Right Turn Ahead

Walter, tomorrow Americans vote.  Polling suggests a rightward turn in our politics. 

This mirrors insight from David Schoenbaum's classic study Hitler's Social Revolution:  Class and Status in Nazi Germany (1967).  I did a college newspaper book review on it, which is why I am aware of its frame of analysis, which I share here. 

As the middle class collapses, it turns to the political right, not to the left, to emotionally salvage its status.  The middle class, although it is collapsing, cannot bring itself to see itself as really proletarians, members of the working class, or even worse, the lumpen proletariat. 

Marxism, of course, argued the middle class would radicalize and turn to the working-class left.  In Weimar Germany, as Schoenbaum documents, the middle class moved right - for emotional reasons.  We are seeing a repeat here.

The youthful protests of the 60's that did so much to shape our lives is now history.  Society is going to move right, not further left.  As a student of history, you will find this comparison of interest.

More importantly, as persons who need to survive today, we need to accept reality, not idealism, utopian politics, and academic sentimentalism

Take care.  Paul