REPUBLICAN ‘REFORMOCONS’ CAN’T FACE
HEARTLESSNESS
“ [Yuval] Levin's description of American life
sounds appealing, but it does not reflect
the reality of the [Ohio] steelworkers' lives. The
massive, distant system of material provision" is
their company, which is far more top-down than
any federal bureaucracy. Nothing happens face to face;
immediately felt needs go ignored; families don't
matter. There is no ‘common life’ except for the
workers' desperate effort to stick together as they look
ahead to weeks or months without pay -or, perhaps,
a future without a job. Global competition is making
these workers disposable, and so they are turning for
insight and inspiration to Sanders, or Piketty, or Trump.
The reformocons, for all their creativity and eloquence,
don't grasp the nature of the world in which their cherished
middle-class Americans actually live. They can't face its heartlessness.”
sounds appealing, but it does not reflect
the reality of the [Ohio] steelworkers' lives. The
massive, distant system of material provision" is
their company, which is far more top-down than
any federal bureaucracy. Nothing happens face to face;
immediately felt needs go ignored; families don't
matter. There is no ‘common life’ except for the
workers' desperate effort to stick together as they look
ahead to weeks or months without pay -or, perhaps,
a future without a job. Global competition is making
these workers disposable, and so they are turning for
insight and inspiration to Sanders, or Piketty, or Trump.
The reformocons, for all their creativity and eloquence,
don't grasp the nature of the world in which their cherished
middle-class Americans actually live. They can't face its heartlessness.”
[Yuval Levin wrote one of the essays in the
Republican
reformocons’ Room to Grow.]
Packer, George, “The Republican Class War,” pp: 26-34, The
New Yorker,
November 9, 2015
November 9, 2015
