Deaths of Despair and the Future of Capitalism, Anne Case and Angus Deaton, 2020.
The Meritocracy Trap, Daniel Markovitz, 2019.
On the Clock, Emily Guendelsberger, 2019.
A Collective Bargain, Jane McAlevey, 2020.
the case for A JOB GUARANTEE, Pavlina Tcherneva, 2020.
A Brief History of Fascist Lies, Federico Finchelstein, 2020.
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When Little Richard died in May, it brought me back to a car trip I took in the summer of 2013 from New York City to visit my sister in Michigan. Instead of my usual route west through Pennsylvania and Ohio, I chose to drive up to and across Ontario. The Canadians were celebrating the bicentennial defeat of the American invasion of 1812, and I wanted to check out their historical markers and buysome souvenirs.
That led me to stay my first night outside of Buffalo and catch a concert by Ted Nugent in the countryside east of the city. A classic rock guitar shredder with a couple of hits from back when, Nugent is best known these days as a Trump booster, NRA board member, and a “kill ‘em and grill ‘em” hunting buff. I was attending to find out if Nugent still presented himself as a proud product of Detroit. I’d lived in that city in 1965, when it was racist yet still prosperous and Motown Records ruled the AM radio with Dylan and the Brits. A set of white rockers like Nugent emerged out of this fertile soil who claimed a Detroit blend of industrial masculinity and an acknowledged debt to Black R&B. How was that holding up in second term Obama America after decades of hollowing out de-industrialized Detroit?
The guy behind me in the line to be patted down (for bottles and weapons?) was bristling with hostility but inside the vibe of the modest crowd was otherwise benign. NRA members were invited to sit in the front on picnic tables, and a couple of fans were sporting FUCK CUOMO tee shirts. (The Governor of New York had recently signed some gun laws.) Minus those embellishments it could have been any outdoor audience of white Average Joes and Janes anticipating a country, oldies, or jam band. Some vets, some coping with disabilities, and one striking, handsome couple. The cool kids back in high school? The quarterback and the homecoming queen?
After an opening act led by a leather clad female shredder, the stage was reset, and Nugent’s arrival was foregrounded with three tunes blasted over the PA. Grand Funk Railroad’s “We’re an American Band.” Detroit. Mitch Ryder’s hit Little Richard Medley. Detroit. And the Rolling Stones’ “Street Fighting Man.”
These signifiers were reaffirmed in Nugent’s between song chatter, along with his defense of the Second Amendment, reminiscing about “killing shit,” and badmouthing Obama. “Never forget where you’re from. I’m from Detroit,” he admonished his audience and then placed his patriotism inside his rocker cred with this crowd pleaser: “The USA is the greatest country in the history of the world because no other country could have produced a Little Richard or Bo Diddley.”
On my way to the parking lot during the encore I passed the handsome couple, who looked aglow, transfixed with satisfaction, like people who had just attended a deeply self-affirming, meaningful cultural event or religious service.
Deaths of Despair and the Future of Capitalism, published in March, is a patiently reasoned, data-laden description of a nightmare unique to the USA: the rising rate of middle aged white working class deaths from suicides, opioid overdoses, and alcohol poisoning. Somewhere near the end of the twentieth century, life expectancy quit its steady 2% a year increase, but only in America, and on closer look, only among white folks without a BA.
Princeton economists Anne Case and Angus Deaton load their book with graphs that show us spinning away from Europe, Japan, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, graphs that all look the same if you don’t read their different captions. Here we go, slowly climbing up the mountain of prosperity and good health with the other industrialized, affluent nations after WWII, and then, usually around 2000, sometimes by the middle of the 1970s, depending on the graph, we turn away, off on our own, walking off a cliff. We may have finished with the American Century, but our exceptionalism is ghoulishly intact. Our medical care is uniquely expensive, inefficient, and unfair. Our working-class wages and job quality in the greatest decline. Our turn towards self-obliteration unrivaled.
With their methodical, cover-all-angles academic rhetoric, Case and Deaton dispute the counter arguments about region and culture. The data doesn’t add up. The collapse of social institutions and personal stability, whether in the realms of religion, marriage, sports, work ethic, or sobriety all follow from the loss of good jobs, the culture and psychology aren’t the cause. And then the authors make the obvious but still crucial connection. The it’s-their-own-fault critique of the white working class over the last three decades mirrors the same cart-before-the-horse critique made of inner city Black society and culture decades ago when the jobs for those Americans moved away to the suburbs, the south, then Mexico, then China, now Viet Nam. The authors consciously line up Deaths of Despair with the earlier work of William Julius Wilson, who patiently unraveled that earlier, racist, drained of economics, and still dominant analysis in books like When Work Disappears, the World of the New Urban Poor, published in 1996.
