Who Looks Down on Teachers?

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1. moosesnsquirrels says:

   September 20, 2012 at 10:14 am

   I think this is a very complex question of cultural history, but I’ll take a stab a drafting a short description of my thesis.

   I find that our political lexicon is too small to accommodate a full discussion of our national political and economic debate. Americans typically describe themselves as “conservative” or “liberal”. Sometimes they also use “right” or “right-wing”, but very rarely “left” or “left-wing”; the latter terms are now considered derogatory, almost “fightin’ words”. But this does very little good for political discussion.

   Generally, I would argue,”conservative” and “liberal” are not really opposites. The opposite of “conservative” is “radical”: Conservatives want to make change slowly, if at all; Radicals want to make change at the most fundamental level (“radical” coming from “radix”, the Latin word for root), usually rapidly. Thus, both terms can apply to any variety of goals; the question is the degree and speed of change that is sought.

   When it comes to social behavior, i.e., the range of behavior that one is willing to accept in a society, then “liberal” describes someone who favors, or is comfortable with, a wider range of acceptable expression while a “traditionalist” seeks to keep the range of expression more narrowly confined to established social norms. (Think Harvey Milk vs. Archie Bunker.) Of course, we can see our first point of confusion–Since new forms of expression are likely to run counter to traditional forms, then traditionalists in this context can also be conservative while liberals are radical. But my point is that this doesn’t have to be the case every time: As Hillary Clinton, among others, remarked in the 2008 presidential race, it was the Democrats–traditionally the “liberal” party (no pun intended)–who were the true conservatives in the face of the Republican attempts to “radically” change our government to a more “conservative” vision. (Ouch! My eyes are starting to spin.)

   On top of this, we also have “left” and “right”, which originally referred to the social distribution of property. The left favored a more egalitarian, even equalitarian, sharing of wealth among citizens; the right favored individual property ownership. (See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Left_wing) Thus the “left” includes such political groups as communists and socialists; the right includes groups such hierarchy-oriented groups as monarchists, aristocrats, fascists, and other groups that argue in favor of inequality. (See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right-wing_politics)

   In American politics, we have allowed these terms to become blurred and even adopt contradictory meanings. Thus, “liberal” has become synonymous with “left” and “radical”, and “conservative” synonymous with “right” and “traditionalist”. Yet, one can be a radical traditionalist (i.e., a “reactionary”, a term all but gone from America save the dictionary) or a conservative liberal (i.e., one who rejects a reactionary). I argue this is at the heart of the union-bashing liberal problem. By compacting so many different meanings into a few terms, we have lost the ability to accurately describe our politics.

   In the case of the union-bashing “liberals”, I argue that the “left” in American, i.e., the groups that traditionally supported a more egalitarian distribution of wealth and property and supported unions as an important social mechanism for achieving that goal, has been dead for nearly 30 years. Thus, “liberal” in the sense of “left” has no (or very little) meaning anymore. The “liberals” are now just those who support a wider range of acceptable social behavior, which today usually means things like gay marriage and abortion rights. In fact, it’s actually pretty easy to find lots of common ground between liberals and libertarians when it comes to behavior–both generally agree in letting people do what they want, so long as they don’t hurt anyone else. (Remember when Barry Goldwater came out in support of gay rights in the early ’90s?) The difference has more to do with how to guarantee that freedom, with liberals favoring government action and libertarians favoring individual action. In fact, by the end of the ’80s the intellectual liberal elites had largely abandoned the leftist ideas of income distribution and started moving to the laissez-faire rightist ideas in the GOP, arguing that personal freedom through an economic and academic meritocratic economic system was worth the cost of a less equal distribution of wealth. Since unions stood for the opposite, and were composed of members were typically were not among the academic meritocratic elites, the liberal abandoned the unions and so too have abandoned public education–Just look a Rham Emanuel’s comments and attitude and compare those to Mitt Romney’s infamous “47% Speech”.

   The shift has been well documented and discussed among such writers as Christopher Lasch (“The Age of Narcissism”, “The Revolt of the Elites”, and “The Minimal Self”), E.J. Dionne (“Why Americans Hate Politics”), and Chris Hedges (“The Death of the Liberal Class”), among others. These authors trace the history to the death of the left in the ’50s McCarthy witch hunts and the riots and discontent in the ’60s, the assumption of political power by the college educated, contented middle class baby boomers in the ’70s who forgot their working class roots (see, Michael Moore’s “Capitalism: A Love Story”, and the retirement of the older generation who remembered the Great Depression and repression by the rich until the end of World War II.

   So, we need to rebuild a left to save our unions, starting to expand our sorry excuse for a political lexicon.

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2. Betsy Marshall says:

   September 22, 2012 at 9:21 am

   Another excellent book that addresses how an ‘economic and academic meritocratic economic system’ has sabotaged our democratic principles and led to a vast divergence of wealth in this country is Christopher Hayes (“Twilight of The Elites, America After Meritocracy”).

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