GAFA: C’est des salauds, mais des salauds tellement cool ! (Will Silicon Valley finally lose its most-favored robber baronism clause ?)

C’est un salaud, mais c’est notre salaud. John Foster Dulles (?)

J’appelle stratégies de condescendance ces transgressions symboliques de la limite qui permettent d’avoir à la fois les profits de la conformité à la définition et les profits de la transgression : c’est le cas de l’aristocrate qui tape sur la croupe du palefrenier et dont on dira «II est simple», sous-entendu, pour un aristocrate, c’est-à-dire un homme d’essence supérieure, dont l’essence ne comporte pas en principe une telle conduite. En fait ce n’est pas si simple et il faudrait introduire une distinction : Schopenhauer parle quelque part du «comique pédant», c’est-à-dire du rire que provoque un personnage lorsqu’il produit une action qui n’est pas inscrite dans les limites de son concept, à la façon, dit-il, d’un cheval de théâtre qui se mettrait à faire du crottin, et il pense aux professeurs, aux professeurs allemands, du style du Professor Unrat de V Ange bleu, dont le concept est si fortement et si étroitement défini, que la transgression des limites se voit clairement. A la différence du professeur Unrat qui, emporté par la passion, perd tout sens du ridicule ou, ce qui revient au même, de la dignité, le consacré condescendant choisit délibérément de passer la ligne ; il a le privilège des privilèges, celui qui consiste à prendre des libertés avec son privilège. C’est ainsi qu’en matière d’usage de la langue, les bourgeois et surtout les intellectuels peuvent se permettre des formes d’hypocorrection, de relâchement, qui sont interdites aux petits-bourgeois, condamnés à l’hypercorrection. Bref, un des privilèges de la consécration réside dans le fait qu’en conférant aux consacrés une essence indiscutable et indélébile, elle autorise des transgressions autrement interdites : celui qui est sûr de son identité culturelle peut jouer avec la règle du jeu culturel, il peut jouer avec le feu, il peut dire qu’il aime Tchaikovsky ou Gershwin, ou même, question de «culot», Aznavour ou les films de série B. Pierre Bourdieu

Bourdieu chose to make it his life’s work to debunk the powerful classes’ pretensions that they were more deserving of authority or wealth than those below. He aimed his critiques first at his own class of elites — professors and intellectuals — then at the media, the political class and the propertied class. “Distinction,” published in 1979, was an undisputed masterwork. In it, Bourdieu set out to show the social logic of taste: how admiration for art, appreciation of music, even taste in food, came about for different groups, and how “superior” taste was not the result of an enchanted superiority in scattered individuals. This may seem a long way from Wellington-booted and trucker-hatted American youth in gentrifying neighborhoods. But Bourdieu’s innovation, applicable here, was to look beyond the traditional trappings of rich or poor to see battles of symbols (like those boots and hats) traversing all society, reinforcing the class structure just as money did. (…) The power of Bourdieu’s statistics was to show how rigid and arbitrary the local conformities were. In American terms, he was like an updater of Thorstein Veblen, who gave us the idea of “conspicuous consumption.” College teachers and artists, unusual in believing that a beautiful photo could be made from a car crash, began to look conditioned to that taste, rather than sophisticated or deep. White-collar workers who defined themselves by their proclivity to eat only light foods — as opposed to farmworkers, who weren’t ashamed to treat themselves to “both cheese and a dessert” — seemed not more refined, but merely more conventional. Taste is not stable and peaceful, but a means of strategy and competition. Those superior in wealth use it to pretend they are superior in spirit. Groups closer in social class who yet draw their status from different sources use taste and its attainments to disdain one another and get a leg up. These conflicts for social dominance through culture are exactly what drive the dynamics within communities whose members are regarded as hipsters. Once you take the Bourdieuian view, you can see how hipster neighborhoods are crossroads where young people from different origins, all crammed together, jockey for social gain. One hipster subgroup’s strategy is to disparage others as “liberal arts college grads with too much time on their hands”; the attack is leveled at the children of the upper middle class who move to cities after college with hopes of working in the “creative professions.” These hipsters are instantly declassed, reservoired in abject internships and ignored in the urban hierarchy — but able to use college-taught skills of classification, collection and appreciation to generate a superior body of cultural “cool.” They, in turn, may malign the “trust fund hipsters.” This challenges the philistine wealthy who, possessed of money but not the nose for culture, convert real capital into “cultural capital” (Bourdieu’s most famous coinage), acquiring subculture as if it were ready-to-wear. (Think of Paris Hilton in her trucker hat.) Both groups, meanwhile, look down on the couch-­surfing, old-clothes-wearing hipsters who seem most authentic but are also often the most socially precarious — the lower-middle-class young, moving up through style, but with no backstop of parental culture or family capital. They are the bartenders and boutique clerks who wait on their well-to-do peers and wealthy tourists. Only on the basis of their cool clothes can they be “superior”: hipster knowledge compensates for economic immobility. All hipsters play at being the inventors or first adopters of novelties: pride comes from knowing, and deciding, what’s cool in advance of the rest of the world. Yet the habits of hatred and accusation are endemic to hipsters because they feel the weakness of everyone’s position — including their own. Proving that someone is trying desperately to boost himself instantly undoes him as an opponent. He’s a fake, while you are a natural aristocrat of taste. That’s why “He’s not for real, he’s just a hipster” is a potent insult among all the people identifiable as hipsters themselves. The attempt to analyze the hipster provokes such universal anxiety because it calls everyone’s bluff. And hipsters aren’t the only ones unnerved. Many of us try to justify our privileges by pretending that our superb tastes and intellect prove we deserve them, reflecting our inner superiority. Those below us economically, the reasoning goes, don’t appreciate what we do; similarly, they couldn’t fill our jobs, handle our wealth or survive our difficulties. Of course this is a terrible lie. And Bourdieu devoted his life to exposing it. Those who read him in effect become responsible to him — forced to admit a failure to examine our own lives, down to the seeming trivialities of clothes and distinction that, as Bourdieu revealed, also structure our world. Mark Greif

L’aura de cool absolu qui entoure Barack Obama doit en effet beaucoup –voire tout– à Pete Souza. Le photographe officiel canarde le président américain partout –dans son bureau, dans ses voyages, quand il va embrasser des bébés et manger des hot-dogs– et fournit en instantané sa légende iconographique. Les photos sont mises à disposition du public et des médias par la Maison Blanche, sous une license Creative Commons, pour qu’elles soient mieux partagées. Grâce à Pete Souza, on a l’impression d’être dans la vraie vie de Barack Obama, alors que rien n’est plus construit que ses photos. Slate

The aesthetics of cool developed mainly as a behavioral attitude practiced by black men in the United States at the time of slavery. Slavery made necessary the cultivation of special defense mechanisms which employed emotional detachment and irony. A cool attitude helped slaves and former slaves to cope with exploitation or simply made it possible to walk the streets at night. During slavery, and long afterwards, overt aggression by blacks was punishable by death. Provocation had to remain relatively inoffensive, and any level of serious intent had to be disguised or suppressed. So cool represents a paradoxical fusion of submission and subversion. It’s a classic case of resistance to authority through creativity and innovation. Today the aesthetics of cool represents the most important phenomenon in youth culture. The aesthetic is spread by Hip Hop culture for example, which has become “the center of a mega music and fashion industry around the world” (…). Black aesthetics, whose stylistic, cognitive, and behavioural tropes are largely based on cool-mindedness, has arguably become “the only distinctive American artistic creation” (…). The African American philosopher Cornel West sees the “black-based Hip Hop culture of youth around the world” as a grand example of the “shattering of male, WASP cultural homogeneity” (…). While several recent studies have shown that American brand names have dramatically slipped in their cool quotients worldwide, symbols of black coolness such as Hip Hop remain exportable. However, ‘cool’ does not only refer to a respected aspect of masculine display, it’s also a symptom of anomie, confusion, anxiety, self-gratification and escapism, since being cool can push individuals towards passivity more than towards an active fulfillment of life’s potential. Often “it is more important to be ‘cool and down’ with the peer group than to demonstrate academic achievement,” write White & Cones (…). On the one hand, the message produced by a cool pose fascinates the world because of its inherent mysteriousness. The stylized way of offering resistance that insists more on appearance than on substance can turn cool people into untouchable objects of desire. On the other hand, to be cool can be seen as a decadent attitude leading to individual passivity and social decay. The ambiguity residing in this constellation lends the cool scheme its dynamics, but it also makes its evaluation very difficult. (…) A president is uncool if he clings to absolute power, but becomes cooler as soon as he voluntarily concedes power in order to maintain democratic values. Thorsten Botz-Bornstein

Cool est généralement associé au sang-froid et au contrôle de soi et il est utilisé dans ce sens comme une expression d’approbation ou d’admiration. Cette notion peut aussi être associée à une forme de nonchalance. Wikipedia

There is no single concept of cool. One of the essential characteristics of cool is its mutability—what is considered cool changes over time and varies among cultures and generations. One consistent aspect however, is that cool is wildly seen as positive and desirable. Although there is no single concept of cool, its definitions fall into a few broad categories. The sum and substance of cool is a self-conscious aplomb in overall behavior, which entails a set of specific behavioral characteristics that is firmly anchored in symbology, a set of discernible bodily movements, postures, facial expressions and voice modulations that are acquired and take on strategic social value within the peer context. Cool was once an attitude fostered by rebels and underdogs, such as slaves, prisoners, bikers and political dissidents, etc., for whom open rebellion invited punishment, so it hid defiance behind a wall of ironic detachment, distancing itself from the source of authority rather than directly confronting it. In general, coolness is a positive trait based on the inference that a cultural object (e.g., a person or brand) is autonomous in an appropriate way. That is the person or brand is not constrained by the norms, expectation of beliefs of others. (…) Cool is also an attitude widely adopted by artists and intellectuals, who thereby aided its infiltration into popular culture. Sought by product marketing firms, idealized by teenagers, a shield against racial oppression or political persecution and source of constant cultural innovation, cool has become a global phenomenon that has spread to every corner of the earth. Concepts of cool have existed for centuries in several cultures. In terms of fashion, the concept of “cool” has transformed from the 1960s to the 1990s by becoming integrated in the dominant fabric of culture. America’s mass-production of “ready-to-wear” fashion in the 1940s and ‘50s, established specific conventional outfits as markers of ones fixed social role in society. Subcultures such as the Hippies, felt repressed by the dominating conservative ideology of the 1940s and ‘50s towards conformity and rebelled. (…) Starting in the 1990s and continuing into the 21st century, the concept of dressing cool went out of the minority and into the mainstream culture, making dressing “cool” a dominant ideology. Cool entered the mainstream because those Hippie “rebels” of the late 1960s were now senior executives of business sectors and of the fashion industry. Since they grew up with “cool” and maintained the same values, they knew its rules and thus knew how to accurately market and produce such clothing. However, once “cool” became the dominant ideology in the 21st century its definition changed to not one of rebellion but of one attempting to hide their insecurities in a confident manner. The “fashion-grunge” style of the 1990s and 21st century allowed people who felt financially insecure about their lifestyle to pretend to “fit in” by wearing a unique piece of clothing, but one that was polished beautiful. For example, unlike the Hippie style that clearly diverges from the norm, through Marc Jacobs’ combined “fashion-grunge” style of “a little preppie, a little grunge and a little couture,” he produces not a bold statement one that is mysterious and awkward creating an ambiguous perception of what the wearer’s internal feelings are. While slang terms are usually short-lived coinages and figures of speech, cool is an especially ubiquitous slang word, most notably among young people. As well as being understood throughout the English-speaking world, the word has even entered the vocabulary of several languages other than English. In this sense, cool is used as a general positive epithet or interjection, which can have a range of related adjectival meanings. Wikipedia

Ronald Perry writes that many words and expressions have passed from African-American Vernacular English into Standard English slang including the contemporary meaning of the word « cool. » The definition, as something fashionable, is said to have been popularized in jazz circles by tenor saxophonist Lester Young. This predominantly black jazz scene in the U.S. and among expatriate musicians in Paris helped popularize notions of cool in the U.S. in the 1940s, giving birth to « Bohemian », or beatnik, culture. Shortly thereafter, a style of jazz called cool jazz appeared on the music scene, emphasizing a restrained, laid-back solo style. Notions of cool as an expression of centeredness in a Taoist sense, equilibrium and self-possession, of an absence of conflict are commonly understood in both African and African-American contexts well. Expressions such as, « Don’t let it blow your cool, » later, chill out, and the use of chill as a characterization of inner contentment or restful repose all have their origins in African-American Vernacular English. (…) Among black men in America, coolness, which may have its roots in slavery as an ironic submission and concealed subversion, at times is enacted in order to create a powerful appearance, a type of performance frequently maintained for the sake of a social audience. (…) « Cool pose » may be a factor in discrimination in education contributing to the achievement gaps in test scores. In a 2004 study, researchers found that teachers perceived students with African-American culture-related movement styles, referred to as the « cool pose, » as lower in achievement, higher in aggression, and more likely to need special education services than students with standard movement styles, irrespective of race or other academic indicators. The issue of stereotyping and discrimination with respect to « cool pose » raises complex questions of assimilation and accommodation of different cultural values. Jason W. Osborne identifies « cool pose » as one of the factors in black underachievement. Robin D. G. Kelley criticizes calls for assimilation and sublimation of black culture, including « cool pose. » He argues that media and academics have unfairly demonized these aspects of black culture while, at the same time, through their sustained fascination with blacks as exotic others, appropriated aspects of « cool pose » into the broader popular culture. George Elliott Clarke writes that Malcolm X, like Miles Davis, embodies essential elements of cool. As an icon, Malcolm X inspires a complex mixture of both fear and fascination in broader American culture, much like « cool pose » itself. Wikipedia

Vous allez dans certaines petites villes de Pennsylvanie où, comme ans beaucoup de petites villes du Middle West, les emplois ont disparu depuis maintenant 25 ans et n’ont été remplacés par rien d’autre (…) Et il n’est pas surprenant qu’ils deviennent pleins d’amertume, qu’ils s’accrochent aux armes à feu ou à la religion, ou à leur antipathie pour ceux qui ne sont pas comme eux, ou encore à un sentiment d’hostilité envers les immigrants. Barack Obama (2008)

Pour généraliser, en gros, vous pouvez placer la moitié des partisans de Trump dans ce que j’appelle le panier des pitoyables. Les racistes, sexistes, homophobes, xénophobes, islamophobes. A vous de choisir. Hillary Clinton

Ces idées ont un nom : nationalisme, identitarisme, protectionnisme, souverainisme de repli. Ces idées qui, tant de fois, ont allumé les brasiers où l’Europe aurait pu périr, les revoici sous des habits neufs encore ces derniers jours. Elles se disent légitimes parce qu’elles exploitent avec cynisme la peur des peuples. (…) Je ne laisserai rien, rien à toutes celles et ceux qui promettent la haine, la division ou le repli national. Je ne leur laisserai aucune proposition. C’est à l’Europe de les faire, c’est à nous de les porter, aujourd’hui et maintenant (…) Et nous n’avons qu’un choix, qu’une alternative : le repli sur nous frontières, qui serait à la fois illusoire et inefficace, ou la construction d’un espace commun des frontières, de l’asile et de (…) faire une place aux réfugiés qui ont risqué leur vie, chez eux et sur leur chemin, c’est notre devoir commun d’Européen et nous ne devons pas le perdre de vue. (…) C’est pourquoi j’ai engagé en France un vaste travail de réforme pour mieux accueillir les réfugiés, augmenter les relocalisations dans notre pays, accélérer les procédures d’asile en nous inspirant du modèle allemand, être plus efficaces dans les reconduites indispensables. Ce que je souhaite pour l’Europe, la France commence dès à présent à le faire elle-même. Emmanuel Macron

J’entends les voix apeurées qui nous appellent à construire des murs. Plutôt que des murs, nous voulons aider les gens à construire des ponts. Mark Zuckerberg

Mes arrière-grands-parents sont venus d’Allemagne, d’Autriche et de Pologne. Les parents de [mon épouse] Priscilla étaient des réfugiés venant de Chine et du Vietnam. Les Etats-Unis sont une nation d’immigrants, et nous devrions en être fiers. Comme beaucoup d’entre vous, je suis inquiet de l’impact des récents décrets signés par le président Trump. Nous devons faire en sorte que ce pays reste en sécurité, mais pour y parvenir, nous devrions nous concentrer sur les personnes qui représentent vraiment une menace. Etendre l’attention des forces de l’ordre au-delà des personnes qui représentent de vraies menaces va nuire à la sécurité des Américains, en dispersant les ressources, tandis que des millions de sans-papiers qui ne représentent aucune menace vivront dans la peur d’être expulsés. Mark Zuckerberg

We can suggest what you should do next, what you care about. Imagine: We know where you are, we know what you like. A near-term future in which you don’t forget anything, because the computer remembers. You’re never lost. Eric Schmidt (Google)

I don’t believe society understands what happens when everything is available, knowable and recorded by everyone all the time. (…) Let’s say you’re walking down the street. Because of the info Google has collected about you, we know roughly who you are, roughly what you care about, roughly who your friends are. (…) I actually think most people don’t want Google to answer their questions. They want Google to tell them what they should be doing next. Eric Schmidt

The average American doesn’t realize how much of the laws are written by lobbyists (…) Washington is an incumbent protection machine. Technology is fundamentally disruptive. (…) Google policy is to get right up to the creepy line and not cross it. Google implants, he added, probably crosses that line. (…) With your permission you give us more information about you, about your friends, and we can improve the quality of our searches. We don’t need you to type at all. We know where you are. We know where you’ve been. We can more or less now what you’re thinking about. Eric Schmidt

There’s such an overwhelming amount of information now, we can search where you are, see what you’re looking at if you take a picture with your camera. One way to think about this is, we’re trying to make people better people, literally give them better ideas—augmenting their experience. Think of it as augmented humanity. Eric Schmidt

La Silicon Valley avait beaucoup d’intérêts en jeu dans cette présidentielle, notamment du fait de sa très forte dépendance vis-à-vis des travailleurs immigrants et par rapport au travail déporté dans des pays à faibles salaires. Cette seule situation est intolérable pour la « middle class » américaine, très touchée par le chômage, surtout les seniors, qui sont marginalisés et débarqués dans cette économie numérique basée sur un jeunisme brutal, qui exclut les plus âgés et qui se répand rapidement. Avec près de cinquante ans de stagnation de leurs revenus et de difficultés économiques, les prolétaires ruminaient en silence leur colère en espérant qu’Obama allait faire des miracles. Au final, ils se sentent les victimes du progrès numérique. Ils voulaient leur revanche de façon vraiment tranchée et à n’importe quel prix… Leur raisonnement : ces entreprises de la high-tech éliminent des emplois, en créent en dehors, génèrent d’énormes richesses, dont une très grosse partie hors des Etats-Unis, ne paient pas d’impôts sur ces richesses, qui ne profitent donc pas à la « middle class ». On estime à 58 % la part du chiffre d’affaires de la Silicon Valley en dehors des Etats-Unis, l’an dernier. La « Valley » ne se gêne pas pour faire un lobbying substantiel auprès des politiciens de Washington afin de servir ses intérêts. Et elle est donneuse de leçons. « Changer le monde » pour en faire un monde meilleur, mais pour qui ? Pour les centres de la high-tech et du showbiz de Californie, et c’est une bonne partie du 1 % de la population américaine le plus riche qui profite des progrès. Les thèmes qui ont occupé la Silicon Valley n’ont pas résonné avec le prolétariat. (…) la précarisation des emplois par les nouvelles plates-formes numériques, comme Uber, a provoqué des débats amers. L’avènement de l’intelligence artificielle a davantage crispé les esprits du fait de sa capacité à supprimer beaucoup d’emplois sans perspective d’en créer au moins autant de nouveaux. La high-tech de l’ère Obama n’a fait qu’inquiéter ou marginaliser le prolétariat américain. On voit qu’elle ne peut et ne pourra pas être « la » voie unique de salut pour les économies et les sociétés en difficulté. Georges Nahon

Barons voleurs est un terme péjoratif, qu’on trouve dans la critique sociale et la littérature économique pour caractériser certains hommes d’affaires riches et puissants des États-Unis au XIX^e siècle. Dans l’histoire des États-Unis d’Amérique, l’âge doré voit l’éclosion de ces capitaines d’industrie qui façonnent le rêve américain mais sont aussi accusés, à cette période de capitalisme sauvage, d’exploiter et éventuellement réprimer la main-d’œuvre, ainsi que de pratiquer la corruption. L’expression apparaît dans la presse américaine, en août 1870, dans le magazine The Atlantic Monthly, pour désigner les entrepreneurs pratiquant l’exploitation pour accumuler leurs richesses. Leurs pratiques incluent le contrôle des ressources nationales, l’influence sur les hauts fonctionnaires, le paiement de salaires extrêmement bas, l’écrasement de leurs concurrents par leur acquisition en vue de créer des monopoles et de pousser les prix à la hausse, ainsi que la manipulation des cours des actions vers des prix artificiellement hauts, actions vendues à des investisseurs voués à l’appauvrissement dès le cours retombé, aboutissant à la disparition de la société cotée. L’expression, forgée par les muckrakers, allie le sens de criminel (« voleur ») et celui de noblesse douteuse (un « baron » est un titre illégitime dans une république). Le président Theodore Roosevelt est intervenu contre les monopoles en obtenant du gouvernement conservateur qu’il mette au pas ces capitaines d’industrie, qu’il appelle des « malfaiteurs de grande fortune » et des « royalistes de l’économie ». Wikipedia

In the US, Google, Apple, Facebook, and Amazon are generally praised as examples of innovation. In the French press, and for much of the rest of Europe, their innovation is often seen in a less positive light—the ugly Americans coming over with innovative approaches to invading personal privacy or new ways to avoid paying their fair share. Take Google: its tax affairs in France are being challenged (paywall)—which comes soon after it has been forced to institute a “right to be forgotten” and threatened with being broken up. But the spread of the term “GAFA” may be as much to do with cultural resentment as taxes. “I think it’s more about distribution of power in the online world than tax avoidance,” Liam Boogar, founder of the French start-up site, Rude Baguette, tells Quartz. France, after all, is a country with a long history of resisting US cultural hegemony. Remember José Bové, the sheep farmer who destroyed a McDonald’s in 1999 and was a symbol for the anti-globalization movement? Times have changed; McDonald’s most profitable country in Europe is now France. Having lost that battle, the French have instead turned their ire to Silicon Valley. There is also a loss of public sympathy in the wake of the massive American government spying revelations. Jérémie Zimmermann, one of the founders of La Quadrature, a tech-oriented public policy non-profit, tells Quartz he dislikes the term “GAFA” and prefers to refer to the big US firms as the “PRISM” companies (after the US National Security Agency program revealed by Edward Snowden) or the “Bullrun” firms (another NSA program), which he uses to refer to “more or less every US-based company in which trust is broken”—citing examples that include Intel, Motorola, and Cisco. Even if the term has a negative connotation, it’s worth noting which companies didn’t make the acronym. Microsoft, most notably. Samsung is another. No Yahoo. Google, Apple, Facebook, and Amazon pretty much dominate every facet of our lives—from email from friends and family to what’s in your pocket to how you get everything in your house to how you pay. As far as acronyms of global power go, it works. Quartz

GAFA is an acronym for Google, Apple, Facebook, and Amazon — the 4 most powerful American technology companies. Usage of the term “GAFA” is increasingly common in Europe. The acronym, originally from France, is used by the media to identify the 4 companies as a group – often in the context of legal investigations. The EU is (…) generally quite hostile to the unfettered ambitions of corporations. Any company that seeks to acquire a monopoly, engage in anti-competitive practices, dodge taxes, or invade EU citizens’ privacy is likely to find themselves under investigation, and potentially facing a hefty fine. Every GAFA company is currently under investigation by the EU for something. Google knows a lot about you, although there are some steps you can take to minimise it. The company uses the information they pull from your browsing habits, emails, Google Drive files, and anything else they can get their hands on to serve you ever more targeted ads. In the past this has led to the EU criticising Google’s use of personal data. More recently, the EU has been investigating Google for antitrust violations. Microsoft has been fined €2.2 billion for abusing its dominant market position and pushing its own services over the years, and the EU is concerned that Google is doing the same with search and Android. If they’re found to be abusing their position, they’ll face billions of euro worth of fines and be required to change their business practices. Google has already been forced, by the EU, to change how it operates. After a landmark ruling last year, citizens of the EU have the “right to be forgotten” on the Internet. People can request that search engines remove links to web pages that contain information about them — although MakeUseOf readers don’t seem too fussed about it. Apple Music was only unveiled this month but, according to Reuters, the deals they’ve inked with record companies are already under investigation. The EU, however, is more interested in Apple’s tax practices. The Union already shut down some tax loopholes, such as the Double Irish, that Apple used to minimize their tax burden, both in Europe and the US. The Union is continuing to investigate whether other practices they engaged in were legal. A ruling was due this month but has been pushed back. The EU isn’t keen on Facebook for the same reason most people aren’t — its questionable privacy record. Facebook knows a surprising amount about us – information we willingly volunteer. From that information you can be slotted into a demographic, your « likes » recorded and relationships monitored. There are several investigations, and a class action law suit, looking into whether or not Facebook’s privacy policy is legal. So far things are looking bad for Facebook. Despite frequent updates, a Belgian report released earlier this year “found that Facebook is acting in violation of European law“. Just like the other companies, Facebook could face heavy fines if they don’t fall into line with the EU’s policies. The EU’s issue with Amazon is a little different. The EU wants a Digital Single Market where every citizen would be able to purchase the same products at the same price as any other, regardless of where the products were being sold from. They are, according to VentureBeat, concerned that Amazon, and other e-commerce companies like Netflix, “have policies that restrict the ability of merchants and consumers to buy and sell goods and services across Europe’s borders.” For example: videos offered by the company’s streaming aren’t available in every country, which is at odds with the EU’s aim to treat every member nation and citizen equally. A year-long investigation launched this year so, at least for now, Amazon is free to continue as they are. The EU is clearly not going to let the GAFA companies operate unchecked, nor let them have the same level of independence they enjoy in the US. The EU takes a much more hands on approach to consumer protection and anti-competition laws than the Obama administration. Make us of.com

Les chiffres sont vertigineux. Apple est l’entreprise la plus capitalisée en bourse, avec une valeur qui a dépassé les 800 milliards de dollars. Celle d’Alphabet, la maison mère de Google, atteint près de 650 milliards de dollars. Google représente 88% du marché de la recherche sur Internet aux Etats-Unis et Facebook vient de franchir la barre des deux milliards d’utilisateurs actifs. Amazon? Le géant de la vente en ligne, qui s’apprête à ouvrir un deuxième siège en Amérique du Nord – plusieurs villes sont en lice –, est en train de tuer le petit commerce. Cette toute-puissance inquiète. (…) Un sondage publié le 25 septembre par le quotidien US Today révèle que 76% des Américains sont désormais d’avis que les GAFA, les Big Four de la tech et leurs petits frères, ont trop de poids dans leur vie. Pas moins de 52% d’entre eux jugent cette influence «mauvaise». Certains de ces géants ont dû faire face à des scandales, ce qui entache leur déontologie et leur crédibilité. Le 6 septembre, Facebook a admis que près de 500 faux profils liés à la Russie avaient acheté pour plus de 100 000 dollars de publicité, entre juin 2015 et mai 2017, pour influencer l’élection présidentielle américaine en véhiculant des messages censés nuire à Hillary Clinton. «Je ne veux pas que qui que ce soit utilise nos instruments pour nuire à la démocratie», a proclamé son cofondateur et patron Mark Zuckerberg dans une vidéo, en présentant ses excuses. C’est la première fois que le groupe admet avoir été manipulé ainsi, offrant à la Russie une plateforme de choix pour sa propagande. De quoi intéresser le procureur spécial Robert Mueller, qui enquête sur les possibles collusions entre l’équipe de Donald Trump et Moscou. Facebook va devoir rendre des comptes devant le Sénat. Le Congrès entendra également Twitter et Google dans le cadre de l’affaire russe. Une audience publique est prévue le 1er novembre. Facebook avait déjà été critiqué pour avoir diffusé des vidéos de meurtres et de suicides en direct. Et facilité, grâce à ses algorithmes, des messages racistes et antisémites ciblés. Le New York Times s’est moqué des excuses tardives du groupe, en trouvant une analogie avec Frankenstein, qui a échappé à son créateur. Faut-il réguler le secteur? S’achemine-t-on vers une législation antitrust contre les géants de la tech? Le controversé Stephen Bannon, que Donald Trump a limogé cet été de son poste de conseiller stratégique à la Maison-Blanche, l’avait appelée de ses vœux. Tout comme la sénatrice démocrate Elizabeth Warren, à l’autre bout de l’échiquier politique. La News Media Alliance, qui regroupe plus de 2000 titres américains et canadiens, donne également de la voix en ce sens, les médias d’information souffrant de la rude concurrence des géants d’Internet. (…) Comme le rappelle le New York Times, Facebook et Google bataillent ferme depuis le mois dernier contre un projet qui veut les rendre responsables s’ils hébergent du trafic sexuel sur leurs sites. L’enjeu est majeur: une loi vieille de vingt ans protège pour l’instant les compagnies internet de poursuites en justice en raison de contenus postés par des internautes. Sentant le vent tourner, les géants de la tech commencent à renforcer leurs équipes d’avocats et de lobbyistes. Le Temps

Emmanuel Macron, qui vomit le populisme, fait tout pour l’alimenter. Il en a apporté la démonstration, mardi à la Sorbonne, en se faisant le défenseur exalté de l’Union européenne, sans vouloir entendre les réticences des peuples. Sa prétendue ‘refondation’ européenne n’est autre que la perpétuation d’une institution technocratique et éloignée de la vie des gens. Son choix d’une ‘Europe souveraine » est celui d’une supranationalité qui méconnait les nations et leur désir de maîtriser leur destin. L’entendre affirmer que l’Europe doit « faire une place aux réfugiés » car « c’est notre devoir commun » révèle son indifférence aux inquiétudes qui partout se manifestent. En Allemagne, la percée de l’afD, ce week-end, a été motivée par la folle politique migratoire d’Angela Merkel et son incapacité à mesurer le danger islamiste. (…) D’islam politique, il n’en a évidemment pas été question dans le discours fleuve du chef de l’Etat. Il ne veut ‘conduire la bataille’ que pour donner plus de pouvoirs encore à une Union de plus en plus soviétoïde. Il n’a réservé ses coups, comme à son habitude, qu’à ceux qui ne pensent pas comme lui. (…) non content de s’aveugler sur une Union européenne vécue comme une violence ou une menace par beaucoup de citoyens abandonnés, le président s’est une fois de plus laissé aller au manichéisme en usage chez les esprits sectaires. Pour lui, ceux qui critiquent l’UE laisseraient voir un ‘nationalisme’, un ‘identitarisme’, un ‘souverainisme de repli’ et autres « passions tristes ». Il dit de ceux-là qu’ils « mentent aux peuples ». Et de menacer, d’ailleurs peu clairement : « Je ne laisserai rien, rien, à ceux qui promettent la haine, la division ou le repli national ». Mais où est la haine, en l’occurrence, sinon dans ces propos présidentiels qui cherchent à discréditer des contradicteurs. Ivan Rioufol

In the 50 years between the end of the American civil war in 1865 and the outbreak of the first world war in 1914, a group of entrepreneurs spearheaded America’s transformation from an agricultural into an industrial society, built gigantic business empires and amassed huge fortunes. (…) In the 50 years since Data General introduced the first mini-computers in the late 1960s, a group of entrepreneurs have spearheaded the transformation of an industrial age into an information society, built gigantic business empires and acquired huge fortunes. (…) The first group is now known as the robber barons. The second lot—call them the silicon sultans—could face a similar fate. Like their predecessors, they were once revered as inventive mould-breakers, delivering gadgets to the masses. But just like Rockefeller and the other “malefactors of great wealth”, these new capitalists are losing their sheen. They have been diversifying into businesses that have little to do with computers, while egotistically proclaiming that they alone can solve mankind’s problems, from ageing to space travel. More pointedly, they stand accused of being greedy businessfolk who suborn politicians, employ sweatshop labour, stiff other shareholders and, especially, monopolise markets. Rockefeller once controlled 80% of the world’s supply of oil: today Google has 90% of the search market in Europe and 67% in the United States. (…) Just as the railroad made it possible for obscure companies to revolutionise everything from food (Heinz) to laundry (Procter & Gamble), the internet allows entrepreneurs to disrupt everything from retailing (Amazon) to transport (Uber). Both relied on the relentless logic of economies of scale. The robber barons started with striking innovations—in Ford’s case, a more efficient way of turning petrol into power—but their real genius lay in their ability to “scale up” these innovations to squeeze the competition. (…) The silicon sultans updated the idea. Mr Gates understood the imminent ubiquity of personal computers, and the money to be made from making their software. Messrs Brin and Page grasped that their search engine could create a massive audience for advertisers. Mr Zuckerberg saw that Facebook could profit from inserting itself into the social lives of a sizeable chunk of the world’s population. Economies of scale allowed the robber barons to keep reducing prices and improving quality. Henry Ford cut the price of his Model T from $850 in its first year of production to $360 in 1916. In 1924 you could buy a much better car for just $290. The silicon sultans performed exactly the same trick. The price of computer equipment, adjusted for quality and inflation, has declined by 16% a year over the five decades from 1959 to 2009. Each iPhone contains the same amount of computing power as was housed in MIT in 1960. The robber barons denounced regulators in the name of the free market, but monopoly suited them better. (…) Although the Sherman Anti-Trust Act of 1890 outlawed these devices as restraints on free trade, the barons either neutralised the legislation or got round it with another control-preserving device, the holding company. By the early 20th century trusts and holding companies held nearly 40% of American manufacturing assets. Alfred Chandler, the doyen of American business historians, summed up the hundred years following the civil war as “ten years of competition and 90 years of oligopoly”. The silicon sultans have it easier. They sometimes brush with the law—Google and Apple have been scolded for creating informal agreements to prevent poaching wars—but network effects, whereby the more customers a service has, the more valuable it becomes, mean that their businesses tend towards monopoly anyway. (…) The result, in both cases, is an unparalleled concentration of power. A century ago the barons had a lock on transport and energy. Today Google and Apple between them provide 90% of smartphone operating systems; over half of North Americans and over a third of Europeans use Facebook. None of the five big car companies, by contrast, controls more than a fifth of the American market. (…) Today most firms are widely held by large numbers of shareholders: the largest individual shareholder in Exxon, the grandchild of Standard Oil, is Rex Tillerson, the company’s chief executive. He owns 0.05% of the stock. But tech is different. Together Google’s two founders, Sergey Brin and Larry Page, and its executive chairman, Eric Schmidt (who also sits on the board of The Economist’s parent company) control two-thirds of the voting stock in Google. Mark Zuckerberg owns 20% of Facebook shares but almost all of its “class B” shares, which have ten times the voting power of ordinary shares. The tech titans are not as rich in relative terms as the robber barons. When Rockefeller retired in the early 20th century, his net worth was equal to about one-thirtieth of America’s annual GNP. When Mr Gates stepped aside as CEO of Microsoft in 2000 his net worth might have equalled 1/130th of it. But they nevertheless represent the most significant concentration of business wealth in the world. In 2013 34% of billionaire-entrepreneurs aged 40 or under made their money in high tech. (…) Both the robber barons and the silicon sultans helped to create a very different America, divided by class and obsessed with money. In “The Theory of the Leisure Class”(1899), Thorstein Veblen showed how an egalitarian society was becoming an aristocratic one. In “Capital in the Twenty-First Century” (2013) Thomas Piketty made similar claims for the past 40 years. (…) No sooner had they transformed themselves from challengers into incumbents than the robber barons succumbed to the two great temptations of a successful middle age: undisciplined growth and unqualified self-belief. Rockefeller spilled into a succession of adjacent businesses—he bought forests to supply his company with wood, established plants to turn the wood into barrels, produced chemicals for refining and bought ships and railroad cars to carry his products. Harriman turned from financing railways to dabbling in finance more generally. (…) Google is pouring its super-profits into a succession of loosely related industries: robotics, energy, household appliances, driverless cars and anti-ageing. The company may well be fashioning a world in which it has a hand in everything humans do—driving them to work, adjusting their thermostats, making (and monitoring) their phone calls, and, of course, organising their information. Facebook has spent $2 billion on a start-up that makes virtual-reality equipment. Elon Musk, one of the founders of PayPal, has moved into electric cars and rockets. Jeff Bezos, Amazon’s founder, is also investing in private space travel. (…) In the Valley, extending life to 100 or 120 is a passion; Mr Thiel even talks about abolishing death. Reforming the state is another hobby; again Mr Thiel takes things to the limit with a project to establish a collection of floating city states in international waters outside the reach of governments. Reinventing food—creating meat substitutes in particular—is another recent craze: Messrs Brin, Gates and Thiel have invested in alternative food companies. (…) The most controversial sideways move the robber barons made was into day-to-day politics. (…) Robber barons bought newspapers—Ford turned the Dearborn Independent into a mouthpiece for his cranky views on the Jews. Not content with establishing what Arthur Schlesinger junior called “government of the corporations, by the corporations and for the corporations”, a growing number of robber barons and their children went into politics themselves. Two of Rockefeller’s children became governors—Nelson of New York and Winthrop of Arkansas—and Nelson went on to be Gerald Ford’s vice-president. (…) This year Google’s political action committee spent more on campaigns than Goldman Sachs, a company legendary for its political connections. Mr Zuckerberg has founded a pressure group, fwd.us, to push for immigration reform. The prospectus for the group, headed by one of Mr Zuckerberg’s former Harvard room-mates, boasts that the tech industry will become “one of the most powerful political forces” because “we control massive distribution channels, both as companies and as individuals”. These “channels” include old-media redoubts such as the Washington Post (bought by Mr Bezos) and the New Republic (bought by Facebook’s Chris Hughes) as well as new media empires such as Yahoo. Silicon Valley is now a regular stop in fundraising and an established part of America’s revolving-door culture. Al Gore, a former vice-president, has been a senior adviser to Google. Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook’s chief operating officer, started her career as chief of staff to Larry Summers when he was treasury secretary. (…) The age of the robber barons led inexorably to the age of populist revolt, with mass strikes, anti-monopoly legislation, social reforms and, eventually, the New Deal of the 1930s. The robber barons had ruined too many people and broken too many rules. (…) A cohort of politicians and lawyers fairly swiftly translated the backlash into policy. Teddy Roosevelt thundered against the “criminal rich”. Woodrow Wilson followed up with even more vigorous attacks on corporate America. The 16th amendment to the constitution introduced an income tax for the first time, and the 17th amendment decreed that senators should be elected by popular vote rather than appointed by local legislatures. That the tech barons have attracted only a fraction of the ire of the robber barons is not surprising: with relatively small, highly paid workforces, they are not involved in the battles with unions that turned the robber barons into ogres. In 1901 US Steel, Carnegie’s creation, employed a quarter of a million men—more than the army and navy combined. Today Google employs more than 50,000, Facebook 8,000 and Twitter 3,500. The electronic toys the tech barons make also inspire more affection among consumers than the commodities or infrastructure that the robber barons produced. But there are nevertheless growing rumbles of discontent. Starting in 1994, the American government successfully prosecuted Microsoft for predatory pricing and undermining competition. The EU is currently mulling various ways of reducing Google’s dominance in the search market, and has even proposed splitting its search engine operations in Europe from the rest of its business. Aside from monopoly and inequality, the main gripe against the tech barons concerns privacy. The tech industry makes much of its money from hoovering up private information. (…) The final enduring theme in the story of the American barons is the story of philanthropy. Carnegie pronounced that “the man who thus dies rich dies disgraced”. The robber barons (including Carnegie) did not exactly die poor. But almost all of them became philanthropists in old age. Carnegie tried to make equality of opportunity mean something by founding 2,811 public libraries. Rockefeller’s intellectual legacy, the University of Chicago, is one of America’s greatest. Mr Gates’s foundation is one of the largest in the world; and he and his fellows are following their predecessors by applying the same mixture of imagination and hubris to philanthropy that they applied to business. In America entrepreneurs do not just create bigger fortunes. They also cast longer shadows. The Economist

Many of the more privileged Americans who frequent fancy restaurants, stay in hotels and depend on hired help for lawn and pool maintenance, home repair and childcare don’t think illegal immigration is that big of a deal. Those in the higher-paid professions do not fear low-wage competition for their jobs in law, medicine, academia, the media, government or the arts. And many who have no problem with the present influx live in affluent communities with good schools insulated from the immediate budgetary consequences of meeting the needs of the offspring of the 11 million here illegally. These wealthier people aren’t so much liberal in their tolerance of illegal immigration as they are self-interested and cynical. In contrast, the far more numerous poor and lower middle classes of America, especially in the Southwest, are sincerely worried — and angry. (…) For the broad middle class, the poor and minorities — people who dine mostly at home, travel infrequently, mow their own lawns and change their children’s diapers — inexpensive service labor is not seen as much of a boon to them. Plus, lower- and middle-class Americans live in communities where schools are more impacted by an influx of Spanish-only speakers. And as janitors, maids, groundskeepers, carpenters, factory workers and truckers, they fear competition from lower-wage illegal alien laborers. Legal immigrants who wait years in line to enter the United States legally can be particularly unsympathetic to others who cut in front — in violation of the law. Victor Davis Hanson (October 6, 2006)

The furor of ignored Europeans against their union is not just directed against rich and powerful government elites per se, or against the flood of mostly young male migrants from the war-torn Middle East. The rage also arises from the hypocrisy of a governing elite that never seems to be subject to the ramifications of its own top-down policies. The bureaucratic class that runs Europe from Brussels and Strasbourg too often lectures European voters on climate change, immigration, politically correct attitudes about diversity, and the constant need for more bureaucracy, more regulations, and more redistributive taxes. But Euro-managers are able to navigate around their own injunctions, enjoying private schools for their children; generous public pay, retirement packages and perks; frequent carbon-spewing jet travel; homes in non-diverse neighborhoods; and profitable revolving-door careers between government and business. The Western elite classes, both professedly liberal and conservative, square the circle of their privilege with politically correct sermonizing. They romanticize the distant “other” — usually immigrants and minorities — while condescendingly lecturing the middle and working classes, often the losers in globalization, about their lack of sensitivity. On this side of the Atlantic, President Obama has developed a curious habit of talking down to Americans about their supposedly reactionary opposition to rampant immigration, affirmative action, multiculturalism, and political correctness — most notably in his caricatures of the purported “clingers” of Pennsylvania. Yet Obama seems uncomfortable when confronted with the prospect of living out what he envisions for others. He prefers golfing with celebrities to bowling. He vacations in tony Martha’s Vineyard rather than returning home to his Chicago mansion. His travel entourage is royal and hardly green. And he insists on private prep schools for his children rather than enrolling them in the public schools of Washington, D.C., whose educators he so often shields from long-needed reform. In similar fashion, grandees such as Facebook billionaire Mark Zuckerberg and Univision anchorman Jorge Ramos do not live what they profess. They often lecture supposedly less sophisticated Americans on their backward opposition to illegal immigration. But both live in communities segregated from those they champion in the abstract. The Clintons often pontificate about “fairness” but somehow managed to amass a personal fortune of more than $100 million by speaking to and lobbying banks, Wall Street profiteers, and foreign entities. The pay-to-play rich were willing to brush aside the insincere, pro forma social-justice talk of the Clintons and reward Hillary and Bill with obscene fees that would presumably result in lucrative government attention. Consider the recent Orlando tragedy for more of the same paradoxes. The terrorist killer, Omar Mateen — a registered Democrat, proud radical Muslim, and occasional patron of gay dating sites — murdered 49 people and wounded even more in a gay nightclub. His profile and motive certainly did not fit the elite narrative that unsophisticated right-wing American gun owners were responsible because of their support for gun rights. No matter. The Obama administration and much of the media refused to attribute the horror in Orlando to Mateen’s self-confessed radical Islamist agenda. Instead, they blamed the shooter’s semi-automatic .223 caliber rifle and a purported climate of hate toward gays. (…) In sum, elites ignored the likely causes of the Orlando shooting: the appeal of ISIS-generated hatred to some young, second-generation radical Muslim men living in Western societies, and the politically correct inability of Western authorities to short-circuit that clear-cut connection. Instead, the establishment all but blamed Middle America for supposedly being anti-gay and pro-gun. In both the U.S. and Britain, such politically correct hypocrisy is superimposed on highly regulated, highly taxed, and highly governmentalized economies that are becoming ossified and stagnant. The tax-paying middle classes, who lack the romance of the poor and the connections of the elite, have become convenient whipping boys of both in order to leverage more government social programs and to assuage the guilt of the elites who have no desire to live out their utopian theories in the flesh. Victor Davis Hanson

For the last two decades, Apple, Google, Amazon and other West Coast tech corporations have been untouchable icons. They piled up astronomical profits while hypnotizing both left-wing and right-wing politicians. (…) If the left feared that the tech billionaires were becoming robber barons, they also delighted in the fact that they were at least left-wing robber barons. Unlike the steel, oil and coal monopolies of the 19th century that out of grime and smoke created the sinews of a growing America, Silicon Valley gave us shiny, clean, green and fun pods, pads and phones. As a result, social media, internet searches, texts, email and other computer communications were exempt from interstate regulatory oversight. Big Tech certainly was not subject to the rules that governed railroads, power companies, trucking industries, Wall Street, and television and radio. But attitudes about hip high-tech corporations have now changed on both the left and right. Liberals are under pressure from their progressive base to make Silicon Valley hire more minorities and women. Progressives wonder why West Coast techies cannot unionize and sit down for tough bargaining with their progressive billionaire bosses. Local community groups resent the tech giants driving up housing prices and zoning out the poor from cities such as Seattle and San Francisco. Behind the veneer of a cool Apple logo or multicolored Google trademark are scores of multimillionaires who live one-percenter lifestyles quite at odds with the soft socialism espoused by their corporate megaphones. (…) Instead of acting like laissez-faire capitalists, the entrenched captains of high-tech industry seem more like government colluders and manipulators. Regarding the high-tech leaders’ efforts to rig their industries and strangle dissent, think of conniving Jay Gould or Jim Fisk rather than the wizard Thomas Edison. (…) The public so far has welcomed the unregulated freedom of Silicon Valley — as long as it was truly free. But now computer users are discovering that social media and web searches seem highly controlled and manipulated — by the whims of billionaires rather than federal regulators. (…) For years, high-tech grandees dressed all in hip black while prancing around the stage, enthralling stockholders as if they were rock stars performing with wireless mics. Some wore jeans, sneakers, and T-shirts, making it seem like being worth $50 billion was hipster cool. But the billionaire-as-everyman shtick has lost his groove, especially when such zillionaires lavish their pet political candidates with huge donations, seed lobbying groups and demand regulatory loopholes. Ten years ago, a carefree Mark Zuckerberg seemed cool. Now, his T-shirt get-up seems phony and incongruous with his walled estates and unregulated profiteering. (…) Why are high-tech profits hidden in offshore accounts? Why is production outsourced to impoverished countries, sometimes in workplaces that are deplorable and cruel? Why does texting while driving not earn a product liability suit? Victor Davis Hanson

Progressives used to pressure U.S. corporations to cut back on outsourcing and on the tactic of building their products abroad to take advantage of inexpensive foreign workers. During the 2012 election, President Obama attacked Mitt Romney as a potential illiberal “outsourcer-in-chief” for investing in companies that went overseas in search of cheap labor.Yet most of the computers and smartphones sold by Silicon Valley companies are still being built abroad — to mostly silence from progressive watchdogs. (…)  Progressives demand higher taxes on the wealthy. They traditionally argue that tax gimmicks and loopholes are threats to the republic. Yet few seem to care that West Coast conglomerates such as Amazon, Apple, Google, and Starbucks filtered hundreds of billions in global profits through tax havens such as Bermuda, shorting the United States billions of dollars in income taxes. The progressive movement took hold in the late 19th century to “trust-bust,” or break up corporations that had cornered the markets in banking, oil, steel, and railroads. Such supposedly foul play had inordinately enriched “robber baron” buccaneers such as John D. Rockefeller, Andrew Mellon, Andrew Carnegie, and J. P. Morgan. Yet today, the riches of multibillionaires dwarf the wealth of their 19th-century predecessors. Most West Coast corporate wealth was accumulated by good old-fashioned American efforts to achieve monopolies and stifle competition. Facebook, with 2 billion monthly global users, has now effectively cornered social mediaGoogle has monopolized internet searches — and modulates users’ search results to accommodate its own business profiteering. Amazon is America’s new octopus. Its growing tentacles incorporate not just online sales but also media and food retailing. Yet there are no modern-day progressive muckrakers in the spirit of Upton Sinclair, Frank Norris, and Lincoln Steffens, warning of the dangers of techie monopolies or the astronomical accumulation of wealth. Amazon, Apple, Microsoft, and Facebook are worth nearly $1 trillion each. (…) The tech and social-media industries pride themselves on their counterculture transparency, their informality, and their 1960s-like allegiance to free thought and free speech. (…) On matters such as avoiding unionization, driving up housing prices, snagging crony-capitalist subsidies from the government, and ignoring the effects of products on public safety (such as texting while driving), Silicon Valley is about as reactionary as they come. Why, then, do these companies earn a pass from hypercritical progressives? Answer: Their executives have taken out postmodern insurance policies. Our new J. P. Morgans dress in jeans and T-shirts — like the late Steve Jobs of Apple or Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook — appearing hip and cool. Executives in flip-flops and tie-dyes can get away with building walls around their multiple mansions in a way that a steel executive in a suit and tie might not. The new elite are overwhelmingly left-wing. They head off criticism by investing mostly in the Democratic party, the traditional font of social and political criticism of corporate wealth. In 2012, for example, Obama won Silicon Valley by more than 40 percentage points. Of the political donations to presidential candidates that year from employees at Google and Apple, over 90 percent went to Obama (…) No one has grasped that reality better that the new billionaire barons of the West Coast. As long as they appeared cool, as they long as they gave lavishly to left-wing candidates, and as long as they mouthed liberal platitudes on global warming, gay marriage, abortion, and identity politics, they earned exemption from progressive scorn. The result was that they outsourced, offshored, monopolized, censored, and made billions — without much fear of media muckraking, trust-busting politicians, unionizing activists, or diversity lawsuits. Hip billionaire corporatism is one of the strangest progressive hypocrisies of our times. Victor Davis Hanson

Attention: des barons voleurs peuvent en cacher d’autres !

