Light On Dark Water

Youthful Idealism

Youth, as everyone knows who has passed through it some time ago, is the age not of idealism but of self-importance, uncertainty masked by certitude and moral grandiosity untouched by experience of life — or, of course, the age of total insouciance. 

–Theodore Dalrymple

Dalrymple is musing on the dangerous mixture of youth and ideology in Muslim extremists, especially the British ones; the whole piece is at National Review Online. This is the opening sentence, and it really struck me. It certainly describes me as a young man, and fits many of the people I knew then. I've been saying for a long time that what was called idealism in the youth culture of the 1960s was generally not that at all, but I've never managed to say what it actually was as well as Dalrymple does here.

A few months ago I read an article about the heavy bias toward youth in the technology industry, where even being as old as forty is a marked disadvantage if you're looking for a job. Some entrepreneur still in his twenties admitted that he didn't even consider hiring anyone much older than himself, and said, "Let's face it: young people are smarter. That's just a fact."

I snorted at that and thought No, young people are stupid. But that's not right, either. Young people in general do have quicker minds, can more readily learn new things, and do complicated tasks more rapidly, and those are qualities very desirable in a programmer or engineer. But what often strikes me about young people is that they tend to be foolish. I don't know that as a group they're any more foolish than the youth of any time, but very foolish many of them are, and ignorant as well. Moreover, they tend to be arrogant in their foolishness. Youth possesses many gifts, but that wisdom is not often one of them is part of the wisdom of the ages, and of age, that it doesn't yet grasp.

Maclin Horton

60 responses to “Youthful Idealism”

  1. Rob G

    “Young people in general do have quicker minds, can more readily learn new things, and do complicated tasks more rapidly, and those are qualities very desirable in a programmer or engineer.”
    No doubt. Yet besides the lack of wisdom you mention, which is partially a function of age, there is also a shallowness I see in today’s younger people. I work with some very intelligent younger folks, who really know their stuff when it comes to the nuts and bolts of work (mostly computer related), but whose non-work interests and endeavours are often ridiculously insipid. It’s almost like that in certain aspects they’ve never moved beyond their teens.
    Come to think of it, maybe it’s time to read Carr’s The Shallows again.

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  2. Mac

    I’m trying really hard not to be the old man fuming about These Kids Today. But a lot of them make it difficult. There was a piece on one of the big news sites, maybe the NYT, a few days ago about the deterioration of the whole concept of adulthood, and I do think there’s something to that. The piece was wrong-headed in a lot of ways but I found it interesting that the idea had taken hold even there.
    It does seem objectively the case that there’s been an overall decline in education.
    The Shallows? Don’t remember you mentioning that before, though, old as I am, I might well have forgotten it.

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  3. Art Deco

    Most of my parents contemporaries were married by their 22d birthday. To some extent, that was anomalous, previous generations having married later. Still, they were, for the most part, ready. About 3/4 kept their marriages together, they had 3 or 4 children a piece from that one marriage (as opposed to the two children from multiple ‘relationships’ that is normal today), were more meticulous about saving money, and passed personal milestones earlier in life.
    You recall the Springsteen song The River? The character in whose voice the song was sung was later revealed to be Springsteen’s brother-in-law, born around about 1948 and (if I am not mistaken) still married to Springsteen’s sister. Would the narrative make any sense today?
    We used to be better people than we now are.

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  4. Robert Gotcher

    Part of the problem is that us grownups have ceased to believe in the wisdom of the elders, indeed in our own wisdom. I mean WE don’t believe that older people are wiser and we don’t tell the smart-aecky kids that, either.
    My wife supervises teenagers and I am constantly amazed that when there is a disagreement between my wife and the kids, the attitude is not, “Kathy is much older than you; she knows what she’s talking about. You are still wet between the ears.”
    This shift in adult self-confidence seems to have begun in the 60s. We allowed that fact that adults do make mistakes and that some are bad or stupid lead to an acceptance fo the leveling of the field.
    And our kids get the message. “My opinion is as good as yours. It is my opinion against yours. That fact that you are 30 years older and much more experienced is irrelevant because I’m smart and can figure things out.”

