Yesterday, the Wall Street Journal published a letter by Tom Perkins (the “Perkins” in the venture capital firm “Kleiner Perkins”) in which he compared rhetoric about the unjust riches of the “1 percent” to the events of Kristallnacht, the overture to the Holocaust. In a terrific editorial, Josh Marshall explains why the hyper-rich turn into such crybabies when it’s pointed out that they’ve gamed the system so that they grow richer and richer while everyone else gets poorer:
One is the simple but massive run up in the concentration of wealth itself over the past two generations. There’s a slice of the population, whether it’s the top 1% or .01% or whatever, that doesn’t just have more stuff and money. The sheer scale of the difference means they live what is simply a qualitatively different kind of existence. That gulf creates estrangement and alienation, and one of a particular sort in a democracy where such a minuscule sliver of the population can’t hope to protect itself alone at the ballot box.
Let’s call this socioeconomic acrophobia.
A second is tied specifically to the 2008 financial crisis. The last 35 years or so have seen a period in which the celebration of wealth and the wealthy has been near the extreme end of the pendulum swing that has moved back and forth over the course of American history. Let’s not distract ourselves, for the moment, with whether this view is right or wrong. It’s a pendulum swing as old as America. In this view, the super rich, the founders and most successful entrepreneurs, not only wow us by their genius and success but are also seen as the people driving forward the society and economy and prosperity for everyone. That’s a nice climate to be wealthy in.
That all changed very abruptly at the end of 2008.
Suddenly, there was vast public animus at “Wall Street” and the Big Banks, exacerbated massively by the politics of the bailout. And not just from the left but from the right too, though in a different form. Pretty deserved on many levels: the financial sector, the figurative “Wall Street”, had come close to crashing the global economic system by a mix of irresponsible risk taking and gaming the political system to permit this high-risk, wealth-juicing leverage. But if we’re to understand the psychology of the individuals involved we must appreciate the whipsaw nature of that experience.
The Brittle Grip, Part 2
[Josh Marshall/TPM]
(via MeFi)