Marie Gluesenkamp Perez is a Democratic congresswoman from rural Washington who has won twice in a very Trump-friendly district, garnering her significant national attention. Even I have written about her. She put herself back in the news recently by introducing a bill to limit bright headlights, which, she says, is the kind of thing real Americans really want their government to do.
James Pogue has an interesting profile in the NY Times that brings home how poorly Gluesenkamp Perez fits into either American political party as currently constituted:
Her worldview is widely held in rural America but almost completely unrepresented in national politics — neither reactionary nor exactly liberal; skeptical of big business and big government alike. She believes our society ought to be oriented toward working with your hands, living in nature and fostering deep and considered connection to a community. Her two biggest influences, her former senior adviser guessed, are the Bible and the ruralist Kentucky farmer-author Wendell Berry.
Personally I always regard too much interest in Wendell Berry as a sign of ill-thought-out alienation from the real world, and I will come back to that.
Ms. Gluesenkamp Perez’s signature cause is known as “right to repair.” In its simplest form, it is a call for manufacturers to make smartphones and farm equipment and headlights that can be fixed and tinkered with at home — so it’s possible to truly own them, unlike the disposable products or subscription services that surround us today.
To make this possible at any real scale, you’d have to change the whole value system shaping our increasingly financialized society, which incentivizes the rapid consumption of cheap imported goods and businesses built on the collection of what policy types describe as rents, rather than producing material things of lasting value. That’s what Ms. Gluesenkamp Perez has set out to do.
“We don’t want to be perpetual renters of disposable crap,” she told an interviewer for the website Front Porch Republic. “We want things that last.”
One of Gluesenkamp Perez's stock lines is to complain about the "high cost of cheap goods."
To question the value of those goods, though, is to question the judgment of the leaders who sold them to us.
This resonates widely in America; I saw lots of praise on Twitter/X for Trump's line about no child needing 37 dolls, and "this is a nation, not an economy" is a widely repeated line.
What makes me crazy about this discourse is the positing of this imaginary THEM, "the leaders who sold them to us." Nobody in Washington told Americans to buy cheap foreign crap; those things sold because, and only because, Americans chose to buy them over more expensive domestic alternatives. I mentioned here recently that a shower head company offered its customers a more expensive, American-made version of one product, and not a single person bought it. Lots of Americans claim to want things that last, but when offered the choice they almost always chose the cheap version. Whose fault is that?
Across the whole of my lifetime the political establishment has been struggling to preserve manufacturing jobs in the US. Programs to teach poor kids skills like carpentry or plumbing go back to the nineteenth century. Lately we have had a weird fad of trying to make all high school students "college ready" rather than teaching them auto mechanics, but plenty of intellectuals (like me) have protested this, and American community colleges have stepped into this void. My big project down in Danville includes a major program to train manufacturing workers. Even the US Navy funds a major program to train industrial workers.
The world we live in is the world we have made. Nobody did this to us, not the government or the financial elite or the Jews or the Illuminati; we have done it to ourselves.
Many, many Americans are drawn to Wendell Berry's gospel of a simple life rooted in rural tradition. Berry wants people to live slowly and weigh any proposed innovation for years or decades before deciding to embrace it. His major practical complaint is against "cheap food", because intense competition among farmers forces them to adopt highly efficient, chemical-intensive factory methods. Maybe you nod along with this; but how did Americans react when we got a burst of food inflation in 2020 to 2023? It wasn't pretty.
Gluesenkamp Perez diagnoses Americans as suffering from deep fears about themselves and their world:
That angst, for many, is about a basic worry that neither party is seriously listening to today: a fear that we are losing what the philosopher Henri Bergson once described as an “open society” and replacing it with a society of the “anthill” — with most people living a drone-like existence, reduced to data points in a system run by technocrats and corporations. It’s a way of life that’s anathema to both America’s economic promise and its cultural traditions.