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  5. Janet

    Quite some time ago, I was struck by the fact that younger people I knew who were very spiritually astute, very devout–all the things that can eventually lead to great holiness–could be very, very stupid in some ways. I realize that it’s wisdom that they are lacking. The other day, the reading was the one about how you can’t put new wine in old wineskins and I was thinking that that’s exactly it. No matter how much spriritual knowledge and experience you have when you are young, unless you are very exceptional(like the Little Flower or Dominic Savio) you just have to wait until your wineskin gets seasoned before you can be wise.
    There is also among young folks a kind of screwy idealism whereby they refuse to think that something they want might not happen. They just don’t want to listen to older people who they just think are raining on their parade–like the poem about the man in the dustcoat that we talked about long ago.
    AMDG

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  6. Rob G

    The Shallows is Nicholas Carr’s book from a couple years back about how the internet affects its users’ thinking processes. He’s a neurologist or a neurobiologist — something along those lines.

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  7. Robert Gotcher

    alecky, not aecky.

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  8. Robert Gotcher

    Wet behind the ears, not between. Although maybe….

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  9. Mac

    Dry between the ears is what young people tend to think about old people. In a sense it’s not a fair rhetorical fight, because we’ve been young, but they haven’t been old. A more expansive version of “you’ll understand one day when you have children of your own.”
    I agree with pretty much everything y’all have said. I frequently wonder about this, though: “We used to be better people than we now are.” Were we really? I’m inclined to think so, where many of the fundamentals are concerned. But it’s a difficult thing to judge. Is it a net break-even, with some things worse and some things better?
    Here’s the gentleman in the dustcoat that Janet’s referring to.
    And the Springsteen song Art mentioned.

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  10. Paul

    British culture … is the crudest, most aggressive, and most lacking in refinement of any of the Western cultures
    This has certainly been my experience. And I suspect many British people are secretly proud of it.
    As to the young, what so often surprises me with my students is how bad they are at following simple instructions. If you say, “This has to be submitted in a card folder”, half of them will hand it in in plastic. Only when you say “We have to archive this for six years because it’s assessed for your degree, so put it in an acid-free card archive folder before you hand it in, not in plastic, that will leech the ink,” will they deign to follow your instructions. Because just doing what you ask, why would they do that? The idea that there is a reason for something even if they don’t know it never seems to occur to them.

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  11. Paul

    The quotation about British culture is from later in the Dalrymple article, in case that wasn’t clear.

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  12. Marianne

    Part of the problem is that us grownups have ceased to believe in the wisdom of the elders, indeed in our own wisdom. I mean WE don’t believe that older people are wiser and we don’t tell the smart-aecky kids that, either.
    I think maybe this is the crux of the whole thing. And it reminds me of how confused I was when I first saw Rebel Without a Cause as a teenager in the 1950s. The message seemed to be that the parents of the kids in the film were the cause of all the unhappiness. The ones most focused on were James Dean’s parents, who really didn’t seem all that bad to me. But the father was ineffectual, and prone to tears. What lay behind that picture of parents? The two world wars? In any case, it was light years away from the father in the Andy Hardy films of just the previous decade.
    Couple of clips for comparison:
    Here’s Andy Hardy’s father talking to Andy about fidelity in marriage.
    And here’s James Dean confronting his father, who’s wearing a pinafore apron and cleaning up a spilled tray of food.

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  13. Art Deco

    But it’s a difficult thing to judge. Is it a net break-even, with some things worse and some things better?
    When Fr. Neuhaus said he thought moral slobbery was pretty consistent over time, I think he erred inasmuch as I suspect you can detect cycles of decay and renewal. But over long cycles, my wager is that that’s true, with affluence regulating the mode of expression.
    To discuss one example of improvement, popular history of the sort that public television trafficks in I suspect overstates some of the cruelties evident in the world of 1948. Still my mother could tell you stories of people she knew in college who said stupefying things. My grandparents were small town Appalachian gentry (one a Southerner, one not), so she was raised with a particular disposition toward blacks which was quite foreign to some of the rougher stuff she had occasion to hear. (Her most elaborate story involved a chap from North Carolina her roommate was dating).

