Courtesy of Roy, Ross Douthat, poor underprivileged conservative Christian, takes to the pages of the New York Times, where he sits as the youngest Op-Ed page writer there ever, in a grotesque reminder of just how prevalent affirmative action is for the right, and denounces affirmative action. Well, claims that it unfairly excludes the members of the white working class and most of all, white Christians. Douthat is, of course, a great man of the people, the son of a lawyer and a writer, educated at Hamden Hall in New Haven, and then Harvard, where he undoubtedly deprived some stout yeoman of his rightful place. There's nothing I like better than denunciations of elites from a 29-year-old New York Times columnist who graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Harvard. I dreamed I saw Joe Hill last night . . . .
Oh where was I? Douthat no more gives a fuck about working class Americans than I give a shit about him. He views them as a constituency gullible enough to elect Republicans. Period, end of story. The purpose of articles like this is not uplift for the working class, but to help nurture and rationalize their sense of grievance and to give it a politically useful direction. Its secondary aim is to foster guilt in your average upscale Times reader, people who may not be close enough to the situation to smell the bullshit. (As a working class kid who has devoted his life to the working class, I can assure you that if Ross had ever pulled this bullshit line on me at anytime between the ages of 15 and 50 I would have kicked his sorry motherfucking ass into next year.)
If one is interested in improving working class mobility there are a number of things one can do and support. First, and foremost, one can be a friend and ally of labor unions, the single most important instrument of working class mobility in the history of the United States (and that of the western world). Douthat, being in the end just another Republican fuckstick, is an opponent of unions. You could support universal health care so that no working class person is ever again threatened with penury due to a lack of health insurance. Needless to say, Douthat does not. You could support the expansion of student loans and their control by the government rather than profit-oriented financial institutions. Yeah, you know the answer. You could favor greater support for state colleges and universities -- no they are not Harvard, but access to Berkeley or UCLA or Michigan or Wisconsin or UVA at next to no cost would be a pretty nice thing. Ivy League numbers are too small to really bring about broad-based mobility. I haven't seen Ross advocate for any of these things in his column. And, of course, you could support reproductive rights so that people are not saddled with children for whom they are not yet prepared, but again, we all know where Ross comes down on this.
And then -- curse you Edroso -- into the fray steps Rod Dreher to bemoan the absence of Pentacostals in elite universities and other strata of learnedness. How shocking really. (Second tumbler of rye break-- that is so fucking good -- to paraphrase Ball Four, the greatest book of all time, Dreher, you're never going to make the big leagues drinking Dr. Pepper.) Where was I again? So, Dreher, do you think maybe the following might have something to do with the fact that evangelicals aren't dominating the Ivies? Well let's see, you've got an authoritarian culture, based on biblical literalism, that vehemently rejects basic tenets of science, that withdraws from any hint of cosmopolitan life for the safety of home schooling, that constantly denounces elites, particularly those who are well-educated, that advocates for a completely distorted, religiously driven teaching of history, and instills the notion that the places that are the center of elite learning in the country -- Boston, New York, Philadelphia, the Bay Area, Madison, Ann Arbor, and southern California -- are dens of iniquity, best avoided by godly people. Do you think that maybe this and not the fact that little Janie had the prize pig in the 4-H club might be the reason that she's not heading to Moscow on the Charles?
Let me repeat, the purpose of these kinds of articles is not to advance the cause of the urban or rural working classes. They are designed to create a sense of victimization -- a kind of equivalency to the sufferings endured by Blacks -- which can also be used to justify both racism and appeals to racism that remain the basic staple of right wing politics in this country. There are many ways to help working class white people in this country, all of which I support. But Ross Douthat and Rod Dreher support none of them -- they just want to help stoke white resentment, and in that sense, they are no different from Pat Buchanan.