I found these links and arguments both so relieving and so infuriating that I often had to set aside Deaths of Despair, too upset to read. As someone old enough to watch the Rust Belt rust, and good jobs disappear from Chicago’s Southside, Newark, Decatur, Flint, Dayton, Oakland, and industrialized pockets of small cities and towns across the USA, yes, thank God two Princeton profs are pointing out that the white working class has been pushed into a pain ridden, suicidal cul-de-sac, one the Black urban poor have been abandoned in for the last half century. But really: why must it take these two Princeton profs to prove the obvious? WTF did we think would happen to all those people who once worked in all those abandoned mills and factories?
As it once stood as the centerpiece of the industrialization that won World War II, and then of our post-war, car-centric, 1950s suburbanization; Detroit now stands as the centerpiece of our despair, because it doesn’t stand alone. Look too long at Detroit and you have to start thinking about all the people killing themselves in all the little Detroits across our country. Easier to turn away and gaze instead at our coastal capitols of finance and high tech and their scattered pockets of opulence. Or is it?
The Meritocracy Trap, published in 2019, convinces that times are way too tense, if not yet desperate, at the top. Maybe not the tippy top of multi-billionaires, but just below, among the high achieving, Ivy League plus Stanford elite. Author Daniel Markovits is himself a Yale Law School professor and that gives him a pretty good vantage point. Whether all his students are wound as tight as he claims I wouldn’t know, but two central insights from the book stuck with me.
First, whereas our old hereditary elite assumed a life of leisurely conspicuous consumption and drew wealth from an inheritance; our new meritocracy requires a commitment to unceasing work and continuous investment in the self as capital. Second, those pulled into this elite, which once opened up to merit in the 1960s, have now closed rank to perpetuate their meritocracy through elite institutions of lifetime training, education, and psychology for themselves and their progeny, elite education financed by tax free donations and geographically specific real estate taxes. Get groomed and socialized at the best schools since before you’re in kindergarten, graduate from Harvard, and increase Harvard’s mammoth endowment with a charitable tax deduction, while tax revenues for broadly shared public education dwindle away.
As the drawbridge is cranked up and closed, what does this meritocracy see when they look out beyond the parapet of affluence? The old aspirational middle class hobbling towards the castle of success loaded down by too much student debt and unaffordable housing. And beyond them, the old lower middle class trapped working in a warehouse, call center, or fast-food chain.
I love On the Clock – published in 2019 a few months before The Meritocracy Trap – laid off journalist Emily Guendelsberger’s memoir of her year working in an Amazon warehouse in southern Indiana, a call center in western South Carolina, and a McDonalds in San Francisco. Of course, the jobs are impossible and brutal and don’t pay enough to really cover food, clothing, shelter, transportation, medical care and are designed to make employees easily replaceable in a constant churn of hire, fire, quit, rehire. And here’s the key, Guendelsberger portrays her co-workers as if they are real people just like herself because they are, struggling to get by, sometimes having fun, enjoying mastering parts of their job, oftentimes overwhelmed.
On The Clock’s description of life in a call center should make the reader sympathize the next time they reach an overworked human being, forced to upsell while handling your customer complaint, from a noisy cubicle, on a computer with outdated software, timed and punished by an algorithm. But that section of the book made me want to holler. I’m a retired phone company technician, hired into The Phone Company back when it was a nationwide, regulated, unionized monopoly. Those call center jobs were, once upon a time, hard but good union jobs, with benefits, opportunities for upgrades and transfers, and a grievance procedure. Complaints from Bell System customers were handled inside the Bell System, not by a deregulated, outsourced, non-union subcontractor.
Reviews have noted On the Clock’s similarity to Barbara Ehrenreich’s 2001 Nickel and Dimed. I’d place both in a tradition of women-journalists-writing-about-working-bad-jobs tracing back at least to Barbara Garson’s All the Livelong Day from 1975 and her The Electronic Sweatshop from 1988. Garson identified the pivot in her second book, when Silicon Valley transformed, as her subtitle put it, the Office of the Future into the Factory of the Past. Guendelsberger updates technology’s tightening grip on the workday as those bad jobs creep ever closer to the authors’ own laid-off reality. Appropriately, it’s women journalists who document and feel this bottom dropping out (or reaching up?) below them. They’re closer to it than the men. Look at the graphs.
Anxiety and burn-out at the top, budget breaking debt below, crummy jobs below that, amidst the suicide and despair. What should be done? If exposés changed things, all this would have been corrected by Garson’s book in 1975.