    You do not hear much of that, anymore, and none of it’s analogues in public life. For people like my grandparents, social relations across the color bar were conducted on a patron-client basis according to dictates of propriety; Jews were people you dealt with at work, not people you had into your home.

    You know, though, for them and for people like my father’s parents, that was pretty remote from daily life. The tough stuff is invariably that you have to be in the habit of doing every day. And yes, they were better about it, and built and maintained a more wholesome world. My mother recalled that it began breaking down ca. 1963.

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  14. Mac

    I wondered if Dalrymple’s view of British culture was accurate. That’s pretty sad, because in the U.S. we still tend to see the British through the filter of BBC costume dramas etc.
    I hate admit, but have to admit, that a lot of the stuff we’re noting here, e.g. your observation about students not doing what they’re told unless given what they consider a good reason, really got its start with my generation. As Robert said:
    “This shift in adult self-confidence seems to have begun in the 60s. We allowed that fact that adults do make mistakes and that some are bad or stupid lead to an acceptance fo the leveling of the field.”
    It wasn’t only push from the kids that made that happen, it was a tendency of the authorities to give in to it. At the level of the average family, there might have been an Archie Bunker sort of situation, but the fact that the All in the Family deck was very much stacked against Archie was more significant: the elites were on the side of the kids, and happily joined in labeling those who resisted as cave men.

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  15. Robert Gotcher

    I’ve read, and wouldn’t be surprised, that commercial interests were very much in favor of setting up a divide between generations so they could create dual markets in one household.

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  16. Mac

    Those two clips are really striking, Marianne. I’d never seen an Andy Hardy movie, but I saw Rebel as an adult ten or fifteen years ago and was really struck by the weird and pathological portrayal of the father. I think there was some kind of vogue in the ’50s for a psychological theory that dominating women and passive men were the root of all sorts of problems in the youth of the day, and figured that the movie was more or less preaching that. I disliked the movie precisely because it romanticized the young and caricatured the middle-aged.

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  17. Mac

    Right, Art, one of the things that have to be put onto the scales in making these kinds of judgments is segregation and various other manifestations of racism. There has been genuine progress in that area, despite the fact that there have been some steps back, too, e.g. in the condition of the black family.
    “My mother recalled that it began breaking down ca. 1963.”
    I may have mentioned in the movie discussion a few weeks ago how surprised I was at the sexuality in Dr. No, which I think was release in 1962.
    And I think this is important: “…with affluence regulating the mode of expression.” I’ve thought for a long time much of the license of the past 60 years or so (and I don’t mean just sexual license, I mean the general propensity to reject limits on personal freedom) is in very large part a function of our unprecedented wealth.

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  18. Mac

    “…commercial interests were very much in favor of setting up a divide…” I think it’s too much of a leap to hold them responsible, but they certainly took advantage of it, and effectively encouraged it.

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  19. Anne-Marie

    It wasn’t only push from the kids that made that happen, it was a tendency of the authorities to give in to it.
    I once met a German born in the 50s who said that he absolutely rejected his parents’ claim to authority since they had been Nazis. That generation of German parents could hardly do otherwise than give in to it. But I don’t think of, say, the Vietnam war as having a similar effect in the US, because the push from the kids and the adult acquiescence started earlier.

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  20. Rob G

    “the general propensity to reject limits on personal freedom) is in very large part a function of our unprecedented wealth”
    Yes, St. John was definitely onto something when he linked “the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eye, and the pride of life,” a thing that’s very difficult to get a certain sort of conservative to see. As someone I recently read put it, we spend a lot of time attempting to breed exceedingly small camels or to manufacture very large needles.

