2008 Woodie Awards
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Progressive Paulitics...Why we need to resurrect "class"
By Paul Perry on 2/1/07
In my class American Political Thought, Professor Sykes mentioned that a poll was taken about American political discourse to survey which political words we, as a people, tend to shy away from and just avoid utilizing. The top ranked phrase was "the state." We tend not to think of ourselves as so separate from our government, in that whole We The People kind of way.
The second most avoided word in American political discourse, our professor reported, is "class." My hand immediately shot up in protest. "I disagree. What about William Jennings Bryan, Teddy Roosevelt's trust-busting, his cousin's New Deal, Hoffa and the labor movement, MLK's Poor People's Campaign, etc.?" We may not use the word itself in our discourse, but we are being less than honest with ourselves if we think that it has not informed a huge portion of our history.
We talk about class in moments of strife and inconvenience. The Great Depression. The aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. The turmoil of the 1960s. We ask ourselves, just for a moment, how did we get here? What could have been done to prevent this? How are we going to treat each other as we move forward? Yet somehow we fall back into the same patterns. Executive pay keeps rising meteorically while wages for the rest of us stagnate. Fewer and fewer workers are joining unions and collectively bargaining for economic justice with their employers. The blue chip stocks are soaring to new highs while the blue-collar stores are going out of business in the face of globalized competition.
But precisely because we only talk about class in times of crises, we are not allowing ourselves the opportunities to avert them. Much like foreign policy, where a nation must work even more diligently in peacetime to avert war, we should resurrect the discussion of class and realize its place as a central theme in our American story. Last week I wrote about the concept of the American Dream. That is a story about class! The widespread commitment to equal opportunity in this country makes it more possible than in most places (though this is increasingly less true) to improve your class standing and be socially mobile. Don't tell me that we never talk about class!
The second most avoided word in American political discourse, our professor reported, is "class." My hand immediately shot up in protest. "I disagree. What about William Jennings Bryan, Teddy Roosevelt's trust-busting, his cousin's New Deal, Hoffa and the labor movement, MLK's Poor People's Campaign, etc.?" We may not use the word itself in our discourse, but we are being less than honest with ourselves if we think that it has not informed a huge portion of our history.
We talk about class in moments of strife and inconvenience. The Great Depression. The aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. The turmoil of the 1960s. We ask ourselves, just for a moment, how did we get here? What could have been done to prevent this? How are we going to treat each other as we move forward? Yet somehow we fall back into the same patterns. Executive pay keeps rising meteorically while wages for the rest of us stagnate. Fewer and fewer workers are joining unions and collectively bargaining for economic justice with their employers. The blue chip stocks are soaring to new highs while the blue-collar stores are going out of business in the face of globalized competition.
But precisely because we only talk about class in times of crises, we are not allowing ourselves the opportunities to avert them. Much like foreign policy, where a nation must work even more diligently in peacetime to avert war, we should resurrect the discussion of class and realize its place as a central theme in our American story. Last week I wrote about the concept of the American Dream. That is a story about class! The widespread commitment to equal opportunity in this country makes it more possible than in most places (though this is increasingly less true) to improve your class standing and be socially mobile. Don't tell me that we never talk about class!
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