Entitled and frustrated

There are few things uglier than the sight of a man who feels entitled to wealth or privilege casting around for someone to blame when he suffers a setback. And I worry about that, because we're going to see more of it soon.

Bush has made several mistakes during this war (though prosecuting it was not an error), but the worst was at the very beginning. He failed then, and has consistently failed since, to explain to the American people that the war is going to mean sacrifices. I do not expect to be as well-off five years from now as I am now. Oil prices must go up, and the stress on companies around the world will cause some to go bust; people out of work start to lose their homes and then banks start to go bust (and we've let some banks get so huge that that could be disastrous). At least a minor depression seems likely, not even mentioning the cost of prosecuting the war for another twenty years or so.

It is far better to say in advance "This is going to hurt" than to surprise people, especially people as comfortable with ever-increasing prosperity as we are these days. Remember the astonishment when people found that stock prices could actually go down? In a suburb of Chicago I saw a bumper sticker that read "Prosperity is my birthright." When that woman loses her job and her home, will she think herself robbed of her birthright?

I worry because demagogues find fertile soil among the frustrated; and we've trained up a couple of generations to consider themselves hyphenated-Americans. It will be horribly easy to find groups to blame and hate. And what holds us together as a country is not so much our systems of law as the social contract that says that we're all in this together. The politics of victimhood (baby demagoguery) is already magnifying every discrepancy into an offense; what is going to happen when there are some real losses?