SE Book Club's End-of-Month-Review-of: Listen, Liberal, Or, What Ever Happened to the Party of the People?

Moonwalking with Einstein - The Art and Science of Remembering Everything

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Monday, 30 May 2016

Hi all! Thanks for reading Listen Liberal with us. Time for the end of the month discussion. :)

I am interested in your thoughts on Neo-Liberalism; any experiences or insights you may have; and local/national/international examples; and any other books you'd think SE might like or are thought provoking!

(As always, don't be shy! Feel free to make a book club post and run with it!)

For those of you who want a jump start to the conversation, I've posted the New York Time's review below- but I'm very interested in your own experiences/points-of-view.

I'd also like to ask how many people read the book, and kindly remember, this is a book review- so having reading the book (or part of it) is really integral to the conversation.

Thanks!

NYT review:

Reveal

Liberals may be experiencing mixed emotions these days. The prospect of a Trump presidency has raised urgent fears: of the nation?s fascist tendencies, of the potential for riots in the streets. At the same time, many liberals have expressed a grim satisfaction in watching the Republican Party tear itself apart. Whatever terrible fate might soon befall the nation, the thinking goes, it?s their fault, not ours. They are the ones stirring up the base prejudices and epic resentments of America?s disaffected white working class, and they must now reap the whirlwind.

In his new book, the social critic Thomas Frank �poses another possibility: that liberals in general ? and the Democratic Party in particular ? should look inward to understand the sorry state of American politics. Too busy attending TED talks and �vacationing in Martha?s Vineyard, Frank argues, the Democratic elite has abandoned the party?s traditional commitments to the working class. In the process, they have helped to create the political despair and anger at the heart of today?s right-wing insurgencies. They may also have sown the seeds of their own demise. Frank?s recent columns argue that the Bernie Sanders campaign offers not merely a challenge to Hillary Clinton, but a last-ditch chance to save the corrupted soul of the Democratic Party.

Frank has been delivering some version of this message for the past two decades as a political essayist and a founding editor of The Baffler magazine. ?Listen, Liberal? is the thoroughly entertaining if rather gloomy work of a man who feels that nobody has been paying attention. Frank?s most famous book, ?What?s the Matter With Kansas?? (2004), argued that Republicans had duped the white working class by pounding the table on social issues while delivering tax cuts for the rich. He focused on Kansas as the reddest of red states (and, not incidentally, the place of his birth). This time Frank is coming for the Ivy League blue-state liberals, that ?tight little network of enlightened strivers? who have allegedly been running the country into the ground. Think of it as ?What?s the Matter With Massachusetts??

Frank?s book is an unabashed polemic, not a studious examination of policy or polling trends. In Frank?s view, liberal policy wonks are part of the problem, members of a well-educated elite that massages its own technocratic vanities while utterly missing the big question of the day. To Frank, that question hasn?t changed much over the last few centuries. ?It is the eternal conflict of management and labor, owner and worker, rich and poor ? only with one side pinned to the ground and the other leisurely pounding away at its adversary?s face,? he writes. Today, polite circles tend to describe this as the issue of ?inequality.? Frank prefers an older formulation. ?The 19th century understood it better: They called it ?the social question,??? he writes, defined as ?nothing less than the whole vast mystery of how we are going to live together.?

As Frank notes, today some people are living much better than others ? and many of those people are not Republicans. Frank delights in skewering the sacred cows of coastal liberalism, including private universities, bike paths, microfinance, the Clinton Foundation, ?well-meaning billionaires? and any public policy offering ?innovation? or ?education? as a solution to inequality. He spends almost an entire chapter mocking the true-blue city of Boston, with its ?lab-coat and starched-shirt? economy and its ?well-graduated? population of overconfident collegians.

Behind all of this nasty fun is a serious political critique. Echoing the historian Lily Geismer, Frank argues that the Democratic Party ? once ?the Party of the People? ? now caters to the interests of a ?professional-managerial class? consisting of lawyers, doctors, professors, scientists, programmers, even investment bankers. These affluent city dwellers and suburbanites believe firmly in meritocracy and individual opportunity, but shun the kind of social policies that once gave a real leg up to the working class. In the book, Frank points to the Democrats? neglect of organized labor and support for Nafta as examples of this sensibility, in which ?you get what you deserve, and what you deserve is defined by how you did in school.? In more recent columns, he has linked this neglect to the rise of a figure like Sanders, who says forthrightly what the party leadership might prefer to obscure: Current approaches aren?t working ? and unless something dramatic happens, Americans are heading for a society in which a tiny elite controls most of the wealth, �resources and decision-making power.

