Re: Campaign 2016 -- Don't Let the Perfect Become the Enemy of the Good
Kep I feel you're dealing with a generational issue more than the end of the Republic. Coming from a white working class family myself and having my earliest memories of the late 70's, these people simply put blamed Carter and Dems for every bad thing happening to them even if those things had their roots in events that took place long before. They bought into the promise of Reagan and the defense spending and deficit fueled economy thereafter, and have never wavered from that. It could be a baby boomer thing, but that whole martyr complex (I'm the only one working, I'm the only one paying taxes, I'm the only one who has morals, etc) syndrome has been capitalized on beautifully by the GOP. Only problem is these people are dwindling as the overall share of the voting public
No. I hear it from their kids, too. I think you ignore that narrative at your peril, because it
really speaks to middle income people. Ironically, the recession, which should have taught the exact opposite lesson, only reinforced it, because they knew so many people who were out of work and thus, in their blinders, "parasitic." Of course, the moment they lose their own job the scales fall from their eyes, but by then it's too late.
But the Boomers, Xs, and Millenials are essentially the same old Model T that's always been. The superficiality of change comes from the ground conditions when they grow up: so we have seen first racists, then sexists, and now homophobes slide down the razor blade into the tub of death based strictly on the bigotries that were hip when they were young. But it's not as if any given person in any generational cohort was any more enlightened than their parents. They just breathed different poisons as children.
If anything I think young people have been exposed to a colder, more atomized and less socially cohesive environment growing up, as the great tearing of social fabric that capitalism imposes just gets worse and worse with each decade. With that loss of cohesion comes a loss in the willingness to fight for communal values that transcend individual self-interest. In that regard, the Reaganites did win a permanent victory: they destroyed the community, left the broken pieces as prey to the commercial monsters who have swooped in since, and ironically then blamed the anomie that followed on the liberals who had tried to stop them. I do not see any way to ever repair that. Peoples do not become
more communal unless they face an existential crisis, and we are insulated from anything approaching the level of self-reflection required by our technological and entertainment pacifiers.
