The gay/hipster index

The policies and ideas of the Bush administration, as well as those coming from most Republicans and the conservative movement, seem diametrically opposed to what you're saying is needed to attract talent and prosper in the creative economy.

Once I heard a former high-ranking member of the Bush administration on economic policy, when asked about immigration and national security, say, "If it comes down to a question of national security and economic growth, we will always choose in favor of national security. I don't care if it means that the next Bill Gates can't get in ..." And that's a view shared by many members of the administration, at least what we've seen in policy.

But the bigger issue is not the Bush administration. The bigger issue is the class divide, which is destroying our country. And that divide is between people who are members of the creative class and fortunate enough to migrate from Pittsburgh or Cleveland or Buffalo or St. Louis to these great thriving creative centers like New York and Boston and Washington and San Francisco and Chicago and Los Angeles. Those people are doing just fine. But the people left behind got really pissed off and got angrier and angrier and madder and madder, and they looked at these cities filled with single people, filled with young people, filled with successful people, filled with immigrants, filled with people cohabitating, having fun, vibrant night life, filled with gay people, and they said "Enough's enough!"

The blame for this situation also goes to the Democrats, because when the Democrats were in power President Clinton, whom I admire greatly, did not build a society that provided a way for these people to become part of the creative economy. So it's this anxiety that's grown up as a result of the rise of the creative economy -- whose benefits are extraordinarily concentrated among a relatively small group of people in an even smaller group of regions -- that's ripping this society apart. And that's what political polarization really is. It isn't just an issue between red and blue states, it's a political polarization which has underneath it a new economic geography of class. And it's terrifying.

You don't win friends on either side of the aisle by using the "C" word. No politician likes to go there.

People have attacked me for using the word "class." Actually, what my critics have done most of the time is try to make my argument appear elitist, and that's not what it is. What I'm saying is that there's this new class of people, the creative class, with a different relationship to the economy, who generate a lot of value and, as this book suggests, are also getting paid a heck of a lot of money for doing it while the whole rest of the economy gets left behind. So this class divide is becoming starker.

Here's the way I look at it: You go to any part of the United States, and you know when you're in a creative class neighborhood or when you're not in a creative class neighborhood. You know it, you feel it, it's there. You don't have to believe it's a class, but you know it. I know it, you know it, I feel it. I could even feel it in Australia, you could feel it when you went into certain kinds of communities.

This is a true class divide -- economic in its roots, with social and cultural implications. In the U.S. it's very concentrated in particular communities and particular regions and particular neighborhoods. The great failure in this country, and the great risk to this country, is that no one is willing to talk about how to move across that class divide, so you have Democrats and Republicans equally throwing gasoline on the fire.

And while most of my friends on the left will point an accusatory finger at George Bush, I actually think George Bush is doing exactly what he's supposed to do. He and the Republicans are supposed to reach out to the people who are scared and anxious and say, "The past was better for you. Why do you want a future that resembles Washington, or L.A. or Manhattan? Why do you want all these crazy gay people running around and yuppie nightlife and single people and your kids moving there and their marriages breaking up? You want your good old family values back, don't you?"

The failure is on the left because they're the people who are supposed to be making a case for a proactively inclusive future. And why can't our left today -- instead of saying we're going to appeal to blue-collar voters by saying, "Well, what we're going to do is scale back women's rights and we don't even want to talk about gay rights" -- why can't the left do what you're supposed to do? Which is what Franklin Roosevelt did.

What Franklin Roosevelt did, and this is by the way of an analogy, during the New Deal, which was brilliant, I mean freaking brilliant, is he said, "I'm not going to fan the flames of class warfare. I'm not going to side with business or labor. I'm not going to close the factories nor am I going to give giant tax breaks to the robber barons." Our situation now looks just like the late 1920s -- the creation of new industries, creation of new sectors, incredible robber baron wealth, Gatsby-like partying in the cities, all of this celebrity culture, and then an impoverished new class, the working class. Which is exactly how the creative economy has unfolded.

Except that what Roosevelt did is say, "I'm going to make sure that these working-class people get to be part of the industrial economy. I'm going to build an industrial society that allows people to organize and bargain collectively, raise their wages, has affordable housing, get long-term mortgages, provides occupational safety and health, Social Security in their old age and welfare in their spells of poverty. And I'm going to make sure that their kids can go to college."

Next Page: "The U.S. has become very Darwinistic"

• 
• Be the first to post a letter about this story
• View blog reactions