Mick Konczal,Medium: Learning from Trump in Retrospect
As Joan C. Williams noted in an important essay, “the white working class (WWC) resents professionals but admires the rich.” The WWC doesn’t encounter rich people, but “professionals order them around every day. The dream is not to become upper-middle-class, with its different food, family, and friendship patterns; the dream is to live in your own class milieu, where you feel comfortable – just with more money.”
Why class arguments don’t work on the working class anymore–what is the real American dream. Consider that “own class milieu” allows for the distorted culture and institutions that preserve racism, sexism, and other attacks on equal protection of the law. So do the class milieus of upper-middle-class professionals and the rich as well.
We need to talk about monopoly power, especially as Trump doesn’t take it up. Meanwhile we should feel out our own case against professionals. Tying professionals to commodification, the people who get in the way of needed goods (especially with whatever TrumpCare ends up looking like), might be a way to go there.
It is the medical profession as much as insurance companies that have prevented health care from becoming part of the infrastructure.
We need to remember a narrative of what has happened to workers and how we are going to fix it is more important than covering every potential base.
Read here “all workers”.
The brilliant economist David Card gave me a useful point here during an interview: the divide among economists on trade is driven by the fact that labor economists study the real effects of unemployment on real people, where trade and macroeconomists treat people as just another commodity.
Marx’s fundamental and valid criticism of capitalism was that it was an ideology that turned everything — people, law, politics, art, culture — into commodities and stripped every other value of society. The price of everything and the value of nothing. Any criticism needs to point out that the dominance of money as a showstopper is a huge problem with capitalism.
Obviously, people in poverty are worse off than others, and there’s philosophical reasons to want a market system that allows for inequality as long as it benefits the worst-off in society.
The call for centrism will not even admit this principle. You’re on your own.
Here is the hard truth that we are not facing:
“Post-tax-and-transfer” inequality, the thing everyone was cheering as the way forward, is going to be a major causality in the next four years, probably the next 8 months even, conceptually as a Trump administration doesn’t think that way at all, and practically as the conservatives destroy transfers and progressive taxation. Getting a clearer strategy and narrative around pushing wages up, and getting a fuller agenda around places left behind, needs to be centered more than it is.
Opposition to the steamroller of Trumpism must not be based on notions of self-evident truths.
Ezekiel Kweku writes in an excellent article, “The lesson we should draw from Clinton’s loss is not that white supremacy is unbeatable at the polls, but that it’s not going to beat itself…If the Democratic Party would like to keep more Donald Trumps from winning in the future, they are going to have to take the extraordinary step of doing politics.”