Off to board for PDX in a half hour...the comment the other week on Charles Murray is still on my mind...Murray has an exceptional gift for provocation, and the theme of his new one--the moral collapse of the white American working class over the last fifty years--indeed provokes me, even or perhaps especially since I haven't read it...
One reaction/thought embodied in a pompous title I just drafted for this post and then scratched: A Dream of a Better Future for a Distressed Working Class: Politics as the New Opium of the People and Why That's a Good Thing.
The thought: Instead of banging on about decline and decay, we need to think about what can give a renewed purpose to the lives of people in the American working class.
I completely respect the claim--I take it this is M's own normative position--that if the American elite starts affirming the socially conservative values by which it lives that that affirmation might help the working class. The elite believes, and the people follow.
Fair enough--but I just don't think that claim corresponds to a big part of social reality in which non-elites need to define themselves against elite ideology rather than simply adopting it.
Thus my line: Just as the recession of certain elites from religious belief centuries ago opened up space for a popular embrace of religion that helped people down the socioeconomic ladder at one stage in history, a recession of certain elites from political belief now could open up space for a working class embrace of politics.
Currently American elites dominate the ranks of true believers of both red and blue stripes. I am highly hopeful that if that became much less true, the prospects for working class people in our country would become much better. If blue faith and red faith became the heartland properties of people in the lower ranks of our society instead of those at the top, the worrisome features of contemporary working class life would have a much better chance of turning around than under our current regime. Or so it seems this morning at Newark airport :)
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