Unmasking a Myth About White Women

A Widely Accepted Lie

A recent article called JD Vance Doesn't Want All Women to Be Trad Wives, Just White Women  makes a typical, progressive mistake. The article's author accepts the lie that decades ago, only black women were poor, while white women all lived comfortable lives as trad wives. The article says that black women have never had the luxury of being trad wives, and that is true as far as it goes. However, it is blatantly and completely false to say that in those days, all or even most white women lived as trad wives. In reality, only upper middle-class women could afford to live that way. Working-class white women have always worked.

I grew up in the nineteen forties and fifties, and I can assure you that in those days, working-class white women worked outside of their homes. Restaurants had waitresses, and supermarkets had women working their cash registers; banks had women working as tellers, and offices had typists. The women in those jobs were practically all white because the racism of the time generally prevented companies from hiring black women.  When I was in school, I was taught almost exclusively by white women. So, the idea that in those days, white women were all trad wives is a lie.

Where Does the Lie Come From?

Why do some people spread this lie about our past? They do so in order to prevent the emergence of class solidarity across racial lines. The lie helps to maintain the idea that white workers are above all white people rather than workers who happen to be white, and by so doing, the lie prevents white workers from seeing that their fate is bound together with the fate of black workers. 

If working-class whites and blacks got together, they could take over the country. They would form an unbeatable coalition, and to prevent that happening, lots of money is invested in the effort to persuade white working-class people that blacks are the enemy. White workers are told that, in the past, they were better off. They are told that their current poverty and insecurity are new things that are due to the encroachments of black and other non-white workers. The lie paints a rosy picture of an imaginary past when all white people were well off, and all white women looked and dressed like the models in magazine ads.

We Must Tell the Truth About Our History

We progressives could offer an alternative picture of our past. We could promote class solidarity by telling the truth about our history, but for reasons that I discussed in an earlier post on this blog, we do not do so. Like the author of the article referred to above, we buy into the view that in the past, all white people were comfortable, and all black people were oppressed. We differ from our political opponents only in saying that we should not return to that past. The truth is that in the past, working-class people of all races were oppressed. Blacks were more oppressed than whites, but focusing exclusively on that difference serves to perpetuate the shared oppression of all working-class people. We must free ourselves from the lie, and we must recognize that we will all rise together, or we will not rise at all.

A Woman's Right to Choose is a Kitchen Table Issue

 A Misleading Distinction

A recent article in the New York Times made a distinction between the abortion issue and “kitchen table issues.” The latter are economic issues like inflation, taxes, the minimum wage or the cost of living. The article dealt with the attitudes of Hispanic men toward a woman's right to choose and said that the idea that a woman should be able to choose for herself is being used successfully to appeal to Hispanic male voters. However, the article suggested that a woman’s right to choose should not be emphasized too heavily because Hispanic men are more concerned about kitchen table issues.

This distinction indicates a failure to see the economic aspect of the abortion issue for working-class Americans. Abortion bans mostly effect working-class women. Rich women have always been able to obtain abortions, and that will not change. Rich women in states where abortions are illegal will be able to travel to other states or to foreign countries, but working-class women will often be unable to do so. Thus, prohibiting abortions affects mainly working-class women.

A Woman's Right to Choose is Especially Important to Working-Class Families

A young working-class woman with no children may have an opportunity to acquire skills and improve her economic situation, but an unwanted pregnancy condemns her to poverty because caring for a child and working to support it leave her no time to improve her skills through education. In contrast, a young woman from a rich family may simply take a semester off from college and then go on to become a lawyer or an accountant.

An unwanted pregnancy affects not only the economic prospects of a working-class woman but also those of her whole family. If she is a single parent, the economic effect of an unwanted pregnancy is obvious, but if she is married and her family loses her income, the effect will still be serious. Thus, the question of a woman's right to choose is clearly a kitchen table issue. Her choice affects the economic well-being of her whole family. 

A Woman's Right to Choose is Especially Important to Immigrant Families

The economic advantage of being able to choose to terminate a pregnancy is particularly important to immigrants and to the children of immigrants are who trying to make a better life for themselves here. They struggle hard against difficult odds to build lives in our country. In one immigrant family I know, the husband works as an auto mechanic, and the wife cleans houses and offices. They have a daughter who recently graduated from high school and has a plan for earning a good living and for using the opportunity offered by our local community college to receive training in her chosen trade.

Her plan is a good one, but an unwanted pregnancy would make it much more difficult to execute. In a family where all of the members are doing all that they can do to get ahead, someone would have to leave work to care for the baby. At best, the young woman’s plan for success would have to be delayed for years. At worst, she might never reach her goal. Thus, the young woman’s decision will have an enormous economic impact on her life and on the lives of all of the members of her family.