Are you living a drone-like existence? I'm not. The worry that modernity will enslave us is two centuries old, but in fact modern westerners have more freedom than anyone else in history. If you ask me, the most drone-like thing anyone in the modern world does is factory work. Revulsion against that particular kind of dronish existence is helping to drive low-end manufacturing out of America. Nobody really wants those jobs. (Except Haitian immigrants.)
Where did I learn about Wendell Berry? On the internet. MAGA, supposedly seething against the financializing elite and their plan to make us drones, is the most online political movement in history.
Gluesenkamp Perez rebels, as many other Americans do, against an economic philoosphy that says the only real goal is to produce goods for consumers. Instead we should worry more about empowerment, autonomy, community, closeness to nature, workers' rights, or something else.
Even if we agreed that those goals were important, how would we pursue them? Gluesenkamp Perez supports tariffs, but since Trump started will-nilly tariffing the world, American manufacturing has declined. Maybe better designed tariffs would help promote manufacturing here, but, again, I am not convinced that Americans really want manufacturing jobs. How would more factory work promote "autonomy"? One reason I support real national health insurance is that I would like to help people pursue autonomy rather than corporate jobs of any sort, but people like Berry and Gluesenkamp Perez are too suspicious of Big Hospital and Big Pharma and all of that to put much energy into Medicare for all.
This whole line of thinking is fundamentally confused. How can we have both stronger communities and more autonomy?
Nobody forced us to live like this; this is just what free society looks like, at our level of technology and social organization. Peasants worked with their hands, lived close to nature, and mostly lived in strong communities, but they were not happier than we are.
If you don't like your life, change it. In our world, you have the freedom to do that. Neither peasants nor 1950s factory workers did.
1 comment:
If you don't like your life, change it. In our world, you have the freedom to do that. Neither peasants nor 1950s factory workers did.
This is a classic example of people imagining that there are enough well paying jobs for everyone. But there simply aren't.
You can word extremely hard, take every opportunity you can to advance, and still lose. You can do everything right to try to get hired or promoted, and still be passed over. You can start your own business and run it the best you can manage, and still go under.
Because you can't cheat basic math. If there are more people looking to obtain a position than there are positions, somebody HAS to lose. If there are more small businesses competing for customers than a market can bear, then some of the HAVE to go under. Et cetera.
Even if you want to argue that anybody can find success in our system, not everybody can find success. Like the tired old lady who works at my local grocery store in the produce department — further breaking her already broken back unloading trucks of fruits and vegetables and putting them on the shelves every single day.
She has no prospects. She can't change her life, no matter how much she dislikes it. She has no freedom to do that. She works herself to exhaustion every single day, in constant pain, just to survive another day. She has no hope of advancement, or even just a raise. She has nowhere to go, no one who would hire her for anything. She already can't afford to make ends meet, and so she can't afford to take some kind of training for a different job - either financially, or in terms of free time. And even if she did, who would hire her? The job market is extremely biased against the elderly — even moreso against older women — and she's lucky to be in her current job as it is. She's not going to be able to retire. She's going to work at her current job until she dies, or is disabled and then dies from lack of a way to support herself.
I know this to be true. I've talked to her about all these things. She does her best to laugh it off, but she is a broken old woman (who isn't even that old) with no absolutely future, who just isn't ready to roll over and die yet, but who is STUCK in her situation with no way out. She's not lazy; she's not selfish; she's not unreasonable; she's just trapped by poverty. She wants more hours, but the store won't give them to her. She wants to move somewhere with better prospects but she can't afford to. She wants to clear the debt she's trapped it, but it'll take thirty years at this rate and she'll be long dead first. (And it's not even that much debt!)
The American Dream inherently relies on a lot of innocent hardworking people losing through no fault of their own, in order to buoy other people to success. Because our system is designed to reward those who claw their way to the upper ranks through luck or villainy, and it leaves those who can't make it to suffer and die.
Post a Comment