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  21. Mac

    Heh. That’s very good about the camels and needles. And More and more I describe that certain sort of conservative as “right-wing” rather than “conservative.”

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  22. Mac

    Anne-Marie, I once read an interview with Blixa Bargeld, a German musician who played with Nick Cave for many years, among other things. The only reason I remember it (it was over ten years ago) and the only bit of it that stuck with me, was him saying something like “We hate all that–Mozart, Beethoven [and he named several other German artists]. That’s all fascist stuff for us.” The “we” was his young Germans. I was shocked at anyone describing Mozart as fascist.
    American rebels blamed their parents’ generation for Vietnam, but that didn’t have anything like the same place or effect that the revulsion against Nazism no doubt did for Germans. We were more interested in denouncing middle-class-ness in itself: “the gray despair of your ugly lives”, as Frank Zappa put it. This was often a rather disgusting level of ingratitude. But I think one less-remarked engine of the rebellion–maybe not a major one, but present–was damaged families. I once counted up the number of divorced and otherwise messed-up households that my radical friends came from and the number was higher than average. Not a decisive thing, certainly, but an influence.

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  23. El Miserable

    I’m looking forward to the Demons (by Dostoevsky) review!

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  24. Paul

    Not that Britain is entirely like that – there are wonderful people doing wonderful things, and the general level of politeness in day-to-day interactions is, if anything, higher than elsewhere. But the category of people who seem not to share, even to resent, the civilised values of the society they live in is much larger and more obvious in Britain. And as a prison doctor this is the class of people that Dalrymple knows best.
    The most worrying thing about walking round certain foreign cities at night is the possibility of encountering British football supporters or stag parties. You wouldn’t necessarily want to come across a bunch of German skinheads or Italian hooligans, but the ratio of them to Germans and Italians as a whole is an awful lot smaller.

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  25. Mac

    I’m not sure I’m going to be able to manage a real review. But I’ll definitely be posting something about it soon.

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  26. Art Deco

    I disliked the movie precisely because it romanticized the young and caricatured the middle-aged.
    The characters played by Dean, Wood, and Mineo did not strike me as ‘romanticised’. The Mineo character in particular was a mess.
    I do thing the Jim Backus character was a contrivance, but the other adults were not (as far as I can recall). Twenty years later, I’m fairly sure I was acquainted with all of them.

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  27. Art Deco

    I also did not interpret the Starke family configuration in the way you did. You recall the one time in the film the mother looked happy, she was doing something feminine (making a bag lunch for her surly son). It seemed to me that the mother was thrust unwillingly and uncertainly into a leadership role in her household because her husband responded to all challenges with dithering. An aspect of the narrative was displaying in the homes of tthe three adolescents three avenues each of maternal and paternal abdication (and then demonstrating it among school officials).

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  28. Louise

    “Some entrepreneur still in his twenties admitted that he didn’t even consider hiring anyone much older than himself, and said, “Let’s face it: young people are smarter. That’s just a fact.””
    LOL!
    How often have I said to myself “that was when I was young and stupid”?

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  29. Louise

    “I’m trying really hard not to be the old man fuming about These Kids Today. But a lot of them make it difficult.”
    hehehe
    I’m assuming these words are almost identical to those of some famous dead Greek guy, somewhere.

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  30. Louise

    “I mean WE don’t believe that older people are wiser and we don’t tell the smart-aecky kids that, either.”
    I do. But you know, it doesn’t help that there are a LOT of extremely foolish older people around. I’m 45, for those who don’t know and some of my parents’ acquaintances etc… well!
    And I will excuse foolishness and even arrogance in the young (I remember being young) but I am pretty intolerant of those same qualities in older people.

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  31. Louise

    “Not that Britain is entirely like that – there are wonderful people doing wonderful things, and the general level of politeness in day-to-day interactions is, if anything, higher than elsewhere. But the category of people who seem not to share, even to resent, the civilised values of the society they live in is much larger and more obvious in Britain. And as a prison doctor this is the class of people that Dalrymple knows best.”
    I was relieved to read the first part of this, Paul.

