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.