OK, the actual science relating to the metaphor, of a frog allowing itself to be boiled to death if the temperature of the water in the pot in which it sits is raised slowly enough, debunks it as a myth. Frogs, it turns out, are not dumb enough to sit still for that type of treatment. Establishment politics though still operates on the premise that most Americans may be susceptible to that practice. It might be literally true, the NY Times once published an article ”The Dangers of Taking a Dip in the Hot Tub” detailing a rise in emergency room visits from hot tub accidents, with heat overexposure responsible for ten percent of them. An older observation though could better explain our establishment’s stubborn determination to pursue politics as usual, regardless of increasing pain felt by a majority of Americans. Thomas Paine had this to say in his pamphlet “Common Sense, written at the dawn of the American Revolution
“A long habit of not thinking a thing wrong, gives it a superficial appearance of being right, and raises at first a formidable outcry in defense of custom.” Such voices are heard today dismissing the fundamental premise of Bernie Sander's 2016 presidential campaign, that our current political establishment, and the economic interests that own it, sells out the interests of average Americans. His views are called radical, fringe, and “well outside the mainstream”. For that reason it is said Sanders can not win the presidency. Through all of 2015 that was the conventional wisdom, and many repeat it still.
Conventional wisdom says many things of course. It asserts that the only way for Social Security to remain solvent is to reduce adjustments made for inflation in payments made to beneficiaries, for example. And that Seniors should be forced to wait longer to become eligible for those benefits. This while workers in their 50's and 60's are increasingly culled from management positions and forced to compete to become door greeters at Walmart.
Conventional wisdom, at least according to Congress and most leading presidential candidates, also says that an income of a quarter million a year is middle class. This at a time when one out of six Americans, and over a fifth of children under 18, live in poverty (officially defined as an annual income of less than $18,500 for a family of three). Our political class, and the conventional wisdom that supports it, places a higher priority on shielding the earnings of those making hundreds of thousands a year from any additional “tax hit” than it does on eliminating the suffering of children in families earning below twenty grand a year.
Back when the Bush tax cuts were about to expire in 2012, President Obama sought to have them lapse only for income levels above the middle class. A hue and cry subsequently arose over how to define middle class income. Obama proposed that couples with an income less than $250,000 should not be subject to higher taxes. Ultimately, after battles in Congress, that line got drawn at $450,000 for a married couple ($400,000 for an individual), below which they could keep all of their Bush tax cuts.
Simultaneous with this high profile national debate over preserving the Bush tax cut for middle class families, the Publisher's Clearinghouse launched a brand new giveaway gimmick to excite and entice the masses into subscribing to their magazines. All of the mania surrounding recent Powerball drawings now fixes that Lottery as our current “go to” portal for get rich instantly fantasies, but for a generation prior that distinction was held by the Publisher's Clearinghouse Sweepstakes, the folks who showed up on your doorstep with a banner and a check. Instead of just giving away ten million dollars like they had been previously doing, in 2012 they announced a five thousand dollars a week for life grand prize that some lucky person already held the winning number for. Five thousand dollars a week for life, that's the stuff that dream are made of for hundreds of millions of Americans. That happens to equal an income of $260,000 a year.
The Publisher's Clearinghouse is still selling magazines off of their fabulous $260,000 a year for your life (and your heir's now also) grand prize, while Hillary Clinton is making new vows to shield middle class incomes up to $250,000 a year from any increase in taxes. What's wrong with this picture? Maybe it's the people who are not in it, the ones who have no say when it comes to establishing conventional wisdom – or defining the middle class: the ones trying to get by on something closer to the median national income of $50,000 a year. The ones for whom $250,000 is a fortune.
Tens of millions of American voices have long been ignored by the gate keepers of establishment politics. They were the trees not heard falling off in some distant forest, far removed from the corridors of power. Those not listened to are seldom represented. The status quo depends upon estrangement, and long has grown accustomed to elections where most potential voters stay home instead. That's what happens when people tire of voting for the lesser evil, and winning even less than that. That's what happens when the establishment's “long habit of not thinking a thing wrong, gives it a superficial appearance of being right”. Tens of millions of Americans live in poverty while America’s 185 wealthiest clans are collectively worth $1.2 trillion. The system that enabled this is called politics as usual.
Bernie Sanders is not politics as usual, and the response he has gotten on the campaign trail since he announced his bid for the presidency has been anything but politics as usual. If Sander's views are seen as falling outside the mainstream of American politics that's only because the stream bed is engineered and runs through concrete culverts , narrowly defined and carefully controlled by banks that direct it. It took Bernie Sanders a slow tenacious life time of hard political work directly pitted against prevailing establishment interests to rise to the rank of Senator from the small state of Vermont, where many of his constituents got the chance to know and respect him personally. It took a global financial melt down in 2008 to provide Sanders with a platform dramatic enough for his message to break through nationally. It's a message that resonates easily though when people finally hear it, because they already know it in their bones. It is a call to action, and the frog is feeling the Bern.