The View from Flyover Country: Dispatches from the Forgotten America

by Sarah Kendzior

the view from the cracks is a lot clearer than the view from above.

So in the era of the audacity of hope, I made a case for the audacity of despair.

It is easy, when people feel frightened and abandoned, for a demagogue to exploit those feelings of despair for political gain. It is easy for that demagogue to translate fear into fanaticism, to shift extremism into the mainstream and market it under the guise of populism.

These dismissals, which focus on gentrification as culture, ignore that Lee’s was a critique of the racist allocation of resources.

Gentrifiers focus on aesthetics, not people. Because people, to them, are aesthetics. Proponents of gentrification will vouch for its benevolence by noting it “cleaned up the neighborhood.” This is often code for a literal whitewashing.

Hipsters want rubble with guarantee of renewal. They want to move into a memory they have already made.

Rich cities such as New York and San Francisco have become what journalist Simon Kuper calls gated citadels, “vast gated communities where the one percent reproduces itself.”

If you are thirty-five or younger—and quite often, older—the advice of the old economy does not apply to you. You live in the post-employment economy, where corporations have decided not to pay people. Profits are still high. The money is still there. But not for you. You will work without a pay raise, benefits, or job security. Survival is now a laudable aspiration.

So what can you do? You can work your hardest and do your best. You can organize and push for collective change. You can hustle and scrounge and play the odds. But when you fall, know that millions are falling with you. Know that it is, to a large extent, out of your hands. And when you see someone else falling, reach out your hands to catch them.

This is not a solution. Not a good answer to "what can you do?"

In one of the wealthiest countries in the world, privation should not come with the job description, and survival should not be an aspiration.

Journalist David Dennis argues that requiring unpaid internships shuts out voices from poor communities by denying those who hail from them the ability to work:

Most Americans associate the march with Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech and call for racial harmony. They remember half of the targeted “twin evils” of racism and economic deprivation. They remember the freedom, and forget the jobs. But the two are inseparable.

The problem in America is not that there are no jobs. It is that jobs are not paying.

During the recession, American companies found an effective new way to boost profits. It was called “not paying people.” “Not paying people” tends to be justified in two ways: a fake crisis (“Unfortunately, we can’t afford to pay you at this time…”) or a false promise (“Working for nearly nothing now will get you a good job later”). In reality, profits are soaring and poorly compensated labor tends to lead to more poorly compensated labor. Zero-opportunity employers are refusing to pay people because they can get away with it.

One can see the truth of King’s equation of income and rights in the powerlessness of low-wage workers to change their situation. Wages are not corresponding to demand or credentials. In a post-employment economy, wages are both arbitrary and fixed.

The Americans who serve their country the most

I hate this bullshit framing. Surprised she uses it. What's the formula for determining who "serves the country the most"?

Poverty is a denial of rights sold as a character flaw.

People not only fall through the cracks, they live in the cracks as a full-time occupation. The view from the cracks is a lot clearer than the view from above. When you look down on people, they stop being people. But when you watch from below, you see how easy it is to fall.

Today the 1990s feel like a dream only because the nightmare they created became ordinary. In the decade to come, the tabloid would become gospel, the social fabric sewn from the lunatic fringe. Radical polarization became rote. America went crazy and never went back.

American ideology has long tilted between individualism and Calvinism. What happened to you was either supposed to be in your control—the “pull yourself up by your bootstraps” approach—or divinely arbitrated. You either jumped, or you were meant to fall. Claims you were pushed, or you were born so far down you could not climb up, were dismissed as excuses of the lazy. This is the way many saw their world before it collapsed.

When wealth is passed off as merit, bad luck is seen as bad character. This is how ideologues justify punishing the sick and the poor.

As journalist Kevin Drum observes, in every previous recession, government spending rose. In this recession, they cut benefits, food stamps, jobs. They cut and blame us when we bleed.

When the most you can ask from your society is that it will spare you, you have no society of which to speak.

The outreach for Batkid was celebrated as a triumph of the human spirit. But what it demonstrated is how much better society could be if generosity were consistently applied toward all, instead of concentrated into brief celebratory affairs.

Charity, as a supplement to justice, should be applauded. But charity as a substitute for justice is neither charity nor justice. It is cruelty.

