I’ve been doing a lot of writing lately and recently set myself to trying to say something about rhetoric and the latest Democratic NYC mayoral debate. What Follows is my first piece of amateur punditry, written a couple of days ago.
Am I the only one who pines for the pre-PC days when Republicans were the pearl-clutching party of perpetual outrage? It might be hard to remember, but there was a time when conservatives were thin-skinned and sensitive, while liberals1 were bold and open-minded, or at least up for encountering new or troubling ideas. For the last couple of decades, though, the paradigm has been reversed, with liberals going in for a lot of censorious, aggrieved admonishment (of their opponents as well as one another).
The expectation that progressive politicians speak blandly and benignly was on full view at last night’s debate between New York’s Democratic candidates for mayor. Almost universally, postmortem analyses of the contest cite one candid comment by Anthony Weiner (the human embodiment of “nothing left to lose”) as being the crassest and most “controversial” moment of the debate. Weiner’s remark came as a response to a question about the status of the city’s economy. What he said was “We're creating a lot of restaurant worker jobs and poor people jobs...We have to stop that. We have to try to make this a middle class capital again."
That people would call this comment offensive is craven, silly, and, sadly, completely unsurprising. Many people have rushed to to Twitter to tweak the “tactless” Weiner (look at that sentence! The Post’s got nothin’ on me!). But what, exactly, are they indicting Weiner for? It cannot, at least in the center-left sea so many of us swim in, have anything to do with the position that he’s taking. Everybody talks, grumblingly, about our “jobless recovery” in which our rising GDP owes entirely to financial overlords manifesting money via black magic, rather than to traditional growth in wages or proliferation of employment opportunities. It is also a truism that what few jobs are being created in America tend to be insecure, low-skill jobs in the lightly unionized service industry.
If Weiner’s ideas are not to blame, perhaps people are finding fault with his phrasing. If so, isn’t Weiner just being punished for a reliance on plain language? We’ve all heard the cutesy coinage “McJob” used to describe a position (likely in the world of fast food), that pays a pittance and offers one no security, no benefits, and little opportunity of advancement. I’ve never heard anyone complain about this being a demeaning or smirky term that belittles the holders of such jobs. Why is Weiner’s “poor people jobs” so much meaner a phrase? It’s apt, technically. These jobs will keep a person, certainly a person with dependants, living in a state of panicky, paycheck to paycheck penury. The phrase might, out of context, carry a whiff of patrician condescension, but Weiner is no Mitt Romney. And he’s not saying the poor don’t deserve jobs; he’s saying that the poor deserve jobs that will help them escape poverty.
Still, I’ll grant that there is something a little suspect about Weiner’s campaign catchphrase “I want to fight for the middle class and those struggling to make it,” that might be feeding this controversy. It could be the fact that he utters those words more often than most people blink, but it could also be the fact that he seems to be leaving the underest dog (the underclass) undefended, which doesn’t seem all that progressive at the end of the day. Like a lot of liberals, I like my candidates to be advocates of the exploited, explicitly taking up for the most marginal among us. Weiner’s playing to the middle class seems a little calculated (they are more politically powerful and engaged, I’d guess, than the people at the base of our economic pyramid) or myopic (it’s the class he comes from, after all). Still, the middle class is seeing its ranks dramatically thinned (with more people falling than rising), especially here in New York, and this is certainly a bad thing. At the end of the day, I have to wonder, is there a meaningful moral difference between fighting against downward mobility and fighting for upward mobility? I’m not sure there really is, so, again, it appears that Weiner’s position is no more elitist than any of his peers’.
It seems like Weiner’s crime lies simply and solely in his invocation of the P-word (and not the one we’ve come to expect). What is so wrong with calling people poor? It’s a great taboo in America, where everyone likes to identify as shades of middle class, to apply the label to anyone. To call another person poor is insulting. To call oneself poor indicates self-loathing and a clinical deficit of get-up-and-go. To subscribe to this logic, though, is to buy into a value system that conflates poverty with stupidity, idleness, and moral degeneracy.2 Fundamentally, this is an oppressive value system that shames the poor into feeling like all-round losers and the sole authors of their economic misfortune. When we are Pollyannaish, or even simply vague, about the kind of jobs America is generating and the lives they afford for those who work them, we deny people access to an outrage that they ought to be feeling.
Relative happiness is everything. In America we tell everyone that they’re winners, or at least comfortably average middle class folks. This might do something to boost our vaunted self-esteem, but it also generates a lot of complacency, encouraging people to cherish their crumbs, rather than noticing all the pie they’re missing out on. People are told that they’re doing better than they are and they believe it, or else they feel personally guilty for failing to thrive. This same system encourages and abets callousness in the rich, as they can cast the poor as lazy, or plausibly deny any awareness of the alpine angle of America’s wealth gap, or of the particulars of life at its lower reaches.
As Tevye opines in Fiddler On The Roof, “It's no shame to be poor... but it's no great honor either.” We need to build ladders, not because poverty is shameful, but because it is hard, limiting, and often arbitrary. If we’re going to build sturdy ladders and floors, though, we’re going to need to talk with at least a modicum of frankness about life and work in America, which is all Weiner did. What he said wasn’t especially brave, or insightful, or empathetic, but it was honest and, in the straitjacketed world of Democratic political discourse (and only there), bold.
Anthony Weiner is, famously, a man of many vices, but at this debate he fleetingly displayed one of his greatest virtues, a commitment (in the political realm, at least) to saying what he means and meaning what he says. He’s a plainspoken man in a mushmouthed milieu and he deserves some credit for that. To me, the most controversial thing about his statement on “poor people jobs,” was that it was controversial at all.
1 or “progressive,” as we’re apparently supposed to say, as 20’s lingo is hot, hot, hot and 40’s lingo is not, not, not.
2 If, when you hear Weiner use the phrase “poor people jobs,” you assume he means not, simply, jobs whose paychecks make one poor, but, jobs fit only for unwashed and unworthy morons, it’s at least as likely that you have bought into this value system as it is that Weiner has. In other words, you may well be picking up something that he wasn’t putting down.
