Elizabeth Warren has a video debunking of the right’s “class warfare” cries that’s going viral. Here’s the money quote:
I hear all this, you know, “Well, this is class warfare, this is…” whatever. No. There is nobody in this country who got rich on his own — nobody. You built a factory out there? Good for you. But I want to be clear. You moved your goods to market on the roads the rest of us paid for. You hired workers the rest of us paid to educate. You were safe in your factory because of police forces and fire forces that the rest of us paid for. You didn’t have to worry that marauding bands would come and seize everything at your factory — and hire someone to protect against this — because of the work the rest of us did.
This is the point, I think, where as a member of the Progressive Choir I’m supposed to leap to my feet and shout AMEN. But instead, for some reason, I just get depressed.
For one thing, this is such an obvious restatement of John Donne that it makes me wonder how far our understanding of human societies has backslid since 1624, and in particular how pervasive the individualist myth has become in American politics and culture (and by extension, the world’s) that so many people see Warren’s riff as noteworthy.
But this also wouldn’t have gone viral if it were a Senate candidate from, say, Missouri or New Mexico. But it’s Elizabeth, who many progressives seem to idolize with a zeal far outstripping her actual accomplishments or resume. And I wonder about that. Warren’s popularity as an obscure academic-turned-financial-regulatory-bureaucrat underscores just how little influence and how few advocates progressive politics have in DC. Progressives (as distinct from Democrats) are a long ways from a majority in this country, but they’re a significant segment of Americans, and they’re badly underrepresented in Washington because of media bias and how corrupt our political process is.
After the uninspiring disaster that was Martha Coakley, I’m sure a firebrand like Warren seems like a godsend to many Massachusetts Democrats. But outside that specific circumstance – a state with a long tradition of progressive politics, a recent disaster with a moribund machine politician, a national constituency of fawning progressive fanboys and fangirls – how viable is someone like Warren running for higher office? How many progressives are there in, say, the US Senate? Depending on your definition, maybe half a dozen?
The upshot is that when I see the national popularity of Warren, I mostly notice how few people in actual elected office there are for progressives to point to and say, “She (or he) says what I think.” And when I see the popularity of this particular video, I mostly wonder when it was that this ceased being such a painfully self-evident riff that nobody would give it a second thought.