Andrew Stephen: The US is no longer a land where people of humble origin become film stars and presidents
[Andrew Stephen was appointed US Editor of the New Statesman in 2001, having been its Washington correspondent and weekly columnist since 1998.]
America, we're always being told on both sides of the Atlantic, is the ultimate classless society: "the richest, freest and happiest country in the world", in the words of that well-known American proletarian Rupert Murdoch. Yet, increasingly, reliable empirical studies - to say nothing of the evidence staring in the face of those of us who live here - show that this is simply untrue. The US is more stratified politically, economically and socially than ever before.
Take politics, for a start. The most powerful and important job in the world, the US presidency, has been in the hands of just two families - the Bushes and the Clintons - for 18 years, and will remain so until 2009. Nor is it by any means inconceivable that these two dynasties could stay entrenched in the White House at least until, say, 2029. Is America developing its own aristocracies, which Thomas Jefferson warned was already happening, even in his day?
Should Hillary Clinton win the presidency in 2008 and then complete two terms - which, as things stand, she is more likely to do than any of the country's other 300 million or so citizens - she will be in office until 2017. The chances are that the nation would then be ready for a Republican in the White House. My prediction? Step forward Jeb Bush, governor of Florida until January and brother, of course, of Dubbya. He would still be just 63 for the 2016 presidential election and is by far the brightest of the four sons of George Bush I, who started the era of America's dynastic rule in 1989.
Yet even if Jeb decided to turn the job down for a couple of presidential terms after then, he would still be younger in 2024 than Ronald Reagan was when he successfully ran for his second term in 1984. Should he not wish to return to politics at all, his own smart and politically highly ambitious son George P Bush would doubtless be more than willing, at 48, to step in. By 2017, Chelsea Clinton would be eligible to run for the White House - and so, God help us, would the fun-loving princesses Jenna and Barbara Bush. Perhaps the only modern parallel of rule by political dynasty is that of India, which was governed by the same family for 37 of the first 42 years of its independence.
If all this sounds mere whimsy - as it may well turn out to be - the truth is that it masks far deeper problems of inequality. "The situation of a son [in the US] is more than ever likely to be dictated by his father's social position than by his own merits," says Professor Jacques Mistral, former senior fellow at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, co-author of La préférence américaine pour 'inégalité and economic adviser to successive French governments. The same message comes from Alice Rivlin, senior economic adviser to successive administrations and former vice-chair of the Federal Reserve, who says: "Income inequality [in the US] is widening quite rapidly. It does matter to people that there are such unequal chances to get ahead."
Most telling of all is a report quietly released last May by the programme policy and planning unit of the respected and non-partisan Pew Charitable Trusts. The first in a series of studies on American economic mobility, produced in collaboration with four think tanks and entitled Economic Mobility: Is the American Dream Alive and Well?, found that a man in his mid-thirties today is likely to be earning $30,010 annually - 12 per cent less than his father earned, adjusted in real terms, in 1974. In the same period, household incomes rose by just 9 per cent - and then only because of the large-scale entry into the workforce of women during that period.
So, 231 years after 13 colonies declared independence from a Britain ruled by hated aristocracies, is the US no longer the land of golden opportunity or the thriving role model for Gordon Brown's Britain so many in the UK believe it to be? Very roughly, the income of each new American generation had risen by 52 per cent since 1820, but the Pew findings "suggest the up-escalator that has historically ensured that each generation would do better than the last may not be working very well", as the authors conclude. Cal Jillson, a political scientist and author of Pursuing the American Dream, says that because median family income has remained essentially flat since 1973, the very term American dream seems "illusory"....
Read entire article at New Statesman
America, we're always being told on both sides of the Atlantic, is the ultimate classless society: "the richest, freest and happiest country in the world", in the words of that well-known American proletarian Rupert Murdoch. Yet, increasingly, reliable empirical studies - to say nothing of the evidence staring in the face of those of us who live here - show that this is simply untrue. The US is more stratified politically, economically and socially than ever before.
Take politics, for a start. The most powerful and important job in the world, the US presidency, has been in the hands of just two families - the Bushes and the Clintons - for 18 years, and will remain so until 2009. Nor is it by any means inconceivable that these two dynasties could stay entrenched in the White House at least until, say, 2029. Is America developing its own aristocracies, which Thomas Jefferson warned was already happening, even in his day?
Should Hillary Clinton win the presidency in 2008 and then complete two terms - which, as things stand, she is more likely to do than any of the country's other 300 million or so citizens - she will be in office until 2017. The chances are that the nation would then be ready for a Republican in the White House. My prediction? Step forward Jeb Bush, governor of Florida until January and brother, of course, of Dubbya. He would still be just 63 for the 2016 presidential election and is by far the brightest of the four sons of George Bush I, who started the era of America's dynastic rule in 1989.
Yet even if Jeb decided to turn the job down for a couple of presidential terms after then, he would still be younger in 2024 than Ronald Reagan was when he successfully ran for his second term in 1984. Should he not wish to return to politics at all, his own smart and politically highly ambitious son George P Bush would doubtless be more than willing, at 48, to step in. By 2017, Chelsea Clinton would be eligible to run for the White House - and so, God help us, would the fun-loving princesses Jenna and Barbara Bush. Perhaps the only modern parallel of rule by political dynasty is that of India, which was governed by the same family for 37 of the first 42 years of its independence.
If all this sounds mere whimsy - as it may well turn out to be - the truth is that it masks far deeper problems of inequality. "The situation of a son [in the US] is more than ever likely to be dictated by his father's social position than by his own merits," says Professor Jacques Mistral, former senior fellow at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, co-author of La préférence américaine pour 'inégalité and economic adviser to successive French governments. The same message comes from Alice Rivlin, senior economic adviser to successive administrations and former vice-chair of the Federal Reserve, who says: "Income inequality [in the US] is widening quite rapidly. It does matter to people that there are such unequal chances to get ahead."
Most telling of all is a report quietly released last May by the programme policy and planning unit of the respected and non-partisan Pew Charitable Trusts. The first in a series of studies on American economic mobility, produced in collaboration with four think tanks and entitled Economic Mobility: Is the American Dream Alive and Well?, found that a man in his mid-thirties today is likely to be earning $30,010 annually - 12 per cent less than his father earned, adjusted in real terms, in 1974. In the same period, household incomes rose by just 9 per cent - and then only because of the large-scale entry into the workforce of women during that period.
So, 231 years after 13 colonies declared independence from a Britain ruled by hated aristocracies, is the US no longer the land of golden opportunity or the thriving role model for Gordon Brown's Britain so many in the UK believe it to be? Very roughly, the income of each new American generation had risen by 52 per cent since 1820, but the Pew findings "suggest the up-escalator that has historically ensured that each generation would do better than the last may not be working very well", as the authors conclude. Cal Jillson, a political scientist and author of Pursuing the American Dream, says that because median family income has remained essentially flat since 1973, the very term American dream seems "illusory"....