I try. Lord knows how I try. I try to maintain a certain equilibrium about all of my fellow citizens. We're all in this great democratic experiment together, after all. I think we have an obligation as a self-governing democratic republic to make government work best for all our people. I believe in the idea of a political commonwealth, and in the political commons to which we all have a right and in which we all have a stake. Economic anxiety in de-industrialized America is very real and it is a real danger to all of what we can achieve together. It is now, and it was in 1980, when I drove from Youngstown to Toledo to Flint to Grand Rapids as we wound into the election that brought us Ronald Reagan.
(So, by the way, is the intractable poverty of people, working class and otherwise, who are not white.)
So, I try. Lord knows how I try.
But what am I supposed to do when so many of my fellow citizens guzzle snake oil by the gallon and call it champagne?
I think what hangs us up the most is that we're all clinging rather desperately to the Presumption of Regularity. We need something that looks and feels more like normal. So we project that need onto an awful lot of what's going on. Especially with 45* making such forceful and deliberate efforts to vacate the norm.
Add it all up and we're danger-close to a charge of False Consciousness, but what else we got?
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