A l’heure où avec leur formidable force de frappe financière et trésors de guerre accumulés …

Les multinationales géantes du numérique semblent à la manière des « barons voleurs« du 19e siècle américain …

Concentrer tous les pouvoirs et écraser toute concurrence sur leur passage …

Face à des gouvernants dont ils partagent clairement le ton volontiers moralisateur et méprisant …

Et des masses rejetées dans les passions désormais déclarées rétrogrades des questions d’identité et de souveraineté nationales …

Comment ne pas s’étonner de l’étrange indulgence dont…

Sous prétexte de leur coolitude …

Continuent jusqu’ici à bénéficier ces nouveaux maitres de morale et de mépris qui les dirigent ?

Silicon Valley Billionaires Are the New Robber Barons

Progressives forget their history of breaking up mega-corporations as they lionize tech giants such as Apple, Google, and Facebook.

Victor Davis Hanson

National Review

August 17, 2017

Progressives used to pressure U.S. corporations to cut back on outsourcing and on the tactic of building their products abroad to take advantage of inexpensive foreign workers.

During the 2012 election, President Obama attacked Mitt Romney as a potential illiberal “outsourcer-in-chief” for investing in companies that went overseas in search of cheap labor.

Yet most of the computers and smartphones sold by Silicon Valley companies are still being built abroad — to mostly silence from progressive watchdogs.

In the case of the cobalt mining that is necessary for the production of lithium-ion batteries in electric cars, thousands of child laborers in southern Africa are worked to exhaustion.

In the 1960s, campuses boycotted grapes to support Cesar Chavez’s unionization of farm workers. Yet it is unlikely that there will be any effort to boycott tech companies that use lithium-ion batteries produced from African-mined cobalt

Progressives demand higher taxes on the wealthy. They traditionally argue that tax gimmicks and loopholes are threats to the republic.

Yet few seem to care that West Coast conglomerates such as Amazon, Apple, Google, and Starbucks filtered hundreds of billions in global profits through tax havens such as Bermuda, shorting the United States billions of dollars in income taxes.

The progressive movement took hold in the late 19th century to “trust-bust,” or break up corporations that had cornered the markets in banking, oil, steel, and railroads. Such supposedly foul play had inordinately enriched “robber baron” buccaneers such as John D. Rockefeller, Andrew Mellon, Andrew Carnegie, and J. P. Morgan.

Yet today, the riches of multibillionaires dwarf the wealth of their 19th-century predecessors. Most West Coast corporate wealth was accumulated by good old-fashioned American efforts to achieve monopolies and stifle competition.

Facebook, with 2 billion monthly global users, has now effectively cornered social media.

Google has monopolized internet searches — and modulates users’ search results to accommodate its own business profiteering.

Amazon is America’s new octopus. Its growing tentacles incorporate not just online sales but also media and food retailing.

Yet there are no modern-day progressive muckrakers in the spirit of Upton Sinclair, Frank Norris, and Lincoln Steffens, warning of the dangers of techie monopolies or the astronomical accumulation of wealth. Amazon, Apple, Microsoft, and Facebook are worth nearly $1 trillion each.

Conservatives have no problem with anyone doing well, so their silence is understandable. But in the Obama era, the nation received all sorts of progressive lectures on the downsides of being super-rich.

Obama remonstrated about spreading the wealth, knowing when not to profit, and realizing when one has made enough money. He declared that entrepreneurs did not build their own businesses without government help.

Yet such sermonizing never seemed to include Facebook, Starbucks, or Amazon.

The tech and social-media industries pride themselves on their counterculture transparency, their informality, and their 1960s-like allegiance to free thought and free speech. Yet Google just fired one of its engineers for simply questioning the company line that sexual discrimination and bias alone account for the dearth of female Silicon Valley engineers.

What followed were not voices of protest. Instead, Google-instilled fear and silence ensued, in the fashion of George Orwell’s 1984.

On matters such as avoiding unionization, driving up housing prices, snagging crony-capitalist subsidies from the government, and ignoring the effects of products on public safety (such as texting while driving), Silicon Valley is about as reactionary as they come.

Why, then, do these companies earn a pass from hypercritical progressives?

Answer: Their executives have taken out postmodern insurance policies.

Our new J. P. Morgans dress in jeans and T-shirts — like the late Steve Jobs of Apple or Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook — appearing hip and cool.

Executives in flip-flops and tie-dyes can get away with building walls around their multiple mansions in a way that a steel executive in a suit and tie might not.

The new elite are overwhelmingly left-wing. They head off criticism by investing mostly in the Democratic party, the traditional font of social and political criticism of corporate wealth.

In 2012, for example, Obama won Silicon Valley by more than 40 percentage points. Of the political donations to presidential candidates that year from employees at Google and Apple, over 90 percent went to Obama.

One of the legacies of the Obama era was the triumph of green advocacy and identity politics over class.

No one has grasped that reality better that the new billionaire barons of the West Coast. As long as they appeared cool, as they long as they gave lavishly to left-wing candidates, and as long as they mouthed liberal platitudes on global warming, gay marriage, abortion, and identity politics, they earned exemption from progressive scorn.

The result was that they outsourced, offshored, monopolized, censored, and made billions — without much fear of media muckraking, trust-busting politicians, unionizing activists, or diversity lawsuits.

Hip billionaire corporatism is one of the strangest progressive hypocrisies of our times.

Voir aussi:

How Silicon Valley Turned Off the Left and Right
Victor Davis Hanson
Townhall
Sep 28, 2017

When left and right finally agree on something, watch out: The unthinkable becomes normal.So it is with changing attitudes toward Silicon Valley. For the last two decades, Apple, Google, Amazon and other West Coast tech corporations have been untouchable icons. They piled up astronomical profits while hypnotizing both left-wing and right-wing politicians.

Conservative administrations praised them as modern versions of 19th-century risk-takers such as Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller. Bill Gates, the late Steve Jobs and other tech giants were seen as supposedly creating national wealth in an unregulated, laissez-faire landscape that they had invented from nothing.

At a time when American companies were increasingly unable to compete in the rough-and-tumble world arena, Apple, Microsoft, and Facebook bulldozed their international competition. Indeed, they turned high-tech and social media into American brands.

The left was even more enthralled. It dropped its customary regulatory zeal, despite Silicon Valley’s monopolizing, outsourcing, offshoring, censoring, and destroying of startup competition. After all, Big Tech was left-wing and generous. High-tech interests gave hundreds of millions of dollars to left-wing candidates, think tanks and causes.

Companies such as Facebook and Google were able to warp their own social media protocols and Internet searches to insidiously favor progressive agendas and messaging.

If the left feared that the tech billionaires were becoming robber barons, they also delighted in the fact that they were at least left-wing robber barons.

Unlike the steel, oil and coal monopolies of the 19th century that out of grime and smoke created the sinews of a growing America, Silicon Valley gave us shiny, clean, green and fun pods, pads and phones.

As a result, social media, internet searches, texts, email and other computer communications were exempt from interstate regulatory oversight. Big Tech certainly was not subject to the rules that governed railroads, power companies, trucking industries, Wall Street, and television and radio.

But attitudes about hip high-tech corporations have now changed on both the left and right.Liberals are under pressure from their progressive base to make Silicon Valley hire more minorities and women.

Progressives wonder why West Coast techies cannot unionize and sit down for tough bargaining with their progressive billionaire bosses.

Local community groups resent the tech giants driving up housing prices and zoning out the poor from cities such as Seattle and San Francisco.

Behind the veneer of a cool Apple logo or multicolored Google trademark are scores of multimillionaires who live one-percenter lifestyles quite at odds with the soft socialism espoused by their corporate megaphones.Conservatives got sick of Silicon Valley, too.

Instead of acting like laissez-faire capitalists, the entrenched captains of high-tech industry seem more like government colluders and manipulators. Regarding the high-tech leaders’ efforts to rig their industries and strangle dissent, think of conniving Jay Gould or Jim Fisk rather than the wizard Thomas Edison.

With the election of populist Donald Trump, the Republican Party seems less wedded to the doctrines of economic libertarian Milton Friedman and more to the trust-busting zeal of Teddy Roosevelt.

The public so far has welcomed the unregulated freedom of Silicon Valley — as long as it was truly free. But now computer users are discovering that social media and web searches seem highly controlled and manipulated — by the whims of billionaires rather than federal regulators.

The public faces put on by West Coast tech leaders have not helped.

For years, high-tech grandees dressed all in hip black while prancing around the stage, enthralling stockholders as if they were rock stars performing with wireless mics. Some wore jeans, sneakers, and T-shirts, making it seem like being worth $50 billion was hipster cool.

But the billionaire-as-everyman shtick has lost his groove, especially when such zillionaires lavish their pet political candidates with huge donations, seed lobbying groups and demand regulatory loopholes.

Ten years ago, a carefree Mark Zuckerberg seemed cool. Now, his T-shirt get-up seems phony and incongruous with his walled estates and unregulated profiteering.

Of course, Silicon Valley’s critics should be wary. They wonder whether the golden tech goose can be caged without being killed.

Both liberals and conservatives are just beginning to ask why internet communications cannot be subject to the same rules applied to radio and television.

Why can’t Silicon Valley monopolies be busted up in the same manner as the Bell Telephone octopus or the old Standard Oil trust?

Why are high-tech profits hidden in offshore accounts?

Why is production outsourced to impoverished countries, sometimes in workplaces that are deplorable and cruel?

Why does texting while driving not earn a product liability suit?

Just because Silicon Valley is cool does not mean it could never become just another monopoly that got too greedy and turned off the left wing, the right wing and everybody in between.

Voir également:

Self-made wealth in America

Robber barons and silicon sultans

Today’s tech billionaires have a lot in common with a previous generation of capitalist titans—perhaps too much for their own good

The Economist

Dec 30th 2014

IN THE 50 years between the end of the American civil war in 1865 and the outbreak of the first world war in 1914, a group of entrepreneurs spearheaded America’s transformation from an agricultural into an industrial society, built gigantic business empires and amassed huge fortunes. In 1848 John J. Astor, a merchant trader, was America’s richest man with $20m (now $545m). By the time the United States entered the first world war, John D. Rockefeller had become its first billionaire.

In the 50 years since Data General introduced the first mini-computers in the late 1960s, a group of entrepreneurs have spearheaded the transformation of an industrial age into an information society, built gigantic business empires and acquired huge fortunes. When he died in 1992, Sam Walton, the founder of Walmart, was probably America’s richest man with $8 billion. Today Bill Gates occupies that position with $82.3 billion.

The first group is now known as the robber barons. The second lot—call them the silicon sultans—could face a similar fate. Like their predecessors, they were once revered as inventive mould-breakers, delivering gadgets to the masses. But just like Rockefeller and the other “malefactors of great wealth”, these new capitalists are losing their sheen. They have been diversifying into businesses that have little to do with computers, while egotistically proclaiming that they alone can solve mankind’s problems, from ageing to space travel. More pointedly, they stand accused of being greedy businessfolk who suborn politicians, employ sweatshop labour, stiff other shareholders and, especially, monopolise markets. Rockefeller once controlled 80% of the world’s supply of oil: today Google has 90% of the search market in Europe and 67% in the United States.

Together, the two groups throw light on some of the most enduring themes of American history—both the country’s extraordinary ability to generate vast wealth and its enduring ambivalence about concentrations of power. Henry Ford, the youngest of the robber barons, once said that history is more or less bunk. He was wrong. The silicon sultans have the advantage of being able to learn from their predecessors’ mistakes. It is not entirely clear that they are doing so.

History rhymes

All business titans have certain things in common—a steely determination to turn their dreams into reality, a gargantuan appetite for success and, as they grow older, a complicated relationship with the fruits of their labour. But the robbers and sultans have more in common than most: they are the Übermenschen of the past 200 years of American capitalism, the people who feel the future in their bones, bring it into being—and sometimes go too far.

The most striking similarity is that they refashioned the material basis of civilisation. Railway barons such as Leland Stanford and E.H. Harriman laid down more than 200,000 miles of track, creating a national market. Andrew Carnegie replaced iron with much more versatile steel. Ford ushered in the era of the automobile. Mr Gates tried to put a computer in every office and in every home. Larry Page and Sergey Brin put the world’s information at everybody’s fingertips. Mark Zuckerberg made the internet social. Just as the railroad made it possible for obscure companies to revolutionise everything from food (Heinz) to laundry (Procter & Gamble), the internet allows entrepreneurs to disrupt everything from retailing (Amazon) to transport (Uber).

Both relied on the relentless logic of economies of scale. The robber barons started with striking innovations—in Ford’s case, a more efficient way of turning petrol into power—but their real genius lay in their ability to “scale up” these innovations to squeeze the competition. “Cut the prices; scoop the market; run the mills full,” as Carnegie put it. The silicon sultans updated the idea. Mr Gates understood the imminent ubiquity of personal computers, and the money to be made from making their software. Messrs Brin and Page grasped that their search engine could create a massive audience for advertisers. Mr Zuckerberg saw that Facebook could profit from inserting itself into the social lives of a sizeable chunk of the world’s population.

Economies of scale allowed the robber barons to keep reducing prices and improving quality. Henry Ford cut the price of his Model T from $850 in its first year of production to $360 in 1916. In 1924 you could buy a much better car for just $290. The silicon sultans performed exactly the same trick. The price of computer equipment, adjusted for quality and inflation, has declined by 16% a year over the five decades from 1959 to 2009. Each iPhone contains the same amount of computing power as was housed in MIT in 1960.

The robber barons denounced regulators in the name of the free market, but monopoly suited them better. Rockefeller rued the “destructive competition” of the oil industry, with its cycle of glut and shortage, and set about ensuring continuity of supply. The first trust, Standard Oil’s, established in 1882, was designed to persuade his rivals to give up control of their companies in return for a guaranteed income and an easy life. “The Standard was an angel of mercy reaching down from the sky and saying ‘Get into the ark. Put in your old junk. We will take all the risks’,” he wrote.

Others followed. Although the Sherman Anti-Trust Act of 1890 outlawed these devices as restraints on free trade, the barons either neutralised the legislation or got round it with another control-preserving device, the holding company. By the early 20th century trusts and holding companies held nearly 40% of American manufacturing assets. Alfred Chandler, the doyen of American business historians, summed up the hundred years following the civil war as “ten years of competition and 90 years of oligopoly”.

The silicon sultans have it easier. They sometimes brush with the law—Google and Apple have been scolded for creating informal agreements to prevent poaching wars—but network effects, whereby the more customers a service has, the more valuable it becomes, mean that their businesses tend towards monopoly anyway. In the digital world, the alternative is often annihilation. As Peter Thiel, PayPal’s cerebral founder, put it in “Zero to One”: “All failed companies are the same: they failed to escape competition.”

The result, in both cases, is an unparalleled concentration of power. A century ago the barons had a lock on transport and energy. Today Google and Apple between them provide 90% of smartphone operating systems of; over half of North Americans and over a third of Europeans use Facebook. None of the five big car companies, by contrast, controls more than a fifth of the American market.

The 0.000001%

The silicon sultans are some of the few businesspeople who can compete with the robber barons in terms of ownership. Carnegie made a point of always owning more than half of his company. Today most firms are widely held by large numbers of shareholders: the largest individual shareholder in Exxon, the grandchild of Standard Oil, is Rex Tillerson, the company’s chief executive. He owns 0.05% of the stock. But tech is different. Together Google’s two founders, Sergey Brin and Larry Page, and its executive chairman, Eric Schmidt (who also sits on the board of The Economist’s parent company) control two-thirds of the voting stock in Google. Mark Zuckerberg owns 20% of Facebook shares but almost all of its “class B” shares, which have ten times the voting power of ordinary shares.

The tech titans are not as rich in relative terms as the robber barons. When Rockefeller retired in the early 20th century, his net worth was equal to about one-thirtieth of America’s annual GNP. When Mr Gates stepped aside as CEO of Microsoft in 2000 his net worth might have equalled 1/130th of it. But they nevertheless represent the most significant concentration of business wealth in the world. In 2013 34% of billionaire-entrepreneurs aged 40 or under made their money in high tech.

What makes these concentrations of wealth all the more striking is that they followed on the heels of two of the most egalitarian periods in American history. The 1830s-40s saw America (outside the slave-owning South) establish itself as the land of participatory politics and individualism that Alexis de Tocqueville celebrated in “Democracy in America”. The years between the second world war and the late 1970s were years of low inequality of income in the United States.

Both the robber barons and the silicon sultans helped to create a very different America, divided by class and obsessed with money. In “The Theory of the Leisure Class”(1899), Thorstein Veblen showed how an egalitarian society was becoming an aristocratic one. In “Capital in the Twenty-First Century” (2013) Thomas Piketty made similar claims for the past 40 years.

The culture they helped to create troubled barons of both eras. Andrew Carnegie, who had risen from bobbin-boy to steel magnate in 17 years, worried about the contrast between “the palace of the millionaire and the cottage of the labourer”. Though he stretched the bounds of good taste when, as perhaps the richest man in the world, he wrote a pamphlet entitled “The Advantages of Poverty” (1891), he was nevertheless sincere in worrying that class division was producing “rigid castes” living in “mutual ignorance” and “mutual distrust” of each other. Mr Thiel contrasts the egalitarian Silicon Valley of his childhood, in which everybody lived in identikit houses and attended first-rate state-funded schools, with today’s divided Valley. But they have taken their strictures only so far. Carnegie bought a ruined castle in Scotland, Skibo, for $85,000 and maintained a staff of 85. Mr Thiel bought an oceanfront spread in Maui for $27m.

No sooner had they transformed themselves from challengers into incumbents than the robber barons succumbed to the two great temptations of a successful middle age: undisciplined growth and unqualified self-belief. Rockefeller spilled into a succession of adjacent businesses—he bought forests to supply his company with wood, established plants to turn the wood into barrels, produced chemicals for refining and bought ships and railroad cars to carry his products. Harriman turned from financing railways to dabbling in finance more generally.

The tech barons are following a similar arc. Google is pouring its super-profits into a succession of loosely related industries: robotics, energy, household appliances, driverless cars and anti-ageing. The company may well be fashioning a world in which it has a hand in everything humans do—driving them to work, adjusting their thermostats, making (and monitoring) their phone calls, and, of course, organising their information. Facebook has spent $2 billion on a start-up that makes virtual-reality equipment. Elon Musk, one of the founders of PayPal, has moved into electric cars and rockets. Jeff Bezos, Amazon’s founder, is also investing in private space travel.

Both groups started dreaming ever bigger dreams. The robber barons turned their hands to solving social problems. Ford led a peace convoy to Europe to put an end to war. When he arrived in Norway and gave the locals a long lecture on tractor production in faltering Norwegian, a local commented that you have to be a very great man to say such foolish things. In the Valley, extending life to 100 or 120 is a passion; Mr Thiel even talks about abolishing death. Reforming the state is another hobby; again Mr Thiel takes things to the limit with a project to establish a collection of floating city states in international waters outside the reach of governments. Reinventing food—creating meat substitutes in particular—is another recent craze: Messrs Brin, Gates and Thiel have invested in alternative food companies.

The most controversial sideways move the robber barons made was into day-to-day politics. A critic once wrote that Rockefeller’s company did everything to the Pennsylvania legislature except refine it. The Senate was known as “the millionaire’s club”. Robber barons bought newspapers—Ford turned the Dearborn Independent into a mouthpiece for his cranky views on the Jews. Not content with establishing what Arthur Schlesinger junior called “government of the corporations, by the corporations and for the corporations”, a growing number of robber barons and their children went into politics themselves. Two of Rockefeller’s children became governors—Nelson of New York and Winthrop of Arkansas—and Nelson went on to be Gerald Ford’s vice-president.

The silicon sultans swore that they would not repeat this mistake, and indeed they have gone nothing like as far as their predecessors. Yet politics is both necessary to business and irresistible to the self-important. This year Google’s political action committee spent more on campaigns than Goldman Sachs, a company legendary for its political connections. Mr Zuckerberg has founded a pressure group, fwd.us, to push for immigration reform. The prospectus for the group, headed by one of Mr Zuckerberg’s former Harvard room-mates, boasts that the tech industry will become “one of the most powerful political forces” because “we control massive distribution channels, both as companies and as individuals”. These “channels” include old-media redoubts such as the Washington Post (bought by Mr Bezos) and the New Republic (bought by Facebook’s Chris Hughes) as well as new media empires such as Yahoo. Silicon Valley is now a regular stop in fundraising and an established part of America’s revolving-door culture. Al Gore, a former vice-president, has been a senior adviser to Google. Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook’s chief operating officer, started her career as chief of staff to Larry Summers when he was treasury secretary.

The backlash

The age of the robber barons led inexorably to the age of populist revolt, with mass strikes, anti-monopoly legislation, social reforms and, eventually, the New Deal of the 1930s. The robber barons had ruined too many people and broken too many rules. Ida Tarbell (whose father had been ruined by Rockefeller) proved to be the most devastating critic: a series of brilliant articles in McClure’s magazine aired Rockefeller’s dirty laundry and popularised the term robber baron. Theodore Dreiser, a novelist, skewered the new rich in “The Titan” and “The Financier”. Some economists worried that America was becoming as unequal as Europe.

A cohort of politicians and lawyers fairly swiftly translated the backlash into policy. Teddy Roosevelt thundered against the “criminal rich”. Woodrow Wilson followed up with even more vigorous attacks on corporate America. The 16th amendment to the constitution introduced an income tax for the first time, and the 17th amendment decreed that senators should be elected by popular vote rather than appointed by local legislatures.

That the tech barons have attracted only a fraction of the ire of the robber barons is not surprising: with relatively small, highly paid workforces, they are not involved in the battles with unions that turned the robber barons into ogres. In 1901 US Steel, Carnegie’s creation, employed a quarter of a million men—more than the army and navy combined. Today Google employs more than 50,000, Facebook 8,000 and Twitter 3,500. The electronic toys the tech barons make also inspire more affection among consumers than the commodities or infrastructure that the robber barons produced. But there are nevertheless growing rumbles of discontent. Starting in 1994, the American government successfully prosecuted Microsoft for predatory pricing and undermining competition. The EU is currently mulling various ways of reducing Google’s dominance in the search market, and has even proposed splitting its search engine operations in Europe from the rest of its business.

Aside from monopoly and inequality, the main gripe against the tech barons concerns privacy. The tech industry makes much of its money from hoovering up private information.“We know where you are,” says Mr Schmidt. “We know where you’ve been. We can more or less know what you’re thinking about.” The EU is drafting a privacy directive, to come into effect in 2016, which could introduce strict rules about data collection.

Despite these growing worries, there is no sign that the trend will reverse. For all the dramatic changes between the railway age and the silicon age, America still has the right formula for producing entrepreneurs. It sucks in talent from all over the world: Carnegie was the son of an impoverished Scottish textile weaver, Mr Brin the son of Russian immigrants. It tolerates failure: the list of barons who failed at least once before they succeeded includes R.H. Macy, H.J. Heinz, Henry Ford and Steve Jobs. And it encourages ambition. Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner put their finger on an enduring national trait in “The Gilded Age” (1873): “In America nearly every man has his dream, his pet scheme, whereby he is to advance himself socially or pecuniarily.” Walt Whitman did the same: he celebrated “the extreme business energy, and this almost maniacal appetite for wealth prevalent in the United States”. And the ability to produce such men has allowed America, once again, to pull ahead of the rest of the West.

At the same time, the backlash against the robber barons points to another enduring theme: the tension between big business and democracy. Americans’ admiration for self-made millionaires leads them to be suspicious of huge organisations. Charles Francis Adams, a great-grandson of America’s second president, warned that companies were bent on “establishing despotisms which no spasmodic popular effort will be able to shake off”.

Louis Brandeis, one of the greatest Supreme Court judges, became the voice of the campaign against “the curse of bigness”. “Mere bigness” is an offence against society, he argued, because democracy “cannot endure” when you have huge concentrations of wealth in the hands of a few. Today’s Supreme Court is as comfortable with bigness as Brandeis was uncomfortable with it. Presidents habitually cuddle up to huge organisations in order to raise the money they need to run for office. Yet suspicion of size is growing once again on both the Tea Party right and the Democratic left.

So is bigness capable of redeeming itself? The final enduring theme in the story of the American barons is the story of philanthropy. Carnegie pronounced that “the man who thus dies rich dies disgraced”. The robber barons (including Carnegie) did not exactly die poor. But almost all of them became philanthropists in old age. Carnegie tried to make equality of opportunity mean something by founding 2,811 public libraries. Rockefeller’s intellectual legacy, the University of Chicago, is one of America’s greatest.

Mr Gates’s foundation is one of the largest in the world; and he and his fellows are following their predecessors by applying the same mixture of imagination and hubris to philanthropy that they applied to business. In America entrepreneurs do not just create bigger fortunes. They also cast longer shadows.

Voir de plus:

Google’s CEO: ‘The Laws Are Written by Lobbyists’
Derek Thompson
The Atlantic
Oct 1, 2010

« The average American doesn’t realize how much of the laws are written by lobbyists » to protect incumbent interests, Google CEO Eric Schmidt told Atlantic editor James Bennet at the Washington Ideas Forum. « It’s shocking how the system actually works. »In a wide-ranging interview that spanned human nature, the future of machines, and how Google could have helped the stimulus, Schmidt said technology could « completely change the way government works. »

« Washington is an incumbent protection machine, » Schmidt said. « Technology is fundamentally disruptive. » Mobile phones and personal technology, for example, could be used to record the bills that members of Congress actually read and then determine what stimulus funds were successfully spent.

Schmidt pushed back on the claim that the White House doesn’t understand business. He acknowledged that the American business community distrusts the administration, but he said the criticism are mostly about tone. He also brushed off the idea that the White House needs more business executives as an argument about « symbolism » rather than substance.On the hot topic of China versus America, he made a pithy distinction between what makes the world’s leading powers uniquely successful. America is a bottoms-up entrepreneurial engine, and China is more like « a well-run large business. » »America’s research universities are the envy on the world, » he said. « We have 90 percent of the top researchers in the world. We also have a bizarre policy to train people and then kick them out by not giving them visas, which makes no sense at all. »China governs like a large industrial company, he added. « It wants to maximize its cash flow. It wants to maximize its internal and external demand. All of the interesting new ideas [for example, doubling down on solar tech] can be understood as a business expansion. »The end of the interview turned to the future of technology. When Bennet asked about the possibility of a Google « implant, » Schmidt invoked what the company calls the « creepy line. » »Google policy is to get right up to the creepy line and not cross it, » he said. Google implants, he added, probably crosses that line.At the same time, Schmidt envisions a future where we embrace a larger role for machines and technology. « With your permission you give us more information about you, about your friends, and we can improve the quality of our searches, » he said. « We don’t need you to type at all. We know where you are. We know where you’ve been. We can more or less now what you’re thinking about.

 Voir de même:

Google’s Eric Schmidt Talks to Charlie Rose
Charlie Rose
23 September 2010

How does Google see the future?
There’s such an overwhelming amount of information now, we can search where you are, see what you’re looking at if you take a picture with your camera. One way to think about this is, we’re trying to make people better people, literally give them better ideas—augmenting their experience. Think of it as augmented humanity.

What’s the challenge from Facebook and social networking?
At the moment, the two companies coexist quite well. But social networking is important, and Facebook is a consequential company. The more we know about what your friends do, with your permission—and I need to say that about 500 times—we can use that to improve the experience of getting information you care about. We’re actually building social information into all our products.

But people are saying, for example, in e-commerce, that you’re more likely to be served by the opinions of 10 friends than by a Google search.
If that’s the future, we’ll see. We can certainly make our advertising much more effective to the degree we have more information about who your friends are. The fact is, there’s not going to be a single solution here.

And the phenomenon of Zynga, what does that say to you?
People are willing to spend an awful lot of money on fake animals.

You no longer serve on the Apple board. It is said Steve Jobs got very upset with you, his friend. I didn’t go into the search business, he said. Why are you going into the phone business?

Apple (AAPL) is a company we both partner and compete with. We do a search deal with them, recently extended, and we’re doing all sorts of things in maps and things like that. So the sum of all this is that two large corporations, both of which are important, both of which I care a lot about, will [remain] pretty close. But Android was around earlier than iPhone.

The operating system was around.
That’s correct.

Given the app gap, how does Android compete with the iPhone?
The iPhone established a whole new category, but…the Apple model is closed. Same hardware, same applications, same store—a so-called vertical stack. All the other vendors want an alternative, and Apple is not going to give it to them. Along comes this Android operating system, which is a complete turnkey solution with similar capabilities. Most important, we make the software available for free. So all of a sudden, Android becomes very popular with companies like Motorola (MOT) and LG. We now have more than 200,000 of these phones being turned on every day—in 59 countries. We think Android will end up being one of the small number of very successful mobile devices.

What’s Android’s market share?
Well, we don’t really know. What we do know is it’s growing phenomenally fast.

Where is the world of apps going?
The Google (GOOG) model is called open-Web applications. There’s another model Apple is pushing, which are these iPad applications. The iPad apps are beautiful but highly restrictive. They’re written in a specific programming language; they’re not Web applications. Over the next few years it should be possible using so-called open technologies to build apps as powerful as those on the iPad but do them on the Web, which means they’ll run everywhere.

How far off is that?
The technology is there, and people are developing it. Ultimately, in the Internet, openness has always won. I cannot imagine that the current competitive environment would reverse that.

Where will mobile be in five years?
Today, a powerful touchscreen phone costs about $150. With subsidies it can get down to a small number of dollars. So in five years, that phone can be essentially given away in developing countries. That means we can sell billions of them. The higher-end phones will be approaching supercomputers.

What did you learn from Google’s experience in China?
The thing you learn about China is…Chinese citizens are very clever, very creative, and the Chinese government is very, very powerful.

So you didn’t change government censorship policies by being there?
The evidence is clear that our entry did not alter censorship policies whatsoever. Negotiating, Charlie, doesn’t work with the Chinese.

Voir encore:

Google and the Search for the Future
The Web icon’s CEO on the mobile computing revolution, the future of newspapers, and privacy in the digital age.

Holman W. Jenkins Jr.
WSJ
Aug. 14, 2010

To some, Google has been looking a bit sallow lately. The stock is down. Where once everything seemed to go the company’s way, along came Apple’s iPhone, launching a new wave of Web growth on a platform that largely bypassed the browser and Google’s search box. The « app » revolution was going to spell an end to Google’s dominance of Web advertising.

But that’s all so six-months-ago. When a group of Journal editors sat down with Eric Schmidt on a recent Friday, Google’s CEO sounded nothing like a man whose company was facing a midlife crisis, let alone intimations of mortality.

For one thing, just a couple days earlier, Google had publicly estimated that 200,000 Android smartphones were being activated daily by cell carriers on behalf of customers. That’s a doubling in just three months. Since the beginning of the year, Android phones have been outselling iPhones by an increasing clip and seem destined soon to outstrip Apple in global market share.

True, Apple sells its phones for luscious margins, while Google gives away Android to handset makers for free. But not to worry, says Mr. Schmidt: « You get a billion people doing something, there’s lots of ways to make money. Absolutely, trust me. We’ll get lots of money for it. »

« In general in technology, » he says, « if you own a platform that’s valuable, you can monetize it. » Example: Google is obliged to share with Apple search revenue generated by iPhone users. On Android, Google gets to keep 100%. That difference alone, says Mr. Schmidt, is more than enough to foot the bill for Android’s continued development.

And coming soon is Chrome OS, which Google hopes will do in tablets and netbooks what Android is doing in smartphones, i.e., give Google a commanding share of the future and leave, in this case, Microsoft in the dust.

Can it all be so easy? Google’s stock price has fallen nearly $150 since the beginning of the year. Financial pundits have started to ask skeptical questions, wondering why it doesn’t give more of its ample cash back to shareholders in the form of buybacks and dividends. Some suspect that all that temptation merely encourages Mr. Schmidt, along with founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page—the triumvirate running the company—to splurge on gimmicky ideas that never pay off. Fortune magazine recently called Google a « cash cow » and suggested more attention be paid to milking it rather than running off in search of the next big thing.

But to hear Mr. Schmidt tell it, the real challenge is one not yet on most investors’ minds: how to preserve Google’s franchise in Web advertising, the source of almost all its profits, when « search » is outmoded.

The day is coming when the Google search box—and the activity known as Googling—no longer will be at the center of our online lives. Then what? « We’re trying to figure out what the future of search is, » Mr. Schmidt acknowledges. « I mean that in a positive way. We’re still happy to be in search, believe me. But one idea is that more and more searches are done on your behalf without you needing to type. »

« I actually think most people don’t want Google to answer their questions, » he elaborates. « They want Google to tell them what they should be doing next. »

Let’s say you’re walking down the street. Because of the info Google has collected about you, « we know roughly who you are, roughly what you care about, roughly who your friends are. » Google also knows, to within a foot, where you are. Mr. Schmidt leaves it to a listener to imagine the possibilities: If you need milk and there’s a place nearby to get milk, Google will remind you to get milk. It will tell you a store ahead has a collection of horse-racing posters, that a 19th-century murder you’ve been reading about took place on the next block.

Says Mr. Schmidt, a generation of powerful handheld devices is just around the corner that will be adept at surprising you with information that you didn’t know you wanted to know. « The thing that makes newspapers so fundamentally fascinating—that serendipity—can be calculated now. We can actually produce it electronically, » Mr. Schmidt says.

Mr. Schmidt obviously has an eye to his audience, which this day consists of folks with an abiding devotion to the newspaper business. He speaks in sorrowful tones about the « economic disaster that is the American newspaper. » He assures us that in the coming deluge trusted « brands » will be more important than ever. Just as quickly, though, he adds that whether the winners will be new brands or existing brands remains to be seen. On one thing, however, Google is willing to bet: « The only way the problem [of insufficient revenue for news gathering] is going to be solved is by increasing monetization, and the only way I know of to increase monetization is through targeted ads. That’s our business. »

Mr. Schmidt is a believer in targeted advertising because, simply, he’s a believer in targeted everything: « The power of individual targeting—the technology will be so good it will be very hard for people to watch or consume something that has not in some sense been tailored for them. »

That’s a bit scary when you think about it. But for investors and executives the big question, of course, is which companies will control these opportunities. Google may see itself as friend and helper to the media business, but it also clearly sees itself in control of the targeting information. Says Mr. Schmidt: « As you go from the search box [to the next phase of Google], you really want to go from syntax to semantics, from what you typed to what you meant. And that’s basically the role of [Artificial Intelligence]. I think we will be the world leader in that for a long time. »

Between here and there, though, the company faces ever-growing legal, political and regulatory obstacles. The net neutrality debate, which Google has led, has taken a sudden turn that has many of its former allies in the « public interest » sector shouting « treason. »

What was most striking about the set of net neut « principles » Google produced this week with former antagonist Verizon was that they didn’t apply to wireless. « The issues of wireless versus wireline gets very messy, » Mr. Schmidt told one news site. « And that’s really an FCC issue, not a Google issue. »

Wait. Isn’t the future of the Internet wireless these days? Isn’t wireless the very basis of the new partnership between Google and Verizon, built on promoting Google’s Android software? But Google has now broken ranks with its allies and dared to speak about the sheer impracticality of net neutrality on mobile networks where demand is likely to outstrip capacity for the foreseeable future.

If that weren’t about to become a sticky political wicket for the company, it also faces growing antitrust, privacy and patent scrutiny, fanned by a growing phalanx of Beltway opponents, the latest being Larry Ellison and Oracle. « There’s a set of people who are intrinsic oppositionists to everything Google does, » Mr. Schmidt acknowledges resignedly. « The first opponent will be Microsoft. »

Mr. Schmidt is familiar with the game—as chief technology officer of Sun Microsystems in the 1990s, he was a chief fomenter of the antitrust assault on Bill Gates & Co. Now that the tables are turned, he says, Google will persevere and prevail by doing what he says Microsoft failed to do—make sure its every move is « good for consumers » and « fair » to competitors.

Uh huh. Google takes a similarly generous view of its own motives on the politically vexed issue of privacy. Mr. Schmidt says regulation is unnecessary because Google faces such strong incentives to treat its users right, since they will walk away the minute Google does anything with their personal information they find « creepy. »

Really? Some might be skeptical that a user with, say, a thousand photos on Picasa would find it so easy to walk away. Or a guy with 10 years of emails on Gmail. Or a small business owner who has come to rely on Google Docs as an alternative to Microsoft Office. Isn’t stickiness—even slightly extortionate stickiness—what these Google services aim for?

Mr. Schmidt is surely right, though, that the questions go far beyond Google. « I don’t believe society understands what happens when everything is available, knowable and recorded by everyone all the time, » he says. He predicts, apparently seriously, that every young person one day will be entitled automatically to change his or her name on reaching adulthood in order to disown youthful hijinks stored on their friends’ social media sites.

« I mean we really have to think about these things as a society, » he adds. « I’m not even talking about the really terrible stuff, terrorism and access to evil things, » he says.

Not that Google is a doubter of the value of social media. Mr. Schmidt awards Facebook his highest accolade, calling it a « company of consequence. » And though « there is a lot of hot air, a lot of venture money » in the sector right now, he predicts that one or two more « companies of consequence » will be born among the horde of new players just coming to life now.

A skeptic might wonder whether, despite present glory, Google itself might yet prove a flash in the pan. The company has enormous technological confidence. Mr. Schmidt describes how YouTube, its video-serving site, almost « took down » the company in its early days, thanks to the swelling outflow of video dispatched from its servers to users around the globe. Salvation was the « proxy cache »—lots of local servers around the world holding the most popular videos. « The technology that Google invented allows us to put those things very close to you, » says Mr. Schmidt. « It was a tremendous technological achievement. »

But with YouTube, as with lots of Google projects, there remains the question of how to make money. Google captured the search wave and shows every sign of positioning itself successfully for the mobile wave. As for the waves after that, your guess may be as good as Mr. Schmidt’s.

Mr. Jenkins writes the Journal’s weekly Business World column.

Voir par ailleurs:

Vents contraires contre les géants de la tech aux Etats-Unis
Critiquées pour leur situation de monopole et leur rôle joué pendant l’élection présidentielle américaine, les multinationales de la Silicon Valley doivent affronter des oppositions toujours plus fortes
Valérie de Graffenried
Le Temps
28 septembre 2017

Le vent est en train de tourner. L’appétit vorace et la toute-puissance financière des géants technologiques américains GAFA – acronyme pour Google, Apple, Facebook et Amazon – provoquent des remous aux Etats-Unis. Donald Trump n’en est pas le plus grand fan, et il ne s’en cache pas. Contrairement à son prédécesseur, il est plutôt hostile à la Silicon Valley, bastion progressiste par excellence. Des grands patrons de la tech se sont frontalement opposés à lui sur des dossiers clés comme le décret anti-immigration, le réchauffement climatique ou les émeutes de Charlottesville.

Alors quand les GAFA sont montrés du doigt en raison de leur situation de monopole et critiqués pour avoir véhiculé de la désinformation pendant l’élection présidentielle américaine, ce n’est pas Donald Trump qui monte au créneau pour les défendre. En Europe aussi, le débat est vif. A la fin de juin, la Commission européenne a sanctionné Google pour abus de position dominante en lui infligeant une amende record de 2,4 milliards de dollars (2,33 milliards de francs). Surtout, elle veut taxer davantage les GAFA, accusés de faire de l’optimisation fiscale. Elle a présenté ses premières pistes jeudi. Mais pour que les choses bougent sur ce plan, une position unanime des 28 Etats membres est nécessaire, ce qui est loin d’être acquis.

Danger pour la démocratie

Les chiffres sont vertigineux. Apple est l’entreprise la plus capitalisée en bourse, avec une valeur qui a dépassé les 800 milliards de dollars. Celle d’Alphabet, la maison mère de Google, atteint près de 650 milliards de dollars. Google représente 88% du marché de la recherche sur Internet aux Etats-Unis et Facebook vient de franchir la barre des deux milliards d’utilisateurs actifs. Amazon? Le géant de la vente en ligne, qui s’apprête à ouvrir un deuxième siège en Amérique du Nord – plusieurs villes sont en lice –, est en train de tuer le petit commerce. Cette toute-puissance inquiète. Cité par l’AFP, Bill Galston, un ex-conseiller du président Bill Clinton, cofondateur du think tank «The New Center», dénonce ces «moyens quasi illimités, qu’ils peuvent utiliser pour faire du lobbying». Et s’interroge sur le danger que cela peut représenter pour la démocratie.

Un sondage publié le 25 septembre par le quotidien US Today révèle que 76% des Américains sont désormais d’avis que les GAFA, les Big Four de la tech et leurs petits frères, ont trop de poids dans leur vie. Pas moins de 52% d’entre eux jugent cette influence «mauvaise». Certains de ces géants ont dû faire face à des scandales, ce qui entache leur déontologie et leur crédibilité. Le 6 septembre, Facebook a admis que près de 500 faux profils liés à la Russie avaient acheté pour plus de 100 000 dollars de publicité, entre juin 2015 et mai 2017, pour influencer l’élection présidentielle américaine en véhiculant des messages censés nuire à Hillary Clinton. «Je ne veux pas que qui que ce soit utilise nos instruments pour nuire à la démocratie», a proclamé son cofondateur et patron Mark Zuckerberg dans une vidéo, en présentant ses excuses.

Le syndrome Frankenstein

C’est la première fois que le groupe admet avoir été manipulé ainsi, offrant à la Russie une plateforme de choix pour sa propagande. De quoi intéresser le procureur spécial Robert Mueller, qui enquête sur les possibles collusions entre l’équipe de Donald Trump et Moscou. Facebook va devoir rendre des comptes devant le Sénat. Le Congrès entendra également Twitter et Google dans le cadre de l’affaire russe. Une audience publique est prévue le 1er novembre. Facebook avait déjà été critiqué pour avoir diffusé des vidéos de meurtres et de suicides en direct. Et facilité, grâce à ses algorithmes, des messages racistes et antisémites ciblés. Le New York Times s’est moqué des excuses tardives du groupe, en trouvant une analogie avec Frankenstein, qui a échappé à son créateur.

Faut-il réguler le secteur? S’achemine-t-on vers une législation antitrust contre les géants de la tech? Le controversé Stephen Bannon, que Donald Trump a limogé cet été de son poste de conseiller stratégique à la Maison-Blanche, l’avait appelée de ses vœux. Tout comme la sénatrice démocrate Elizabeth Warren, à l’autre bout de l’échiquier politique. La News Media Alliance, qui regroupe plus de 2000 titres américains et canadiens, donne également de la voix en ce sens, les médias d’information souffrant de la rude concurrence des géants d’Internet.

Le Congrès est en plein chantier sur la fiscalité des entreprises, mais pour l’instant aucun projet majeur n’est prévu pour limiter l’influence et l’expansion des GAFA. Les bénéfices de l’innovation technologique pour le consommateur semblent encore primer. Le climat politique a toutefois bien changé à Washington. Les législateurs du Congrès ont les GAFA sérieusement à l’œil. Le corset qui commence à les gainer promet de se resserrer.

Comme le rappelle le New York Times, Facebook et Google bataillent ferme depuis le mois dernier contre un projet qui veut les rendre responsables s’ils hébergent du trafic sexuel sur leurs sites. L’enjeu est majeur: une loi vieille de vingt ans protège pour l’instant les compagnies internet de poursuites en justice en raison de contenus postés par des internautes. Sentant le vent tourner, les géants de la tech commencent à renforcer leurs équipes d’avocats et de lobbyistes.

Voir également:

Mark Zuckerberg sort de sa réserve pour critiquer la politique d’immigration de Donald Trump

Le patron de Facebook a ouvertement critiqué les récentes décisions du président américain sur l’immigration. Sheryl Sandberg, numéro deux de Facebook, a quant à elle exprimé son désaccord sur la question de l’avortement.

Le Monde.fr avec AFP et Reuters

28.01.2017

« Mes arrière-grands-parents sont venus d’Allemagne, d’Autriche et de Pologne. Les parents de [mon épouse] Priscilla étaient des réfugiés venant de Chine et du Vietnam. Les Etats-Unis sont une nation d’immigrants, et nous devrions en être fiers. » Vendredi 27 janvier, le fondateur de Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg, a publié un message sur le réseau social pour critiquer les récentes décisions de Donald Trump concernant l’immigration.

Un fait rare : Mark Zuckerberg avait pris soin, jusqu’ici, de ne pas afficher trop ouvertement ses opinions politiques – malgré des soupçons d’ambitions électorales, qu’il a démentis – et s’était abstenu de soutenir un candidat pendant la campagne présidentielle américaine. Il avait toutefois laissé entendre, dans un discours en avril dernier, son aversion pour certaines idées de Donald Trump, sans pour autant le nommer : « J’entends les voix apeurées qui nous appellent à construire des murs. Plutôt que des murs, nous voulons aider les gens à construire des ponts. »

Depuis, Donald Trump l’a emporté, et a durci dès ses premiers jours de mandat la politique d’immigration pour « protéger la nation contre l’entrée de terroristes étrangers », rapporte un décret publié vendredi soir. Il interdit notamment l’arrivée de ressortissants de sept pays musulmans pendant trois mois : Irak, Iran, Libye, Somalie, Soudan, Syrie et Yémen. Deux jours plus tôt, il avait signé un autre décret ordonnant la construction d’un mur à la frontière entre les Etats-Unis et le Mexique.

