I grew up in Greenwich, CT, one of the richest zip codes in the country and the median home price is in the millions. During BLM there were tons of BLM signs and signs like "White Silence Equals Violence", in front of five million dollar homes. DEI is popular with the very rich because it assuages their guilt and it's cost free. They might work for Goldman Sachs, but hey, they vote democrat and have altruistic theories! Btw, most of them employ all sorts of low paid immigrants who they don't treat very well. But DEI policies don't threaten anyone except young working class white men trying to move up.
If you guys come back into power in 2028 because Trump runs his mouth too much please, please don't bring the Clinton/ Obama neo con machine back, please. They are bad news and you will end up losing again in 4 years, they are toxic and wrong on just about everything.
"...shared economic interests of the popular classes" become elusive in a world whose class dimension has been heavily eclipsed by gender and race. Where once the larger contours of the majority of the US population were perceived as class ones -- as in most of the best literary fiction from Dreiser and Wharton through Fitzgerald, Farrell and O'Hara to Cheever and Updike -- the contours of everyday life for most vanished from media. The closest discussed facsimile to class became "inequality." Country club exclusiveness and exploitative workplace authoritarianism remained, but for most these were no longer articulated in the public sphere until Right-wing populists swooped in to exploit them for moneyed ends.True, the inattention to race in the class centered realists is shocking, though race gets some attention in a Farrell's great Studs Lonogan.
Great comment. Abandoning the working class is by design. Leftists see it as a feature, not a bug. Marcuse’s One Dimensional Man was the Bible of the New Left in the 1960s and he’s the most important of the Critical Theorists who created the Woke movement. Critical Race Theory is an offshoot of Critical Theory.
Anyways, Marcuse felt that the working class had been incorporated into the system of oppression, so leftists would have to build their coalition around minorities, women, and sexual minorities.
I think Dem overreaction to.the working class's tilt toward.support of the Vjetnam and cu!rural trsditionalism.were key factors in partial eclipse of working class salience.
This tip-toes around the less convenient but more historically accurate explanation.
Namely, one that actually tracks with the fact that the 'working class' was not actually a culturally unified bloc, historically speaking.
This is covered up by the fact that it tended to *vote* like a unified bloc up until the mid-60s.
After the mid-60s--or, more accurately, after the Civil Rights Act of 1964--you see a huge fracturing, in which the Democrats lose a massive amount of ground with working class whites, and gained massive amounts of ground with working class minorities.
This shift in voting patterns is most apparent in the South (you'll notice a flip in partisan affiliation there that begins in the '64 election and continues to this day), but it happens everywhere from '64 onward.
It is at this point that you see a distinct shift in electoral strategy, where Democrats try to win elections by maximizing black turnout, and Nixon deploys the 'Southern strategy' to try and maximize turnout amongst low-income whites and especially white evangelicals.
And it is that this point where 'race' begins to eclipse class for a generation.
The echoes of that basic electoral calculus persist to this day, but somewhere around the 1990s it became muddied by the fact that the country had become more diverse and less racist. By the 1990s, you can't call someone 'the n word' in the public square and not be socially punished for it.
You'd think this would get Democrats and Republicans to abandon the old logic of their coalitions and focus more on class issues--but the opposite happens, largely IMO due to social media. The Democrats becomes hostage to the cult of woke and its excesses, and the Republicans become hostage to the cult of Trump and neo-fascist Christian Nationalist lunacy.
Accelerating it all is the fallout from the natural conclusion to the 'Reagan Revolution', which financializes the US economy and then destroys it in 2008, and COVID, which sends the social media-driven algorithmic hysteria into global overdrive.
And here we are, in a time of political madness and informational anarchy. And very little signs we'll soon be out. (And plenty of signs that when we do get out, the Chinese will have ascended to become the pre-eminent global power)
> you'll notice a flip in partisan affiliation there that begins in the '64 election and continues to this day
That's simply wrong. The South did not have a majority of Republican congressional districts until 1994.
However, the late 60s was when the New Left (described above) began its anti-Enlightenment takeover of the Democratic Party. The 1960s also began the Sexual Revolution, which Christian conservatives oppose. 1972 was when abortion was legalized. By the 90s, the Democrats were an uneasy coalition of leftists and liberals. Now they're wholly leftist.
I couldn't read the whole article because of the paywall but earners, owners, and donors almost answers it's question in the title. Focusing on economic issues is hard because the people lined up against you with power are the owners and donors. You can beat your head against the wall to raise wages and make it easier to join unions or you can do something about some social issue that doesn't run up against capitalism. The old country club republicans are more liberal on abortion or gay rights because after all their kids could need those things too. and now days that includes having multi-racial grandkids. But raise their taxes to pay for daycare they already have or health care they don't worry about and you will get pushback.
I think the appeal of "socialists" or populist progressives is that idealogues won't be so quick to give up or back down when the fight gets hard. we need people who really want to fight to make those broad economic reforms and restrictions on corporate power a reality.
