One of the interesting arguments in Crashing the Gate is that the progressive organizations offer their employees a sense of moral superiority to compensate for poor pay (exacerbated by crushing debts). However, the exercise of that moral superiority offends the very disenfrachised poor that progressives seek to represent.

The discussion of the moral-superiority-instead-of-pay trade off should be extended far beyond the operation of political parties. Academia should shoulder a huge part of the blame for recasting moral superiority as pay. For instance, in the University of California system, where doctoral students are dramatically underfunded and at high risk for attrition, the graduate student instructors at U.C. Berkeley have attempted to strike for better pay. The response of the university administration has always been to whip up parental outrage and make a moral claim that teaching is a spiritual calling. Many departments parcel out the scarce teaching positions so that graduate students only get an income for one semester out of the year: when students question the expectation that they take out loans to make up the difference (steadily adding up over the course of 10+ years), administrators tell them that they should just be happy they got into such a competitive university. Meanwhile tenured professors get the benefit of exploiting their students’ professional skillset for a fraction of market value. This is a moral-superiority-instead-of-pay argument. As the University of California pushes their no-pay-for-calling message year after year, while drawing a student body with a strong commitment to social justice, is it any wonder the products of that education have been conditioned to expect moral positioning as a substitute for pay?

While university administers admonish teachers for being overly-concerned about money, a series of investigations and audits have recently revealed that the executives in the University of California system were wildly over-compensated. It’s hard for those underpaid, steeped-in-moral-entitlement workers that academia has been pumping out to ignore this level of hypocrisy. The rich are apparently getting richer while manipulating the moral values of struggling students.

Another tributary stream of the moral para-economy occurs in the gendered approach to compensation in the corporate world. Women are highly susceptible to moral arguments to discriminate against themselves in salary negotiations. While it’s easy to blame individual women for failing to stick up for themselves, the sheer force of numbers suggest that women en masse have been encouraged to view opportunities for moral superiority as a tempting substitute for monetary pay.

The moral para-economy can be viewed as an aspect of the problem of rankism. No matter how much the powers and the interests try to convince people of their inherent inferiority in order to exploit their lowered expectations, the hallmark of progressive civilization is the underlying assumption that we all have equal value as human beings. As financial and social inequalities escalate, the demand for moral privilege expands to compensate. As the beneficiaries of material inegalitarianism defend their advantages, the moral claims get louder. In this respect, it doesn’t matter whether your gang colors are Red or Blue: poor Republicans and poor Democrats both demand the moral high ground to compensate for the material distortions of our society.

If Democrats are still looking for a core value that everyone can get behind, it’s worth considering rankism as a primary threat to building an inclusive “reality-based” community.