« Comme beaucoup d’entre vous, je suis inquiet de l’impact des récents décrets signés par le président Trump », explique Mark Zuckerberg, avant de développer :

« Nous devons faire en sorte que ce pays reste en sécurité, mais pour y parvenir, nous devrions nous concentrer sur les personnes qui représentent vraiment une menace. Etendre l’attention des forces de l’ordre au-delà des personnes qui représentent de vraies menaces va nuire à la sécurité des Américains, en dispersant les ressources, tandis que des millions de sans-papiers qui ne représentent aucune menace vivront dans la peur d’être expulsés. »

Les poids lourds américains inquiets

Comme beaucoup d’employeurs de la Silicon Valley, M. Zuckerberg plaide depuis longtemps pour un assouplissement des règles d’immigration aux Etats-Unis. Notamment parce que ces entreprises recrutent beaucoup de personnes étrangères et que les lois américaines compliquent leur arrivée.

Le patron de Facebook n’est d’ailleurs pas le seul à s’être montré inquiet après le décret signé vendredi par le nouveau président américain. Dans une note interne qu’a pu consulter le Wall Street Journal, Sundar Pichai, qui dirige Google, a expliqué que ce décret pouvait affecter 187 salariés de l’entreprise. « Nous sommes inquiets de l’impact de ce décret et de toutes les propositions qui pourraient imposer des restrictions aux Googlers [les employés de Google] et leurs familles, ou qui pourraient créer des obstacles pour apporter de grands talents aux Etats-Unis. »

D’autres poids lourds de la Silicon Valley comme Apple, Netflix et Tesla ont exprimé leur consternation au sujet de ce décret.

Alphabet, maison mère de Google, a rappelé d’urgence les membres de son personnel qui se trouvaient à l’étranger et a invité ceux qui pourraient être concernés par le décret à ne pas quitter les Etats-Unis.

« Ce n’est pas une politique que nous soutenons », écrit quant à lui Tim Cook, le patron d’Apple, dans une lettre adressée à ses employés. « Nous avons pris contact avec la Maison blanche pour expliquer ses effets néfastes pour nos collaborateurs et notre entreprise », poursuit-il, promettant d’aider les victimes du décret.

Selon Brad Smith, président et directeur juridique de Microsoft, 76 employés de la firme viennent des sept pays concernés par le décret. « En tant qu’entreprise, Microsoft croit à une immigration équilibrée et hautement qualifiée (…) Nous croyons à l’importance de protéger les réfugiés reconnus comme tels et respectueux de la loi dont les vies peuvent être menacées par les procédures d’immigration », ajoute-t-il dans un courriel.

Quant au fondateur de SpaceX, Elon Musk, qui a récemment semblé cultiver une relation avec Trump, il a tweeté que « beaucoup de gens qui sont affectés par cette politique sont de solides partisans des États-Unis » qui ne « méritent pas d’être rejetés ».

Fait étonnant, le réseau social Twitter a aussi réagi, affichant son soutien aux personnes concernées par ce décret : « Twitter est construit par les immigrants de toute religion. Nous serons toujours pour eux et avec eux ».

« Ne pas autoriser (les ressortissants) de certains pays ou les réfugiés à venir en Amérique n’est pas correct et nous devons épauler ceux qui sont affectés », a pour sa part déclaré Brian Chesky, cofondateur et directeur général d’Airbnb, qui a promis d’héberger gratuitement les étrangers refoulés.

Sheryl Sandberg attaque Trump sur l’avortement

La numéro deux de Facebook, Sheryl Sandberg, a elle aussi critiqué publiquement Donald Trump jeudi, cette fois sur le terrain de l’avortement. Parmi les nombreux décrets signés par le nouveau président dès son entrée en fonctions, l’un interdit le financement d’ONG internationales soutenant l’avortement. Une décision « qui pourrait avoir de terribles conséquences pour les femmes et les familles partout dans le monde », a déploré M^me Sandberg sur Facebook.

La directrice opérationnelle de Facebook avait rencontré M. Trump en novembre, lors de la réunion qu’il avait organisée à la Trump Tower avec plusieurs dirigeants de la Silicon Valley, ce qui avait déclenché un certain nombre de critiques. Contrairement à Mark Zuckerberg, Sheryl Sanberg, par ailleurs fondatrice d’une ONG consacrée aux femmes, avait affiché son soutien dès juin 2016 à Hillary Clinton, mais s’était montrée très discrète à ce sujet depuis.

Voir encore:

Taxation des GAFA : l’Union européenne désunie
Si la France a réussi à imposer son ordre du jour sur cette question, ses propositions ne font pas l’unanimité.
Le Monde économie
Cécile Ducourtieux (Bruxelles, bureau européen)
21.09.2017

Le ministre de l’économie, Bruno Le Maire, a réussi un beau coup médiatique ces derniers jours en imposant à l’ordre du jour européen le sujet de la taxation des géants du numérique (les « GAFA », pour Google, Amazon, Facebook et Apple). Pour autant, la solution inédite avancée par Bercy ne fait pas l’unanimité dans l’Union. Le ministère français suggère que, pour obliger ces multinationales championnes de l’optimisation fiscale à payer les impôts correspondant à leur activité effective dans un pays, on impose, non pas leurs bénéfices, mais leur chiffre d’affaires, au motif qu’il serait plus facile à matérialiser.

Après avoir obtenu le ralliement, début septembre, de trois autres poids lourds européens (ses homologues allemand, italien et espagnol), M. Le Maire est également parvenu à convaincre six autres ministres (l’autrichien, le grec, le slovène, le bulgare, le portugais et le roumain), à l’Ecofin, la réunion des grands argentiers européens du 16 septembre à Tallinn (Estonie). Pour ne pas être en reste, la Commission européenne, jusqu’alors très prudente à l’idée d’une « taxe GAFA » spécifique, a rendu publique, jeudi 21 septembre, une « communication » sur le sujet.

Pour autant, l’institution s’est gardée de tout enthousiasme. Si elle salue l’activisme hexagonal, et assure qu’elle va l’explorer plus avant, elle reste convaincue que la bonne solution, à terme, pour éviter que les géants du Net continuent d’échapper massivement à l’impôt en profitant d’une fiscalité datant du XX^e siècle, peu adaptée à la dématérialisation accélérée des échanges, c’est une remise à plat complète de la taxe sur le profit.

« Il n’est plus question de tolérer une situation où des sociétés échappent pratiquement à l’impôt malgré des bénéfices considérables. C’est une question de justice sociale et de pragmatisme. Nous estimons que le manque à gagner pour les fiscs européens est supérieur à 5 milliards d’euros par an », explique au Monde Pierre Moscovici, le commissaire à l’économie. Pour autant, estime l’ex-ministre de l’économie du gouvernement Ayrault, « il vaut mieux, pour adapter notre fiscalité à l’ère du numérique, changer la roue qu’ajouter une rustine aux règles existantes ».

Travail de conviction

La Commission tente, depuis fin 2016, de relancer un projet jugé très ambitieux d’harmonisation au niveau européen du calcul de l’impôt sur le revenu. Baptisée « Accis » à Bruxelles, pour « assiette commune consolidée pour l’impôt sur les sociétés », cette ébauche de directive est censée définir les règles d’établissement de la base fiscale pays par pays, et celles de la consolidation des profits au niveau des sociétés mères.

La Commission préférerait largement poursuivre son travail de conviction auprès des pays membres, plutôt que de l’abandonner pour la proposition française, plus rapide à mettre en œuvre à court terme, jure M. Le Maire.

« Nous n’excluons aucune option, et l’initiative française réunissant désormais dix pays est la bienvenue. Mais nous tenons à rappeler que la taxation du numérique est une question politique, qui appelle des réponses globales et exige un temps de réflexion. Les options les plus simples à énoncer ne sont pas forcément les plus simples à mettre en œuvre », insiste M. Moscovici.

La taxation du chiffre d’affaires inquiète à Bruxelles : comment éviter de taxer doublement les sociétés du Net (par le chiffre d’affaires et par le profit), alors que cette pratique va à l’encontre de toutes les règles en matière fiscale ? Quel seuil de revenus « numériques » choisir pour cibler les « grosses » plates-formes sans pénaliser tout l’écosystème des start-up européennes ? En 2010, une première tentative de taxe Google hexagonale avait été rapidement abandonnée pour cette dernière raison. Elle visait la publicité en ligne, principale source de revenus de la plupart des acteurs du Net, à commencer par les plus petits…

Doutes sur le fond

Par ailleurs, au-delà de ces doutes sur le fond, huit pays membres ont fait part, selon nos informations, de leurs fortes réserves concernant la proposition française, lors de l’Ecofin (la Suède, Malte, les Pays-Bas, le Luxembourg, l’Irlande, Chypre, la Belgique et le Royaume-Uni). Or, rien ne peut avancer au niveau européen en matière fiscale sans l’unanimité des pays membres. Certains, comme l’Irlande, le Luxembourg ou les Pays-Bas pratiquent des fiscalités notoirement accommodantes pour les GAFA, et sont parmi les moins enthousiastes à Bruxelles dès lors qu’il s’agit de lutter contre la fraude et l’évasion fiscale, même si leur position s’est un peu assouplie après le scandale « LuxLeaks », fin 2015.

D’autres, comme la Suède, réclament généralement que les travaux européens se calent sur les discussions internationales dans le cadre de l’OCDE (Organisation de coopération et de développement économiques), afin que les Etats-Unis y soient associés.

Chargés de la présidence tournante de l’Union et obligés, du fait de cette responsabilité temporaire, à une certaine neutralité, les Estoniens se sont prudemment tenus en retrait du débat à l’Ecofin. Plutôt en faveur de la poursuite des négociations autour d’Accis, ils vont tenter de rapprocher les points de vue européens avant le conseil des dirigeants de l’Union, fin décembre.

Leur but ? Sur un sujet identifié désormais comme prioritaire, ils veulent que l’Europe contribue à influencer le travail de l’OCDE, qui travaille aussi sur la taxation du numérique et doit rendre son rapport en avril 2018. Si une proposition législative de la Commission émerge de toutes ces tractations, ce ne sera logiquement pas avant cette échéance internationale, soit au plus tôt dans le courant du deuxième trimestre 2018.

Voir de plus:

Comment Macron alimente le populisme

Ivan Rioufol

Liberté d’expression

27 septembre 2017

Emmanuel Macron, qui vomit le populisme, fait tout pour l’alimenter. Il en a apporté la démonstration, mardi à la Sorbonne, en se faisant le défenseur exalté de l’Union européenne, sans vouloir entendre les réticences des peuples. Sa prétendue ‘refondation’ européenne n’est autre que la perpétuation d’une institution technocratique et éloignée de la vie des gens. Son choix d’une ‘Europe souveraine » est celui d’une supranationalité qui méconnait les nations et leur désir de maîtriser leur destin. L’entendre affirmer que l’Europe doit « faire une place aux réfugiés » car « c’est notre devoir commun » révèle son indifférence aux inquiétudes qui partout se manifestent. En Allemagne, la percée de l’afD, ce week-end, a été motivée par la folle politique migratoire d’Angela Merkel et son incapacité à mesurer le danger islamiste. C’est Alice Schwarzer, grande figure du féminisme en Allemagne, qui déclarait l’autre jour dans Le Figaro, parlant de la chancelière : « Elle n’a pas perçu la différence entre l’islam et l’islamisme, entre la religion et l’idéologie politique (…) De cette fausse perception sur la politisation de l’islam ont découlé de nombreuses erreurs ». D’islam politique, il n’en a évidemment pas été question dans le discours fleuve du chef de l’Etat. Il ne veut ‘conduire la bataille’ que pour donner plus de pouvoirs encore à une Union de plus en plus soviétoïde. Il n’a réservé ses coups, comme à son habitude, qu’à ceux qui ne pensent pas comme lui.

Ce mercredi, dans Le Figaro, l’universitaire Jean-Claude Pacitto alerte sur l’intolérance qui s’est installée dans l’Université, aux prises avec des moeurs mafieuses donnant au conformisme sa place de choix, lors des procédures de cooptation. Pacitto s’interroge : ‘La France n’est-elle jamais sortie de cette tentation toute soviétique qui consiste à envisager le débat qu’en termes d’élimination des adversaires ?’. En tout cas, à entendre Macron hier à la Sorbonne, la réponse est non. En effet, non content de s’aveugler sur une Union européenne vécue comme une violence ou une menace par beaucoup de citoyens abandonnés, le président s’est une fois de plus laissé aller au manichéisme en usage chez les esprits sectaires. Pour lui, ceux qui critiquent l’UE laisseraient voir un ‘nationalisme’, un ‘identitarisme’, un ‘souverainisme de repli’ et autres « passions tristes ». Il dit de ceux-là qu’ils « mentent aux peuples ». Et de menacer, d’ailleurs peu clairement : « Je ne laisserai rien, rien, à ceux qui promettent la haine, la division ou le repli national ». Mais où est la haine, en l’occurrence, sinon dans ces propos présidentiels qui cherchent à discréditer des contradicteurs. Je ne sais pas si la méthode est spécifiquement soviétique. Reste qu’elle vient compléter un autoritarisme qui se retrouve généralement chez les faibles. Le macronisme devient, de plus en plus, un despotisme éructant.

Voir par ailleurs:

The Hipster in the Mirror
Mark Greif
The New York Times
November 12, 2010

A  year ago, my colleagues and I started to investigate the contemporary hipster. What was the “hipster,” and what did it mean to be one? It was a puzzle. No one, it seemed, thought of himself as a hipster, and when someone called you a hipster, the term was an insult. Paradoxically, those who used the insult were themselves often said to resemble hipsters — they wore the skinny jeans and big eyeglasses, gathered in tiny enclaves in big cities, and looked down on mainstream fashions and “tourists.” Most puzzling was how rattled sensible, down-to-earth people became when we posed hipster-themed questions. When we announced a public debate on hipsterism, I received e-mail messages both furious and plaintive. Normally inquisitive people protested that there could be no answer and no definition. Maybe hipsters didn’t exist! The responses were more impassioned than those we’d had in our discussions on health care, young conservatives and feminism. And perfectly blameless individuals began flagellating themselves: “Am I a hipster?”

I wondered if I could guess the root of their pain. It’s a superficial topic, yet it seemed that so much was at stake. Why? Because struggles over taste (and “taste” is the hipster’s primary currency) are never only about taste. I began to wish that everyone I talked to had read just one book to give these fraught debates a frame: “Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste,” by Pierre Bourdieu.

A French sociologist who died in 2002 at age 71, Bourdieu is sometimes wrongly associated with postmodern philosophers. But he did share with other post-1968 French thinkers a wish to show that lofty philosophical ideals couldn’t be separated from the conflicts of everyday life. Subculture had not been his area, precisely, but neither would hipsters have been beneath his notice.

He came from a family of peasants in the foothills of the Pyrenees. His father was elevated by a job in the village post office — although he always emphasized that he had attained his position by being neither better nor different. Pierre, as a child, was elevated yet more drastically by the school system. He so distinguished himself in the classroom that he was carried to studies at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris. This was the pinnacle of French intellect, the path of Sartre and Maurice Merleau-Ponty.

Yet Bourdieu chose to make it his life’s work to debunk the powerful classes’ pretensions that they were more deserving of authority or wealth than those below. He aimed his critiques first at his own class of elites — professors and intellectuals — then at the media, the political class and the propertied class.

“Distinction,” published in 1979, was an undisputed masterwork. In it, Bourdieu set out to show the social logic of taste: how admiration for art, appreciation of music, even taste in food, came about for different groups, and how “superior” taste was not the result of an enchanted superiority in scattered individuals.

This may seem a long way from Wellington-booted and trucker-hatted American youth in gentrifying neighborhoods. But Bourdieu’s innovation, applicable here, was to look beyond the traditional trappings of rich or poor to see battles of symbols (like those boots and hats) traversing all society, reinforcing the class structure just as money did.

Over several years in the 1960s, Bourdieu and his researchers surveyed 1,200 people of all classes and mined government data on aspects of French domestic life. They asked, for instance, Which of the following subjects would be most likely to make a beautiful photograph? and offered such choices as a sunset, a girl with a cat or a car crash. From government dietary research, they took data on the classic question: Do you think French people eat too much? The statistical results were striking. The things you prefer — tastes that you like to think of as personal, unique, justified only by sensibility — correspond tightly to defining measures of social class: your profession, your highest degree and your father’s profession.

The power of Bourdieu’s statistics was to show how rigid and arbitrary the local conformities were. In American terms, he was like an updater of Thorstein Veblen, who gave us the idea of “conspicuous consumption.” College teachers and artists, unusual in believing that a beautiful photo could be made from a car crash, began to look conditioned to that taste, rather than sophisticated or deep. White-collar workers who defined themselves by their proclivity to eat only light foods — as opposed to farmworkers, who weren’t ashamed to treat themselves to “both cheese and a dessert” — seemed not more refined, but merely more conventional.

Taste is not stable and peaceful, but a means of strategy and competition. Those superior in wealth use it to pretend they are superior in spirit. Groups closer in social class who yet draw their status from different sources use taste and its attainments to disdain one another and get a leg up. These conflicts for social dominance through culture are exactly what drive the dynamics within communities whose members are regarded as hipsters.

Once you take the Bourdieuian view, you can see how hipster neighborhoods are crossroads where young people from different origins, all crammed together, jockey for social gain. One hipster subgroup’s strategy is to disparage others as “liberal arts college grads with too much time on their hands”; the attack is leveled at the children of the upper middle class who move to cities after college with hopes of working in the “creative professions.” These hipsters are instantly declassed, reservoired in abject internships and ignored in the urban hierarchy — but able to use college-taught skills of classification, collection and appreciation to generate a superior body of cultural “cool.”

They, in turn, may malign the “trust fund hipsters.” This challenges the philistine wealthy who, possessed of money but not the nose for culture, convert real capital into “cultural capital” (Bourdieu’s most famous coinage), acquiring subculture as if it were ready-to-wear. (Think of Paris Hilton in her trucker hat.)

Both groups, meanwhile, look down on the couch-­surfing, old-clothes-wearing hipsters who seem most authentic but are also often the most socially precarious — the lower-middle-class young, moving up through style, but with no backstop of parental culture or family capital. They are the bartenders and boutique clerks who wait on their well-to-do peers and wealthy tourists. Only on the basis of their cool clothes can they be “superior”: hipster knowledge compensates for economic immobility.

All hipsters play at being the inventors or first adopters of novelties: pride comes from knowing, and deciding, what’s cool in advance of the rest of the world. Yet the habits of hatred and accusation are endemic to hipsters because they feel the weakness of everyone’s position — including their own. Proving that someone is trying desperately to boost himself instantly undoes him as an opponent. He’s a fake, while you are a natural aristocrat of taste. That’s why “He’s not for real, he’s just a hipster” is a potent insult among all the people identifiable as hipsters themselves.

The attempt to analyze the hipster provokes such universal anxiety because it calls everyone’s bluff. And hipsters aren’t the only ones unnerved. Many of us try to justify our privileges by pretending that our superb tastes and intellect prove we deserve them, reflecting our inner superiority. Those below us economically, the reasoning goes, don’t appreciate what we do; similarly, they couldn’t fill our jobs, handle our wealth or survive our difficulties. Of course this is a terrible lie. And Bourdieu devoted his life to exposing it. Those who read him in effect become responsible to him — forced to admit a failure to examine our own lives, down to the seeming trivialities of clothes and distinction that, as Bourdieu revealed, also structure our world.

Mark Greif, a founder of n+1 and an assistant professor at the New School, is the editor, with Kathleen Ross and Dayna Tortorici, of “What Was the Hipster? A Sociological Investigation,” published last month.

Voir encore:

Si vous souhaitez être crédibles, arrêtez de dire « Les GAFA »
Julien Cadot
Numerama
27 janvier 2017

Les GAFA n’existent pas. Essayons de comprendre pourquoi cette expression n’a pas de sens en 2017.

Si l’on regarde du côté de Wikipédia, on s’aperçoit que l’acronyme GAFA se rapporte à deux choses. Premièrement, il peut signifier Geometric And Functional Analysis, bimensuel anglophone dédié à la recherche en mathématiques. Il peut aussi signifier Google Apple Facebook Amazon, quatre entreprises qu’on nommerait également « Géants du web ». Si votre passion pour les chiffres vous a conduit à cet article, nous avons le regret de vous informer qu’il ne sera pas question du périodique dans ces paragraphes, mais bien de nos amis américains.

Car il est rare, en France, qu’une journée se passe sans que le terme GAFA (le plus souvent « Les GAFA ») ne soit employé. On le trouve dans la presse web et papier, à la radio, à la télé, mais aussi dans la bouche de candidats à la présidentielle, sous la plume d’économistes ou dans les rapports des associations et organismes qui s’intéressent à la vie du web. Et pourtant, en 2017, plusieurs raisons nous conduisent à penser que ce terme est à bannir. Nous allons essayer de les expliquer.

Commençons par une rapide autocritique. Si vous faites une recherche sur GAFA Google, vous vous apercevrez bien vite que l’acronyme se trouve sur nos pages. Et c’est vrai : notre première volonté étant de nous faire comprendre le plus immédiatement possible, nous avons pu l’utiliser. Pourtant, depuis un an à peu près, il faut savoir que nos journalistes ont la consigne de ne jamais l’employer au premier degré. Il peut être utilisé dans des propos rapportés et quand il s’agit, nous allons le voir, de souligner par ironie une conception trop simpliste des acteurs du web.

GAFA : 4 entreprises qui n’ont rien à voir

Et c’est précisément le premier point qui nous turlupine : dire « Les GAFA », c’est faire un rassemblement qui n’a, au fond, pas beaucoup de sens. Les Géants du Web ? Apple est loin d’être né du web et encore aujourd’hui, l’entreprise de Cupertino est plus connue pour son matériel que pour ses logiciels (qui ne sont pas forcément des parties du « web »). Google est une agence de publicité, un moteur de recherche, un créateur de robot, un fournisseur d’accès à Internet, un fonds d’investissement, un chercheur en santé et en intelligence artificielle… et Google ne s’appelle plus Google, mais Alphabet.

Amazon est un e-commerçant. Tout ce que fait Amazon n’a qu’un but : vendre toujours plus de choses sur Amazon. Kindle, 1-Click, Dash, Alexa, Premium, Prime Now et autres services se regroupent autour de l’activité principale du géant de Seattle : c’est une boutique qui veut vendre des choses matérielles ou immatérielles. Une grosse boutique internationale, mais une boutique quand même. Facebook, enfin, est un réseau social, une régie publicitaire, une plateforme de contenu, un kiosque pour les médias (voire un média), un autre réseau social (Instagram) ou un explorateur de tendances technologiques. C’est, dans un sens, celui qui s’approche le plus de Google / Alphabet. Mais effectivement, (GF)+A+A, ça sonne moins bien.

(GF)+A+A, ça sonne moins bien

Ces quelques définitions fort simples et non exhaustives de ces sociétés montrent bien que les mettre sous une même bannière n’est presque jamais justifié, sans compter qu’en plus d’être différentes, ces entreprises sont concurrentes et pas une bande de copains américains. Ou alors, le regroupement se justifie par des choses beaucoup trop vagues (multinationale, richesse, optimisation fiscale, communication…) qui sont aussi des caractéristiques de milliers d’entreprises qui n’ont rien à voir avec la tech ou le web. Et le premier défaut de cet acronyme est particulièrement problématique quand il se mêle par exemple à la politique, quel que soit le bord.

Emmanuel Macron a par exemple employé le terme le 27 janvier 2017 pour dire que « Les GAFA » participeraient au financement de son pass jeunesse pour la culture. La « culture » a un rapport avec l’activité d’un Amazon, par exemple, ou celle d’un Google en tant que moteur de recherche. Mais pourquoi diable faire payer Apple et Facebook pour un pass culture ? Pourquoi ne pas impliquer Twitter et Microsoft ? Et surtout, pourquoi éviter des acteurs qui ont, eux, tout à voir avec la culture, comme Netflix ?

GAFA : et les autres ?

Cette dernière interrogation nous mène à un deuxième point : le terme « GAFA » est désuet. Il sonne comme une sorte de locution creuse et un brin moqueuse, souvent utilisée pour parler en mal de ces entreprises qui sont autant des mastodontes que des dinosaures de notre web. Quand on entend le mot, on a l’impression de se trouver en 2010 et d’entendre parler du tout puissant IBM.

Aujourd’hui, le web et les nouvelles technologies se sont redessinés très largement et évoquer par exemple l’impact d’une entreprise sur la société, positif ou négatif, sans parler d’Uber ou de Tesla est un non sens. Tout comme parler d’un grand réseau social et oublier Snapchat. Ou parler de Google et d’Apple sans évoquer les colosses de l’autre côté du globe que sont Baidu, Alibaba, LeEco ou Samsung et dont la croissance est loin d’être stoppée. C’est comme si la locution donnait un éclairage bien trop important à quatre entreprises, qui sont certes énormes, mais qui ne sont pas l’alpha et l’oméga de l’innovation, de la nouveauté ou de l’économie moderne.

À ce sujet, employer le terme « NATU » (Netflix, Airbnb, Tesla, Uber) qui cherche à s’imposer pour remplacer « GAFA » est tout aussi problématique : il oublie, lui aussi, les puissants asiatiques et fait un plan serré maladroit sur quatre autres entreprises qui n’ont, elles non plus, rien en commun.

GAFA : effacer les problèmes derrière un acronyme

Dès lors, un candidat à une élection présidentielle (tous ou presque le font) qui emploie « GAFA », « NATU » ou même « Géants californiens » (ils sont loin d’être tous californiens), n’a pas vraiment d’idée de qui il parle et de comment il souhaite impliquer tel ou tel acteur dans tel ou tel plan. Et ce point est peut-être le plus important de tous : résumer un groupe informe a une conséquence bien réelle sur la manière dont les gouvernements, états, organisations, économistes et même les militants agissent.

Si l’on prend le problème réel de la fiscalité on comprend très vite qu’on ne traite pas de la même manière avec Apple (Irlande) qu’avec Netflix (Luxembourg) Google (bureaux internationaux, présents à Paris et à Londres) ou qu’avec des sociétés moins exposées et donc moins souvent pointées du doigt (Samsung, Huawei…) et qui pratiquent très probablement des « optimisations » sur lesquelles il y aurait à enquêter.

Arnaud Montebourg évoquait « quatre entreprises californiennes »

Sans parler de tout ce qui n’entre pas dans la fiscalité. Par exemple, quand on est une collectivité ou une ville, ce n’est pas du tout la même chose de monter un projet avec Google (plusieurs centaines d’employés à Paris, allant de la communication à la recherche) qu’avec un Facebook (petits bureaux, compétences très orientées business) ou un Amazon qui a à la fois des bureaux mais aussi des entrepôts et des livreurs et qui opère donc à plusieurs niveaux avec des tas de problématiques et d’interlocuteurs différents.

Traiter avec les GAFA, faire plier les GAFA, faire financer X ou Y choses avec les GAFA, organiser un plan avec les GAFA, impliquer les GAFA sont autant de propositions qui n’ont aucune signification pratique et aucune portée réelle : tout au plus s’agit-il de vaines promesses ou de faux espoirs.

GAFA : créer une mythologie technologique

Le dernier point que nous souhaitons relever est peut-être tout à la fois le moins grave et le plus remarquable. En effet, à force d’être mal utilisé, à tort et à travers, le terme a remplacé l’objet qu’il désigne. Le signifiant « Les GAFA » est une sorte de chimère sans signifié, qui résonne comme une menace toute puissante, l’épure d’une techno-divinité. Les GAFA nous espionnent. Les GAFA nous contrôlent. Les GAFA nous privent de telle ou telle liberté.

Si on estime que « Les GAFA » n’ont aucun sens réel, alors toutes ces phrases sonnent creux — en plus de perdre en crédibilité. En effet, si l’on prend par exemple la collecte des données personnelles, il est on ne peut plus faux de mettre Google, Amazon, Facebook et Apple dans le même panier. Les quatre compagnies n’ont pas du tout la même politique sur le sujet et une critique ou un éloge qui s’applique à l’un ne s’appliquera pas forcément à l’autre.

« Les GAFA » n’existant pas, ils ne peuvent ni être une cible crédible, ni un allié de confiance. En revanche, le terme entretient un flou artistique qui n’aboutit, concrètement, à rien.

Les GAFA n’existant pas en tant qu’entité, il est très difficile de mettre autre chose que de l’irrationnel derrière cette expression, même si elle a pu avoir du sens au moment où elle a été employées la première fois. Et l’irrationnel, surtout dans des cas économiques, sociaux ou politiques très concrets que nous venons d’esquisser, n’a rien d’une route à emprunter pour avancer.

Voir de plus:

American cultural imperialism has a new name: GAFA

Kabir Chibber

Quarzƒ

December 01, 2014

In France, there’s a new word: GAFA. It’s an acronym, and it has become a shorthand term for some of the most powerful companies in the world—all American, all tech giants. GAFA stands for Google, Apple, Facebook, and Amazon.

The phrase is used by newspapers, blogs, and talking heads on TV—see here and here and here (all links in French). It even appears in the local version of “The Internet for Dummies.” Le Monde’s economics editor, Alexis Delcambre, tells Quartz that GAFA first appeared in his newspaper in December 2012. “GAFA is not used very often, but when used, it is almost always on critical topics, including taxes or personal data,” he says.

In the US, Google, Apple, Facebook, and Amazon are generally praised as examples of innovation. In the French press, and for much of the rest of Europe, their innovation is often seen in a less positive light—the ugly Americans coming over with innovative approaches to invading personal privacy or new ways to avoid paying their fair share. Take Google: its tax affairs in France are being challenged (paywall)—which comes soon after it has been forced to institute a “right to be forgotten” and threatened with being broken up.

But the spread of the term “GAFA” may be as much to do with cultural resentment as taxes. “I think it’s more about distribution of power in the online world than tax avoidance,” Liam Boogar, founder of the French start-up site, Rude Baguette, tells Quartz. France, after all, is a country with a long history of resisting US cultural hegemony.

Remember José Bové, the sheep farmer who destroyed a McDonald’s in 1999 and was a symbol for the anti-globalization movement? Times have changed; McDonald’s most profitable country in Europe is now France. Having lost that battle, the French have instead turned their ire to Silicon Valley.

There is also a loss of public sympathy in the wake of the massive American government spying revelations. Jérémie Zimmermann, one of the founders of La Quadrature, a tech-oriented public policy non-profit, tells Quartz he dislikes the term “GAFA” and prefers to refer to the big US firms as the “PRISM” companies (after the US National Security Agency program revealed by Edward Snowden) or the “Bullrun” firms (another NSA program), which he uses to refer to “more or less every US-based company in which trust is broken”—citing examples that include Intel, Motorola, and Cisco.

Even if the term has a negative connotation, it’s worth noting which companies didn’t make the acronym. Microsoft, most notably. Samsung is another. No Yahoo.

Google, Apple, Facebook, and Amazon pretty much dominate every facet of our lives—from email from friends and family to what’s in your pocket to how you get everything in your house to how you pay. As far as acronyms of global power go, it works.

What Is GAFA? Why The EU Doesn’t Love Large Harry Guinness
Make us of.com
June 18, 2015

GAFA is an acronym for Google, Apple, Facebook, and Amazon — the 4 most powerful American technology companies. Usage of the term “GAFA” is increasingly common in Europe. The acronym, originally from France, is used by the media to identify the 4 companies as a group – often in the context of legal investigations.

The EU has been butting heads with large companies for years. Let’s take a look at why it doesn’t like Google, Apple, Facebook, and Amazon.What’s Different About Europe?

The Europe Union, or EU, is composed of 28 countries. The major European powers, like France, Germany and (for the time being) the United Kingdom, are all members. The EU creates laws that cover all member states and treat every citizen equally. It is because of the EU that I, as an Irish person, am free to travel, work and live in almost any other European country.

The EU is based on the idea that nation states operating together are more powerful than those standing alone. It’s also generally quite hostile to the unfettered ambitions of corporations. Any company that seeks to acquire a monopoly, engage in anti-competitive practices, dodge taxes, or invade EU citizens’ privacy is likely to find themselves under investigation, and potentially facing a hefty fine.

Every GAFA company is currently under investigation by the EU for something.

Why the EU Doesn’t Like Google

Google knows a lot about you, although there are some steps you can take to minimise it. The company uses the information they pull from your browsing habits, emails, Google Drive files, and anything else they can get their hands on to serve you ever more targeted ads. In the past this has led to the EU criticising Google’s use of personal data. How Much Does Google Really Know About You? How Much Does Google Really Know About You? Read More 

More recently, the EU has been investigating Google for antitrust violations. Microsoft has been fined €2.2 billion for abusing it’s dominant market position and pushing it’s own services over the years, and the EU is concerned that Google is doing the same with search and Android. If they’re found to be abusing their position, they’ll face billions of euro worth of fines and be required to change their business practices.

Google has already been forced, by the EU, to change how it operates. After a landmark ruling last year, citizens of the EU have the “right to be forgotten” on the Internet. People can request that search engines remove links to web pages that contain information about them — although MakeUseOf readers don’t seem too fussed about it.

Why the EU Doesn’t Like Apple

Apple Music was only unveiled this month but, according to Reuters, the deals they’ve inked with record companies are already under investigation. Apple Unveils Apple Music at WWDC, U.S. Army Website Hacked, & More… [Tech News Digest] Apple Unveils Apple Music at WWDC, U.S. Army Website Hacked, & More… [Tech News Digest] Apple Music arrives at last, the United States Army gets hacked, Uwe Boll’s Kickstarter rage, Pizza Hut Blockbuster Box movies, and Grand Theft Auto V in real life. Read More

The EU, however, is more interested in Apple’s tax practices. The Union already shut down some tax loopholes, such as the Double Irish, that Apple used to minimize their tax burden, both in Europe and the US. The Union is continuing to investigate whether other practices they engaged in were legal. A ruling was due this month but has been pushed back.

Why the EU Doesn’t Like Facebook

The EU isn’t keen on Facebook for the same reason most people aren’t — it’s questionable privacy record. Facebook Privacy: 25 Things The Social Network Knows About You Facebook Privacy: 25 Things The Social Network Knows About You Facebook knows a surprising amount about us – information we willingly volunteer. From that information you can be slotted into a demographic, your « likes » recorded and relationships monitored. Here are 25 things Facebook knows about… Read More

There are several investigations, and a class action law suit, looking into whether or not Facebook’s privacy policy is legal. So far things are looking bad for Facebook. Despite frequent updates, a Belgian report released earlier this year “found that Facebook is acting in violation of European law“.

Just like the other companies, Facebook could face heavy fines if they don’t fall into line with the EU’s policies.

Why the EU Doesn’t Like Amazon

The EU’s issue with Amazon is a little different.

The EU wants a Digital Single Market where every citizen would be able to purchase the same products at the same price as any other, regardless of where the products were being sold from. They are, according to VentureBeat, concerned that Amazon, and other e-commerce companies like Netflix, “have policies that restrict the ability of merchants and consumers to buy and sell goods and services across Europe’s borders.” For example: videos offered by the company’s streaming aren’t available in every country, which is at odds with the EU’s aim to treat every member nation and citizen equally.

A year-long investigation launched this year so, at least for now, Amazon is free to continue as they are.

What Do You Think?

The EU is clearly not going to let the GAFA companies operate unchecked, nor let them have the same level of independence they enjoy in the US. The EU takes a much more hands on approach to consumer protection and anti-competition laws than the Obama administration.

So tell me, what do you think? Is the EU overreaching in its regulation of the GAFA companies or is it right to limit the tech giants’ ambitions?

Voir par ailleurs:

Trump et l’arrogance de la Silicon Valley
Georges Nahon (président d’Orange Silicon Valley, à San Francisco, et de l’Institut Orange)
Les Echos
2 déc. 2016

Aux Etats-Unis, les vives réactions des déçus de l’élection de Donald Trump surprennent : excès de langage que l’on reprochait au nouveau président élu, manifestations violentes dans les rues, diatribes sur les réseaux sociaux dépassant le raisonnable. En Californie du Nord démocrate, certains dans la high-tech envisagent un « Calexit », une sécession à la « Brexit ». Ce qui est mis en cause implicitement, c’est la légitimité du système électoral et politique américain, un discours de droite que des démocrates frustrés ont, hélas !, adopté. Le secteur de la high-tech s’est mobilisé en faveur de Mme Clinton. La Silicon Valley avait beaucoup d’intérêts en jeu dans cette présidentielle, notamment du fait de sa très forte dépendance vis-à-vis des travailleurs immigrants et par rapport au travail déporté dans des pays à faibles salaires. Cette seule situation est intolérable pour la « middle class » américaine, très touchée par le chômage, surtout les seniors, qui sont marginalisés et débarqués dans cette économie numérique basée sur un jeunisme brutal, qui exclut les plus âgés et qui se répand rapidement. Avec près de cinquante ans de stagnation de leurs revenus et de difficultés économiques, les prolétaires ruminaient en silence leur colère en espérant qu’Obama allait faire des miracles. Au final, ils se sentent les victimes du progrès numérique. Ils voulaient leur revanche de façon vraiment tranchée et à n’importe quel prix… Leur raisonnement : ces entreprises de la high-tech éliminent des emplois, en créent en dehors, génèrent d’énormes richesses, dont une très grosse partie hors des Etats-Unis, ne paient pas d’impôts sur ces richesses, qui ne profitent donc pas à la « middle class ». On estime à 58 % la part du chiffre d’affaires de la Silicon Valley en dehors des Etats-Unis, l’an dernier.

La « Valley » ne se gêne pas pour faire un lobbying substantiel auprès des politiciens de Washington afin de servir ses intérêts. Et elle est donneuse de leçons. « Changer le monde » pour en faire un monde meilleur, mais pour qui ? Pour les centres de la high-tech et du showbiz de Californie, et c’est une bonne partie du 1 % de la population américaine le plus riche qui profite des progrès. Les thèmes qui ont occupé la Silicon Valley n’ont pas résonné avec le prolétariat. Il y a eu le gigantisme des licornes, ces plates-formes numériques, valorisées en milliards de dollars. Et ces acquisitions colossales de sociétés de technologie loin de la vie de millions d’Américains. Enfin, les très nombreuses levées de fonds de campagne dans la Silicon Valley par les démocrates ont accentué son nombrilisme d’exceptionnalisme quasi messianique. En réalité, la précarisation des emplois par les nouvelles plates-formes numériques, comme Uber, a provoqué des débats amers. L’avènement de l’intelligence artificielle a davantage crispé les esprits du fait de sa capacité à supprimer beaucoup d’emplois sans perspective d’en créer au moins autant de nouveaux. La high-tech de l’ère Obama n’a fait qu’inquiéter ou marginaliser le prolétariat américain. On voit qu’elle ne peut et ne pourra pas être « la » voie unique de salut pour les économies et les sociétés en difficulté.

Aux Etats-Unis, la high-tech a eu un réveil difficile le jour de l’élection de Donald Trump, et toute sa sophistication dans l’analyse des mégadonnées (Big Data) et son intelligence artificielle ne lui ont pas permis de comprendre ce qui se passait dans « l’autre » société américaine et de se comporter différemment pour faciliter le succès de Mme Clinton. Même ses populaires médias sociaux ont été pris à partie pour avoir influencé le vote dans la mauvaise direction en propageant sans contrôle des mensonges et des inexactitudes. La résilience légendaire de la Silicon Valley et sa capacité remarquable à prendre des risques et à dépasser rapidement ses échecs devraient lui permettre de retrouver sa vraie place et de contenir son arrogance. Et de refocaliser proprement son énergie créatrice pour rendre le monde meilleur… pour tous.

Littérature/peinture: Parfois le traître est juste un traître (After Amos Oz’s latest Judas kiss, thank God for Israel Museum’s Jesus exhibition)

Chagall, Exodus 1952-66

Through many a dark hour I’ve been thinkin’ about this that Jesus Christ was betrayed by a kiss but I can’t think for you you’ll have to decide whether Judas Iscariot had God on his side. Bob Dylan

Judas ! Dylan fan (Manchester, May 17, 1966)

We made him and he betrayed the cause. Dylan fan

I think most of all I was angry that Dylan… not that he’d played electric, but that he’d played electric with a really poor sound system. It was not like it is on the record [the official album]. It was a wall of mush. That, and it seemed like a cavalier performance, a throwaway performance compared with the intensity of the acoustic set earlier on. There were rumblings all around me and the people I was with were making noises and looking at each other. It was a build-up. (…)  It came as a complete surprise to me. I guess I’d heard Dylan was playing electrically, but my preconceptions of that were of something a little more restrained, perhaps a couple of guitarists sitting in with him, not a large-scale electric invasion. (…) we were still living the first acoustic LPs and I don’t think many people had moved on to the electric material. (…) It’s strange. But certainly that wasn’t the Dylan I focused on. Maybe I was just living in the past. And I couldn’t hear the lyrics in the second half of the concert. I think that’s what angered me. I thought, ‘The man is throwing away the good part of what he does.‘ (…) I think I was probably being egged on. I certainly got a lot of positive encouragement as soon as I’d done it. I sat down and there were a lot of people around me who turned round and were saying, ‘That was great, wish we’d have said that’ – those sort of things. And at that point I began to feel embarrassed really, but not that embarrassed. I was quite glad I’d done it. (…) It came at the same time as the revelation that someone else was claiming it was they that did the shout, and that intrigued me because I couldn’t understand why anyone would want to do that. I supposed I rationalised it by saying, well, maybe two people in the auditorium shouted ‘Judas’ but I’m absolutely convinced that it was me that the microphones picked up. And, being a bit of an amateur historian, I wanted to set the record straight. (…) I don’t regret doing it because I think I did it for the right sorts of reasons. I felt betrayed by someone who’d formed a very big part of my life for two or three years. But, y’know, with the benefit of hindsight, I don’t think I would do it now. (…) Brilliant [laughs]. Absolutely brilliant. But that wasn’t the set that you heard in the auditorium. It didn’t sound like that. John Cordell

It has been reckoned to be one of the pivotal moments in popular music in the 20th Century, on a par with the riot at Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring in Paris ». (…) It’s funny – you wait 30-odd years for Judas to turn up and you get two at once. (…) I think being called Judas was the point. Betraying what? It’s quite ridiculous. (…) This was not a bad set, it was absolutely fantastic what they played. It was eye-opening and revolutionary. I’m so glad there is a record of it. (…) In essence, it’s the night that pop music became rock music. It was heavy metal, it was thrash metal, it was death metal, it was everything that’s come since then. I was totally aware, the moment it finished, I knew I had been present at something that was seismic. Dr CP Lee

The only reason tapes of those shows exist today is because we wanted to know, ‘Are we crazy?’. We’d go back to the hotel room, listen to a tape of a show and think, ‘Shit, that’s not that bad. Why is everybody so upset?’ Robbie Robertson

These are the same people that tried to pin the name Judas on me. Judas, the most hated name in human history! If you think you’ve been called a bad name, try to work your way out from under that. Yeah, and for what? For playing an electric guitar? As if that is in some kind of way equitable to betraying our Lord and delivering him up to be crucified. All those evil motherfuckers can rot in hell. Bob Dylan

For those American Jews who lack any shred of integrity, the media should be required to label them at the bottom of the television screen whenever they pop up, e.g. Bill Kristol is “Jewish and an outspoken supporter of the state of Israel.” That would be kind-of-like a warning label on a bottle of rat poison – translating roughly as “ingest even the tiniest little dosage of the nonsense spewed by Bill Kristol at your own peril. Phil Giraldi

As the New Year 5778 begins, 88% of Israeli Jews say that they are happy and satisfied with their lives. This makes sense. Israel’s relative security, its prosperity, freedom and spiritual blossoming make Israeli Jews the most successful Jewish community in 3,500 years of Jewish history. The same cannot be said for the Jews of the Diaspora. In Western Europe, Jewish communities that just a generation ago were considered safe and prosperous are now besieged. Synagogues and Jewish schools look like army barracks. And the severe security cordons Jews need to pass through to pray and study are entirely justified. (…) The crisis is a function of growing levels of popular antisemitism spurred by mass immigration from the Islamic world and the resurgence of indigenous European Jew-hatred, particularly on the far Left. The same cannot be said of the American Jewish community, which at the dawn of 5778 also finds itself steeped in an ever deepening crisis. (…)  While antisemitism is experiencing a growth spurt in the US progressive movement, and antisemitism is becoming increasingly overt in US Muslim communities, neither the Reform nor Conservative movements has taken significant institutional steps to fight them. Instead, both movements, and a large swath of the Jewish institutional world, led in large part by Reform and Conservative Jews, have either turned a blind eye to this antisemitism or supported it. Caroline Glick

Parfois, le traitre est celui qui est en avance sur son temps. Amos Oz

That’s what the Jews in Israel think because they have no notion of the limits of power. The fact is that all the power in the world cannot transform someone who hates you into someone who likes you. It can turn a foe into a slave, but not into a friend. All the power in the world cannot transform a fanatic into an enlightened man. All the power in the world cannot transform someone thirsting for vengeance into a lover. And yet these are precisely the real existential challenges facing the State of Israel: how to turn a hater into a lover, a fanatic into a moderate, an avenger into a friend. Am I saying that we do not need military might? Heaven forbid! Such a foolish thought would never enter my head. I know as well as you that it is power, military power, that stands, at any given moment, even at this very moment while you and I are arguing here, between us and extinction. Power has the power to prevent our annihilation for the time being. On condition that we always remember, at every moment, that in a situation like ours power can only prevent. It can’t settle anything and it can’t solve anything. It can only stave off disaster for a while. Shmuel Ash (Judas, Amos Oz)

Every so often in history, courageous people have appeared who were ahead of their time and were called traitors or eccentrics. Amos Oz

And so that is indeed what the Jews possess in the deepest recesses of the Jew-hater’s imagination. We are all Judas. Gershom Wald (Judas, Amos Oz)

 In front of me hangs Marc Chagall’s picture Crucifixion in Yellow. It shows the figure of the crucified Christ in an apocalyptic situation: people sinking into the sea, people homeless and in flight, and yellow fire blazing in the background. And with the crucified Christ there appears the angel with the trumpet and the open roll of the book of life [Rev 14.6]. This picture has accompanied me for a long time. It symbolizes the cross on the horizon of the world, and can be thought of as a symbolic expression of the studies which follow. Jürgen Moltmann

The sculpture, created by Russian Jewish artist Mark Antokolsky in 1876, is part of a collection of more than 150 artworks by 40 Jewish and Israeli artists who have used Christian imagery to challenge long-held taboos in both communities. It showcases the evolving attitudes of Jewish, Zionist and Israeli artists toward a figure whose place in Jewish history has been negotiated and reinterpreted over more than two millennia. It is a risky statement for an Israeli museum. Throughout history, Jews have traditionally shunned Jesus and his gospel. And while the Holy Land might be his accepted birthplace, for Jews in the modern state of Israel there is often resistance to learning about or even acknowledging Christianity. The Washington Post

We are talking about a 2,000-year-old tension between Judaism and Christianity and the fact that anti-Semitism grew in Christian thought and theology. (…) Israelis are funny about Jesus. But when we scrape the surface, we realize that there is a lot of Christian imagery all around us, even if we’re unaware of it. Amitai Mendelsohn

In the 19th century, the main issue was the Jewish artist feeling emancipated, and it was important for those artists to connect with their surrounding and the time. For Israeli artists, it’s also a kind of emancipation from the heavy Jewishness of their country. Ronit Steinberg (Jerusalem’s Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design)

Lorsque Jésus pense que tout le monde peut aimer tout le monde, peut être pensait-il à autre chose que ce que l’on a interprété. (…) L’amour prêché par Jésus tel qu’il est interprété, est quelque chose de tout à fait impossible. Le contraire de la guerre (…) n’est pas l’amour mais plutôt le compromis. (…) Mon père s’appelait Judas. Mon fils s’appelle aussi Judas. C’est quelque chose qui m’intéresse depuis mes 16 ans. De plus, cette traitrise de Judas, on peut considérer que c’était en quelque sorte le Tchernobyl de l’antisémitisme (…) Pourquoi Judas qui avait les moyens vendrait-il son maitre, son idole, son enseignant pour quelque chose comme 600 euros actuels ? Je trouvais que ça ne cadrait absolument pas. (…) Judas a cru en Jésus même plus que Jésus ne croyait en lui-même. (…) Le monde chrétien lorsqu’il l’a découvert a été choqué. C’est comme un électrochoc que de lire cela : le premier chrétien est mort ainsi, c’était également le dernier chrétien, et le seul chrétien. Un électrochoc dont personnellement je me réjouis. Je crois qu’il est bien mérité, peut-être également cela pourra-t-il un petit peu atténuer ce Tchernobyl de l’antisémitisme.  (…) Personnellement je n’ai pas de préférence pour l’un ou l’autre des personnages, ou des idées de ce roman. Je vais d’ailleurs vous donner un petit truc : il faut vous mettre dans des visions très contradictoires. Je n’ai pas voulu écrire un manifeste politique ou un roman. L’écrivain doit pouvoir se mettre à la place de l’autre. Il faut pouvoir décrire avec la même ferveur, deux ou trois visions opposées. (…) Je suis évolutionniste. Je crois aux compromis (…) et le contraire du compromis, ce n’est pas l’idéal, l’idéalisme, mais c’est le fanatisme et la mort. Amos Oz

L’intrigue de Judas cherche moins à exploiter le décor de pierres blondes et les ruelles de Jérusalem qu’à abriter un huis clos entre trois marginaux : l’ex-étudiant Shmuel Asch qu’une séparation a conduit à laisser tomber sa thèse sur l’apôtre, le vieil historien Gershom Wald, et une veuve de 45 ans, Atalia Abravanel. Entre ces trois solitaires que tout sépare et qui appartiennent à des générations différentes, des relations précaires mais fortes vont finir par se nouer. Les développements didactiques consacrés à Judas, qu’Amos Oz mêle à son histoire, doublent le roman d’un véritable essai. L’entrelacs ne prend pas toujours et sature parfois le récit. C’est l’aspect le moins convaincant du livre, malgré l’intérêt de l’hypothèse prêtée à Asch d’un Judas fidèle entre les fidèles, poussant Jésus à monter sur la croix pour faire éclater sa divinité en espérant qu’il survive à son supplice. Le dévoilement progressif du secret qui pèse sur la maisonnée est en revanche très réussi. La vérité apparaît en pleine lumière au fur et à mesure que se modifie le regard sur les objets quotidiens (canne, café, lampe à pétrole) auxquels Oz a toujours l’art de donner une âme. Nicolas Weill

Attention: une trahison peut en cacher une autre !