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  32. Mac

    No doubt there was a Greek expression for “these kids today.”
    “But you know, it doesn’t help that there are a LOT of extremely foolish older people around.”
    Yep, as the saying goes…. I saw that coming a long time ago, as my generation got older. I remember thinking, probably when I was forty-ish, that eventually there would be a president of my generation, and I probably wouldn’t like him. And history coughed up Bill Clinton.

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  33. Mac

    I’ll admit I may be unfair toward Rebel Without a Cause, Art. I don’t actually remember much of it at this point, and I don’t remember any characters or families other than the Dean character and his. I just remember thinking that the portrayal of the father bordered on the preposterous. And that the Dean character was romanticized in a beautiful-doomed-youth sort of way. Perhaps I’ll watch it again at some point.

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  34. Marianne

    Interesting that the actor, Jim Backus, who played the father in Rebel, went on to become the voice of Mr. Magoo and then had a key role on Gilligan’s Island. Don’t think he ever tackled another straight dramatic role.

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  35. Robert Gotcher

    Backus started voicing Magoo in 1949, six years before Rebel.

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  36. Louise

    “No doubt there was a Greek expression for “these kids today.””
    Well, Nick and I often say “O, the lawlessness!” when the young’uns are being naughty. It comes from “The Clouds” by Aristophanes, I think. IIRC, it referred to “the young people today.”

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  37. Art Deco

    I just remember thinking that the portrayal of the father bordered on the preposterous.
    I would agree with you, the character was contrived, and used as a foil. (Contrast his ineffectual response to threats from local toughs to the maid in the Crawford house who wields a club and chases them out of the house). The scenes with the other parents were much more credible.
    One way they emasculated the fathers was in not revealing what any of them did for a living, other than suggesting it was fairly lucrative. (One family has a club membership, in another the father eats dinner and a coat and tie and the family employs a cook, and in a third the absent mother can afford a handsome home and a maid on alimony and child support payments from the absent father).
    Did you notice another aspect of the family configurations: only child, only child, and two child family with about a decade between older sister and younger brother? I think a point is being made about these sorts of configurations, driven by the low fertility of the Depression-era. One of the only displays of intra-familial affection is by the Wood character for her brother. No one else has siblings. (And the way the scene is set up you notice that Wood has assumed the maternal role her zombie-like mother does not and that her father insists on picking that moment to snarl at her).
    One other aspect that impressed me was the way they left the location ambiguous. You cannot quite tell if you’re in a core city or in a suburb. The presence of a planetarium ca. 1955 would suggest a metropolis of some sophistication and the presence of cliffs on the coast would suggest California (or Washington State or BC?). It is left ambiguous. You cannot quite say it is not your town.

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  38. Mac

    Well, you do make it sound considerably more interesting than I’d given it credit for. Writing this on a phone so will be terse, but: implicit (not necessarily deliberate) dismissal of the value of the father’s work is something that began to be prevalent in family portrayals then. Would be interesting pop culture study. Also, did any of the families practice a religion? I don’t recall any.

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  39. Mac

    I did think “wasn’t that Mr. Magoo?” and then thought “nah…”.

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  40. Art Deco

    Mrs. Starke (in her bathrobe, being transported in a police car) enlarges on her domestic problems to the police and does make a reference to ‘your children’ which includes ‘you pray for them’. That’s it as far as I can recall. The scene at the planetarium has the astronomer presenting what amounts to an atheist cosmology. I think that detail is significant.

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  41. Art Deco

    And history coughed up Bill Clinton.

    The first person born in that nexus of years to appear on a national ticket was Dan Quayle. History coughed up an amiable Jaycee married to an evangelical dreadnaught.