Daniel Markovits believes the elite engines of meritocracy like Yale should expand and welcome a new and wider swath of the meretricious. A good idea, but not enough. Anne Case and Angus Deaton believe transforming national medical care could repair the safety net and provide medical, social, and emotional support for those in distress. They also believe removing the burden of employer based medical benefits would reduce the cost of creating new jobs. All true, but would that end the relentless hollowing out of jobs they also document and create new jobs in places like On the Clock’s southern Indiana and western South Carolina?
In the books discussed above, the authors often describe unions as a social reality that has somehow faded into the past, like the Shaker religion, or penmanship, or steam powered locomotives, a commonly shared miscalculation. In fact, there’s been a fifty-year, successful war on unions. (See Invisible Hands by Kim Phillips Fein for one good history.) Countering and winning that war, from my perspective as a retired union member, is essential. And that can’t happen until we recognize that a war is being fought and we’re losing.
For a succinct and terrifying (the scary graphs are in color) summary of Deaths of Despair, I recommend Case and Deaton’s one-hour video presentation and Q & A with the Economic Policy Institute’s Thea Lee at epi.org. The final question before the close, from a member of the Steelworker’s Union, is answered by the authors with a heartfelt but puzzled plug for workers participation in determining their own future. But how? Lee ends the video by providing one answer, the PRO Act, the latest even-the-playing-field-for-union-organizing bill that’s been passed by the House and blocked by the Senate.
It’s not surprising that Case and Deaton hadn’t heard of the PRO Act until Lee mentioned it. And it’s not surprising the Republicans haven’t allowed a vote on it in the Senate. And it won’t be surprising if the Democrats just don’t get around to it if Biden is elected and they take back the Senate. The two big reasons I hear from union retirees for why they might not vote for Biden and the Democrats this time are first, Biden & his Dems voted for NAFTA, and second, Biden & his Dems let Card Check, the union revival bill of that era, die from neglect under Bill Clinton.
Jane McAlevey’s A Collective Bargain, published in 2020, is the latest reframing of organized labor’s mugging by the New Right, New Labor, and the New Democrats, wrapped in MacAlevey’s recounting of her successful organizing drives in majority female occupations like nursing and public education. I’ve been happily surprised by the attention this book has received. Have hard times moved unions from the back of public consciousness? Is McAlevey’s feminist reframing part of a gender shift with Guendelsberger’s empathic muckraking, the high profile of women in the founding and leadership of Black Lives Matter, and the well-sourced rumors that the next head of the AFL-CIO will either be Sara Nelson or Liz Shuler? Has the union organizing taking place at media jobs moved the whole discussion closer to home and away from the benign neglect of previous decades? And will any of this matter when it comes down to hardball legislative priorities and the PRO Act?
I retired when the second George Bush was President. Shortly after Obama’s inauguration, when it wasn’t clear if the Great Recession would turn into the second Great Depression, we held a retirees meeting at my Local in the Bronx. The mood was anxious if not scared, and there was talk assuming that the Obama Democrats would no doubt be rolling out some kind of New Deal jobs and works program. It never happened.
As long as drug companies can buy off Congress, turn pain into addiction, and subsidize a concert hall or two, we will never have the safety net we need to put us back on the graphs with the world’s other wealthy countries. So I still grumble thinking about those Democratic Primary debates where self-identified realists like Buttigieg chided so-called idealists like Sanders and Warren for promoting health care coverage for all. People are dying, in fact, killing themselves. It’s too late for the triage of incremental progress. Or are we realistically admitting that the drug companies control Congress and there’s nothing all that big that we can do about it?
In the meantime, finance flows into the creation of the driverless car and truck, robots are readied to replace humans if they get too expensive and contentious, low wage essential workers are valorized during the pandemic and then ignored. Wilson’s Black urban poor are no longer new and still unemployed, Case and Deaton’s white working class are overdosing. Who’s next? Adjunct professors living in their cars provide a clue.
But what if, when the meritocracy looked out beyond their fortress of achievement the landscape didn’t look so scary? What if there were a lot of ways to not be passionate about, but maybe satisfied, with your career? What if when you fell out of the elite, you didn’t have to fall so far? What if, in fact, everybody had a decent full-time job?
Pavlina Tcherneva makes the case for such a formerly unspeakable desire in her recently published the case for A JOB GUARANTEE. I can’t vouch for the modern monetary theory she promotes but I’m with Tcherneva all the way about the need for her jobs solution. It is, in fact, what us union retirees thought would happen at the beginning of the Great Recession. It could be what would make those Ivy League plus Stanford grads less anxious. It could return the dignity of work to all who’ve felt their dignity snatched away. Whatever you call our current monetary theory, it isn’t working. It’s killing people. It’s destroying jobs. It’s building too many luxurious homes and leaving people homeless. It’s making the wrong people rich. Time for a different theory.
