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.”
Yeah. I have seen that mentioned elsewhere…they don’t give a damn about tax cuts for the rich.
The are monomaniacal about good paying jobs. They will follow that piper anywhere.
Yep.
A job provides two things:
*money necessary for living
*an identify. I am a __.
Most liberal economists are rather clueless about that second part.
Even some economists are noticing and rethinking:
“In most of economic theory, a job isn’t treated as something inherently valuable — it’s just a conduit through which money flows from employer to employee. But most people probably care not just about the amount of money they get, but how they get it. If they see themselves as having earned their daily bread, they feel better about themselves than if they got a handout. A job also probably has an important symbolic value — it sends a message that society cares about you and has a place for you.
The Democrats have been the party of the social safety net, and have long wondered why so many working-class Americans don’t seem to appreciate those benefits.”
A Job Is More Than a Paycheck
If Dems don’t bother to understand the motivation, how can they create programs to appeal?
When did Democrats start buying into the notion that the social safety net is what is keeping people from having jobs?
The people caught in the social safety net would like the dignity of contributing to society. The way the system of jobs is set up by employers — we are still a business-driven political system, regardless of conservative propaganda — not only denies that the opportunity for that dignity but rewards most those who extract the most and contribute the least to society.
The social safety net exists to provide income security during times of economic hardship, most often brought on by economy-wide conditions like recessions. The barriers to people taking the jobs that are out there often relate to transportation (including the match of schedules to work hours and geographic routes), child care (and also elder care or care for a disabled relative), and the match of skill sets to the employer’s prejudices. Cutting these benefits will starve people, pure and simple.
Working-class people are among the first to glom onto these benefits when they are needed. And the first to hop off of them when they get new jobs. They do not see or will not understand the realities of other people’s lives, especially those who are just given up entirely.
And they don’t see the informal sector of the economy into which people are forced as a place in which people often work very hard (whatever that means) to keep from losing it all. The moralism about people who work in the informal economy is very strong. Without providing alternatives to that means of survival.
If we actually checked for such, I wonder what we would find in rural poors…
https://www.theguardian.com/society/2016/nov/25/huge-rise-in-hospital-beds-in-england-taken-up-by-pe
ople-with-malnutrition
more than symbolic, it’s part of being productive in society, for the next generation, previous generation, etc
The notion of “being productive in society” is what is being questions in articles about the rise of bullshit jobs.
What productivity does a guy like Donald Trump really add to the economy for the next generation? What does he do that independently-owned and operated hotels and resorts could not do–or independent clothing labels?
I don’t find him productive in the sense that I’m using the term, but I’m also not sure he’s ever learned to do a day’s work. what I’m trying to get at in my comment is doing work isn’t what happens when one goes home from work (the paycheck or affirmation “I’m an [whatever]” at best it’s about doing something one considers worthwhile – something many don’t have a chance at and that is certainly one of our problems today. but I should add I’m not talking about ppl whose sense of worth is based on bullying others via wealth or whatever – where it’s not about a job it’s about exploiting control over others.
I understand fully what you are talking about. It is cultural, rather and economic, and of course economists who never deal with cultural “externalities” will inevitably screen it out of their analyses. And they will include Donald Trump’s “productivity” as part of the Gross Domestic Product.
The political inequity really is that the people who do the actual work of keeping the society running are paid the least, and those who bully or exploit are paid the most.
Some folks have even given the phenomenon a name: the good work discount of salary. The less you bully and exploit, the more your good work of actually doing something is discounted. Child and elderly caregivers are at the bottom of the income scale in compensation, and are doing work without which lots of other workers would not be able work themselves.
yes. and add to that the kind of people who prefer what we are calling productive work if they can get it, vs. the kind whose self esteem depends on bullying, and there where are we as a society? [I’ll answer that – we are where we are right now]
An identity is a cultural value not expressible in economic terms without some contortion. Economists refuse to be part of the integration of view of society. (Anthropologists actually tend to do that sort of synthesis better.)
And the economists most listened to are those who abstract the most so that only money remains the topic. And “incentives”, whatever they are.
I think the key problem is downward mobility. also think that’s what appeals about T’s slogan, most of us live with the day to day reality that we are worse off than the previous generation. the slogan isn’t about nostalgia, I think ppl hear it as a promise to restore the prosperity of the middle class, working class, etc. I mean, I think many T voters heard it as a promise along those lines. dems have not explained why we are worse off, and I don’t think the party elite cares to find out – might require doing a little thinking and trying to come up with a way forward that isn’t just sound bites and moar war