    I figure your last shots are in the next three cycles: so far the ‘expressed interest’ list includes Gov. Perry, Gov. Bush, Peter King, and several non-pols including John Bolton, Ben Carson, Herman Cain, and Donald Trump. On the other side, that list includes Howard Dean, Joe Manchin, Bernie Sanders, and, of course, Vice President Hairplugs and Hildebeeste.

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  42. Art Deco

    And there’s James Webb.

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  43. Mac

    God save us from another Clinton presidency. I’d prefer anyone else on that list, including Donald Trump, which is a pretty horrible thing to say. Webb could be interesting.

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  44. Art Deco

    Webb or Manchin would be the best the Democratic Party have to offer. Both know something of how business is done in the federal government, both have experience in public administration, both have some reserve regarding the sillier and more asinine constituencies in the Democratic Party, and both are old men.
    On the Republican side, I’d prefer Govs. Jindal or Walker (not listed above) were older ‘ere they sought the job. La famille Bush have a history of indifference to immigration enforcement. The disreputable Mr. Derbyshire dissected the sources of that in this review of the book published under the Governor’s byline.
    http://www.vdare.com/articles/john-derbyshire-concludes-jeb-bush-just-doesn-t-like-americans-very-much

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  45. Robert Gotcher

    As a Wisconsinite, I don’t think Walker is ready. I think he has a lot of intestinal fortitude, though.
    I will say this. He has a history of learning from his mistakes while sticking to his principles which is very edifying.

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  46. Mac

    Without even knowing anything very specific about J Bush I’d be inclined to oppose him. We’ve had enough of them.
    “Just doesn’t like Americans very much”–pretty true of most of our upper-upper-crust, in financial and/or status terms.

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  47. Mac

    “Increasingly, Americans are governed by an elite which despises them.” I think I read that somewhere a year or two ago at National Review Online, but when I went to look for it a few weeks later I couldn’t find it, so maybe I said it. Either way, I think it’s true.

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  48. Marianne

    Not sure I agree that Jeb Bush belongs in that group of elites who just don’t much like Americans, or even despises them. Being married to a Mexican woman who comes from a modest background has made him quite sympathetic to immigrant causes, but that doesn’t mean he sees other Americans in an exceedingly bad light.

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  49. Art Deco

    but that doesn’t mean he sees other Americans in an exceedingly bad light.

    Read the review, and recall Chesterton’s dicta of understanding a man by what he takes for granted.

    Without even knowing anything very specific about J Bush I’d be inclined to oppose him. We’ve had enough of them.
    There’s a version of this image where he has on his high chair a newspaper which has the headline “Bush v. Clinton 2016”
    http://img.desmotivaciones.es/201107/stewie_gun.jpg

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  50. Marianne

    I did read the Derbyshire article you linked to, and I don’t think the Jeb Bush quotes he included show that Jeb doesn’t think much of Americans. Here are three of those quotes:
    “It is essential that we have an ample supply of workers both for labor-intensive jobs that few Americans want and for highly skilled jobs for which there are inadequate numbers of Americans with the skills to fit them.”
    “Like most immigrants, Hispanics are tremendously entrepreneurial.”
    “Immigrants are unlikely to be complacent about the freedom and opportunity that for them previously was only a dream and was gained only through great effort and sacrifice. Our nation constantly needs the replenishment of our spirit that immigrants bring.”
    Derbyshire faults Bush on the facts underlying much of what Bush says in his book, and he may be right on that. But isn’t the rest of his criticism really just the “spin” he gives to it all?

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  51. Mac

    I don’t think Jeb Bush is in the despising class, and I don’t think what Derbyshire quotes in that piece is as awful as Derb says. But on the basis of it I’d say Bush is pretty out of touch, and not someone who, as president, would do much to reverse the trends that are diminishing the middle class. “It is essential that we have an ample supply of workers both for labor-intensive jobs that few Americans want…” More-immigration advocates never supply the essential other half of that idea: “for the wages offered.” Whenever some new source of decent-sounding jobs appears around here, the news stories always report that the number of people applying is many times greater than the number of jobs. Offer a good living wage with health insurance, sick leave, and vacation for some of those “jobs Americans won’t do”, and there would be plenty of willing people. As I’m always saying, the more-immigration cause is a weird alliance of business and the left. Business wants cheap labor, the left wants more “diversity”, i.e. a lower proportion of white folks.

