Polarizing America

Back in the 1930s, I had a deeply conservative first cousin congressman, angry opponent of FDR’s New Deal, who was defeated for reelection by another strongly liberal first cousin, who became one of the pillars of FDR’s New Deal support in the House of Representatives.  My father was an anti – New Deal Republican, while my mother worshiped Woodrow Wilson and FDR.  That liberal first cousin was also, like my mother, the child of a share-cropper. That was the way politics was back then; political squabbles were as much within as between families.  But it is not just politics that has become polarized in recent years.  The American family is also showing signs of deep structural changes along race, class and educational lines. They reflect growing differences between, rather than within, families.  And that of course produces political polarization.   Political fights are now more than the province of the dinner table.  A report released in September by sociologists led by Zhenchao Qian of Ohio State University revealed sharp and growing divisions in family structure which the sociologists attribute to the increasing income inequality across America.

Family diversity is the name of the game these days in America.  It has always been so, as the report recognizes.  Even back in the 19^th century, sharp divisions in family structure existed between rich and poor, but the 20^th century brought better education and a booming economy with steadily rising wages that created a convergence between rich and poor family structures and ways of life.  The sociologists’ concern is that structural diversity is again sharply increasing, and falls increasingly along the lines between the haves and have not’s.  Wealthy, well-educated Americans are much more likely to be married, to stay married, and to have children who do not live in poverty.  Poor families are much more likely to feature single parents, divorced parents and children raised by grandparents.  A child you can’t feed is sent to be raised by grandma.  But immigrant parents are much more likely to be married and stay married than U.S. born families.  Over half of U.S. born white families featured children living with dual-income married parents, while only 24 percent of African American children lived in such arrangements.  37 percent of African American children lived in families with never-married or divorced parents.  The report found that such a living arrangement was closely correlated to poverty.  And all these differences have been sharply increasing since the 2000 U.S. Census.  Rich and poor families again, as in the time of Disraeli’s England, live in different nations that do not understand one another.

As someone whose father was a descendant of the town founders and whose mother was a child of a share-cropper, I have a keen sensitivity to how different the world looks from each direction.  I grew up with my father’s sense of naturally earned entitlement by  hard work and my mother’s mantra of “beggars can’t be choosers.” With prosperity comes a sense of social acceptance and an entitlement that has been earned by effort and determination; being poor is some kind of failing which should not be encouraged by acceptability. What others might consider thoughtless wastefulness is simply a convenient way of life, made possible by hard work.  With poverty comes a sense of rejection, oppression and a necessary but unloved frugality.  Poverty has been enforced by being held down, and the oppressors have only contempt for those they ignore and mistreat; it is that sense of oppression that leads to picket lines, strikes and eventually to social revolutions. 

What the sociologists have documented is that a common perception, that poverty is the result of family instability and lack of determination, is not always right.  In fact, much of the time it is the relative poverty that produces the family instability and the sense of oppression that generates lack of effort.  I throw in “relative” with the poverty to emphasize three things.  First, even the poorest of Americans is living at an income level several times that of the poor in the rest of the world.  That is why we are continually surprised by the apparent easy acceptance by newly immigrant families of incomes and living conditions that we in general regard as abject poverty.  And it’s part of why immigrant family structure remains stable in the presence of that poverty.  We blame immigrants for being unwilling to assimilate when in fact they are clustering in family groups that make that initial poverty more tolerable.  Second, the driving dynamic is relative income inequality, not absolute levels of income.  A small town family making $10,000 that is surrounded by families making $50,000 feels about as poor as a big city family making $50,000 that is surrounded by families making $500,000.  And third, continuing poverty is as much as anything a state of mind generated by the sense of oppression and of rejection by the relatively more prosperous.  After my father died, I and my family were not poor; we were “temporarily out of funds” as the psychologist Eric Bern used to say.  We were buffered from the rejection that makes us “poor” by our long term connections to the town from my father’s side of the family, which enabled us to share in the benefits of our “home” town even without money.  We were accepted and respected as members of the small-town “family.”  Long-term poverty in a large urban area destroys that.

That is why the sociologists credit growing income inequality for the increasing family instability.  And that is why I am angered by the refusal of the “one percent” to fund increased pay for workers to keep up with their productivity gains or accept a reasonable share of the taxes needed to make a complex modern society viable through public education and infrastructure development, though I am a retiree who is not out of pocket either way.  And it is why I am angered by the financial corporations’ over-reliance on the use of derivatives to make money, creating the incentive for the rest of the one percent not to make productive use of their capital by job creation.   They collectively drag society down, uncaring about how they destroy the home in which they live, all in pursuit of their private interest.  They forget, and must be reminded, that financial obligations include our responsibility for the family in which we are a part, and that extends far beyond the walls that separate us.