Tone Deaf
Working-class Black and Latino Americans, more likely to be paid lower wages, less likely to own significant assets; feel that they are being deprived of a fair share; see this as a consequence of white privilege. Meanwhile, white working-class American’s see themselves as less than privileged, barely hanging on; feel that such demands by Blacks and Latinos amount to a threat to their meager share, their livelihood. Neither group is the other group’s problem, the two groups have a common problem; America’s wealth and income distribution problem.
In a prosperous nation with more than 800 billionaires, no one should have to work for low wages, work multiple jobs, in order to survive. Yet, not enough is coming down to the working class for sharing. Robbing Peter to pay Paul is not the answer. It is because of America’s unfair income distribution that the two groups are being pitted against one another in their struggle to eke out a living. More needs to come down to the working class in toto. Less needs to go up to the already wealthy.
While the Democratic Party seeks to attract the vote of working-class Blacks and Latinos, Republicans have made significant progress in attracting votes from the white working-class; thus splitting, thereby negating, the working-class vote. Choosing sides is not the answer. These are the same group with an artificial distinction being made on the basis of race and ethnicity. There is only one side here – that’s the side of the working class; the side of a majority of Americans.
Ken,
I don’t think that I have an attaboy big enough to fit this article. I will have to settle for a GREAT BIG THANKS>
Ken,
Taking it full circle from my last comment on yer “Trumpian” thread, if liberal elites could hear the music, then they would know that all that they need do is bake better cookies for a broader set of children, deficit scolds be damned. At a time of secular stagnation then runaway inflation is not such a terrible risk as it would happen alongside dollar exchange rate devaluation. We now have all the oil that we need at high enough price. This is not 1972.
Ron
Thanks. Make me cry.
Is Sandel on to something here?
https://www.cnn.com/videos/tv/2020/09/09/amanpour-michael-sandel-meritocracy.cnn
Ken,
Sorry, but sound is not convenient to me while my wife is in the house. She has the TV blasting and after she wakes up a bit more will likely be cranking videos on her iPad. So, I must shelf that to later. However, I am well versed on the meritocracy issue.
There are two things wrong with our contemporary ideas regarding the benefits of meritocracy. First, most people that agree with meritocracy do not know what it means to have a meritocracy. Second, meritocracy, contrary to general public perception, has nothing to do with professional achievement, but instead academic achievement (which is an oxymoron).
Meritocracy is such a powerful justification for elitism because elites have defined merit to roughly mean elite. This is to say that all the best opportunities should accrue to those with the highest standardized test scores or the highest GPA. Although there are certainly exceptions to this and I am one, the accrual of merit signals in our education system, regardless of public or private, depends upon a stable household environment with regular meals and a devout respect for authority and love of our socioeconomic system. Either poverty, anger, or free-thinking may disqualify one from having sufficient merit to warrant better economic opportunity.
My dad was illiterate. He said that when he tried to learn to read that the letters ran together. He had functioning arithmetic skill. He built bridges and roads. He could read blueprints. He once determined an error by the engineers building a bridge that would have had the two ends not meeting in the middle and got it corrected in time to save the highway department a bundle. The engineer that made the error was the beneficiary of meritocracy thereby earning a high salary, but my dad was not. Later in life my dad built a truck scale when none of the local contractors in Orange VA had the necessary skill to pour concrete to the demanding tolerances required. My dad was the best shot and the best hunter in our known community of acquaintances, which was quite large because dad was one of twenty children born to a moonshiner on Old Rag Mountain. In retirement, dad learned to graft trees. He had always kept an extraordinarily productive garden.
My mom was the best cook around as well as the housekeeper with the cleanest home. She was also great caring for problem children, solving unsolvable problems with anger or potty training.
I was raised in a meritless household and even as a child was proud of it. Hence my attitude towards elitism and my early interest in socialism which with considerable dismay I learned was only another elitist system with different security gates. My GPA in public school was only about the 75th percentile, but my standardized test scores ran in the low to mid 90’s with my STEM tests generally in the 99th percentile. So, with my economic disadvantage I got public assistance and academic scholarships to begin college, but dropped out in my first semester, because I was not one to perform stupid pet tricks. Fortunately for me, I had enough merit to get hired as a computer operator sorting and collating punched cards. There was no stopping me after that. Back then in 1968, IT was a green field for anyone that could learn and do the work.
P.S., much of the perception of meritocracy is likely derived from our economic history so full of green fields where rags may sometimes be replaced by riches. Virgin green fields provide an opportunity for skills to count more than social signals, but these days most fields are well mowed and grazed.
The majority of the white working class does not want to vote for people that actually try to help the working class.
That’s just a fact.
EMike,
Perhaps it is just a fact. The good thing is that we only need that thin margin that separates losing Democratic Party candidates from winning in a majority of states and districts. We do not need every state nor every district, just an effectively governing majority.
I grew up eating fresh-baked homemade cookies and never developed much taste for cookies “fresh” out of a box. If one loses their home, whether rented or mortgaged, then the state’s handout may taste more like pity than rescue. Besides, a lot of people actually want a job a lot more than they want that government check.
Elites more freely hand out money when it gets to pass through their primary benefactors whether the FIRE sector, the MIC, energy and transportation or some other special interest. When elites try to help the working class then their policy choices are often colored by their own economic interests more than the interests of the working class.
Nonetheless, the white working class has been so neglected and betrayed for so long, that it would be an extremely heavy lift to regain their trust now. So, we might as well put it all on race. That was decided over 50 years ago and now it is baked in.
