Currently reading (brief impression of) Listen, Liberal [by Thomas Frank]

I'm currently reading [read: listening to the audiobook] of Listen, Liberal by journalist Thomas Frank, of What's the Matter with Kansas fame.  It is basically a critique of the Democratic Party since the late 1960s; specifically a critique of its policy shifts away from the New Deal coalition of FDR and towards courting the young emerging professional class and outright disdain and contempt for traditional working class voters.

It's a very good and eye-opening book but also incredibly depressing.

It makes a good companion piece to Chris Hayes' Twilight of the Elites: America after Meritocracy (2013), though Hayes' own programming shifts since 2013, and really since leaving UP with Chris Hayes on Saturday mornings, with its long-format, deep policy dives and landing the more prestigious but greatly abbreviated 7pm slot just before Rachel Maddow, and his coverage of the Bernie Sanders campaign, Hayes himself seems to have sold out and fallen in line with the Meritocratic consensus he once so eloquently deplored in the pages of his 2013 book.  It saddens me.

With the victory of Hillary Clinton over Sanders, the Meritocracy seems as firmly in charge of the Democratic Party's destiny right now as it ever has been.  That saddens me, as a "Bernie Bitter Ender", though I will probably reluctantly pull the lever for HRC come November because Trump must be stopped no matter what.  It just saddens me that "permanent disillusionment" seems to be the fate I must resign myself to in this country for someone with my particular set of political ideals that HRC pays lip service to at best.  I hope I'm wrong and that HRC pleasantly surprises me; but after the disappointments of the first Clinton presidency and the mediocre gains of Obama's two terms, I'm not holding my breath.  I feel like Bernie Sanders was our last best hope.  My tepid support for HRC is born out of an exhausted fatalism and looking back at the 1990s through rose colored glasses.

The new Thomas Frank book also reminds me of my ultimate failure to join the Professional Class as a working librarian.  I'm shut out, largely owing to my inability to navigate the intricacies of office politics owing to my at the time undiagnosed Asperger's.  If I had made it, I might have had to more deeply examine myself as potentially part of the problem...or I'd be more oblivious to that fact, shielded from critical self examination by my larger paycheck.

I belong to what my friend PK describes as "The Intellectual Proletariat", e.g. highly educated but under-employed, well-read liberal artsy types lacking high tech STEM skills but otherwise skilled at critical thinking, writing, etc. but objecting to The Washington Consensus on moral grounds.

I'm only a few chapters in so far, but Thomas Frank makes it clear that things went awry by deliberate design as far back as 1972, so basically for as long as I've been alive (born in February 1971).  The Great Society was undermined fatally by the Vietnam War and the social split caused by that war, with union hardhats beating hippies with a sense of patriotic zeal, and the over-correction in reaction to that, the undue obsession with the then Youth Culture, as the "new" base of the Democratic Party, and the inculcated disdain for working stiffs and probably returning veterans not lucky enough to get a college deferment from the war, or lacking the economic means to flee to Canada for the war's duration.

As the old saying has it, "The Personal is the Political";  I'm reminded that Librarianship has become so professionalized that the MLS is today a defacto MBA for Libraryland and if you're not in some kind of managerial role, you're deemed unworthy to call yourself a Library professional or Librarian period if you're "merely" a solo practitioner providing core library services to the public directly.  That role is considered unworthy of "professional" level salary compensation, etc.  That's what merely college educated "paras" are for, no MLS required.  Librarians manage Paras & Clerks first, and provide core library services only as an afterthought, or in more of a consulting capacity at most.  It wasn't always this way, and the change isn't necessarily for the better, and definitely hurts ASD people from becoming successful Librarians due to the emphasis on the managerial role, which we often SUCK at.  If you have an MLS but are mainly interested in providing core library services directly to the public, well, you're an underachiever by definition and sucks to be you, pal.

I deplore this state of affairs, but also feel I'm just a lone voice, crying in the wilderness.