THERE’S A STORE in the wealthy Washington suburb of Bethesda, Maryland, that calls itself “Three Dog Bakery.” I read about it the other day. In addition to offering “pooch pretzels,” “mini beagles,” and other “all-natural pet pastries,” it throws birthday parties for dogs. Rich dog owners (I mean, rich owners of dogs, not owners of rich dogs) bring in their pets and up to 12 of their pets’ pet friends, and the revels begin. Clerks prepare cake and goodie bags for the canine partiers. They sing “Happy Birthday” to the guest-of-honor dog. There are balloons and party favors and gift certificates. It costs a considerable amount of money.
“Three Dog Bakery,” in other words, is a perfect symbol of what everyone has come to call “Clinton-era decadence,” that delirium of tawdry excess that has gripped our nation’s winners in the nineties and beyond, as their stock market portfolios ballooned and their paychecks swelled beyond all reason. The signs of this heedless self-indulgence are everywhere. Just this morning I got a flier for the new Ritz Carlton hotel here in Washington, which offers guests “300-thread-count Frette Egyptian cotton sheets,” “butler-drawn baths,” and “a choice of Mount Harmony herbal soaps, handcut to order.” And down the street from the Ritz is the White House itself, where the first lady, in a new, lushly illustrated, overpriced coffee-table book, boasts of redecorating her mansion in “ruby damask” and “moire silk” and commanding underpaid persons of color to serve elaborate desserts to her and her wealthy guests. Meanwhile, of course, not more than a half mile away, rain pours through the splintered roofs of inner-city schools, abandoned children sleep in rat-infested alleyways, senior citizens cry themselves to sleep from hunger.
It makes your skin crawl, doesn’t it? A bit too much like ancient Rome for comfort, is it not? Little wonder, then, that newsmagazines, network TV anchors, PBS documentarians, and sociologists of all stripes have come to describe our present period as the “Decade of Greed,” an orgy of elitist extravagance unseen since . . .
Wait a minute. What am I saying? Nobody calls this the Decade of Greed. Greed, in fact, is a word that has scarcely been uttered in the Clinton era, despite the piling up of fortunes far beyond the reach of a Mellon or a Carnegie. The explosion of wealth in the nineties was similar to previous such explosions in every crucial respect but one: the way in which it was mythologized on the airwaves and in the public prints. You would scan the op-ed pages in vain for the cigar-chomping capitalist familiar from the caricatures of earlier generations; in the nineties (a term I use, by the way, to include the year 2000 and the first three weeks of 2001) cigar chomping was actually a mark of refinement, so long as the cigar cost more than, say, a set of encyclopedias. For the first time in history, an economic boom proceeded without the catcalls and sneering of an adversary culture. Artists, belletrists, journalists, social theorists, muckrakers, academics — all the traditional party-pooping critics of materialism fell oddly silent. Their ridicule had greeted the parvenues and get-rich-quick schemers of the 1880s, the 1920s, the 1950s, and of course (and how) the 1980s. But not now — not in the 1990s.
For the last decade we have been without a Mark Twain or Upton Sinclair, a Mencken or Sinclair Lewis or Dos Passos, without even a Christopher Lasch or some other jowly Jeremiah worrying aloud about the debilitations of affluence. In place of the adversary culture a small army of courtier journalists arose, panting to celebrate the newly rich, to sing hymns to their taste and sensitivity, to their compassion, their self-knowledge, their spirituality, their dynamism, their willingness to “think outside the box,” their egalitarianism, their refusal to wear ties to work — all the admirable traits that earlier rich guys, from John D. Rockefeller to Michael Milken, had somehow lacked. Baby boomer rich people, we learned, were “dynamists” operating in the realm of “pure possibility.” They were wise, they were visionary, they struggled admirably under the mighty weight of their social consciences. Plus they had pots and pots of money.
All of this is about to end. And not merely because of the weary stock market and the slowly deflating economy. For psychological reasons that I am not qualified to diagnose, it is difficult for the verbal class to criticize the accumulation of wealth when the country is being presided over by a liberal Democrat — and, more importantly, when it is liberals who are piling up the wealth. (Liberals pile up wealth much more tastefully than right-wingers.) The actual facts of the situation are irrelevant; this is a matter of how the national life is presented and interpreted. The billions wasted in the Clinton years on the dot-com delusion, for example, were surely as misdirected as the billions sunk into “junk bonds” in the 1980s; yet one was daring and bold (if overenthusiastic), while the other was intolerable, wasteful, even immoral. The difference lay not in the facts but in the attitude of the people who presented them.
