Misguided by barren abstract concepts

Why Don’t the Poor Rise Up? by Thomas B. Edsall

Some excellent material in this column. Rather than address particulars, I want to use Edsall's comments as a starting point.

I think Edsall is dancing around an issue I have been cogitating about for some years. His argument makes perfect sense in the context of the language of the academy and of the identity obsessed left. You have classes and races and genders. You have orientation and body shaming and immigration status. The postmodernists, Gramscians, third-wave feminists, critical race theorists, etc. have given us an exceptionally dull and heavy vocabulary of identity. For all the fine parsings, in the academy and the radical left, it all comes down to race, class, gender.

For all that the words have been around for decades now, much of it is a mishmash arising from whatever is politically expedient. The racial identity of the US has barely budged since the 1960s which might come as a surprise to many people. Why? Because we have introduced the concept of Hispanic as a racial category, which it is not and everyone acknowledges it is not. Most Hispanics self-identify as white so when you strip out Hispanic and look only at race, the changes since the 1960s are minor. A couple more percentage points of individuals identifying as mixed race, three or four more points of those identifying as Asian. A couple more points self-identifying as African-American. But that's about it.

With class, we have never been able to decide what we are talking about. We are not a class society, in fact we are somewhat antagonistic to the very concept of class. Not only are all our children above average but we all firmly self-identify as average ourselves (middle class). Middle class is who we psychologically are regardless of our income or bank account. We usually use income as a gross proxy for class but there is only a weak link between the two concepts. Virtually every American will cycle between at least three of the income quintiles in their lifetime. ~15% will either fall from the top quintile to the bottom or rise from the bottom to the top at least once in their life. That has virtually nothing to do with class.

Gender. What's there to say that hasn't already been talked to death. The academy and the radical left are fixated on matters of gender, either gaps or identities or orientations to the seeming exclusion of everything else. The issues are so talked about that all hold on reality has been lost. LGBT constitute some 2-3% of Americans but millennials assume that 25-30% of the population is LGBT.

None of this is to assert that there aren't race, class, and gender issues. Rather, it is to assert that most of what we are talking about are power struggles and not problem solving, tag lines not conversations, flags not communities. The language has become debased and we confuse the map for the terrain.

I think a central issue not addressed by Edsall is the multiplication of identities in the post war era. We are we all much richer in lifestyle, income and wealth (even though there are widening gaps between the categories of the top and bottom quintiles. We are also both more and less secure. In empirical terms, we are far more secure. In psychological terms, we seem all to be more afraid and uncertain.

What I think Edsall fails to address is the mismatch between our academic language and concepts and the lived reality of Americans. With increased wealth and income comes greater latitude for decision making.

Edsall seems to focus on the loss of community identity. I wonder, in contrast, whether what we are seeing is actually an explosion of communities. Virtually no one identifies themselves as solely or even substantially by singular identities such as race, class, gender. We all, to a greater or lesser degree, can and do identify prolifically. We self-identify not only on race, class, and gender but also on ethnicity, religion, church, neighborhood, profession, employer, schools attended, degrees obtained, income earned, associations participated in, status within enterprises, industry worked in, sports team supported, hobbies pursued, region of the country, political affiliation, familial status, nativity, etc. ad infinitum.

You can see the meaninglessness of the tired old categories by doing match-ups. The college educated, family oriented, Nigerian petroleum engineer emigrating to the US has far more in common (and finds greater welcome) with virtually any of his fellow petroleum engineers than with an African American resident of the tough neighborhoods of Chicago. The black southern AME middle class church goer more in common with the white southern UMC church goer than either of them with Ivy League graduates or atheists. There is a near infinity of permutations.

By trying to force fit people into a few archaic monolithic abstract categories of race, class, and gender and pretending that those are meaningful categories and that there is uniformity within those categories, we grossly misrepresent the world.

The young high school graduate working part time in retail or as a life guard while completing college looks like they are in the miserable bottom quintile but their presence in that bottom quintile actually tells us virtually nothing about their prospects and opportunities.

Why aren't the poor rising up? In part, the issue is that we have framed the question incorrectly. We have allowed our abstract concepts to mask reality in its rich complexity. Until we shift our language away from the sterile abstract concepts of the 20th century European radical totalitarian philosophers, we can make no progress in understanding the nature and reality of problems that we might wish to solve.