Obama Plagiarized His "Bitter" Argument!!!!

[alcibiades_mystery]

Well, not really, although it bears a very close resemblance to the argument put forth by Thomas Frank in What's the Matter with Kansas?

Indeed, the question of compensatory surrogates for economic interests has been the core question of leftist thought since the great post-war settlements in the Western nations. Essentially, the story goes like this. The working class was in outright revolt - a state of open class warfare with the capitalist class - since the industrial revolution. This is true, and don't let any rosy-eyed liberal tell you it isn't. Until World War II, class warfare was a fact of life in all industrialized nations: it was open, it was brutal, it was violent, and it was goddamn effective. Then, in the immediate post-war period and into the 1960's, it more or less disappeared. Capital had grown no kinder, and was arguably more vicious than ever. So, why? Why did it disappear? Many answers have been given.

If you say "ideology," then you're a Marxist, and maybe an Althusserian. The premise here is that capitalist State has a number of arms that serve to enforce a ruling set of beliefs. It just got better at conditioning people (there's no man behind the curtain here: the capitalist class is no less conditioned and mystified by ideology than the working class), through the education system, among other things. You might also be a Birmingham School type, which tends to be more properly Gramscian after Stuart Hall's development of articulation theory (eschewing Althusser's scientism, etc.).

If you say that the emergence of mass media became an effective ideological tool, then you're a media studies person, and you investigate how film, radio, television, etc., promote and enforce a set of beliefs in viewers. The classic in the genre is early: Adorno and Horkheimer's "The Culture Industry as Mass Deception." (Adorno, for a German social theorist, knew shitloads about American radio and film, having worked in both the New York radio industry and in Hollywood while in exile)

If you say that the very capacity to argue and engage in class warfare in public has shifted beneath the feet of the working class, then you're likely some type of Habermasian: what constituted a public has evaporated.

If you say that the working class turned its attention to other matters of identity (race, gender, sexuality, religion), and for good reason, then you're likely a cultural theorist. If you think the working class turned its attention to those things and that was bad bad bad, then you're a truly outmoded SDS white boy. Or Joan Scott.

There are tons of explanations, but it is the core question. The only answer that's clearly not right is "Because things got better!" This is dumb liberalism of the worst kind. So is "You shouldn't stereotype!" It's not stereotyping. It's thinking about systemic and ecological effects. And yes, you are a statistic in a demographic, and if I came to your residence I could show you 20 things that you think are uniquely YOU that are in fact fairly predictable population effects (it's the old saw of American individualism: nobody has ever been swayed by advertising, yet it is a multi-billion dollar business and everybody wears the same goddamn sneakers: only a fool would believe in such American mythologies anymore).

If you say that what has shifted is not just the composition of the public sphere, but the economic substructure itself - up to and including a collapse of any real distinction between culture and economy, then you are a post-structuralist, a la a Negri, etc. In this latter version, you don't need to explain why people turn away their economic interests to focus on identity and cultural matters (God, guns, gays): it's all of a piece. That's where I stand. It's also why Frank - and Obama - are wrong. But not as wrong as the asinine Hillarians, who pretend not to even understand the question.

[Swamp Rat]

1. Bitter is better

:D

[hfojvt]

2. aren't you missing some historical events?

1. WWI and the pogrom against progressive leaders
2. WWII and the rise of American prosperity
3. Income tax, FED, new deal programs
4. Stalinism and the seeming invalidation of socialism
5. immigration became a smaller percentage of a larger population base
6. automobile monopoly and increased atomization of society

Also, you wrote about the 'working class' but wasn't the majority of the working population pre-1930 independent farmers? Were they really in revolt? (The populist Baum makes them the Scarecrow, without the brains to see who their allies were.)

[murielm99]

3. WWII and the rise of American prosperity,

but also the rise of labor unions. The working class became the middle class when unions were at their peak.

[hfojvt]

4. to a degree though, also the selling out of labor unions

Instead of trying to change the system like Powderly and the KoL, Gompers and the AFL just wanted a bigger piece of the pie.