If you have seen the movie Barton Fink, you'll see that it captures this same point. Intellectuals who want to champion the working class often have no interest in talking to them, or taking their viewpoints seriously. They often approach reform in a utopian, unrealistic way so that they may disclose a vision, but no comprehensible, practical way of getting there.

A review of American labor history, however, reveals that contrary to the assumptions of the otherwise excellent Mssrs. Greenfield and Orwell (both of whom I greatly admire), the American socialist movement was created and advanced not by eggheads but by working men and women.

Think about that history: the Ludlow miners, Joe Hill, Big BIll Heywood, Albert Parsons, Mother Jones, and that greatest of Hoosiers, Eugene Debs. Debs himself, running as the socialist candidate for president, won 6% of the popular vote. Think of the Wobblies-- they were working class heroes and socialists, Not eggheads. The eggheads, I believe gravitated largely to the anarchist movement, not the socialist movement.

So, traditionally, liberals and socialists in America have come from the ranks of the working classes. How this changed is a fascinating historical question. I think it was three things, but I'm just guessing.

First, the development of the labor movement turned decidedly against the socialists and the "liberal" ideology because it was able, after WWII, to make huge gains within a modified corporate capitalist system and in addition, made a conscious decision to eschew the creation of a political workers party opting instead to form ranks within the Democratic Party.

Second, a series of Red Scares coupled with post 9/11 roundups and oppression made it dangerous to be associated first with socialist causes.

Third, the Vietnam war really put the division in between the intellectual left (the "ungrateful, spoiled brat" college protestors and their Black liberation quasi-allies) and the working class left (the hardhats whom Nixon manipulated with patriotism related canards).

As a result, there has been a decades long disconnect in terms of association and communication between the intellectual left and the working class. This is the Barton Fink Syndrome.

What will cure it? Two things-- the emergence (we see initial signs) of union/working class leaders who are beginning to advocate for the left. Perhaps not socialism, but certainly far more left than we've seen in recent decades. Health care seems to be a leading cause of this.

Second, the coming Depression/Recession. Since our new national threat is Islamic terrorism rather than ideological communism, there won't be the same grounds for another Red Scare tactic by the PTB.

Well, let's hope, anyway,

Back in the day,

the ability of the mooks among us to confabulate a link between "islamofascism" and whatever political obstacle currently stands in their way. It seems to have proven itself a useful all-purpose bludgeon.

Outstanding, historically-grounded writing, by the way. Enough of a rarity around here that the occasional sighting is a real event.

Sawbones:

the ability of the mooks among us to confabulate a link between "islamofascism" and whatever political obstacle currently stands in their way. It seems to have proven itself a useful all-purpose bludgeon.

Outstanding, historically-grounded writing, by the way. Enough of a rarity around here that the occasional sighting is a real event.

Actually, after I wrote that part, I had the same thought. The motherfuckers will find a way to link fighting for single payor health care with Al Qaeda.

Interesting history but I think not completely accurate in a couple of respects.

1. Socialism in the US was pretty much a bottom up affair, as you describe, in its formative days before WWI. It became less so in the 20s and 30s as the middle class intellectuals got hold of it. Liberalism was something very different. The Progressive movement was a middle class movement, anti-corporate but also anti-machine, in favor of rationality, efficiency and good government. Its reaction to the problems of the urban poor was to try to uplift and civilize them by middle class lights.

2. FDR and Hitler between them brought the US white working class into the middle class. Like the peasants who got their own land out of the French Revolution, their slice of the post-war prosperity gave them something to lose and turned them into a conservative class.

3. At the heart of the Democratic schism in the late 60s was not Vietnam but the belief of many white working class Democrats that they were being screwed over by elitists for the sake of poor people of color who didn't deserve it. They lost control of the urban space, politically and physically. They saw their taxes as going to lazy and undeserving welfare recipients. The beginnings of affirmative action deprived them in many instances of seniority rights and/or nepotism, which are the closest thing that a working person has to property rights in a job. Their children were sent to school with people whom they regarded as not merely inferior but dangerous. And they were despised as ignorant racists because all they wanted was to hold on to a neat clean home in a quiet orderly neighborhood among people like themselves with a good job down at the plant for themselves and their kids. They've never forgiven the people who despised them.

4. In Western Europe, people pay high taxes and get high benefits in return. Never mind health care and free university tuition. Ride the trains, or look at the public recreational facilities in any middling town. Since the 60s, in the US, public -- assistance, transportation, health, you name it -- means poor colored people. Any government program is assumed to be a way to take money away from people who can take care of themselves and give it to undeserving people who can't.

5. The Republicans have been living for 40 years off the breakdown of the post-New Deal urban order in the 1960s, which is the great failure of American liberalism.