Freddie DeBoer asks Whether College is Worth It . . .

Freddie DeBoer's newest article raises an issue of importance for so many of us these days: Whether College is Worth It. I recommend Freddie's entire article, but here's an excerpt to introduce the topic:

Those of you who have read my (brilliant, eye-opening, majestic) first book know that I do indeed think we are pushing too many people into the college pipeline. But my resistance is a little different than most; it’s not a reflection on the cost of college, at least not for the students. I think a) we push so many people into college because the Reagan-Thatcher neoliberal consensus destroyed middle class jobs in industry and manufacturing and we don’t have many alternatives and b) we shouldn’t push kids into college because most of those who have to be pushed will prove to lack the cognitive and soft skills necessary for them to capitalize on their degrees anyway. When people obsess over the college pipeline, they do so because they think that college can turn everybody into a busy little meritocrat, the kind who go on to get jobs at Google or a SLAC or the Ford Foundation or the Department of the Interior. But the high school excellence to college to enviable PMC employment cycle depends on a level of natural intellectual talent, plus the ability to delay gratification and keep to a schedule etc., that many people don’t have. So we need other models, and in the book I explore some.

Here’s the thing, though. In the debate as it exists in the real world, I think a really trenchant question for the kids who forego college is this: what will you do instead? How will you spend those four-plus years of your life, if not in school?

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About our Increasingly Visible Political Realignment.

Matt Taibbi has such a way with words. This is an excerpt from his most recent article, "Campaign 2024: Not Left Versus Right, But Aflluent Versus Everyone Else: The realignment of major parties away from blue against red and toward a rich versus poor dynamic is America's most undercovered political story."

"People like to say nothing matters anymore,” Greenberg said. “But the conversation that you’re not having actually does matter.” Try saying that one three times fast.

A lot of coverage of Campaign 2024 is going to be like this, in which aides, pundits, and pollsters speak like fridge-magnet haikus or Alan Greenspan pressers. There are now so many taboo subjects in American politics that even data journalists, whose job is to give us the cold hard facts, are forced to communicate in allusions and metaphors, because what’s happening can’t be discussed.

American politics has long been a careful truce, in which natural economic tensions were obscured by an elegantly phony two-party structure that kept urban and rural poor separate, nurtured a politically unadventurous middle class, and tended to needs of the mega-rich no matter who won. That system is in collapse. Voters are abandoning traditional blue-red political identities and realigning according to more explosive divisions based on education and income. As the middle class vanishes the replacement endgame emerges. A small pocket of very wealthy and very educated, for whom elections have until now mostly been ceremonial and to whom more fraught realities of the current situation are an annoyance, will move to one side. That’s your “15% strongly approve” group, the Marie Antoinettes who’ll go to the razor pledging loyalty to the regent, even if he’s a loon in a periwig, or Joe Biden.

The inevitable other constituency is just everyone else, which should be a larger demographic. The only reason polls are at 43-43 (or perhaps slightly in Biden’s disfavor) is because the other actor is Donald Trump. If Democrats should be panicking because they’re not trouncing an opponent whose biggest campaign events have been arraignments, it’s just as bad for Trump that he polls even with a man who’s a threat to walk into a propeller or carry a child into a forest every time he walks outside. Still, the abject horror Trump inspires among the Georgetown set may be his greatest political asset, and a reason the realignment seems to be proceeding even with him around."

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The Democrat Ruling Class

Ruy Teixeira explains "How the Democrats Became the Party of the Ruling Class." Excerpt:

The Democratic Party, he argues, has abandoned its traditional working-class base and become a party of college-educated elites. For decades, the party has been hemorrhaging white working-class voters. But in recent election cycles, it has suffered big losses among Latinos without a college education, and has started to slide with non-college-educated Asian and even black Americans as well. The Republicans have capitalized on that loss by embracing these exiled voters, creating an inverted political dynamic that has left those of us old enough to remember the traditional pro-worker, anti-war left with our heads spinning . . .

The city-dwelling, college-educated, professional-class demographic that serves as both the political base of the Democratic Party and the ideological core of the left constitutes America’s new ruling class. As such, its interests, values, and worldview are as one with the institutions that form our country’s political, cultural, and corporate establishments — including government agencies, NGOs, universities, and the industries of cultural production. Unsurprisingly, these power centers benefit from mass censorship of those who dissent from their orthodoxies, from the contrivance of new disciplinary tools to wield against the working class, and from the endless invocation of emergencies to justify radical exercises of state power, such as Covid-19 and the ostensible menace of Vladimir Putin.

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