It’s hard to imagine greater symbols of America living in the past than roasting pigs and gas-guzzling motorcycles, but an Iowa “Roast and Ride” is where GOP hopefuls just gathered to make a case that they should be the next President. In their speeches, the Perrys and Walkers of the world unironically promised to return America to greatness by wallowing in nostalgia for a world that no longer exists. According to an Economist report, there was one exception: Marco Rubio. An excerpt:
Mr Perry is 65 years old, while Mr Walker is 47. But the two governors sounded rather similar in their wistful recollections of modest childhoods marked by cheerful, hard-working, up-by-the-bootstraps small town thrift. Mr Walker was the undoubted star of the day even before he arrived. His speech was well-received, but it was a disappointment. He talked of an American Dream led astray, and set up a straw man attack on Mr Obama and the likely Democratic nominee, Hillary Clinton, saying that to listen to them, the measure of success in America was “how many people are dependent on government.” But in his own childhood in small town America, nobody said or wrote in their high school yearbooks that they wanted to grow up to be dependent on the government, Mr Walker said. The great thing about America, he went on, was that it offered equality of opportunity, even if outcomes were up to individuals. America is one of the few countries left in the world where it doesn’t matter what class you are born into, he declared, and many in the audience, notably the older voters with snowy hair, clapped enthusiastically.
But even in a political speech to activists, that was a riskily glib thing to say. The evidence is overwhelming that American social mobility has stalled in recent decades, and that accidents of birth have come to matter far too much. The great question of the age is how to fix that, and both thoughtful Republicans and Democrats have begun wrestling with competing solutions. Mr Walker simply sweeps that debate aside, and in doing so sounds like a spokesman for an imperfectly-remembered past when the American Dream came easily.
The contrast was startling when Senator Marco Rubio came to talk. The Cuban-American senator from Florida is only three years younger than Mr Walker, but he sounded as if he came from a different generation. The economy has changed in the past 20 years, he told the crowd. There is more global competition and machines can do many of the jobs that once paid good wages to middle class workers. We are living through a moment of transformation such as we have not seen since the Industrial Revolution, Mr Rubio said. Unfortunately, we have all of these leaders that are stuck in the past, he said. He was polite enough to add: “especially on the left”, but his rebuke to some of his Republican rivals was well made.
In part Mr Rubio is defending himself tactically from the charge that America is not ready to hand the White House to another young, eloquent senator (having tried that with a certain Senator Obama from Illinois). But he is right to challenge crowds such as the one in Boone. I like the 20th century, Mr Rubio joked. I was born in the 20th century. But it is time to build a new American century.•