I'm Still Kicking Mitt While He's Down--A Few Reflections On The Virtues of the Bourgeoisie

I recently had occasion to look over some old family photographs with my dad. There aren’t many. Pop’s family wasn’t much for taking pictures, and some of the places in the photos I didn’t recognize. When I asked Pop where they’d been taken, his answer surprised the hell out of me.

“Oh, that one’s at the Country Club,” he said offhandedly.

“Your family belonged to a country club?” I asked, surprised.

“We all did,” Pop said. “All the families my folks knew did.”

My pop is most assuredly not the country club type. He’s a lifelong Democrat, he bristles at any form of exclusivity, and he doesn’t really have proper country club demeanor. He swears. A lot. He likes to pick fights with Republicans. He’s been known to throw his clubs into the water hazards when he shanks it. But what surprised me even more than my father’s family having belonged to a country club was that there had been one in his hometown.  

“Peru had a country club?” I asked, dumbfounded.

Peru, Indiana, my father’s hometown and the town where I spent my adolescence, is a mighty desolate place these days. In the two decades since I left for college, the population has sunk from 14,000 to 11,000. There’s not much to eat if you don’t like Subway, Taco Bell, or McDonalds. Forget shopping there. The town’s only remaining major employer manufactures auto parts, and it’s been shrinking as those jobs go to China. Jobs are scarce, wealth practically nonexistent. How a place like this had ever sustained a country club was beyond me, and I told Pop so.

“You don’t get it,” Pop said. “When I grew up, there were lots of small businesses and small businessmen. That’s how you make money. You don’t get rich working for somebody else. Hell yes, there was plenty of money in Peru when I was a kid. There was a real middle class. But that’s all gone.”

He’s right. It is all gone. Peru has few, if any, small businesses left. It’s a strip of chains from one end of the rapidly-shrinking little town to the other. Blue’s Drugstore is now a CVS. First Farmers Bank and Trust is now a Bank of America. The town is a wasteland of corporate outlets staffed by part-time employees grateful for whatever crumbs they can get from their corporate overlords.

But this phenomenon isn’t limited to places like Peru. My St. Louis suburb is located right off Watson Road, a pretty busy street lined with businesses on both sides. After Pop and I spoke, I realized that St. Louis, like Peru, is losing small businesses left and right. Along Watson Road, it’s all Office Max, Office Depot, Home Depot, Kohls, McDonalds, KFC, Bank of America, and just about every other big chain you can imagine.

~          ~          ~

It’s rare that I would agree with Mitt Romney. On anything. But one line he spoke in one debate sort of resonated with me--that about starting your own business. “Take a shot, go for it, take a risk, get the education, borrow money if you have to from your parents, start a business,” he said, citing a friend of his who took out a $20,000 loan from his parents.

Borrow a little money, start a business. Have a good idea, believe in yourself enough to go for it, sell the idea to an interested investor, and make money with it. It’s not bad advice.

Or at least it wouldn’t have been forty years ago, when it was still possible to be an entrepreneur. Because about ten seconds after Mitt gave his fatuous advice, two reasons occurred to me as to its fatuity.

1)      Whose parents have $20k to stake them to a business? Not the vast majority of Americans who are barely getting by.

2)      The time to be an entrepreneur in America is pretty much over, thanks to Mitt Romney himself and people like him—the sons of bitches who leveraged other people’s money into buying businesses, stripping them of their assets, selling them off piece by piece, and firing the workforce. Ask the people who used to work for Ampad. Or Kaybee Toys. Or any of the other businesses—started by entrepreneurs—that Bain Capital took over in hostile takeovers and then dismembered.

As Mitt Romney knows full well, because he’s the miserable prick who did it, so fuck him and his fatuosity.

It may sound counterintuitive, but big business, which you’d think would be the successful end result of entrepreneurialism, kills it. In essence, big business—almost always with the collusion of your elected representatives, whom they’ve bought—gobbles up the little guys, underprices them, drives them into extinction, or forcibly takes them over. Mom-and-pops disappear under the big-box’s parking lot, and suddenly, where Cutler’s Hardware used to be, there’s a Lowe’s. Instead of Scholin Brothers, we get Office Max. Goodbye Cunetto’s House of Pasta, hello Olive Garden.

Not only do you not get rich working for the chains, you don’t even make enough to survive. The big-box stores keep their employees in a state of perpetual indentured servitude. Each Walmart, for example—the biggest, ugliest, and most evil of the bunch—according to a recent study, costs its community approximately $900,000 a year in public revenue, because they pay their workers so little that most of them are on food stamps or other forms of public assistance.

“Well, hell,” you can almost hear the conservatives saying, “let ‘em vote with their feet! If they don’t like it, let ‘em go get a job somewhere else!”

Except there isn’t anywhere else to go, because Walmart’s already driven its competitors out of business.

~          ~          ~

And as small businesses go, so goeth the Middle Class—the kind of people who could afford to belong to a country club in Peru, Indiana. It may not have been big or fancy. But at least there was one. Now there isn’t. Matter of fact, there’s not even a Walmart. They did a feasibility study, and concluded that there wasn’t enough money left in the town to justify building one there.

