On class

Yesterday evening I saw on Facebook that a Black guy from CHHS had died. I don't remember him well, I think he was class of '86. This followed upon hearing -- around the middle of the week -- how a woman I knew from an Al Anon group had died. She was a rarety in Al Anon (though not in AA), a working-class, country, no bullshit person. She may have had a college degree but if so, I'd bet it wasn't a fancy one. In the last year she had lost a couple of people close to her, a son and a brother, if memory serves correctly, and she had a daughter who was herself flirting with death via substances more or less constantly.

All the conversation in the United States and around the world has been about race since the murder of George Floyd, and it is unquestionably an important and necessary conversation. #MeToo and decades of structural sexism has made us focus on sexism, with some progress on some fronts.

But it has become very difficult to talk about class, even as social mobility in the United States in particular has diminished. Much of it comes back to LBJ's old truism "If you can convince the lowest white man he’s better than the best colored man, he won’t notice you’re picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he’ll empty his pockets for you." This is the preferred politics of division practiced by Trump et al.

The problem in American politics is that if you start talking about class too openly and frequently, you will be branded a Marxist. Plus everybody likes to insist we don't have rigid classes, and most people will say they are middle class, because nobody wants to admit to others that they're not.

Biden and the Democrats may or may not need to figure this out to win in November. I don't think it's strictly a problem of rhetoric we need to solve. We need to fix it in our minds.