In Third World America, Arianna Huffington paints a very stark, albeit semantically inaccurate, picture of the decline of the middle class, and how that decline is intimately tied to policies that have led to our now crumbling infrastructure, soaring national debt, bubble economics, and one of the worst performing education systems in the developed world. This inaccuracy is both the books greatest merit and greatest failure, in that it is not Huffington’s observations that are flawed, but the definitions that she surrounds them with.
If one is to go by the late 18th century French definition of what "middle class" is, the premise of the book is somewhat valid (even then, tenuously), if extremely outdated. However, Huffington opts to define middle class by a range of income from people who claim to be middle class, the top end of which is individuals earning $90,000, twice the average family’s income in America. The silly numbers aside, allowing Americans to define political and economic definitions is not a great way to academically analyze a situation. The most clear example of why would be the average American’s aversion to the term "socialism", even though the vast majority favor a downward redistribution of wealth more radical than that found in Sweden, as demonstrated by Professor Michael Norton of Harvard Business School. The average person doesn’t have the education or economic wherewithal to make a realistic determination of what class they fall into, and it’s intellectually dishonest to allow their judgment to determine a premise for this kind of analysis. At best, what Huffington defines as the dwindling middle class would be more suitably defined as the American labor aristocracy, a definition that takes into account not only the artificial creation of this economic group through racist government programs like the G.I. Bill and FHA programs, but also accuracy places the group at the correct end of the economic spectrum: the upper echelon of the working class, or petit-bourgeoisie. By not acknowledging this economic reality Third World America fails to accurately convey that the crisis now faced by the "middle class" is one that the true working class and economically and politically disfranchised groups have been dealing with since the transition from feudalism to capitalism.
Another shortfall of the book that stands out is the great misunderstanding, or perhaps deliberate misrepresentation, of history, both American and international, that Huffington uses to avoid alienating readers that may themselves have similar misunderstandings. I should note that when I say "deliberate misrepresentation", I don’t mean to call Arianna Huffington a liar; I am positive that it’s not a simple misunderstanding simply because she’s an extremely well educated person with a background in economics, and I most certainly understand the motivation behind fudging some key facts to keep an American audience from throwing the book down in all too common reactionary fury. I simply disagree that it’s the right thing to do. Though some would no doubt get angry at having history accurately described to them, others would read on and become properly informed, and by not portraying things as they actually happened, Huffington is inadvertently encouraging people to, in typical American fashion, embrace wrong definitions, revisionist history, and half-assed middle of the road policy positions that, as we’ve seen both in the last two years of the Obama presidency and the eight years of the Clinton presidency, simply do little-to-nothing to address income disparity, financial chicanery of the banking and corporate elite, or poverty levels. A small example of such fact-fudging is when Huffington claims that the fall of the Soviet Union led to the death of Marxism as a political and economic philosophy. There are two things wrong with that assertion, the first being that it completely ignores the contemporary post-Chicago New Developmentalist attitude found in almost every South American nation (Hugo Chavez, Evo Morales, et. al.), an attitude that absolutely has its roots in Marxism, if not actively promoted by South American Marxists themselves. Second, it neglects to mention not only that the hard times that the Soviet Union faced near "the end" were not only due to the economic liberalization imposed by the fledgling oligarchy (not unlike that of China), but that the Soviet Union actually fell because of a U.S. supported coup by Boris Yeltsin, one that ended with him shelling parliament because of their opposition to the radical right-wing economic reforms he was attempting to unilaterally implement. It’s an intellectually dishonest representation of well documented recent history, though sadly, it is not the most egregious; that honors goes to Huffington’s pining for the glory days of capitalism, through which she describes what we have today is not capitalism, rather "corporatism". Let’s set aside the fact that "corporatism" is just the inevitable final state of free-market capitalism, where by exerting their will on the government the moneyed elite become a new aristocracy and just focus on history. Capitalism has always, throughout its several centuries of existence, has been exclusively about making money and extracting wealth. Slavery, racism, anti-Semitism, these concepts didn’t suddenly pop up just because, they came about because they were extremely effective where profits are concerned, as the late (and very much missed) Howard Zinn so deftly demonstrated in A People’s History of the United States. Every single positive development that led to parts of the American working class becoming what Huffington describes as the "middle class" has been a result of modern liberalism and progressivism (it’s important to not mistake these programs for socialism, as an important tenet of socialist ideology is anti-racism and complete solidarity, a trait that these programs could not possibly be described with). The fact of the matter is that capitalism is an amoral economic system and no greater good could ever possibly originate from it. This isn’t a matter up for debate, it’s a fact. It’s the reason that Adam Smith was so adamant about addressing needs that a free market cannot possibly effectively account for. It’s not a judgment, either; neither Ayn Rand nor Milton Friedman, the modern icons of capitalist ideology, would have ever described themselves to be "moral" or concerned with the well being of workers, and if they are willing to acknowledge that fact there’s no reason for the Left to shy away from it. By doing so it only gives credence to the arguments of free market fundamentalists; arguments that have been tried over and over again, always leading to spectacular disaster for all but the richest of the rich and causing the huge deficit burden that we are now faced with. That ideological reinforcement is just not something America can afford anymore.
As I wrote in the beginning of this review, the intellectual disparity demonstrated by Huffington between presentation and reality is both the greatest flaw and greatest merit of Third World America (and let me assure anyone reading this who has been nodding along angrily that this conclusion took a fair amount of soul searching, chainsmoking, and espresso to reach). Arianna Huffington is not wrong in her assessment of the decline of the United States of America from an international economic super power into a loose third world confederacy; she is scarily right. One needs only to compare the Gini coefficient of some of the Deep South states to war-ravaged Palestine to see proof of that reality. The only objection I have with Third World America is that I personally believe that it is our responsibility to properly educate rather than blindly convert, though perhaps I have too much faith in a country where more people believe in the Devil than evolution, and Arianna Huffington has the right idea in her approach after all. The bottom line is that I recommend this book, but only to people who have not actively studied economics or history. If you have, you won’t learn anything new, and you will find just as much to criticize as I did. For others though, Third World America will be a sobering revelation about where we are headed as a nation if we don’t hit the brakes on free market fundamentalism immediately. Certainly it is a great introductory text in that sense, and extremely accessible as well.