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  52. Art Deco

    Derbyshire’s point is that Jeb Bush’s disregard of ordinary working class Americans is so much a part of his matrix that he does not notice it. That’s his baseline. It is something with a different texture than a character like Anthony Kennedy or Barack Obama manifests.
    The bourgeois are not hurting in this country. Salaried employees are doing well; small business likely has problems it did not in the past due to the accumulation of statutory legislation and regulation which gives lawyers a franchise to make your world worse.
    What has happened is a secular decay in the relative position (and sometimes in real earnings, though that’s much overstated) of various strata of the wage-earning population. George Borjas has made it clear that the distributional effects are small but clear: mass immigration is not in the interests of ordinary low-skill wage earners.
    There are, of course, other sources of the problems that working people are having. One is the hypertrophy of tertiary schooling for sorting the labor market and the shift from hands-on training and apprenticeshp to classroom instruction. These are injurious to certain social sectors (mainly men who learn in a particular way).

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  53. Art Deco

    the left wants more “diversity”, i.e. a lower proportion of white folks.
    You realize that the signature of the portside is the manufacture of patron-client relations. Ordinary working people do not need the ministrations of county social workers.

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  54. Mac

    People on the right say that a lot about manufacturing patron-client relations, and I always have trouble believing that anyone would consciously do it. Perhaps it happens without being entirely deliberate.
    “The bourgeois are not hurting in this country.” I never know exactly what people mean by bourgeois, though perhaps it has a clear definition in the world of economics. But at any rate when I refer to the middle class, I don’t think it’s the same thing you mean by “the bourgeois.” I mean everybody between poor, as in not having enough money to cover basic living expenses, and rich, as in having so much money that one doesn’t need to work. In that sense, a lot of the middle class is not in good shape at all. I’m sure you know more numbers than I do, but I think they support the observation that things have gotten considerably more difficult for the lower end of the middle class over the past 30 years or so.
    Re immigration, one of the ironies of the left’s support of unrestricted immigration from the south is that it is essentially the same thing as sending jobs to poor countries, which they denounce. It’s just importing the low-wage workers rather than exporting the jobs.

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  55. Janet

    Yes, except that when you export the jobs, you don’t have to educate the workers children or pay for their medical care.
    I’m not making a moral judgment on any of this, I’m just saying that’s a difference.
    AMDG

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  56. Mac

    I think for the most part Society does that, though, not the employers, for the kind of low-end jobs we’re talking about.

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  57. Janet

    Right. I was thinking of the left not minding if society paid that cost.
    AMDG

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  58. Mac

    Nor do the employers.

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  59. Art Deco

    But at any rate when I refer to the middle class, I don’t think it’s the same thing you mean by “the bourgeois.” I mean everybody between poor, as in not having enough money to cover basic living expenses, and rich, as in having so much money that one doesn’t need to work.
    I’m referring to anyone who does not have a mess of accumulated wealth or a position of influence who earns his living from salaries or proprietors’ income or perhaps commissions. That would be about 28% of the population. It’s not precisely coterminous with the baccalaureate population, but it is close. The patriciate would be perhaps 3%. Roughly 30% would be skilled workers and their dependents (or people respectably retired from that status. The people who’ve been having a difficult time of it these last several decades have been the most impecunious 40% or so. I think about 70% of the public can meet basic expenses from earnings and private pension income and Social Security and Medicare bring many of the remainder up to par. Lower down in the social scale, it gets hairy.

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  60. Mac

    Indeed it does. And I don’t think either political party has much of an idea of what to do about it. I’m not sure how much can be done by political means to change big underlying trends.

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