NYTimes | Insofar
as individualization has taken hold in the United States, the prospects
for collective action on behalf of the poor are dim, at best.
Collective
action on behalf of the poor requires a shared belief in the obligation
of the state to secure the well-being of the citizenry. That belief has
been undermined by what Beck calls
the “insourcing” of risk, transferring obligations from the state to
the individual. This reallocation of responsibility has been studied
from various angles.
In his book “The Great Risk Shift,”
Jacob Hacker, a political scientist at Yale, joins the argument by
documenting the economic pressures on individuals resulting from the
widespread erosion of social insurance. “For decades, Americans and
their government upheld a powerful set of ideals that combined a
commitment to economic security with a faith in economic opportunity,”
Hacker writes. “Today that message is starkly different: You are on your own.”
Collective social action, in turn, has been supplanted by a different kind of revolt. David A. Snow
, professor of sociology at the University of California, Irvine, noted
that the top priorities of the specific movements associated with
individualization – “the feminist movement,
lesbian-gay-bisexual-transgender movements, the black power movement,
the disability rights movement, and, most recently, the fat-acceptance
movement” – do not lend themselves to broad economic demands on behalf
of the less well off.
Instead, Snow wrote in a chapter of the 2013 book “The Future of Social Movement Research,”
concern with distributional inequities and injustices tends to take a back seat to procedural issues and injustices bearing on rights and associated matters of inclusion and exclusion and to group reputational issues.
The
most recent example of the populace’s rising up to substantially change
the course of legislation was not in support of raising the minimum
wage or of making the tax system more progressive. It was the enormous
and successful outcry
– three million emails to Congress, a petition with 4.5 million
signatures, 2.4 million tweets and 10 million calls to members of
Congress — over the attempted enactment of the Stop Online Piracy Act
(SOPA) in 2012. Supporters of the net neutrality movement saw free or low-cost access to music and video resources on the Internet threatened by the measure. Their complaints, backed by tech firms
whose profits depend on open access to the Internet — Google, Facebook,
eBay, Twitter etc. – defeated the bill backed by their commercial
adversaries, the music, motion picture and cable industries.
Compare the SOPA protest to the sole organized attempt to challenge the flow of wealth to the top 1 percent and the profits funneled to the finance industry: Occupy Wall Street, which collapsed in less than a year, despite intensive, generally favorable media coverage.
