May 2, 2023

As liberals got better educated their gap with those they’re trying to reach grew

 Sam Smith - As someone who has been involved in progressive causes since the 1960s and the son of someone who served in the Roosevelt administration, I have become aware of something not much recognized by liberals. Namely as they have improved their own educational and economic status they have increased the gap between themselves and those they are trying to serve.

As I young guy I took lessons from labor union organizers, black civil rights activists and others who were doing their work on the street. I was better educated and better off than many of them, but I soon learned that was something that didn't impress them and so I tried to learn how to think and talk like them.

I have been increasingly struck by how little such an approach has impact these days. Liberals consider themselves wiser than others and don't mind trying to make others realize it. The problem is that this doesn't help their goals, especially as Republicans have developed a con job approach to organizing, pretending to be representing ordinary citizens rather than the economic elite. 

The problem has even affected labor unions as illustrated in this summary of a book by Kevin Boyle about the UAW:

Current political observers castigate organized labor as more interested in winning generous contracts for workers than in fighting for social change. The UAW and the Heyday of American Liberalism offers a compelling reassessment of labor's place in American politics in the post-World War II era. The United Automobile Workers, Kevin Boyle demonstrates, was deeply involved in the pivotal political struggles of those years, from the fight for full employment to the battle for civil rights, from the anticommunist crusade to the war on poverty. The UAW engaged in these struggles in an attempt to build a cross-class, multiracial reform coalition that would push American politics beyond liberalism and toward social democracy. The effort was in vain; forced to work within political structures - particularly the postwar Democratic party - that militated against change, the union was unable to fashion the alliance it sought. The UAW's political activism nevertheless suggests a new understanding of labor's place in postwar American politics and of the complex forces that defined liberalism in that period.

I got thinking about all this in part because today I'll be on zoom at a meeting of liberal activists discussing reparations as a major and favorable course of action. As an old time liberal I've never like reparations, in part because my approach to change includes helping those you want to change see the value in it for themselves as well as others. Reparations are a punishment of those you're trying to reach for sins that aren't even being committed anymore. To a former academic student of slavery, it may seem just the right thing, but to an old fashioned activist it strikes me as going against the very group you're trying to change.

I've noticed this shift not only in politics. For example, I've been on the board of some wonderful non-profits and discovered something I had never thought about before: intellectually and financially you may be directed to the needs and opinions of funders but to make everything work right you have to keep up the enthusiasm of the ordinary folk served by your operation. I realized that I had run into this at my first job out of college. Working in radio news, I found that the station had two audiences: listeners and advertisers. Similarly non-profits often have two constituencies: funders and and the folks you're serving. And you can't ignore the latter just because your money comes from the former.  

It struck me that, once again, being a reporter had given me a different take on how things work. As a reporter you are constantly talking to and writing about those strikingly different from yourself. You learn how varied are the perspectives around you. And how my college professors only taught me about a few of them.

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