Actually, society is OK — it seems broken only because we know we can do even better, and (rightly) focus on the bits that still don’t work well — but I agree that it makes no sense to try to blame our least powerful and most vulnerable members for the broken bits.
David Megginson I’d argue it seems better because we have done better in the past, and see the ways it has gotten worse. (Such as gains from productivity switching from going to everyone during the 1950s and 1960s to predominantly going to the rich, powerful people since the 1980s) Still doing better than the 1930s though!
Kevin C. good points, but we’re also doing better than the 50s, 60s, 70s, 80s, and 90s if you consider people who don’t happen to share my gender, skin colour, ancestry (including religious faction), and sexual orientation.
Even within the white, male, hetero community, when I was growing up in Kingston (Ontario, Canada) in the 1970s there was a disproportionate number of English- and Scottish-sounding surnames in the affluent neighbourhoods south of Princess St, and a disproportionate number of Irish- and French-sounding surnames in the much-larger neighbourhoods to the north. While there were many exceptions, you could see that the anti-Catholic/Irish/French bigotry of the 19th century still had a ripple effect: your economic prospects depended to a large degree on which church your great-grandfather attended, where he was born, and what language he spoke.
At the same time, there was a private (not gated, but similar) neighbourhood just to the north of me called Grenville Park, that had been built during the late 1950s and early 1960s. My father (a lawyer) told me that there had originally been a covenant in every deed, agreeing that the current (or future) owner would not resell to Jewish people. I’m not sure when it was struck down.
During 1960s in Canada, it was still legal for a husband to rape his wife. In the 1970s, you could still be sent to prison for being homosexual, and the government was still kidnapping aboriginal children from their families and sending them to residential schools. Until the 2000s, same-sex couples were still forbidden to marry in Canada.
tl;dr — the past may have been better for WASP hetero men like me, but it could be a fucking nightmare for everyone else.
That’s true and good but during the same period social mobility in many countries has ground to a halt and inequality has risen dramatically. The recent past Kevin C. refers to was certainly more racist and homophobic than today but it was also the era when these issues first began to be addressed. It was also the era when many governments invested in infrastructure and education for its populations and oversaw the doubling of real wages which put most of the working class into the middle class. The experience since then has been mainly in the form of the dismantling of those gains.
What’s interesting is that we don’t ever seem to have had a time with (relative) economic equality and (relative) demographic equality (race, gender, sexual orientation, etc). There’s no reason they should be mutually exclusive, but it does suggest an alternative historical narrative.
How does this hold up? (Putting on devil’s advocate robes.) The apparent economic equality after WWII was largely a result of a privileged elite within the working class (white, male, hetero, good union jobs, returning WWII vets, etc) consolidating its own entitlements before rushing to the barricades to keep everyone else out during the civil rights, LGBT rights, women’s rights, etc struggles that were just ramping up.
Certainly, the aging remnants of that generation are the backbone of the GOP today. They hate big government, except when it delivers their own entitlements (from the GI bill after WWII to Medicare and Old Age Security today).
If there’s any validity to that narrative, then we might be genuinely trying something new now, rather than simply fighting to restore what we had 60 years ago.
The situation in the United States is somewhat atypical of the situation elsewhere in the first world because of the endurance of horizontal as well as vertical stratification. This is one of the great unaddressed legacies of slavery in the US and it will continue to divide the American working class. Naturally conservative politicians have made good use of these divisions.
Elsewhere, where social cohesion is less problematic there is little sense that the extension of civil rights to all groups is orthogonal to progress in the condition of working class people in general.
I don’t know how the US is going to deal with this cohesion issue but even there a lot of progress has been made.
Other countries have had different social-cohesion challenges: witness France’s brutal exclusion of its Arab population from most of the fruits of economic and social progress, or England’s sharp divide between a rich, service-based South and an impoverished, post-industrial North.
France is a pretty good example of how not to handle things. The reverberations of its infamous and racist colonial past are going to take years to play out.