A l’heure où en ce Nouvel an juif …

Et à l’instar d’un Judas « déçu par la ‘passivité de Jésus’ le livrant au Sanhédrin afin de provoquer une révolution armée contre l’occupant romain » …

Nombre de juifs de la Diaspora américaine ainsi qu’une minorité active de Juifs israéliens semblent déterminés à pousser Israël au suicide territorial face à ses ennemis palestiniens et arabes …

Contrairement à un nombre croissant de chrétiens ouvertement  solidaires du projet sioniste …

Comment ne pas se désoler …

Derrière son long héritage revendiqué de Jérémie à Lincoln ou de Gaulle ou même Herzl ou Ben Gourion …

De la véritable apologie de la trahison du dernier roman de l’écrivain israélien Amos Oz …

Mais comment en même temps ne pas être conforté d’initiatives du côté israélien …

Telles que cette récente  exposition du Musée d’Israël …

Rappelant contre ces innombrables représentations du Christ à travers lesquelles nos musées avaient réussi à le déjudaïser …

La longue tradition de représentations de Jésus dans l’art juif et aujourd’hui israélien ?

Amos Oz: «Parfois, le traître est celui qui est en avance sur son temps»

L’écrivain plaide en faveur de Judas dans une fresque saisissante où il pose à Israël la question de la mémoire et du futurAndré Clavel
Le Temps30 août 2016

Raconter. Raconter, encore et encore. Des histoires, Amos Oz en a toujours inventé, depuis sa plus lointaine enfance, dans l’appartement familial rempli de livres – jusque dans la salle de bain. «Je ne peux m’empêcher d’écrire, dit le ténor des lettres israéliennes. Mes romans ne peuvent certes pas changer le monde mais ce que je souhaite, c’est qu’ils parviennent à ouvrir de nouvelles fenêtres dans le cœur de mes lecteurs.» Des fenêtres – et autant d’horizons –, il n’en manque pas dans Judas, son roman le plus audacieux et le plus ambitieux, une fresque qui comptait d’abord près de mille pages mais qu’il a peu à peu dégraissée des deux-tiers, après cinq ans de labeur.

Politique et religion

C’est dire le prix de ce récit où la théologie croise la politique, où les histoires intimes se mêlent à la grande Histoire – la naissance d’Israël, en particulier – et où le cofondateur du mouvement La Paix Maintenant jette un éclairage littéraire sur ses engagements citoyens tout en interrogeant les textes bibliques, sa lecture de chevet. «Ils contiennent des histoires magnifiques et douloureuses, sans parler de la beauté de la langue» dit le magicien Oz qui, nourri de l’Ancien Testament, s’est aussi plongé dès son adolescence dans le Nouveau Testament. Il est la source vive de son roman, au détour duquel il remet en scène le plus controversé des personnages, ce Judas qu’il réhabilite merveilleusement en tordant le cou aux vieilles – et tenaces – légendes qui font de lui le pire des renégats.

Dès les premières lignes, Amos Oz annonce la couleur: dans cette histoire, écrit-il, «on va parler de désir, d’un amour malheureux et d’une question théologique inexpliquée». Nous sommes à Jérusalem, pendant l’hiver 1959, au cœur d’une ville portant encore les stigmates de la guerre qui l’a divisée en deux, dix ans auparavant. C’est dans ces décors que se débat un jeune homme qui joue de malchance, Shmuel Asch, 25 ans, un étudiant en histoire des religions que sa fiancée vient de plaquer cruellement. Autre coup dur, la récente faillite de son père qui va le contraindre à trouver un emploi pour financer ses études, un emploi qu’il finira par dénicher grâce à une petite annonce: en échange d’un hébergement et d’un modeste salaire, un invalide de 70 ans cherche un garçon de compagnie pour lui faire la conversation cinq heures chaque soir.

Grincheux

C’est ainsi que Shmuel débarque chez le très fantasque Gershom Wald, un bavard impénitent, un vieux grincheux aussi érudit que misanthrope. Remplie de livres, située à l’ombre d’un figuier – comme dans une parabole biblique –, sa maison sera le théâtre de dialogues enflammés où s’affronteront deux générations, celle des certitudes et celle des désillusions. D’un côté, les beaux idéaux socialistes de Shmuel, qui brûle de réformer le monde. De l’autre, l’ironie cinglante de Gershom, qui vomit les idéologies. Don Quichotte contre Voltaire. «Je ne crois pas en la rédemption du monde. Il est sinistre et rempli de souffrances mais qui veut le sauver versera des torrents de sang» lance Gershom, avant d’ajouter: «Tout le monde ou presque traverse l’existence, de la naissance à la mort, les yeux fermés. Si on les ouvrait une fraction de seconde, on pousserait des hurlements effroyables sans jamais s’arrêter.»

Voir aussi:

Amos Oz: « Judas a cru en Jésus »

Simon Bentolila

7 septembre 2016

A l’occasion de la parution en France de son roman Judas (Gallimard), l’écrivain israélien Amos Oz s’est exprimé mardi 6 septembre au Musée d’art et d’histoire du Judaïsme.

A l’occasion de la parution en France de son roman Judas (Gallimard), Amos Oz a tenu une conférence ce mardi 6 septembre, au musée d’art et d’histoire du judaïsme. L’écrivain israélien, en conversation avec la journaliste du Monde Josyane Savigneau, s’est exprimé sur les nombreux thèmes qui traversent le roman déjà traduit en 15 langues. L’histoire se déroule il y a 51 ans, dans un Jérusalem dont l’auteur avoue être « nostalgique », et met en scène trois personnages principaux dans une même maison isolée : Gershom Wald, « un vieux handicapé qui a perdu la foi en tout », Attalia, « furieuse contre toute la gente masculine » dont s’amourache le jeune Shmuel Asch, qui à l’opposé de Wald veut changer le monde et s’intéresse à Jésus dans la religion juive.

Concernant le Christ, qui est l’un des sujets récurrents du roman avec Judas Iscariote, Amos Oz affirme : « Lorsque Jésus pense que tout le monde peut aimer tout le monde, peut être pensait-il à autre chose que ce que l’on a interprété. » Et va même jusqu’à affirmer que « l’amour prêché par Jésus tel qu’il est interprété, est quelque chose de tout à fait impossible ». Le contraire de la guerre, selon Oz, n’est pas l’amour mais plutôt le compromis. À ce propos, rappelle-t-il, « Shmuel, idéaliste et Wald, pessimiste, vont se changer mutuellement ».

Quant à Judas, il intéresse Amos Oz sur son trait de caractère le plus célèbre : « Qu’est-ce qu’un traitre ? Qu’est-ce qui fait qu’un traitre est considéré comme traitre ? ». Et de rappeler l’origine de son intérêt pour cette question : « Mon père s’appelait Judas. Mon fils s’appelle aussi Judas. C’est quelque chose qui m’intéresse depuis mes 16 ans. De plus, cette traitrise de Judas, on peut considérer que c’était en quelque sorte le Tchernobyl de l’antisémitisme (…) Pourquoi Judas qui avait les moyens vendrait-il son maitre, son idole, son enseignant pour quelque chose comme 600 euros actuels ? Je trouvais que ça ne cadrait absolument pas. (…) Judas a cru en Jésus même plus que Jésus ne croyait en lui-même ».

L’écrivain israélien espère que ce livre, qu’il a écrit en cinq ans, bousculera les clichés antisémites : « Le monde chrétien lorsqu’il l’a découvert a été choqué. C’est comme un électrochoc que de lire cela : le premier chrétien est mort ainsi, c’était également le dernier chrétien, et le seul chrétien. Un électrochoc dont personnellement je me réjouis. Je crois qu’il est bien mérité, peut-être également cela pourra-t-il un petit peu atténuer ce Tchernobyl de l’antisémitisme. »

Mais il précise tout de même qu’il n’a pas écrit ce livre afin d’en faire un manifeste pour l’une ou l’autre des opinions qui y sont représentées : « Personnellement je n’ai pas de préférence pour l’un ou l’autre des personnages, ou des idées de ce roman. Je vais d’ailleurs vous donner un petit truc : il faut vous mettre dans des visions très contradictoires. Je n’ai pas voulu écrire un manifeste politique ou un roman. L’écrivain doit pouvoir se mettre à la place de l’autre. Il faut pouvoir décrire avec la même ferveur, deux ou trois visions opposées. » Et de rappeler, encore, une fois, sa conviction : « Je suis évolutionniste. Je crois aux compromis (…) et le contraire du compromis, ce n’est pas l’idéal, l’idéalisme, mais c’est le fanatisme et la mort. »

Voir également:

Amos Oz : « Pourquoi Judas aurait-il trahi Jésus pour 30 deniers, soit 600 euros ? »

Ecrivain engagé, militant pour la paix, Amos Oz réhabilite la figure de Judas, dans un magnifique roman qui s’interroge sur les souffrances du peuple juif. Entretien.

Didier Jacob

28 décembre 2016

Dans la Jérusalem du début des années 60, Shmuel, un jeune étudiant, accepte, moyennant rétribution, de tenir compagnie à Gershom Wald, un vieil homme solitaire qui débat sans fin sur le sionisme et les origines de l’Etat hébreu. Dans la maison du vieil homme, une jolie femme, Atalia, pleure son mari perdu, un soldat israélien sauvagement assassiné alors qu’il effectuait une dangereuse mission.

Shmuel, qui ne tarde pas à tomber amoureux de la veuve, rédige une thèse sur «Jésus dans la tradition juive», dans laquelle il tente de réhabiliter la figure controversée de Judas. Mais Shmuel est aussi fasciné par le combat du père défunt d’Atalia, un des pionniers du sionisme qui s’opposa à Ben Gourion au moment de la création de l’Etat d’Israël, et milita pour un non-Etat à la fois arabe et juif.

En inventant de toutes pièces ce personnage idéaliste accusé par les siens de les trahir, et en racontant dans ce roman si sensuellement philosophique comment Judas fut considéré à tort comme un traître, Amos Oz, le bouillant activiste à qui certains de ses compatriotes ont si souvent reproché son engagement pour la paix, tient plus que jamais son rôle d’empêcheur de conter en rond. Entretien.

Voir encore:

Roman

Judas

Amos Oz

Jérusalem, 1959, un trio hanté par le passé. Puisant dans la théologie et l’histoire d’Israël, le romancier livre une réflexion vibrante sur la trahison.

Ils sont trois personnages, rassemblés comme à huis clos. Une intimité non exclusive, dans laquelle s’immisce l’atmosphère extérieure. A commencer par celle de la ville, en cette fin de l’année 1959 : le froid de l’air, le gris du ciel, le grand silence des rues trop calmes et trop vides. « Cet hiver, Jérusalem était paisible, comme absorbée dans ses pensées. De loin en loin, on entendait sonner les cloches des églises. Une légère brise venue de l’ouest s’engouffrait dans les cyprès, ébranlant les cimes et le coeur de Shmuel. » Shmuel est l’un des trois protagonistes de Judas. Il en est même la figure centrale, si on envisage ce grand livre d’Amos Oz comme un roman d’apprentissage — ce qu’il est, mais à quoi on ne saurait le réduire.

Shmuel a 25 ans, il est hypersensible et idéaliste, en outre « corpulent, barbu, timide, émotif, socialiste, asthmatique, cyclothymique, les épaules massives, un cou de taureau, des doigts courts et boudinés : on aurait dit qu’il leur manquait une phalange ». Plaqué par sa petite amie et sans un sou en poche, il vient de décider de planter là ses études, le mémoire qu’il a entrepris sur « Jésus dans la tradition juive », pour occuper le poste d’homme de compagnie, logé, nourri, blanchi, auprès d’un vieil intellectuel invalide. Lui, c’est Gershom Wald, un grand vieillard laid, physiquement diminué mais inlassable dissertateur, érudit, sceptique, caustique. Avec lui cohabite Atalia Abravanel, la femme qui complète le trio. Autour duquel le romancier convoque aussi, au gré des pages et de l’évolution de son intrigue, nombre de fantômes : celui d’un fils disparu, d’un époux mort, d’un père renié. Et surtout, celui de Judas Iscariote, l’apôtre qui, par un baiser, livra Jésus à ses bourreaux — l’incarnation même du traître selon la tradition chrétienne qui fit de son geste son principal argument antisémite.

Tenant fermement ce thème de la trahison comme fil conducteur à son intrigue — et s’interrogeant : chacun de nous n’est-il pas le traître d’un autre ? — Amos Oz ne craint pas de puiser à la théologie, à l’histoire des relations entre judaïsme et christianisme ou à celle du sionisme et de la fondation de l’Etat d’Israël, pour tisser l’apprentissage intellectuel, politique et sentimental de Shmuel d’éléments théoriques et de développements philosophiques ou historiques passionnants. Judas est un roman d’idées, c’est incontestable. Un roman puissant et audacieux, dans lequel, de bout en bout, la rhétorique et la confrontation des points de vue tiennent une place essentielle.

Mais c’est aussi, et tout autant, dans un même geste romanesque remarquable, une fiction poignante et roborative, portée par les pensées et les émotions de Shmuel, Wald et Atalia, habitée par le passé de chacun, hantée par leurs erreurs, leurs fidélités et leurs reniements. Personnages cernés par la perte, le deuil, les spectres, ils ne sont jamais, pour Amos Oz, de plates figures métaphoriques, mais des êtres de chair, de sang, de désirs, d’incertitudes, de chagrins, de tourments — auxquels, ultimement, Amos Oz invite Judas à se joindre. Judas qui se raconte alors à la première personne et que le romancier invite à regarder, non plus comme le Traître en majuscule, mais comme un homme aveuglé par la foi et rongé par le désespoir. Devenu un assassin par excès de vertu et de passion. Parce qu’il croyait au miracle. Judas, peut-être « le premier chrétien […]. Le dernier. Le seul ».

| Ha besora al-pi yehuda iskariot, traduit de l’hébreu par Sylvie Cohen, éd. Gallimard, 352 p., 21 €.

 Voir de plus:

Jésus dans l’art israélien une exposition surprenante

Beatrice Guarrera

Terra santa

16 mars 2017

Au musée d’Israël, jusqu’à 16 avril une exposition montre comment Jésus est représenté chez les artistes israéliens. Où l’on voit l’iconographie chrétienne symboliser parfois le peuple juif, parfois le palestinien.

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(Jérusalem) – Jésus représenté par les artistes israéliens (juifs ou arabes): il a le visage d’un juif emmené dans un camp de concentration, il est sur la croix comme un bédouin auquel on a confisqué ses terres, il a le regard d’un enfant palestinien qui va mourir. L’exposition qui se tient jusqu’au 16 avril au Musée d’Israël à Jérusalem, intitulée « Voici l’homme: Jésus dans l’art israélien » (Behold the Man: Jesus in Israeli Art), a de quoi surprendre.

L’image de Jésus sur la croix représente depuis longtemps la plus grande souffrance de l’humanité. Celle d’un homme mort injustement dans d’affreux tourments, homme fils du Créateur, condamné par  ses propres créatures. La gravité de cet événement, qui bouleverse depuis plus de deux mille ans, est arrivée avec le temps à symboliser aussi autre chose, au point d’être utilisée par des artistes israéliens pour représenter la douleur avec la plus grande force d’expression possible. Des artistes juifs l’utilisent depuis le XIXe siècle jusqu’à aujourd’hui des Israéliens : certaines de leurs œuvres ont été choisies et rassemblées par le conservateur de l’exposition Amitai Mendelsohn. Parmi les auteurs, Maurycy Gottlieb, Marc Chagall, E.M. Lilien, Reuven Rubin, Igael Tumarkin, Moshe Gershuni, Motti Mizrachi, Menashe Kadishman, Michal Na’aman, Adi Nes et Sigalit Landau.

Marc Chagall avec sa célèbre « Crucifixion en jaune » a été l’un des premiers à transformer la crucifixion de Jésus en symbole de la souffrance du peuple juif. Pendant longtemps, les juifs ont considéré la représentation de la croix presque comme un tabou, alors qu’ils avaient été tenus pour être le « peuple déicide ». Au XIXe siècle, la situation a changé. Les illustrations de Ephraim Moses Lilian (Autrichien, 1874-1925)  utilisent très souvent la couronne d’épines, des croix et des images associées à la figure de Marie. Elles veulent symboliser aussi bien la souffrance juive de la diaspora que le rôle du sionisme, qui a conduit à la résurrection de la Terre d’Israël. Le mal de l’holocauste est rappelé dans la série « 6.000.001 » de Moshe Hoffman (Israélien, 1938-1983). Jésus sur la croix, qui ressemble à un juif, est attrapé par le bras par un soldat allemand. Dans d’autres œuvres, les artistes utilisent encore le symbole de la croix: des juifs en ligne face aux camps de concentration forment une croix, ou ces planches de bois cassées à l’intérieur de la clôture d’un camp de concentration.

Reuven Rublin représente lui-aussi Jésus: le sionisme aurait la mission de ramener aux juifs à la vie, tout comme Jésus est ressuscité pour donner la vie à l’humanité. Au contraire, la peinture de Naftali Bezem (Israélien né en Allemgane en 1924) donne un autre sens aux symboles chrétiens. Dans « Courtyard of the Third Temple » (cours du Troisième Temple) Bezem fait référence au massacre de Kafr Kassem en 1956, qui a causé la mort d’environ cinquante Palestiniens. Pour la première fois la figure de Jésus est reprise pour peindre une victime palestinienne.
Igael Tumarkin (israélien né en Allemagne en 1933) associe à la crucifixion la souffrance des bédouins, auxquels les terres ont été confisquées, et il réalise ainsi son œuvre en assemblant des lambeaux de vêtements sur une croix en bois. Une femme palestinienne avec un enfant dans les bras est le sujet de la photographie prise dans une prison par Micha Kirshner (Né en Italie en 1947). La référence à la Vierge Marie est claire: la femme souffre, comme Marie, et le destin de l’enfant sera celui de la mort, comme Jésus.

Un dernier repas avec les apôtres en tenue militaire est l’une des dernières œuvres de l’exposition: les soldats israéliens, émissaires d’un pouvoir plus puissant qu’eux, sont les victimes qui pourraient être trahies, tout comme Jésus.
Cette intéressante exposition du Musée d’Israël montre comment l’iconographie chrétienne est toujours d’actualité, capable de décrire les conflits de notre époque. Du point de vue des artistes, la question n’est pas celle de la foi mais de la force du symbole qui ont un caractère universel et de Jésus dont le charisme les fascine.

Jusqu’au 16 avril au musée d’Israël à Jérusalem.

Voir par ailleurs:

Betrayal in Jerusalem

Avishai Margalit

March 9, 2017

Judas

by Amos Oz, translated from the Hebrew by Nicholas de Lange

Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 305 pp., $25.00

On a wintry day in Jerusalem in late 1959, Shmuel Ash spots an enigmatic job posting on a university campus board:

Offered to a single humanities student with conversational skills and an interest in history, free accommodation and a modest monthly sum in return for spending five hours per evening with a seventy-year-old invalid, an educated, widely cultured man. He is able to take care of himself and seeks company, not assistance.

Ash, whose parents, we are told, “had lost their entire life savings in an instant, whose own research had stalled, who had dropped out of university, and whose girlfriend had suddenly married her former boyfriend,” decides to accept the position.

Ash moves to a house that is inhabited by two people, Atalia Abravanel, forty-five, and Gershom Wald, her seventy-year-old invalid father-in-law. They are haunted by the memories of two others who have a presence in the house: Shealtiel Abravanel, Atalia’s dead father, and Micha, Atalia’s late husband and Wald’s son. As we learn later, Micha was killed in the 1948 war and his corpse savagely desecrated.

The 1948 war between Jews and Arabs in Palestine is called the War of Independence by Jews and Al Naqba, or the Catastrophe, by Palestinian Arabs. What is striking in Judas, Amos Oz’s captivating new novel, is that the Jewish Abravanels, both father and daughter, view the 1948 war as an unmitigated catastrophe. This is so in their own lives through the loss of Micha, and for Jews nationally by heaping misery on Jews and Arabs alike.

Oz’s story zooms in on the trio of the living, which has expanded to include Ash, then zooms out onto a quintet that includes the two living-dead with their tight hold on the living. Much of the book consists of conversations between Ash, Wald, and Atalia about religion, Zionism, and the legacy of the war, as well as increasingly intimate exchanges about their private lives.

Shmuel Ash is twenty-five years old. As Lord Byron once asked: “Is there anything in the future that can possibly console us for not being always twenty-five?” In the case of the stocky and bearded Ash, the answer is Atalia—the lady of the house. Ash, “shy, emotional, socialist, asthmatic,” falls deeply in love with her.

Ash is based on the nineteenth-century Russian literary archetype of the “superfluous man”: well-read, intelligent, idealistic, with copious goodwill, and yet utterly ineffectual. Ash can interpret the world but can barely change his own underwear. Like Goncharov’s Oblomov, he stays in bed until midday, a grown baby who dusts his beard with scented talc powder.

Ash is the novel’s link between the story that takes place in 1959 and the one about Jesus and Judas that took place in the first century. His academic research, which he had recently given up, was dedicated to the way in which Jews viewed Jesus. When he tries to explain his interest in the subject, he mumbles: “The figure of Jesus of Nazareth…and Judas Iscariot…and the spiritual world of the Chief Priests and Pharisees who rejected Jesus.”

In Mikhail Bulgakov’s masterpiece The Master and Margarita, written in the 1930s, Jesus and Judas’s Jerusalem is woven onto Stalinist Moscow of the 1930s by the Master, who is writing a biography of Pontius Pilate. Oz uses a similar device: Shmuel Ash’s historical research transplants Jesus and Judas onto the divided city of Jerusalem of the late 1950s.

Oz has a formidable rhetorical talent that doesn’t always work in his favor. He is in danger of giving the impression that his novels are an excuse for delivering eloquent speeches about big ideas. Luckily, his novel is not just about abstractions. For one thing, the contentious life of Jerusalem—divided between Israel and Jordan—has a major part in the novel, and to great effect.

By describing Ash and Atalia’s long walks through its narrow alleyways, Oz brings a wintry wind into his powerful depiction of the city in December. For him, Jerusalem between winds is a place graced with moments of transcendence:

There was no rain, just a few gray tatters of clouds crossing the sky on their way from the sea to the desert. The morning light that touched the stone walls of Jerusalem was reflected back soft and sweet, honeyed light, the light that caresses Jerusalem on clear winter days between one rainstorm and the next.

Oz captures the way the harsh, blinding glare of Jerusalem summers is replaced in winter by a soft glow reflected in the washed building stones. (I have to confess that I am, perhaps, too susceptible to Oz’s evocation of Jerusalem. He and I attended kindergarten together and were raised in the same Jerusalem neighborhood, a place movingly, almost eerily evoked in Oz’s autobiographical novel A Tale of Love and Darkness.)

Oz is very particular about naming his leading characters: the name Ash is already a giveaway. Oz maintains without conviction that Shmuel, to the best of his knowledge, has no relation to the “well-known writer” Scholem Asch, who scandalized the Jewish world with his sympathetic trilogy written in the years of World War II on themes having to do with the life of Jesus. The conventional wisdom among Jews at the time was that there was a direct line between Christian anti-Semitism and the Nazi anti-Semitism calling for the elimination of the Jews. Scholem Asch’s trilogy, which depicted Jesus in a favorable light, was taken as a betrayal by many Jews.

Atalia is another telling name. The biblical Atalia of the ninth century BC is the only woman who became a ruling sovereign in Judea. In Athalie, Racine’s 1691 play, she is the epitome of a fiercely independent woman, as is Oz’s Atalia, the commanding lady of the haunted house who bears herself regally. Meanwhile, Abravanel strongly suggests the name of the descendants of the leading Jewish families who were expelled from Spain in 1492.

“Abravanel? Such an aristocratic name,” says Ash to Atalia, before adding, “If I remember rightly he was the only one to oppose the creation of the state? Or else he was only opposed to Ben-Gurion’s approach?”

Much like the symbolic names and the dual plotlines, Oz’s book is a novel of ideas, of the kind that Vladimir Nabokov hated. Then again, Oz is in good company, for Nabokov also hated Dostoevsky and Mann for this very reason. The book turns on three ideas deriving from three people: Ben-Gurion, Judas, and Jesus. “Ben-Gurion” is shorthand for the justification—or the lack thereof—of founding the State of Israel. “Judas” stands for the idea of betrayal, or rather the ambiguity of betrayal. And “Jesus” suggests Judaism’s refusal to deal seriously with the challenge of Christianity.

Ben-Gurion, the founder of the State of Israel, shaped its strategy and its major institutions like no one else. Oz, instead of dealing with Israel as it is now, goes back to its foundation, arguing back and forth with its forefather. Oz recognizes Ben-Gurion’s ability to get under one’s skin, whether as a friend or foe. After all, Ben-Gurion quite evidently got under Oz’s skin. Here is the admirer Wald:

There’s no one like Ben-Gurion…. The Jewish people has never before had such a far-sighted leader as Ben-Gurion. Few understand as he does that “the people shall dwell alone, and shall not be reckoned among the nations” is a curse and not a blessing.

And here is Ben-Gurion’s opponent Ash:

Ben-Gurion may have been in his youth a workers’ leader, a sort of tribune of the plebs, if you like, but today he heads a self-righteous, chauvinistic state and he never stops spouting hollow biblical phrases about renewing our days as of old and realizing the vision of the prophets.

Wald, the bereaved father who suffered from Ben-Gurion’s war, remains an admirer of Ben-Gurion. Ash, who belongs to a pathetic group of six dedicated to renewing socialism, is an opponent of Ben-Gurion from the left. Ash and Wald’s reactions to Ben-Gurion are not new. The interesting opposition to Ben-Gurion in the novel comes from an unexpected source: the late Shealtiel Abravanel, Atalia’s father, who

tried in vain to persuade Ben-Gurion in ’48 that it was still possible to reach an agreement with the Arabs about departure of the British and the creation of a single joint condominium of Jews and Arabs, if we only agreed to renounce the idea of a Jewish state.

Abravanel is a thoroughly Mediterranean aristocrat, much at ease with his educated Arab friends and other educated people in the Levant, and rather estranged from his fellow Jews. He speaks Hebrew, Arabic, Turkish, French, English, and Ladino but, tellingly, not Yiddish, the language of Eastern European Jews. His opposition to Ben-Gurion cuts deep—he is hostile to the notion of the nation-state. In discussing Abravanel’s ideas with Atalia, Ash asks her: “Don’t you believe that in 1948 we fought because we had no alternative? That we had our backs to the wall?” “No,” she replies categorically. “You didn’t have your backs to the wall. You were the wall.”

Is this internal Zionist talk in the middle of a work of art, to borrow Stendhal’s simile, “like a gun shot in the middle of a concert, something vulgar, and however, something which is impossible to ignore”? I don’t think so. The ideological talk here is like the cannon shots in Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture: an integral part of the music, not an outside noise. By creating Abravanel, Oz has succeeded in establishing a credible upholder of views strongly held against the mainstream Zionism of Ben-Gurion. But Abravanel amounts to much more than an ideological opponent of Ben-Gurion. The question is whether his views amount to a betrayal. And here is where the comparison to Judas, the arch betrayer of history, naturally comes to mind.

There are many manifestations of betrayal in the novel. Shmuel Ash feels that he betrayed his mother and father by fantasizing about replacing them with a better class of parents. Indeed, he “always blamed himself for his disloyalty,” as if he were an enemy agent in the family, whereas his parents and sister felt that he betrayed them by betraying his calling as a religious leader to become a scholar. Betraying one’s parents is, in the writings of Oz, a big deal. Yet Ash’s betrayal of his parents doesn’t seem at all comparable with the evocation of Judas; Abravanel’s betrayal of Ben-Gurion—if it is in fact a betrayal—would. For Oz, notwithstanding this discrepancy, both betrayers seem to be in need, at the very least, of rehabilitation.

Indeed, Ash offers a radical reevaluation of Judas, who, he claims, “was the most loyal and devoted” of all of Jesus’s disciples. Ash believes that Judas “never betrayed him, but, on the contrary, he meant to prove his greatness to the whole world.” The Gnostic Gospel of Judas of the late second century already describes Judas as the only disciple to understand the true message of Jesus, while the other disciples are portrayed as lacking understanding. Moreover, in Ash’s view, the role of Judas in the redemptive scheme of humanity is to hand over Jesus to the Romans not as an act of betrayal, but as an expression of ultimate devotion.

During the Romantic movement, the theme of Judas as the true loyalist permeated literature. Even devout Catholic writers like François Mauriac and Paul Claudel contributed, if not to Judas’s radical reevaluation (from worst to best), then at least to Judas’s rehabilitation (“not so bad”).

Ash takes this idea even further: “Judas Iscariot was the founder of the Christian religion.” It would be wrong to take Ash’s half-baked ideas about Judas as the author’s own—Ash, we are told, wrote these words in his notebook “in a state of great excitement”—but bringing Judas into the novel is a way for Oz to deal with the ambiguity of betrayal, namely its susceptibility to reevaluation (or rehabilitation) from one generation to another. It is in the notion of betrayal, and not in Judas himself, that I suspect Oz is interested.

While Ash is an academic researcher, he is also an amateur private eye searching for Abravanel’s record. His investigation leads him to the State Archives in Jerusalem, where he meets a dour archivist, a certain Mr. Sheindelevich: “What is that you wish to know, precisely?” Mr. Sheindelevich asks. “After all,” he adds, “they all wanted as one man to set up a state, and they all knew as one man that we would have to defend ourselves by force.”

“Even Shealtil Abravanel?” Ash asks. The archivist tells him dryly: “He was a traitor.”

Ash reevaluates Judas, whereas Oz, to my mind, only rehabilitates Abravanel. He doesn’t side with Abravanel’s opposition to the idea of a nation-state in general, or to the idea of Israel in particular. What he does is to give Abravanel’s position legitimacy from a Zionist perspective.

A current exhibition at the Israel Museum in Jerusalem is dedicated to the image of Jesus in Jewish plastic arts. In it, there is an imposing sculpture by Mark Antokolsky, a famous Jewish sculptor in tsarist Russia of the second half of the nineteenth century, titled Christ Before the People. The portrayal of Jesus in the sculpture is unique in not seeing Jesus from a critical Jewish perspective. Indeed, there is nothing wrong historically or conceptually with the idea that Jesus was, and remained, a Jew.^* Jesus the Galilean Jew, the faith healer, was not a problem for most Jews. It is with Jesus Christ that the hostility begins.

No doubt, medieval Judaism produced nasty accounts of Jesus. As Wald puts it: “All these foul texts were written by narrow-minded little Jews because they were afraid of the attractive power of Christianity.” The standard account for the hostility of the Jewish attitude is suggested in the novel by Ash himself: “The Jews who wrote this polemic were certainly writing under the influence of their oppression and persecution by the Christians.” But Wald will have none of such explanations. “Surely if you want to challenge Jesus the Christian,” he says, “you have to elevate yourself, not descend into the gutter.”

Wald views the challenge of Christianity to Judaism in its possibility and promise of universal love. Wald, the bereaved father, does not believe in universal love: “Surely anyone who loves everybody does not really love anybody.” In my view, he speaks for Oz, for whom the main divide between Christianity and Judaism is the idea of universal love. Many Jews refuse to believe in the human possibility of such love.

Jesus is the Lamb of God, the sacrificial lamb of Passover for the sake of humanity at large. In the days leading to Passover in 1948, Micha, Wald’s son and Atalia’s husband, was a promising mathematical logician, aged thirty-seven. Because of his relatively old age and a severe kidney failure, he was exempted from taking active part in the war. But he volunteered and was killed in battle, sacrificing his life for the sake of the Jews in besieged Jerusalem.

Jewish martyrology was developed in competition with Christian martyrology. It therefore doesn’t include Jesus. The emblem of Jewish martyrology is Abraham’s willingness to sacrifice his beloved son Isaac on Mount Moriah. Willingness to sacrifice oneself may seem relatively easy compared to a willingness to sacrifice one’s beloved child. Gershom Wald, in recounting the death of his only child, refers to Abraham: “He grew up with me without a mother. He was only six when his mother died. I brought him up on my own. I took him myself and led him to Mount Moriah.” Wald rehearses the Israeli mantra that the death of those who were killed in the fighting of 1948 was not in vain. But then he starts to hear an inner voice: “I seemed to hear Shealtiel Abravanel asking me silently if I still believed that it was all worthwhile.”

Was it worth it? This hovering question can be seen as the bleeding scar of the novel. It doesn’t abate or get better with time. This horrific question is posed on all levels: personal—the death of Micha—and collective—the mutually inflicted pain by Jews and Arabs.

Shmuel Ash’s initiation rite in the haunted house takes three months. Eventually he is liberated from that gnostic maze by Atalia, who brings him his traveling bag one morning and insists for his own sake that he leave. (“If you stay with us any longer you’ll turn into a fossil,” she says.) His redemption means that he is ready to begin a new life, probably in one of the development towns in Israel’s south. There, he watches as a beautiful woman hangs a wet blouse. She is the opposite of Atalia, the unattainable widow, and suggests the possibility of a new beginning.

At the end of the novel, so beautifully translated by Nicholas de Lange, Ash wonders: Where to? What next? But we are left instead with that silent question of Abravanel’s—perhaps of the novel’s: Was it worth it?

Voir aussi:

“Judas” by Amos Oz: Curiosity, Desire, Betrayal, Loyalty…

Tulika B

On arts and aesthetics

June 3, 2017

Judas (2014) by Amos Oz translated by Nicholas de Lange (2016, Houghton Mifflin)

The shortlist for the 2017 Man Booker International Prize (@ManBookerPrize) was announced in April with the following six novels making it to the top: Compass by Mathias Enard (France), A Horse Walks Into a Bar by David Grossman (Israel), The Unseen by Roy Jacobsen (Norway), Mirror, Shoulder, Signal by Dorthe Nors (Denmark), Fever Dream by Samantha Schweblin (Argentina) and Judas by Amos Oz (Israel). The winner will be announced on June 14, 2017.

I have already written about Mirror, Shoulder, Signal and also The Traitor’s Niche by Albanian author Ismail Kadare that had made it to the longlist.

I recently finished Judas by Amos Oz (born 1939) – professor of literature at Ben-Gurion University in Beersheba and Israel’s most famous living author. Some of his other notable books are A Tale of Love and Darkness,  Scenes from Village Life, Between Friends and My Michael. Judas has been translated into English by Nicholas de Lange, a professor of Hebrew and Jewish Studies at the University of Cambridge.

When I first saw the title and the cover of the book (top left version) and learnt about the reputation of the writer, I hesitated to read the work, thinking it might be too “elite”. It is indeed loaded with very big and important ideas going in all sorts of directions but what makes Judas accessible, ultimately, to one and all is its simple underlying “coming-of-age” template.

The book burgeons with (often quite provocative) perspectives – on the formation and identity of Israel, the Jewish views of Jesus, the Christian views of Judas, love and hate, power and nation states, the nature of allegiance and treason, etc. Since I haven’t written much on Judaism and the Jewish experience in history (just posts on a novel called For Two Thousands Years by Romanian writer Mihail Sebastian and metal sculptures of the body by Tel Aviv-based Ofer Rubin), I thought of picking this one up.

The period is 1959-60. The place is Jerusalem – a still-divided city (a battle in 1948 had made the Israelis capture the West and the Jordanians capture the East). Shmuel Ash is a twenty-five-old idealistic (and, at times, crazily emotional) student of history and religion who has been forced to abandon his MA thesis (on the “Jewish Views of Jesus”) – and with that the dreams of a future academic career. His father’s finances have collapsed, his allowance has been cut. His girlfriend Yardena has ditched him and married her former boyfriend – Nesher Sharshevsky, a hard-working hydrologist (specialist in “rainwater collection”). Adrift, without resources, Shmuel must urgently look for work.

Shmuel discovers a note on the campus noticeboard for a paid position. A companion is needed for an old man called Gershom Wald; he wants to be read to, argued with. The young student responds and is led to a strange house, where, along with the old man, he finds a woman in her 40s – Atalia Abravanel, Wald’s daughter-in-law – mysterious, attractive, haunted by ghosts from the past. Shmuel is taken by both the figures. Drawn to the former’s intellectual vigour and the latter’s sexual appeal.

As these three characters interact over the winter – against the hum of the domestic rituals of cooking and cleaning  – they open themselves up and find themselves changed. Sweeping concepts in religion, history, politics are debated and discussed. Texts on the Jewish reception of Jesus are mixed with paragraphs on the Christian perception of Judas. According to the received wisdom of the popular mind, Judas – the ugly, greedy traitor – is synonymous with “the Jew” itself. All anti-Semitism in Western Civilisation, it is indicated in the novel…pogroms, the Inquisition, blood libels, the Holocaust…emerged from this reprehensible image in the New Testament. Gershom Wald points out: “And so that is indeed what the Jews possess in the deepest recesses of the Jew-hater’s imagination. We are all Judas.”

And yet, the role of Judas is also seen from a sympathetic perspective. For Shmuel Ash, Judas has an important role in the saga of salvation. By abandoning Jesus, selling him off, he actually gives him an opportunity to realise and display his greatness. [Such positive reassessments have been around for a long time. Saint Vincent Ferrer, a Dominican preacher (1350–1419) is believed to have asserted that Judas was on God’s side. A Biblical scholar named William Klassen wrote a book called Judas: Betrayer or Friend of Jesus? in 2004.]

There are other traitors in and around the story. Atalia’s father Sheatiel Abravanel is called a traitor for passionately believing in the brotherhood between Arabs and Jews, for having opposed Ben-Gurion’s radical nationalistic approach to the founding of modern Israel. Outside this piece of fiction, the author himself has been referred to as a traitor by his countrymen – for proposing a two-state solution to the Israeli–Palestinian conflict. He has acknowledged this designation as a badge of honour.

The intense intellectual (and sexual) drama of Judas concludes in tender, touching moments. And although several tough issues remain (understandably) unresolved, one powerful observation is etched in the reader’s mind: “Every so often in history, courageous people have appeared who were ahead of their time and were called traitors or eccentrics.” Why, Abraham Lincoln, the liberator of the slaves, was called a traitor by his opponents, the German officers who tried to assassinate Hitler were executed as traitors…

Read Judas – a multi-layered, multi-faceted narrative that superbly articulates the ambiguities and complexities of human life and culture – if you want to entertain yourself with an old-fashioned novel of ideas (particularly if you appreciate the traditions of Dostoevsky and Thomas Mann).

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Part of a conversation between Shmuel Ash and Gershom Wald:

SA: All the power in the world. Take the combined power of the Soviet Union and the United States and France and Britain. What can you not achieve with such power, by any manner or means?

GW: I think that with such power you could conquer whatever you felt like. From sea to sea.

SA: That’s what you think. That’s what the Jews in Israel think because they have no notion of the limits of power. The fact is that all the power in the world cannot transform someone who hates you into someone who likes you. It can turn a foe into a slave, but not into a friend. All the power in the world cannot transform a fanatic into an enlightened man. All the power in the world cannot transform someone thirsting for vengeance into a lover. And yet these are precisely the real existential challenges facing the State of Israel: how to turn a hater into a lover, a fanatic into a moderate, an avenger into a friend.

“And yet these are precisely the real existential challenges facing the State of Israel: how to turn a hater into a lover, a fanatic into a moderate, an avenger into a friend.” (Photo: The Israeli Air Force crosses all of Israel from north to south, in honor of the country’s 63rd Independence Day by User “Israel Defense Forces”, CC BY 2.0, Wikimedia Commons)

Am I saying that we do not need military might? Heaven forbid! Such a foolish thought would never enter my head. I know as well as you that it is power, military power, that stands, at any given moment, even at this very moment while you and I are arguing here, between us and extinction. Power has the power to prevent our annihilation for the time being. On condition that we always remember, at every moment, that in a situation like ours power can only prevent. It can’t settle anything and it can’t solve anything. It can only stave off disaster for a while.

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Two videos:

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Voir aussi:

Jewish art challenges the taboo of Jesus

Israeli artist Adi Nes’s depiction of Leonardo da Vinci’s “Last Supper” substitutes Jesus’s apostles with Israeli soldiers. (Elie Posner/The Israel Museum)

By Ruth Eglash January 5

JERUSALEM — At the center of the Israel Museum’s newest art exhibit stands an imposing, life-size marble figure of Jesus. The sculpture, titled “Christ Before the People’s Court,” would not be out of place in a church in Rome.Yet in this depiction, the Christian savior wears a Jewish skullcap.The sculpture, created by Russian Jewish artist Mark Antokolsky in 1876, is part of a collection of more than 150 artworks by 40 Jewish and Israeli artists who have used Christian imagery to challenge long-held taboos in both communities. It showcases the evolving attitudes of Jewish, Zionist and Israeli artists toward a figure whose place in Jewish history has been negotiated and reinterpreted over more than two millennia.It is a risky statement for an Israeli museum.Throughout history, Jews have traditionally shunned Jesus and his gospel. And while the Holy Land might be his accepted birthplace, for Jews in the modern state of Israel there is often resistance to learning about or even acknowledging Christianity.

  Marc Chagall’s “Yellow Crucifixion” shows the suffering of Jewish Holocaust victims through the image of Jesus Christ as a Jew. (Avshalom Avital/The Israel Museum)

This stems mainly from a fear of centuries-old anti-Semitism, especially in Europe, where the crucifixion of Jesus was used as an excuse to persecute Jews.

“We are talking about a 2,000-year-old tension between Judaism and Christianity and the fact that anti-Semitism grew in Christian thought and theology,” said the exhibition’s curator, Amitai Mendelsohn.

Mendelsohn said he was surprised at just how many Jewish artists throughout history, and today in Israel, have used Jesus and Christian themes as inspirations for their work.

It is a delicate subject for Jews everywhere, including in Israel, but artists by nature “are attracted to something that is forbidden for them,” he said.

Ziva Amishai-Maisels, a professor emeritus at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem who specializes in Christian imagery in Jewish art, said that religious Jews, who might be opposed to such depictions, would probably stay away from the exhibition. “Those who do go might be stunned,” she said, “but I don’t think they will react badly.”

Some of the works, though, could offend pious Christians, she said. “They might feel the images are sacrilegious, but the wall texts are explanatory enough — if they read them, it should calm them down.”

While some of the older works by European Jews challenge Christian anti-Semitism or look at how Jesus’ Jewish roots could act as a bridge between the two religions, more-contemporary pieces explore Jesus as an anti-establishment figure who suffered at not being understood.

Ronit Steinberg, an art historian from Jerusalem’s Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design, said the appeal for Jewish artists in depicting Jesus has changed over the years, but all are tied together by a common thread.

“In the 19th century, the main issue was the Jewish artist feeling emancipated, and it was important for those artists to connect with their surrounding and the time. For Israeli artists, it’s also a kind of emancipation from the heavy Jewishness of their country,” she said.

There’s the “Yellow Crucifixion,” a 1943 Marc Chagall painting showing Jesus as a Jew. Hued in yellow, perhaps representing the star the Nazis forced Jews to wear, Jesus is strung from a cross wrapped in a Jewish prayer shawl and phylacteries.

Another artist, Moshe Hoffman, a Hungarian Jew who survived the Holocaust, used his art to question Christianity’s role in the genocide. In one work, “Six million and 1,” Hoffman shows a Nazi guard attempting to pull Jesus from the cross to make him Jewish prisoner number 6,000,001.

Others used Jesus as a Jew to connect their Jewish identity to Christian surroundings. While Antokolsky was the first Russian Jewish artist to be accepted by his peers, he suffered an identity crisis from being Jewish and Russian.

As the exhibit, which is arranged chronologically, arrives at works from the past few decades, a theme develops in which Jewish Israelis use Christian iconography to question their political and national identity.

One such work is by Igael Tumarkin. His monogram is the metal frame of a standard-issue Israeli army cot twisted to form a cross. Flanked by material that appears to be a shredded Israeli flag, the piece was created in 1984 and was a protest against the war Israel was fighting in Lebanon at the time. The title, “Mita Meshuna,” means both “strange bed” and “strange death” in Hebrew.

Perhaps the best-known contemporary artwork on display is Adi Nes’s depiction of Leonardo da Vinci’s “Last Supper,” which substitutes Israeli soldiers for the apostles.

Nes’s photograph sold at Sotheby’s for $250,000, the highest an Israeli photograph has ever fetched. And the image has become a cultural icon for Israelis, suggesting perhaps that Christian themes are becoming more acceptable in Jewish culture.

Voir enfin:

Column One: Israel and the American Jewish crisis

 The key to strengthening and supporting the community is to bypass its failed leadership and speak and interact directly with American Jews.

Caroline B. Glick

The Jerusalem Post

September 19, 2017

As the New Year 5778 begins, 88% of Israeli Jews say that they are happy and satisfied with their lives. This makes sense. Israel’s relative security, its prosperity, freedom and spiritual blossoming make Israeli Jews the most successful Jewish community in 3,500 years of Jewish history.

The same cannot be said for the Jews of the Diaspora. In Western Europe, Jewish communities that just a generation ago were considered safe and prosperous are now besieged. Synagogues and Jewish schools look like army barracks. And the severe security cordons Jews need to pass through to pray and study are entirely justified. For where they are absent, as they were at the Hyper Cacher Jewish supermarket in Paris in 2015, assailants strike.