EMike,
BTW, my dad was terribly racist. He despised MLK, but not even half as much as he despised Barry Goldwater. Of course, my dad’s black hunting and fishing buddies were nothing like those blacks that dad saw demonstrating on TV. My mom always remembered the kindness and decency of her nanny, but then mom did not write “The Help” either. Her parents were nothing like as poor as my dad’s parents, but her three brothers squandered all their inheritance while she was married off to a philandering brute that she eventually divorced. In any case, both always voted a straight Democratic Party ticket, despite their lack of trust for liberals since FDR. What they did trust unquestionably though was that the Republican Party would always look out for the interests of rich people and big business.
@Ron,
“…we might as well put it all on race. That was decided over 50 years ago and now it is baked in…”
[Over 50 years ago as principally in 1968 with AFDC changes, not in 1964 with the Civil Rights Act. The workfare that came later under Clinton Republicans just added insult to injury all around. Universal childcare and vocational training on a path to work would have changed 1968, but when Republicans rescinded the dividends tax credit in 1954 what remained was a capital gains tax preference that would consolidate corporate America washing most unions and blue collar manufacturing workers out of existence as well as end defined benefit pension plans for all workers. In such a consolidating economy then better welfare programs are out of reach. Workers are fighting over the remaining scraps instead of building the economy larger and more inclusively.]
@Ken,
“…There is only one side here – that’s the side of the working class; the side of a majority of Americans.”
[So, the economically privileged must succeed politically by divide and conquer strategies. What could be more convenient for them than racial division?]
Yeah; meritocracy, elitism, … kinda take one’s mind back to the ’80s and the yuppies, doesn’t it?
the thing about meritocracy is that there is no guarantee that meritocrats are honest or decent, or even competent. i know too many harvard folks who are obviously bright and completely shallow. after all “i am so smart i don’t have to think about anything to know the answer.”
there is an answer to poverty but “soaking the rich” won’t do it. : first is a minimum wage that is a living wage (covers health care and retirement savings). second is making and enforcing laws against predatory businesses. even the “rich” don’t like to be robbed. third would be housing built by the government, sold at a reasonable price, with easy mortgage holidays during hard times. fourth would be jobs that even “low skilled” people can take pride in. fifth would be “encouraging” employers to train their workers instead of letting public “education” subsidize employers by taking on that function… and miseducating most people.
etc. but you won’t get there from here with the same old standard solutions.
of couse with the climate going to hell, all bets are off.
Ken Melvin has an apt u-tube suggestion, but meritocracy is not the crux of the cruft.
What the World competes for now is not merit, but market share enough to gain economy of scale. The dark side of Adam/Smith competition is each nation’s attempt to expand market share by attracting the wealthiest emigrants. The forces on Capitol Hill seek to hold on to their 888 billionaires and attract more multimillionaires by taxing less from wealthy folk but more from poor. In microcosm each state within the Union attempts to keep its own wealthy and attract more from other states by oppression of its poor.
How to get a handle on that free competition? You got me?
@Ken,
Uh, takes me back to the mid-60’s through the mid-70’s. That was my time of peak revolution and peak socialism. By the 80’s I had given up on politics, partly due the election of the drug store truck driving man’s POTUS Reagan and partly due to raising three girls. I had become the petite meritocracy for a while at least. Kids at home change everything. If you do your job with them well enough then you can stop worrying about them after they finish their educations.
@Coberly,
Indubitably!
justin
i see. empires today compete not for land but for people who can make them money.
i don’t think they are thinking of market share or economies of scale. they grow because that is their nature. like a cancer.
the founders had it almost right. the only way to contain the drive for power is by setting up a system of countervailing powers. that worked well enough until the money power grew too big to countervail.
ultimately the money power will fail… as a cancer ultimately fails. unfortunately it will take the host with it.
Coberly your post @September 12, 2020 8:34 pm – you do realise (apart from housing where I don’t necessarily disagree with you – although I see the problem as more difficult – it needs financial regulation changes as well)
that a universal basic income will go a long way to addressing all the other issues. The problem with trying to address being able to afford to live with market regulation is that they are different classes of problems. The market does not care if people can afford to live or not, the market only cares about what price gets me what I need. And higher minimum wages don’t address the problems of people who for one reason or another cannot work. UBI does – and it also allows mistreated workers to say FU to the people who are mistreating them.
Reason
of course there are issues / details that need to be worked out. I did not mention universal basic income, though i htink it might turn out to be necessary, because i don’t think welfare is the best way to deal with the problem of poverty… certainly not in the first instance. Taxing the rich just makes them fight you harder. Doesn’t mean the rich don’t need to pay taxes… just not taxes to support all of the rest of us… unless that becomes the only option, which is what it might come to if we don’t find another way lo stop them, the rich, from destroying their own base (us).
“the market”, unregulated will always, has always, led to destitution for some. that’s why we need regulation. i still believe the free market is the best way to protect us politically and possibly against a stagnation of over-regulation, but we need enough regulation to stop the natural tendency of what we call competition (unregulated). we don’t play football without rules.
there are people who cannot work, either for their own reasons or because “the economy” does not provide them jobs. as long as we are humane we will need to provide those people a “basic income,” but a living minimum wage would be a better first step… one which “the rich” could not honestly feel was imposing an “unfair” burden on them. i would expect that minimum wage to be high enough so people could pay for their own health care (through Medicare) and their own retirement, disability and death insurance (through Social Security) and their own unemployment insurance. SS has worked for eighty years because the workers pay for it themselves. Medicare was supposed to work that way but has been almost destroyed by making it mostly paid by the rich, and subject to political crimes like Bush’s drug act, and the general failure of congress to oversee honest pricing. But worker pays is the simplist, fairest, and safest way to organize “social insurance,” But it requires an honest wage base.