This is an excellent article, and we can learn much from it. What will continue to confound us is that some "cultural" values are in irreconcilable conflict with economic ones. I grew up in West Virginia. I lived in a small city and my dad had a white-collar job, but I went to a summer camp where 98% of my fellow campers were coal miners' kids. [It was a "company camp". Yep, paternalism. My dad was personnel director for the stores division. Yep, "company stores."] Truman was president, labor legend John L. Lewis headed up the UMW. What no one knew then was that continuing to burn coal would imperil the planet. Now we know. Nothing short of shutting down the EPA could have made the WV miners become Democrats again. And let's be honest, even if the miners had "collective ownership of the means of production," they would have voted exactly as they did. In the long term, the solution for West Virginia is, I guess, some transformative reshaping of their economy. But in the time it will take to do that, they and their children will have died. Perhaps West Virginia is an extreme example, dependent as it is on a natural resource. But factory jobs in the rust belt aren't coming back. Even if we undo all the trade deals, those jobs are being rapidly eliminated by robots. These are baffling times, and although we all need to understand better the despair of the white, working class, the answers to it are not going to be clear for a long time.
This is an excellent article, and we can learn much from it. What will continue to confound us is that some "cultural" values are in irreconcilable conflict with economic ones. I grew up in West Virginia. I lived in a small city and my dad had a white-collar job, but I went to a summer camp where 98% of my fellow campers were coal miners' kids. [It was a "company camp". Yep, paternalism. My dad was personnel director for the stores division. Yep, "company stores."] Truman was president, labor legend John L. Lewis headed up the UMW. What no one knew then was that continuing to burn coal would imperil the planet. Now we know. Nothing short of shutting down the EPA could have made the WV miners become Democrats again. And let's be honest, even if the miners had "collective ownership of the means of production," they would have voted exactly as they did. In the long term, the solution for West Virginia is, I guess, some transformative reshaping of their economy. But in the time it will take to do that, they and their children will have died. Perhaps West Virginia is an extreme example, dependent as it is on a natural resource. But factory jobs in the rust belt aren't coming back. Even if we undo all the trade deals, those jobs are being rapidly eliminated by robots. These are baffling times, and although we all need to understand better the despair of the white, working class, the answers to it are not going to be clear for a long time.
ReplyDeleteHere's another interesting link: Yanis Varoufakis's take on Trump's victory.
ReplyDeleteGreat article. Thanks. And thanks, TheDudeDiogenes, on the Varoufakis piece too.
ReplyDelete