The problem, in Frank?s view, is not simply that mainstream Democrats have failed to address growing inequality. Instead, he suggests something more sinister: Today?s leading Democrats actually don?t want to reduce inequality because they believe that inequality is the normal and righteous order of things. As proof, he points to the famously impolitic Larry Summers, whose background as a former president of Harvard, former Treasury secretary and former chief economist of the World Bank embodies all that Frank abhors about modern Democrats. ?One of the reasons that inequality has probably gone up in our society is that people are being treated closer to the way that they?re supposed to be treated,? Summers commented early in the Obama administration.

?Remember, as you let that last sentence slide slowly down your throat, that this was a Democrat saying this,? Frank writes. From this mind-set stems everything that the Democrats have done to betray the masses, from Bill Clinton?s crime bill and welfare reform policies to Obama?s failure to rein in Wall Street, according to Frank. No surprise, under the circumstances, that the working class might look elsewhere for satisfying political options.

Frank is hardly the first critic to remark upon a disconnect between the lives of wealthy liberals and the grittier constituencies they supposedly serve. As the historian Steve Fraser demonstrates in his wide-ranging new book, the idea of the ?limousine liberal? has a long and messy history all its own. The term originated during the 1969 New York mayoral campaign, when the Democratic candidate Mario Procaccino charged the highborn Liberal Party incumbent John Lindsay, formerly a Republican, with acts unbecoming to his social class. Procaccino?s accusation differed slightly from Frank?s: Procaccino believed that Lindsay genuinely sought ambitious programs to empower the poor and the black and the disenfranchised. The problem was that Lindsay did it all from the ?silk-stocking district? of the Upper East Side, where his wealth insulated him from the dire consequences of his actions.

Though Procaccino lost the mayoral election, his biting phrase went on to have an illustrious political career of its own. ?Nowadays,? Fraser writes wryly, ?Hillary Clinton serves as ?Exhibit A? of this menace,? ?the quintessential limousine liberal hypocrite.? Despite its title, however, Fraser?s book is not really about liberals and their supposed foibles. Instead, he seeks to describe how ?right-wing populists? have insulted, vilified, mocked and analyzed those liberals in both the present and the past.

According to Fraser, suspicion of highborn reformers extends back at least to the Progressive Era, when the idea of an activist government administered by well-educated experts began to take hold. Since then, these villains of American consciousness have labored under a variety of epithets: ?parlor pinks,? ?Mercedes Marxists,? ?men in striped pants.? In each iteration, what seems to drive the attacks is not only the tincture of hypocrisy but the unrestrained confidence with which such liberals express their expert views. In that sense, Frank?s fuming at the smug knowledge workers of Boston might have come straight from the pages of National Review, circa either 1955 or 2015.

Fraser does not deny a certain reality behind the ?limousine liberal? image. ?Limousine liberalism was never a myth,? he writes, however ?absurd and scurrilous? the political rhetoric may have been. Something did change beginning in the early 20th century, as the complexities of modern society began to demand new forms of expertise and new institutions to coordinate them. Resentment of ?limousine liberals? is nothing less than a reaction to the modern condition, Fraser argues, though some politicians have more effectively navigated its challenges than others. Franklin Roosevelt managed to transcend his patrician upbringing to emerge as a genuine champion of the ?little man? ? and to become enormously popular while doing it.

Fraser agrees with Frank that the Democratic Party can no longer reasonably claim to be the party of the working class or the ?little man.? Instead, he argues, the Republican and Democratic parties now represent two different elite constituencies, each with its own culture and interests and modes of thought. Fraser describes today?s Republicans as the party of ?family capitalism,? encompassing everyone from the mom-and-pop business owner on up to ?entrepreneurial maestros? such as the Koch brothers, Linda McMahon and Donald Trump. The Democrats, by contrast, represent the managerial world spawned by modernity, including the big universities and government bureaucracies as well as ?techno frontiersmen? like Mark Zuckerberg and Bill Gates. These are two different ways of relating to the world ? one cosmopolitan and interconnected, the other patriarchal and hierarchical. Neither one, however, offers much to working-class voters.

