Class and Community

 Marketplace Weekend just aired a revealing segment on Gillette, WY (coal) where life depends on extraction and very un-deplorable people love Trump. They believe w/o him they would be a ghost town. They don't hate anybody; they love their community. I am afraid we liberals have bought into market-idolatry sufficiently to cause us to be too quick to say "just move to where the jobs are."

In other words, stable, human community is a lesser value. I have a theory that part of the medieval/modern paradigm shift was stability/mobility. For moderns/liberals, mobility is fundamental. Go West, Young Man. (Or as Paul Ehrlich put it ) 50 years ago, Foul your nest and move West!  [my emphasis] Geographical mobility served social mobility. I share this value, I must say. I believe in meritocracy. Part of me does. But I returned to MN in favor of stable community. In  that, I share something, I am afraid, with the Appalachian people who distrust education because it leads to children moving away!)

Even though it's fine to observe that the real cause for the decline in coal is not regulation, but cheaper natural gas, and that Gillette's days are numbered anyway, the deeper question for social policy, in my opinion,  is retraining. Turn WV into Silicon Valley. Bring the jobs to the community, rather than dissolving the community to go look for work elsewhere. This means way more economic planning than we are used to.

And this too  is fraught, of course. Snyder's The Road to Unfreedom is required reading; but his first dialectic of civic virtue is individual vs. totality. He knows Berdyaev well enough, perhaps, to recognize the importance of personal community, but the danger of reducing persons to commodities in service of the market must not be underestimated. The freedom to leave home to better oneself can turn into its own kind of slavery. This is a major theme for the  5% of Nashville output that is worth listening to. Among the classics:

What have they done to the old home place?

Why did they they tear it down?

Why did I leave the plow in the field,

  and look for a job in the town? 

It may be too easy to dismiss this as nostalgic sentimentality. It is a real lament for lost community.

To R. Moody on collusion - weekend of August 5, 2018

Hey Rick!

No doubt you are planning this, already, but there must be a ton of analysis about DT's admission that he "colluded" by getting "oppositional research" from a foreign power. The New Yorker thinks this is a real turning point.

My own two cents is that the  matter is just wonky enough to be obfuscatable, and DT is pushing the envelope. ["Everybody does it, it's legal." except it isn't when viewed as  campaign contribution from a foreigner, let alone from a hostile power.] It could be that DT is testing the waters to see how much more he can get away with. He has admitted to something not that different from shooting someone on 5th Avenue. In terms of illegality, it is just as brazen. 

As we know, fascism creeps up on a society. Small offenses become bigger and bigger ones, and we get inured to them. This month's New York Review of Books contains  a remark by a Dutch historian (in the article about global warming called, "the Great Melt") It seems the Dutch papers were full of alarm at the menace  of Nazism in 1933, but by 1938 there was hardly a mention anymore. People got tired of hearing about it. Nothing they could do about it anyway. A kind of variation, perhaps, on the  analogy of the frog in water slowly heating to the boiling point. 

I am nearing the end of Snyder's The Road to Unfreedom. If you haven't read it, please do. He draws on untranslated sources largely unknown in the West. he makes a convincing, and frightening case. Toward the end he predicts an attempted putsch to suspend the coming election. The voter fraud commission may be a trial balloon for that kind of thing, Fortunately, it didn't produce the results he desired.