No Room At The Realtor's

I am increasingly trying to live a disconnected life - as, in, disconnected from digital media.  It's one of my ways of coping with a world ruled by very bad actors who want to make very bad news.  (Another coping mechanism of mine is to work to create collective expressions of good news via collective constructive organic work.  But I digress.)

This week, however, a bad actor managed to insert a bit of bad news into my consciousness.  It happened while I was driving in Southern California on one of my regular visits to family.  If you don't have streaming Internet because you don't want to be addicted to your smartphone, and yet you do want to know why you're stuck in traffic (and boy, was I stuck!), you have little choice but to listen to the radio for traffic updates.  Being exposed to alarming headlines is an unavoidable risk of getting your information this way.  So it was that I heard that Donald Trump is starting to attack Democratic leaders from states that have been experiencing a surge in homelessness.

This piqued my interest for a number of reasons.  First, almost the only claims to legitimacy which Trump has are the performance metrics of the visible, formal economy.  Those metrics paint a wildly optimistic picture of the American economy.  (NASDAQ sets new records!  Dow sets new records!  Unemployment below 4 percent!)  Yet the "boots-on-the-ground" reality which many of us see paints an entirely different picture,  One of the parts of that picture concerns the epidemic of homelessness whose rate of increase jumped drastically under the Trump regime.

Trump's tweets this week about the homeless crisis contain a note of outrage over the lack of help which the homeless are receiving, yet as noted in at least one of the articles linked in this post, Trump is proposing actions which would exacerbate the homeless crisis even further by reducing the availability of affordable housing.  His outrage is therefore hypocritical.

It might be good to examine the roots of homelessness in the United States, for I want to suggest that homelessness is a feature (and not a bug) of the very system of oligarchic capitalism and radical individualism that characterize American society.  I don't have time today to get into a rigorous defense of my hypothesis, but I think it good to list a few items of history:

• Homelessness has been a feature of American society since the 1870's, and has been closely linked to two phenomena: the enforcement of the cultural notion that the only respectable living arrangement is for people to own their own homes (thus eliminating shared housing, boarders, and other "non-standard" arrangements), combined with the increasing expense of achieving this ideal.  (Source: "Home and Homelessness in the United States: Changing Ideals and Realities", A. R. Veness, 1991)
• Homelessness was a surprisingly strong feature of the "Roaring Twenties", which has been widely taught to children by historiographers as being a time of rising prosperity for the majority of Americans.  In reality, it was anything but.  (Source: "Poverty in the Prosperous Years: The Working Poor of the 1920's and Today," B. Payne, 2013)
• During the 1920's, more than 60 percent of Americans lived below the poverty line.  (Source: BBC GSCE CCEA, Retrieved 27 December 2019)

I want to focus particularly on the first bullet point.  Home ownership in the United States has long been touted as a big step toward respectability, as it is a key component of being able to live a completely individualized life, un-beholden to any responsibility for the collective of which the individual is but a part.  But home ownership has become rapidly unaffordable because the rate of inflation of home prices has far outpaced the rate of increase of most workers' wages for at least two decades.  Housing is an obvious example of the damage that results when oligarchs blow aspirational bubbles.  Post-secondary education is another.

Two further observations.  First, it is useful to see Trump as, among other things, a symptom of a greater evil.  We know that Russia worked hard to insure that Trump would capture the White House, so we can see Trump in a very real sense as a manifestation of the will of the oligarchy (and its chief oligarch Putin) who now rule Russia.  If the symptoms of extreme wealth inequality are now ballooning in America under Trump, it is only logical that we should see them ballooning in Putin's Russia as well, as has been noted in journalism covering the Russian homelessness crisis.  See "St. Petersburg Tackles a Homelessness Crisis Moscow Won't Address," for instance, where you will read that Russia treats its homeless population the same way a narcissistic parent treats an imperfect child - as a limb to be amputated.  One other similarity between Russia and the United States is that even during Russia's 21st-century supposed "roaring decade" (or more, accurately, "roaring few years" of high oil revenues from 2008 to 2015-2016), there were between one and five million children living on the street in Russia.

Second, both Trump and the Russian leadership find it useful to maintain a narcissistic facade of perfection, and to project their actual imperfections onto scapegoats who can be demonized by being "otherized."  But on closer examination, the perfection which they seek to portray looks unsettlingly similar to the fragile bubble-film perfection of America in the Roaring Twenties.  Most of 1920's America was suffering, yet the nation was deluded by the media portrayals of the good fortune of the rich.  It required only a very small shift in consciousness to burst that delusion.  The shift occurred once the wealthy were confronted with a crisis they could not handle.  And then suddenly those who had been suffering all along began to become "activized."  A similar phase change may be in our not too distant future.