One liberal whose reputation still seems to be up for grabs is Barack Obama, now on his way out of office and into the history books. Frank gives Obama a middling-to-poor grade ? something in the D range, let?s say ? for what he deems to be the president?s vague and rambling answer to the ?social question.? Frank compares Obama unfavorably with Franklin Roose�velt, another Democratic president who inherited an economic crisis from his Republican predecessor. Roosevelt took advantage of the Great Depression to reshape American society in fundamental ways, introducing social welfare and labor protections that shifted real power into the hands of the middle and working classes. (Frank largely gives Roosevelt a pass on the New Deal?s own structural inequalities, including its exclusions of women and nonwhite workers.) Obama, by contrast, let the crisis go ?to waste,? according to Frank, tweaking around the regulatory edges without doing anything significant to change the economic balance of power. ?Our economy has been reliving the 1930s,? Frank mourns. ?Why hasn?t our politics??

Part of the answer may be that our economy did not, in fact, relive the 1930s. By the time Roosevelt won his first presidential election, the economy had been in free-fall for more than three years and the stock market had lost nearly 90 percent of its value. Three years into the Great Recession, the stock market had begun its climb toward record highs, though that prosperity failed to trickle down to the middle and working classes. Frank sees this uneven recovery as a tragedy rather than a triumph, in which Obama ?saved a bankrupt system that by all rights should have met its end.? He says little, however, about what sort of system might have replaced it, or about what working-class voters themselves might say that they want or need. In a book urging Democrats to pay attention to working-class concerns, there are decidedly few interviews with working people, and a lot of time spent on tech conferences and think tanks and fancy universities.

Perhaps as a result, Frank?s book ends on a pessimistic note. After two decades of pleading with liberals to think seriously about inequality, to honor what was best about the New Deal, Frank has concluded that things will probably continue to get worse. ?The Democrats have no interest in reforming themselves in a more egalitarian way,? he writes. ?There is little the rest of us can do, given the current legal arrangements of this country, to build a vital third-party movement or to revive organized labor.?

But this conclusion, too, may rest on a faulty analogy with the 1930s. Franklin Roosevelt did not suddenly decide on his own to enact Social Security or grant union rights. Those ideas came up from below, through decades of frustration and struggle and conflict. If Americans want something different from their politicians, there is no alternative to this kind of exhausting and uncertain hard work. In the end, it is the only way that liberals ? or conservatives ? will listen.

(It's funny because it's written by a Historian from Yale)

Previous Book Club Post: http://sensibleendowment.com/section.php/25

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[by lilmookieesquire@5:02pmGMT]

Comments

mechavolt said @ 10:12pm GMT on 31st May [Score:4 Underrated]

Like steele, this book was a punch in the gut. It made me reevaluate some of my own positions, like pushing for increased education access. It's essentially the liberal "pull yourself up by your bootstraps" argument -- go to college, get a degree, and you're assured success. And if you aren't successful, then you obviously picked the wrong degree. And it's still the same old argument -- we as a society will only help you succeed if you "earn it", and the definition of how to "earn it" keeps expanding. Work hard. Get a degree. Intern for free. Work overtime. Suck up to your boss. Get another degree because your promotion potential is limited. It never ends. We're all still stuck in the mindset of providing ways for the shit upon to trudge the same paths we already did, after we've shuttered the gates behind us by taking all of the existing jobs and rendering the value of an education ever smaller. I'm thinking more and more that social programs need to be designed to help first, provide the basic minimums, let people live their lives without fear of eviction and bankruptcy, and that is what allows people to thrive and do the things to better society. Let the person who wants to go to college go, but don't force everyone into a one-size-fits-all hand-me-down.

evil_eleet said @ 10:26pm GMT on 31st May [Score:1 laz0r]

This is why I'm for Basic Income. There are too many people out there that wouldn't benefit from going to college. It's just not for everyone. College should be free, but it's not the ultimate solution to all the fast food workers and truck drivers that automation is going to be making obsolete very soon. We need to start working towards a post scarcity society and Basic Income is a major step.

Dalillama said @ 7:12pm GMT on 1st Jun [Score:1 Insightful]

I think we should absolutely pay for college for everyone to the extent of their desire and ability, but that's got nothing to do with improving the economy; I just think that education is a positive thing. The problem with neoliberalism is that it fundamentally ignores certain realities: The Republican version says: Work hard, climb the ladder, become an executive. Problem:There's a lot more people out there than there are executive positions to be had for any amount of work or luck or asskissing. The Democratic version is "Go to college, get a degree, train to be a lawyer or a nurse, then you'll make more money". Problem: The economy can only support so many lawyers and nurses, because somebody still needs to grow the food, make the electronics, staff the stores, maintain the roads, build the structures, etc. or you don't have a damn economy anymore.

steele said @ 6:05pm GMT on 30th May [Score:1 Underrated]

Keep in mind the NYT review was written by a historian at Yale and is basically the target of Listen, Liberal's pleas.

