Today's Commentary

Imagine the levels (and the various types) of desperation necessary to motivate someone enough to put his life on the line (and the lives of his family and friends) to get back to a 20-dollar-an-hour job that barely gets him by.

Michelle Goldberg (NYT), on how we're getting it upside and backwards:

Lately some commentators have suggested that the coronavirus lockdowns pit an affluent professional class comfortable staying home indefinitely against a working class more willing to take risks to do their jobs.

Writing in The Post, Fareed Zakaria tried to make sense of the partisan split over coronavirus restrictions, describing a “class divide” with pro-lockdown experts on one side and those who work with their hands on the other. On Fox News, Steve Hilton decried a “37 percent work from home elite” punishing “real people” trying to earn a living. In a column titled “Scenes From the Class Struggle in Lockdown,” The Wall Street Journal’s Peggy Noonan wrote: “Here’s a generalization based on a lifetime of experience and observation. The working-class people who are pushing back have had harder lives than those now determining their fate.”

The assumptions underlying this generalization, however, are not based on even a cursory look at actual data. In a recent Washington Post/Ipsos survey, 74 percent of respondents agreed that the “U.S. should keep trying to slow the spread of the coronavirus, even if that means keeping many businesses closed.” Agreement was slightly higher — 79 percent — among respondents who’d been laid off or furloughed.

The rubes are being fooled again. A tiny fraction of well-heeled and well-connected Rube Wranglers have a big double-digit percentage of Americans convinced that it's the "liberal elites" who're fucking them over by keeping them out of work, and not the Rent-Collectors who're fucking them over by goading them into putting their lives on the line in service to a closed-loop Wall Street business universe that they'll never be allowed to participate in at any meaningful level, if at all.

It's the new variation on poor dumb white farm boys getting suckered into fighting and bleeding and dying to support the southern slave-holders' right to own people as property - property those farm boys would never own, and never get the chance to own.

I may get sick - and I may get my mom sick - and we may both die in a gruesome and agonizing way, and if I don't die, I may be saddled with the hospital bills for the rest of my life, and my kids may never get a decent start in life because we can't afford schooling, and there will never be more than an extreme outside chance that I'll be able to retire on anything but an ever-decreasing Social Security benefit - but at least Steve Mnuchin will always have millions of patriots just like me to put a few pennies in his pocket. And that's what's really important to me.