What if the Middle Class is a Mistake?
John Hayward, a.k.a. @Doc_0, writer of thought-provoking Twitter threads, has been on a roll lately with examinations of how Democrats' methods of anarcho-tyranny come down squarely on the middle class. (Quick note, as I use it, this includes the working class.) I could easily post dozens of tweets from the thread, but I think this one really sums his thoughts up:
And as you might have noticed after the Year of the Pandemic, the Left wants Americans to live in fear. They hate red-state middle class communities where everyone feels secure and happy, insulated from the social crises the Left seeks to exploit for power.
— John Hayward (@Doc_0) April 21, 2021
To read just a sampling of Hayward's thoughts on the subject, see here, here, and here.
Hayward writes in an aggressive, fast-paced style that seizes attention and gets his readers nodding along. I enjoy his observations very much and and happy to share them. At the same time, I'm gifted (cursed) with a mental mechanism that finds the counter-argument all the time. Since Hayward hits in multiple places where I agree and disagree (which I assume suits a thinker like Hayward just fine) that mechanism threw up a question:
Is the middle class a mistake?
To be perfectly honest, I'm not entirely sure what this question means. I know that there are those who would answer unhesitatingly, "YES!" But I know their reasons and I reject them. In any case, they say to never ask a question you don't want answered, so that's not the right question.
What good is the middle class?
This feels a bit more useful, if only because the kneejerk rejoinder, "It isn't!" is so flatly juvenile it discredits itself. Some scholarly examinations conclude that a thriving and vibrant middle class is the key to economic growth and prosperity. Also that the middle class preserves and stabilizes the social order. While this rings true, it's also, like, totally square, man.
Let's bring back in Hayward. He observes that Democrats hate and want to destroy middle class comfort. I take no issue with that observation. I certainly see no good reason to want to destroy the middle class, so I share his ire against those who do. What I'm not so sure about is whether I'm keen on the middle class being insulated.
Should the middle class be comfortable?
Don't get me wrong. I love my comfortable middle-class lifestyle. But without going full or even partially Marxist, I am aware of the ways in which that comfort holds me back. Why risk it, y'know?
Not that the middle class ought to be a crucible. I often mock the line from the unofficial theme song of New York City, "If I can make it there / I'll make it anywhere." You've got to be a real galaxy-brain to think that your town being a meatgrinder is something to brag about.
I suppose what I'm thinking of is vibrancy. There's a line about welfare being a safety net and not a hammock, and I guess I feel the same way about the middle class. And from my vantage, if there is one thing the Democrats hate just as much as middle-class security, it's middle-class vibrancy. Hell, they might even hate it more.
Lemme peel middle-class insulation away from middle-class security, because I think that's what my mental mechanism caught on. See, I don't really think Democrats hate the insulation part. In fact, I think it works to their political advantage. I could be wrong. If BLM had marched down my suburban block, I don't know how many of my neighbors would subsequently vote for law and order versus how many would vote to simply pay the ransom. But being insulated as my neighbors and I are means none of us has to even think about it that way. Because of that, I think it's much easier for middle class people to remain low-information voters and get sucked in by Democrats as low-information voters tend to.
Vibrancy, by contrast, works in the other direction. Vibrancy promotes civic engagement which increases voter information. That's not good for Democrats. Vibrancy also promotes mobility, both economic and literal. If all else fails, mobility offers the chance to escape blue hell-holes for greener, er, redder pastures. Also not good for Democrats.
Now, security can be either vibrant or stagnant. Democrats hated corporations until they got into their boardrooms. Now they love 'em and want to put everyone in a corporate job. This dovetails nicely with their ongoing efforts to put Mom and Pop out of business. (Hello, $15/hr minimum wage! Hello to you, COVID!) It's really not shocking to suppose that a government run de facto by Democrat bureaucrats would want to mold the nation in its image.
If anything, the tyranny Democrats propose is a tyranny not of affliction but of comfort. Not of Big Brother but of Soma. (Tho' Big Brother will be there to make sure you take your Soma.) Democrats aren't planning to smother the middle-class with a pillow. They intend to fluff that pillow and never let it out of bed again.
Glad you found him and other good ones on Twitter, his threads were interesting reads and I can't find much to disagree with either. The middle class is always the one that Marx-based ideologies always end up attacking and looting despite their claims of helping the poor against the rich. Funny how so many things marketed that way, like that minimum wage increase, end up keeping the same people on top while cutting off middle class people aspiring to the upper classes off at the knees while doing nothing at best (or more frequently riling up) the poor they say they want to help, huh?
ReplyDeleteAll that said, your contrast of vibrancy and security is a good one and I agree vibrancy is better. On the moving from blue hell to redder pastures, though, I only approve as long as they don't vote for the same crap they moved away from... *Gives my best glare to the New Yorkers and Californians who brought their politics with them to Atlanta* Damn, I need to find some redder pastures myself. Any thoughts on how to encourage more vibrancy? Also, looking forward to more of your thoughts on the corporate situation.
I'll have to do some thinking on ways to generate more middle-class vibrancy. I'm going to make myself come up with three ideas right now and maybe an article will appear later:
ReplyDelete1. Form new civic orgs (or whatever you call FOE, Kiwanis, KofC, etc). The old ones are, well, old and have either shifted focus away from their origins or lost focus altogether. Now more than ever, people need networking opportunities. A 21st century take on the model of over a century ago might take root.
2. For conservatives: consider teaching as a second career or a retirement gig. The idea that conservatives should pull their kids out of public schools only further cedes ground that conservatives have already ceded. The cure is not less involvement, but more. The PTA doesn't cut it and, in some areas, is little more than kabuki theater. The reason I say second career is because the critical race propaganda is so deeply entwined in the curriculum (I know someone working on a teaching degree and I get to peek at the texts) that most any 18 year old will get sucked in. Someone with life experience will fare better. I know teaching isn't for everyone, but at a minimum, change the conversation. Discuss teaching later in life as an aspiration.
3. My third idea is more of an observation: Repairmen always have work. If you're trying to figure out where to direct young people who are not cut for college, you can't go wrong with anything that fits the broad heading of "repair work." As automation gobbles up more middle-class work, the need for people to fix things increases. And it's not all robots and learn-to-code. Pipes still need plumbers, wires need electricians, HVACs still need...whatever you call the HVAC repair guys. And, FWIW, most IT work doesn't require any programming language knowledge, just the boldness to get into those files that Microsoft tells most people not to touch.
Good plan and looking forward to a potential article. On those...
ReplyDelete1. That I think people can get on board with, though I'm not sure how and as a very much introverted Odd I'm not remotely qualified to start one. I'll float the idea to a few people interested in these things, though.
2. That's definitely going to be a hard sell, both in terms of antipathy towards public school and the selection of teacher jobs themselves between unions and qualifications, especially in light of the beer virus brain diarrhea giving more people a taste of home school. CRT definitely needs some a solid counter to it, though. The state of education is just depressing, period.
3. That's an idea I've been playing with myself on and off if I didn't have enough money for either a move or training but not both. Plus there's the fact that I'm clumsy enough to wrench a limb off even in the best of circumstances. Still, it's an idea worth getting out there, and while he's more about the trades in general Mike Rowe and his Works foundation definitely makes a good starting point for this.