Never Stop Posting 
Actually, society is OK — it seems broken only because we know we can do even better, and (rightly) focus on the bits that still don’t work well — but I agree that it makes no sense to try to blame our least powerful and most vulnerable members for the broken bits.
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David Megginson I’d argue it seems better because we have done better in the past, and see the ways it has gotten worse. (Such as gains from productivity switching from going to everyone during the 1950s and 1960s to predominantly going to the rich, powerful people since the 1980s) Still doing better than the 1930s though!
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Kevin C. good points, but we’re also doing better than the 50s, 60s, 70s, 80s, and 90s if you consider people who don’t happen to share my gender, skin colour, ancestry (including religious faction), and sexual orientation.
Even within the white, male, hetero community, when I was growing up in Kingston (Ontario, Canada) in the 1970s there was a disproportionate number of English- and Scottish-sounding surnames in the affluent neighbourhoods south of Princess St, and a disproportionate number of Irish- and French-sounding surnames in the much-larger neighbourhoods to the north. While there were many exceptions, you could see that the anti-Catholic/Irish/French bigotry of the 19th century still had a ripple effect: your economic prospects depended to a large degree on which church your great-grandfather attended, where he was born, and what language he spoke.
At the same time, there was a private (not gated, but similar) neighbourhood just to the north of me called Grenville Park, that had been built during the late 1950s and early 1960s. My father (a lawyer) told me that there had originally been a covenant in every deed, agreeing that the current (or future) owner would not resell to Jewish people. I’m not sure when it was struck down.
During 1960s in Canada, it was still legal for a husband to rape his wife. In the 1970s, you could still be sent to prison for being homosexual, and the government was still kidnapping aboriginal children from their families and sending them to residential schools. Until the 2000s, same-sex couples were still forbidden to marry in Canada.
tl;dr — the past may have been better for WASP hetero men like me, but it could be a fucking nightmare for everyone else.
LikeLike
That’s true and good but during the same period social mobility in many countries has ground to a halt and inequality has risen dramatically. The recent past Kevin C. refers to was certainly more racist and homophobic than today but it was also the era when these issues first began to be addressed. It was also the era when many governments invested in infrastructure and education for its populations and oversaw the doubling of real wages which put most of the working class into the middle class. The experience since then has been mainly in the form of the dismantling of those gains.
LikeLike
What’s interesting is that we don’t ever seem to have had a time with (relative) economic equality and (relative) demographic equality (race, gender, sexual orientation, etc). There’s no reason they should be mutually exclusive, but it does suggest an alternative historical narrative.
How does this hold up? (Putting on devil’s advocate robes.) The apparent economic equality after WWII was largely a result of a privileged elite within the working class (white, male, hetero, good union jobs, returning WWII vets, etc) consolidating its own entitlements before rushing to the barricades to keep everyone else out during the civil rights, LGBT rights, women’s rights, etc struggles that were just ramping up.
Certainly, the aging remnants of that generation are the backbone of the GOP today. They hate big government, except when it delivers their own entitlements (from the GI bill after WWII to Medicare and Old Age Security today).
If there’s any validity to that narrative, then we might be genuinely trying something new now, rather than simply fighting to restore what we had 60 years ago.
LikeLike
The situation in the United States is somewhat atypical of the situation elsewhere in the first world because of the endurance of horizontal as well as vertical stratification. This is one of the great unaddressed legacies of slavery in the US and it will continue to divide the American working class. Naturally conservative politicians have made good use of these divisions.
Elsewhere, where social cohesion is less problematic there is little sense that the extension of civil rights to all groups is orthogonal to progress in the condition of working class people in general.
I don’t know how the US is going to deal with this cohesion issue but even there a lot of progress has been made.
LikeLike
Other countries have had different social-cohesion challenges: witness France’s brutal exclusion of its Arab population from most of the fruits of economic and social progress, or England’s sharp divide between a rich, service-based South and an impoverished, post-industrial North.
LikeLike
France is a pretty good example of how not to handle things. The reverberations of its infamous and racist colonial past are going to take years to play out.
LikeLike