Governor Gregoire faced the press last Wednesday and told them that her 2011-13 budget proposal didn’t reflect her values, but that the voters had spoken, she had heard them, and she was “honoring” them with her all-cuts budget.

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Being the mostly unreconstructed lefties we are here at the blog, we might have chosen to say that the voters were bought, bullied, muzzled, manipulated, and disenfranchised. Tens of millions of dollars poured into Washington this fall to convince us that it’s better to have tens of thousands of children without health care than it is to pay two cents tax on a can of Coke. Billionaires contributed more than they would have paid in tax to convince regular people that rich people shouldn’t have to pay tax.

But the regular-people-duped-into-voting-against-their-own-interests story will only lead to the inevitable unreconstructed-elitist-lefties-calling-regular-people-dumb accusations, so let’s consider for a moment that it might be the rich people who are voting against their own interests. Maybe it’s the oligarchs who are dumb.

Real wages for the middle classes have been stagnant across the last 40 years while income and wealth have flowed to the upper 1% in a way not seen since the Gilded Age. This has also come with a 40-year assault on the broad middle class, the public sphere, and the civic sector. The Seattle Times couldn’t plausibly run their relentless campaign to demonize public workers without a lot of groundwork having been laid. The notions that markets can solve all problems, that private is always better than public, that government can do nothing right, and that our society’s losers must be losers because they deserve it have been cultivated and consistently deployed since the 1970s.

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So while the rich have gotten extraordinarily richer, it has come with the concomitant erosion of the public infrastructure that American private wealth was built on. Roads, bridges, parks, public services, and public education especially have shrunk dramatically from the robust middle of the twentieth century. At some point you’d think that smart rich people would see the value in a little redistribution of wealth in order to prevent an electorate that eventually feels so squeezed as to call forth another Roosevelt (Teddy or Franklin, it doesn’t really matter). If today’s tycoons don’t learn the lessons of the Rockefellers and Vanderbilts before them and realize that private philanthropy blood money will never take the place of genuine public investment, their heirs could find themselves at the mercy of regulators and reformers.

Perhaps the most shortsighted aspect of the gutting of the public sphere for maximum profit has been the decimation of public education. Not only has funding for public Kindergarten through graduate school been slashed, but school, especially public higher education, has been pushed inexorably away from education and toward training. As more and more of our world has become privatized, more and more of public school has become about training employees rather than educating citizens. In K-12, students are tracked toward high stakes tests whose primary function is to line the wallets of for-profit testing companies, (Governor Gregoire repeatedly said that there would be no “sacred cows” in the budget cutting frenzy, but that apparently didn’t include the high stakes tests for K-12 students that do nothing for learning or graduation rates. She could’ve saved 100 million bucks by eliminating those tests.) Funding in community colleges has been shifted more and more toward vocational and technical training, and in public universities more and more toward “high demand” enrollments. When those representing the universities go to Olympia to beg for money, we only talk about serving the state’s economy, providing employees for businesses, and how much money our graduates can make. We don’t even bother anymore talking about an educated citizenry, social responsibility, or higher education as a key to a healthy democracy, because no one in power cares about those things. Public education, in the eyes of political and business leaders, is about preparing people to take their place in the economic machine and not screw things up too badly.

That leaves real education, education that includes real inquiry and debate, teaches fundamental principles, and even—gasp—includes the humanities and arts, available only to those who can afford it. After all of the innovation, expansion, and prosperity that was generated by massive public investment in state universities in the mid-twentieth-century, we are rapidly returning to a time when genuine education will be the privilege of those students who can attend colleges named after robber barons (Stanford, Carnegie, Vanderbilt, etc.). This will tend to make the portion of the population with access to leadership, money, influence, and control a lot more inbred, kind of like British royalty.

And the big losers in that deal may very well end up being the oligarchs. The short-term profit hoarding may not be able to withstand the long-term instability that comes with a widening chasm between the haves and have nots.

The governor may have honored somebody or something with her budget proposal last week, but it wasn’t voters.