Western European Jewry’s crisis is exogenous to the Jewish communities. It isn’t the Jews who caused the crisis, which may in time cause the wholesale exodus of the Jews from Europe. The crisis is a function of growing levels of popular antisemitism spurred by mass immigration from the Islamic world and the resurgence of indigenous European Jew-hatred, particularly on the far Left.

The same cannot be said of the American Jewish community, which at the dawn of 5778 also finds itself steeped in an ever deepening crisis. And while antisemitism is a growing problem in America, particularly on university campuses, unlike their European counterparts, American Jews could mount and win a battle against the growing anti-Jewish forces. But in large part, they have chosen not to. And they have chosen not to fight the antisemites because they are in the midst of a self-induced identity crisis.

First, there is the problem of demographic collapse.

According to the Pew Research Center’s 2013 study of American Jewry, nearly 60% of American Jews intermarry. Based on the Pew data, the Jewish People Policy Institute published a report in June that noted that not only are 60% of American Jews who get married marrying non-Jews, only half of American Jews are getting married at all. And among those who are getting married, less than a third are raising their children as Jewish in some way.

Earlier this month, a study of American Jews was published by the Public Religion Research Institute. It found that not only hasn’t the situation improved since the Pew survey was published, the trend toward assimilation and loss of Jewish identity among American Jews has accelerated.

In 2013, 32% of American Jews under 30 said that they were not Jews by religion. Today the proportion of Jews under 30 who say they have no relation to the Jewish faith has ballooned to 47%.

Not surprisingly, the wholesale abandonment of Jewish faith by nearly half of young American Jews has taken a toll on the two liberal streams of American Judaism. According to the study, the percentage of American Jews who identify as Reform or Conservative Jews is in free fall.

Whereas in 2013, 35% of American Jews identified as Reform, today, a mere four years later, only 28% identify as Reform. The situation among Conservatives is even worse. In 2013, 18% of American Jews identified as Conservatives. Today, only 14% do. Among Jews under 30 the situation is even starker. Only 20% of American Jews under 30 identify as Reform. Only 8% identify as Conservative.

To be sure, the trend toward secularism and assimilation among US Jewry is not new. And over the years, Reform and Conservative leaders have adopted varying strategies to deal with it.

In 1999 the Reform movement tried to deal with the problem by strengthening the movement’s religious practices. Although the effort failed, the impulse that drove the strategy was rational. American Jews who seek spiritual and religious meaning likely want more than a sermon about tikkun olam.

The problem is that they also want more than a rabbi donning a kippa and a synagogue choosing to keep kosher.

This is why, as the number of Reform and Conservative Jews is contracting, the number of American Jews who associate with the Orthodox movement is growing. Between 2013 and 2017, the proportion of young American Jews who identify as Orthodox grew from 10% to 15%.

Moreover, more and more American Jews are finding their spiritual home with Chabad. Today there are more Chabad houses in the US than Reform synagogues.

Unable to compete for Jews seeking religious fulfillment, the Reform and Conservative movements have struck out for new means of rallying their bases and attracting members. Over the past year, two new strategies are dominating the public actions of both movements.

First, there is a selective fight against antisemitism. While antisemitism is experiencing a growth spurt in the US progressive movement, and antisemitism is becoming increasingly overt in US Muslim communities, neither the Reform nor Conservative movements has taken significant institutional steps to fight them.

Instead, both movements, and a large swath of the Jewish institutional world, led in large part by Reform and Conservative Jews, have either turned a blind eye to this antisemitism or supported it.

Take for instance the case of Davis, California, imam Amman Shahin.

On July 21 Shahin gave a sermon calling for the Jewish people to be annihilated. His Jewish neighbors in the progressive Jewish communities of Davis and Sacramento didn’t call the police and demand that he be investigated for terrorist ties. They didn’t demand that his mosque fire him.

Instead, led by the Oakland Jewish Federation, local rabbi Seth Castleman and the JCRC, they embraced Shahin. They appeared with him at a public “apology” ceremony, where he failed to apologize for calling for his Jewish colleagues, and every other Jew, to be murdered.

All Shahin did was express regret that his call for genocide caused offense.

On the other hand, the same leaders stand as one against allegations of antisemitic violence stemming from the political Right. In the face of an utter lack of evidence, when Jewish institutions were subjected to a rash of bomb threats last winter, Reform and Conservative leaders led the charge insisting that far-right antisemites were behind them and insinuated that the perpetrators supported President Donald Trump. When it worked out that all of the threats were carried out by a mentally ill Israeli Jew, they never issued an apology.

So, too, the Reform and Conservative movements, like the rest of the American Jewish community, treated the Charlottesville riot last month like a new Reichstag fire. They entirely ignored the violence of the far-left, antisemitic Antifa protesters and behaved as though tomorrow neo-Nazis would take control of the federal government. They jumped on the bandwagon insisting that Trump’s initial condemnation of both groups was proof that he has a soft spot for neo-Nazis.

The problem with the strategy of selective outrage over antisemitism is that it isn’t at all clear who the target audience is. Survey data shows that the more active Jews are in the synagogue, the less politically radical they are and the more devoted to Jewish causes they are. So it is hard to see how turning a blind eye to leftist and Muslim antisemitism will rally their current membership more than they already have been rallied. Moreover, the more radicalized Jews become politically, the more outlets they have for their political activism both as Jews and as leftists. No matter how anti-Trump Conservative and Reform leaders become, they can never rival the progressive forces in the Democratic Party.

Prospects for success of the second strategy are arguably even lower. The second strategy involves cultivating animosity toward Israel over the issue of egalitarian prayer at the Kotel.

Last June, the government overturned an earlier decision to build a passageway connecting the Western Wall Plaza with Robinson’s Arch, along the Southern Wall, where egalitarian prayer services are held. The government also rescinded a previous decision to have representatives of the Conservative and Reform movements receive membership in the committee that manages the Western Wall Plaza.

The government’s first decision was non-political. The Antiquities Authority nixed the construction of the passage due to the adverse impact construction would have on the antiquities below the surface.

As to the second decision, it is far from a matter of life and death. The committee has no power to influence egalitarian prayers for better or for worse.

And yet, rather than acknowledge that the decision was a setback but it didn’t harm the status of egalitarian prayer at the Wall, the Reform and Conservative movements declared war against the government and dragged much of the organized Jewish establishment behind them.

The Reform leadership canceled a scheduled meeting with Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, and the Jewish Agency Board followed suit.

Six hundred Conservative rabbis signed a letter to Netanyahu accusing him of betraying Diaspora Jewry and announcing they would be forced to reconsider their support for Israel.

Ambassador David Friedman, who had just taken residence in Israel a month before the explosion, used his first public remarks as ambassador to call his fellow American Jews to order.

Friedman said, “Yesterday, I heard something that I thought I’d never hear before. And I understand the source of the frustration and the source of the anger. But I heard a major Jewish organization say that they needed to rethink their support for the State of Israel.

“That’s something unthinkable in my lifetime, up until yesterday. We have to do better. We must do better,” he said.

But in the intervening months, the Conservative and Reform movements have not relented in their attacks. They have ratcheted them up.

The thinking appears to be that if they can make this problem look like a life or death struggle between Israel and progressive Jewry, they can both keep their dwindling bases engaged and attract members of the increasingly anti-Israel Jewish far Left.

The problem with this is that just as they cannot outdo the Democratic Party in their hostility toward Trump, so the Conservative and Reform movements cannot be more anti-Israel than Jewish Voices for Peace and other anti-Israel Jewish groups.

The question for Israelis is what this failure of the mainstream American Jewish leadership means for the future of Israel’s relationship with American Jewry. Jewish survival and continuity through the ages has been predicated and dependent on our ability as Jews to uphold the commandment of the sages that all Jews are responsible for one another. As the most successful Jewish community in history, Israel has a special responsibility for our brethren in the Diaspora.

The first step toward fulfilling our duty is to recognize the basic fact that while it is true that the American Jewish community is in crisis, the leaders of that community are in an even deeper crisis. And the key to strengthening and supporting the community is to bypass its failed leadership and speak and interact directly with American Jews.

Hillbilly elegy: Attention, une relégation sociale peut en cacher une autre ! (It’s the culture, stupid !)

Je me suis pâmé, il y a huit jours, devant un campement de Bohémiens qui s’étaient établis à Rouen. Voilà la troisième fois que j’en vois. Et toujours avec un nouveau plaisir. L’admirable, c’est qu’ils excitaient la haine des bourgeois, bien qu’inoffensifs comme des moutons. Je me suis fait très mal voir de la foule en leur donnant quelques sols. Et j’ai entendu de jolis mots à la Prudhomme. Cette haine-là tient à quelque chose de très profond et de complexe. On la retrouve chez tous les gens d’ordre. C’est la haine qu’on porte au Bédouin, à l’hérétique, au philosophe, au solitaire, au poète. Et il y a de la peur dans cette haine. Moi qui suis toujours pour les minorités, elle m’exaspère. Du jour où je ne serai plus indigné, je tomberai à plat, comme une poupée à qui on retire son bâton. Gustave Flaubert (Lettre à George Sand, 12 juin 1867)

Aux États-Unis, les plus opulents citoyens ont bien soin de ne point s’isoler du peuple ; au contraire, ils s’en rapprochent sans cesse, ils l’écoutent volontiers et lui parlent tous les jours. Alexis de Tocqueville

Toutes les stratégies que les intellectuels et les artistes produisent contre les « bourgeois » tendent inévitablement, en dehors de toute intention expresse et en vertu même de la structure de l’espace dans lequel elles s’engendrent, à être à double effet et dirigées indistinctement contre toutes les formes de soumission aux intérêts matériels, populaires aussi bien que bourgeoises.  Bourdieu

Il y a autant de racismes qu’il y a de groupes qui ont besoin de se justifier d’exister comme ils existent, ce qui constitue la fonction invariante des racismes. Il me semble très important de porter l’analyse sur les formes du racisme qui sont sans doute les plus subtiles, les plus méconnaissables, donc les plus rarement dénoncées, peut-être parce que les dénonciateurs ordinaires du racisme possèdent certaines des propriétés qui inclinent à cette forme de racisme. Je pense au racisme de l’intelligence. Le racisme de l’intelligence est un racisme de classe dominante qui se distingue par une foule de propriétés de ce que l’on désigne habituellement comme racisme, c’est-à-dire le racisme petit-bourgeois qui est l’objectif central de la plupart des critiques classiques du racisme, à commencer par les plus vigoureuses, comme celle de Sartre. Ce racisme est propre à une classe dominante dont la reproduction dépend, pour une part, de la transmission du capital culturel, capital hérité qui a pour propriété d’être un capital incorporé, donc apparemment naturel, inné. Le racisme de l’intelligence est ce par quoi les dominants visent à produire une «théodicée de leur propre privilège», comme dit Weber, c’est-à-dire une justification de l’ordre social qu’ils dominent. Il est ce qui fait que les dominants se sentent d’une essence supérieure. Tout racisme est un essentialisme et le racisme de l’intelligence est la forme de sociodicée caractéristique d’une classe dominante dont le pouvoir repose en partie sur la possession de titres qui, comme les titres scolaires, sont censés être des garanties d’intelligence et qui ont pris la place, dans beaucoup de sociétés, et pour l’accès même aux positions de pouvoir économique, des titres anciens comme les titres de propriété et les titres de noblesse. Pierre Bourdieu

If you’re not working, over time you’re much more likely to develop attitudes and orientations and behavior patterns that are associated with casual or infrequent work. And then when you open up opportunities for people, you notice that these attitudes, orientations, habits and styles also change. William Julius Wilson

Crime, family dissolution, welfare, and low levels of social organization are fundamentally a consequence of the disappearance of work. William Julius Wilson

Racism should be viewed as an intervening variable. You give me a set of conditions and I can produce racism in any society. You give me a different set of conditions and I can reduce racism. You give me a situation where there are a sufficient number of social resources so people don’t have to compete for those resources, and I will show you a society where racism is held in check. If we could create the conditions that make racism difficult, or discourage it, then there would be less stress and less need for affirmative action programs. One of those conditions would be an economic policy that would create tight labor markets over long periods of time. Now does that mean that affirmative action is here only temporarily? I think the ultimate goal should be to remove it. William Julius Wilson

Ces dernières années, la gauche américaine a cédé, à propos des identités ethniques, de genre et de sexualité, à une sorte d’hystérie collective qui a faussé son message, au point de l’empêcher de devenir une force fédératrice capable de gouverner. Mark Lilla

Né à Detroit dans les années 1950, j’ai grandi dans une famille où personne n’avait fréquenté l’université. Lorsque j’ai obtenu une bourse pour l’université du Michi­gan, j’ai été confronté à un snobisme de gauche qui méprisait la classe ouvrière, son attache­ment à la famille, la religion. Cette gauche caviar a suscité chez moi une forte réaction. Mark Lilla

Aux Etats-­Unis, les notions de citoyen et de bien commun ont été emportées par l’individua­lisme, tandis qu’en France elles existent tou­jours : la gauche comme la droite peuvent les revendiquer, elles permettent de défendre autant l’éducation publique que la nation. (…) Le seul moyen de sortir de l’im­passe est d’en appeler à quel­ que chose que tous les Améri­cains partagent mais qui n’a rien à voir avec nos identités, sans nier leur existence et leur importance. Une telle chose existe, si seulement les progres­sistes acceptaient d’en parler de nouveau : la citoyenneté. Mark Lilla

Une des nombreuses leçons à tirer de la présidentielle américaine et de son résultat détestable, c’est qu’il faut clore l’ère de la gauche « diversitaire ». Hillary Clinton n’a jamais été aussi excellente et stimulante que lorsqu’elle évoquait l’engagement des États-Unis dans les affaires du monde et en quoi il est lié à notre conception de la démocratie. En revanche, dès qu’il s’agissait de politique intérieure, elle n’avait plus la même hauteur de vue et tendait à verser dans le discours de la diversité, en en appelant explicitement à l’électorat noir, latino, féminin et LGBT (lesbiennes, gays, bisexuels et trans). Elle a commis là une erreur stratégique. Tant qu’à mentionner des groupes aux États-Unis, mieux vaut les mentionner tous. Autrement, ceux que l’on a oubliés s’en aperçoivent et se sentent exclus. C’est exactement ce qui s’est passé avec les Blancs des classes populaires et les personnes à fortes convictions religieuses. Pas moins des deux tiers des électeurs blancs non diplômés du supérieur ont voté pour Donald Trump, de même que plus de 80 % des évangéliques blancs. (…) l’obsession de la diversité à l’école et dans la presse a produit à gauche une génération de narcissiques, ignorant le sort des personnes n’appartenant pas aux groupes auxquels ils s’identifient, et indifférents à la nécessité d’être à l’écoute des Américains de toutes conditions. Dès leur plus jeune âge, nos enfants sont incités à parler de leur identité individuelle, avant même d’en avoir une. Au moment où ils entrent à l’université, beaucoup pensent que le discours politique se réduit au discours de la diversité, et on est consterné de voir qu’ils n’ont pas d’avis sur des questions aussi éternelles que les classes sociales, la guerre, l’économie et le bien commun. L’enseignement de l’histoire dans les écoles secondaires en est grandement responsable, car les programmes adoptés plaquent sur le passé le discours actuel de l’identité et donnent une vision déformée des grandes forces et des grands personnages qui ont façonné notre pays (les conquêtes du mouvement pour les droits des femmes, par exemple, sont réelles et importantes, mais on ne peut les comprendre qu’à la lumière des accomplissements des Pères fondateurs, qui ont établi un système de gouvernement fondé sur la garantie des droits). Quand les jeunes entrent à l’université, ils sont incités à rester centrés sur eux-mêmes par les associations étudiantes, par les professeurs ainsi que par les membres de l’administration qui sont employés à plein temps pour gérer les « questions de diversité » et leur donner encore plus d’importance. La chaîne Fox News et d’autres médias de droite adorent railler la « folie des campus » autour de ces questions, et il y a le plus souvent de quoi. Cela fait le jeu des démagogues populistes qui cherchent à délégitimer le savoir aux yeux de ceux qui n’ont jamais mis les pieds sur un campus. Comment expliquer à l’électeur moyen qu’il y a censément urgence morale à accorder aux étudiants le droit de choisir le pronom personnel par lequel ils veulent être désignés ? Comment ne pas rigoler avec ces électeurs quand on apprend qu’un farceur de l’université du Michigan a demandé à se faire appeler « Sa majesté » ? Cette sensibilité à la diversité sur les campus a déteint sur les médias de gauche, et pas qu’un peu. L’embauche de femmes et de membres des minorités au titre de la discrimination positive dans la presse écrite et l’audiovisuel est une formidable avancée sociale – et cela a même transformé le visage des médias de droite. Mais cela a aussi contribué à donner le sentiment, surtout aux jeunes journalistes et rédacteurs en chef, qu’en traitant de l’identité ils avaient accompli leur travail. (…) Combien de fois, par exemple, nous ressert-on le sujet sur le « premier ou la première X à faire Y » ? La fascination pour les questions d’identité se retrouve même dans la couverture de l’actualité internationale qui est, hélas, une denrée rare. Il peut être intéressant de lire un article sur le sort des personnes transgenre en Égypte, par exemple, mais cela ne contribue en rien à informer les Américains sur les puissants courants politiques et religieux qui détermineront l’avenir de l’Égypte et, indirectement, celui de notre pays. (…) Mais c’est au niveau de la stratégie électorale que l’échec de la gauche diversitaire a été le plus spectaculaire, comme nous venons de le constater. En temps normal, la politique nationale n’est pas axée sur ce qui nous différencie mais sur ce qui nous unit. Et nous choisissons pour la conduire la personne qui aura le mieux su nous parler de notre destin collectif. Ronald Reagan a été habile à cela, quoiqu’on pense de sa vision. Bill Clinton aussi, qui a pris exemple sur Reagan. Il s’est emparé du Parti démocrate en marginalisant son aile sensible aux questions d’identité, a concentré son énergie sur des mesures de politique intérieure susceptibles de bénéficier à l’ensemble de la population (comme l’assurance-maladie) et défini le rôle des États-Unis dans le monde d’après la chute du mur de Berlin. En poste pour deux mandats, il a ainsi été en mesure d’en faire beaucoup pour différentes catégories d’électeurs membres de la coalition démocrate. La politique de la différence est essentiellement expressive et non persuasive. Voilà pourquoi elle ne fait jamais gagner des élections – mais peut en faire perdre. L’intérêt récent, quasi ethnologique, des médias pour l’homme blanc en colère en dit autant sur l’état de la gauche américaine que sur cette figure tant vilipendée et, jusqu’ici, dédaignée. Pour la gauche, une lecture commode de la récente élection présidentielle consisterait à dire que Donald Trump a gagné parce qu’il a réussi à transformer un désavantage économique en colère raciste – c’est la thèse du whitelash, du retour de bâton de l’électorat blanc. C’est une lecture commode parce qu’elle conforte un sentiment de supériorité morale et permet à la gauche de faire la sourde oreille à ce que ces électeurs ont dit être leur principale préoccupation. Cette lecture alimente aussi le fantasme selon lequel la droite républicaine serait condamnée à terme à l’extinction démographique – autrement dit, que la gauche n’a qu’à attendre que le pays lui tombe tout cuit dans l’assiette. Le pourcentage étonnamment élevé du vote latino qui est allé à M. Trump est là pour nous rappeler que plus des groupes ethniques sont établis depuis longtemps aux États-Unis, moins leur comportement électoral est homogène. Enfin, la thèse du whitelash est commode parce qu’elle disculpe la gauche de ne pas avoir vu que son obsession de la diversité incitait les Américains blancs, ruraux, croyants, à se concevoir comme un groupe défavorisé dont l’identité est menacée ou bafouée. Ces personnes ne réagissent pas contre la réalité d’une Amérique multiculturelle (en réalité, elles ont tendance à vivre dans des régions où la population est homogène). Elles réagissent contre l’omniprésence du discours de l’identité, ce qu’elles appellent le « politiquement correct ». La gauche ferait bien de garder à l’esprit que le Ku Klux Klan est le plus ancien mouvement identitaire de la vie politique américaine, et qu’il existe toujours. Quand on joue au jeu de l’identité, il faut s’attendre à perdre. Il nous faut une gauche postdiversitaire, qui s’inspire des succès passés de la gauche prédiversitaire. Cette gauche-là s’attacherait à élargir sa base en s’adressant aux Américains en leur qualité d’Américains et en privilégiant les questions qui concernent une vaste majorité d’entre eux. Elle parlerait à la nation en tant que nation de citoyens qui sont tous dans le même bateau et doivent se serrer les coudes. Pour ce qui est des questions plus étroites et symboliquement très chargées qui risquent de faire fuir des électeurs potentiels, notamment celles qui touchent à la sexualité et à la religion, cette gauche-là procéderait doucement, avec tact et sens de la mesure. Les enseignants acquis à cette gauche-là se recentreraient sur la principale responsabilité politique qui est la leur dans une démocratie : former des citoyens engagés qui connaissent leur système politique ainsi que les grandes forces et les principaux événements de leur histoire. Cette gauche postdiversitaire rappellerait également que la démocratie n’est pas qu’une affaire de droits ; elle confère aussi des devoirs à ses citoyens, par exemple le devoir de s’informer et celui de voter. Une presse de gauche postdiversitaire commencerait par s’informer sur les régions du pays dont elle a fait peu de cas, et sur les questions qui les préoccupent, notamment la religion. Et elle s’acquitterait avec sérieux de sa responsabilité d’informer les Américains sur les grandes forces qui régissent les relations internationales. J’ai été invité il y a quelques années à un congrès syndical en Floride pour parler du célèbre discours du président Franklin D. Roosevelt de 1941 sur les quatre libertés. La salle était bondée de représentants de sections locales – hommes, femmes, Noirs, Blanc, Latinos. Nous avons commencé par chanter l’hymne national puis nous nous sommes assis pour écouter un enregistrement du discours de Roosevelt. J’observais la diversité des visages dans l’assistance et j’étais frappé de voir à quel point ces personnes si différentes étaient concentrées sur ce qui les rassemblait. Et, en entendant Roosevelt invoquer d’une voix vibrante la liberté d’expression, la liberté de culte, la liberté de vivre à l’abri du besoin et la liberté de vivre à l’abri de la peur – des libertés qu’il réclamait « partout dans le monde » – cela m’a rappelé quels étaient les vrais fondements de la gauche américaine moderne. Mark Lilla

On brode beaucoup sur la non intégration des jeunes de banlieue. En réalité, ils sont totalement intégrés culturellement. Leur culture, comme le rap, sert de référence à toute la jeunesse. Ils sont bien sûr confrontés à de nombreux problèmes mais sont dans une logique d’intégration culturelle à la société monde. Les jeunes ruraux, dont les loisirs se résument souvent à la bagnole, le foot et l’alcool, vivent dans une marginalité culturelle. En feignant de croire que l’immigration ne participe pas à la déstructuration des plus modestes (Français ou immigrés), la gauche accentue la fracture qui la sépare des catégories populaires. Fracture d’autant plus forte qu’une partie de la gauche continue d’associer cette France précarisée qui demande à être protégée de la mondialisation et de l’immigration à la « France raciste ». Dans le même temps, presque malgré elle, la gauche est de plus en plus plébiscitée par une « autre France », celle des grands centres urbains les plus actifs, les plus riches et les mieux intégrés à l’économie-monde ; sur ces territoires où se retrouvent les extrêmes de l’éventail social (du bobo à l’immigré), la mondialisation est une bénédiction. Christophe Guilluy

La focalisation sur le « problème des banlieues » fait oublier un fait majeur : 61 % de la population française vit aujourd’hui hors des grandes agglomérations. Les classes populaires se concentrent dorénavant dans les espaces périphériques : villes petites et moyennes, certains espaces périurbains et la France rurale. En outre, les banlieues sensibles ne sont nullement « abandonnées » par l’État. Comme l’a établi le sociologue Dominique Lorrain, les investissements publics dans le quartier des Hautes Noues à Villiers-sur-Marne (Val-de-Marne) sont mille fois supérieurs à ceux consentis en faveur d’un quartier modeste de la périphérie de Verdun (Meuse), qui n’a jamais attiré l’attention des médias. Pourtant, le revenu moyen par habitant de ce quartier de Villiers-sur-Marne est de 20 % supérieur à celui de Verdun. Bien sûr, c’est un exemple extrême. Il reste que, à l’échelle de la France, 85 % des ménages pauvres (qui gagnent moins de 993 € par mois, soit moins de 60 % du salaire médian, NDLR) ne vivent pas dans les quartiers « sensibles ». Si l’on retient le critère du PIB, la Seine-Saint-Denis est plus aisée que la Meuse ou l’Ariège. Le 93 n’est pas un espace de relégation, mais le cœur de l’aire parisienne. (…)  En se désindustrialisant, les grandes villes ont besoin de beaucoup moins d’employés et d’ouvriers mais de davantage de cadres. C’est ce qu’on appelle la gentrification des grandes villes, symbolisée par la figure du fameux « bobo », partisan de l’ouverture dans tous les domaines. Confrontées à la flambée des prix dans le parc privé, les catégories populaires, pour leur part, cherchent des logements en dehors des grandes agglomérations. En outre, l’immobilier social, dernier parc accessible aux catégories populaires de ces métropoles, s’est spécialisé dans l’accueil des populations immigrées. Les catégories populaires d’origine européenne et qui sont éligibles au parc social s’efforcent d’éviter les quartiers où les HLM sont nombreux. Elles préfèrent déménager en grande banlieue, dans les petites villes ou les zones rurales pour accéder à la propriété et acquérir un pavillon. On assiste ainsi à l’émergence de « villes monde » très inégalitaires où se concentrent à la fois cadres et catégories populaires issues de l’immigration récente. Ce phénomène n’est pas limité à Paris. Il se constate dans toutes les agglomérations de France (Lyon, Bordeaux, Nantes, Lille, Grenoble), hormis Marseille. (…) On a du mal à formuler certains faits en France. Dans le vocabulaire de la politique de la ville, « classes moyennes » signifie en réalité « population d’origine européenne ». Or les HLM ne font plus coexister ces deux populations. L’immigration récente, pour l’essentiel familiale, s’est concentrée dans les quartiers de logements sociaux des grandes agglomérations, notamment les moins valorisés. Les derniers rapports de l’observatoire national des zones urbaines sensibles (ZUS) montrent qu’aujourd’hui 52 % des habitants des ZUS sont immigrés, chiffre qui atteint 64 % en Île-de-France. Cette spécialisation tend à se renforcer. La fin de la mixité dans les HLM n’est pas imputable aux bailleurs sociaux, qui font souvent beaucoup d’efforts. Mais on ne peut pas forcer des personnes qui ne le souhaitent pas à vivre ensemble. L’étalement urbain se poursuit parce que les habitants veulent se séparer, même si ça les fragilise économiquement. Par ailleurs, dans les territoires où se côtoient populations d’origine européenne et populations d’immigration extra-européenne, la fin du modèle assimilationniste suscite beaucoup d’inquiétudes. L’autre ne devient plus soi. Une société multiculturelle émerge. Minorités et majorités sont désormais relatives. (…)  ces personnes habitent là où on produit les deux tiers du PIB du pays et où se crée l’essentiel des emplois, c’est-à-dire dans les métropoles. Une petite bourgeoisie issue de l’immigration maghrébine et africaine est ainsi apparue. Dans les ZUS, il existe une vraie mobilité géographique et sociale : les gens arrivent et partent. Ces quartiers servent de sas entre le Nord et le Sud. Ce constat ruine l’image misérabiliste d’une banlieue ghetto où seraient parqués des habitants condamnés à la pauvreté. À bien des égards, la politique de la ville est donc un grand succès. Les seuls phénomènes actuels d’ascension sociale dans les milieux populaires se constatent dans les catégories immigrées des métropoles. Cadres ou immigrés, tous les habitants des grandes agglomérations tirent bénéfice d’y vivre – chacun à leur échelle. En Grande-Bretagne, en 2013, le secrétaire d’État chargé des Universités et de la Science de l’époque, David Willetts, s’est même déclaré favorable à une politique de discrimination positive en faveur des jeunes hommes blancs de la « working class » car leur taux d’accès à l’université s’est effondré et est inférieur à celui des enfants d’immigrés. (…) Le problème social et politique majeur de la France, c’est que, pour la première fois depuis la révolution industrielle, la majeure partie des catégories populaires ne vit plus là où se crée la richesse. Au XIXe siècle, lors de la révolution industrielle, on a fait venir les paysans dans les grandes villes pour travailler en usine. Aujourd’hui, on les fait repartir à la « campagne ». C’est un retour en arrière de deux siècles. Le projet économique du pays, tourné vers la mondialisation, n’a plus besoin des catégories populaires, en quelque sorte. (…) L’absence d’intégration économique des catégories modestes explique le paradoxe français : un pays qui redistribue beaucoup de ses richesses mais dont une majorité d’habitants considèrent à juste titre qu’ils sont de plus en plus fragiles et déclassés. (…) Les catégories populaires qui vivent dans ces territoires sont d’autant plus attachées à leur environnement local qu’elles sont, en quelque sorte, assignées à résidence. Elles réagissent en portant une grande attention à ce que j’appelle le «village» : sa maison, son quartier, son territoire, son identité culturelle, qui représentent un capital social. La contre-société s’affirme aussi dans le domaine des valeurs. La France périphérique est attachée à l’ordre républicain, réservée envers les réformes de société et critique sur l’assistanat. L’accusation de «populisme» ne l’émeut guère. Elle ne supporte plus aucune forme de tutorat – ni politique, ni intellectuel – de la part de ceux qui se croient «éclairés». (…) Il devient très difficile de fédérer et de satisfaire tous les électorats à la fois. Dans un monde parfait, il faudrait pouvoir combiner le libéralisme économique et culturel dans les agglomérations et le protectionnisme, le refus du multiculturalisme et l’attachement aux valeurs traditionnelles dans la France périphérique. Mais c’est utopique. C’est pourquoi ces deux France décrivent les nouvelles fractures politiques, présentes et à venir. Christophe Guilluy

Parler de relégation sociale n’a pas grand sens quand on est à dix minutes du métro et au coeur d’un marché de l’emploi gigantesque. Christophe Guilluy

J’ai suivi cette campagne avec un sentiment de malaise franchement (…) qui s’est peu à peu transformé en honte.  (…) Malaise parce que la deuxième France, dont vous parlez, la France qui est périphérique, qui hésite entre Marine Le Pen et rien,  je me suis rendu compte que je ne la comprenais pas, que je ne la voyais pas, que j’avais perdu le contact. Et ça, quand on veut écrire des romans, je trouve que c’est une faute professionnelle assez lourde.  (….) Parce que je ne la vois plus, je fais partie de l’élite mondialisée, maintenant. (…) Et pourtant, je viens de cette France. (…) Elle habite pas dans les mêmes quartiers que moi. Elle habite pas à Paris. A Paris, Le Pen n’existe pas. Elle habite dans des zones périphériques décrites par Christophe Guilluy. Des zones mal connues. (…) Mais le fait est que j’ai perdu le contact. (…) Non, je la comprends pas suffisamment, je veux dire, je pourrais pas écrire dessus. C’est ça qui me gêne, c’est pour ça que suis mal à l’aise. (…) Non, je suis pas dans la même situation. Moi, je ne crois pas au vote idéologique, je crois au vote de classe. Bien que le mot est démodé. Il y a une classe qui vote Le Pen, une classe qui vote Macron, une classe qui vote Fillon. Facilement identifiables et on le voit tout de suite. Et que je le veuille ou non, je fais partie de la France qui vote Macron. Parce que je suis trop riche pour voter Le Pen ou Mélenchon. Et parce que je suis pas un hériter, donc je suis pas la classe qui vote Fillon. (…) Ce qui est apparu et qui est très surprenant – alors, ça, c’est vraiment un phénomène imprévu – c’est un véritable parti confessionnel, précisément catholique. Dans tout ce que j’ai suivi – et, je vous dis, j’ai tout suivi  – Jean-Frédéric Poisson était quand même le plus étonnant. (…) Une espèce d’impavidité et une défense des valeurs catholiques qui est inhabituelle pour un parti politique. (….) Ca m’a interloqué parce que je croyais le catholicisme mourant. (…) [Macron] L’axe de sa  campagne, j’ai l’impression que c’est une espèce de thérapie de groupe pour convertir les Français à l’optimisme. Michel Houellebecq

Marine Le Pen aurait pu être la porte-parole du parti de l’inquiétude, elle aurait pu faire venir sur le plateau l’humeur de cette partie du pays qui voit sa disparition programmée et s’en désole. Elle aurait pu évoquer le séparatisme islamiste et l’immense tâche qui nous attend consistant à convaincre des dizaines, peut-être des centaines, de milliers de jeunes Français de l’excellence de leur pays, de ses arts, ses armes et ses lois. Or, du début à la fin, elle a paru retourner à son adversaire le procès en légitimité dont elle est sans cesse l’objet. Incapable de lui concéder le moindre point, autant que de lui opposer une véritable vision, elle a ânonné des mots-clefs comme « UOIF » et « banquier », croyant sans doute que cela suffirait à faire pleuvoir les votes, ce qui laisse penser qu’elle tient ses électeurs en piètre estime. Les insinuations sur l’argent de son adversaire, sa façon de dire à demi-mot au téléspectateur « si vous êtes dans la mouise, c’est parce que lui et ses amis se goinfrent », m’ont rappelé les heures sombres de l’affaire Fillon, quand des journalistes répétaient en boucle le même appel au ressentiment. L’autre France, celle qui n’a pas envie de l’avenir mondialisé et multiculti qu’on lui promet, mérite mieux que ce populisme ras des pâquerettes. (…) On n’est pas obligé, cependant, de hurler avec les bisounours. Quoi que répètent fiévreusement ceux qui adorent voler au secours des victoires, un faux pas, même de taille, ne suffit pas à faire de Marine Le Pen quelqu’un d’infréquentable. À la différence de l’intégralité de mes confrères qui se frottent les mains sur l’air de « je vous l’avais bien dit ! », je ne suis pas sûre qu’elle ait « montré son vrai visage ». L’ayant interviewée à plusieurs reprises, nous avons eu avec elles des engueulades homériques : jamais je ne l’ai vue, dans ces circonstances, faire preuve de la mauvaise foi fielleuse qu’elle a opposée à son adversaire – et je ne lui avais jamais vu, même sur un plateau, ce masque sarcastique. Avait-elle en quelque sorte intégré sa propre illégitimité, a-t-elle été mal conseillée par son cher Florian Philippot ou était-elle décidément très mal préparée à la fonction qu’elle briguait ? Toujours est-il qu’elle a raté son rendez-vous avec le peuple français. (…) Il faudra bien résoudre un jour ce petit problème de logique : il existe chez nous un parti que les tribunaux ne peuvent pas interdire, qui a le droit de se présenter aux élections, mais les électeurs n’ont pas le droit de voter pour lui et ses dirigeants n’ont pas le droit de gagner. Ce qui, on en conviendra, est assez pratique pour ceux qui l’affrontent en duel. On me dit qu’il respecte le cadre de la République, mais pas ses fameuses valeurs. Sauf que, pardon, qui est arbitre des valeurs, Le Monde, les Inrocks, Jacques Attali ? N’est-ce pas une façon bien commode d’exclure de la compétition ceux qui vous déplaisent ? Je ne me résous pas à vivre dans un monde où il y a une seule politique possible, un seul vote raisonnable et un seul point de vue acceptable. (…) Post Scriptum : je viens d’entendre un bout de la chronique de François Morel, l’un des papes du comico-conformisme sur France Inter. Il comparait – ou assimilait je ne sais – Marine Le Pen à une primate: Taubira, c’était dégueulasse; mais pour une Le Pen, c’est normal. Digne conclusion de la quinzaine de la haine (et de l’antifascisme nigaud) que nous a offerte la radio publique. Elisabeth Lévy

The paradox of France is that it is desperate for reform — and desperate not to be reformed. It wants the benefits of a job-producing competitive economy but fears relinquishing a job-protecting uncompetitive one. A Macron presidency will have to devote its intellectual and rhetorical energies to explaining that it can be one or the other, but not both. I don’t want to close this column without allowing for the awful chance that Le Pen might win. That would be a moral tragedy for France and a probable disaster for Europe. But it would also be a reminder that chronic economic stagnation inevitably begets nationalist furies. In the United States, a complacent left acquits itself too easily of its role in paving the way to the Trump presidency. Many of Le Pen’s supporters might be bigots, but their case against the self-satisfaction, self-dealing, moral preening and economic incompetence of the French ruling classes is nearly impeccable. Bret Stephens

Nous qui vivons dans les régions côtières des villes bleues, nous lisons plus de livres et nous allons plus souvent au théâtre que ceux qui vivent au fin fond du pays. Nous sommes à la fois plus sophistiqués et plus cosmopolites – parlez-nous de nos voyages scolaires en Chine et en Provence ou, par exemple, de notre intérêt pour le bouddhisme. Mais par pitié, ne nous demandez pas à quoi ressemble la vie dans l’Amérique rouge. Nous n’en savons rien. Nous ne savons pas qui sont Tim LaHaye et Jerry B. Jenkins. […] Nous ne savons pas ce que peut bien dire James Dobson dans son émission de radio écoutée par des millions d’auditeurs. Nous ne savons rien de Reba et Travis. […] Nous sommes très peu nombreux à savoir ce qu’il se passe à Branson dans le Missouri, même si cette ville reçoit quelque sept millions de touristes par an; pas plus que nous ne pouvons nommer ne serait-ce que cinq pilotes de stock-car. […] Nous ne savons pas tirer au fusil ni même en nettoyer un, ni reconnaître le grade d’un officier rien qu’à son insigne. Quant à savoir à quoi ressemble une graine de soja poussée dans un champ… David Brooks

Vous allez dans certaines petites villes de Pennsylvanie où, comme ans beaucoup de petites villes du Middle West, les emplois ont disparu depuis maintenant 25 ans et n’ont été remplacés par rien d’autre (…) Et il n’est pas surprenant qu’ils deviennent pleins d’amertume, qu’ils s’accrochent aux armes à feu ou à la religion, ou à leur antipathie pour ceux qui ne sont pas comme eux, ou encore à un sentiment d’hostilité envers les immigrants. Barack Hussein Obama (2008)

Pour généraliser, en gros, vous pouvez placer la moitié des partisans de Trump dans ce que j’appelle le panier des pitoyables. Les racistes, sexistes, homophobes, xénophobes, islamophobes. A vous de choisir. Hillary Clinton

L’Amérique est en train de se désagréger. Pendant la majeure partie de l’histoire de notre nation, quelle que soit l’inégalité de richesse entre les citoyens les plus riches et les plus pauvres, nous avons maintenu une égalité culturelle connue nulle part ailleurs dans le monde – pour les Blancs, en tout cas. (…) Mais ce n’est plus vrai, et c’est de moins en moins vrai depuis les années 1960. Les gens commencent à remarquer le grand fossé. Le Tea Party voit l’arrogance d’une élite politique qui pense qu’elle sait tout et impose au reste de l’Amérique de s’aligner sur elle. Le mouvement Occupy dénonce une élite économique qui vit dans des manoirs et se déplace en jets privés. Chacun a raison sur un aspect du problème, mais ce problème va bien au-delà de l’inégalité politique ou économique. Nous sommes maintenant confrontés à un problème d’inégalité culturelle. Lorsque les Américains se vantaient de « l’American way of life » – une expression encore d’usage courant en 1960 -, ils parlaient d’une culture civique qui englobait une proportion extrêmement importante d’Américains de toutes les classes sociales. C’était une culture englobant des expériences partagées de la vie quotidienne et des hypothèses partagées sur les valeurs américaines centrales impliquant le mariage, l’honnêteté, le travail acharné et la religiosité. Au cours des 50 dernières années, cette culture civique commune s’est effondrée. Nous avons développé une nouvelle classe supérieure hyper-diplômée, souvent issue d’écoles d’élite, partageant des goûts et des préférences qui les distinguent de l’Amérique traditionnelle. En même temps, nous avons développé une nouvelle classe inférieure, caractérisée non par la pauvreté mais par le retrait des institutions culturelles fondamentales de l’Amérique. (…) Pourquoi ces nouvelles classes inférieures et supérieures ont-elles émergé ? Pour expliquer la formation de la nouvelle classe inférieure, les explications faciles de la gauche ne résistent pas à l’examen. Ce n’est pas que les hommes blancs de la classe ouvrière ne peuvent plus gagner un « salaire familial » qui leur permette de se marier. L’homme moyen employé dans une profession ouvrière gagnait autant en 2010 qu’en 1960. Ce n’est pas qu’un mauvais marché du travail ait poussé les hommes découragés à abandonner le marché du travail. Le décrochage sur le marché du travail a augmenté aussi rapidement pendant les années fastes des années 80, 90 et 2000 que pendant les mauvaises années. (…) Comme je l’ai soutenu dans une grande partie de mes travaux précédents, je pense que ce sont les réformes des années 1960 qui ont déclenché la détérioration. Les changements de politique sociale au cours des années 1960 ont rendu économiquement plus viable d’avoir un enfant sans mari si vous étiez une femme ou de vous débrouiller sans travail si vous étiez un homme ; plus sûr de commettre des crimes sans en subir les conséquences ; et plus facile de laisser le gouvernement s’occuper des problèmes de votre communauté que vous et vos voisins deviez auparavant régler. Mais en fait, comprendre ce qui a généré cette nouvelle classe inférieure n’est pas particulièrement important. Une fois la détérioration amorcée, une boucle d’auto-renforcement s’est installée alors que les normes sociales traditionnellement puissantes se sont effondrées. Parce que le processus s’est auto-renforcé, abroger les réformes des années 1960 (quelque chose qui n’arrivera pas) ne ferait au mieux que modifier lentement les tendances. Pendant ce temps-là, la nouvelle classe supérieure doit son origine à des forces qui ne sont la faute de personne et qui résistent à la manipulation. La valeur économique des cerveaux sur le marché va continuer d’augmenter quoi qu’il arrive, et les plus prospères de chaque génération auront tendance à se marier entre eux quoi qu’il arrive. En conséquence, les Américains les plus prospères continueront de tendre vers la consolidation et l’isolement en tant que classe. Et ce n’est pas les changements des taux marginaux d’imposition des riches qui y feront quelque chose. Pas plus que l’augmentation des bourses pour les enfants de la classe ouvrière. La seule chose qui puisse faire la différence est la reconnaissance par les Américains de les toutes classes sociales qu’il existe un problème d’inégalité culturelle et qu’il faut faire quelque chose pour y remédier. Ce « quelque chose » n’a rien à voir avec les nouvelles mesures ou règlementations de l’Etat. Il est clair que la politique publique a, hélas, eu des conséquences culturelles négatives, mais les effets pervers ont été tout autant inévitables du côté de l’ingénierie sociale de droite que de celui de l’ingénierie sociale de gauche. Le « quelque chose » que j’ai en tête doit être défini en termes de familles américaines individuelles agissant dans leur propre intérêt et dans celui de leurs enfants. Faire cela à Fishtown nécessite un soutien de l’extérieur. Il reste un noyau de vertu civique et d’implication dans la classe ouvrière américaine qui pourrait faire des progrès contre ses problèmes si les gens qui essaient de faire les bonnes choses obtiennent le renforcement dont ils ont besoin – non pas sous la forme d’une aide gouvernementale, mais dans la validation des valeurs et des normes qu’ils continuent de défendre. La meilleure chose que la nouvelle classe supérieure puisse faire pour fournir ce renfort est d’abandonner son condescendant « refus de juger ». Les personnes mariées et instruites qui travaillent dur et élèvent consciencieusement leurs enfants ne devraient pas hésiter à exprimer leur désapprobation envers ceux qui défient ces normes. Pour ce qui est du mariage et de l’éthique du travail, la nouvelle classe supérieure doit commencer à prêcher ce qu’elle pratique. Charles Murray

Murray (…) soutient qu’avant les années 1960, les Américains de toutes les classes participaient à une culture commune traditionnelle d’engagement civique et social qui valorisait le mariage, le travail, l’honnêteté et la religiosité – crédité comme « l’exceptionnalisme américain » par Alexis de Tocqueville dans son classique du 19e siècle « La démocratie en Amérique. » Aujourd’hui, cette culture persiste parmi les élites hautement éduquées, gagnantes de la redistribution économique de la mondialisation, mais ces vertus vigoureuses se dissolvent parmi les perdants de la mondialisation, la classe ouvrière du 21e siècle. L’augmentation de la ségrégation démographique signifie que les élites qui dirigent la nation savent peu de choses sur l’effondrement culturel inquiétant qui remonte l’échelle socio-économique. Murray décrit une nouvelle classe supérieure très instruite composée des 5% de professionnels et de gestionnaires les plus prospères qui dirigent les principales institutions du pays. La plupart résident dans des « super codes postaux » à revenu élevé et socialement homogènes, à proximité des centres énergétiques urbains. L’exclusivité se renforce d’elle-même : les élites se socialisent principalement et se marient entre elles (« homogamie »), assurant la future domination de leurs enfants sur la base de l’intelligence génétique, d’autres talents hérités et d’une culture de haut niveau nourrie par l’accès à des établissements d’enseignement d’élite. Pour souligner que la nouvelle fracture culturelle est largement basée sur la classe, et non sur la race/l’ethnicité, Murray limite les sections principales de « Coming Apart » à la comparaison des différences socioculturelles entre les blancs d’âge moyen (30-49 ans) dans deux communautés : la classe moyenne de Belmont, dans le Massachusetts, et la classe ouvrière de Fishtown, en Pennsylvanie (Murray construit des versions quelque peu « fictives » de ces communautés grâce à des modèles ajustés statistiquement qui contrôlent l’âge, la race, le revenu et la profession pour accentuer les contrastes entre elles.) Belmont représente peut-être 20% de la population totale des États-Unis; Fishtown, environ 30%. Murray révèle des niveaux alarmants d’isolement social et de désengagement parmi les blancs de la classe ouvrière de Fishtown. Au début des années 2000, seulement 48 % étaient mariés, contre 84 % en 1960 ; les enfants vivant dans des ménages avec les deux parents biologiques sont passés de 96 % à 37 %; le nombre d’handicapés a quintuplé de 2 % à 10 % ; les taux d’arrestation pour crimes violents ont quadruplé, passant de 125 à 592 pour 100 000 personnes; et le pourcentage de fréquentation de l’église une seule fois par an a presque doublé, passant de 35 % à 59 %. En 2008, près de 12 % des hommes dans la force de l’âge titulaires d’un diplôme d’études secondaires n’étaient « pas sur le marché du travail » — soit le quadruple du pourcentage par rapport au creux historique de 3 % en 1968. La classe moyenne supérieure bien éduquée, les Blancs du modèle Belmont de Murray s’en sortent bien mieux : 83 % sont mariés ; 84 % des enfants vivent dans des foyers biparentaux ; moins de 1 % sont en invalidité, bien que près de 40 % ne fréquentent l’église qu’une fois par an. Presque tous les hommes adultes font partie de la population active. Le principal problème de « Coming Apart » est que l’accent mis par Murray sur une fracture culturelle entre les Blancs masque autre chose : la destruction de valeurs, de secteurs économiques et de classes professionnelles entières par l’automatisation et l’externalisation. Et n’oubliez pas les mouvements massifs de main-d’œuvre immigrée légale et illégale bon marché : ce facteur met en place un conflit classique, le marché du travail ethniquement divisé, dans lequel vous trouvez des blancs syndiqués de la classe ouvrière opposés aux nouveaux arrivants minoritaires qui sont prêts à travailler pour moins cher. (parfois « au noir » et dans des conditions lamentables).Frederick Lynch

