Robert Reich: The Revolt of the Anxious Class

[eridani]

http://www.nationofchange.org/news/2015/12/15/the-revolt-of-the-anxious-class/

The anxious class feels vulnerable to forces over which they have no control. Terrible things happen for no reason.

Yet government can’t be counted on to protect them.

Safety nets are full of holes. Most people who lose their jobs don’t even qualify for unemployment insurance.

Government won’t protect their jobs from being outsourced to Asia or being taken by a worker here illegally.

Government can’t even protect them from evil people with guns or bombs. Which is why the anxious class is arming itself, buying guns at a record rate.

They view government as not so much incompetent as not giving a damn. It’s working for the big guys and fat cats – the crony capitalists who bankroll candidates and get special favors in return.

When I visited so-called “red” states this fall, I kept hearing angry complaints that government is run by Wall Street bankers who get bailed out after wreaking havoc on the economy, corporate titans who get cheap labor, and billionaires who get tax loopholes.

[840high]

1. kick

[daleanime]

2. K&R.....

[pampango]

3. As in the 1930's, the question is whether economic insecurity will lead Americans to turn

to the left, as they did with FDR, or to the right, as many Europeans did.

It was only a matter of time before the anxious class would revolt.

They’d support a strongman who’d promise to protect them from all the chaos. Who’d save jobs from being shipped abroad, slam Wall Street, stick it to China, get rid of people here illegally, and block terrorists from getting into America? A strongman who’d make America great again – which really means make average working people safe again.

It was a pipe dream, of course – a conjurer’s trick. No single person can do this. The world is far too complex. You can’t build a wall along the Mexican border. You can’t keep out all Muslims. You can’t stop corporations from outsourcing abroad.

Nor should you even try. Besides, we live in a messy democracy, not a dictatorship.

The left dealt with economic insecurity with progressive taxes, liberal regulations, an effective safety net and engagement with the rest of the world. The right did and does just the opposite.

Add to that the cultural insecurity of the American right which sees a majority minority country emerging and does not like it. That makes it easier for the right to blame THEM (Mexicans, Muslims, Chinese) for our insecurity. Building walls, raising tariffs, keeping THEM out makes sense to them.

[quaker bill]

4. yes the parallels to the 1930s are profound

and the question is Right or Left. The odds favor Right, and have for 30 years. Left will require a stroke of luck and just the right candidate at the right moment.

[MisterP]

5. "precariat" is the word

even a lot of Mexican-bashing (literally) is very economic at its base; ever since the 70s we've had this "producerist" right-wing populism that blames "the globalist elites" for welfare and got outsources into power (and then they blamed the outsourcing on nonwhites)

it's basically a Prop 13 thing where Marx's prole is replaced by the Angry White Male: some say that the Dems have abandoned the working class for "boutique issues" (ugh), and indeed they've tried to mask dismemberment of the economy with socially-uplifting language and appeals to minorities--but if one thinks of the main fighters for this or that group, one doesn't think of Rahm or Harold Ford