Now, what can be done about all of that, I wonder? It does not appear possible to reverse globalization. Can America, ever again, have what Thomas Jefferson envisioned, a working/middle class of persons who have some economic independence by virtue of owning the productive property they work?
That matters. My mother’s father was a sharecropper who eventually saved enough to buy his own land. The family was always poor – but even throughout the Great Depression they always ate well, because they could grow their own food. I think some part of a nation’s resilience is based on having a non-trivial number of people who can get by no matter what happens.
See Distributism, formulated by lefty Catholics in the late 19th/early 20th to provide an alternative to both socialism and capitalism.
But, the industrial side of it is necessarily based on small-scale craft-and-cottage industries; I’ve never seen any explanation of how any large-scale industrial enterprise – and in many industries an enterprise must be large-scale to be at all efficient – could be organized along Distributist lines.
I’m one-third of the way through Kimmell’s book now. Really fascinating. Kimmel’s thesis is that AWM have bad reasons to be angry (a sense of “aggrieved entitlement”) and good reasons to be angry (economic marginalization/dispossession), but in either case their anger is misdirected – they are “sending their mail to the wrong address”; whoever or whatever is to blame for their troubles, it is not minorities or immigrants or feminists or biggummint.
Some people live to work, work to live
Any little tremble and the earth might give
Ya can’t hide it in a Volvo or a London Fog
Can’t hide it in a mansion with an imported dog No matter how we plan and rehearse, we’re at pink slip’s mercy in a paper universe
And we’re afraid that we’re just a bum
Someday when all our stuff is gone and we’re left without a dime
Time ain’t money when all ya got is time
And we can see us standin on the corner with our nine-day beards and our bright red eyes
Goin, hey hey hey hey hey hey hey
Hey hey hey hey, come on and listen to my story man hey, hey hey hey hey, ah hey
I think there’s a lot of romantic nostalgia in the viewpoints described. A putatively independent farm family typically takes out a crop loan every spring and prays that the sun and the rain will cooperate enough to let them pay the loan back in the fall. And even straight-up subsistence farming is no guarantee against starvation; as a fictional example, think of the farm family in The Good Earth that had to migrate to the city to survive a famine.
Western industry has displaced traditional crafts and family farms by providing better opportunities. Western society used to be 99% farmers, but our ancestors all fled the farm as soon as a chance do something else presented itself; not because they had to, but because anything at all, even the drudgery of a factory, was better than farm life.
Remember, too, that that’s what “globalization” really is: the former farm workers in poor nations doing exactly the same thing that earlier generations of Western peasants did, leaving the farm and taking jobs in industry in pursuit of a better and less burdensome life.
Minorities or feminists are not to blame for the decline in family-owned and small-scale businesses, and no one blames them. As “biggummint”, I don’t know what that is. But big government certainly is.
Since Obama took office, the federal government has gone on the attack against organic farmers, truckers, airline pilots, bakeries, and meat producers, just to name a few. The government spent hundreds of billions of dollars propping up big banks but not small banks, with the unsurprising result that the big banks have gotten bigger while many small banks have disappeared. The government has required that almost all Americans fork over a large chunk of their income to the health insurance industry. They’ve driven up the cost of gasoline by continuing to expand the ethanol requirement. And of course these things are not unique to the current administration; big government has always been the enemy of small business.
If we want to help small farms and other businesses survive and prosper, here’s what we should do. (1) Cut regulations, which prevent them from doing business. (2) Cut taxes, which make them less financially viable. (3) Cut mandates, which make them less financially viable. (4) Cut government handouts to major corporations, which will make it easier for small businesses to compete with them.
I don’t know why you’d find that fascinating. You’ve talked about it for years. It’s been a standard hang wringing issue on the left for like 30 years. But here’s the thing: white working class men aren’t secret progressives. “But they should be!” Yeah, what’s the matter with Kansas, bro?
Who are these people really? They are the people who were too dense, too rigid too untalented to change with the times. Few people in the area my dad grew up in stayed on the farm, they mostly did other things, most of them went on to lead much more comfortable and prosperous lives and became professionals. All the farms are gone for the most part. The people who did not leave the farm and go on to do other things were generally the least capable. I will not say this is 100% true, bad luck and circumstances can bring anyone down no matter how capable, but if you are going to look at this group as a whole they are not best and brightest but the worst and dimmest. This is why they will not align themselves with other groups in the same circumstances, they are in a different boat. They have not been discriminated against the same way minorities have - and in fact probably many minorities would wonder why they are not more successful. This is something rarely talked about, but it has been my experience that minorities see non-minorities who are not prosperous differently, the thought is that there is something wrong with them if they are not more successful.
So, in short, the forces keeping this group of “angry white men” from being more prosperous lawyers doctors engineers etc. are to a much greater degree internal rather than the forces keeping the population of minorities from having those opportunities. I think distributism would not solve the problem really, you would just be giving stuff to people who would screw it up and blame other people.
They are pretty spread out all ready; all the professions listed in the OP are service professions with abundant private practices, or situations where the professionals involved often have an ownership stake in the firm. Production has changed, we produce services now instead of sweating in a field all day raising soyer. It’s a welcome change for most.
This just in! Small town hicks upset that their obsolete businesses no longer economically viable! Blame Negros, Jews and Chinamen!
I did some quick research. There are actually a lot of small businesses out there.
Some interesting facts:
There are 28 million small businesses in the U.S
70% of small businesses are owned and operated by a single person
Small businesses employ 57% of the country’s private workforce
77 million people that make up the US small business workforce
60 to 80% of all new jobs come from small businesses
So there are obviously a lot of opportunities for Americans to be financially independent. However, Distributism is largely nonsense. It is not economically viable to have a significant fraction of the US population running self-contained farms.
Boat shoes and seersucker jackets? What is it casual Friday? In Savannah? In 1920?
The author, Michael Kimmel, is a gender studies professor who has never worked a day in his adult life off campus. His entire career has been in the field of “men’s studies,” essentially writing one book after another about how he sees men and masculinity; his continued employment and such fame as he possesses is predicated on the assumption that men are facing some barrier to their masculinity, so he HAS to come up with threats to masculinity or there’s no reason for him to be paid money.
He’s writing sociology mumbo jumbo to entertain other sociologists, and I doubt he would really know anything about modern industry and business.
His whole article and the OP strike me as “ways for me to show contempt working-class whites in such a way that I feel good about myself and morally superior and get to pretend I’m progressive.”
Sort of in the vein of PeopleofWallmart.com where you can laugh at poor people and feel like you’re striking a blow for the progressive cause.
Of course it is. It doesn’t prove him wrong, but a total lack of experience in industry and commerce absolutely does raise reasonable skepticism about one’s ability to comment on that field. It is a perfectly legitimate point.
Kimmel is perfectly qualified to diagnose emotional reactions he observes among American AWM as being symptoms of (among several other things) their sense of economic dispossession; and one need be only a journalist (which Kimmel also functions as, in this book), not an academic, to see that that dispossession is a real thing even if their sense of “entitlement” to possession is false.
However, Kimmel does not pretend to be an economist and does not presume to offer any policy solutions to the dispossession-problem. Discussion of such is what this thread is for. And, of course, there might be none; not every problem has a solution.
Lets suppose everyone gets their 40 acres and a mule, or whatever. You think the people who get Alaska are going to be happy that they didn’t get the Napa Valley?