I can’t speak for the rest of the country, but from what I’ve seen around here, the white working class is quite used to feeling abandoned. Liberals are seen as the sort of people who would never get their hands dirty and who disdain blue collar jobs of any kind, instead gravitating towards elite positions at universities or jobs in government or public policy where they can tell their inferiors what to do. While the universities are filled with the latter, local community colleges are inundated with white working class kids seeking to obtain for themselves what they failed to get from the public schools: basic literacy and numeracy — and job skills which are of actual use in the real world.
Aside from the irony that anyone with a high school degree should have to go to college in order to learn to read and write, a perfect example of a valuable real-world skill is welding. Public school teachers (who reflect the view of the educrat class) tend to hold such “dirty” and “dangerous” work in disdain, and they steer kids away from it. Guidance counselors attempt to push them into universities where they go into a lifetime of debt for worthless degrees that impart zero job skills. But some of the kids are smarter than that. They realize that if you have a skill that is worth something in the real world, you can actually feed your family.
They also know something that the Occupy movement (often holders of useless degrees) has missed: that the educational system’s institutional bias against promoting real world skills has led to shortages — in some instances not of jobs, but of skilled workers to fill them. Such as welders.
I have to take exception to his use of the term “liberal” here, because what he is really talking about are progressives. Many FDR/New Deal liberals are blue-collar liberals and they aren’t ashamed to work with their hands nor do they sneer at people who do.
Today’s progressives have contempt for the working class and think physical labor is beneath them. They talk about workers as a bloc of voters to be wooed and led, but not as equal partners.
Listen to them talk when they are defending illegal immigration – they claim we need illegal immigrants because American workers are too lazy to perform those jobs. Does that sound like someone who respects the working class?
Filed under: Economy, Education | Tagged: Classism, Economy, Education | 55 Comments »
