The Two Horatios

There are two famous Horatios.. One is the American Horatio Alger, who wrote a series of novellas in the last century, stories in which penniless boys by dint of hard work, talent and luck rose to the top. The other is the Roman Horatio, the man of courage and duty in the old Republic who held a bridge alone against an army and who slew his own sons for plotting against the state.

The first Horatio is far more famous, but of far less relevance, in our society. As the Economist has pointed out (via Bull Moose), social mobility in the U.S. is in decay even while social stratification is increasing. We are, in other words, seeing the development of an American aristocracy. You can see this in dry statistics, but also by visiting any town in America and really seeing it. We are divided between flourishing McMansions and gated communities on the one hand, and decaying middle class neighborhoods on the other.

This decay in America's middle class society imperils not only the economic future, or the chance for a just society. It is a betrayal of our own best self, our vision of what we want America to be. It is also a dangerous sign for any democracy. Right now the two front-runners for President in 2008 are Jeb Bush, the brother of a President, and Hilary Clinton, the wife of a President. America is not supposed to work that way. We are in the process of creating an aristocratic republic dominated by a few great families. But these families do not possess the sense of public duty that the classical Horatio possessed. We are embracing aristocratic injustice without aristocratic virtues.

The Economist argues that the Republicans are actively enabling the process of feudalization (although I think they give Bush's NCLB law too much credit, since it is an indirect method to a school privatization which will only broaden the gap between rich and poor), which is obviously true. But they also blame the Democrats for being "more interested in preferment for minorities than building ladders of opportunity for all." This is a vicious slander, given the historic mission of the Democratic Party in guaranteeing equality of opportunity. But the fact that such a respectable publication could believe such calumny indicates the need for liberalism to remind everyone what we stand for.

Liberals have a great, even heroic task before us. We must stand against the forces that are sapping the strength of our middle-class democracy. We need to resuscitate Mr. Alger, and we must do so by standing on that bridge, alone if we must, against those who want to destroy our country.