Journalists, you can be sure, are about to rediscover greed. Avarice is on the comeback trail. There will be something suspect — something gross and declasse — about the first fortunes to be made in the era just beginning. With the new President Bush in the White House, we’re going to see the reemergence of all kinds of things we haven’t seen since — well, since the old President Bush was in the White House. Avarice and selfishness are just the beginning. Say hello to homelessness, for instance: We are about to see a horrifying deterioration in the plight of our nation’s street people. We haven’t heard much — anything, really — about the homeless since, oh, roughly January 20, 1993. As it happens, the number of people living on steam grates has remained pretty much constant from the middle 1980s, when they filled the airwaves and graced the cover of countless magazines, to the present day, when they are all but forgotten. They are about to be remembered.
Twinned with homelessness, hunger will quickly become intolerable in the United States — which is, as we are doomed to be often reminded, the richest country in the history of humankind. While bejeweled women in sequined gowns and tuxedo-clad fat cats sip Dom Perignon and box-step their way through George W. Bush’s America, swollen-bellied children will be discovered queueing up for slices of American cheese at our nation’s soup kitchens, which will be “stretched to the limit.” Curiously, and greatly to their credit, the only public figures in the past decade who have tried to draw attention to hunger in Bill Clinton’s America have been functionaries of Bill Clinton’s Department of Housing and Urban Development. They were ignored. Soon, though, they’ll find work in privately financed organizations with names like the Emergency Coalition for Feeding the Children. And at last their cries will be heard.
Hunger and homelessness — scandalous though they will suddenly be — will be mere symptoms of what will be understood as the defining problem of the Bush era: the gap between rich and poor. This is yet another affliction that almost vanished in the last decade. Only a few left-wingers, consigned to the margins of the political conversation, were rude enough to note that the gap remained obdurately large. Their day, too, has finally come. They will point out that X percent of the population (the figure will vary, depending on whether you’re reading the cover story in Business Week, the six-part series in the New York Times, or the special pull-out report in Newsweek; but the number will be teeny-tiny) owns XX percent of the nation’s wealth (again the figure will vary, but it will be surprisingly close to 100 percent). And it will be getting worse. The statistic will also appear high up in stories about “deindustrialization.” Tough, brawny old industries began to wither away in the 1980s, causing much human anguish and inspiring several Pulitzer Prizes for feature writing. The process of deindustrialization was then put on hold for eight years. It is poised to resume, as once-proud breadwinners are pressed into jobs flipping hamburgers.
The central cause of deindustrialization will be the trade deficit. Readers who survived the Reagan nightmare will recall the trade deficit and shudder. It was caused by Asians (Chinese or Japanese or Koreans — who can remember anymore?) who were on the verge of purchasing the entire United States. The trade deficit continued to rise during the 1990s; in fact, it just reached a new record a few months ago. It has done so under a cloak of silence, however. Having gone unremarked for so long, it is about to become unendurable. In this it resembles something called “the savings rate.” For much of the 1980s the savings rate was around 2 percent, and it was a national disgrace: A population besotted by materialism had thrown off the virtue of thrift in a mad desire for instant gratification. Throughout the nineties the savings rate continued to fall, until today it is actually negative, if you can imagine. But it hasn’t been an emblem of much of anything for many years. It will be now, though, starting January 20.
Then again, the Bush era may not begin so quickly. It may take a couple of years. But gradually a picture will emerge, and the newly revitalized adversary culture will paint it in the most lurid colors. We will find ourselves in a divided nation, torn between a decadent and meretricious elite and a lower class struggling just to get by, afflicted with homelessness and rampant hunger, preyed upon by corporate raiders at home and sinister forces from abroad, while a heartless government in Washington obsesses over imagined threats. (Did I mention that the Pentagon is about to start wasting money again?) The picture will be one of a nation in decline, and without much prodding Prof. Paul Kennedy and maybe even Kevin Phillips (authors, respectively, of the Reagan-era classics The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers and The Politics of Rich and Poor) will be coaxed from retirement. In time our unhappy social critics will look to a leader — a politician, a governor, perhaps a United States senator — who will reluctantly come forward to offer a means of rescue, who will argue that the decline doesn’t have to continue forever, who will boldly assert that America’s greatest days are still ahead.
And she’ll be right.
Andrew Ferguson is a senior editor at THE WEEKLY STANDARD.
