The War, Enron, the Income Gap, and Other Christmas Table Chatter

Counting family members staying over and Christmas Eve dinner guests, we had around our table two or three Bush voters, four or five for Gore, perhaps two for Buchanan, one or two for Nader. We spoke about politics more than on any holiday in memory. Yet whenever a potentially contentious topic came up, many times we were nearly finishing one another's sentences in agreement.

First the obvious: Everyone (with perhaps one exception, but she was English) was grateful for the striking military successes in Afghanistan, and for the fact that the Taliban had been routed with few American casualties and less loss of life than many had feared.

Then came worried talk about the economy, the collapse of Enron's paper empire, the disappearance of the savings of thousands who had put their faith in that company's widely touted business model. The conversation flowed into the growing income gap between richer and poorer Americans. Most of the adults could remember childhoods spent in middle- and working-class suburbs, where the social distance between a factory worker's kids and an accountant's seemed insignificant.

Such communities are no more. The globalized economy means that the factory jobs (if they are unionized) have vanished for good. The accountant's kids (if they are smart) have become investment bankers, and the formerly "middle-class" suburbs are home to thousands of poor immigrants living in overcrowded rental housing and doing the dishes and yard work.

Houses where families once raised three, four and five kids have been remodeled to accommodate two working professionals, their one child and the servants who tend them. Recent census data reveals that in the most immigrant-heavy suburbs in New York and California the median income has dropped by nearly 20 percent in the last decade, an indicator of how thinly spread were the gains of the 1990s boom.

The U.S. class profile increasingly resembles that of Latin America, with an elite of rich and skilled and a growing proportion of the semi-poor; this my little brother, just back from a monthlong visit with a Brazilian girlfriend, was pleased to confirm. As Patrick Buchanan argues in his new book Death of the West, no Western people is currently reproducing in demographically sustainable numbers, which means that the West has no future as a culture unless that transformation is reversed. (While Buchanan as an author and political figure did not come up in our conversation, his general ideas on foreign and social policies most emphatically did?with much assent and no noticeable disagreement.)

As for the War Against Terror: all of us hoped to avoid a "war of civilizations" against Islam, while fearing that the threshold had already been crossed. No one believed the line, still pushed aggressively by the establishment's lapdog pundits, that there was "absolutely no connection whatsoever" between the ongoing hostilities between Israel and the Palestinians and the virulent anti-Americanism raging in much of the Muslim world. Indeed, that linkage sometimes couldn't even be comfortably explored between friends. My brother-in-law, a professor at MIT, told of broaching this topic to one of his best friends on the faculty, only to be cut short with a sarcastic "It's always the Jews"?a guaranteed conversation-stopper.

On the day of Christmas Eve, CNN was providing regular reports on whether the Israelis would allow Yasir Arafat to travel to Bethlehem for Mass that evening, and we were all taking notice. My stepsister, a natural conciliator, wondered how the Israelis could fail to see that they were just generating hatred by their actions?in some reports, Israeli functionaries were commenting arrogantly that Arafat has failed to "do his job" and there is "no vacation at the end of the year" for those who don't do their jobs. The point seemed to be to deprive the Palestinians of any shred of political dignity, and one wonders what can possibly be the fruit of such tactics.

And so the talk wandered over to our general sense of voicelessness. Any elected politician who mused about making the Israel-Palestine peace process a central part of his legislative agenda would be quietly taken aside by a top aide and asked, "Are you crazy? Do you want to face a well-funded primary opponent every election cycle for the next 15 years?"

So the work is left to esteemed but retired figures like George Mitchell and Warren Rudman, whose recommendations can be safely finessed and ignored.

Meanwhile, the conservative political establishment is pounding the drums harder for an air war against Iraq?a state that according to every authoritative recent report I've read had nothing to do with the 9/11 terror attacks. None of us could imagine how such an attack?seemingly a blatant violation of international law that would be greeted with loathing in virtually every capital in the world?would render our future Christmases any more safe and secure.