The worst aspect of conservatives’ gripes about classism are the solutions they propose. Never do they suggest that we actually do something to mitigate the extreme imbalance of power between the social orders, because that would change them from compassionate conservatives into dirty commies. The farthest they usually go in this regard is to recommend that we vote for a candidate who shares our values, a guy with whom we can imagine chugging a can of beer while we’re both cleaning our rifles or talking about soybean yield or getting our hair cut in some really authentic small-town barbershop from back before the big-box stores killed small towns.
David Brooks is a daring writer, however, and he pushes it to the limit: We need a “common project,” he declares, in which Americans from different classes can come together to do something jointly and thus learn to understand one another. Such an undertaking, which sounds a lot like one of those team-building exercises that are always suggested by management consultants, would “improve social mobility” so that “social distance will decline.”
Yea, verily: When the venture capitalist shall dwell with the checkout clerk, and the payday lender will lie down with the coal miner, then brotherly concord will prevail at last.
The truth is, though, we already have a common project between the classes — it’s the economy. Technically speaking, the highly educated professional class does know how the other half lives, because they tell the other half how to live. They set their wages and hours. They make suggestions of what to eat and drive and squeeze onto their toothbrushes. They instruct them how to do their jobs — and they even offer friendly advice for how to rationalize it when those jobs get shipped to Mexico or China.
Now, there is something that would change this ugly class situation, and it’s not a society-wide project in which bosses and bossed come together for a series of exciting trust falls. It’s the opposite: An organization of workers that allows them to confront members of the other class and negotiate with them over wages, hours and the other things that actually determine the conditions of their lives.
Unfortunately, such organizations strike most conservatives as a perversion of the natural order. Try to set one up where you work and within minutes David Brooks’s tasteful fans in the C-suite would be on the phone to the Ferguson PD imploring them to show up in full combat mode and make you stop. But let workers form unions and it would actually do something huge and immediate to close the crevasse of inequality, increase mobility, and maybe put a big dent in racism and police brutality along the way.
No empathy from on high required. Do something about class itself, and the rich can keep their “classism.” Snobbery without power behind it is not deadly but merely amusing, a joke from a Monty Python skit long ago.
—Thomas Frank
Ann Coulter and David Brooks Play a Sneaky, Unserious Class Card
I think all players should be judged within the context of the era in which they played, and during McGwire’s career, the sport was saturated with performance-enhancing drugs, largely because over the period of about 15 years, no one within the institution of baseball — not the union leaders, not MLB owners, not the commissioner, not the clean players, nor the media that covered the sport — aggressively addressed the growing problem. Through that inaction, what evolved was a chemical Frankenstein of a game. Like it or not, that’s what the sport was in that time: no drug testing, lots of drug use, lots of drug users, lots of money being made by everybody. (And by the way, no team, baseball executive or player has offered to give back the money made in that time.)
And now we have the latest iteration of this very old phenomenon: whites who believe that it’s a racist act to point out their racism. The accusation itself is the racist act and in their minds much worse than whatever it was they were accused of saying. Nothing is more racist than calling someone a racist.
I feel the same way about a nine-inch penis that I do an armored tank: They’re nice to look at, but if a guy thinks he’s parking it in my garage, he’s utterly insane. Just because you have the equipment doesn’t mean you necessarily know to operate the machinery, and there’s simply no correlation between a guy’s dick size and performance in bed. A guy with a big penis may be more confident in his sexuality, after a lifetime of having his body affirmed by sexual partners, but that can go one of two ways. Confidence can lead to incredibly sexy sex, but it also could mean that he’s the type of guy who is so “sure what he’s doing” that he ignores communication and physical cues. Guys who haven’t been gifted with a battering ram tend to be more willing to listen and to give—and everyone loves a giver.
Since 2008, it has become a biennial ritual in the political press. In the aftermath of every election — no matter the outcome — the media establishment carefully explains that the Republican Party will now have to move to the center, accept compromise and govern more responsibly. And each and every time — no matter the circumstances — the Republican Party ignores this counsel and instead becomes more extreme, more intransigent and more antagonistic toward governance.
Black people know what cannot be said. What clearly cannot be said is that the events of Ferguson do not begin with Michael Brown lying dead in the street, but with policies set forth by government at every level. What clearly cannot be said is that the people of Ferguson are regularly plundered, as their grandparents were plundered, and generally regarded as a slush-fund for the government that has pledged to protect them. What clearly cannot be said is the idea of superhuman black men who “bulk up” to run through bullets is not an invention of Darren Wilson, but a staple of American racism.
Based on what I knew about Germany and its national pathology and its failure to really take the right lessons from its own history, I was hardly surprised by the reaction that I received for attempting to describe the situation in Israel-Palestine. For instance, I wasn’t surprised that there were attempts to shut my talks with David Sheen down. However, when I was so promiscuously described as an anti-Semite, including by gentile politicians like Volker Beck, and that this behavior was considered perfectly normal in German society, I have to admit to some level of shock…
There is something gone badly wrong in the way police are taught to look at civilians these days. This is the logic of an occupying power being employed on American citizens. Ever since 9/11, when we all began to be told that we were going to have to bend a little bit, and then a little bit more, to authority or else we’d all die, the police in this country have been militarized in their tactics and in their equipment, which is bad enough, but in their attitudes and their mentality, which is far, far worse. Suspicion has bled into weaponized paranoia, especially in the case of black and brown people, especially in the case of young men who are black or brown, but this is not About Race because nothing ever is About Race. Even the potential of a threat requires a deadly response, Dick Cheney’s one-percent idea brought to American cities and towns until Salt Lake City, of all places, winds up with cops who are deadlier on the streets than drug dealers. This is how you wind up with Darren Wilson. This is how you wind up with Michael Brown, dead in the middle of the road. This is how Darren Wilson walks, tonight, for the killing of Michael Brown. This is how you end up with an American horror story.