This book was like a punch in the gut, it made me realize that even thinking the majority of politicians were corporate tools, I had likely been given them too much credit by way of attributing incompetence when likely I was actually seeing strategy. Frank's argument brings organizations like SpaceX into a new light as our own nation's space program is marginalized and constantly put on the budget back burner with preference being given to private organizations. And private charities like the Gates Foundation and Zuckerberg's act as tax havens that tell us 'Rich people are more suited to decide how money should be spent than your government.'

We now seem to have acquired two 'pull your self up by your own bootstraps, big government is bad' political parties with the difference largely being who funds them and who they sucker in to vote for them. One thing is for sure though, those of us who aren't fortunate to be among the top 10% are screwed.

Dalillama said^[1] @ 12:05am GMT on 31st May [Score:1 Sad]

That leads to an interesting question about what we mean by competence; the fact is that they deliberately and with forethought embarked on a course that anyone could see would lead to serious problems in both the immediate and long-term future. In my book, that is incompetence: Deliberately choosing a shitty option when a good one is available.

hellboy said @ 1:23am GMT on 31st May [Score:4 Underrated]

Serious problems for who? The Democratic leadership doesn't want to fix the system, they like it just fine the way it is.

raphael_the_turtle said @ 1:42pm GMT on 31st May [Score:1 Underrated]

If Clinton wins this thing I have a feeling we're going to be hearing the word Globalization a lot for the next four years. But at least all those people who wont be able to afford children because they've been replaced by a robot or a Third World slave will be able to legally get abortions.

sanepride said @ 3:22am GMT on 1st Jun

Maybe less children is the best outcome anyway.

lilmookieesquire said @ 4:42am GMT on 1st Jun [Score:1 Sad]

Or we could just have a nice old fashioned war like we used to.

lilmookieesquire said @ 4:43am GMT on 1st Jun

Everyone is employed when you have a jolly good war!

raphael_the_turtle said @ 11:17am GMT on 1st Jun

Sure, just ask Japan.

hellboy said^[1] @ 2:01am GMT on 10th Jun [Score:1 Good]

I'm only a couple chapters in and it's already infuriating. I like the point about the Dems' shift to supporting the professional class - I was aware they had ditched the working class in favor of more affluent voters but hadn't heard it expressed that way before. And the drawbacks of the professional meritocracy are well described and thought-provoking (for me especially, as someone who regarded meritocracy as a good thing). I particularly like Frank's scorn for economists and their aversion to accountability (bunch of fucking astrologers they are).

The point about education is very insightful - I remember noticing when I lived in Europe years ago that while they (Sweden, Germany, etc) valued education highly and made a quality education easily available to everyone, it wasn't all about going to university. Many people went to excellent vocational schools, and there didn't seem to be any shame in that, unlike in the US (where "shop class" is a synonym for "short bus").

I do think a comprehensive higher education is to the benefit of society as a whole, but ever since my experience in Europe I've thought that higher education didn't need to be aimed at white collar jobs to be valuable. We need firefighters and carpenters and plumbers just as much as we need doctors and lawyers, and if those blue collar workers can speak two or more languages and know about Occam's Razor, so much the better.

Speaking of astrologers, I stumbled across this quote as I was writing this comment (don't know if Frank uses it, but he must have read it at least):

The only function of economic forecasting is to make astrology look respectable. - John Kenneth Galbraith

HoZay said @ 2:40am GMT on 10th Jun

I'm also only partway through the book. Maybe you can help me clarify my thinking. Frank says the democratic party turned its back on the working man by abandoning labor in favor of minorities and women. So why was labor resistant to helping minorities and women? Why doesn't "workers" include everybody? It seemed to me that the white working class abandoned the party because racism and belligerent patriotism were more important to them than protecting their economic interests through solidarity.
Becoming the party of equal rights for everybody, I think, was the right thing to do. Losing the support of white blue collar workers sucks, but it's them turning their back on the party, not the other way around.

hellboy said @ 9:29am GMT on 10th Jun

Hmm, good question. I'll try to remember to post my thoughts when I get to that part.

steele said @ 1:18pm GMT on 10th Jun

Why are you speaking of "becoming the party of equal rights for everybody" as if that was why they changed? 10 years ago much of the Democratic party was against gay marriage. 20 years ago most of them were against gays in general. 25 years ago they were passing legislation that disproportionately targeted african-americans.

