Lucid Interval
Read, if you can, Lillian B. Rubin's Why Don't They Listen to Us? Speaking to the Working Class in "Dissent" magazine.
Yeah, I know, a lot of it is fuzzy rage against some sort of invisible neo-con Christian bogeyman, whose "conservative money" poured into "think tanks that support a group of right-wing writers whose job was to stir popular anger and fear into a stew that would boil over and scorch what they called the "liberal elite," and the music goes round and round and the result was Ann Coulter.
Well, what did you expect from someone whose tagline says she's "with the Institute for the Study of Social Change, University of California, Berkeley."
But read it, I say, because once it lays out (and repeats, and re-repeats) her contempt for everyone to the right of her, it's actually a decent critique of how the left has failed to connect with what used to be its voting base in the working class, by failing to really take those voters seriously.
Sure, people on the right have been saying this, but here you can read it from one with a tenured seat in the ivory tower. The good part starts about a third of the way down the page.
Rubin is angry as hell at "us" (neocons, whatever we are), and she doesn't want to talk to us, but at least she's interested in America. And she's got a lot of the same ideas we do.
Yeah, I know, a lot of it is fuzzy rage against some sort of invisible neo-con Christian bogeyman, whose "conservative money" poured into "think tanks that support a group of right-wing writers whose job was to stir popular anger and fear into a stew that would boil over and scorch what they called the "liberal elite," and the music goes round and round and the result was Ann Coulter.
Well, what did you expect from someone whose tagline says she's "with the Institute for the Study of Social Change, University of California, Berkeley."
But read it, I say, because once it lays out (and repeats, and re-repeats) her contempt for everyone to the right of her, it's actually a decent critique of how the left has failed to connect with what used to be its voting base in the working class, by failing to really take those voters seriously.
Sure, people on the right have been saying this, but here you can read it from one with a tenured seat in the ivory tower. The good part starts about a third of the way down the page.
Move up a couple of decades to the 1980s when "crime in the streets" was the biggest issue in American politics. While the right argued for more police, for tougher sentences, for trying juveniles as adults, we insisted that racism and overheated media coverage were at the core of the furor, that the perception of crime didn't match the reality, and with as much fanfare as we could muster, presented statistics to prove the point. It struck me even then that we were mistaken to try to reorder perceptions with facts, partly because we failed to take account of the psychological reality that experience overwhelms statistics no matter how compelling the numbers may be, but also because the perception of crime wasn't totally illusory.
Not that there wasn't truth in our side of the argument; it just wasn't the whole truth. I believe unequivocally that racist assumptions are built into the American psyche but, in this case, they were fueled by the fact that a disproportionate number of street crimes were committed by young African Americans. The media were often irresponsible and always sensationalist in reporting crime, but they didn't make it up. Crime was on the rise; the streets in urban communities had become more dangerous; and, while most people were never themselves mugged, it was enough to know someone who had been-whether a personal acquaintance or a victim encountered on the eleven o'clock news-to create the kind of fear that was so prominent during those years.
Back then there was a saying that "A conservative is a liberal who got mugged on his way to the subway." When I first heard it, I was outraged by those flip words; now it seems to me that they weren't entirely wrong. So today I wonder if a conservative isn't a working-class guy who heard the "liberal elite" (as the right has effectively labeled us) tell him he had nothing to fear when experience told him otherwise-not just on crime but on a whole slew of issues that have turned the country into a cultural and political battlefield.
Rubin is angry as hell at "us" (neocons, whatever we are), and she doesn't want to talk to us, but at least she's interested in America. And she's got a lot of the same ideas we do.
