I'm always interested to find places where the diverse political opinions of large swaths of the US public overlap. You know: despite what one might hear, chances are no one is excited that BP's oil spill is going to effect wild life, the environment, or people's livelihoods for a long time after any "official" clean-up ends. No one wants our educational system to fail our children. Everyone wants the government to run efficiently, and to reduce wasteful spending. We all want these things, regardless of our political attitudes. We might differ about where to cut, where to spend, how to educate, who should be on the hook for an environmental disaster, but, it is the same sense of injustice that drives us in our thinking.
I'm not writing this to suggest we need some sort of reconciliation , because I don't know that reconciliation is desirable, or even possible. I say that, not to be polemic, or divisive, but just because, on a personal level, that's where I am right now. I don't think that the issues with education stem from the "pro-Islamic" nature of our text books (and I'll say this, outright: when Conservatives talk about liberal "revisionism," what they're talking about is increased inclusivity. When they talk about correcting those "revisions" they are talking about reversing those inclusive trends. Also, we are a secular nation, period. If you believe otherwise, you've been intentionally misled). I don't think we need to figure out how to gut social programs to pay for more protracted, covert, potentially illegal, wars of aggression. Conversations about the "decline" of the American Empire (you'll note that these come from a socialist and conservative source, respectively... note the differences in tone, attitude, and perspective on this "decline"), are happening everywhere, and have been for quite some time.
But we all generally think something has to be done about something. Part of this malaise comes, I believe, from the increasing income gap that exists in the United States. In my neck of the woods, the Mott's Applesauce plant in Williamson, New York, just got away with a contract that is nearly criminal in it's alterations to the relationships between labor and the company. This means that Wayne County, an already struggling area, (median income hovers around $50,000, with nearly 10% living in poverty), has lost one of the last good-paying Union jobs extant there. So as the public discourse begins to focus itself on the potential expiration of the Bush Tax Cuts , against this backdrop of falling incomes and middle class erosion , another one of these points of overlap is coming more sharply into focus: Everyone wants income distribution to be equitable and fair. We disagree about how we want this to happen. But we want it to happen.
My brother is a socially liberal, fiscal conservative. He and I were talking one time, while I shoveled chicken shit from his chicken coop, and he worked on one of his 5 (the number he tells his wife) or so International Tractors he owns.
"The problem," he said, putting it impressively succinctly, "Is money."
I nodded my assent. He continued: "If we could make the world run, somehow, without money, things would be a lot better for everyone. It just corrupts everything."
This made me smile. "You know that that's one of the ideas behind the Communist Manifesto, right? That Karl Marx suggested the system that would replace capitalism would be one in which money wasn't a means of separating individuals or classes?"
This gave him pause. He is not a Socialist. He is not a Communist. Not in any overt way, anyway. But everyone shares this idea. It is in the background of what the literary critic Fredric Jameson refers to as our "political unconscious."(Essentially, our literature is an expression of our sense of the fissures and ideological limits of Capitalism, and an attempt to imagine the utopia that might exist after this system breaks down.) This, I think, was a little much for my brother to take; he lives, as much as he can, in the image of our grandfather on our mother's side: a staunch, conservative, truck-driving, gun-toting pro-American individualist. My brother is ex-military. An ex-owner/operator (I'm talking big-rigs: 18 wheels, and many thousands of pounds of freight). He is not, again, a Socialist.
So, I'll give him a little time to let this sink in. But it does say something, doesn't it, of the intellectual overlap that does happen among the large swath of us that can be considered middle class? We all recognize the issues. We've all analyzed the issues, and come to some of the same conclusions, though we call them different things. We all know this: there is something inherently problematic about the objectifying nature of money. It creates unequal relationships between people, and, as belief in the equality of people is part of our cultural history, we find this hard to take.
A few weeks after the conversation with my brother, I was riding in a car with my absolutely wonderful Mom. I asked her to tell me some things about Grandpa (I never knew him well). Thinking of the protest at the Mott's plant, she began talking about his attitude towards labor and economics.
"One thing about him," she said, "He had ideas about what was happening in the world. He said it years ago: there are only going to be two classes - the rich, and the poor."
I'll have to tell my brother.
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