The demise of the American Middle Class terrifies me for a lot of reasons. One, I’m a member of it, and who wants to be on a sinking ship? But two, because a middle class is absolutely necessary for a stable civil society.

The Middle Class has certainly come in for its share of abuse. To refer to something as “bourgeois” is to relegate it to the realm of the chintzy. The realm of bad taste. Small-mindedness, pettiness, puritan attitudes. Webster’s defines it as “marked by a concern for material interests and respectability and a tendency toward mediocrity.”

The upper classes—the aristocrats—scorn the bourgeois for their parvenu tastes, their vulgarity, their gaudiness, their pathetic attempts to ape the manners and mores of the aristocracy, for the unforgivable sin of not having been born one of them. The lower classes despise them in equal measure. “Boozhie” has been a Black English insult for a long time now. Napoleon Bonaparte derided his enemy England as “a nation of shopkeepers”—a country of petty bourgeoisie, hardly worthy of notice.

Wonder if he ever thought about that in exile on St. Helena. Because the Nation of Shopkeepers, in the end, proved tougher than the nation of Bastille-burning peasants and ancient aristocrats.

You can mock them all you want, but there’s no getting around the fact that society, in order to be able to function as a society, needs the middle class. We need our doctors, our lawyers, our teachers, our dentists, and, perhaps most importantly, our small businesspeople, not only to provide us with the goods and services we need, but to employ us as well.

Russia is a terrific example of a country without a functioning middle class. For a number of historical reasons to complex to go into here, Russia, in the early part of the last millennium, divided itself essentially between the serfs—the peasants—and the aristocracy. Throughout most of the history of the institution, it was forbidden to educate serfs. Serfs were not allowed to have their own money, and serfs couldn’t leave their masters’ estates—they were born, lived, and died in the same place.

Which meant that a middle class, an entrepreneurial class—that class of people that understands money, how to get it, how it works, and how to use it to make more of it—never developed. Which meant, further, that the class which spawns the professionals that society needs to function never developed. Which meant, yet further, that Russia was, throughout most of its history, forced to rely upon non-Russians (Jews, Germans, Armenians, Georgians, Poles, etc.) or marginalized Russians (the Old Believers, who, because of their resistance to reforms in the Russian Orthodox Church, were cast out of mainstream Russian society) to perform the roles played by the middle class.

In essence, Russia outsourced its bourgeoisie, with predictable—and lousy—results.

The middle class does more than just provide society with the people it needs to get stuff done. It’s a moderating influence in society—it’s a buffer zone between the exploiters at the top and the exploited at the bottom. The middle class is, generally, the most highly educated of the social classes—the rich don’t need it and the poor don’t have access to it. It stabilizes society. The more people you have in the middle class, the fewer potential recruits you have for angry mobs of penniless proletariats.

Take the case of Germany. At one point, the German Principalities had a large and thriving middle class. But then came the Revolutions of 1848, the Uprising of the Bourgeoisie, which decided that, as the backbone of society, it deserved a little more say in running the affairs of the nation.

It had worked in England. The English Civil War has traditionally been cast as a religious conflict, one between the Anglican Cavaliers and the Puritan Calvinist Roundheads. But Michael Walzer’s “The Revolution of the Saints” recasts the conflict as one between the emerging bourgeoisie (largely Calvinist) and the traditional English aristocracy (almost exclusively Anglican). And the middle class, for the first time, got a stake in the running of society, which, predictably, calmed everyone down and gave England the stability, the industry, and the infrastructure it needed to become the world’s first superpower.

But it didn’t work in Central Europe. The Revolutions of 1848 were put down in pretty short order. And as a result, a gigantic chunk of the German middle class—its lawyers, journalists, professors, teachers, bankers, artisans, businesspeople, etc.—packed up and left Germany altogether. And they came to the United States.

There is an interesting school of thought that holds that Germany, once the pinnacle of European civilization, was able to slip so easily into the fanatically nationalistic militarism that led to Bismarck, the Kaiser, and, eventually, Hitler, because its middle class—that tolerant, synthesizing, moderating force within society—had come here.

The lesson is pretty clear: countries that never develop a middle class, or which dispose of them, come to bad ends. And America’s middle class is in bigger trouble than the African white rhino. It’s being strangled, bit by bit, by tax policies which favor the wealthy and ignore the poor, but which hit the middle class especially hard; by the migration of good-paying jobs overseas; and by an ever more powerful and predatory plutocracy of corporations that crushes small business, and with it, the potential of entrepreneurialism.

“It’s all over for the little guy,” laments Soprano Family soldier Pasquale Parisi in Season Six of the show. He’s leaving a Jamba Juice store, unable to shake it down for protection money as he used to do to its predecessor, a Mom-and-Pop poultry store forced to vacate the premises for this single store avatar of the soulless corporate giant behind it.

And he's right. It is over for the little guy. It’s done. There’s no more room left for the entrepreneurial spirit in America. And with that goes the middle class. And with that, I fear, so goes the America we grew up believing would last forever. We’re becoming a nation of wage-slaves and wage-slave masters—and no democracy can sustain itself like that.