I grew up in Greenwich, CT, one of the richest zip codes in the country and the median home price is in the millions. During BLM there were tons of BLM signs and signs like "White Silence Equals Violence", in front of five million dollar homes. DEI is popular with the very rich because it assuages their guilt and it's cost free. They might work for Goldman Sachs, but hey, they vote democrat and have altruistic theories! Btw, most of them employ all sorts of low paid immigrants who they don't treat very well. But DEI policies don't threaten anyone except young working class white men trying to move up.
If you guys come back into power in 2028 because Trump runs his mouth too much please, please don't bring the Clinton/ Obama neo con machine back, please. They are bad news and you will end up losing again in 4 years, they are toxic and wrong on just about everything.
"...shared economic interests of the popular classes" become elusive in a world whose class dimension has been heavily eclipsed by gender and race. Where once the larger contours of the majority of the US population were perceived as class ones -- as in most of the best literary fiction from Dreiser and Wharton through Fitzgerald, Farrell and O'Hara to Cheever and Updike -- the contours of everyday life for most vanished from media. The closest discussed facsimile to class became "inequality." Country club exclusiveness and exploitative workplace authoritarianism remained, but for most these were no longer articulated in the public sphere until Right-wing populists swooped in to exploit them for moneyed ends.True, the inattention to race in the class centered realists is shocking, though race gets some attention in a Farrell's great Studs Lonogan.
Poof! Your world no loner exists!
Great comment. Abandoning the working class is by design. Leftists see it as a feature, not a bug. Marcuse’s One Dimensional Man was the Bible of the New Left in the 1960s and he’s the most important of the Critical Theorists who created the Woke movement. Critical Race Theory is an offshoot of Critical Theory.
Anyways, Marcuse felt that the working class had been incorporated into the system of oppression, so leftists would have to build their coalition around minorities, women, and sexual minorities.
I think Dem overreaction to.the working class's tilt toward.support of the Vjetnam and cu!rural trsditionalism.were key factors in partial eclipse of working class salience.
This tip-toes around the less convenient but more historically accurate explanation.
Namely, one that actually tracks with the fact that the 'working class' was not actually a culturally unified bloc, historically speaking.
This is covered up by the fact that it tended to *vote* like a unified bloc up until the mid-60s.
After the mid-60s--or, more accurately, after the Civil Rights Act of 1964--you see a huge fracturing, in which the Democrats lose a massive amount of ground with working class whites, and gained massive amounts of ground with working class minorities.
This shift in voting patterns is most apparent in the South (you'll notice a flip in partisan affiliation there that begins in the '64 election and continues to this day), but it happens everywhere from '64 onward.
It is at this point that you see a distinct shift in electoral strategy, where Democrats try to win elections by maximizing black turnout, and Nixon deploys the 'Southern strategy' to try and maximize turnout amongst low-income whites and especially white evangelicals.
And it is that this point where 'race' begins to eclipse class for a generation.
The echoes of that basic electoral calculus persist to this day, but somewhere around the 1990s it became muddied by the fact that the country had become more diverse and less racist. By the 1990s, you can't call someone 'the n word' in the public square and not be socially punished for it.
You'd think this would get Democrats and Republicans to abandon the old logic of their coalitions and focus more on class issues--but the opposite happens, largely IMO due to social media. The Democrats becomes hostage to the cult of woke and its excesses, and the Republicans become hostage to the cult of Trump and neo-fascist Christian Nationalist lunacy.
Accelerating it all is the fallout from the natural conclusion to the 'Reagan Revolution', which financializes the US economy and then destroys it in 2008, and COVID, which sends the social media-driven algorithmic hysteria into global overdrive.
And here we are, in a time of political madness and informational anarchy. And very little signs we'll soon be out. (And plenty of signs that when we do get out, the Chinese will have ascended to become the pre-eminent global power)
> you'll notice a flip in partisan affiliation there that begins in the '64 election and continues to this day
That's simply wrong. The South did not have a majority of Republican congressional districts until 1994.
However, the late 60s was when the New Left (described above) began its anti-Enlightenment takeover of the Democratic Party. The 1960s also began the Sexual Revolution, which Christian conservatives oppose. 1972 was when abortion was legalized. By the 90s, the Democrats were an uneasy coalition of leftists and liberals. Now they're wholly leftist.
I couldn't read the whole article because of the paywall but earners, owners, and donors almost answers it's question in the title. Focusing on economic issues is hard because the people lined up against you with power are the owners and donors. You can beat your head against the wall to raise wages and make it easier to join unions or you can do something about some social issue that doesn't run up against capitalism. The old country club republicans are more liberal on abortion or gay rights because after all their kids could need those things too. and now days that includes having multi-racial grandkids. But raise their taxes to pay for daycare they already have or health care they don't worry about and you will get pushback.
I think the appeal of "socialists" or populist progressives is that idealogues won't be so quick to give up or back down when the fight gets hard. we need people who really want to fight to make those broad economic reforms and restrictions on corporate power a reality.