Le dernier livre de Charles Murray, Coming Apart, a déjà fait couler beaucoup d’encre dans la presse américaine. Auteur controversé, surtout après la publication, en 1994, de The Bell Curve : Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life, écrit avec Richard J. Herrnstein, il a l’habitude d’irriter certains et de plaire à quelques autres. Charles Murray peut être décrit comme un conservateur libertarien plaçant ses espérances dans les vertus individuelles des citoyens et non dans l’intervention de l’État. Un pays peuplé de citoyens vertueux, dont les vertus sont défendues par la constitution, c’est à peu près tout ce qu’il aurait fallu à l’Amérique pour réussir. L’exceptionnalisme américain tiendrait à la manière dont les Américains ont su cultiver dans l’ensemble de la société, jusqu’à une période récente, ces vertus qui ont permis à l’Amérique d’être ce qu’elle est. Il ne s’intéresse qu’à cette réalité-là, armé de statistiques diverses, pour la plupart tirées des recensements ou de la General Social Survey, enquête annuelle qui existe depuis le début des années 1970. Il a sans doute tort de négliger les questions de justice et d’égalité et plus largement l’évolution de l’économie, mais il a l’avantage, pour un lecteur français de se préoccuper de tout un secteur de la réalité auquel on attache généralement peu d’importance, celui des valeurs et fondements culturels de nos sociétés. Il ne prétend pas regarder la réalité dans tous ses aspects en toute impartialité. Il développe une thèse dont il ne cherche pas à convaincre à tout prix qu’elle est l’unique façon d’analyser le réel. Cette thèse consiste à dire que, si ses prémisses sont correctes, l’Amérique risque de s’effondrer comme un château de cartes, en raison de l’écart grandissant qui sépare une nouvelle élite (new upper class) d’un nouveau sous-prolétariat (new lower class) qui s’est éloigné des vertus fondatrices de la société américaine, sur lesquelles nous reviendrons : en gros les 20 % les plus éduqués et les plus riches d’un côté et les 30 % qui le sont le moins de l’autre. (…) Comme le sous-titre l’indique, il concentre son attention sur les Américains blancs, dans la majeure partie de son livre, non parce que seul l’avenir des blancs lui importe, mais pour éviter que les tendances qu’il décrit soient spontanément imputées à une affaire raciale ou ethnique. C’est bien de classes sociales dont il parle. (…) Il y a toujours eu des riches et des pauvres aux Etats-Unis. Mais, jusqu’au début des années soixante, dit-il, ils ne vivaient pas trop différemment les uns des autres et étaient imprégnés d’une même culture civique fondée sur ce qu’il appelle les « vertus fondatrices » . « L’instruction de Theodore Roosevelt, rejeton d’une famille de l’élite new-yorkaise, bien que délivrée par des précepteurs, se fondait sur les mêmes manuels que ceux lus en classe par les enfants des fermiers de l’Ohio, des commerçants de Chicago et des pêcheurs de la Nouvelle Angleterre » (p. 141). Les histoires édifiantes contenues dans McGuffey Readers, peut-être l’équivalent américain du Tour de France de deux enfants d’Augustine Fouillée à peu près à la même époque, étaient lues par tous les enfants. « Dès la moitié du XXème siècle, l’idée que l’école était l’endroit où l’on devait inculquer un ensemble de vertus par une socialisation systématique avait été rejetée […] On en est venu à supposer implicitement que le système américain lui-même continuerait de fonctionner en toute circonstance pourvu que nous fassions de bonnes lois» (p. 142).  (…) Cette culture civique s’est considérablement érodée au fil du temps, mais beaucoup plus dans le sous-prolétariat que parmi ceux qui sont à la fois les mieux éduqués et les plus riches. Charles Murray consacre la première partie de son ouvrage à décrire la formation de la nouvelle élite (The new upper class). Par là, il désigne les gens qui dirigent l’économie, la politique et les institutions culturelles du pays, distinguant même une « narrow elite » ne comprenant que ceux qui ont une véritable influence. Cette élite existait déjà dans les années 1960 mais avait des origines sociales assez diverses et ne se distinguait pas par un mode de vie à part: « Ils étaient des gens puissants, mais ne formaient pas une classe. » (p. 21). Au fil du temps cette élite s’est de plus en plus isolée des modes de vie du reste de ses concitoyens, au prix d’une ignorance grandissante de la vie du pays sur lequel elle exerce son pouvoir. Charles Murray explique l’avènement et l’épanouissement de cette classe de privilégiés par la valeur marchande croissante attribuée à l’intelligence, l’explosion de la richesse parmi les plus riches, le perfectionnement des mécanismes de sélection à l’université qui se sont mis en place dans les universités d’élite dès les années 1960 (« les entrants à Harvard en 1952 auraient figuré parmi les 10 % moins bons de ceux admis en 1960 » p. 55) et l’homogamie cognitive qui résulte des unions entre personnes de très haut niveau éducatif. Cette élite cultive l’entre-soi et s’auto-reproduit. C’est ce que Robert Reich appelait déjà en 1991 « la sécession de ceux qui réussissent ». Même dans des villes réputées pour leur diversité, celle‑ci est trompeuse : à New York, elle « n’existe que dans la rue. Dès que les gens ont pénétré dans leur bureau ou leur appartement, ils se retrouvent avec des collègues et des voisins qui appartiennent aux tous derniers centiles de la distribution par revenu et niveau éducatif » (p. 73). À titre d’exemple, Charles Murray classe les treize quartiers (zipcodes) les plus chics de Washington en fonction du centile de répartition combinant richesse et l’éducation : « Onze d’entre eux se trouvaient dans le 99^ème centile. Et pas n’importe quelle place dans ce centile. Dix sur onze se situaient dans la moitié supérieure de ce centile, classement qui n’est partagé que par moins de 5 Américains sur 1000 en moyenne » (p. 81).  En 2000, les quartiers qu’il appelle « the Big Four », situés à New York, Washington, Los Angeles et San Francisco, rassemblaient 39 % de cette élite étroite vivant dans ces quartiers huppés (SuperZips, dernier percentile). Une étude de la localisation, en 2004, de la promotion de Harvard, Princeton et Yale en 1979, montre que 83 % d’entre eux résident dans les quartiers du dernier décile combinant revenus et niveau éducatif. Cette élite conjugue un mode de vie en tous points étranger à celui de la plupart des Américains, tant dans sa façon de manger, de se distraire ou d’élever ses enfants pour lesquels la course aux meilleures écoles commence très tôt. La transmission passe désormais par le maintien d’un capital cognitif, favorisé par l’homogamie cognitive, l’entre-soi et l’énergie dépensée pour placer ses enfants dans les meilleures conditions possibles afin de répondre aux critères de sélection des plus grandes universités. Cette élite n’a aucune idée des préoccupations et des conditions de vie des Américains ordinaires. C’est le revers de l’efficacité croissante qu’a eue l’Amérique à orienter vers les meilleures universités les jeunes gens aux performances intellectuelles les plus élevées et à injecter ce capital humain dans l’économie américaine. Que sont devenues les vertus fondatrices de la société américaine au fil de cette transformation qui a accompagné le développement d’une contre-culture dans les années 1960, puis d’une réaction à cette dernière dans les années 1980, et enfin d’une synthèse plus ou moins heureuse opérée par ce que David Brooks a appelé les Bobos ? (…) L’Amérique, comme projet, a reposé, selon lui, sur quatre vertus fondatrices : l’ardeur au travail, l’honnêteté, le mariage et la religiosité. Comment ont-elles traversé ces années de turbulence dans les deux segments extrêmes de l’échelle sociale, les 20 % les mieux éduqués et les plus riches et les 30 %  les moins dotés des Américains âgés de 30-49 ans ? Établir ce que sont les 20 % et 30 % en question sur une période aussi longue est en soi un problème ardu, les compétences requises dans les mêmes professions ayant évolué avec le temps. Charles Murray va le résoudre en affectant aux Américains blancs âgés de 30-49 ans,  le score cognitif correspondant au plus haut diplôme obtenu en lui ajoutant celui correspondant à une standardisation du score cognitif requis pour la profession exercée ou en doublant le premier en l’absence d’emploi. Afin de rendre l’analyse plus vivante, il affecte une résidence fictive aux 20 % les mieux dotés – Belmont, quartier chic de Boston – et aux 30 % les moins dotés – Fishtown, quartier populaire du Nord-Est de Philadelphie, en voie de boboïsation en fin de période. Cette localisation fictive lui permet d’aller au-delà des analyses statistiques pour consacrer un chapitre entier à Fishtown, la ville réelle, à partir de monographies menées par d’autres à Fishtown même ou dans le voisinage immédiat de Fishtown. (…) Charles Murray constate que ces quatre vertus fondatrices ont perdu de leur influence, tout particulièrement à Fishtown, plus touché par la déstructuration de la structure familiale traditionnelle (raréfaction des gens mariés et des enfants élevés par leurs deux parents biologiques) par la délinquance (détenus, libérés conditionnels, mesure de probation), par la rareté des emplois stables et réguliers et par le déclin de la religiosité. L’engagement religieux a reculé à Belmont, mais plus encore à Fishtown où le noyau de pratiquants est si mince que ces derniers font désormais plus figure d’hurluberlus que de ciment communautaire. S’agissant du Fishtown réel, la gentrification qui s’est opérée dans les années 2000 a fait monter les prix immobiliers et a relégué les habitants dans la périphérie. Le Fishtown réel est donc en voie de disparition, mais pas le Fishtown fictif qui s’est relocalisé dans les banlieues ou dans les petites villes de l’Amérique rurale. Charles Murray s’essaie ensuite à mesurer l’étendue du sous-prolétariat, cette partie du prolétariat en grande difficulté, à partir de trois catégories. Il ajoute aux hommes âgés de 30‑49 ans qui ne rapportent pas suffisamment d’argent pour faire vivre un ménage de deux personnes au-dessus du seuil de pauvreté (14 634 $ en 2010), les femmes âgées de 30-49 ans qui élèvent seules leurs enfants et un quart des personnes qui ne sont engagées dans aucune activité associative, religieuse ou non (community isolates). Ces trois catégories sont rares à Belmont et s’y sont peu accrues, contrairement à ce qui s’est passé à Fishtown. Ce sous-prolétariat y a triplé entre 1969 et 2007 juste avant la récession (passant de 9 % à 27 %), alors qu’il n’a guère dépassé 4 % à Belmont. Lorsque Charles Murray inclut les classes intermédiaires (les 50 % de blancs qui ne sont ni du type Fishtown, ni du type Belmont) ce sous-prolétariat représente 19 % des Américains blancs âgés de 30-49 ans en 2009 et a sans doute dépassé les 20 % en 2010. Le capital social, c’est-à-dire la capacité d’agir ensemble, s’est fortement érodé aux Etats‑Unis à partir des années 1960 (Robert Putnam, 2000), mais tout particulièrement à Fishtown, quels que soient les indicateurs choisis : la confiance placée dans les autres en général, les rapports de bon voisinage, l’obligeance ou la croyance selon laquelle les autres se conduisent de manière équitable. Au contraire, même si elle est moins ancrée qu’autrefois dans la vie locale, la nouvelle élite a continué d’avoir une vie sociale plutôt bien remplie. Contrairement à une idée répandue, ce n’est pas parmi les plus démunis que les valeurs américaines fondatrices continuent de prospérer, mais dans l’élite méritocratique qui, après avoir goûté aux joies de la subversion des normes bourgeoises, redécouvre les vertus de la sobriété et de la contrainte. Comme l’écrit David Brooks, « c’est vrai que les Bobos ont appris les vertus de la contrainte et de la sobriété, même si le code de sobriété Bobo doit plus à l’American Medical Association qu’à la rigueur victorienne. » (…) Charles Murray ne laisse aucune place à l’action de l’État pour promouvoir ces valeurs notamment à travers un système éducatif plus performant – dont il a pourtant vanté les mérites du temps où les manuels McGuffey Readers contribuaient à distiller ces valeurs à tous les petits Américains – et qui rééquilibrerait les chances des enfants vivant dans des milieux où « la course à l’échalote » ne commence pas dès le berceau. Sans parler d’autres actions politiques que Routh Douthat détaille dans sa critique publiée dans le New York Times : diminuer les taxes sur le travail, prendre au sérieux la politique familiale, ne pas accueillir des millions d’immigrants peu qualifiés en compétition sur les mêmes segments du marché du travail, réduire les taux d’incarcération. Charles Murray cite beaucoup David Brooks et partage au moins un point d’accord sur l’évolution souhaitable, qu’il appelle avec emphase le Grand Réveil de la nouvelle élite, lequel peut prêter à sourire mais contient une part de vérité applicable ailleurs qu’aux Etats-Unis sur laquelle nous ferions bien de réfléchir. La complaisance vis-à-vis d’elle même, l’égoïsme et le confort de la pensée relativiste sont les grands défauts de la nouvelle élite méritocratique. David Brooks craint un « affaiblissement des Etats-Unis si les citoyens les plus éminents trouvent plus de satisfaction dans la possession d’une cuisine surdimensionnée que dans l’engagement patriotique (patriotic service) ». Charles Murray parle d’une « élite vaine » qui dysfonctionne autant que le sous-prolétariat, mais d’une autre manière : « au niveau de la famille, ses membres réussissent. Mais ils ont renoncé à leur responsabilité d’établir et de promouvoir des normes. Les membres les plus puissants et les plus prospères de leur classe profitent des avantages de leur position privilégiée, sans s’intéresser aux inconvénients de leur propre comportement. Ils sont actifs politiquement mais, quand il s’agit d’utiliser leur position pour  promouvoir la république, il n’y a plus personne. » (p. 294). Charles Murray met en cause la duplicité et le relativisme (nonjudjmentalism) de cette super‑élite. (…) Cette nouvelle élite manifeste la plus grande tolérance en refusant de juger les conduites personnelles de ses concitoyens, laissant croire que tout se vaut, y compris ce qu’elle refuse obstinément de pratiquer pour elle-même et qui lui réussit si bien. Elle juge inacceptable d’utiliser des qualificatifs désobligeants pour personne « à l’exception des gens qui ne partagent pas leur opinion politique, des chrétiens fondamentalistes et du prolétariat blanc des zones rurales » (p. 290). Charles Murray apporte un autre sujet de réflexion sur le système méritocratique, dont on a tendance à faire le pivot de la justice sociale. Depuis plusieurs générations, ce système a produit aux Etats-Unis, comme dans d’autres pays, dont la France aussi, une élite qui s’auto‑reproduit. Ce n’est plus exclusivement la richesse transmise qui assure la réussite de ses propres enfants, mais l’adoption de conduites éducatives, un entre-soi, une sécession du monde ordinaire visant à leur garantir, autant que faire se peut, d’être les meilleurs dans cette compétition méritocratique. Si les qualités cognitives se transmettent aussi bien que la richesse autrefois, comment faut-il rebattre les cartes ? Il me semble, qu’à cet égard, l’excès d’attention portée à la richesse est une forme d’anachronisme qui dissimule une bonne partie des enjeux de la justice sociale. Michèle Tribalat

I think like a lot of people I was surprised, maybe not as surprised as everybody else. But, yeah, it was a pretty big shocker. (…) I think I heard a lot of the things that people have talked about. I heard a very large amount of frustration, a feeling that things weren’t going especially well, also that the elites didn’t care necessarily about a lot of the folks living in middle America. So I do think that feeling of alienation and frustration really drove a lot of people to make a political decision that obviously a lot of people don’t quite understand. (…) I think it’s important to ask, too pessimistic for who? And my sense, if you look at the polling, is that the most pessimistic of sub-demographic in our entire country is the white working class. And so, yes, he was very pessimistic. He was very critical of the direction of the country. But there was one group of people in the country for whom that message really made sense and rang true. (…) I don’t think in a wholesale way. There is obviously an element of sort of racial anxiety that animates at least part of Trump’s appeal. But, you know, my sense is the gross majority of people who voted for Trump were not primarily motivated by anything like racial animus. And if we talk like it was, then I think we do ourselves a disservice because we sort of discredit some of the very real things that are going on in this area of the country. (…) I think some folks – and again, I wouldn’t say that everyone or even most people feel like that. But I definitely think that there are some people who are motivated by a certain fear that other people are getting ahead of them in the proverbial line. And that’s some of what’s going on. But again, I think that a lot of folks are more motivated by the sense that things just aren’t going especially well and nobody really cares about them. (…) again, I don’t know how large the population is. But my suspicion is that there are a lot of people who were at least relatively attracted to the optimistic message of Obama. And over the last eight years they’ve really had their optimism shattered, and so were willing to go for somebody like Trump. (…) Just because he was so different. Because he was offering a very harsh critique of sort of mainstream elite opinion. And he was offering it at a time when a lot of folks felt like the elites had failed in various ways. J.D. Vance

As an economic experiment, if your goal is to promote growth and innovation, [Silicon valley]’s incredibly successful. As a social experiment, if you’re meaning to foster a long-term sense of community, and an attachment not just to the people that you see every day but the people that live around you, then it is not going very well at all. (…) Poor in Middletown is you live in a really crappy, dilapidated house and you get your food through food stamps. Poor out here is: ‘I’m sleeping in a street, I have no one who I really depend on’. (…) There’s this worry that I have that most of the people who live here don’t feel a special attachment to the place, or to the people who are less fortunate who live here. (…) It is in your face, in your family, in your home. (…) There’s absolutely been a difference in a way I think the country has responded psychologically to the crack epidemic versus the opioid epidemic. So I think a lot of black Americans are completely justified in being sensitive about that fact. (… [white privilege] collapses a poor kid who is the son of an unemployed coalminer into the same group as a rich boarding school kid who grew up in New England. (…) when Trump [delivered] a very similar message – your communities are falling apart, you can’t get any jobs, it’s terrible – to white audiences, they were much more willing to listen. (…) I think that Obama is everything that the American meritocracy values at a time when a lot of us feel like the American meritocracy doesn’t value very much about us at all. It is just sort of like everything about him. He’s like the American ideal at the very moment that we feel like we’re the opposite of the American ideal. (…) The natural question that comes – especially in the modern political context as part of that – is the fact he has black skin. I think for some people that’s definitely part of it. But I continue to think the racial explanation of the reaction to Obama doesn’t quite capture how much everything about him is both enviable but also dislikable. Because we dislike the things that we envy. (…) He talks in a way that a professor talks, he talks in a way that you sort of aspire to talk if you’re a young law student. Trump talks like a guy at a bar in West Virginia. Trump talks like my dad sitting around the dinner table. J.D. Vance

My politics had started to drift to the right of my family, many of them classic blue dog Democrats. Still, I admired President Clinton in a way that happens when someone like you really makes it. He was a poor boy with a vaguely Southern accent, raised by a single mother with a heavy dose of loving grandparents. As my grandmother told me, presidents were almost always rich people, but Bill Clinton was one of us. Yet it was that very relatability that made Mr. Clinton’s personal failings frightening. The data shows that working-class families like mine face much higher rates of marital strife and domestic instability. Demons like Mr. Clinton’s had haunted my home and family for generations, and at an age when I first began to develop strong feelings about my future, I knew that I wanted to outrun them. I cared little for Mr. Clinton’s elite education, his economic success or even his ascendancy to the most powerful office in the world. I cared that he had managed to build the domestic tranquillity that he lacked as a child. But here, in one sex scandal, he had blown it all up. If a man of his abilities had done this, then what hope was there for me? I often wonder how many kids look at our current president the way I once looked at President Clinton. Barack Obama was elected during my second year of college, and save for his skin color, he had much in common with Bill Clinton: Despite an unstable life with a single mother, aided by two loving grandparents, he had made in his adulthood a family life that seemed to embody my sense of the American ideal. I suspected that there were skeletons lurking in his closet, too. Surely this was a man with a secret sex addiction, or at least an alcohol problem. I secretly guessed that before the end of his term, some major personal scandal would reveal his family life to be a sham. I disagreed with many of his positions, so perhaps a dark part of me wanted such a scandal to come out. But it never came. He and his wife treated each other with clear love and respect, and he adored and cared for his children. Whatever scars his childhood left, he refused to let those scars control him. The president’s example offered something no other public figure could: hope. I wanted so desperately to have what he had — a happy marriage and beautiful, thriving children. But I thought that those things belonged to people unlike me, to those who came from money and intact nuclear families. For the rest of us, past was destiny. Yet here was the president of the United States, a man whose history looked something like mine but whose future contained something I wanted. His life stood in stark contrast to my greatest fear. Eventually, I achieved something roughly similar to the president’s early, personal accomplishments: a prestigious law degree, a strong professional career and a modicum of fame as a writer. There were many personal heroes in my life: aunts and uncles, a protective sister, a father who re-entered my life at the right time. But I benefited, too, from the example of a man whose public life showed that we need not be defeated by the domestic hardships of youth. It is one of the great failures of recent political history that the Republican Party was too often unable to disconnect legitimate political disagreements from the fact that the president himself is an admirable man. Part of this opposition comes from this uniquely polarized moment in our politics, part of it comes from Mr. Obama’s leadership style — more disconnected and cerebral than personal and emotive — and part of it (though a smaller amount than many on the left suppose) comes from the color of his skin. On Jan. 20, the political side of my brain will breathe a sigh of relief at Mr. Obama’s departure. I will hope for better policy from the new administration, a health reform package closer to my ideological preferences, and a new approach to foreign policy. But the child who so desperately wanted an American dream, with a happy family at its core will feel something different. For at a pivotal time in my life, Barack Obama gave me hope that a boy who grew up like me could still achieve the most important of my dreams. For that, I’ll miss him, and the example he set. J.D. Vance

Experts have warned for years now that our rates of geographic mobility have fallen to troubling lows. Given that some areas have unemployment rates around 2 percent and others many times that, this lack of movement may mean joblessness for those who could otherwise work. But from the community’s perspective, mobility can be a problem. The economist Matthew Kahn has shown that in Appalachia, for instance, the highly skilled are much likelier to leave not just their hometowns but also the region as a whole. This is the classic “brain drain” problem: Those who are able to leave very often do. The brain drain also encourages a uniquely modern form of cultural detachment. Eventually, the young people who’ve moved out marry — typically to partners with similar economic prospects. They raise children in increasingly segregated neighborhoods, giving rise to something the conservative scholar Charles Murray calls “super ZIPs.” These super ZIPs are veritable bastions of opportunity and optimism, places where divorce and joblessness are rare. As one of my college professors recently told me about higher education, “The sociological role we play is to suck talent out of small towns and redistribute it to big cities.” There have always been regional and class inequalities in our society, but the data tells us that we’re living through a unique period of segregation. This has consequences beyond the purely material. Jesse Sussell and James A. Thomson of the RAND Corporation argue that this geographic sorting has heightened the polarization that now animates politics. This polarization reflects itself not just in our voting patterns, but also in our political culture: Not long before the election, a friend forwarded me a conspiracy theory about Bill and Hillary Clinton’s involvement in a pedophilia ring and asked me whether it was true. It’s easy to dismiss these questions as the ramblings of “fake news” consumers. But the more difficult truth is that people naturally trust the people they know — their friend sharing a story on Facebook — more than strangers who work for faraway institutions. And when we’re surrounded by polarized, ideologically homogeneous crowds, whether online or off, it becomes easier to believe bizarre things about them. This problem runs in both directions: I’ve heard ugly words uttered about “flyover country” and some of its inhabitants from well-educated, generally well-meaning people. I’ve long worried whether I’ve become a part of this problem. For two years, I’d lived in Silicon Valley, surrounded by other highly educated transplants with seemingly perfect lives. It’s jarring to live in a world where every person feels his life will only get better when you came from a world where many rightfully believe that things have become worse. And I’ve suspected that this optimism blinds many in Silicon Valley to the real struggles in other parts of the country. So I decided to move home, to Ohio. (…) we often frame civic responsibility in terms of government taxes and transfer payments, so that our society’s least fortunate families are able to provide basic necessities. But this focus can miss something important: that what many communities need most is not just financial support, but talent and energy and committed citizens to build viable businesses and other civic institutions. Of course, not every town can or should be saved. Many people should leave struggling places in search of economic opportunity, and many of them won’t be able to return. Some people will move back to their hometowns; others, like me, will move back to their home state. The calculation will undoubtedly differ for each person, as it should. But those of us who are lucky enough to choose where we live would do well to ask ourselves, as part of that calculation, whether the choices we make for ourselves are necessarily the best for our home communities — and for the country. J. D. Vance

“ Hillbilly Elegy ” is a very important book and it also resonated with me in a very personal way because I also experienced the problems of rural poverty. I grew up in a small town in Western Pennsylvania. My father was a coal miner. He worked in these coal mines of Western Pennsylvania and occasionally he worked in steel mills in Western Pennsylvania. He died at the age of 39, with a lung disease. Left my mother with six kids and I was the oldest at 12 years of age. My father had a 10th grade education, my mother had a 10th grade education. My mother who lived to the ripe old age of 94, raised us by cleaning house occasionally. Initially we were on relief. We call it welfare now. She got off welfare and supported us by cleaning house; and what I distinctly remember about growing up in rural poverty is hunger. (…) Now, given my family background, black person, black family in rural poverty; as one of my colleagues at Harvard told me, the odds that I would end up at Harvard as a University professor and capital U on University, are very nearly zero. Like J.D. I’m an outlier. An outlier in — Malcolm Gladwell says in his book “ Outlier, The Study of Success. ” We are both outliers; but it’s interesting that J.D. never talks about holding himself up by his own bootstraps, and that’s something that I reject. I don’t refer to myself that way, because both J.D. and I, were in the right places at the right times, and we had significant individuals who were there to rescue us from poverty and enabled us to escape. We are the outliers being at the right place at the right time, and when I think about your question, that’s one thing I think about; how lucky I was. I had some significant individuals who helped me escape poverty. (…) ointing out some differences that I have with J.D. It’s really kind of a matter of emphasis. Not that we differ, it’s just a matter of emphasis. First of all, we both agree that too many liberal social scientists focus on social structure and ignore cultural conditions. You know, they talk about poverty, joblessness and discrimination, but they also don’t talk about some of the cultural conditions, that grow out of these situations, in response to these situations. Too many conservatives focus on cultural forces and ignore structural factors. Now J.D. has made the same point in “ Hillbilly Elegy ” and you also have made the same point in some subsequent interviews talking about the book. Now where we disagree and this relates back to your question, Camille, is in the interpretation of these cultural factors. J.D. places a lot of emphasis on agency. That people even in the most impoverished circumstances have choices that can either improve or exacerbate their situation, their predicaments. And I also think that a gency is important and should not be ignored, even in situations where individuals confront overwhelming structural impediments. But what J.D., and I’d like to hear your response to this J.D., wha t you don’t make explicit or emphasize enough from my point of view, is that agency is also constrained by these structural factors, even among people who you know, make positive choices to improve their lives, there are still constraints and I maintain th at the part of your book where you talking about agency, really cries out for a deeper interrogation. A deeper interrogation of how personal a gency is expanded or inhibited by the circumstance that the poor or working classes confront, including you know, their interactions and families, social networks , and institutions, in these distressed communities. In other words, what I’m trying to suggest is that personal agency is recursively associated with the structural forces within which it operates. And here you know, it’s sort of insightful to talk about intermediaries and insightful to talk about people who aid, who help you in making choices, and you do that well in the book. But here’s the point, given the American belief system on poverty and welfare in which Americans as you point out Camille, place far greater emphasis on personal shortcomings as opposed to structural barriers and especially when you’re talking about the behavior of African Americans. I believe that explanations that focus — don’t get me wrong, you don’t even talk about African Americans in the sense, I’m talking about people out there in the general public. Given this focus on personal shortcomings as opposed to structural barriers in a common for outcomes, I believe that explanations that focus on agency are likely to overshadow explanations that focus on structural impediments. Some people read a book, but they’re not that sophisticated, the take away will be those personal factors and you know, I would have liked to have seen you sort of try to put things in context you know. Talk about the constraints that people have. Now this relates to the second point I want to make. In addition, to feeling that they have little control over themselves, that is lack of agency. You point out that the individuals in these hillbilly communities tend to blame themselves — I’m sorry, blame everyone but themselves, and the term you used to explain this phenomenon is cognitive dissonance, when our beliefs are not consistent with our behaviors. And I agree, and many people often do tend to blame others and not themselves, but I think that when we talk about cognitive dissonance, we also have to recognize that individuals in these communities do indeed have some complaints, some justifiable complaints, including complaints about industries that have pulled off stakes and relocated to cheaper labor areas overseas and in the process, have devastated communities like Middletown, Ohio. Including complaints about automation replacing the jobs of cashiers and parking lot attendants. Including the complaints that government and corporate actions have undermined unions and therefore led to a decrease in the wages or workers in Middletown. (…) And let me also point out, here’s where we really do agree. We both agree that there are cultural practices within families and so on and in communities that reinforce problems created by the structural barriers. (…) Practiced behaviors that perpetuate poverty and disadvantage. So, this we agree. Too often liberals ignore the role of these cultural forces in perpetuating or reinforcing conditions associated with poverty or concentrated (inaudible). (…) even in extreme property, my mother kept telling me, you’re going to college. And my Aunt Janice also reinforced — my Aunt Janice was the first person in my extended family who got a college education, and I used to go to New York to visit her during the summer months, and I said you know, I want to be like Aunt Janice, you know? (…) you really see this when you look at neighborhoods. Neighborhoods in which an overwhelming majority of the population are poor, but employed are entirely different from neighborhoods in which people are poor but jobless. Jobless neighborhoods trigger all kinds of problems. Crime, drug addiction, gang behavior, violence. And one of the things that I had focused on when I wrote my book, When Work Disappears is what happens to intercity neighborhoods that experience increasing levels of joblessness. And we did some research in Chicago and it was really you know, sad, talking to some of the mothers who were just fearful about allowing their children to go outside because the neighborhood was so incredibly dangerous. And I remember talking with one woman and she says — who was obese and she says you know, I went to the doctor he said that I should go out and exercise. Can you imagine jogging in this neighborhood? Because the joblessness had created problems among young people who were trying to make ends meet and they’re involved in crime and drugs and so on. So, I would say that if you want to focus on improving neighborhoods, the first thing that I would do would try to increase or enhance employment opportunities. (…) I don’t know if the conditions have changed that much, since I wrote The Truly Disadvantaged. The one big difference is that I think there’s increasing technology and automation that has created problems for a lot of low skilled workers. You know, I mentioned automation replacing jobs that cashiers held, and parking lot attendants held. So, you have a combination not only of the relocation of industries overseas, that I talked about in The Truly Disadvantaged; but now you have increasing automation and technology replacing jobs, and this worries me because I think that people who have poor education are going to be in difficult situations increasingly down the road. You look at intercity schools, not only schools in intercities, but in many other neighborhoods, and kids are not being properly educated. So, they’re not being prepared for the changes that are occurring in the economy. I remember one social scientist saying that it’s as if — talking about the black population. It’s as if racism and racial discrimination put black people in their place only to watch increasing technology and automation destroy that place. So, the one significant difference from the time I wrote The Truly Disadvantaged in 1987, is the growing problems created by increasing technology for the poor.(…) it seems that poor whites right now are more pessimistic than any group, and the question is why. I was sort of impressed with your analysis of the white working class in the age of Trump. You know, you pointed out that when Barack Obama became president there were a lot of people in your community who were really struggling and who believe that the modern American meritocracy did not seem to apply to them. These people were not doing well, and then you have this black president who’s a successful product of meritocracy who has raised the hope of African Americans and he represented every positive thing that these working-class folks that you write about did not possess or lacked. And Trump emerged as candidate who sort of spoke to these people. What is interesting is that if you look at the Pew Research polls, recent Pew Research polls, I think you pointed this out in your book, the working-class whites right now are more pessimistic than any other group about their economic future and their children’s future. Now is that pessimism justified? I think they’re overly pessimistic. I still maintain that to be black, poor and jobless is worse than being white, poor and jobless, okay? But, for some reason, the white poor is more pessimistic. Now I think with respect to the black poor and working class has kind of an Obama effect you know. I think that may wear off and then blacks will become even more equally as pessimistic as whites in a few years. (this reminds me of your points J.D., reminds me of a paper that Robert Sampson, a colleague at Harvard and I wrote in 1995 entitled Toward a Theory of Race, Crime and Urban Inequality. A paper that has become a classic actually in the field of criminology because it’s generated dozens of research studies. Our basic thesis we were addressing you know, race and violent crime, is that racial disparities and violent crime are attributable in large part to the persistent structural disadvantages that are disproportionately concentrated in African American urban communities. Nonetheless, we argue that the ultimate cause of crime were similar for both whites and blacks, and we pose a central question. In American cities, it is possible to reproduce in white communities the structural circumstances under which many blacks live. You know, the whites haven’t fully experienced the structural reality that blacks have experienced does not negate the power of our theory because we argue had whites been exposed to the same structural conditions as blacks then white communities would behave – – the crime rate would be in the predicted direction. And then we had an epiphany. What about the rural white communities that you talk about. Where you’re not only talking about joblessness, you’re not only talking about poverty, but you’re also talking about family structure. So, here in Appalachia, you could reproduce some of the conditions that exist in intercity neighborhoods and therefore it would be good to test our theory in these areas because we’d be looking at the family structure. The rates of single parent families. We’d be looking at joblessness, we’d be loo king at poverty. So, we need to move beyond the urban areas and see if we can look at communities that come close to approximating or even worse in some cases, and some intercity neighborhoods. (…) Mark Lilla and a number of other post-election analysts observed that as you point out that the Democrats should not make the same mistake that they made in the last election, namely an attempt to mobilize people of color, women, immigrants and the LGBT community with identity politics. They tended to ignore the problems of poor white Americans. I was watching the Democratic convention with my wife on a cruise to Alaska, and one concern I had was there did not seem to be any representatives on the stage representing poor white America. I could just see some of these poor whites saying they don’t care about us. They’ve got all these blacks, they’ve got immigrants, they’ve got (inaudible), but you don’t have any of us on the stage. Maybe I’m overstating the point, but I was concerned about that. Now one notable exception, critics like Mark Lilla point out was Bernie Sanders. Bernie Sanders had a progressive and unifying populous economic message in the Democratic primaries. A message that resonated with a significant segment of the white lower-class population. Lower class, working class populations. Bernie Sanders was not the Democratic nominee and Donald Trump was able to, as we all know, capture notable support from these populations with a divisive not unifying populous message. I agree with Mark Lilla that we don’t want to make the same mistake again. We’ve go to reach out to all groups. We’ve got to start to focus on coalition politics. We have to develop a sense of interdependence where groups come to recognize that they can’t accomplish goals without the support of other groups. We have to frame issues differently. We can’t go the same route. We can’t give up on the white working class. (…) Addressing the question of increase in economic segregation. People don’t realize that racial segregation is on the decline, while economic segregation is a segregation of families by income is on the increase. William Julius Wilson

I’m a bit of a fan boy of William Julius Wilson as I wrote Hillbilly Elegy, so it was real exciting to be able to get him to sign this book.  (…) Culture (…) is a really, really, difficult and amorphous concept to define, and one of the things that I was trying to do with “ Hillbilly Elegy ” is try to in some ways draw the discussion away from this structure versus personal responsibility narrative and convince us to look at culture as a third and I think very important variable. I often think that the way that conservatives, and I’m a conservative, talk about culture is in some ways an excuse to end the conversation instead of starting a much more important conversation. It’s look at their bad culture, look at their deficient culture, we can’t do anything to help them; instead of trying to understand culture as this much bigger social and institutional force that really is important that some cases can come from problems related to poverty and some cases can come from a host of different factors that are difficult to understand. So, here’s what I mean by that. One of the most important I think cultural problems that I talk about is the prevalence of family and stability and family trauma in some of the communities that I write about; and I take it as a given that that trauma and that instability is really bad, that it has really negative downstream effects on whether children are able to get an education, whether their able to enter the workforce, whether they’re  able to raise and maintain successful families themselves. I think it’s tempting to sort of look at the problems of family instability and families like mine and say there’s a structural problem if only people had access to better economic opportunities, they wouldn’t have this problem. I think that’s partially true, but also consequently partially false. I think there’s a tendency on the right to look at that and say these parents need to take better care of their families and of their children, and unless they do it, there’s nothing that we can do. And I think again, that is maybe partially true, but it’s also very significantly false. What I’m trying to point to in this concept of culture, is we know that when children grow up in very unstable families that it has important cognitive effects, we know that it has important psychological effects, and unless we understand the problem of family instability and trauma, not just as a structural problem, or problem with personal responsibility, but as a long-term problem, in some cases inherited from multiple generations back, then we’re not going to be able to appreciate what’s really going on in some of these families and why family instability and trauma is so durable and so difficult to actually solve. So, I tend to think of culture as in some ways, this way to sum all of the things that are neither structural nor individual. What is it that’s going on in people’s environments good and bad that make it difficult for them to climb out of poverty. What are the things that they inherit. It’s not just from their own families, but from multiple generations back. Behaviors, expectations, environmental attitudes that make it really hard for them to succeed and do well. That’s the concept of culture that I think is most important, and also frankly that I think is missing a little bit from our political conversation when we talk about these questions of poverty, we’re really comfortable talking about personal responsibility, we’re really comfortable talking about structural problems. We don’t often talk about culture in this way that I’m trying to talk about it, in “ Hillbilly Elegy. ” (…) the second point that I wanted to make (…) is this question of Agency and whether I overemphasize the role of Agency. I think that for me, this is a really tough line to tow because I’m sort of writing about these problems you know, having in my personal memory, I’m not that far removed from a lot of them. I know that myself, one of the biggest problems that I faced was that I really did start to give up on myself early in high school, and I think that’s a really significant problem. At the same time, I understand and recognize the problem that Bill mentions which is that we have this tendency to sort of overemphasize Personal Agency and to proverbially blame the victim for a lot of these problems. So, what I was trying to do with this discussion of Personal Agency in the book, and I may have failed, but this is the effort, this is what I’m really trying to accomplish. Is that the first instance, I do think that it’s important for kids like me in circumstances like mine, to pick up the book and to have at least some reinforcement of the Agency that they have. I do think that’s a significant problem from the prospective of kids who grew up in communities like mine. The second thing that I’m trying to do, is talk about Personal Agency, not jus t from the prospective of individual poor people, but from the entire community that surrounds them. So, one of the things that I talk about is as religious communities in these areas, do they have the, as I say in the book, toughness to build Churches that encourage more social engagement as opposed to more social disaffection. I think that’s a question of Personal Agency, not from the perspective of the impoverished kid, but from a religious leader and community leaders that exist in their neighborhood. So, I think that sense of Personal Agency is really important. One of the worries that I have, is that when we talk about the problems of impoverished kids and this is especially true amongst sort of my generation, so this is — I’m a tail end of t he millennials here, is that we tend to think about helping people, 10 million people at a time a very superficial level, and one of the calls to action that I make in the book with this — by pointing out to Personal Agency is the idea that it can be really impactful to make a difference in 10 lives at a very deep level at the community level. And I think that sometimes is missing from these conversations. And then, the final point that I’ll make is that there’s a difference between recognizing the importance of Personal Agency and I think ignoring the role of structural factors in some of these problems, right? So, the example that I used to highlight this in the book is this question of addiction. So, there’s some interesting research that suggests that people who believe inherently that their addiction is a disease, show slightly less proclivity to actually fight that addiction and overcome that addiction. So, that creates sort of a catch 22, because we know there are biological components to addiction. We know that there are these sorts of structural non-personal decision-making drivers of addiction, and yet, if you totally buy in to the non-individual choice explanation for addiction, you show less of a proclivity to fight it. So, I think that there is this really tough under current to some of our discussions on these issues, where as a society we want to simultaneously recognize the barriers that people face, but also encourage them not to play a terrible hand in a terrible way, and that’s what I’m trying to do with this discussion of Personal Agency. The final point that I’ll make on that, is that the person who towed that line better than anyone I’ve ever known was my Grandma, my Ma’ma who I think is in some ways the hero of the book. She always told me. Look J.D., like is unfair for us, but don’t be like those people who think the deck is hopelessly stacked against them. I think that’s a sentiment that you hear far too infrequently among America’s elites. This simultaneous recognition that life is unfair for a lot of poor Americans, but that we still have to emphasize the role of individual agency in spite of that unfairness and I think that’s again a difficult balancing act. I may not have struck that balancing act perfectly in the book, but that was the intention. (…) the first thing is definitely you know, going back to my grandma. I think if anybody had a reason for pessimism and cynicism about the future, it was her. It’s sort of difficult to imagine a woman who had lived a more difficult life and yet ma’ma had this constant optimism about the future, in the sense that we had to do better because that was just the way that America worked. I mean I think that she was this woman who had this deep and abiding faith in the American dream in a way that is obviously disappearing And in fact, as I wrote about in the book, was I started to see disappearing even you know, when I was a young kid in my early 20’s. So, I think that my grandma was a huge part of that. I also think that the Marine Corp was a really huge part of that, and this is sort of a transformational experience that I write about in the book. The military is this really remarkable institution. It brings people from diverse backgrounds together, gets them on the same team. Gets them marching proverbially and literally towards the same goal, and for a kid who had grown up in a community that was starting to lose faith in that American dream, I think that the military was a really useful way to, as I say in the book, teach a certain amount of willfulness as opposed to despair and hopelessness. So, I think that was a really critical piece of it. (…) On the other hand, one thing I really worried about and one thing that I increasingly worried about as I actually did research for the book, is this idea of faith and religion, not just as something that people believe in, but as an actual positive institutional and social role player in their lives. And one of the things you do see, that this is something that Charles Murray’s written about, is that you see the institutions of faith declining in some of these lower income communities faster than you do in middle and upper income communities. I don’t think you have to be a person of faith to think that that’s worrisome. I think you can just read a paper by Jonathan Gruber that talks about all of these really positive social impacts of being a regular participatory Church member. So, you know, I think I was lucky in that sense, but a lot of folks, and when I look at the community right now, it worries me a little bit that you don’t see these robust social institutions in the same way that you certainly did 30, 40 years ago, and even when I was growing up in Middletown. The last point that I’ll make about that, is that (…) these trends often take half a century or more to really reveal themselves and I do sometimes see signs of resilience in some of these communities that I sort of didn’t fully anticipate and didn’t expect when the book was published. So, one of the things I’ve started to realize for example is when we talk about the decline of institutional faith, even though I continue to worry about that, one of the institutions that’s actually picked up the slack are groups like Alcoholics Anonymous and Narcotics Anonymous. They almost have this faith effect. It brings people together. There’s even a sort of liturgical element to some of these meetings that I find really, really fascinating and interesting. So, people try to find and replace community when it’s lost but you know, clearly, they haven’t at least as of yet, replaced it even remotely to the degree that it has been lost which is why I think you see some of the issues that we do. (…) on this question of identity politics, I think that what worries me is that a lot — it’s not a recognition that there are disadvantaged non-white groups that need some help or there needs to be some closing of the gap you know. When I talk to folks back home, very conservative people, they’re actually pretty open-minded if you talk about the problems that exist in the black ghetto because of problems of concentrated poverty and the fact that the black ghetto was in some ways created by housing policy. It was the choice of black Americans. It was in some ways created by housing policy. I find actually a lot of openness when I talk to friends and family about that. What I find no openness about is when somebody who they don’t know, and who they think judges them, points at them and says you need to apologize for your white privilege. So, I think that in some ways making these questions of disadvantage zero sum, is really toxic, but I think that’s one way that the Democrats really lost the white working class in the 2016 election. The second piece that occurs to me, and this applies across the political spectrum, is that what we’re trying to do in the United States, it’s very easy to be cynical about American politics, but we’re rying to build a multi-racial, multi-ethnic, multi-religious nation, not just a conglomeration, an actual nation of people from all of these different tribes and unify them around a common creed. I think that’s really delicate. It’s basically never been done success fully over a long period in human history and I think it requires a certain amount of rhetorical finesse that we don’t see from many of our politicians on either side these days and that really, really worries me. (…) my general worry with the college education in the book at large is sort of two things. So, the first is that, I think we’ve constructed a society effectively in which a college education is now the only pathway to the middle class, and I think that’s a real failure on our part. It’s not something you see in every country, and I don’t think it necessarily has to be the case here. There are other ways to get post-secondary education and I absolutely think that we have to make that easier, and I really see this as sort of the defining policy challenge of the next 10 years is to create more of those pathways; because the second born on this is that college is a really, really culturally terrifying place for a lot of working class people. We can try to make it less culturally terrifying, we can try to make for the elites of our universities a little bit more welcoming to folks like me, and this is something that I wrote about in the book, really feeling like a true outsider at Yale for the first time, in an educational institution. I think that we also have to acknowledge that part of the reason that people feel like cultural outsiders is for reasons that aren’t necessarily going to be easy to fix, and if we don’t create more pathways for these folks, we shouldn’t be surprised that a lot of them aren’t going to take the one pathway that’s there, that effectively runs through a culturally alien institution.  (…) in certain areas, especially in Ohio, Kentucky, West Virginia and so forth. I think the biggest under reported problem for the baby boomers is the fact that they are taking care of children that they didn’t necessarily anticipate taking care of because of the opioid crisis. This is the biggest dr iver of elder poverty in the State of Ohio, is that you have entire families that have been transplanted from one generation to the next. They were planning for retirement based on one social security income, and now all of a sudden, they have two, three additional mouths to feed. I think my concern for the baby boom generation is especially those folks of course because it’s not just bad for them, it’s bad for these children who are all of a sudden thrown into poverty because of the opioid addition of that middle generation of the parents, of the kids and the sons and daughters of the grandkids. And then the very last question, culture, I think of as a way to understand the sum of the environmental impacts that you can’t necessarily define as structural rights, so the effects of family instability and trauma that exists in people, the effects of social capital and social networks in people’s lives, You know, all of these things I think add up to a broad set of variables that can either promote upward mobility or inhibit upward mobility; and again I think we very often talk about job opportunities and educational opportunities, we very often talk about individual responsibility and Personal Agency. We very rarely I think talk about those middle layers and those institutional factors that in a lot of ways are the real drivers of this problem. (…) on the inequality and concentration wealth, the top thing, I’ll say this one area where I actually think conservative senator Mike Leaf from Utah has had some really, really, interesting ideas. One of the tax reform proposals Senator Leaf has advocated for is actually setting the capital taxation rate at the same rate as the ordinary income rate. Because that’s what’s really driving this difference, right. It’s not ordinary income earners. It’s not salaried professionals. Those Richard Reeve says that’s a problem. It’s primarily actually that folks in the global economy, especially the ultra-elite, folks in the global economy have achieved some sort of economic lift off from the rest of the country and I think that in light of that, it doesn’t make a ton of sense that we continue to have the taxation policy that we do. Frankly, that’s one of the reasons why I am sort of so conflicted about President Trump because I think in some ways instinctively at least the President recognizes this, but we’ll see what actually happens with tax reform over the next few months. The question about job competition is absolutely correct. You can’t just have a better educated workforce but hold the number of workers constant. At the same time, I do think there’s a bit of a chicken and egg problem here right because you know, while the skills gap is overplayed and while it violates all of these rules of Econ 101, one of the things you hear pretty consistently from folks who would l ike to expand, would like to hire more, would like to produce more, is that there are real labor force constraints, especially in what might be called non-cognitive skills, right; and this is a thing that you hear a lot. In my home state if you really want to hire more, and you really want to produce more, and sell more, then the problem is the opioid epidemic has effectively thinned the pool of people who were even able to work. So, I do think that productivity is really important, but I also think that we tend to think of these things in too mathematical and sort of hyper-rational ways, but part of the reason productivity is held back, is because we have real problems in the labor market, and if you fix one, you could help another, and they may create a virtuous cycle. J.D. Vance

