Recently a friend posted an essay on "Shit Life Syndrome" as a reason for why large swaths of working class people broke ranks with the Democrats and voted for Republicans (and likely will again, if the DNC nominates another neoliberal corporatist shill like they have for the last few decades). According to the article:
"Shit-life syndrome is not another fictitious illness conjured up by the psychiatric-pharmaceutical industrial complex to sell psychotropic drugs. It is a reality created by corporatist rulers and their lackey politicians—pretending to care about their minimum-wage-slave constituents, who are trying to survive on 99¢ boxed macaroni and cheese prepared in carcinogenic water, courtesy of DuPont or some other such low-life leviathan."
While this article approaches realism about the peril of working class Americans, it stays just inside the fantasyland of viewing the Democratic Party as THE solution to our social ills...
For instance, the lead sentence in the article says this: "Getting rid of [the President] means taking seriously 'shit-life syndrome'—and its resulting misery, which includes suicide, drug overdose death, and trauma for surviving communities." And the final paragraph says "The question is just how clueless are the Dems? Will they convince themselves that shit-life syndrome sufferers give a shit about [the President's] impeachment? Will they convince themselves that Biden, Buttigieg, Bloomberg or Warren are so wonderful that shit-life syndrome sufferers will take them and their campaign promises seriously?"
Notice the end game here is the establishment of the DNC in political power. They are obsessed with getting rid of one noxious corporate shill (our current president) to replace him with a more palatable corporate shill. This is precisely the ruse that people are beginning to see through, and why they have lost faith in the entire system. The end game should not be to establish one regime over another, but to bring about a just society where all people have the resources they need to survive and thrive, so they can live into the full human flourishing intended for them by God. And this is why I identify with Classical Christianity, and not any modern American political category, whether Left or Right, progressive or conservative.
I have family members and old friends who are working class folk. Here’s what I gather from them: They know that college educated liberals (as a cohort) don’t care about them, unless possibly as a charity project. Liberals certainly don’t want to live near them, work with them, or send their kids to school with them. Liberals are quick to label them “deplorable” and lecture them on their offensive speech and outdated views. But liberals are absent when big banks foreclose on their farm or house, or when big pharma gets them addicted to painkillers, or when big corporate shipped their job to another country, or when their children are maimed or killed in the endless wars of empire which benefit big industry. Many of these working class folk have lost hope that the system can be reformed, and they just want to burn it down. Maybe Republicans will help them out a little. But if they don't at least they will wreak havoc on the establishment that has given them a “shit life”. I think it brings amusement and schadenfreude to them to see the President make all the college educated elites go apoplectic because they cannot control him or reign him in.
Liberals love to justify their distaste for the working class by saying that the "real reason" they voted for Republicans is that they are repressed racists letting their venom spew. This is a convenient oversimplification to remedy liberal complicity in the dysfunction of our culture. Do many of these working class folk have racist tendencies? Often. But a huge part of that is because they have been socialized by the people who run the game to see other working class ethnicities as competitors and enemies. It’s the oldest play in the book. The masters divide and conquer and set the slaves at each other’s throats so they don’t combine forces and overcome their masters.
If the working class (and middle class for that matter) ever combined forces to establish something like a just society, the owning class would lose their power. So, the owning class uses media and education to “manufacture consent” (in Chomsky’s words) by keeping the bottom 90% divided among endless divisions so we will never work together. They train us to focus on differences and stay divided along lines of gender, sexuality, ethnicity, culture, age cohort, alternative/normie, progressive/traditional, etc. Diversity is weaponized to break us into tribal squabbling so we will not develop class consciousness of economic injustice.
For me, the picture posted above sums it all up. The people with all the cookies convince us to fight each other tooth and nail for a single cookie so we won’t notice that they hold the whole batch. And liberals often hold the function of “cookie police” who lecture those “beneath them” about cookie equity, while ignoring the fact that their enlightened benefactors are keeping the cookie stash to themselves.
I also think that Christians (and other religious communities for that matter) need to dig into their own historic resources for socio-economic criticism and construction: We need to revive our criticism of greed, envy, “private” property, consumerism, usury, oppression of the poor, and other systemic aspects of Consumerism. And then we also need to re-construct our own traditions for communal living, collective economics, and Christian communal action. There’s a broad stream of anarchist and socialist thought that is outside of reductive Marxism (although even Marxism, carefully used, can yield effective tools of economic and social critique). Anglicanism in particular has a robust history from English monasticism, to F.D. Maurice's Christian Socialism, to the "Red Vicar" Conrad Noel, to the Distributism of CS Lewis and JRR Tolkien, to anarcho-communal vision of Kenneth Leech.
Recently I have been impressed by the economic musings of Orthodox Theologian David Bentley Hart (he of "That All Shall Be Saved" fame). His criticisms of Late Capitalism as crass idolatry are trenchant, and he advocates complete withdrawal. In the same vein, but with a more redemptive outlook on reforming Western Economics (rather than withdrawing from it) is Harvey Cox's work in "The Market as God" (which was later made into a book). Also relevant here is the work of former New York Times reporter, Harvard theologian, and activist Chris Hedges. Hedges has analyzed how our current political and economic system has caused anomie and rage across American culture as a whole, how it has shifted American religion toward extremism, and how it has eviscerated the ideals of American Liberalism.
But no matter who we read, or if we decide to work within our current system, or if we decide to envision an entirely new socio-political system, we cannot merely aim at removing one leader to replace them with another one who is only moderately less corrupt and less crass. We cannot merely be content with an entitled liberal "equality of the rich" where we revel in a diversity of genders and sexualities and cultures and ethnicities, so long as everyone is wealthy and privileged and college educated. Instead we must aim for a radically just society in which EVERY single person-- rich, poor, old, young, majority, minority, male, female, cis, trans, gay, straight, and any other category-- has access to the "daily bread" promised by Jesus for all the children of God.
A truly healthy society, a truly just government, and a truly good economic system will provide what every person needs to not only survive, but thrive. The health of a society is not found in its GDP or the Stock Market or even in employment rates. The health of a society is found in the physical, psychological, and social health of its people. And we should judge economic and political systems based on how they contribute to the full health and human flourishing of those people who inhabit them.
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