SPRING 2014
ing factors to such immobile politics.
Due to educational inequity in the
United States, upward mobility is severely reduced. As a result of the highly
unequal nature of the public school experience in the United States being dependent upon one’s income or residence
in a relatively homogenous income
area, thre is a solidification of inequality in the United States. This hardening
reality of inequality in the United States
may fuel the partisan polarization and
divide so evident in American politics
DOMESTIC
tween education, income, and political
polarization, other factors influence
the modern American phenomenon
of political gridlock. In fact, it must
be noted that income is but one of the
various elements that form Democrats’
and Republicans’ respective coalitions.
The correlation between income and
partisan affiliation is not unique, for as
noted in an article by Derek Thompson
in The Atlantic, “geography, education, race, and marital status all influence both our earning potential and our
polarization on the basis of income inequality. Education is one of the responsible – and flagrantly unequal – factors.
The essence of the American dream,
that one can get ahead with hard work
through education, may not translate
into the reality of the situation of educational inequity and income inequality
in the United States today. Additionally,
the political polarization and gridlock
– terms frequently coined by political
observers to describe the current state
of American politics – are driven in part
Due to the ingrained inequities in the American public school
system, educational inequality acts as at least one indirect factor that drives the gridlock in Congress.
today. Nonetheless, the fact of the matter is that educational inequities have
created a situation in which achieving
financial success independent of starting income is increasingly difficult –
perhaps even impossible at some levels.
According to Ezra Klein of The Washington Post, “America now has less
social mobility than countries such as
Canada, Germany, and France.” The effects of educational inequities on the reduction of American social mobility are
starkly apparent in a statistic cited by
President Obama and quoted in Klein’s
article: that “a child born into the top
twenty percent has about a two-in-three
chance of staying at or near the top.” By
contrast, those children at the other end
of the spectrum, in the lowest income
bracket, have “a less than one-in-twenty
shot at making to the top.” While thecausal link between educational inequity and this lack of social mobility in
the United States seems abstract, the
quality of education is likely a highly
salient feature that solidifies the income
inequality in this country that seems today to be growing in both seriousness
and relevance to American politics.
Amidst the complex relationship be-
vote.” Other demographic factors are
certainly responsible for today’s political polarization, but the income factor
is interesting for a number of reasons.
First, the two parties’ philosophies
regarding the role of government in
ameliorating the income gap are fundamentally divergent. The Pew Research
Center cites the statistic that ninety
percent of Democrats believe that the
government’s role in “reducing the gap
between the rich and everyone else”
should amount to “a lot” or “some,”
while among Republicans, only fortyfive percent ascribe to the same belief
in heavy government involvement in
remedying the issue. Second, among
both Democrats and Republicans, and
therefore bridging the partisan divide,
is a belief that “most people can get
ahead through hard work,” despite a belief in the economy’s advantaging of the
wealthy. As a result, there is a dichotomy in the debate regarding income inequality. If the economy is thought to
advantage the wealthy, how can people
ensure their financial well-being and
experience social mobility through hard
work? Another factor must be at play,
a factor that indirectly drives political
by income inequality. While many factors contribute to the partisan divide,
income inequality is evidently one of
those factors, with the two parties deriving their coalitions from bases that
are, in some sense, divided along lines
of income. While there are certainly exceptions to this rule and political coalitions also form on the basis of factors
that are entirely unrelated to socioeconomic conditions, economic mobility
i ́