Saying "becoming the party of equal rights for everybody was the right thing to do" is like congratulating brownies for transforming themselves from flour. You're attributing the end result to the will of the party without acknowledging the external forces that manifested those changes. If a party's social platform is constantly adapting (not leading, adapting) to their voter base while their fiscal platform is constantly regressing (at the expense of that same voter base, no less!) to their financiers, they're not adapting out of benevolence, they're pandering.

How does this sound? "I'm glad the southern plantations became the freer of slaves, I think it was the right thing to do. Losing the labor of the black workers sucked, but it was them turning their back on the plantations, not the other way around." And before you balk, you could get away with saying that in the southern states and be taken seriously. There are people who would find you insightful and would buy you a beer to hear more of your wisdom.

The issue is not that they turned their back on the working class in favor of minorities and women, the issue is that they are playing at a culture war while actively waging a class war against their voter base.

HoZay said @ 4:36am GMT on 11th Jun

But the party did change, and continues to change. If you have a civil rights problem that needs a political solution, which of the available political parties provides a means to achieve the solution? And of course the party changed because activists forced the change, civil rights demonstrations, campus unrest, riots, boycotts, etc all led to political crises. The democratic party responded to that pressure by generally trying to satisfy the needs of those left out of the system, not perfectly, but to a much greater extent than the republican party. It's always been about coalitions jostling each other, not a central committee.

My question was why so many of the white working class opted out of the party as its membership expanded to include other demographics. They were ok with social security, the GI bill, FHA loans, state-supported colleges, etc as long as it was mostly just for white people, but they became fiscal conservatives when these benefits were extended to others. Is there an explanation for that besides racism?

Like I say, I haven't read the whole book yet, but I wondered about that.

steele said @ 2:23pm GMT on 11th Jun

Hozay, the culture war is a distraction from inequality, it is the epitome of divide and conquer. At the same time the democratic party is playing at a culture war on their side, the republicans are doing the same thing on their side. And you know the number one enemy in a culture war? It's not the billionaires who perpetuate the system that encourages the inequality, it's the average white man who is made to feel guilty for benefits that he's not even aware that he has. The culture war is dangling these benefits in front of the different groups blaming the average white man while it's the upper classes holding the stick that the benefits dangle from. Is it any wonder that the working white man would coalesce around a party that's perpetuating the opposite angle?

Doesn't matter which party started it, both parties are taking advantage of it to further their economic ideologies. That's why it's so important to recognize that the relative (because it is relative, what a liberal sees as progress is regress to a conservative and vice versa) social advances in either party aren't a result of the parties leading the way, but as concessions to whatever the overall will of the voter base happens to be.

Look at the attacks that were made on Bernie Sander's campaign, the guy is basically saying (over and over again) the billionaires need to stop cheating their taxes so we can lift everybody out of poverty and yet in response, just by the various leftist groups, he's been called racist, sexist, homophobic, and then repeatedly touted by the media as someone who only connects with white people. The guy is trying to defend 90%+ of the US population in a class war but he's being shit on by the culture war via the very people he's trying to defend.

Finish this book, then check out Dark Money by Jane Mayer and Nixonland by Rick Perlstein to get an idea of how the culture war is being played on the right while everything in Listen Liberal is going on. Also if you haven't read Zinn's 'A People history of the United States (sorry, lrdcthulu) it gives a pretty good rundown of the fight against inequality that both Parties try to ignore.