A Woman's Right to Choose is a Kitchen Table Issue

So, it makes no sense to separate “kitchen table issues” from the issue of a woman’s right to choose. That right is a kitchen table issue, and we should treat it as such.

A National Shame and How We Can End It

Many Americans Must Move Abroad in Retirement 

On YouTube, you can watch a video called “10 SAFEST & CHEAPEST Countries to live or Retire on Social Security.” The video is aimed at the millions of Americans who are victims of the chintzy retirement system offered by the United States. After working a lifetime, these people cannot afford to live comfortably in their own country.  So, they move to countries where their money goes further.

This situation is a national shame. How can we, the citizens of the world’s richest country, look each other in the face when we know that millions of our fellow citizens cannot afford to live here on the pittance that our Social Security system provides? How did we get here?

How Did We Arrive in This Shameful Position?

We got here by focusing so exclusively on economic opportunity for individuals that we forgot some basic truths about our society or any society. It is true that for exceptionally brave, intelligent and hardworking people, our society offers good opportunities. The opportunities are not really better than those in other countries as we can see from international statistics on social mobility, but the opportunities here are still good. However, the focus on individual opportunity blinds us to some key facts.

First, the exceptionally brave, intelligent and hardworking people are able to raise their economic status only because most other people do not raise theirs. If all of our warehouse workers, uber drivers and grocery checkout clerks decided to become social workers, engineers, computer programmers, teachers or nurses, there would not be enough jobs for them. We cannot all rise. A few of us can rise but only because the rest of us do not rise.

Second, our economy depends on having warehouse workers, uber drivers and grocery checkout clerks. If by some miracle, they were all able to become engineers, computer programmers, teachers or nurses, our economy would collapse. We need people to fulfill those functions. So, a just and equitable society must provide a way for them to age with dignity. A just and equitable society must not depend on their being able to move elsewhere to live. What would we have to do to make our society just and equitable?

What Can We Do?

First, we would have to pay our workers a decent wage. Workers who are underpaid cannot save for retirement Today, many people who work full-time are paid so poorly that they are eligible for food stamps. Companies like Walmart and Amazon are able to pay their workers a pittance because we the taxpayers supplement the workers’ earnings. We should end this form of corporate welfare and raise the minimum wage so that people can save for their retirement.

Second, we must preserve our Social Security system by collecting Social Security taxes at all wage levels. We should not allow the obscenely high salaries at the top of our income pyramid to go untaxed. Reducing benefits is not an option if we want our society to be just and equitable. Social Security is an important part of most Americans’ retirement incomes, and if we want Americans to be able to live comfortably in retirement in the United States, we must make sure that they have sufficient incomes. The fact that many Americans cannot live comfortably in retirement in their own country is a a national shame. Let's put an end to it.

To put an end to our national shame, we must elect people who understand what is needed, and that means that we must elect Democrats in November. The Republicans have made it very clear that if they are elected, they will cut Social Security benefits and make our situation even more shameful. To end our national shame, vote for Joe Biden and turn our Congress blue in November.

What is American Patriotism? Thoughts on the Fourth of July

Commitment to the Founding Idea 

On this fourth of July, I attended a concert of patriotic music at Lawrence University in Appleton where I live. I and the rest of the audience sang the familiar, patriotic songs, and I thought about what it means to be a patriotic American. For me, it begins with a recognition that the United States is my home. I was born and grew up here. I have spent almost all of my life here. My parents were born here, and so were my children. This is my home.

However, the United States is not just a place. It is also an idea – the idea that all people are created equal. We all deserve equal economic opportunities, and we all should be equal before the law. My country was founded on that idea, and for me, a commitment to it is an essential part of American patriotism. I believe that I cannot really be a patriotic American without such a commitment. Moreover, a patriot must recognize that our country has never fully lived up to the idea of equality.  It has not been a reality but an aspiration. We have struggled to make our idea a reality. Over the centuries, we have come closer, but a patriotic American must recognize that there is still much to do.

The Founding Fathers Thought About Equality

The fight against economic inequality occupied a large place in the minds of our founding fathers because they knew that extreme economic inequality was incompatible with democracy. A society of extreme inequality tends to become an oligarchy because the wealthy upper class is able to use its wealth to control the society’s politics. The lower classes then see that they are shut out of the political system, and they lose faith in democracy. They fall prey to demagogues who promise to “be their voice” and to fix a rigged system. Democracy cannot survive in a society with extreme inequality in the distribution of wealth and income.

