07-02-2016, 04:39 PM
comment --
Myth #1: Yes, it is easy to forget that much of the working class, indeed a disproportionate part of it, is non-white or Hispanic.
The trick for Democrats is to convince the white working class that they have something in common with the black and Latino parts of the working class, and that differences of church attended or musical preference are trivial in contrast to being part of the working class.
Myth #2: Yes, class distinctions are real and severe -- more real and more sever than they used to be. People may feel shame about being poor... but poverty is much of their reality.
To be poor in America is to be exploited, if not as a worker if one is slightly qualified (one might be fortunate just to have a job), but also to have needs that one can meet only dearly. The American economy is a loan-shark economy.
Myth #3: Yes. America has come to be extremely inegalitarian in economic results. Most people have one class to exploit them (big landowners or urban landlords, financiers and industrialists, bureaucratic elites (including executives), rip=ff merchants, and organized crime). We Americans have all of those.
Much of the mobility is people sinking -- which is nothing worthy of pride. To be sure, the lazy, improvident, and incompetent can expect to sink some from a middle-class milieu -- but today just to stay at the same job usually means that one sinks economically.
The glass ceilings are lower than they used to be, and far more rigid.
Myth #4. To be poor is often to have little chance to better one's lot. Our educational system does a poor job at developing talent, especially when the objective of education is to prepare one for a drudge job even if one gets a college degree.
Myth #5. I showed a study on economic development in the various states, and race came up. On the average a white person from West Virginia was worse off than an American Indian in California, a Latino in Virginia, or a black in Maryland.
West Virginia is really messed up. Be undereducated and live where opportunities are few, and identity as "white" will matter not at all.
Myth #1: Yes, it is easy to forget that much of the working class, indeed a disproportionate part of it, is non-white or Hispanic.
The trick for Democrats is to convince the white working class that they have something in common with the black and Latino parts of the working class, and that differences of church attended or musical preference are trivial in contrast to being part of the working class.
Myth #2: Yes, class distinctions are real and severe -- more real and more sever than they used to be. People may feel shame about being poor... but poverty is much of their reality.
To be poor in America is to be exploited, if not as a worker if one is slightly qualified (one might be fortunate just to have a job), but also to have needs that one can meet only dearly. The American economy is a loan-shark economy.
Myth #3: Yes. America has come to be extremely inegalitarian in economic results. Most people have one class to exploit them (big landowners or urban landlords, financiers and industrialists, bureaucratic elites (including executives), rip=ff merchants, and organized crime). We Americans have all of those.
Much of the mobility is people sinking -- which is nothing worthy of pride. To be sure, the lazy, improvident, and incompetent can expect to sink some from a middle-class milieu -- but today just to stay at the same job usually means that one sinks economically.
The glass ceilings are lower than they used to be, and far more rigid.
Myth #4. To be poor is often to have little chance to better one's lot. Our educational system does a poor job at developing talent, especially when the objective of education is to prepare one for a drudge job even if one gets a college degree.
Myth #5. I showed a study on economic development in the various states, and race came up. On the average a white person from West Virginia was worse off than an American Indian in California, a Latino in Virginia, or a black in Maryland.
West Virginia is really messed up. Be undereducated and live where opportunities are few, and identity as "white" will matter not at all.
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.