"'You have a right to your weariness,'" writes Charles Blow in the NYTimes...

Dear Citizens and Elected Officials:

Here is the link to Blow’s brief column, in the weary time, just one day short of a week after the Mid-Term elections:  www.nytimes.com/… 

Blow is arguing for no short term, decisive ending to our political troubles, with the grand drama extending to Trump running again in 2020, and with the contest up for grabs.  He adds this poignant note:

Or maybe the questions are for us. How could we not have registered fully just how hostile a substantial portion of America is to inclusion and equality? How could we not have registered the full depths of American racism and misogyny? How could we not remember that American progress has always been like a dance with a disagreeable partner, stumbling backward as well as moving forward?

And here is my reply in today’s online commentary space, Monday, November 12, 2018:  

I agree with most of what you have written here, Charles, but I think that your focus on racism and misogyny misses another dynamic which Robert Kuttner gets right in  "Can Democracy Survive Global Capitalism?." I've never seem him write with more passion.  He strikes a different note in his very first chapter, which captures the thrust of what he is saying: "A Song of Angry Men," and he could have entitled it more specifically to the content,  "A Song of Angry White Working Class Men."

Kuttner, as I am, is in a "minority" on the progressive left because he stresses economic alienation, not just on the material plane, when he writes that "In the past four decades, the economy has been turned viciously against ordinary working people." No, he takes it further and writes this:"People had worked hard at jobs that were often hot and dirty.  Someone had not only changed the game and taken away the jobs, but looked down on them for being losers.  This was the injury that Trump understood and the message that he so effectively countered.  It was not just about economics, but about dignity." (My emphasis). 

 Long before this was written, or before the Times covered Anne Case and Angus Deaton's findings about "Death's of Despair," an obscure author, Joe Bageant,  wrote "Deer Hunting with Jesus: Dispatches from America's Class War" He understood, in 2007, what was going on, especially the loss of dignity.  Hillary never got that, nor Obama.  

Reply3 Recommend

Share

Flag

And here is a reply from California: 

1 REPLY

REK commented 41 minutes ago

R

REK

Bay Area, CA30m ago

Great points...I actually thought both Obama and HRC got it well they just didn't do enough to address it. Obama's comments about guns and religion showed a depth of understanding but I think got really taken out of context and interpreted as elitist...but water under the bridge...we now have to reach across all sectors in conversation and to bring about policies that work for the 100%!

Reply2 Recommended

Share

Flag

Thank you for your submission.

We'll notify you via email when your comment has been approved.

Element removed

| Pending Approval

And here was my reply to that comment from REK.

@REKThanks REK.  It's not all one thing or another, and it is very difficult to separate race from class in America, and misogyny perhaps even more difficult.  But both President Obama and Secretary Clinton were not from the working class, and their whole style was very cool, very upper middle class, stressing further education and new skills  for the working class, something which Kuttner points out, was not required of them  in the three "glorious decades" of 1945-1975...since then, the Democratic Party is the party of Wall Street, Silicon Valley, Hollywood and upper middle class professionals... Kuttner senses the dangers of what excited Steve Bannon so much, that the Dems would count on winning a culture war based on race, gender and trans gender issues, and leave the economics to Trump.  It didn't work for the Dems in rural red state America, whatever it did for them in the suburbs.  I would add that the economy right now is not working for Dems, is confusing in its structure of two good numbers, alongside the  continued precarity for the bottom 60-70%.  I liked John Judis in his book about the rise of the populism, “The Populist Explosion: How the Great Recession Transformed American and European Politics,”  pointing out that it is not the 1% vs the 99% but the bottom 70% vs the top 30%, even though amidst that 30% are the leaders of the various portions of the progressive "camps:" on race, gender, the environment, and yes, even the old AFL-CIO bureaucracy, which has been unable to speak effectively for or ignite a working class revolt - from the left.

Best,

bill of rights

Frostburg, MD