Today's Working Class: Mr. Block Triumphant!
File this one in the drawer marked “Has anyone paying
attention
for the past 40 years?”
Gary Younge’s recent piece for the
Guardian
reveals that poor white Americans prefer Mitt Romney to Barack Obama by a 58%
to 32% margin. The
Guardian is a
British paper, but its coverage of American politics is generally more astute
than anything found in the United States, and that includes the good, gray (and
vastly overrated)
New York Times.
This time, though, the
Guardian sinks
to simplistic analysis worthy of Fox News.
Okay, I exaggerate. Unlike Fox, Younge got quite a few
things right. He’s spot on when noting that this isn’t new; Bush won the
blue-collar and poor vote by roughly the same margin. So did John McCain.
Younge doesn’t push it back much further, though he could. The working-class
poor began to abandon the Democrats en masse in the 1960s and for many of
the same reasons as today–they were seduced into thinking that social and
cultural concerns were more important than power relations. In truth, though, their
presence in the New Deal Coalition was
tenuous from the get-go. They could be found in big numbers among the
Dixiecrats resisting civil rights after World War II and in the George Wallace
campaign of 1968. Millions more voted for Nixon that year, and for Reagan in
1980 and 1984. They were perfect fodder for the come-to-Jesus snake oil
salesmen of the age of cable.
Younge suggests that liberals don’t understand the poor or
blue-collar workers very well. I agree, but the problem is the opposite of the
contempt and condescension he notes. At this point I should reveal that I grew
up working-class poor and am now a labor historian. I have been equally guilty
of the liberals’ primary sin toward the lower classes: romanticism. That is to
say, liberals and academics have been among the worst offenders of allowing the
working class to avoid taking responsibility for self-created conditions. By
casting the working class as deceived rather than deluded, as seduced rather
than a willing bed partners, as victims rather than participants, lots of
well-meaning folks have become enablers when they should have been critics.
Younge notes (correctly) that the Democrats don’t exactly
offer an irresistible economic plan for the poor, but he and I part company
when he says that viewing social class in economic terms alone is
condescending. What Karl Marx observed 140 years ago is just as true
today–class-consciousness is a prerequisite for class formation. There is,
strictly speaking, no such thing as the working class anymore. Younge would
have us excuse the myopia that leads workers to focus on social issues while
ignoring their objective economic reality. He’d also label liberal
misunderstanding a greater sin than the blockhead mentality that thinks saving
the country from gay marriages, prayerless schools, or taxes, or abortion, or
teachers’ unions, or [fill in a paranoid single cause here] is more important
than the very objective, material realities that undergird social class. Too much
of today’s working class is, as the Industrial Workers of the World labeled it
in the early 20th century, the embodiment of Mr. Block–the
industrial slave who thinks highly of his boss/master. (How’s that GOP
trickle-down thing working out for y’all?)
I’ll play apostate. It’s time for liberals to call out such
nonsense and hold those who can think
accountable for their behavior. I’m all for helping those who can’t help
themselves. I’m not so naïve as to think that anyone who wants a job in a
nation with near-double-digit unemployment can get one. That said, a boorish
lout is a boorish lout, whether he has an MBA from Harvard or carries a racist
banner in a Tea Party rally in a played-out West Virginia coal town. Today’s
working class is not the same one that led sit-down strikes in the 1930s; far
too often it consists of Mr. Blocks willing to fan the flames of misogyny,
homophobia, racism, anti-government paranoia, and slogan-slinging
libertarianism. Younge decries the liberal critique that the lower classes are
modern-day Know Nothings. Well, dammit, they are! Myopia is a single step
removed from blindness. It’s even worse; it’s a self-induced loss of sight.
Here’s another reality. The blue-collar white working class is
a dying anachronism. Walter Reuther and the sit-down strikers aren’t coming
back. (Today’s autoworkers are as likely to be found among global warming
deniers as on a picket line.) It’s time for liberals to step out of the red
state/blue state dialogue and go purple. That is, stop making excuses for
idiots and, by all means, stop wasting resources trying to organize those who
don’t wish to be organized. It’s time for a new progressive coalition fashioned
from 21st century reality, not mid-20th century dreams.
What might it look like? One only has to look at demographics and, yes,
economics. A liberal-led purple coalition would be female and ethnic, not male
and Anglo. It would also galvanize lower-level professionals, service-industry
workers, the involuntarily disadvantaged, and contingency workers; that is,
those whose paychecks and material conditions lead to class-consciousness. Get
these folks organized and maybe Mr. Block will put on a pair of glasses and
take a hard look around.
The challenge of all concepts is to translate vision into
accessibility. In 1983, The Chieftains proved that Western and Asian musicians could
make beautiful music together. The
Mountain Music Project seeks to expand the idea. Producer Danny Knicely operates
from the assumption that hills are hills, whether the mountains are the
Appalachians or the Himalayas; that it makes no difference if a wooden flute comes
from Ireland or the Himalayas (bansuri); and
that fiddles are fiddles, whether they are finely crafted, or roughly hewn from
a chunk of wood and finished with a sheath of goatskin stretched across the
chamber (sarangi). He then gathered American
bluegrass and Nepali musicians and told them to make mountain music together.
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