Why There Won’t Be a Revolution

The poor you will always have, the good book says, but as for the rich man, he will wither away like a delicate flower in the midday sun. The first prediction has certainly been borne out, but the second part (James 1:11) had not yet come to pass by the Panic of 1907, when Theodore Roosevelt warned of a coming reckoning against the "malefactors of great wealth." Nor by 1990, when former Nixon aide Kevin Phillips predicted that Americans would rise to extract revenge on "the rich who got the benefits of the go-go years" of the 1980s. As late as 2001, no less an authority than, uh, NEWSWEEK wrote in the wake of 9/11 that "the arrogant wheeler-dealer ordering a $600 bottle of wine with dinner … has vanished utterly as an icon," which remained true until approximately 2002. Well, listen up, you rich guys, this time we really mean it. The president himself is repelled by your rapacious greed, your kids are ashamed to admit that their mom is a banker, even your girlfriends are sick of your whining about your bonus, and you're going to have to learn to live on $500,000 a year like a normal person. Oh, and by the way, nice watch. Is it Cartier?

In America, the country that invented the modern model of wealth—i.e., derived neither from inherited landholdings nor royal patronage—mocking the rich is historically one of the most durable cultural memes, matched only by envy of them. In different eras over the past two centuries, one or the other has predominated, but only rarely has the American public evinced the kind of outrage that gives rise to serious political change. Historically, that has happened only when Americans suspect that the rich haven't been playing by the same rules as the rest of us, so today's crop of Wall Street millionaires—celebrated for their frugality, honesty and wise stewardship of the economy—should have nothing to fear, right? Except that the day after the administration proposed capping executive pay in financial companies that have been bailed out by the government, the letters published in The New York Times ran six-to-one in favor of the idea. That included one warning that ending bonuses for overpaid bankers might drive them into occupations, such as driving taxis, where their incompetence could get other people killed. While some economists worry that a cap of $500,000 a year is too low to attract experienced executives, ordinary Americans may actually regard it as excessively generous. A study published last August by political scientists Benjamin Page and Lawrence Jacobs found that on average Americans think CEOs of large corporations should be able to get by on $200,000. That would represent an average pay cut, by Page and Jacobs's calculations, of 98.57 percent from the actual figure of $14 million.

Also last week, the Web was crackling with posts and counterposts on The Bag Lady Papers, a blog on The Daily Beast Web site by Alexandra Penney, the former editor of Self magazine who claims to have lost almost all her money to Bernard Madoff. On the night she realized that she wasn't rich any longer, she Googled the Hemlock Society, looking for a painless way to die. She gave up on that idea, but had to weather another crisis when she went on the wrong night to get two-for-one pizzas at Domino's.

Yes, sometimes rich people do come across as clueless, self-involved twits! Yet for all the schadenfreude in the air, no one was sharpening the guillotines, with the possible exception of Berkeley economist and former labor secretary Robert Reich. On his blog, Reich wrote hopefully that the debacle of Tom Daschle's cabinet nomination might be a signal that public disgust with the antics of the overclass had begun to boil over. Yet who but a Berkeley professor could imagine blood running in the streets over a nominee for secretary of health and human services? What we haven't seen, muses Lee Eisenberg, author of the financial-planning-guide-cum-Wall-Street-jeremiad "The Number," is anger at rich people as a class. "I'm surprised there isn't more of it," he adds.

Populist sentiments have waxed and waned over the decades, peaking during times of economic distress for farmers and workingmen, especially the 1890s and the 1930s. Yet by and large most Americans have tried to stay neutral in the war between the classes, particularly in contrast to European countries of comparable wealth. What Americans lack is what the European working classes gleefully exhibit: resentment of the rich personally, as distinct from unhappiness with policies that affect how income and wealth are distributed. The press considered it a major gaffe last fall when Barack Obama gave a tentative endorsement to the idea of using the tax system to help redistribute income—although the record shows that he won the election. In fact, according to Page, for the first time since the 1930s a majority of Americans are in favor of taxing the rich—heavily, if necessary—to redistribute income. But that doesn't mean they want to kill them. So far, at least, they prefer to laugh at them. The vagaries of the economy over the next several years will determine if Jay Leno can continue to fill in American society the role the French delegated to Robespierre.

Americans' contradictory attitudes toward wealth are ingrained in the national culture. Sigmund Freud, steeped in fin de siècle Middle European pessimism, memorably compared the unconscious significance of money to that of excrement, an idea that found very few takers on this side of the Atlantic. The first European settlers to New England were Calvinists, belonging to a stern creed obsessed with the fate of their souls. Believers in predestination, they anxiously sought the outward signs of inward grace, signifying their "election" to heaven. One of these was worldly prosperity; wealth was a valued indicator that the possessor enjoyed God's favor. The other salient feature of American society is that it lacked a landed aristocracy. This meant, as Alexis de Tocqueville observed in "Democracy in America," that "there is hardly anything left but money which makes very clear distinctions between men or can raise some of them above the common level."