Case and Deaton have identified and described an open hole spreading though our social order. Many can’t name it, yet they can feel it approaching. I’m repulsed by Ted Nugent’s politics, but I identify with his audience’s desire to somehow understand and deal with, most broadly, what happened to Detroit, or Buffalo or their own livelihoods and communities. Politics that propose a too-small solution to a too-big problem and call it realistic, make the whole idea of realistic sound suspicious. Gaslighting working people about jobs lost from de-industrialization can push folks looking for an explanation towards the darker corners of our national mythology. If it’s true that your good job is never coming back, why not believe a lie?
A Brief History of Fascist Lies, published in 2020, clarifies that lies aren’t a fascist tactic, or the irritating habit of a psychologically unstable head of state, they’re the essence, transcendent false truths from the fascist playbook at work refiguring the past in service to an imaginary future, a direct link between a supposed mass unconscious and its personification in the leader. Author Federico Finchelstein both reassures and unsettles defining our current moment’s difference from classic full-strength fascists Hitler and Mussolini who dismissed elections as relics of outmoded liberalism. What he dubs our post-fascist populists like Trump, Bolsonaro, Modi, Orban, Netanyahu still require their elections to legitimize their lies confirming their unique supremacy. Is that our new normal or an unstable interlude on the way to something worse? (Or better?) Bewildered to see our mechanisms of political representation abused but maintained to lie in service to a bigger lie, do we notice the same transformation happening to our democratic culture?
Little Richard blew up pop music with a burst of hits from 1955 to 1957 and spent the rest of his 87 years switching from renouncing pop for the world of gospel and then back again as an electrifying revival act for, by and large, white rock fans. That first burst was enough, or maybe too much. He never had another run of hits and never needed one.
Some take “Tutti Frutti” et al as the sound of breaking free, beyond constraints. I hear his hits instead as the sound of the fragmented self suddenly made whole, a mix of Pentecostal Christianity, West African spirit possession, American musicianship, drag queen nerve, transcendence, immanence, sexual ecstasy, technological sophistication, and post-war affluence anointing mass culture with Afro-American Rock ‘n’ Roll. I believe fans could feel that in the 1950s and decades later. I believe Ted Nugent felt that, and his audience felt that, and the handsome couple at the concert outside Buffalo felt that.
I believe that anointment lost its power as a rock dynamic, and probably as a spiritual experience, when the hole inside our society grew ever bigger, and so this anointment jumped demonically from aging rockers to something bigger, to our President. Devoid of policy, dressed in lies, exuding anger, immune to facts, he invited followers to feel completed again, as he feels completed, the leader as embodiment of the nation whose performance makes him whole and therefore makes the nation, or a chosen fragment, whole. And then must repeat this performance, on an endless tour, until exhausted. Pop fascism in formation.
In my drive across Ontario after that Ted Nugent concert in 2013, I visited some big forts and small towns that fought off or were captured by the army of the USA two hundred years ago. I bought a commemorative CD and refrigerator magnet and I stopped on county road 2, outside Chatham-Kent, at the memorial marker for Tecumseh and the Battle of Thames. During the War of 1812, for a while, that great native leader from the Ohio Valley, allied with the Canadians and British, had occupied Detroit. Pushed back by the army of William Henry Harrison, Tecumseh was killed by US troops in Canada. Although the body was never found, Harrison parlayed his role in Tecumseh’s death in his political career as the first Governor of Ohio, and then President of the USA.
Two sides won the War of 1812, and a third side lost. Canada discovered it was a single country when neither the British nor the French piece wanted to be annexed to the invading USA. We proved we could defeat the British Navy on Lake Erie and eliminate aboriginal leadership and alliances that stood in the way of our conquest of the Midwest. With the treaty signed and the old borders back in place, both countries ditched their native allies, ending the chance for a North American society that mingled aboriginal and settler cultures and governance. Never as radical as the United States, Canada kept Tecumseh as a national martyr. He’s on my souvenir refrigerator magnet with the other Canadian heroes of that bicentennial.
I’m with Ted Nugent that America is indeed the greatest country in the world because it produced Little Richard. And we are also a country with a history of murderous greed and foreign intervention. Trump or Trumpism may yet stir up a delusional dance of national self-destruction. Biden or Bidenism may yet dial back to a lost centrist consensus that cannot hold. Both will fail if they can’t permanently fill the hole described in Deaths of Despair. I say let the government create good jobs for everyone who needs one and free unions to make the bad ones bearable.