The Underclass.  Couch homeless.  The underemployed.  Marginalized society takes many forms and goes by many names, but its members have one established quality: they are so down on their luck that they have little hope of improving their situation.  They sometimes even give up trying.  The phenomena of marginalization has long been focused on by sociologists, economists, and historians, who have estimated over the last several decades that there are about as many marginalized members of our society as there are unemployed, thus doubling our actual unemployment rate.

You can imagine my surprise at hearing Sean Hannity mention this liberal talking point.

In Sean Hannity’s 2-3-09 radio program, he mentioned a statistic that has begun to pop up in one conservative show after another: that, combined with underemployment and marginalization, the unemployment rate is actually about 17%.  While technically true, the partisan bent of this statistic is unmistakeable; while, during Bush’s presidency, citing the Underclass would have welcomed criticism of the victims of marginalization rather than the causes, today it’s a conservative call to action.  The call?  Get Barack Obama out of the White House so he can stop hurting the poor, helpless American people, of course.  While personal responsibility has served as the ubiquitous mantra of conservatives for some time, their pundits’ efforts to defame Obama have created a new chant: marginalization, circumstance, and despair.

Politics aside, the acknowledgment of statistics which were once abhorrent to even hint at and, especially, of the circumstantial nature of the predicament is a great opportunity for growth in our national paradigm.  One of the hardest battles when discussing politics with economic conservatives has been to convince them of the very real circumstantial crises which may occur in individual lives, outside of the scope or manageability of “personal responsibility.”

The first lesson to learn is that marginalization and victimhood are real.  If a supposition of government malfeasance is the tool to prove it, so be it.  As America fluctuates from an economic bubble to an economic valley, it’s becoming harder to deny that hard work and American ingenuity, invincible as they are, can’t be assaulted from sources outside of the individual.  Circumstance is suddenly a reality, and these people are victims–victims of the federal government.

The hubris of conservatives is their implicit assumption that marginalization will suddenly disappear if government ceases to be involved.  Changes in government involvement (a diminishment, even) will certainly improve the situation, but marginalization is by no means a product of government alone.  It is and has always been a product of unchecked power, which has always been a product of unhealthy social and economic systems.

So marginalization is a systemic problem, not a strictly governmental one.  Many social institutions exercise the powers of governance, not just the feds and Obama, and oftentimes with more potentially harmful motivations.  Consider John D. Rockefeller, who was known for restricting his competitors access to resources–thus defeating them by trickery and cunning, rather than by producing a better product; he marginalized them.

Or Pullman, who hired employees and housed them in his infamous Pullman Town.  Although the housing was top-notch, living conditions were so restrictive that the living quarters were little more than high quality prisons.  He marginalized a whole town’s population.

And, of course, the most infamous case of marginalization in America’s brief history: slavery.  The assumption that our nation has lived a history of marginalization (following the aristocratic traditions of the Old World) up until, shall we say, Reagan, that marginalization is now a thing of the past, and that the individual is finally free, after thousands of years of subjugation, to seek opportunity and to achieve success according to their merits, well. . .that’s a long stretch of ideological desert.

The second lesson is that marginalization has many sources.  Even within the scope of their argument, conservatives should be able to admit that a malicious multinational corporation is at least as threatening to freedom as a well-meaning government, and that it may certainly marginalize the human beings over which it exercises governance, as has been done by self-interested economic institutions since time immemorial.  I’m not holding my breath for Hannity, but there are reasonable conservatives out there who have already stood on the edge of this idea, and now’s the perfect time to help them take the plunge.

On a system level, however, we have a more serious challenge.  It doesn’t take a malicious corporation to marginalize people.  The combination of many well-meaning small businesses, working within the misguided principles of a misguided economic system, may be even more destructive.  Furthermore, a government that establishes entitlement and assistance programs without a proper mind for empowering (rather than enabling) the populace may be more destructive still.

The crisis of marginalization has happened before; it will happen again; it’s natural and unavoidable; it’s human nature.  Society, however, need not have such a nature.  In recognizing the effects of circumstance on individual effort and vice versa, and acting accordingly, we can collectively empower the individual, effectively innoculating society against individual greed and the amorality of our economic system.  We may yet stop marginalizing each other and begin to marginalize the risk of being marginalized instead.