It is immoral because it perpetuates a lie: that the white working class that finds itself attracted to Trump has been victimized by outside forces. It hasn’t. The white middle class may like the idea of Trump as a giant pulsing humanoid middle finger held up in the face of the Cathedral, they may sing hymns to Trump the destroyer and whisper darkly about “globalists” and — odious, stupid term — “the Establishment,” but nobody did this to them. They failed themselves. If you spend time in hardscrabble, white upstate New York, or eastern Kentucky, or my own native West Texas, and you take an honest look at the welfare dependency, the drug and alcohol addiction, the family anarchy — which is to say, the whelping of human children with all the respect and wisdom of a stray dog — you will come to an awful realization. It wasn’t Beijing. It wasn’t even Washington, as bad as Washington can be. It wasn’t immigrants from Mexico, excessive and problematic as our current immigration levels are. It wasn’t any of that. Nothing happened to them. There wasn’t some awful disaster. There wasn’t a war or a famine or a plague or a foreign occupation. Even the economic changes of the past few decades do very little to explain the dysfunction and negligence — and the incomprehensible malice — of poor white America. So the gypsum business in Garbutt ain’t what it used to be. There is more to life in the 21st century than wallboard and cheap sentimentality about how the Man closed the factories down. The truth about these dysfunctional, downscale communities is that they deserve to die. Economically, they are negative assets. Morally, they are indefensible. Forget all your cheap theatrical Bruce Springsteen crap. Forget your sanctimony about struggling Rust Belt factory towns and your conspiracy theories about the wily Orientals stealing our jobs. Forget your goddamned gypsum, and, if he has a problem with that, forget Ed Burke, too. The white American underclass is in thrall to a vicious, selfish culture whose main products are misery and used heroin needles. Donald Trump’s speeches make them feel good. So does OxyContin. What they need isn’t analgesics, literal or political. They need real opportunity, which means that they need real change, which means that they need U-Haul. Williamson

This book is about (…) what goes on in the lives of real people when the industrial economy goes south. It’s about reacting to bad circumstances in the worst way possible. It’s about a culture that increasingly encourages social decay instead of counteracting it. The problems that I saw at the tile warehouse run far deeper than macroeconomic trends and policy. too many young men immune to hard work. Good jobs impossible to fill for any length of time. And a young man [one of Vance’s co-workers] with every reason to work — a wife-to-be to support and a baby on the way — carelessly tossing aside a good job with excellent health insurance. More troublingly, when it was all over, he thought something had been done to him. There is a lack of agency here — a feeling that you have little control over your life and a willingness to blame everyone but yourself. This is distinct from the larger economic landscape of modern America. (…) People talk about hard work all the time in places like Middletown [where Vance grew up]. You can walk through a town where 30 percent of the young men work fewer than twenty hours a week and find not a single person aware of his own laziness. (…) I learned little else about what masculinity required of me other than drinking beer and screaming at a woman when she screamed at you. In the end, the only lesson that took was that you can’t depend on people. “I learned that men will disappear at the drop of a hat,” Lindsay [his half-sister] once said. “They don’t care about their kids; they don’t provide; they just disappear, and it’s not that hard to make them go.” (…) Dad’s church offered something desperately needed by people like me. For alcoholics, it gave them a community of support and a sense that they weren’t fighting addiction alone. For expectant mothers, it offered a free home with job training and parenting classes. When someone needed a job, church friends could either provide one or make introductions. When Dad faced financial troubles, his church banded together and purchased a used car for the family. In the broken world I saw around me — and for the people struggling in that world — religion offered tangible assistance to keep the faithful on track. (…) Why didn’t our neighbor leave that abusive man? Why did she spend her money on drugs? Why couldn’t she see that her behavior was destroying her daughter? Why were all of these things happening not just to our neighbor but to my mom? It would be years before I learned that no single book, or expert, or field could fully explain the problems of hillbillies in modern America. Our elegy is a sociological one, yes, but it is also about psychology and community and culture and faith. During my junior year of high school, our neighbor Pattie called her landlord to report a leaky roof. The landlord arrived and found Pattie topless, stoned, and unconscious on her living room couch. Upstairs the bathtub was overflowing — hence, the leaking roof. Pattie had apparently drawn herself a bath, taken a few prescription painkillers, and passed out. The top floor of her home and many of her family’s possessions were ruined. This is the reality of our community. It’s about a naked druggie destroying what little of value exists in her life. It’s about children who lose their toys and clothes to a mother’s addiction. This was my world: a world of truly irrational behavior. We spend our way into the poorhouse. We buy giant TVs and iPads. Our children wear nice clothes thanks to high-interest credit cards and payday loans. We purchase homes we don’t need, refinance them for more spending money, and declare bankruptcy, often leaving them full of garbage in our wake. Thrift is inimical to our being. We spend to pretend that we’re upper class. And when the dust clears — when bankruptcy hits or a family member bails us out of our stupidity — there’s nothing left over. Nothing for the kids’ college tuition, no investment to grow our wealth, no rainy-day fund if someone loses her job. We know we shouldn’t spend like this. Sometimes we beat ourselves up over it, but we do it anyway. (…) Our homes are a chaotic mess. We scream and yell at each other like we’re spectators at a football game. At least one member of the family uses drugs — sometimes the father, sometimes both. At especially stressful times, we’ll hit and punch each other, all in front of the rest of the family, including young children; much of the time, the neighbors hear what’s happening. A bad day is when the neighbors call the police to stop the drama. Our kids go to foster care but never stay for long. We apologize to our kids. The kids believe we’re really sorry, and we are. But then we act just as mean a few days later. (…) I once ran into an old acquaintance at a Middletown bar who told me that he had recently quit his job because he was sick of waking up early I later saw him complaining on Facebook about the “Obama economy” and how it had affected his life. I don’t doubt that the Obama economy has affected many, but this man is assuredly not among them. His status in life is directly attributable to the choices he’s made, and his life will improve only through better decisions. But for him to make better choices, he needs to live in an environment that forces him to ask tough questions about himself. There is a cultural movement in the white working class to blame problems on society or the government, and that movement gains adherents by the day. (…) The wealthy and the powerful aren’t just wealthy and powerful; they follow a different set of norms and mores. … It was at this meal, on the first of five grueling days of [law school job] interviews, that I began to understand that I was seeing the inner workings of a system that lay hidden to most of my kind. … That week of interviews showed me that successful people are playing an entirely different game. (…) I believe we hillbillies are the toughest goddamned people on this earth. … But are we tough enough to do what needs to be done to help a kid like Brian? Are we tough enough to build a church that forces kids like me to engage with the world rather than withdraw from it? Are we tough enough to look ourselves in the mirror and admit that our conduct harms our children? Public policy can help, but there is no government that can fix these problems for us. These problems were not created by governments or corporations or anyone else. We created them, and only we can fix them. (…) I believe we hillbillies are the toughest god—-ed people on this earth. But are we tough enough to look ourselves in the mirror and admit that our conduct harms our children? Public policy can help, but there is no government that can fix these problems for us. . . . I don’t know what the answer is precisely, but I know it starts when we stop blaming Obama or Bush or faceless companies and ask ourselves what we can do to make things better.” J.D. Vance

This is the heart of Hillbilly Elegy: how hillbilly white culture fails its children, and how the greatest disadvantages it imparts to its youth are the life of violence and chaos in which they are raised, and the closely related problem of a lack of moral agency. Young Vance was on a road to ruin until certain people — including the US Marine Corps — showed him that his choices mattered, and that he had a lot more control over his fate than he thought. Vance talks about how, in his youth, there was a lot of hardscrabble poverty among his people, but nothing like today, dominated by the devastation of drug addiction. Everything we are accustomed to hearing about black inner city social dysfunction is fully present among these white hillbillies, as Vance documents in great detail. He writes that “hillbillies learn from an early age to deal with uncomfortable truths by avoiding them, or by pretending better truths exist. This tendency might make for psychological resilience, but it also makes it hard for Appalachians to look at themselves honestly.” (…) Vance talks about the hillbilly habit of stigmatizing people who leave the hollers as “too big for your britches” — meaning that you got above yourself. It doesn’t matter that they may have left to find work, and that they’re living a fairly poor life not too far away, in Ohio. The point is, they left, and that is a hard sin to forgive. What, we weren’t good enough for you?  This is the white-people version of “acting white,” if you follow me: the same stigma and shame that poor black people deploy against other poor black people who want to better themselves with education and so on. (…) Vance plainly loves his people, and because he loves them, he tells hard truths about them. He talks about how cultural fatalism destroys initiative. When hillbillies run up against adversity, they tend to assume that they can’t do anything about it. To the hillbilly mind, people who “make it” are either born to wealth, or were born with uncanny talent, winning the genetic lottery. The connection between self-discipline and hard work, and success, is invisible to them. (…) Vance was born into a world of chaos. It takes concentration to follow the trail of family connections. Women give birth out of wedlock, having children by different men. Marriages rarely last, and informal partnerings are more common. Vance has half-siblings by his mom’s different husbands (she has had five to date). In his generation, Vance says, grandparents are often having to raise their grandchildren, because those grandparents, however impoverished and messy their own lives may be, offer a more stable alternative than the incredible instability of the kids’ parents (or more likely, parent). (…) This is what happens in inner-city black culture, as has been exhaustively documented. But these are rural and small-town white people. This dysfunction is not color-based, but cultural. I could not do justice here to describe the violence, emotional and physical, that characterizes everyday life in Vance’s childhood culture, and the instability in people’s outer lives and inner lives. To read in such detail what life is like as a child formed by communities like that is to gain a sense of why it is so difficult to escape from the malign gravity of that way of life. You can’t imagine that life could be any different. Religion among the hillbillies is not much help. Vance says that hillbillies love to talk about Jesus, but they don’t go to church, and Christianity doesn’t seem to have much effect at all on their behavior. Vance’s biological father is an exception. He belonged to a strict fundamentalist church, one that helped him beat his alcoholism and gave him the severe structure he needed to keep his life from going off track. (…) Vance says the best thing about life in his dad’s house was how boring it was. It was predictable. It was a respite from the constant chaos. On the other hand, the religion most hillbillies espouse is a rusticated form of Moralistic Therapeutic Deism. God seems to exist only as a guarantor of ultimate order, and ultimate justice; Jesus is there to assuage one’s pain. Except for those who commit to churchgoing — and believe it or not, this is one of the least churched parts of the US — Christianity is a ghost. (…) One of the most important contributions Vance makes to our understanding of American poverty is how little public policy can affect the cultural habits that keep people poor. He talks about education policy, saying that the elite discussion of how to help schools focuses entirely on reforming institutions. “As a teacher at my old high school told me recently, ‘They want us to be shepherds to these kids. But no one wants to talk about the fact that many of them are raised by wolves.” (…) Vance says his people lie to themselves about the reality of their condition, and their own personal responsibility for their degradation. He says that not all working-class white hillbillies are like this. There are those who work hard, stay faithful, and are self-reliant — people like Mamaw and Papaw. Their kids stand a good chance of making it; in fact, Vance says friends of his who grew up like this are doing pretty well for themselves. Unfortunately, most of the people in Vance’s neighborhood were like his mom: “consumerist, isolated, angry, distrustful.” (…) As I said earlier, the two things that saved Vance were going to live full time with his Mamaw (therefore getting out of the insanity of his mom’s home), and later, going into the US Marine Corps. I’ve already written at too much length about Vance’s story, so I won’t belabor this much longer. Suffice it to say that as imperfect as she was, Mamaw gave young Vance the stability he needed to start succeeding in school. And she wouldn’t let him slack off on his studies. She taught him the value of hard work, and of moral agency. The Marine Corps remade J.D. Vance. It pulverized his inner hillbilly fatalism, and gave him a sense that he had control over his life, and that his choices mattered.  (…) Anyway, Vance talks about how the contemporary hillbilly mindset renders them unfit for participation in life outside their own ghetto. They don’t trust anybody, and are willing to believe outlandish conspiracy theories, particularly if those theories absolve them from responsibility. Hence the enormous popularity of Donald Trump among the white working class. Here’s a guy who will believe and say anything, and who blames Mexicans, Chinese, and Muslims for America’s problems. The elites hate him, so he’s made the right enemies, as far as the white working class is concerned. And his “Make America Great Again” slogan speaks to the deep patriotism that Vance says is virtually a religion among hillbillies. (…) The sense of inner order and discipline Vance learned in the Marine Corps allowed his natural intelligence to blossom. The poor hillbilly kid with the druggie mom ends up at Yale Law School. He says he felt like an outsider there, but it was a serious education in more than the law (…) What he’s talking about is social capital, and how critically important it is to success. Poor white kids don’t have it (neither do poor black or Hispanic kids). You’re never going to teach a kid from the trailer park or the housing project the secrets of the upper middle class, but you can give them what kids like me had: a basic understanding of work, discipline, confidence, good manners, and an eagerness to learn. A big part of the problem for his people, says Vance, is the shocking degree of family instability among the American poor. “Chaos begets chaos. Instability begets instability. Welcome to family life for the American hillbilly.” (…) The worst problems of his culture, the things that held kids like him back, are not things a government program can fix. For example, as a child, his culture taught him that doing well in school made you a “sissy.” Vance says the home is the source of the worst of these problems. There simply is not a policy fix for families and family systems that have collapsed. (…) Voting for Trump is not going to fix these problems. For the black community, protesting against police brutality on the streets is not going to fix their most pressing problems. It’s not that the problems Trump points to aren’t real, and it’s not that police brutality, especially towards minorities, isn’t a problem. It’s that these serve as distractions from the core realities that keep poor white and black people down. A missionary to inner-city Dallas once told me that the greatest obstacle the black and Latino kids he helped out had was their rock-solid conviction that nothing could change for them, and that people who succeeded got that way because they were born white, or rich, or just got lucky. Until these things are honestly and effectively addressed by families, communities, and their institutions, nothing will change. (…) If white lives matter — and they do, because all lives matter — then sentimentality and more government programs aren’t going to rescue these poor people. Vance puts it more delicately than Williamson, but getting a U-Haul and getting away from other poor people — or at least finding some way to get their kids out of there, to a place where people aren’t so fatalistic, lazy, and paranoid — is their best hope. And that is surely true no matter what your race. Rod Dreher

I believe, and so does J.D., that government really does have a meaningful role to play in ameliorating the problems of the poor. But there will never be a government program capable of compensating for the loss of stable family structures, the loss of community, the loss of a sense of moral agency, and the loss of a sense of meaning in the lives of the poor. The solution, insofar as there is a “solution,” is not an either-or (that is, either culture or government), but a both-and. (…) The loss of industrial jobs plays a big role in the catastrophe. J.D. Vance acknowledges that plainly in his book. But it’s not the whole story. The wounds are partly self-inflicted. The working class, he argues, has lost its sense of agency and taste for hard work. In one illuminating anecdote, he writes about his summer job at the local tile factory, lugging 60-pound pallets around. It paid $13 an hour with good benefits and opportunities for advancement. A full-time employee could earn a salary well above the poverty line. That should have made the gig an easy sell. Yet the factory’s owner had trouble filling jobs. During Vance’s summer stint, three people left, including a man he calls Bob, a 19-year-old with a pregnant girlfriend. Bob was chronically late to work, when he showed up at all. He frequently took 45-minute bathroom breaks. Still, when he got fired, he raged against the managers who did it, refusing to acknowledge the impact of his own bad choices. “He thought something had been done to him,” Vance writes. “There is a lack of agency here — a feeling that you have little control over your life and a willingness to blame everyone but yourself.” (…)  JDV openly credits his Mamaw and the Marine Corps with making him the man he is today. He does not claim he got there entirely on his own, by bootstrapping it. The American conservative

A harrowing portrait of the plight of the white working class J. D. Vance’s new book Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and a Culture in Crisis couldn’t have been better timed. For the past year, as Donald Trump has defied political gravity to seize the Republican nomination and transform American politics, those who are repelled by Trump have been accused of insensitivity to the concerns of the white working class. For Trump skeptics, this charge seems to come from left field, and I use that term advisedly. By declaring that a particular class and race has been “ignored” or “neglected,” the Right (or better “right”) has taken a momentous step in the Left’s direction. With the ease of a thrown switch, people once considered conservative have embraced the kind of interest-group politics they only yesterday rejected as a matter of principle. It was the Democrats who urged specific payoffs, er, policies to aid this or that constituency. Conservatives wanted government to withdraw from the redistribution and favor-conferring business to the greatest possible degree. If this was imperfectly achieved, it was still the goal — because it was just. Using government to benefit some groups comes at the expense of all. While not inevitably corrupt, the whole transactional nature of the business does easily tend toward corruption. Conservatives and Republicans understood, or seemed to, that in many cases, when government confers a benefit on one party, say sugar producers, in the form of a tariff on imported sugar, there’s a problem of concentrated benefits (sugar producers get a windfall) and dispersed costs (everyone pays more for sugar, but only a bit more, so they never complain). In the realm of race, sex, and class, the pandering to groups goes beyond bad economics and government waste — and even beyond the injustice of fleecing those who work to support those who choose not to — and into the dangerous territory of pitting Americans against one another. Democrats have mastered the art of sowing discord to reap votes. Powered by Now they have company in the Trumpites. Like Democrats who encourage their target constituencies to nurse grievances against “greedy” corporations, banks, Republicans, and government for their problems, Trump now encourages his voters to blame Mexicans, the Chinese, a “rigged system,” or stupid leaders for theirs. The problems of the white working class should concern every public-spirited American not because they’ve been forgotten or taken for granted — even those terms strike a false note for me — but because they are fellow Americans. How would one adjust public policy to benefit the white working class and not blacks, Hispanics, and others? How would that work? And who would shamelessly support policies based on tribal or regional loyalties and not the general welfare? As someone who has written — perhaps to the point of dull repetition — about the necessity for Republicans to focus less on entrepreneurs (as important as they are) and more on wage earners; as someone who has stressed the need for family-focused tax reform; as someone who has advocated education innovations that would reach beyond the traditional college customers and make education and training easier to obtain for struggling Americans; as someone who trumpeted the Reformicon proposals developed by a group of conservative intellectuals affiliated with the American Enterprise Institute and the Ethics and Public Policy Center; and finally, as someone who has shouted herself hoarse about the key role that family disintegration plays in many of our most pressing national problems, I cannot quite believe that I stand accused of indifference to the white working class. I said that Hillbilly Elegy could not have been better timed, and yes, that’s in part because it paints a picture of Americans who are certainly a key Trump constituency. Though the name Donald Trump is never mentioned, there is no doubt in the reader’s mind that the people who populate this book would be enthusiastic Trumpites. But the book is far deeper than an explanation of the Trump phenomenon (which it doesn’t, by the way, claim to be). It’s a harrowing portrait of much that has gone wrong in America over the past two generations. It’s Charles Murray’s “Fishtown” told in the first person. The community into which Vance was born — working-class whites from Kentucky (though transplanted to Ohio) — is more given over to drug abuse, welfare dependency, indifference to work, and utter hopelessness than statistics can fully convey. Vance’s mother was an addict who discarded husbands and boyfriends like Dixie cups, dragging her two children through endless screaming matches, bone-chilling threats, thrown plates and worse violence, and dizzying disorder. Every lapse was followed by abject apologies — and then the pattern repeated. His father gave him up for adoption (though that story is complicated), and social services would have removed him from his family entirely if he had not lied to a judge to avoid being parted from his grandmother, who provided the only stable presence in his life. Vance writes of his family and friends: “Nearly every person you will read about is deeply flawed. Some have tried to murder other people, and a few were successful. Some have abused their children, physically or emotionally.” His grandmother, the most vivid character in his tale (and, despite everything, a heroine) is as foul-mouthed as Tony Soprano and nearly as dangerous. She was the sort of woman who threatened to shoot strangers who placed a foot on her porch and meant it. Vance was battered and bruised by this rough start, but a combination of intellectual gifts — after a stint in the Marines he sailed through Ohio State in two years and then graduated from Yale Law — and the steady love of his grandparents helped him to leapfrog into America’s elite. This book is a memoir but also contains the sharp and unsentimental insights of a born sociologist. As André Malraux said to Whittaker Chambers under very different circumstances in 1952: “You have not come back from Hell with empty hands.” The troubles Vance depicts among the white working class, or at least that portion he calls “hillbillies,” are quite familiar to those who’ve followed the pathologies of the black poor, or Native Americans living on reservations. Disorganized family lives, multiple romantic partners, domestic violence and abuse, loose attachment to work, and drug and alcohol abuse. Children suffer from “Mountain Dew” mouth — severe tooth decay and loss because parents give their children, sometimes even infants with bottles, sugary sodas and fail to teach proper dental hygiene. “People talk about hard work all the time in places like Middletown [Ohio],” Vance writes. “You can walk through a town where 30 percent of the young men work fewer than 20 hours a week and find not a single person aware of his own laziness.” He worked in a floor-tile warehouse and witnessed the sort of shirking that is commonplace. One guy, I’ll call him Bob, joined the tile warehouse just a few months before I did. Bob was 19 with a pregnant girlfriend. The manager kindly offered the girlfriend a clerical position answering phones. Both of them were terrible workers. The girlfriend missed about every third day of work and never gave advance notice. Though warned to change her habits repeatedly, the girlfriend lasted no more than a few months. Bob missed work about once a week, and he was chronically late. On top of that, he often took three or four daily bathroom breaks, each over half an hour. . . . Eventually, Bob . . . was fired. When it happened, he lashed out at his manager: ‘How could you do this to me? Don’t you know I’ve a pregnant girlfriend?’ And he was not alone. . . . A young man with every reason to work . . . carelessly tossing aside a good job with excellent health insurance. More troublingly, when it was all over, he thought something had been done to him. The addiction, domestic violence, poverty, and ill health that plague these communities might be salved to some degree by active and vibrant churches. But as Vance notes, the attachment to church, like the attachment to work, is severely frayed. People say they are Christians. They even tell pollsters they attend church weekly. But “in the middle of the Bible belt, active church attendance is actually quite low.” After years of alcoholism, Vance’s biological father did join a serious church, and while Vance was skeptical about the church’s theology, he notes that membership did transform his father from a wastrel into a responsible father and husband to his new family. Teenaged Vance did a stint as a check-out clerk at a supermarket and kept his social-scientist eye peeled: I also learned how people gamed the welfare system. They’d buy two dozen packs of soda with food stamps and then sell them at a discount for cash. They’d ring up their orders separately, buying food with the food stamps, and beer, wine, and cigarettes with cash. They’d regularly go through the checkout line speaking on their cell phones. I could never understand why our lives felt like a struggle while those living off of government largesse enjoyed trinkets that I only dreamed about. . . . Perhaps if the schools were better, they would offer children from struggling families the leg up they so desperately need? Vance is unconvinced. The schools he attended were adequate, if not good, he recalls. But there were many times in his early life when his home was so chaotic — when he was kept awake all night by terrifying fights between his mother and her latest live-in boyfriend, for example — that he could not concentrate in school at all. For a while, he and his older sister lived by themselves while his mother underwent a stint in rehab. They concealed this embarrassing situation as best they could. But they were children. Alone. A teacher at his Ohio high school summed up the expectations imposed on teachers this way: “They want us to be shepherds to these kids. But no one wants to talk about the fact that many of them are raised by wolves.” Hillbilly Elegy is an honest look at the dysfunction that afflicts too many working-class Americans. But despite the foregoing, it isn’t an indictment. Vance loves his family and admires some of its strengths. Among these are fierce patriotism, loyalty, and toughness. But even regarding patriotism (his grandmother’s “two gods” were Jesus Christ and the United States of America), this former Marine strikes a melancholy note. His family and community have lost their heroes. We loved the military but had no George S. Patton figure in the modern army. . . . The space program, long a source of pride, had gone the way of the dodo, and with it the celebrity astronauts. Nothing united us with the core fabric of American society. Conspiracy theories abound in Appalachia. People do not believe anything the press reports: “We can’t trust the evening news. We can’t trust our politicians. Our universities, the gateway to a better life, are rigged against us. We can’t get jobs.” Conspiracy theories abound in Appalachia. Sound familiar? The white working class has followed the black underclass and Native Americans not just into family disintegration, addiction, and other pathologies, but also perhaps into the most important self-sabotage of all, the crippling delusion that they cannot improve their lot by their own effort. This is where the rise of Trump becomes both understandable and deeply destructive. He ratifies every conspiracy theory in circulation and adds news ones. He encourages the tribal grievances of the white working class and promises that salvation will come — not through their own agency and sensible government reforms — but only through his head-knocking leadership. He calls this greatness, but it’s the exact reverse. A great people does not turn to a strongman. The American character has been corrupted by multiple generations of government dependency and the loss of bourgeois virtues like self-control, delayed gratification, family stability, thrift, and industriousness. Vance has risen out of chaos to the heights of stability, success, and happiness. He is fundamentally optimistic about the chances for the nation to do the same. Whether his optimism is justified or not is unknowable, but his brilliant book is a signal flashing danger. Mona Charen

To further quell their culpability and show that the American Dream still functions as advertised, conservatives are fond of trotting out success stories — people who prove that pulling one’s self up by one’s bootstraps is still a possibility and, by extension, that those who don’t succeed must own their shortcomings. Lately, the right has found nobody more useful, both during the presidential election and after, than their modern-day Horatio Alger spokesperson, J. D. Vance, whose bestselling book “Hillbilly Elegy” chronicled his journey from Appalachia to the hallowed halls of the Ivy League, while championing the hard work necessary to overcome the pitfalls of poverty. Traditionally this would’ve been a Fox News kind of book — the network featured an excerpt on their site that focused on Vance’s introduction to “elite culture” during his time at Yale — but Vance’s glorified self-help tome was also forwarded by networks and pundits desperate to understand the Donald Trump phenomenon, and the author was essentially transformed into Privileged America’s Sherpa into the ravages of Post-Recession U.S.A. Trumpeted as a glimpse into an America elites have neglected for years, I first read “Hillbilly Elegy” with hope. I’d been told this might be the book that finally shed light on problems that’d been killing my family for generations. I’d watched my grandparents and parents, all of them factory workers, suffer backbreaking labor and then be virtually forgotten by the political establishment until the GOP needed their vote and stoked their social and racial anxieties to turn them into political pawns. In the beginning, I felt a kinship to Vance. His dysfunctional childhood looked a lot like my own. There was substance abuse. Knockdown, drag-out fights. A feeling that people just couldn’t get ahead no matter what they did. And then the narrative took a turn. Due to references he downplays, not to mention his middle-class grandmother’s shielding and encouragement, Vance was able to lift himself out of the despair of impoverishment and escaped to Yale and eventually Silicon Valley, where he was able to look back on his upbringing with a new perspective. (…) The thesis at the heart of “Hillbilly Elegy” is that anybody who isn’t able to escape the working class is essentially at fault. Sure, there’s a culture of fatalism and “learned helplessness,” but the onus falls on the individual. (…) Oh, the working class and their aversion to difficulty. If only they, like Vance, could take the challenge head on and rise above their circumstances. If only they, like Vance, weren’t so worried about material things like iPhones or the “giant TVs and iPads” the author says his people buy for themselves instead of saving for the future. This generalization is not the only problematic oversimplification in Vance’s book — he totally discounts the role racism played in the white working class’s opposition to President Obama and says, instead, it was because Obama dressed well, was a good father, and because Michelle Obama advocated eating healthy food — but it would be hard to understate what role Vance has played in reinvigorating the conservative bootstraps narrative for a new generation and, thus, emboldening Republican ideology. To Vance’s credit, he has been critical of Donald Trump, calling the working class’s support of the billionaire a result of a “false sense of purpose,” but Vance’s portrait of poor Americans is alarmingly in lockstep with the philosophy of Republicans who are shamefully using Trump’s presidency to forward their own agenda of economic warfare. (…) The message is loud and clear: Help is on the way, but only to those who “deserve” it. And how does one deserve it? By working hard. And the only metric to show that one has worked sufficiently hard enough is to look at their income, at how successful they are, because, in Vance’s and the Republican’s America, the only one to blame if you’re not wealthy is yourself. Never mind how legislation like this healthcare bill, cuts in education funding, continued decreases in after-school and school lunch programs, not to mention a lack of access to mental health care or career counseling, disadvantages the poor. Jared Yates Sexton (Assistant Professor of Creative Writing)

Hillbilly Elégie, qui vient de paraître aux éditions Globe traduit de l’anglais (américain) (…) est l’un des best-sellers de l’année aux Etats-Unis et son adaptation cinématographique est déjà en cours de tournage sous la direction de Ron Howard. Rien que ça ! Ensuite, c’est un livre hors du commun, qui a été salué avec un bel ensemble par la presse intellectuelle américaine, tant du côté conservateur que du côté libéral. On a beaucoup écrit qu’il constituait, en effet, l’une des clefs de cet événement tellement improbable : l’élection à la présidence des Etats-Unis « du Donald ». Ce n’est pourtant pas un essai politique. Il a été écrit avant que « le Donald » ne soit désigné comme candidat par les primaires républicaines. Et cependant, oui, il donne les clefs d’un facteur décisif ayant entraîné la victoire de Trump : le basculement de son côté de ces petits blancs, électeurs des Etats ravagés par le démantèlement des vieilles industries : Michigan, Pennsylvanie, Wisconsin, Ohio, ce qui reste de la Rust Belt, la ceinture de rouille. Rappelons que Trump a bénéficié massivement du « vote blanc ». Il est majoritaire dans cet électorat, même chez les femmes, alors qu’il affrontait, lui, le macho sans vergogne, la première candidate à la présidence de l’histoire des Etats-Unis. Mais ce qui est révélateur, c’est que Trump a obtenu ses meilleurs scores, chez les blancs qui n’ont pas fait d’études universitaires : 72 %, pour les hommes et 62 % chez les femmes. (…) Hillbilly Elégie est impressionnant parce que c’est un livre d’une rare honnêteté intellectuelle, alors qu’il est écrit depuis l’autre côté de la rive : son auteur, J.D. Vance s’est extrait de son milieu d’origine. Il a cessé d’être un hillbilly – autrement dit un crétin des collines, un plouc, un péquenaud – le vrai sens du mot hillbilly. Par un heureux concours de circonstances (son dressage chez les Marines) et grâce à une volonté de fer et une puissance de travail très américaines, il a intégré l’une des universités les plus prestigieuses du pays, Yale, et il est diplômé dans l’un des départements les plus prestigieux de cette université, son Ecole de droit. Né dans la classe ouvrière, il donc a rejoint les rangs de la grande bourgeoisie en devenant un avocat d’affaires renommé. (…) C’est un livre âpre, lucide, sans complaisance, écrit par un homme qui est, certes, passé de l’autre côté de la barrière des classes, mais qui garde une grande tendresse pour sa « communauté » d’origine. Et il se conclut par une série de recommandations sur la meilleure manière de remédier à la misère, tant matérielle que morale, où les siens se sont enfoncés. A travers son témoignage personnel, il nous livre une véritable enquête sur cette réalité sociale peu connue : le déclin de l’ancienne classe ouvrière blanche américaine. Son livre est d’un grand intérêt pour quiconque s’intéresse aux Etats-Unis ; mais il comporte aussi des leçons pour tous les pays anciennement industrialisés qui ont vu, comme le nôtre, fermer les usines et se désertifier certains territoires. Et d’abord son nom, Vance : il le porte par hasard. C’est celui de son géniteur, un chrétien évangéliste du Sud, alcoolique repenti, avec qui il n’a jamais eu le moindre contact avant son adolescence. Sa mère, en effet, est allée, durant toute sa vie d’homme en homme et de drogue en drogue. Comme beaucoup d’enfants de ce milieu, il a été traumatisé par la succession de ses « beaux-pères » de six mois ou d’un an. En quête d’un modèle masculin auquel s’identifier, il est passé de l’un à l’autre. Et l’instabilité à la fois géographique et affective de sa jeunesse en a fait un être angoissé. Première leçon de Hillbilly Elégie : être né dans une famille stable dont les membres adultes ne se hurlent pas après tous les soirs en se jetant à la figure tout ce qui leur tombe sous la main est un atout formidable pour réussir dans la vie…. La vraie famille de J.D., c’étaient ses grands-parents, d’authentiques hillbillies, eux, venus de leur Kentucky natal dans les années 1950 pour travailler dans l’Ohio voisin, où il y avait des mines et des aciéries. Mais Papaw et Mamaw (c’est comme ça qu’on dit Papy et Mamie chez les hillbillies) n’ont jamais oublié leur Kentucky natal, cette région des Appalaches connue pour la beauté de ses paysages… et l’arriération de ses habitants. Délivrance, le film de John Boorman, se passe, on s’en souvient, dans une région des Appalaches et donne de ses habitants une image assez peu flatteuse. Papaw et Mamaw, qui ne voyageaient jamais sans une arme à feu dans leur voiture, ont emporté dans leur Ohio d’adoption leur culture « hillbilly » des collines du Kentucky. Une culture que partageaient beaucoup de familles ouvrières originaires des Appalaches et qui imprègnent encore aujourd’hui les mentalités de leurs descendants. Papaw, ouvrier dans la grande aciérie locale et mécanicien apprécié, était un partisan du Parti démocrate, « le parti qui – je cite – défendait les travailleurs ». On était démocrate parce qu’on était ouvrier. Et c’est précisément cela qui a changé. Brice Couturier

En juin 2016, en pleine campagne présidentielle américaine, paraissait Hillbilly Elegy, un récit autobiographique signé d’un illustre inconnu. Il y racontait son enfance dans la « Rust Belt », cette large région industrielle du nord-est des Etats-Unis, touchée de plein fouet par les crises successives. Quelques semaines plus tard, un long entretien publié sur le site The American Conservative propulsait J.D. Vance au rang de phénomène : l’auteur y défendait la candidature de Trump, qui avait, selon lui, « le mérite d’essayer » de s’adresser aux Blancs les plus pauvres, d’en appeler à leur « fierté » et de vilipender cette « élite » honnie, incarnée par Barack Obama et par Hillary Clinton. Le discours frontal et brutal de la droite, la condescendance embarrassée de la gauche… Dans ce récit à la première personne, publié cette semaine en France (éditions Globe), l’écrivain pointait du doigt ce qui amènerait Donald Trump au pouvoir. (…) Hillbilly Elegy est une plongée dans ses racines, son enfance, son ascension sociale. Vance est né et a grandi entre le Kentucky et l’Ohio, dans cette région des Appalaches dont on entend régulièrement parler tantôt comme le siège de la pire épidémie d’addiction aux opiacés qu’ait connue le pays ces dernières années, tantôt comme cette zone dévastée par le chômage lié à la fermeture des mines de charbon. Vance, lui, s’en est tiré : après un passage dans les Marines, il a quitté son patelin pour partir étudier, d’abord à l’université d’Etat de l’Ohio, puis à la très réputée Yale, dans le Connecticut. A force de volonté, et avec le soutien d’une grand-mère exceptionnelle qui a pallié jusqu’à sa mort les manquements de ses parents (un père « qu’[il] connaissai [t] à peine » et une mère qu’il aurait « préféré ne pas connaître », écrit-il), Vance a réussi ce que peu parviennent à accomplir : il a changé de classe sociale. Il est, écrit-il, un « émigré culturel », qui affirme cependant être resté, au fond de lui, un « hillbilly », un Américain « qui [se] reconnaî [t] dans les millions de Blancs d’origine irlando-écossaise de la classe ouvrière américaine qui n’ont pas de diplôme universitaire ». Se réappropriant au passage ce terme popularisé pendant la grande dépression pour qualifier les migrants économiques venus de la campagne, et devenu depuis franchement péjoratif. Hillbilly Elegy se lit comme un document sur la pauvreté blanche en Amérique. Vance y décrit de l’intérieur une communauté qui vit d’aides alimentaires tout en se plaignant d’un Etat incompétent, passe « plus de temps à parler de travail qu’à travailler réellement », apprend à ses enfants « la valeur de la loyauté, de l’honneur, ainsi qu’à être dur au mal », mais persiste à confondre, chez ses petits, « intelligence et savoir », faisant passer pour idiots des gamins éduqués de manière inefficace. Parce qu’il parle des siens, le jeune homme dresse un constat très rude, dénonce la « fainéantise » de ses anciens semblables tout en appelant le monde politique à « juger moins et [à] comprendre plus ». En mars dernier, dans un éditorial du New York Times intitulé « Pourquoi je rentre chez moi », Vance annonçait sa décision de quitter la Californie pour retourner dans les Appalaches, où il a créé une association de lutte contre la conduite addictive aux opiacés et a participé, au cours des derniers mois, à de nombreux meetings du Parti républicain.M le magazine du Monde

Attention: une relégation sociale peut en cacher une autre ! (It’s the culture, stupid !)

« Amers, accros des armes et de la religion » (Obama), « pitoyables « Hillary Clinton), « sans-dents » (Hollande), « fainéants » (Macron) …

Quatre mois après l’élection volée que l’on sait …

Qui a vu suite à l’assassinat médiatico-politique du candidat de l’alternance …

Et au fourvoiement et auto-sabordement – jusqu’à en oublier son texte – de la candidate des victimes de l’immigration sauvage et de l’insécurité culturelle …

L’élection par défaut d’un candidat qui au-delà de sa réelle volonté de réformer une France jusqu’ici irréformable …

Ne prend même plus la peine, à l’instar de ses prédécesseurs américains ou français, de cacher son mépris pour les « gens qui ne sont rien » et autres « illettrés » ou « fainéants »  …

Et en ces temps où après la passion que l’on sait pour les immigrés et en gommant du coup toute la dimension délictuelle, nos belles âmes n’ont que le mot « migrant » à la bouche …

Comment ne pas voir …

Alors que sort la traduction française du livre de « l’auteur américain qui avait vu venir Trump » (Hillbilly elegy, J.D. Vance) …

Et après la revanche de ces véritables « immigrés de l’intérieur » …

Qui aux Etats-Unis ont largement contribué à la victoire de Trump …

Celle qui pourrait bien venir …

De tous ceux qui au-delà des cas extrêmes de familles déstructurées, de fatalisme social et d’addictions aux opiacés de la Rust belt américaine dont parle Vance …

Mais à l’instar des vraies victimes de la mondialisation de la « France périphérique » évoqués par le géographe Christophe Guilly …

Ne se résignent pas, face au rouleau compresseur de la prétendue « modernité » et du « progrès », à la disparition programmée de leur culture nationale ?

J.D. Vance, l’auteur américain qui avait vu venir Trump

Publié pendant la campagne présidentielle, « Hillbilly Elegy » est devenu un best-seller. J.D. Vance, 33 ans, y raconte cette Amérique blanche et pauvre dont il est issu. Et qui a porté Trump au pouvoir.

M le magazine du Monde

Clémentine Goldszal

04.09.2017

En juin 2016, en pleine campagne présidentielle américaine, paraissait Hillbilly Elegy, un récit autobiographique signé d’un illustre inconnu. Il y racontait son enfance dans la « Rust Belt », cette large région industrielle du nord-est des Etats-Unis, touchée de plein fouet par les crises successives. Quelques semaines plus tard, un long entretien publié sur le site The American Conservative propulsait J.D. Vance au rang de phénomène : l’auteur y défendait la candidature de Trump, qui avait, selon lui, « le mérite d’essayer » de s’adresser aux Blancs les plus pauvres, d’en appeler à leur « fierté » et de vilipender cette « élite » honnie, incarnée par Barack Obama et par Hillary Clinton.

Le discours frontal et brutal de la droite, la condescendance embarrassée de la gauche… Dans ce récit à la première personne, publié cette semaine en France (éditions Globe), l’écrivain pointait du doigt ce qui amènerait Donald Trump au pouvoir. En août 2016, Hillbilly Elegy entrait dans la liste des meilleures ventes du New York Times (il y figure encore aujourd’hui). Cinq mois plus tard, au lendemain de l’élection, les ventes faisaient un nouveau bond. Sous le choc, les progressistes américains cherchaient à comprendre ceux qui avaient porté Trump au pouvoir : traditionnellement démocrates, les Etats de la Rust Belt avaient cette fois-ci largement soutenu le candidat républicain.

L’histoire d’une ascension sociale

J.D. Vance a 33 ans, le visage rond, la raie sur le côté, les yeux bleus. Il s’exprime bien, et son livre est remarquablement écrit. Pas de la grande littérature, mais un ton sans détour, qui lui permet d’exprimer avec une grande clarté sa pensée complexe. Il est marié – à une jeune femme rencontrée durant ses études de droit à Yale – et, à la sortie de son livre, vivait encore à San Francisco, où il gagnait très bien sa vie dans la finance.

Hillbilly Elegy est une plongée dans ses racines, son enfance, son ascension sociale. Vance est né et a grandi entre le Kentucky et l’Ohio, dans cette région des Appalaches dont on entend régulièrement parler tantôt comme le siège de la pire épidémie d’addiction aux opiacés qu’ait connue le pays ces dernières années, tantôt comme cette zone dévastée par le chômage lié à la fermeture des mines de charbon.

J.D. Vance parle de « la classe ouvrière américaine oubliée »

Vance, lui, s’en est tiré : après un passage dans les Marines, il a quitté son patelin pour partir étudier, d’abord à l’université d’Etat de l’Ohio, puis à la très réputée Yale, dans le Connecticut. A force de volonté, et avec le soutien d’une grand-mère exceptionnelle qui a pallié jusqu’à sa mort les manquements de ses parents (un père « qu’[il] connaissai [t] à peine » et une mère qu’il aurait « préféré ne pas connaître », écrit-il), Vance a réussi ce que peu parviennent à accomplir : il a changé de classe sociale.

Il est, écrit-il, un « émigré culturel », qui affirme cependant être resté, au fond de lui, un « hillbilly », un Américain « qui [se] reconnaî [t] dans les millions de Blancs d’origine irlando-écossaise de la classe ouvrière américaine qui n’ont pas de diplôme universitaire ». Se réappropriant au passage ce terme popularisé pendant la grande dépression pour qualifier les migrants économiques venus de la campagne, et devenu depuis franchement péjoratif.

Hillbilly Elegy se lit comme un document sur la pauvreté blanche en Amérique. Vance y décrit de l’intérieur une communauté qui vit d’aides alimentaires tout en se plaignant d’un Etat incompétent, passe « plus de temps à parler de travail qu’à travailler réellement », apprend à ses enfants « la valeur de la loyauté, de l’honneur, ainsi qu’à être dur au mal », mais persiste à confondre, chez ses petits, « intelligence et savoir », faisant passer pour idiots des gamins éduqués de manière inefficace. Parce qu’il parle des siens, le jeune homme dresse un constat très rude, dénonce la « fainéantise » de ses anciens semblables tout en appelant le monde politique à « juger moins et [à] comprendre plus ».

Une parole conservatrice audible

En mars dernier, dans un éditorial du New York Times intitulé « Pourquoi je rentre chez moi », Vance annonçait sa décision de quitter la Californie pour retourner dans les Appalaches, où il a créé une association de lutte contre la conduite addictive aux opiacés et a participé, au cours des derniers mois, à de nombreux meetings du Parti républicain.

Depuis le printemps, les ténors du parti ont d’ailleurs multiplié les appels du pied pour le convaincre de se présenter aux élections sénatoriales, qui se tiendront en novembre. Son nom est devenu familier des lecteurs de la presse quotidienne, son visage apparaît souvent à la télévision (il est devenu éditorialiste pour CNN, en janvier, et signe régulièrement dans les colonnes du New York Times). Plus d’un million d’exemplaires de son livre ont déjà été écoulés, et les droits ont été vendus à plus d’une dizaine de pays.

Les médias semblent avoir trouvé en J.D. Vance une parole conservatrice audible, reçue comme l’émanation articulée de la rage confusément exprimée par les Blancs les plus pauvres d’Amérique. En mai dernier, Bill Gates recommandait même sur son blog la lecture d’Hillbilly Elegy, affirmant y avoir trouvé « des informations nouvelles sur les facteurs culturels et familiaux qui contribuent à la pauvreté ».

 Voir aussi:

La grande colère des petits Blancs américains
Brice Couturier
France Culture
15/09/2017

La culture hillbilly était fondée sur une fierté de cols bleus. Elle se révèle incompatible avec la méritocratie américaine contemporaine.

Hier, je vous nous avez présenté un livre qui a été un événement de société en même temps qu’un best-seller aux Etats-Unis, et dont l’adaptation est en cours de tournage, Hillbilly Elegy. La traduction française vient de sortir aux Editions Globe. Mais d’abord comment définir cette « culture hillbilly » ?

A l’origine, un Hillbilly, c’est un blanc des Appalaches. Vivaient dans ces montagnes des communautés rurales plus ou moins coupées du monde moderne. Leur musique est l’une des composantes de la country music. Ils lui ont apporté, via le violon et le banjo, ses racines irlando-écossaises. Mais le terme est devenu très péjoratif. Dans l’iconographie classique, un Hillbilly c’est quelqu’un qui porte une salopette en jeans, qui sourit bêtement et à qui il manque pas mal de dents. Un péquenaud, un rustre, mais un rustre dangereux.

Retournant le stigmate, J.D. Vance, l’auteur du livre présente sa propre famille et son milieu d’origine sous des couleurs sombres. Ce ne sont pas de joyeux péquenauds qui dansent au son du violon, mais des gens en colère. Parce qu’ils ont le sentiment d’être des victimes du tournant pris par leur pays. Passés de l’agriculture du Kentucky à l’industrie sidérurgique de l’Ohio dans les années 50, ils avaient créé une culture et un mode de vie originaux, dont ils étaient fiers. Ils étaient des « cols bleus », ils participaient au « rêve américain », selon lequel quand on travaille dur, on peut vivre confortablement. Or, ils constatent que ce n’est plus le cas.

Ce qui a changé, c’est que le système social américain est devenu au moins aussi méritocratique que le nôtre. Le passage par une bonne université, comme le constate le hillbilly J.D. Vance, reçu contre toute attente à Yale, permet de se constituer « un capital social » qui est devenu la véritable clef de toute réussite. Or, dans ce milieu de petits blancs, on fréquente rarement le college, encore moins l’université.

A cause du coût (faramineux) des études, mais pas uniquement. Vance montre que les étudiants méritants issus de milieux pauvres, comme le sien, parviennent à financer leurs études par des bourses qu’ils complètent en travaillant. Non, la véritable cause de l’échec des petits blancs de la classe ouvrière, c’est la culture hillbilly elle-même.

A ses yeux, la première caractéristique de cette culture, c’est un sens de l’honneur, de l’honneur familial en particulier extravagant. Sa grand-mère maternelle qui l’a élevé « Mamaw » « venait d’une famille où l’on préférait – je cite – ouvrir le feu plutôt que de discuter. » (p. 35) L’honneur des mères et des filles, en particulier, fait l’objet d’une agressivité toute particulière. « Je pense que nous, les Hillbillies, sommes les gens les plus durs à cuire de la planète, écrit-il. Si quelqu’un insulte notre mère, nous sortons la tronçonneuse. » (p. 277) C’est un milieu violent où l’on se fait justice soi-même. « On n’a pas besoin des autorités pour leur régler leur compte », écrit-il. Et sa fameuse grand-mère a failli, à 12 ans, exécuter d’une balle dans la tête, l’un des voleurs qui avait tenté de subtiliser une vache à ses parents. Elle en a été empêchée au dernier moment par l’un de ses frères. Ca vous crée une réputation chez les voisins…

Ce culte de la force physique va, évidemment, de pair avec un mépris pour le savoir et les études. « Enfant, écrit-il, j’associai la réussite scolaire aux filles. La masculinité, c’était la force, le courage et la volonté de se battre. Les garçons qui avaient de bonnes notes étaient des « gonzesses » ou des « tarlouzes ». » (p. 268) On le devine, cette culture ne favorise pas l’ascension sociale dans un pays où le diplôme universitaire est dorénavant le sésame obligatoire de la réussite sociale.

