Progessives Tire Of White Working Class

The white working class is an inconvenient relic, and the sooner it ceases to exist, the better. That is the underlying assumption of our political establishment. The white working class is not just expected to seek salvation by acquiring bourgeois virtues: it is blamed for failing to acquire those virtues more quickly.

It sounds like the United States where Democrats got impatient with the white blue collar class during the school busing crisis a generation ago. Remember? The Southies of South Boston wanted to keep their children going to school in their Irish neighborhood. But the judges and the politicians had other ideas.

The result is that the working class in Britain is expected to keep voting for Labour just as they always have for a century, but they are beginning to flirt with the right-wing BNP. Here in the United States the white ethnics have been slowly leaving the Democrats for a generation.

In Britain, the Conservative Party is self-consciously moving to gain the votes of the moderate educated metropolitan vote and seem to be ignoring the working class completely. In the United States, the Republicans seem to be doing better.

Let us not be patronising. But the problem is that the white working class has more or less sold its soul to the welfare state. A century ago the white working class proudly belonged to labor unions and friendly societies and drinking clubs that they had built with their own hands. Today they get all their social safety net from the government. And it shows.

Sometime soon, some politician is going to figure out how to win the votes and the enthusiasm of the white working/blue collar class. Why shouldn�t it be a conservative?

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Christopher Chantrill blogs at www.roadtothemiddleclass.com. His Road to the Middle Class is forthcoming.

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Faith & Purpose

“When we began first to preach these things, the people appeared as awakened from the sleep of ages—they seemed to see for the first time that they were responsible beings...”
Finke, Stark, The Churching of America, 1776-1990

Mutual Aid

In 1911... at least nine million of the 12 million covered by national insurance were already members of voluntary sick pay schemes. A similar proportion were also eligible for medical care.
Green, Reinventing Civil Society

Education

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E. G. West, Education and the State

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Law being too tenuous to rely upon in [Ulster and the Scottish borderlands], people developed patterns of settling differences by personal fighting and family feuds.
Thomas Sowell, Conquests and Cultures

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F.S.C. Northrop, The Logic of the Sciences and the Humanities

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“But I saw a man yesterday who knows a fellow who had it from a chappie that said that Urquhart had been dipping himself a bit recklessly off the deep end.” —Freddy Arbuthnot
Dorothy L. Sayers, Strong Poison

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Michael Novak, The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism

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Annie Dillard, Holy the Firm

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James M. Ault, Jr., Spirit and Flesh

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The recognition and integration of extralegal property rights [in the Homestead Act] was a key element in the United States becoming the most important market economy and producer of capital in the world.
Hernando de Soto, The Mystery of Capital

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