The War Zone and the Circus

The vegetable stand is closed and we’re less than 30 days out from the winter solstice— the darkest and shortest day of the year.  Old Man Winter (he, him, his) readies the icey cudgel / lickin’ stick for its annual application to the collective New Englander backside.

It’s tough love and timely in this season of doom-ish foreboding. As the warmest year in recorded human times slithers into the record books, the Conference of the Parties C.O.P.-outers cavort by the Caspian, and the downwardly-mobile US working class grimly confronts a failed political/economic system engineered to leave it adrift and utterly without power…….. maybe a look-back is useful.

In the election’s aftermath I stumbled across some of Thomas Frank’s political analysis published years ago in the UK Guardian.

Frank has been writing for years about the Democratic party’s abandonment of the working class. In What’s the Matter with Kansas? (2004) he examined the history of his home state; its fiery 19th century past on the front-lines of the abolitionist movement (“Bloody Kansas”), its 20th century populism as a New Deal stalwart, and its electoral present: “…the greatest culture-war battlefield…. as its workers and farmers enlist in futile right-wing crusades over abortion and the theory of evolution….(Meanwhile) the Republican Party successfully strengthens corporations in their simultaneous war against workers and farmers—— How has this happened?” he asks.  Author Rick Perlstein sums-up the hustle Frank describes as “Bread and circuses without the bread.”

Given the increasingly bleak prospects for the American majority with its mounting hunger, homelessness, falling life expectancies, medical debt, student debt, and dead-end STEM-Adjacent gig “life-style”——— what some comfortable commentators bemoan as “resentment” is well-warranted.

On November 6, 2016 Frank’s Guardian column headlined, “The Republicans and Democrats failed blue-collar America. The left-behind are now having their say.”

Frank observed, that Trump, despite his millions, his private jet, and his gold plated penthouse had “somehow made himself into the voice of the downwardly mobile millions.” A neat trick, and only possible since there really was no credible opposition from the anointed Democratic nominee Hillary (“It’s My Turn”) Clinton.

https://orbooks.com/catalog/my-turn/

In his Kansas book, Frank detailed how Bill Clinton had successfully passed the Reagan/Bush NAFTA treaty, weakened labor, ended “welfare as we knew it,” and vastly increased prison populations (the Prison-Industrial Complex). As a “New” Democrat—— a founding member of the “Democratic Leadership Council,” Clinton cultivated funding from corporations and Wall Street rivaling (or exceeding) the Republicans.

Noting the “class grievance” against the “modern-day Democratic party—liberals, meritocrats, and plutocrats,” he identified a location where some of them hang out: “Martha’s Vineyard.…… It is a place of yachts and celebrities and fussy shrubbery…. The markers of lifestyle enlightenment are all around you: foods are organic. Clothing is tasteful. A conspicuous absence of cigarette butts.”

High profile endorsers of the smoldering Harris candidacy do reside there.  Recently Homes & Gardens featured a “Tour (of) Barack and Michelle Obama’s Martha’s Vineyard home…”

The  sub-head confides, “The luxury estate pays homage to its prestigious zip code——comprising soothing neutral interiors and a verdant yard overlooking the Atlantic.”

Purchased in 2020 for $11.75 million, the 28 acre ocean-front compound “….is a trove of pared-back coastal decor inspiration and comes complete with a detached barn and a large swimming pool.”

Other rich and famous residents include media producer/ Wall Street “player” Jeffery Kramer, celebs Spike Lee, and Oprah Winfrey.

Set against these Vineyard Blues, Frank recalls the party’s former constituents. “When I think of men I’ve known who work in factories, I often think of a group of locked-out workers I met in Decatur, Illinois, in 1994, during the early days of the Clinton administration.” Union workers were then locked-out at the Staley (corn starch) plant, while Caterpillar and Firestone workers were on strike. Workers referred to Decatur as The War-Zone. There were national solidarity actions throughout the US. Video from Decatur ran on access channels back here, back then.

Workers framing Decatur as a War-Zone,  Frank argued, revealed they understood that  “capitalism had declared war on blue-collar prosperity itself. As a locked-out worker told me in 1994, after reflecting on industrial struggles of the past: Now it’s our turn. And if we don’t do it, then the middle class as we know it in this country will die. There will be two classes…. The very very poor and the very very rich.” (See Guardian, 11/6/16)

Further, Frank reported….”in 1946 big business and executives in Decatur earned a little more than two times as much as the town’s wage workers.”  By 2014 “The CEO of Caterpillar, the focus of the ‘war-zone’ strikes made 486 times as much. Caterpillar’s share price, meanwhile, is roughly 10 times what it was at the time of the strike,” (Guardian, 11/6/16)

Abandoning workers, the Ds “went from being the party of Decatur to the party of Martha’s Vineyard.”

November’s failing light reveals the circus is in town.

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