At 02:05 PM 4/7/98 -0700, Pat Buchanan wrote:
>But unbridled capitalism is also an awesome
>destructive force. It makes men and women obsolete as rapidly as it does
>the products they produce and the plants that employ them. And the people
>made obsolete and insecure are workers, employees, "Reagan Democrats,"
>rooted people, conservative people who want to live their lives and raise
>their families in the same neighborhoods they grew up in.
What makes Buchanan a right-wing demagogue is not so much the fact that his
chameleonic political career exposes him as a fraud, but the fact that the
segment of the electorate he claims to be speaking for -- "rooted people ...
who want to live their lives and raise their families in the same
neighborhoods they grew up in" probably describes about 1/10 of the voting
population, if not
less. The U.S. has long been a society where not only work but family, leisure,
neighborhood, and other facets of "everyday life" have been to greater and
lesser degrees really subsumed by capital. Believe you me, in the 50's and
60's before deindustrialization Midwestern factory towns where all the guys
drank shots or played softball after the shift and every household borrowed
sugar from one another was the exception, not the rule. The liberal-left in the
U.S. falls into this trap w/its sloppy and gratuitous use of the term
"community." There are "communities" of e-mail chat groups and prime time t.v.
viewers and Dallas Cowboy fans but there are not "communities" based on tight-
knit, reciprocal structures of work, play, family, and so on, and their erosion
(quite thankfully from a feminist perspective) did not begin just when GM laid
off hundreds of thousands of line workers in 1991. I would reckon that most
"working families" (another bogus "heartland" term), for good or for bad,
would rather have horizontal mobility and increased wages for trips to
Disneyland and Las Vegas and increased pensions for retirement in a leisuretown
in Arizona or Florida rather than a return to some imagined past.
John Gulick