Fiscal stability that relies on gifts is not stability. It is a guarantee of insecurity: income based not on work but on whim. Capricious generosity is not a replacement for a living wage, nor is it a basis for a functioning society. Charity is no substitute for justice.

Pawnshops and payday loans are the flip side of the United States’ turn to charity over justice. Both phenomena speak to a seemingly permanent impermanence: the replacement of a reliable salary for hard work, with high-cost gambles and unpredictable donations.

Mobility is but a memory. “The life prospects of an American are more dependent on the income and education of his parents than in almost any other advanced country for which there is data,” writes economist Joseph E. Stiglitz in an editorial aptly titled “Equal Opportunity, Our National Myth.”

Corporate feminists like Sheryl Sandberg frame female success as a matter of attitude. But it is really a matter of money—or the lack thereof.

One might assume that rising privation would increase public empathy toward minorities long denied a semblance of a fair shot. But instead, overt racism and racial barriers in America have increased since the recession. Denied by the Supreme Court, invalidated in the eyes of many by the election of a black president, racism erases the individual until the individual is dead, where he is then recast as the enemy.

Such a perspective confuses what free speech does with what free speech means. Free speech allows people to insult and berate each other, but that is not what most people want, and it is rarely what makes freedom of speech attractive to those who do not have it. Those forced to live in countries without free speech know that one of its greatest values is that it allows citizens to speak the truth about their position, to contest false depictions, to refute bias and slander.

Free speech does not mean deferring to people’s right to abuse you.

In academia, the ability to prohibit scholarship is considered more meaningful than the ability to produce it.

“Publish or perish” has long been an academic maxim. In the digital economy, “publish and perish” may be a more apt summation. What academics gain in professional security, they lose in public relevance, a sad fate for those who want their research appreciated and understood.

What I did not understand is that academic publishing is not about sharing ideas. It is about removing oneself from public scrutiny while scrambling for professional security. It is about making work “count” with the few while sequestering it from the many.

People who have the ability to do this are not dispensable. They should not see themselves this way, and they should not be treated this way. Fight for what you are worth, adjuncts. Success is solidarity.

Stupid, throwaway ending. If you don't have any solutions to offer, at least have the decency to skip the hollow rhetoric.

Academics love to complain about superficial reporting or uninformed policy, but their own system denies professionals the opportunity to add depth to their work.

In the fourteen years since Bobos was published, elites have done much to guarantee their children’s security. Namely, they have raised the price of the credentials needed to participate in the new meritocracy by such dramatic measures that it locks out a large part of the population while sending nearly everyone else into debt.

College does not guarantee a job. It is debatable whether college—in a time of defunded and eliminated programs, rampant grade inflation, and limited student-professor interaction—offers much of an education, at least one for which it is worth taking on significant debt. So why go? People go to college because not going to college carries a penalty. College is a purchased loyalty oath to an imagined employer. College shows you are serious enough about your life to risk ruining it early on. College is a promise the economy does not keep—but not going to college promises you will struggle to survive.

Credentialism is economic discrimination disguised as opportunity.

salaried Slate columnist Matthew Yglesias

of course

The problem in journalism is not that people are writing for free. It is that people are writing for free for companies that are making a profit. It is that people are doing the same work and getting paid radically disparate wages. It is that corporations making record earnings will not allocate their budgets to provide menial compensation to the workers who make them a success.

“The medium is the message,” Marshall McLuhan famously said.

Absolutely no reason to drop this quote here.

“In essence, those who aspire to affect one of the most important aspects of our nation—our relationship to the rest of the world—are part of a self-selecting community of those whose families are wealthy enough for them to develop credentials and connections.” Money, not gender, is the biggest barrier to a career in international relations, or any prestige industry. It eliminates the bulk of the talent pool from the start.

This is not to say that paranoia is always unjustified. But it has become a weltanschauung instead of a reaction.

Suspicion of surveillance can be as poisonous to a functioning democracy as surveillance itself.

“Sometimes paranoia’s just having all the facts,” wrote William S. Burroughs. And sometimes paranoia is the broken belief that having the facts is possible.

Paranoia is aggression masked as defense.

Paranoia is the refusal to recognize others except as filtered through ourselves—and how do Americans see themselves? Afraid, afraid, afraid.

But the deeper fear, the real sadness, is that ordinary people are insignificant to the government, and that those in power are indifferent to our fate. You do not need a database to watch Americans suffer.