So, I'm just gonna vent - yet again - because I just read my umpteenth article about how the Great US/European Populist Earthquake is because rich snooty guys in suits worshiped the market instead of taking care of down-home human values like families and tradition and stuff. /1
And I'm not going to name the article, because it wasn't that good. But it's a common refrain: the elites benefited from globalization while not caring about what it did to the Salt of the Earth, who just wanted to have families without being invaded by Somalis or something. /2
Let me stipulate up front: conservatives thought more wealth would just magically solve everything, and liberals assumed more revenue meant the state could keep expanding to buy off voters. Both were wrong. Both could have done more to blunt the pain of globalization. /3
But, man, I am *tired* of the Teeming Masses being let off the hook for family disintegration, the collapse of marriage, the abandonment of religion (stow it, liberals, I'm a religious man), and a lot of other social maladies well in evidence before the Great Recession. /4
Worse yet, all the finger-pointing at "markets" and "globalization" completely avoids a mainspring of the current situation: the unquenchable thirst of those same masses for cheap imported junk and a standard of living based more on flat-screen TVs than health care. /5
I spent years arguing with friends from my working class town about why every cheap import they bought put one of us out of work somewhere else. Their answer? "Make it here and tell the company to take less profit." Something not *one* of them would do in their own lives. /6
In the ensuing years, I've watched them stuff their homes with cheap electronics, a zillion TV channels, cars of ever-increasing quality, while bitching about how nothing is made in America, and pining for factory jobs they'd never wish on the children of their worst enemy. /7
Meanwhile, their kids engage in the classic behaviors of reverse mobility: putzing around in college and not finishing, getting knocked up and not married, valuing leisure time (and dress and deportment) over working steadily. Refusing to grow up, in other words. /8
All because "it's a tough economy," a phrase deployed no matter what the state of the economy. Meanwhile, we keep acting as though globalization was a choice, rather than an inevitability due to the nature of info and manufacturing tech - and our own wants. /9
But above all I'm fed up with the new conservative "Noble Savage" myth. (Liberal version: "The poorest are the purest.") The idea that absent globalization, and immigration, and cheap labor, Western workers would have kept their families together and behaved virtuously. Sure. /10
Maybe it's the other way around: globalization enabled bad trends already in motion. Yes, many towns were killed by it - and cities, supposedly dead in the 1970s, came back because of it. But in the end, we weren't socially stable enough to cope with peace and prosperity. /11
Conservatives who pump this working-class apologia never seem willing to consider what they're really saying: that paternalistic elites should have saved the working class from getting what it wanted. Okay with me, but that's not the populist crap they're spewing now. /12
I expect liberals to carp about markets and how people can't help themselves when tempted by shiny things and advertising and the usual "no one's fault" stuff. But conservatives blaming the "elites" for not being more elite and saving people from bad choices? Wow. /13
The short term answer to this crisis, from the left, seems to be: MOAR SOCIALISM, which is nuts. The Trumpist and European right's answer is: FOREIGNERS OUT. The answer is never: "You shouldn't have gotten what you wanted, but you did. Let's not do it again." /14
But we will. And when another boneheaded solution produces another round of human misery - because we will demand our representatives do what we want right at that moment, instead of exercising some long-term judgment -- we'll blame everyone but ourselves. Again. /15x
