culture
politics
Where As a Nation Do We Go from Here?
Writer, Photographer
University of Texas at Austin
0
0
Genesis
Response
Penultimate
Finale
February 3rd, 2021
Chris:
According to an old Soviet joke, a pessimist thinks that the situation cannot get any worse—and an optimist thinks that it can. In my view the crisis of American class relations is as bad as you say it is, and worse may be yet to come.
In Britain, France, Japan and many other democracies, your future is often determined at the age of 18 or 19, depending on whether you are accepted or rejected by a few prestigious universities, or maybe even earlier, when tests determine which students are shunted into the professional or the vocational track. The lucky few who squeeze through the educational bottleneck—Oxford and Cambridge in the UK, the grandes ecoles in France—end up with all the well-paid and prestigious positions in politics, the civil service, business, media and literature, often by their thirties or forties.
Until recently, there were many avenues to elite professional success in American life which did not require a diploma from the Ivy League or a highly selective state university. But the nationalization of the U.S. elite has raised the value of a credential from a few top schools, while devaluing diplomas from many regional universities and liberal arts colleges.
Meanwhile, the near-extinction of private sector unions in the US has rendered the well-paid working class job a fossil relic. The one remaining unionized occupation with relatively high salaries and good benefits that provides upward mobility for workers with high school educations—the police force—is now under attack in the wake of the Black Lives Matter movement by many progressives who suggest that only college graduates should be allowed to become police officers. The unspoken premise is that high school graduates are inherently more racist and brutal than college graduates.
Following November’s election, the Brookings Institution claimed that “Biden’s winning base in 509 counties encompasses fully 71% of America’s economic activity, while Trump’s losing base of 2,547 counties represents just 29 % of the economy.” By the logic of the Brookings study, if a financier in New York City makes a million times as much from stock market manipulations as a blue collar worker who maintains wireless towers that are essential to the national and global economy in South Dakota, this means that New York City is vastly more “productive” than South Dakota—and upstate New York, as well.
An American diplomat who had spent time in Latin America told me once, “I’m glad we don’t live in a country where the elite live in a few cities and call the rest of the country ‘the hinterland.’” Unfortunately, this is the kind of country the US is becoming.
As I said, I’m an optimist—in the Soviet sense.
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