The Divide
Review of The Divide: American Injustice in the Age of the Wealth Gap, by Matt Taibbi:
It always astounds me when somebody on the Right claims that Barack Obama is a socialist. Even back in 2009, it was pretty obvious that he was doing everything he could to save global capitalism, just as Franklin Delano Roosevelt had pulled out all stops during the Great Depression to preserve the capitalist order. Without these presidents’ injections of taxpayer money into the banking systems – and into the coffers of some of the world’s largest corporations – everything might very well have come crashing down.
Failure to acknowledge these historical facts is pure ideological obfuscation.
However, it wasn’t until I read Matt Taibbi’s book, The Divide: American Injustice in the Age of the Wealth Gap, that I realized the full extent of the Obama administration’s BFF-relationship with Wall Street. Socialism? Yes, but one confined to the mega-rich. Even more bothersome was the author’s excavation of my own deep-seated complicity in this most-recent skewering of American democracy. For Taibbi doesn’t merely add to the pile of books purporting to explain “what went wrong” in the financial industry in 2008; he shows how we as a culture have not yet come to terms with the underlying attitudes and assumptions that still provoke only a resigned shrug when the richest .01% trample on the rights of millions of small investors, pension holders, and basically everyone else who insists on playing by the rules. Like a contemporary Nietzsche, Taibbi highlights the ways in which our cultural idols and illusions regarding wealth have penetrated our legal system at the highest levels, so that a corporation’s theft of billions upon billions of dollars now seems less worthy of jail time than a homeless person’s possession of a joint. As the author puts it:
We’re creating a dystopia, where the mania of the state isn’t secrecy or censorship but unfairness. Obsessed with success and wealth and despising failure and poverty, our society is systematically dividing the population into winners and losers, using institutions like the courts to speed the process. Winners get rich and get off. Losers go broke and go to jail. It isn’t just that some clever crook on Wall Street can steal a billion dollars and never see the inside of a courtroom; it’s that, plus the fact that some black teenager a few miles away can go to jail just for standing on a street corner, that makes the whole picture complete.
The great nonprosecutions of Wall Street in the years since 2008…were just symbols of this dystopian sorting process to which we’d already begun committing ourselves. The cleaving of the country into two completely different states – one a small archipelago of hyperacquisitive untouchables, the other a vast ghetto of expendables with only theoretical rights – has been in the works a long time (Taibbi, 12-13).
The new American legal system of the 21st century is scared to death of pursuing any prosecutions that might negatively impact the economy in any way, while it is increasingly cracking down on (mainly non-white) petty offenders and undocumented immigrants, who are rarely treated with any type of leniency or even decency. For those of us who live on the white middle-class side of privilege, however, the development of this new system has been largely invisible to us. One of this book’s most important public services is to make the invisible visible.
One might criticize Taibbi’s substantial use of anecdotal evidence to make some of his stronger points; however, his stories are so powerful, detailed, and seemingly reflective of general conditions that even a critical reader is susceptible to being swept up in his rhetorical use of them. In fact, I don’t remember shaking with rage so much while reading a book. It also helps that Taibbi has honed his style writing for such publications as Rolling Stone, which has allowed him to develop a style that blends populism and a penchancy for profanity with his ability to do sophisticated cultural analysis.
All in all, it adds up to a book that every American should read, if only to remind us of how far we’ve drifted from our ideals – especially those of democracy, fairness, and the rule of law.
- Michael Van Dyke