It has taken three years of this recession for me to appreciate something my father, a Russian immigrant who came of age in the Depression, once told me about hard times. When I asked him what it was like in the Dirty Thirties, he said that if you had a job it was okay: In fact, it was like being in the heated parlour car in the front of the train, while the unemployed were in the unheated freight cars at the back.
The same is true today. Three years into our great Depression, the cardinal political fact of hard times is: We are not all in this together.
When the fallen (and unlamented) Italian prime minister Silvio Berlusconi was asked how serious the economic crisis was, he replied, “What crisis?” The restaurants in Milan were full. Similarly in North America, restaurants in our cities are doing a brisk trade. For people with jobs – not just the 1 per cent – the guilty pleasures of recession include rising house prices, cheap money and good meals.
The recession is highly selective: a nightmare for some, no more than distant thunder for many. Unionized workers in the public sector are better protected than non-unionized workers in the private sector. Native-born workers are less likely to be fired than recently arrived immigrants. The skilled fare better than the unskilled, the educated better than the uneducated, and aboriginals worst of all.
The same holds true across the world. In Europe, Germans are better off than Greeks – northern countries are better off than southern ones. Common action to save the euro took so long because resentmenttowards their feckless southern partners blinded the Germans to their own interests. Or ask Brazilians: Crisis? What crisis? They’ve never had it so good.
Ask Canadians, too. Our unemployment rate is 2 per cent lower than south of the border and our banks are not about to fail. The struggles of high-tech champions such as Research in Motion are masked, for most, by the surging resource rents from commodities markets. The full burden falls on relatively few regions and few shoulders – aboriginals, young people without post-secondary education, older workers in declining resource sectors and recent immigrants.
Yet in the end no one escapes the great fear.
Even those with secure jobs understand that this is an epochal restructuring of the global economy, the first downturn in which the developing world is gaining power, wealth and jobs at the expense of the developed. In the emerging division of labour with Asia, jobs will not come back for millions of middle-class Westerners who grew up working in manufacturing and services. The jobs of the future will be in health and elder care, and in high-skill areas requiring either advanced computer literacy or doctorates. No one, especially workers in their 50s, can feel secure.
The political response is fragmented. In the United States, the Republicans defend tax cuts designed to render the new inequality permanent, while the Democrats want to hike taxes on the rich to save public services. Each party’s approach is less a solution than an attempt to entrench the privileges of the groups that support them.
The age is crying out for a different kind of politics, one that rallies people around the idea of fighting the great fear together. President Obama’s Osawatomie speech earlier this month – in which he denounced inequality and called for restoring middle-class security – can be the start for that new politics, but its success will come down to persuading the majority who are holding on that their future depends on doing something for those who are slipping back.