Oh, and keep in mind the Unions are for the most part still supporting the Democratic party for those social reasons, while consistently being screwed over by the Free Trade Agreements of the Democratic Party's fiscal ideologies. If that's not a perfect example of the Party's priorities, I don't know what is.

lrdcthulu said @ 6:49pm GMT on 11th Jun

Read all of those books that Steele suggested.

steele said @ 7:55pm GMT on 11th Jun

Have I missed anything? The one thing I did find aggravating about Dark Money is that it didn't really cover any of the shit the Democratic Party pulls so it just paints the left as victims. If you could combine Listen Liberal with Dark Money it would give a.much clearer picture of what we're dealing with.

mechavolt said @ 12:03am GMT on 11th Jun

Because the working class and the professional class want different things. The working class wants financial protections. And the professional class cares about social equality, as long as it doesn't affect the financial balance. And since the Democratic Party caters to the professional class, they focus more on those social equality pushes (which are good, don't get me wrong) and ignore the unions and worker rights side of things. Look at it this way: what does legalizing gay marriage do for an out of work blue collar person? And if the party you're "supposed" to be with doesn't give a shit about you because they care so much about gay people...well, it's not so hard to see where some people might no longer associate with the Democratic Party -- not necessarily because they're bigots and "turned their backs" on the party, but because they have other priorities than civil rights.

HoZay said @ 4:56am GMT on 11th Jun

How does legalizing gay marriage have any impact on an out of work blue collar person? I don't get the conflict there. Also, having other priorities than civil rights - those priorities don't seem to be economic. They vote for people who are anti-union, anti minimum wage, and against spending on infrastructure jobs.

mechavolt said^[1] @ 12:52pm GMT on 11th Jun

Legalizing gay marriage doesn't have any impact on an out of work blue collar person, that's the point. If you were a blue collar worker, would you support the party that pushes an agenda that has little bearing on your day to day life and survival, or support the party that is actively courting you and saying they'll help you out, even if it's only because you're white?

HoZay said @ 3:31pm GMT on 11th Jun

They can actually do two things at once. I would vote for the party that wants to build highways and bridges rather than the party that wants to cut government jobs. Unless homophobia or racism were more important to me than increasing jobs. The White South started turning away from the democrats in the sixties, well before any offshoring of jobs or DLC intrigues. And they turned against big government at the same time they started sending their kids to private white schools.

lrdcthulu said @ 6:48pm GMT on 11th Jun

It's because the Republicans pioneered a political strategy based on conniving people that the most important thing to base voting on was not pure economic policy (i.e, which party's policies will help people like me), but rather loosely defined 'values' (i.e. which party stands up for people like me and the things I believe in.)

So, in effect, Republicans were able to change political and electoral discussions in America from, "What's a smart set of policies to adopt that benefit people" to "Vote for us, because Democrats are elitist liberals who want to make America over in their image.

Since the 1970's, Republicans in the South especially were told by consultants to focus not on economic issues, but on the trifecta that would draw in conservative voters - "God, Guns and Gays." I have dozens of books that make this point over and over - the idea was to convince people that the GOP stood for bigger things than just narrow economic questions, and then get them into the voting booth.

See also, gay marriage, bathroom bills, everytime Fox News complains that Obama likes lattes or arugula, etc.

Two good books about this specifically are Thomas Frank's "What's the Matter with Kansas?"
and Rick Perlstein's "Nixonland" (part two of a trilogy with "Before the Storm" and "The Invisible Bridge."

HoZay said @ 10:00pm GMT on 11th Jun

So white workers turned against democrats not because of the dems economic policy, but because the republicans consistently appealed the their racism and xenophobia?

lrdcthulu said @ 7:03pm GMT on 12th Jun

'Status anxiety'. There was also the leftward drift of the democratic party in the 1960s. Remember that the Democrats were a coalition of intrest groups, so when the liberal north wing grained preeminence, the Republicans began aggressively courting the white working class, who were more economically than socially liberal. (And by economically liberal, I mean "in support of policies that benefited them.) Those were the voters that the Republicans sold the culture war to.

lrdcthulu said @ 7:07pm GMT on 12th Jun

Think of it as a bait and switch - the 70s happened and the GOP said "liberal economic policies dont work. Also, the bigger problem is that Democrats have alien values." So all of the sudden, we're talking about school prayer, etc.

lrdcthulu said @ 6:40pm GMT on 11th Jun

Bear in mind that when you say workers, you're generalizing a huge class of people that has ethnic, social and economic divisions that the collective term glazes over.

And remember, high skill, high wage labor always is skeptical of low skill low wage labor. Any worker can be convinced to be worried about losing his job to people who will work for less.

steele said @ 4:54pm GMT on 18th Jul

I keep seeing ads for this on facebook. It's like the embodiment of the culture discussed in the book.
Nanodegree Plus - Get a Job Guaranteed!

Those of you familiar with the onslaught of certificate programs in the late 90's/early 00's may remember the market flood that resulted in a dramatic drop in wages for pc techs and other lower level computer administration positions.

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