BRATTLEBORO — E. M. Forster wrote “Only connect … ” as the epigraph to Howards End, and I have been thinking of that maxim as I have considered recent developments in American political life.
A lot is going on, from new awareness of how frequently white police officers kill unarmed black people, to a recognition that our system of incarceration is both fascist and deeply broken, to an understanding that rape is rampant on our college campuses. It is as if we are waking up.
The extension of marriage rights to same-sex couples happened much more rapidly than anyone predicted. The same cultural transformation seems likely to occur in the decriminalization of marijuana. Climate change may still be disputed in a regressive Republican congress, but it is increasingly being written into the planning of municipalities and states around the country.
These trends are all documented in the daily press and, taken together, it can seem as though a sort of American awakening is taking place: a return to reason that goes far beyond the gridlocked and bankrupt situation in our national politics.
One can only hope so, of course, and I worry about two things.
The first is that we will continue to see these disparate, progressive developments as isolated from one another, rather than as part of a sort of connective tissue that displays how irrational this nation has been when it comes to public policy and that offers a return to reason.
The second is that we will fail to acknowledge the core issue that underlies all of these dimensions of socioeconomic and political life: the issue of class.
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Class has always been the fault line of United States politics, and it has become increasingly so. Our physical and virtual communities have become increasingly stratified.
The ruling elite in the U.S. has always managed its hold on power through social mechanisms that divided the body politic along racial, ethnic, and religious lines, so that common economic interests were made invisible and undiscussable.
The Civil War urban conflicts in the North - riots, really - between new Irish-Americans and African-Americans, are an early example.
Nixon's southern strategy - and the way that he, and later, Reagan - used crime and race as a way to persuade working-class whites to vote against their economic interests is perhaps the most important recent example, since it changed national politics in such a deep and lasting way.
But this same trend showed up in the short-lived “99 percent” movement, which never much included actual working-class folks or people of color. (Who has time to camp out in a park for a week?)
A close analysis of the movement suggests that it mainly represented an uprising by children of the upper-middle-class against the growing disparity between their economic prospects and those that their parents had had a generation before. It seems like a lost opportunity in some ways.
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I think it is important to talk about class all the time, no matter what local issue one is engaged with. Without that unifying thread, the ruling hegemony - which I don't see as a conspiracy, but rather as the extraordinarily powerful inertia the weight of wealth has to shape politics - will simply continue.
Climate change is a class issue. Our present circumstance has been driven over several decades by corporate interests that have only profit as a motive. The greatest victims of climate change - especially in low-lying regions like Bangladesh, New Orleans, or the inhabitants of subsidized housing in Brattleboro - are poor people.
Campus rape is a class issue. The awareness of impunity among males of a certain class within selective colleges results from a sense of privilege - whether at the University of Virginia or Dartmouth College - that stems from the reality that our legal system is for sale to the highest bidder, and only poor people go to jail for their crimes.
The madness of our system of incarceration, which is worse than any other nation's because of the enormous gap between our espoused principles and our reality, is a class issue.
One out of four African-American males is processed through the judicial system at some point in his life, mostly for minor drug-related crimes. It is a system that rivals the days of slavery in terms of the social control it exerts over a subjugated class.
But the reality is that poor whites face the same kind of intractable legal system - anyone who can't afford a good lawyer does. Just because blacks form a disproportionate percentage of the underclass does not mean that rampant imprisonment of people who commit non-violent crimes is an issue of race alone, although certainly that is a huge dimension of it.
Rikers Island is filled with women, most of them quite young, who were forced into prostitution by economic circumstances and bad choices about men and drugs.
What was their crime? And how many men with the money to use their services - which research demonstrates correlates almost exactly with what lawyers charge per hour - are also in the Rikers Island jail, which news reports indicate rivals Guantanamo Bay in terms of conditions, and is probably worse?
None.
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For someone who grew up in the 1960s and 1970s, it is enormously exciting to see the gains in social consciousness that have resulted in the new awareness I am writing about here - everything from same-sex marriage to a black president in the White House, from a settled agreement that climate change is happening to a recognition, finally, that our prison system is deeply problematic and unequal.
What strikes me, though, is that all of these movements toward social change have been driven by people of privilege, like me: the intellectual class in the U.S., which weighs heavily toward the left, whether one is talking about educators or journalists, administrative staff in non-profits, or freelancers in the IT world.
This is a good thing, of course, but it leaves me wondering what it means to care passionately about specific issues when, in reality, the underlying issue is class and we are members of a privileged class.
A friend, much more radical in his politics than I am, recently framed for me the fight between the 99 percent and the 1 percent as a fight between the 10 percent and the 0.1 percent - a sort of money envy as much as anything. Anyone with a college degree is privileged in the United States.
Until people of the privileged liberal or progressive class who have driven so much positive development in our underlying political arrangements truly align with the much larger underclass - huge numbers of which vote regularly against their own economic self-interests - then we will be slapping bandages on a suppurating wound.
It is hard for someone who grew up with a decent education and bank accounts to know what it is like to grow up without these things. Those of us who worry about whether we can afford the vacation we had planned can't really know what it is like to worry about how to pull together enough cash to buy new tires and get a car inspected so you can keep getting to work, driving legally.
It's also hard for someone like me, who grew up in a sort of privilege at a time when there still was a real middle class in Manhattan - a time that has since ended - to know what it is like to live in a fashion where money is never a concern.
I grew up among rich folks, in private Manhattan schooling and then the Ivy League, with Rockefellers and Kennedys in every class from fifth grade to my last year of college. I was not one of them, but I knew how to inhabit their circles well enough to get by.
It always struck me that money simply wasn't an issue to them. Only rich people don't know the meaning of money. The rest of us know its meaning all the time.
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I have been thinking about these things a lot lately. I am a poet and journalist, not a sociologist or political scientist. I don't have any answers.
But I do think a good question to ponder is this: What does it mean to be a progressive who comes from and lives within the embrace of privilege? With whom do we align - the class to which we might sometimes aspire, or the underclass that supports our lifestyle?
And what would that mean in practice rather than theory?
I really don't know, but we should keep talking about it. Ultimately the course we are on is unsustainable, and some sort of change will take place.
Sometimes I like to listen to old protest folk music - it reminds me of my days back in the anti-nuclear movement in the 1970s - and Pete Seeger's “Which Side Are You On?” is a song I have listened to a lot lately.
I wonder what the answer is - for me or for any of us.