General Discussion
In reply to the discussion: Why is the American left not as effective as the European left? [View all]True Blue Door
(2,969 posts)The left in the past could form around working communities because the deprivations experienced by major proportions of the population were exposed - their kids would go to school without shoes, they were skinny and hungry, they didn't have electricity or hot water, etc. And it was more obvious because the poor lived among other classes much more homogeneously instead of being segregated in almost entirely separate cities like now, so the poor were confronted with their poverty, and the middle-class at least were confronted with their good fortune. It wasn't as easy to disappear into a bubble and forget what you stand on.
Now, because American life is so profoundly economically segregated (I had posted something about that a while ago), people disappear into their circumstances, and don't necessarily in their daily lives see anything to either give them hope in bad times or excite their sympathy in good times. If you're poor, then America is a wasteland; if you're rich, then it's a playground; if you're middle-class, it's a treadmill with some pleasant entertainments playing on the screen.
But from the wasteland, you don't really get to see enough of the playground to feel outraged that it's denied to you, not enough to realize there's no inherent reason why it should be - it's just some distant fantasyland on TV. From the playground, you don't see enough of the wasteland to know that there is nothing but luck standing between you and it - it's just something to avoid, both physically and mentally. And the middle-class are too damn busy to think about either except to be grateful they're not poor and idly hope that something happens to make them rich.
And even in the wasteland, the deprivation is hidden in so many different distractions and destructive pleasures. You're taught by circumstance not to plan for the future, but to use every opportunity to enjoy whatever you can get. So an ignorant rich man might visit the apartment of a grindingly poor person and be amused or disgusted to see an Xbox, and really not understand how the two facts fit together.