The Working Class

You can tell that the winds have shifted significantly when you see an article on the American white working class published prominently in the Harvard Business Review.

7 comments:

raven said...

She makes some good points, but the central thing that stood out to me was how delicately she had to make them, treading lightly with lots of attention to PC rules. "well, they're not ALL racists...." or words to that effect. And the comment from a friend at the end, "this is what the Dems need to hear, but they will never listen".

The biggest racist this country has seen in 50 years just left office. We had a chance, a real chance, an unprecedented opportunity to have some real racial healing and that unprintable fool deliberately exacerbated hostilities.

They can try to continue with the splintering, the ever smaller victim groups, the radicals ever purer than the last fringe element, and in the end, it will get them stacked deep in ditches.

Unlike a lot of places, in this country people know what we have, and are not going to stand for much more loss. People on the way down are a lot more angry than people on the way up. If the left manages to sabotage Trump, the next iteration will be grim indeed.

Grim said...

She makes some good points, but the central thing that stood out to me was how delicately she had to make them, treading lightly with lots of attention to PC rules.

That's what I thought, too. It's as good a piece as can be published in the HBR. It needs to meditate on how unfair all this was to Hillary Clinton, and how it certainly is sexist, and how it certainly is at least a little bit racist.

However, within the context of all that genuflection, the author was allowed to make some real points. It's the best they can do for now.

E Hines said...

From the HBR: Manly dignity is a big deal for working-class men.... Trump promises a world free of political correctness and a return to an earlier era, when men were men and women knew their place. It’s comfort food for high-school-educated guys....

No sexist condescension here. Mm, mm. Certainly no understanding, either.

It needs to meditate on how unfair all this was to Hillary Clinton, and how it certainly is sexist, and how it certainly is at least a little bit racist.

No, it doesn't. Integrity doesn't need to genuflect to anyone or anything. Full stop.

Eric Hines

David Foster said...

Interesting article, thanks for the link. I don't like the *class* part of the phrase "working class" as applied to the US, because it's misleading. This woman's father rose from a very rough background to what the author herself describes as 'middle class', and had a daughter who became a Distinguished Professor of Law. Such a progression is incompatible with the whole idea of 'class'.

Grim said...

We had a similar discussion about "America's Warrior Class" -- or even more provocatively, "Warrior Caste" -- a few years ago. The point being made was that some families elect to serve generation after generation, and make it an important part of how respect is earned within their family's culture. That's a small number of families, though.

So I understood what they meant, and why they wanted to celebrate it; but I also understood the objection to using the terms. 'Caste,' or even hardened 'class,' is not how America works and it's not how we should want it to work either.

On the other hand, the phenomenon she's discussing does exist, and it needs a description so we can refer to it effectively. If "working class" isn't it, it can be something else, but we need some way of speaking that points to the thing being referenced.

Ymar Sakar said...

The pro slave South's Slavery 2.0 was much closer to the British version of the Indian caste system than Slavery 1.0 in Biblical Old Testament times or even the Indian purity system.

The point is that the Left needs a caste of slaves or a class of Elite Rulers born to Rule for their utopia to work. Although to many people that isn't a utopia. The Left considers it the way the builders of the Tower of Babel considered their work the greatest supreme achievement of humanity since Eden's existence. To bring God, to pull all the divine gods, down to the Earth and put them into a temple, to serve at the hand of mortal kings and leaders. Constantine accomplished that few had since.



E Hines said...

Such a progression is incompatible with the whole idea of 'class'.

And

...we need some way of speaking that points to the thing being referenced.

I think the PC aspect of this is overdone. "Class" works fine as a descriptor of what we're discussing; indeed, the whole idea of progression is a matter of moving from a grouping that's less well off in some sense through one that's better off, to one that's even better off: class to class to class.

Nor does the term even have hard boundaries--by design. The broad gray areas quasi-separating one class from another are too amorphous to serve as delimiters in any European, or West Asian, construction. Beyond that, the broad gray areas that more or less serve along one dimension of class--say, economic--are different from those that more or less serve along another dimension of class--say, political--both are different from those that more or less serve along another dimension of class--say, education. And the same man who inhabits, for the time, one class is the same man who inhabits another class at a different level in the progression, and he does so alongside other men who inhabit one of the first man's classes, but not all, and perhaps none, of the others.

Finally: I don't see any need to surrender the language to someone else's perceptions.

Eric Hines