Maybe Edwards' Message Didn't Resonate w/Voters Because Most Poor Think They're "Middle Class"

One THE ELECT AND THE DAMNED
Most Americans--citizens of the wealthiest, most powerful and most ideal-swathed country in the world--by a very wide margin own nothing more than their household goods, a few glittering gadgets such as automobiles and television sets (usually purchased on the installment plan, many at second hand) and the clothes on their backs. A horde if not a majority of Americans live in shacks, cabins, hovels, shanties, hand-me-down Victorian eyesores, rickety tenements and flaky apartment buildings--as the newspapers from time to time chortle that new Russian apartment-house construction is falling apart. (Conditions abroad, in the standard American view, are everywhere far worse than anywhere in the United States. The French, for example, could learn much about cooking from the Automat and Howard Johnson.)

At the same time, a relative handful of Americans are extravagantly endowed, like princes in the Arabian Nights tales. Their agents deafen a baffled world with a never-ceasing chant about the occult merits of private-property ownership (good for everything that ails man and thoroughly familiar to the rest of the world, not invented in the United States), and the vaulting puissance of the American owners.

It would be difficult in the 1960's for a large majority of Americans to show fewer significant possessions if the country had long labored under a grasping dictatorship. How has this process been contrived of stripping threadbare most of the populace, which once at least owned small patches of virgin land? To this fascinating if off-color question we shall give some attention later.

Statements such as the foregoing on the rare occasions when they are ventured (although strictly true and by no means new)1 are bound to be challenged by the alert propaganda watchdogs of the established order. These propagandists, when hard pressed, offer an incantation about a mythical high American standard of living which on inspection turns out to be no more than a standard of gross consumption. The statements must, therefore--particularly in this age of burgeoning one-sided affluence--be monumentally and precisely documented and redocumented. Not that this will deter the watchdogs, who have limitless resources of casuistry and dialectic to fall back upon as well as an endless supply of white paper from denuded forests.


Nation of Employees

Most adult Americans in the quasi-affluent society of today, successors to the resourceful (and wholly imaginative) Americano of Walt Whitman's lush fantasy, are nothing more than employees. For the most part they are precariously situated; nearly all of them are menials. In this particular respect Americans, though illusion-ridden, are like the Russians under Communism, except that the Russians inhabit a less technologized society and have a single employer, There are, of course, other differences (such as the fact that Americans are allowed a longer civil leash), but not of social position. And this nation of free and equal employees is the reality that underlies and surrounds the wealthy few on the great North American continent.

Those few newspapers that make a practice of printing foreign news occasionally survey Latin American countries. The writers are invariably grieved to find a small oligarchy of big landowners in control, with the remainder of the population consisting of sycophantic hangers-on and landless, poverty-stricken peasants. But I have never seen it remarked that the basic description, with the alteration of a few nouns, applies just as well to the United States, where the position of the landowners is occupied by the financiers, industrialists and big rentiers and that of the peasants by the low-paid employees (all subject to dismissal for one reason or other just like the peasants)