Middle Class Economics 101

Ernest Hemingway with Republican troops, Spanish Civil War

One night last week Cody Keenan, the chief White House speechwriter President Obama has christened “Hemingway” knew he needed help…”He’s a brilliant writer,” Obama said. “He’s relentless. His girlfriend and I are glad he finally got rid of the Hemingway beard.”

Michael Schmidt – New York Times, January 20, 2015

The State of the Union is a story. For the audience in the chamber and political operatives watching it on TV it is the text and context which matter. Those with the President will cheer and elaborate as their roles demand. The opposition will provide information about their own role in real time as they glower in silence where they perceive those texts which constitute pieces of their own partisan identity and applaud either enthusiastically or with deliberate moderation where the overarching interests of empire and capital shine alike over both parties.

But beyond the professional audience there is a mass audience, even if a shrinking one, and, beyond that, a secondary one to be reached directly or indirectly during the next two years of electoral politics. For that audience, even though the elements of the text may or may not be of particular interest, a story is wanted. This year, unusually, a central protagonist has been introduced; letter writer Rebekah Erler of Minneapolis.

Ms. Erler, with her own narrative, has provided our Hemingway with a character that has already been tested on the hustings and judged suitable to tie together the story. The character does not require the level of development of a Victorian novel and certainly not that of modern or post-modern fiction. The State of the Union is an 18th century form and its characters will always prove to be allegorical, even while sitting in the audience. In Ms. Erler’s case we do not have to wait long to be told that she represents the Struggling Middle Class, protagonist of what we will call “middle class economics”.

Now the ideological sprites of the GOP will know what to make of this even before the words have left the President’s mouth. What he is advocating is the political program of the working class, socialism. Democrats will pooh-pooh such nonsense indignantly. He is not calling for the abolition of private property and, certainly, not for the withering away of the state. This is no more than the continuation of the grand arc of reform passing from Teddy Roosevelt through FDR etc., etc. Both parties will be correct here. This is the holy mystery of the two-party system. But both will miss the point.

More than six years into the economic crisis which placed him in the White House Obama is free to declare it over but he and his party know they cannot face their working class base without, in some fashion, declaring fealty to the political program which is inseparable from that class. They also know that their rising numbers hide many stories far less uplifting. A State of the Union which proclaimed further erosion of wages and social benefits, continuing transfer of the public treasury into private balance sheets, and increasing levels of violence at home and abroad would be a more realistic story and may well have gathered more applause from the Republican side of the aisle but it would be the end of the Democratic Party.