#WorkingClass #college #labor #unions
"THE COLLEGE-EDUCATED WORKING CLASS
Can a generation of graduates frustrated by their economic prospects change American labor politics?
This is an age of mutinies. For more than a decade in America, they’ve come so thick and fast that they trip over one another: the Tea Party, Occupy, Black Lives Matter, the Resistance, the anti-lockdown protests, the insurrection, the anti-ICE protests. The ur-mutiny, encompassing some of these, provoking and provoked by others, is MAGA. Even in full authoritarian control of the federal government, it still acts like a rioter laying dynamite at the foundation of a decayed establishment.
(. . .)
What is life like for someone born in the 21st century? Your everyday reality is disorienting change—but not the kind that freed Lippmann and his generation to shape their era. Instead, your overwhelming feeling is that the game is rigged against you. You see the old as at best indifferent, if not outright predatory, and lacking the ability or the desire to solve the problems they’ve inflicted on you. The electronic air you breathe crackles with vituperation. Political and media elites hoard status and wealth by keeping you in a perpetual fever of resentment and fury. Meanwhile, tech giants addict you from toddlerhood to devices that alienate you from other people and the natural world, trapping you in a hall of mirrors, until you give up on the idea that truth is even knowable and surrender to the wildest images of unreality. Your sense of your own existence grows fragile, and your job prospects are as precarious as your mental health. Whatever your race or gender, it feels like a liability. The system is a conspiracy against your chance at a decent life.
(. . .)
Perhaps the most important arena of struggle isn’t the internet, where the wars are fought and nothing is achieved except division, but the physical world, where certain problems are common to all ordinary people. Perhaps the deepest conflict is not between red and blue, but between power and powerlessness."
https://archive.ph/WkTRt