manage till death without going broke---having spent an entire adult life working for a living.
I have no righteousness or reason for complaint because I have no belief that Kamala or anyone is going to change the course of this transactional, morally bankrupt society that calls itself free. There's no place for me to run, no one wants an old man with modest means. If Trump wins, I don't know what my wife and I will do, empty-nesters and living in our autumn, but I think we shall see only a more violence and a more dangerous, precarious society. A Trump victory is a victory for a failed democracy if democracy ever meant something like the greater good.
We are as a society incapable of asking who we want to be because that would tax our moral character and our pocketbooks. The wealthy will find out that their choice ruined the world but not likely their finances: they will survive Trump though I doubt they will profit as much as they think. As for the survival of society, that is not in question so much as what kind of society we become.
I am not hopeful or joyful like Mrs Harris nor do I have any notion that arch of justice bends towards goodness. I will live as if those things could be true because despair won’t help and cynicism defeats every future. Everyday may America will prove with another Trump presidency that it is not worthy of its ideals.
I should like to live and die with ideals, the rest may be just survival. But as I said at the outset, I see no near end and that for now is the blessing. I think my plans, well-made as they have been, may pull us through to the end but for America I see a road already taken I am grateful I will not live to see. The future from where I sit looks far more dangerous than ever, no matter what happens to the likes of me.
