They're Not Wrong to Be Looking for Something

Richard Florida, best known for his book on the creative class, had a thread on Twitter yesterday that began to get at a point I've heard several other people make about the larger problem underlying our country's upwelling of populism/fascism, increasingly on display in the Trump years.

Here's what Florida had to say:

There is a "1%" (actually less) of enormously wealthy oligarchs who essentially own and control the means of production and are the robber-barons of our own gilded age.

Then there is a 20-33% of highly educated (dare I say creative class) knowledge workers and professionals who are doing just fine....

Then there are the rest, two-thirds or more of working people, blue collar workers, routine service workers and the truly disadvantaged who are sinking further and further behind.

What REALLY worries me is not the classification scheme. But what I keep thinking about is how this will affect my two girls ages 3 and 5 ...

I come from a working class family. My grandparents migrated here from Southern Italy, and my father had a 7th grade education ... I got a scholarship to Rutgers and was off the proverbial races ...

What terrifies me is that I don't believe my kids have virtually any shot of doing what I did, of finding a career so to speak and making it on their own, even with the advantages we can give them. So much more than my parents could give me.

What terrifies me is that I don't even think giving them access to the best education — schools and universities — in the world will help all that much in the class structure of today's late capitalism.

I find myself saying to [my wife], it doesn't matter where we send them to school or how well they do, we have to save and save and save and essentially have enough money to set them up in some kind of vocation they want to to.

Every time I say it or think it, shivers run down my spine. How did we as a nation and a society get to this point ?... To me this seems like the defining issue of our time. How do we enable individuals to find rewarding, meaningful and purposeful work?

As a society, we certainly have the means to do it. The question is: Do we have the will?

As Florida said, the classifications' names (and the percent of people in those top-two tiers) are less important than the general idea of wealth-hoarding and what we're going to do about it. His thoughts are worth noting in three ways: for pointing out the problem, that he doesn't identify the cause, and that he admits to thinking of his personal need to hoard opportunities for his own children... like lots of other well-off white parents.

He doesn't offer a systemic solution here, but I know he has written such thoughts in other places, particularly paying much more for service work. He has said frequently that there is no intrinsic reason that manufacturing work has a higher use value than service work, for instance.

Jason Szegedi, head planner for Akron, Ohio, has also written a lot about the need to restore the hollowed-out working and middle class that he sees all around him in his state and city, and connected it with the blue-to-red political shift in that state. Here's one example from his blog. (He also writes similar things on Twitter but recently deleted all his tweets.)

Both Florida's and Szegedi's solutions are premised on the idea that the 30-year, post-WWII prosperity bubble the U.S. experienced — which made it possible for white men with only a high school education to support a family on one income — is something that can be recreated. And, if they bother to think of it, that the prosperity can be extended to everyone who was excluded from it the first time around. I doubt that's true, given the climate crisis and the fact that the prosperity was premised on colonialist wealth extraction and the specifics of the post-war period.

This, from a fiction writer named Sarah Schulman, posted to Facebook, is more in keeping with my thinking:

You could arrest all 74 million Trump supporters, close and open a hundred apps and fire every person in government and it wouldn't solve the problem.  

A better strategy would be for the new regime to do things that actually help people like: excellent national healthcare with top-notch drug rehab, a huge infrastructure re-build creating widespread high-skill job training that provides interesting well-paid jobs, equal educational opportunities, and child care, and make decisions humanely and fairly, and I think things would get better around here.

Schulman's answer is also closer to the idea of the Green New Deal, which is to transform shared prosperity on some level by — yes — taking from the 1% and some of the 20% while changing a lot of other things about our energy use so we can live on this planet together.

The people I've watched rampaging through the U.S. Capitol (and I've watched rather a lot of raw video showing just that) are looking for something and it's not going to be found by blaming, excluding, and killing immigrants or Black folks. 

Someone benefits from their rage, though. Let's blame the correct instigators and reconfigure things in a way that works for the vast majority of us as well as the places we live.