The founding fathers were born in a society in which most of the wealth was held by a class of hereditary, titled landowners, and in founding their new country, they made sure that it would have no place for a titled nobility. They thought that would be enough to prevent the emergence of extreme inequality because they lived in an agrarian society with a seemingly limitless supply of land and in a time when the inexpensive tools needed for farming were within the reach of most people.

The Struggle Goes on With New Tools

The methods that served the founding fathers in the fight for equality are not sufficient for us today. We live in an industrial and commercial society that has created new ways for hereditary wealth to be accumulated and new barriers to equality. We do not have a titled nobility, but we do have oligarchs, and they present the same danger to democracy as the titled nobility presented in the eighteenth century. 

As patriotic Americans, we must continue the fight against extreme inequality in order to preserve our democracy. Our weapons in this fight will be different from those used by our eighteenth-century ancestors because our world is different from theirs. Just as we cannot defend our country today with eighteenth-century muskets and swords, so we cannot defend our democracy with eighteenth-century policies. We will have to use weapons like a wealth tax or a system of free post-secondary education in order to counteract the tendency for wealth and income to become ever more concentrated. These are things that our founding fathers would not have thought of doing, but they would have understood completely our reasons for doing them. We have not always thought of such policies as patriotic duties, but that is what they are. Our country is an idea as well as a place, and commitment to the idea is an essential element of American patriotism.

As patriotic Americans, we must continue fight against inequality and oligarchy. We will not be the first modern Americans to understand that patriotism demands that we not shrink from the fight. In the early twentieth century, Wisconsin's progressives saw the need to fight against the power of oligarchy The architects of the New Deal saw the need, too. 

On this fourth of July, let us renew our commitment the idea that our country represents. Let us renew our patriotism.

Gaza and Minnesota: Progressive Politics and the Working Class in America

A Working-Class Victory in Minnesota 

In Minnesota, Uber and Lyft drivers recently won a major victory after a two-year fight with the companies. It was an important victory in the struggle for social justice in the United States. Uber and Lyft are famous for their oppressive treatment of their workers, and they used their lobbying clout as they have in other states to avoid having to pay the drivers a living wage. The issue was whether or not the drivers should be paid at least the minimum wage set by law in Minnesota. The companies claimed that, because the drivers were independent contractors, the law did not apply to them. The companies lobbied to protect their exploitative business model as they have in other states, but in Minnesota, the drivers were able to win.

A Fight Not Supported

The drivers’ long struggle for a living wage did not receive much support from students or other progressive activists across the country. We did not see massive demonstrations or national threats to boycott Uber or Lyft. No one proposed that universities or other institutions sell their holdings of shares in those companies. The Democratic Party was not split over the issue, and the elections of 2022 were unaffected by the drivers' struggle in Minnesota or in other states.

A Fight Supported

The lack of support for these working-class Americans in their struggle for a living wage contrasts strongly with the enormous support shown by American progressives for the residents of Gaza in the face of Israel’s invasion of Gaza last fall. We have seen massive demonstrations. We have seen protest encampments. We have seen the heads of major universities lose their jobs. Jamaal Bowman lost a Democratic primary election. The Democratic Party is deeply split over the issue of American support for Israel, and the issue may well affect the outcome of this fall’s elections.

Why are American progressives so passionate about the war in Gaza and so indifferent to the struggles of working-class Americans here at home?  

American Progressives Are Comfortable

Part of the answer comes from the fact that fighting for justice on the other side of the world is less risky than fighting for justice at home. Most progressive Americans live comfortable, middle-class lives and have little contact with working-class Americans.  The progressives mostly belong to the patrimonial middle class, and they have little interest in changing social arrangements from which they benefit. After all, paying the drivers a living wage might raise the prices that Lyft or Uber charges for rides. On the other hand, fighting for social justice in a place 6000 miles away does not risk upsetting social arrangements here in the United States. In fighting for justice in Gaza, progressives are able to feel a glow of virtue without endangering their own, comfortable, economic positions.

American Progressives Have Lost Sight of the Main Issue

American progressives' failure to support the struggles of working-class Americans may also spring from the fact that American progressives have lost sight of the core issue that underlies all of the issues that are prominent sources of conflict in American politics.  The core, underlying issue is the domination of American society by a tiny minority of wealthy people, and the skewing of public policy to favor that tiny minority. 

American progressive groups have lost site of the connections between their, specific concerns and this underlying issue. So, they do not develop a consistent and coordinated set of political priorities. Instead, they become prey to momentary, political passions. American progressives may become temporarily passionate about the death of George Floyd or about the plight of the Palestinians but do not consistently support policies to improve the lives of ordinary, American people.  

That is why tens of thousands of people mobilized to support the Palestinians in Gaza, but the Uber and Lyft drivers in Minnesota fought their battle alone.