Dispatches From Exile Weekly Mind Dump, 8/13-8/19, 2023: A Tale of Two Tattooed Nations
More should unite us than tattoos.
Finally, there is something that unites Americans regardless of political affiliation. A just released survey by Pew Research shows that equally a third of both Republicans and Democrats have tattoos. Nearly half give as their reason for getting a tattoo, “to make a statement about what they believe.” I’m not one to focus intently on others’ skin while I’m waiting in the checkout line at Walmart, but I can’t say anything like “Bring Back Roe!” or “From My Cold Dead Hands!” has caught my eye. I’ll confess I’m biased against tattoos — see my essay, “Tattoo Nation” if you enjoy my particular brand of runaway cultural invective. Also, my Uncle Charlie, a WWII Navy vet, had a naked mermaid wrapped sultrily around an anchor on his forearm. It got increasingly distorted as his aging skin sagged. Charlie, who was section-eighted out of the Navy for good reasons, was my least favorite uncle.
But dig under the surface of tattoo stats and you find some key disparities. The survey reveals that 37 percent of those with some college or less education have a tattoo, compared with 24 percent of those with a bachelor’s degree and 21 percent of those with a postgraduate degree (the category that includes me). Moreover, 43 percent of lower-income adults have a tattoo, compared with 31 percent of those in middle-income households and 21 percent of those in upper-income households (ditto here).
Therefore, you are more likely to look like a crew member of Blackbeard’s Queen Anne’s Revenge the less educated you are and the lower you fall on the income scale. Uncle Charlie was a high school dropout who scraped by his entire life.
The upshot? Your education and income levels are more indicative of your need to act out than your party affiliation. And this gets to a pet issue of mine: populism, to which I repeatedly return in these commentaries — specifically, today’s toxic right-wing populism which threatens our democracy. Populism is a mass reaction against elites, which comes about from a yawning income and wealth gap. The rich get richer and more powerful while the rest largely stagnate, thus, feeding rising class resentments (and tattoos).
I wrote about our “Gilded Age 2.0” in a piece for the Washington Monthly:
The gap between the rich and everyone else is even greater than it was during the late 19th Century, when the richest two percent of Americans owned more than a third of the nation’s wealth. Today, the top one percent owns almost 40 percent of the nation’s wealth, or more than the bottom 90 percent combined, according to the nonpartisan National Bureau of Economic Research. The first Gilded Age saw the rise of hyper-rich dynastic families, such as the Rockefellers, Mellons, Carnegies, and DuPonts. Today, three individuals—Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, and Warren Buffett—own more wealth than the bottom half of the country combined. And three families—the Waltons, the Kochs, and the Mars—have enjoyed a nearly 6,000 percent rise in wealth since Ronald Reagan took the oath as president, while median U.S. household wealth over the same period has declined by three percent.
The consequences of this wealth gap are dire. Steve Brill explains in his book Tailspin that, by manipulating the tax and legal systems to their benefit, America’s most educated elite, the so-called meritocracy, have built a moat that excludes the working poor, limiting their upward mobility and increasing their sense of alienation, which then gives rise to the populist streak that allowed politicians like Trump to captivate enough of the American electorate.“Of all forms of tyranny, the least attractive and the most vulgar is the tyranny of mere wealth, the tyranny of a plutocracy,” Theodore Roosevelt once warned. The free market has made America the great success it is today. But history has shown that unconstrained capitalism and a growing wealth gap leads to an unhealthy concentration of wealth in the hands of a few. When the gap between the haves and the have-nots goes unchecked, populism takes hold, leading to the election of dangerous demagogues like Trump, and the disastrous politics they bring with them. It is not too late to reverse course. But first, we need to re-learn the lessons from our first Gilded Age if we are going to get out of the current one.
This past week saw two highly contrasting events on the political stage. One was President Joe Biden hosting a summit at Camp David with the leaders of Japan and South Korea. The other was Donald Trump’s fourth criminal indictment; he’s now facing down a head-snapping 91 felony counts. And he’s the GOP presidential front-runner.
Japan and Korea share a deeply poisoned history, even as thriving democratic economic power houses today. Yet both are key in uniting partners to check China’s growing geopolitical ambitions as well as Russia’s return as an imperialistic aggressor. President Biden, drawing on his decades of foreign policy experience, deftly and with little fanfare builds international coalitions to enhance collective security, thereby keeping Americans safe.
Donald Trump, a product and abettor of toxic right-wing populism, brings us rampant criminality, instability and damage to America’s international standing.
Americans are witnessing a tale of two nations. How it plays out will determine whether we continue as the world’s last best hope, or as a self-absorbed palooka ex-superpower more focused on our tattoos than on common interests.
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