The American Middle Class as Victim

Elizabeth Warren’s moralistic tales don’t help create effective economic policies.

Senator Elizabeth Warren, foundering in the Democratic primary, is returning to the theme that made her famous: her moralizing account of personal bankruptcy.

As an academic, Warren did research on personal bankruptcy in the United States. “Our research ended up showing that most of these families weren’t reckless or irresponsible,” she writes, “they were just getting squeezed by an economy that forced them to take on more debt and more risk to cling to their place in America’s middle class.” That is a peculiar claim. Borrowing money that you cannot repay in order to finance personal consumption that you cannot afford is precisely the sort of thing one might wish to indicate with the words “reckless and irresponsible.” To claim that this is the result of “getting squeezed by the economy” is a way of giving your morality play a villain without making any specific person feel bad.

That is one of the things about Warren that appeal to such unlikely admirers as Tucker Carlson: The neo-socialist Left and the neo-nationalist Right are united in their conviction that the American middle class is a victim of forces beyond the control of its members, who therefore must be considered immune to any sort of moral judgment for the state of their lives, their families, or their communities.

The 21st-century tale of college-educated woe in these United States is a strange one.

In the December issue of Harper’s, Wes Enzinna shares his preposterous personal odyssey under the headline “Down and Out in Silicon Valley.” Housing is indeed absurdly expensive in the Bay Area, for reasons that are largely political rather than organic, but Enzinna’s story, colorful as it is (he took up residence in a shack with no plumbing), tells us nothing useful about that. Early in his career, Enzinna moved to work “at an investigative reporting magazine in San Francisco,” by which I assume he is politely indicating Mother Jones, the investigative-reporting magazine in San Francisco where his work has appeared. “My situation,” he writes, “was evidence of how distorted the Bay Area housing market had become, the brutality inflicted upon the poor now trickling up to everyone but the super-rich.”

His situation was no such thing