Vance raconte, à la fin de son livre, comment il renonce, sous la bonne influence de son épouse, une fille de bonne famille, d’origine indienne qu’il a rencontrée à Yale, à aller casser la figure à un conducteur qui lui a coupé la route en lui faisant un doigt d’honneur. Ce renoncement à ses anciennes mœurs « hillbilly » symbolise, à ses yeux, sa propre accession aux classes supérieures éduquées. Je cite : « C’était « la chose raisonnable à faire » (p. 269) « Mais c’est ça, le progrès, non ? Cela vaut mieux que d’être assis dans une cellule de prison pour avoir donné une leçon à ce fils de pute ». (270)

On le devine : dans ce milieu Barack Obama était détesté. Je cite : « Aux yeux de beaucoup de Middletowniens, le président est un extraterreste pour des raisons qui n’ont rien à voir avec sa couleur de peau. Il ne faut pas oublier qu’aucun de mes camarades de lycée n’est allé dans une grande université. Barack Obama en a fréquenté deux, dans lesquelles il a brillé. Il est riche, intelligent et il s’exprime comme un professeur de droit constitutionnel. (…) Son accent – propre, parfait, neutre – est étranger. (…) Il dégage une confiance qui vient de la certitude que, dans l’Amérique moderne, la méritocratie a été forgée pour lui. (…) Le président Obama a fait ses débuts en politique alors que beaucoup de gens, dans ma communauté, commençaient à croire que, dans l’Amérique moderne, la méritocratie n’avait pas été forgée pour eux. Nous savons que nous sommes en train d’échouer. (…) Barack Obama frappe au plein cœur de nos faiblesses. C’est un bon père, ce que beaucoup d’entre nous ne sont pas. Il porte un costume pour aller travailler, alors que nous mettons des bleus de travail quand nous avons la chance d’avoir un emploi. Et sa femme nous explique que nous ne devrions pas donner certains aliments à manger nos enfants et nous la détestons pour ça – non parce qu’elle a tort, mais parce que nous savons qu’elle a raison. » (p. 212, 213) Fantastique, non ?

Voir également:

Hillbilly Elégie, le roman vrai d’une classe ouvrière blanche américaine en crise
Brice Couturier
France Culture
14/09/2017

En nous racontant son enfance et sa jeunesse, dans une famille de la classe ouvrière en déclin de l’Ohio, J.D. Vance jette une lumière sur les sources de la colère américaine des « petits blancs ». Un électorat qui a basculé des Démocrates aux Républicains en deux générations.

Je voudrais attirer votre attention sur un livre, Hillbilly Elégie, qui vient de paraître aux éditions Globe. Traduit de l’anglais (américain) auquel j’avais déjà fait allusion dans ma chronique du 30 janvier. Je m’y livrai à une tentative d’explication de la victoire électorale de Donald Trump. Hillbilly Elégie, c’est d’abord un phénomène éditorial. C’est l’un des best-sellers de l’année aux Etats-Unis et son adaptation cinématographique est déjà en cours de tournage sous la direction de Ron Howard. Rien que ça ! Ensuite, c’est un livre hors du commun, qui a été salué avec un bel ensemble par la presse intellectuelle américaine, tant du côté conservateur que du côté libéral. On a beaucoup écrit qu’il constituait, en effet, l’une des clefs de cet événement tellement improbable : l’élection à la présidence des Etats-Unis « du Donald ».

Ce n’est pourtant pas un essai politique. Il a été écrit avant que « le Donald » ne soit désigné comme candidat par les primaires républicaines. Et cependant, oui, il donne les clefs d’un facteur décisif ayant entraîné la victoire de Trump : le basculement de son côté de ces petits blancs, électeurs des Etats ravagés par le démantèlement des vieilles industries : Michigan, Pennsylvanie, Wisconsin, Ohio, ce qui reste de la Rust Belt, la ceinture de rouille.

Rappelons que Trump a bénéficié massivement du « vote blanc ». Il est majoritaire dans cet électorat, même chez les femmes, alors qu’il affrontait, lui, le macho sans vergogne, la première candidate à la présidence de l’histoire des Etats-Unis. Mais ce qui est révélateur, c’est que Trump a obtenu ses meilleurs scores, chez les blancs qui n’ont pas fait d’études universitaires : 72 %, pour les hommes et 62 % chez les femmes. Et ce livre explique pourquoi.

Hillbilly Elégie est impressionnant parce que c’est un livre d’une rare honnêteté intellectuelle, alors qu’il est écrit depuis l’autre côté de la rive : son auteur, J.D. Vance s’est extrait de son milieu d’origine. Il a cessé d’être un hillbilly – autrement dit un crétin des collines, un plouc, un péquenaud – le vrai sens du mot hillbilly. Par un heureux concours de circonstances (son dressage chez les Marines) et grâce à une volonté de fer et une puissance de travail très américaines, il a intégré l’une des universités les plus prestigieuses du pays, Yale, et il est diplômé dans l’un des départements les plus prestigieux de cette université, son Ecole de droit. Né dans la classe ouvrière, il donc a rejoint les rangs de la grande bourgeoisie en devenant un avocat d’affaires renommé. Et c’est précisément ce que raconte son livre. C’est le récit d’une trajectoire de vie.

Mais cette autobiographie ne ressemble en aucune façon à ces auto-célébrations exaspérantes qu’aiment dicter à des scribouillards les self-made men qui s’ennuient dans leurs appartements de 300 m² de la 5° avenue. C’est un livre âpre, lucide, sans complaisance, écrit par un homme qui est, certes, passé de l’autre côté de la barrière des classes, mais qui garde une grande tendresse pour sa « communauté » d’origine. Et il se conclut par une série de recommandations sur la meilleure manière de remédier à la misère, tant matérielle que morale, où les siens se sont enfoncés. A travers son témoignage personnel, il nous livre une véritable enquête sur cette réalité sociale peu connue : le déclin de l’ancienne classe ouvrière blanche américaine. Son livre est d’un grand intérêt pour quiconque s’intéresse aux Etats-Unis ; mais il comporte aussi des leçons pour tous les pays anciennement industrialisés qui ont vu, comme le nôtre, fermer les usines et se désertifier certains territoires.

Et d’abord son nom, Vance : il le porte par hasard. C’est celui de son géniteur, un chrétien évangéliste du Sud, alcoolique repenti, avec qui il n’a jamais eu le moindre contact avant son adolescence. Sa mère, en effet, est allée, durant toute sa vie d’homme en homme et de drogue en drogue. Comme beaucoup d’enfants de ce milieu, il a été traumatisé par la succession de ses « beaux-pères » de six mois ou d’un an. En quête d’un modèle masculin auquel s’identifier, il est passé de l’un à l’autre. Et l’instabilité à la fois géographique et affective de sa jeunesse en a fait un être angoissé. Première leçon de Hillbilly Elégie : être né dans une famille stable dont les membres adultes ne se hurlent pas après tous les soirs en se jetant à la figure tout ce qui leur tombe sous la main est un atout formidable pour réussir dans la vie….

La vraie famille de J.D., c’étaient ses grands-parents, d’authentiques hillbillies, eux, venus de leur Kentucky natal dans les années 1950 pour travailler dans l’Ohio voisin, où il y avait des mines et des aciéries. Mais Papaw et Mamaw (c’est comme ça qu’on dit Papy et Mamie chez les hillbillies) n’ont jamais oublié leur Kentucky natal, cette région des Appalaches connue pour la beauté de ses paysages… et l’arriération de ses habitants. Délivrance, le film de John Boorman, se passe, on s’en souvient, dans une région des Appalaches et donne de ses habitants une image assez peu flatteuse.

Papaw et Mamaw, qui ne voyageaient jamais sans une arme à feu dans leur voiture, ont emporté dans leur Ohio d’adoption leur culture « hillbilly » des collines du Kentucky. Une culture que partageaient beaucoup de familles ouvrières originaires des Appalaches et qui imprègnent encore aujourd’hui les mentalités de leurs descendants. Papaw, ouvrier dans la grande aciérie locale et mécanicien apprécié, était un partisan du Parti démocrate, « le parti qui – je cite – défendait les travailleurs ». On était démocrate parce qu’on était ouvrier. Et c’est précisément cela qui a changé. Demain, je vous raconte comment les petits-enfants des ouvriers des années 50 et 60 sont devenus des trumpistes en colère.

Voir de même:

Un changement d’époque intellectuelle
Brice Couturier
France Culture
30/01/2017

La pensée progressiste a dominé sans partage depuis un demi-siècle, grâce à l’alliance, pourtant improbable, de l’esprit libertaire des sixties et du néo-libéralisme des années 80. Le hillbilly des Appalaches pourrait bien devenir le nouveau héros de l’époque.

– Nous vivons manifestement un changement d’époque. On le voit à certains événements politiques, jugés hier encore, impensables. Mais ces bouleversements ont été préparés de longue date par des modifications dans l’air du temps, dans la culture. Ce sera le thème de ces chroniques, cette semaine.

Par exemple, que la contre-culture des sixties se soit avérée parfaitement compatible avec le néo-libéralisme des années 80, c’est devenu une évidence. Une bonne part de l’œuvre de Jean-Claude Michéa est destinée à la critique de cet alliage, a priori contre nature, de l’économie libérale et de l’esprit libertaire. Elle s’est incarnée dans le personnage, emblématique de notre époque, du bourgeois-bohême.

Or, l’un des tout premiers à en avoir eu l’intuition est un professeur de littérature à l’Université Columbia, spécialiste de l’histoire des idées et fin connaisseur de la vie intellectuelle française, Mark Lilla.

Dans un article judicieusement traduit par la revue Esprit en octobre 1998, intitulé La double révolution libérale : Sixties et Reaganomics, Mark Lilla se servait d’un détour par la pensée conservatrice pour montrer combien « la déligitimation de l’autorité publique dans tous les aspects de la vie sociale » avait permis un recul de l’Etat, favorable au déploiement du marché. Comment un individualisme poussé à ses ultimes limites avait produit une culture de l’incivilité et de l’irresponsabilité et rendu possible la contre-révolution reaganienne. « La révolution culturelle et la révolution de Reagan ont eu lieu dans l’espace d’une seule génération, et sont des événements complémentaires et non pas contradictoires », concluait l’auteur.

On peut créditer Mark Lilla d’avoir de la suite dans les idées. Lui, qui n’appartient pas au courant conservateur, ne cesse de réclamer qu’on prenne celui-ci au sérieux. Il s’amusait, il y a quelques temps déjà, dans la Chronicle of Higher Education, que l’étude de la pensée conservatrice dans les universités américaines soit abordée sous l’angle des « questions de race, de genre et de classe » ; ou encore qu’on y étudie tout ensemble les grands auteurs, tels qu’Edmund Burke et Peter Viereck et les groupuscules néo-nazis. Dans beaucoup d’universités, ajoutait-il, on se débarrasse du sujet en faisant du conservatisme américain une affaire classée – une bande d’anticommunistes qui se serait éteinte avec la Guerre froide.

Les universitaires de tendance conservatrice sont très rarement embauchés par les universités, ajoutait-il. « _Nous avons fait de sérieux efforts pour accroître notre diversité raciale et ethnique. Il y a des doyens bien payés qui travaillent uniquement sur ce sujet. Mais les universités ne manifestent pas le plus léger intérêt pour la diversité intellectuelle parmi leur personnel enseignant. »

Mark Lilla, qui connaît bien notre propre milieu intellectuel, y a-t-il trouvé davantage de diversité ? Pas vraiment. Dans ce même article, il évoque un dîner bien parisien, où la conversation avait porté sur l’œuvre de Leo Strauss. Alors qu’elle s’apprêtait à devenir intéressante, une des personnes présentes l’avait refermée d’un seul mot : « Mais n’était-il pas un conservateur ? »

Durant près d’un demi-siècle, la pensée progressiste avait acquis une telle hégémonie qu’elle n’était pas mise en question. Il suffisait de caractériser un penseur comme « conservateur », ou pire « réactionnaire » pour lui retirer toute légitimité intellectuelle. Et à régler les questions posées. Cette époque se termine. On le voit à de nombreux signes, notamment au succès public remporté par des auteurs en rupture ouverte avec la doxa progressiste et condamnés par elle.

Aux Etats-Unis, droite et gauche confondues font un succès au livre de JD Vance, Hillbilly Elegy. A memoir of a family and culture in crisis. Le témoignage d’un de ces « petits blancs en colère » des Appalaches qui ont donné le pouvoir à Trump. Le hillbilly, ou l’anti-bobo, précisément. Ni bourgeois, ni bohême…

Mais il semble qu’il suffise de nos jours de dénoncer les « médias de gauche » et la manière dont ils « détruisent la libre expression » pour faire un best-seller aux Etats-Unis. Deux essais viennent de paraître, qui portent ce même sous-titre, dont l’un The Silencing, est signé par Kirsten Powers, une éditorialiste fameuse, qui a servi pourtant dans des administrations démocrates – donc de gauche. L’autre, The intimidating game est signé Kimberley Strassel, éditorialiste au Wall Street Journal.

Et pourtant, écrit Mark Lilla, dans son dernier livre, The Shipwrecked Mind. On political reaction (La pensée du naufrage. Sur la réaction politique), les penseurs réactionnaires ont bien des choses à nous révéler sur ce que nous sommes en train de vivre. Car qui opte pour l’exil intérieur, refuse de participer, perçoit des changements dont la portée échappe aux contemporains. Le refus de l’époque confère une position d’extériorité. Et la nostalgie du passé donne d’utiles éléments de comparaison avec le présent. « Là où d’autres voient le fleuve du temps passer, comme il l’a toujours fait, le réactionnaire voit les débris du paradis flotter à la dérive », écrit-il dans l’introduction à son livre.

La nostalgie politique, contrairement au progressisme, est irréfutable, relève-t-il encore. Or, la nostalgie politique aura été l’une des grandes forces intellectuelles motrices du XX° siècle. A l’issue de chacune des deux guerres mondiales, on a pleuré la disparition du « monde d’hier ». Chaque fois fut proclamée la disparition du « monde tel que nous l’avons connu ».

On trouve des réactionnaires à droite, principalement, mais il en est aussi à gauche, estime Mark Lilla. Dans les deux cas, et c’est le point essentiel de sa démonstration, existe la tentation de remonter le cours de l’histoire, afin de déterminer quel mauvais embranchement aurait été pris. C’est la grande affaire des réactionnaires. Qui font d’excellents historiens.

Voir de plus:

Coming Apart : The State of White America, 1960-2010

Charles Murray

Crown Forum, 2013, 416 p

Michèle Tribalat

Le dernier livre de Charles Murray, Coming Apart, a déjà fait couler beaucoup d’encre dans la presse américaine. Auteur controversé, surtout après la publication, en 1994, de The Bell Curve : Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life, écrit avec Richard J. Herrnstein, il a l’habitude d’irriter certains[1] et de plaire à quelques autres[2]. Charles Murray peut être décrit comme un conservateur libertarien plaçant ses espérances dans les vertus individuelles des citoyens et non dans l’intervention de l’État. Un pays peuplé de citoyens vertueux, dont les vertus sont défendues par la constitution, c’est à peu près tout ce qu’il aurait fallu à l’Amérique pour réussir. L’exceptionnalisme américain tiendrait à la manière dont les Américains ont su cultiver dans l’ensemble de la société, jusqu’à une période récente, ces vertus qui ont permis à l’Amérique d’être ce qu’elle est. Il ne s’intéresse qu’à cette réalité-là, armé de statistiques diverses, pour la plupart tirées des recensements ou de la General Social Survey, enquête annuelle qui existe depuis le début des années 1970. Il a sans doute tort de négliger les questions de justice et d’égalité et plus largement l’évolution de l’économie, mais il a l’avantage, pour un lecteur français de se préoccuper de tout un secteur de la réalité auquel on attache généralement peu d’importance, celui des valeurs et fondements culturels de nos sociétés.

Il ne prétend pas regarder la réalité dans tous ses aspects en toute impartialité. Il développe une thèse dont il ne cherche pas à convaincre à tout prix qu’elle est l’unique façon d’analyser le réel. Cette thèse consiste à dire que, si ses prémisses sont correctes, l’Amérique risque de s’effondrer comme un château de cartes, en raison de l’écart grandissant qui sépare une nouvelle élite (new upper class) d’un nouveau sous-prolétariat (new lower class) qui s’est éloigné des vertus fondatrices de la société américaine, sur lesquelles nous reviendrons : en gros les 20 % les plus éduqués et les plus riches d’un côté et les 30 % qui le sont le moins de l’autre. Il admet volontiers que l’on puisse ne pas être d’accord avec l’ensemble de sa thèse et développer une autre analyse des faits : « si vous pensez qu’apporter égalité et sécurité économiques sont les premières fonctions d’un gouvernement, alors vous devez être un social-démocrate. Vous pouvez facilement trouver des arguments en faveur de la social‑démocratie (compte tenu de cette double priorité) dont vous pensez qu’elle est irremplaçable. Je regarde ces mêmes arguments et les juge secondaires, sans intérêt et absurdes – non pas parce que les chiffres sont faux, mais d’abord en raison des principes. » (p . 280). Il écrit aussi de manière très éclairante que « nos opinions en matière politique sont fondées sur notre vision de la nature de la vie humaine et de la société humaine qui ne peuvent être remises en cause par des chiffres » (p. 234). Ces avertissements auraient été les bienvenus plus tôt, afin de laisser d’emblée au lecteur la marge de liberté nécessaire pour rapporter entièrement ses propos et démonstrations à sa vision de la société américaine idéale, dans ce qu’elle a pour lui d’exceptionnel. Il n’empêche, l’auteur affiche le conditionnement complet de son analyse à des prémisses auxquelles il croit viscéralement. Il admet expressément le relativisme de sa propre analyse scientifique des faits. C’est assez rare pour être salué.

On pourrait alors penser que, si l’on réfute sa vision, on n’a rien à apprendre de la société américaine, a fortiori de la nôtre, en lisant son livre. Ce n’est pourtant pas le cas. Mais voyons d’abord un peu plus en détail quelle est sa thèse.

Comme le sous-titre l’indique, il concentre son attention sur les Américains blancs, dans la majeure partie de son livre, non parce que seul l’avenir des blancs lui importe, mais pour éviter que les tendances qu’il décrit soient spontanément imputées à une affaire raciale ou ethnique. C’est bien de classes sociales dont parle. Par ailleurs, même s’il s’y aventure lui‑même en fin d’ouvrage de manière pas très heureuse, le débat sur les solutions lui paraît secondaire, de même que la compréhension des causes de ce qu’il observe : « la chose importante est de regarder sans ciller la nature du problème. » (p. 12)

Il y a toujours eu des riches et des pauvres aux Etats-Unis. Mais, jusqu’au début des années soixante, dit-il, ils ne vivaient pas trop différemment les uns des autres et étaient imprégnés d’une même culture civique fondée sur ce qu’il appelle les « vertus fondatrices » . « L’instruction de Theodore Roosevelt, rejeton d’une famille de l’élite new-yorkaise, bien que délivrée par des précepteurs, se fondait sur les mêmes manuels que ceux lus en classe par les enfants des fermiers de l’Ohio, des commerçants de Chicago et des pêcheurs de la Nouvelle Angleterre » (p. 141). Les histoires édifiantes contenues dans McGuffey Readers, peut-être l’équivalent américain du Tour de France de deux enfants d’Augustine Fouillée à peu près à la même époque, étaient lues par tous les enfants. « Dès la moitié du XXème siècle, l’idée que l’école était l’endroit où l’on devait inculquer un ensemble de vertus par une socialisation systématique avait été rejetée […] On en est venu à supposer implicitement que le système américain lui-même continuerait de fonctionner en toute circonstance pourvu que nous fassions de bonnes lois» (p. 142). Charles Murray, on l’aura compris, ne peut partager une telle vision : « L’Amérique demeurera exceptionnelle dans la mesure où son peuple continuera d’incarner les mêmes qualités que celles qui l’ont fabriquée dans les deux premiers siècles de son existence. » (p. 143)

Cette culture civique s’est considérablement érodée au fil du temps, mais beaucoup plus dans le sous-prolétariat que parmi ceux qui sont à la fois les mieux éduqués et les plus riches. Charles Murray consacre la première partie de son ouvrage à décrire la formation de la nouvelle élite (The new upper class). Par là, il désigne les gens qui dirigent l’économie, la politique et les institutions culturelles du pays, distinguant même une « narrow elite » ne comprenant que ceux qui ont une véritable influence. Cette élite existait déjà dans les années 1960 mais avait des origines sociales assez diverses et ne se distinguait pas par un mode de vie à part: « Ils étaient des gens puissants, mais ne formaient pas une classe. » (p. 21). Au fil du temps cette élite s’est de plus en plus isolée des modes de vie du reste de ses concitoyens, au prix d’une ignorance grandissante de la vie du pays sur lequel elle exerce son pouvoir. Charles Murray explique l’avènement et l’épanouissement de cette classe de privilégiés par la valeur marchande croissante attribuée à l’intelligence, l’explosion de la richesse parmi les plus riches, le perfectionnement des mécanismes de sélection à l’université qui se sont mis en place dans les universités d’élite dès les années 1960[3] (« les entrants à Harvard en 1952 auraient figuré parmi les 10 % moins bons de ceux admis en 1960 » p. 55) et l’homogamie cognitive qui résulte des unions entre personnes de très haut niveau éducatif. Cette élite cultive l’entre-soi et s’auto-reproduit. C’est ce que Robert Reich appelait déjà en 1991 « la sécession de ceux qui réussissent »[4]. Même dans des villes réputées pour leur diversité, celle‑ci est trompeuse : à New York, elle « n’existe que dans la rue. Dès que les gens ont pénétré dans leur bureau ou leur appartement, ils se retrouvent avec des collègues et des voisins qui appartiennent aux tous derniers centiles de la distribution par revenu et niveau éducatif » (p. 73). À titre d’exemple, Charles Murray classe les treize quartiers (zipcodes) les plus chics de Washington en fonction du centile de répartition combinant richesse et l’éducation : « Onze d’entre eux se trouvaient dans le 99^ème centile. Et pas n’importe quelle place dans ce centile. Dix sur onze se situaient dans la moitié supérieure de ce centile, classement qui n’est partagé que par moins de 5 Américains sur 1000 en moyenne » (p. 81).  En 2000, les quartiers qu’il appelle « the Big Four », situés à New York, Washington, Los Angeles et San Francisco, rassemblaient 39 % de cette élite étroite vivant dans ces quartiers huppés (SuperZips, dernier percentile). Une étude de la localisation, en 2004, de la promotion de Harvard, Princeton et Yale en 1979, montre que 83 % d’entre eux résident dans les quartiers du dernier décile combinant revenus et niveau éducatif. Cette élite conjugue un mode de vie en tous points étranger à celui de la plupart des Américains, tant dans sa façon de manger, de se distraire ou d’élever ses enfants pour lesquels la course aux meilleures écoles commence très tôt. La transmission passe désormais par le maintien d’un capital cognitif, favorisé par l’homogamie cognitive, l’entre-soi et l’énergie dépensée pour placer ses enfants dans les meilleures conditions possibles afin de répondre aux critères de sélection des plus grandes universités. Cette élite n’a aucune idée des préoccupations et des conditions de vie des Américains ordinaires. C’est le revers de l’efficacité croissante qu’a eue l’Amérique à orienter vers les meilleures universités les jeunes gens aux performances intellectuelles les plus élevées et à injecter ce capital humain dans l’économie américaine.

Que sont devenues les vertus fondatrices de la société américaine au fil de cette transformation qui a accompagné le développement d’une contre-culture dans les années 1960, puis d’une réaction à cette dernière dans les années 1980, et enfin d’une synthèse plus ou moins heureuse opérée par ce que David Brooks a appelé les Bobos[5] ?

C’est la question à laquelle tente de répondre l’essentiel du livre de Charles Murray. L’Amérique, comme projet, a reposé, selon lui, sur quatre vertus fondatrices : l’ardeur au travail, l’honnêteté, le mariage et la religiosité. Comment ont-elles traversé ces années de turbulence dans les deux segments extrêmes de l’échelle sociale, les 20 % les mieux éduqués et les plus riches et les 30 %  les moins dotés des Américains âgés de 30-49 ans ? Établir ce que sont les 20 % et 30 % en question sur une période aussi longue est en soi un problème ardu, les compétences requises dans les mêmes professions ayant évolué avec le temps. Charles Murray va le résoudre en affectant aux Américains blancs âgés de 30-49 ans,  le score cognitif correspondant au plus haut diplôme obtenu en lui ajoutant celui correspondant à une standardisation du score cognitif requis pour la profession exercée[6] ou en doublant le premier en l’absence d’emploi. Afin de rendre l’analyse plus vivante, il affecte une résidence fictive aux 20 % les mieux dotés – Belmont, quartier chic de Boston – et aux 30 % les moins dotés – Fishtown, quartier populaire du Nord-Est de Philadelphia, en voie de boboïsation en fin de période. Cette localisation fictive lui permet d’aller au-delà des analyses statistiques pour consacrer un chapitre entier à Fishtown, la ville réelle, à partir de monographies menées par d’autres à Fishtown même ou dans le voisinage immédiat de Fishtown[7].

Sans entrer dans le détail des séries statistiques mobilisées, Charles Murray constate que ces quatre vertus fondatrices ont perdu de leur influence, tout particulièrement à Fishtown, plus touché par la déstructuration de la structure familiale traditionnelle (raréfaction des gens mariés et des enfants élevés par leurs deux parents biologiques) par la délinquance (détenus, libérés conditionnels, mesure de probation), par la rareté des emplois stables et réguliers et par le déclin de la religiosité. L’engagement religieux a reculé à Belmont, mais plus encore à Fishtown où le noyau de pratiquants est si mince que ces derniers font désormais plus figure d’hurluberlus que de ciment communautaire. S’agissant du Fishtown réel, la gentrification qui s’est opérée dans les années 2000 a fait monter les prix immobiliers et a relégué les habitants dans la périphérie. Le Fishtown réel est donc en voie de disparition, mais pas le Fishtown fictif qui s’est relocalisé dans les banlieues ou dans les petites villes de l’Amérique rurale.

Charles Murray s’essaie ensuite à mesurer l’étendue du sous-prolétariat, cette partie du prolétariat en grande difficulté, à partir de trois catégories. Il ajoute aux hommes âgés de 30‑49 ans qui ne rapportent pas suffisamment d’argent pour faire vivre un ménage de deux personnes au-dessus du seuil de pauvreté (14 634 $ en 2010), les femmes âgées de 30-49 ans qui élèvent seules leurs enfants et un quart des personnes qui ne sont engagées dans aucune activité associative[8], religieuse ou non (community isolates). Ces trois catégories sont rares à Belmont et s’y sont peu accrues, contrairement à ce qui s’est passé à Fishtown. Ce sous-prolétariat y a triplé entre 1969 et 2007 juste avant la récession (passant de 9 % à 27 %), alors qu’il n’a guère dépassé 4 % à Belmont. Lorsque Charles Murray inclut les classes intermédiaires (les 50 % de blancs qui ne sont ni du type Fishtown, ni du type Belmont) ce sous-prolétariat représente 19 % des Américains blancs âgés de 30-49 ans en 2009 et a sans doute dépassé les 20 % en 2010.

Le capital social, c’est-à-dire la capacité d’agir ensemble, s’est fortement érodé aux Etats‑Unis à partir des années 1960 (Robert Putnam[9], 2000), mais tout particulièrement à Fishtown, quels que soient les indicateurs choisis : la confiance placée dans les autres en général, les rapports de bon voisinage, l’obligeance ou la croyance selon laquelle les autres se conduisent de manière équitable. Au contraire, même si elle est moins ancrée qu’autrefois dans la vie locale, la nouvelle élite a continué d’avoir une vie sociale plutôt bien remplie. Contrairement à une idée répandue, ce n’est pas parmi les plus démunis que les valeurs américaines fondatrices continuent de prospérer, mais dans l’élite méritocratique qui, après avoir goûté aux joies de la subversion des normes bourgeoises, redécouvre les vertus de la sobriété et de la contrainte. Comme l’écrit David Brooks, « c’est vrai que les Bobos ont appris les vertus de la contrainte et de la sobriété, même si le code de sobriété Bobo doit plus à l’American Medical Association qu’à la rigueur victorienne. »

Le constat ne change guère lorsque Charles Murray passe des blancs à l’ensemble des Américains. La cassure selon une ligne sociale, qu’il diagnostique pour les blancs, vaut pour l’ensemble de l’Amérique : « Des différences de destins entre les différents groupes ethniques persistent en Amérique, mais l’Amérique blanche ne se dirige pas dans une autre direction que le reste de l’Amérique. Nous sommes divisibles en termes de classes » (p. 276).

Comme Charles Murray a annoncé ne pas être autrement intéressé par les solutions à apporter aux problèmes qu’il constate, il n’est pas nécessaire de prendre très au sérieux ses propositions. Soit l’Amérique tombe, soit elle se relève sous l’effet de l’effroi causé par l’apoplexie à laquelle l’Europe ne manquera pas de succomber conjugué au réveil de la nouvelle élite (a civic Great Awakening) qui reprendrait le flambeau de l’ancienne bourgeoisie pour transmettre  aux Américains les valeurs éternelles qui leur ont tellement bien réussi autrefois. Conclusion entièrement déterminée par le parti pris annoncé en cours d’ouvrage selon lequel la grandeur de l’Amérique repose sur les vertus des citoyens et non sur l’intervention de l’État. Rien d’étonnant donc à ce que Charles Murray ne laisse aucune place à l’action de l’État pour promouvoir ces valeurs notamment à travers un système éducatif plus performant – dont il a pourtant vanté les mérites du temps où les manuels McGuffey Readers contribuaient à distiller ces valeurs à tous les petits Américains – et qui rééquilibrerait les chances des enfants vivant dans des milieux où « la course à l’échalote » ne commence pas dès le berceau. Sans parler d’autres actions politiques que Routh Douthat détaille dans sa critique publiée dans le New York Times : diminuer les taxes sur le travail, prendre au sérieux la politique familiale, ne pas accueillir des millions d’immigrants peu qualifiés en compétition sur les mêmes segments du marché du travail, réduire les taux d’incarcération[10].

Charles Murray cite beaucoup David Brooks et partage au moins un point d’accord sur l’évolution souhaitable, qu’il appelle avec emphase le Grand Réveil de la nouvelle élite, lequel peut prêter à sourire mais contient une part de vérité applicable ailleurs qu’aux Etats-Unis sur laquelle nous ferions bien de réfléchir.

La complaisance vis-à-vis d’elle même, l’égoïsme et le confort de la pensée relativiste sont les grands défauts de la nouvelle élite méritocratique. David Brooks craint un « affaiblissement des Etats-Unis si les citoyens les plus éminents trouvent plus de satisfaction dans la possession d’une cuisine surdimensionnée que dans l’engagement patriotique (patriotic service) ». Charles Murray parle d’une « élite vaine » qui dysfonctionne autant que le sous-prolétariat, mais d’une autre manière : « au niveau de la famille, ses membres réussissent. Mais ils ont renoncé à leur responsabilité d’établir et de promouvoir des normes. Les membres les plus puissants et les plus prospères de leur classe profitent des avantages de leur position privilégiée, sans s’intéresser aux inconvénients de leur propre comportement. Ils sont actifs politiquement mais, quand il s’agit d’utiliser leur position pour  promouvoir la république, il n’y a plus personne. » (p. 294).

Charles Murray met en cause la duplicité et le relativisme (nonjudjmentalism) de cette super‑élite. « Certains parents de la nouvelle élite sont responsables de la production et de la diffusion de documents qui représentent ce qu’il y a de pire dans la culture contemporaine, quand d’autres font tout pour protéger leurs enfants de ce qui leur semble une culture violente et décadente. Quelquefois, ces parents sont les deux à la fois. Le seul point commun que je vois dans tout ceci est la mauvaise volonté à transmettre ce qu’ils pratiquent (…) La nouvelle élite détient le secret qui lui permet de maximiser ses chances de mener une vie heureuse, mais refuse de partager ce secret avec les autres » (p. 290). Cette nouvelle élite manifeste la plus grande tolérance en refusant de juger les conduites personnelles de ses concitoyens, laissant croire que tout se vaut, y compris ce qu’elle refuse obstinément de pratiquer pour elle-même et qui lui réussit si bien. Elle juge inacceptable d’utiliser des qualificatifs désobligeants pour personne « à l’exception des gens qui ne partagent pas leur opinion politique, des chrétiens fondamentalistes et du prolétariat blanc des zones rurales » (p. 290). David Brooks, dans le même esprit que Charles Murray exhorte les Bobos à assumer leur leadership : « Ils sont les mieux formés et les plus riches, mais n’ont pas, en général, consacré leur énergie à la vie du pays. De toute évidence, certains  travaillent pour le gouvernement et dans la politique, mais [la nouvelle élite] dans son ensemble, n’attache guère d’attention à la sphère publique, créant ainsi un trou béant. Pour remplir ce trou, elle doit faire ce qu’a fait la classe dirigeante de l’après-guerre, développer l’esprit de service public. »

Charles Murray apporte un autre sujet de réflexion sur le système méritocratique, dont on a tendance à faire le pivot de la justice sociale. Depuis plusieurs générations, ce système a produit aux Etats-Unis, comme dans d’autres pays, dont la France aussi, une élite qui s’auto‑reproduit. Ce n’est plus exclusivement la richesse transmise qui assure la réussite de ses propres enfants, mais l’adoption de conduites éducatives, un entre-soi, une sécession du monde ordinaire visant à leur garantir, autant que faire se peut, d’être les meilleurs dans cette compétition méritocratique. Si les qualités cognitives se transmettent aussi bien que la richesse autrefois, comment faut-il rebattre les cartes ? Il me semble, qu’à cet égard, l’excès d’attention portée à la richesse est une forme d’anachronisme qui dissimule une bonne partie des enjeux de la justice sociale.

---

[1] Ralph Richard Banks, « Charles Murray’s ‘Coming Apart’ and the Culture Myth », The Daily Beast, 8 février 2012. Timothy Noah, « The Two Americas », The New Republic, 20 février 2012.

[2] Bradford Wilcox, « Values Inequality », The Wall Street Journal, 31 janvier 2012. David Brooks, « The Great Divorce », The New York Times, 30 janvier 2012.

[3] Thèse déjà développée dans le premier chapitre de The Bell Curve…

[4] Rober Reich, The Work of Nations : Preparing Ourselves for 21st-Century Capitalism, en français L’économie mondialisée, Dunod, 1994.

[5] Bobos in Paradise : The New Upper Class and How They Got There, Simon & Schuster, 2000.

[6] D’après les données aimablement fournies par de Hunt et Madhyastha non encore publiées.

[7] Patricia Stern Smallacombe, Why Do They Stay : Rootedness and Isolation in an Inner-City White Neighborhood, Dissertations available from ProQuest. Paper AAI3043955. 
http://repository.upenn.edu/dissertations/AAI3043955.

[8] Pour éviter les chevauchements des catégories additionnées.

[9] Bowling Alone : The Collapse and Revival of American Community, Simon and Schuster, 2000.

[10] « Can the Working Class Be Saved », The New York Times, 11 février 2012.

Un texte un peu plus court a été publié dans la revue Commentaire en 2012 :

« Les bobos ou la nouvelle élite américaine », Commentaire, Automne 2012, 38(139).

Voir encore:

Why I’m Moving Home

J. D. Vance

The New York Times

March 16, 2017

COLUMBUS, Ohio — In recent months, I’ve frequently found myself in places hit hard by manufacturing job losses, speaking to people affected in various ways. Sometimes, the conversation turns to the conflict people feel between the love of their home and the desire to leave in search of better work.

It’s a conflict I know well: I left my home state, Ohio, for the Marine Corps when I was 19. And while I’ve returned home for months or even years at a time, job opportunities often pull me away.

Experts have warned for years now that our rates of geographic mobility have fallen to troubling lows. Given that some areas have unemployment rates around 2 percent and others many times that, this lack of movement may mean joblessness for those who could otherwise work.

But from the community’s perspective, mobility can be a problem. The economist Matthew Kahn has shown that in Appalachia, for instance, the highly skilled are much likelier to leave not just their hometowns but also the region as a whole. This is the classic “brain drain” problem: Those who are able to leave very often do.

The brain drain also encourages a uniquely modern form of cultural detachment. Eventually, the young people who’ve moved out marry — typically to partners with similar economic prospects. They raise children in increasingly segregated neighborhoods, giving rise to something the conservative scholar Charles Murray calls “super ZIPs.” These super ZIPs are veritable bastions of opportunity and optimism, places where divorce and joblessness are rare.

As one of my college professors recently told me about higher education, “The sociological role we play is to suck talent out of small towns and redistribute it to big cities.” There have always been regional and class inequalities in our society, but the data tells us that we’re living through a unique period of segregation.

This has consequences beyond the purely material. Jesse Sussell and James A. Thomson of the RAND Corporation argue that this geographic sorting has heightened the polarization that now animates politics. This polarization reflects itself not just in our voting patterns, but also in our political culture: Not long before the election, a friend forwarded me a conspiracy theory about Bill and Hillary Clinton’s involvement in a pedophilia ring and asked me whether it was true.

It’s easy to dismiss these questions as the ramblings of “fake news” consumers. But the more difficult truth is that people naturally trust the people they know — their friend sharing a story on Facebook — more than strangers who work for faraway institutions. And when we’re surrounded by polarized, ideologically homogeneous crowds, whether online or off, it becomes easier to believe bizarre things about them. This problem runs in both directions: I’ve heard ugly words uttered about “flyover country” and some of its inhabitants from well-educated, generally well-meaning people.

I’ve long worried whether I’ve become a part of this problem. For two years, I’d lived in Silicon Valley, surrounded by other highly educated transplants with seemingly perfect lives. It’s jarring to live in a world where every person feels his life will only get better when you came from a world where many rightfully believe that things have become worse. And I’ve suspected that this optimism blinds many in Silicon Valley to the real struggles in other parts of the country. So I decided to move home, to Ohio.

It wasn’t an easy choice. I scaled back my commitments to a job I love because of the relocation. My wife and I worry about the quality of local public schools, and whether she (a San Diego native) could stand the unpredictable weather.

But there were practical reasons to move: I’m founding an organization to combat Ohio’s opioid epidemic. We chose Columbus because I travel a lot, and I need to be centrally located in the state and close to an airport. And the truth is that not every motivation is rational: Part of me loves Ohio simply because it’s home.

I recently asked a friend, Ami Vitori Kimener, how she thought about her own return home. A Georgetown graduate, Ami left a successful career in Washington to start new businesses in Middletown, Ohio. Middletown is in some ways a classic Midwestern city: Once thriving, it was hit hard by the decline of the region’s manufacturing base in recent decades. But the town is showing early signs of revitalization, thanks in part to the efforts of those like Ami.

Talking with Ami, I realized that we often frame civic responsibility in terms of government taxes and transfer payments, so that our society’s least fortunate families are able to provide basic necessities. But this focus can miss something important: that what many communities need most is not just financial support, but talent and energy and committed citizens to build viable businesses and other civic institutions.

Of course, not every town can or should be saved. Many people should leave struggling places in search of economic opportunity, and many of them won’t be able to return. Some people will move back to their hometowns; others, like me, will move back to their home state. The calculation will undoubtedly differ for each person, as it should. But those of us who are lucky enough to choose where we live would do well to ask ourselves, as part of that calculation, whether the choices we make for ourselves are necessarily the best for our home communities — and for the country.

J. D. Vance is the author of “Hillbilly Elegy” and a contributing opinion writer.

 Voir encore:

Hillbilly America: Do White Lives Matter?

Rod Dreher

The American Conservative

July 11, 2016

Yesterday I read J.D. Vance’s new book Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and a Culture In Crisis. Well, “read” is not quite the word. I devoured the thing in a single gulp. If you want to understand America in 2016, Hillbilly Elegy is a must-read. I will be thinking about this book for a long, long time. Here are my impressions.

The book is an autobiographical account by a lawyer (Yale Law School graduate) and sometime conservative writer who grew up in a poor and chaotic Appalachian household. He’s a hillbilly, in other words, and is not ashamed of the term. Vance reflects on his childhood, and how he escaped the miserable fate (broken families, drugs, etc) of so many white working class and poor people around whom he grew up. And he draws conclusions from it, conclusions that may be hard for some people to take. But Vance has earned the right to make those judgments. This was his life. He speaks with authority that has been extremely hard won.

Forgive the rambling nature of this post. I’m still trying to process this extraordinary book.

Vance’s people come from Kentucky and southern Ohio, a deeply depressed region filled with hard-bitten but proud Scots-Irish folks. He begins by talking about how, as a young man, he got a job working in a warehouse, doing hard work for extra money. He writes about how even though the work was physically demanding, the pay wasn’t bad, and it came with benefits. Yet the warehouse struggled to keep people employed. Vance says his book is about macroeconomic trends — outsourcing jobs overseas — but not only that:

But this book is about something else: what goes on in the lives of real people when the industrial economy goes south. It’s about reacting to bad circumstances in the worst way possible. It’s about a culture that increasingly encourages social decay instead of counteracting it. The problems that I saw at the tile warehouse run far deeper than macroeconomic trends and policy. too many young men immune to hard work. Good jobs impossible to fill for any length of time. And a young man [one of Vance’s co-workers] with every reason to work — a wife-to-be to support and a baby on the way — carelessly tossing aside a good job with excellent health insurance. More troublingly, when it was all over, he thought something had been done to him. There is a lack of agency here — a feeling that you have little control over your life and a willingness to blame everyone but yourself. This is distinct from the larger economic landscape of modern America.

This is the heart of Hillbilly Elegy: how hillbilly white culture fails its children, and how the greatest disadvantages it imparts to its youth are the life of violence and chaos in which they are raised, and the closely related problem of a lack of moral agency. Young Vance was on a road to ruin until certain people — including the US Marine Corps — showed him that his choices mattered, and that he had a lot more control over his fate than he thought.

Vance talks about how, in his youth, there was a lot of hardscrabble poverty among his people, but nothing like today, dominated by the devastation of drug addiction. Everything we are accustomed to hearing about black inner city social dysfunction is fully present among these white hillbillies, as Vance documents in great detail. He writes that “hillbillies learn from an early age to deal with uncomfortable truths by avoiding them, or by pretending better truths exist. This tendency might make for psychological resilience, but it also makes it hard for Appalachians to look at themselves honestly.”

This was one of many points at which Vance’s experience converged somewhat with mine. My people are not hillbillies per se, but I come from working-class Southern country white people. Many of the cultural traits Vance describes are present in a more diluted way in my own family. That fierce pride, a pride that would rather see everything go to hell than admit error. This, I think, has something to do with why Southern Protestant Christianity has traditionally been more Stoic than Christian. Real Christianity has as its heart humility. That’s not a characteristic Scots-Irish people hold dear.

Vance talks about the hillbilly habit of stigmatizing people who leave the hollers as “too big for your britches” — meaning that you got above yourself. It doesn’t matter that they may have left to find work, and that they’re living a fairly poor life not too far away, in Ohio. The point is, they left, and that is a hard sin to forgive. What, we weren’t good enough for you?

This is the white-people version of “acting white,” if you follow me: the same stigma and shame that poor black people deploy against other poor black people who want to better themselves with education and so on.

The most important figure in Vance’s life is his Mamaw (pron. “MAM-maw”), Bonnie Vance, a kind of hillbilly Catherine the Great. She was a phenomenally tough woman. She knew how to use a gun, she had a staggeringly foul mouth, she smoked menthols and stood ready to fight at the drop of a hat. And she saved Vance’s life.

Vance plainly loves his people, and because he loves them, he tells hard truths about them. He talks about how cultural fatalism destroys initiative. When hillbillies run up against adversity, they tend to assume that they can’t do anything about it. To the hillbilly mind, people who “make it” are either born to wealth, or were born with uncanny talent, winning the genetic lottery. The connection between self-discipline and hard work, and success, is invisible to them. Vance:

People talk about hard work all the time in places like Middletown [where Vance grew up]. You can walk through a town where 30 percent of the young men work fewer than twenty hours a week and find not a single person aware of his own laziness.

Vance was born into a world of chaos. It takes concentration to follow the trail of family connections. Women give birth out of wedlock, having children by different men. Marriages rarely last, and informal partnerings are more common. Vance has half-siblings by his mom’s different husbands (she has had five to date). In his generation, Vance says, grandparents are often having to raise their grandchildren, because those grandparents, however impoverished and messy their own lives may be, offer a more stable alternative than the incredible instability of the kids’ parents (or more likely, parent).

Vance scarcely knew his biological father until he was a bit older, and lived with his mom and her rotating cast of boyfriends and husbands. Here’s Vance on models of manhood:

I learned little else about what masculinity required of me other than drinking beer and screaming at a woman when she screamed at you. In the end, the only lesson that took was that you can’t depend on people. “I learned that men will disappear at the drop of a hat,” Lindsay [his half-sister] once said. “They don’t care about their kids; they don’t provide; they just disappear, and it’s not that hard to make them go.”

This is what happens in inner-city black culture, as has been exhaustively documented. But these are rural and small-town white people. This dysfunction is not color-based, but cultural.

I could not do justice here to describe the violence, emotional and physical, that characterizes everyday life in Vance’s childhood culture, and the instability in people’s outer lives and inner lives. To read in such detail what life is like as a child formed by communities like that is to gain a sense of why it is so difficult to escape from the malign gravity of that way of life. You can’t imagine that life could be any different.

Religion among the hillbillies is not much help. Vance says that hillbillies love to talk about Jesus, but they don’t go to church, and Christianity doesn’t seem to have much effect at all on their behavior. Vance’s biological father is an exception. He belonged to a strict fundamentalist church, one that helped him beat his alcoholism and gave him the severe structure he needed to keep his life from going off track. Vance:

Dad’s church offered something desperately needed by people like me. For alcoholics, it gave them a community of support and a sense that they weren’t fighting addiction alone. For expectant mothers, it offered a free home with job training and parenting classes. When someone needed a job, church friends could either provide one or make introductions. When Dad faced financial troubles, his church banded together and purchased a used car for the family. In the broken world I saw around me — and for the people struggling in that world — religion offered tangible assistance to keep the faithful on track.

Vance says the best thing about life in his dad’s house was how boring it was. It was predictable. It was a respite from the constant chaos.

On the other hand, the religion most hillbillies espouse is a rusticated form of Moralistic Therapeutic Deism. God seems to exist only as a guarantor of ultimate order, and ultimate justice; Jesus is there to assuage one’s pain. Except for those who commit to churchgoing — and believe it or not, this is one of the least churched parts of the US — Christianity is a ghost.

About Vance’s father’s fundamentalism, I got more details about what this blog’s reader Turmarion, who lives in Appalachia, keeps telling me about that region’s fundamentalism. Even though I live in the rural Deep South, this form of Christianity is alien to me. When he went to live with his dad for a time as an adolescent (if I have my chronology correct), Vance was exposed for the first time to church. He appreciated very much the structure, but noticed that the spirituality on offer was fear-based and paranoid. “[T]he deeper I immersed myself in evangelical theology, the more I felt compelled to mistrust many sectors of society. Evolution and the Big Bang became ideologies to confront, not theories to understand … In my new church … I heard more about the gay lobby and the war on Christmas than about any particular character trait that a Christian should aspire to have.”

This was yet another reminder of why so many Evangelicals react strongly against the Benedict Option. As I often say, I have no experience of this extreme siege mentality in Christianity. In fact, my experience is entirely the opposite. I believe that some Christians coming out of fundamentalism may react so strongly against their miserable, unhappy background that they don’t appreciate the extent to which there really are people and forces out to “get” them. When you have lived almost all your Christian life among highly assimilated Christians who generally don’t pay attention to these things, their complacency can drive you crazy. But Vance helps me to understand how someone who grew up in its opposite would find even the slightest hint of siege Christianity to be anathema.

One of the most important contributions Vance makes to our understanding of American poverty is how little public policy can affect the cultural habits that keep people poor. He talks about education policy, saying that the elite discussion of how to help schools focuses entirely on reforming institutions. “As a teacher at my old high school told me recently, ‘They want us to be shepherds to these kids. But no one wants to talk about the fact that many of them are raised by wolves.”

He continues:

Why didn’t our neighbor leave that abusive man? Why did she spend her money on drugs? Why couldn’t she see that her behavior was destroying her daughter? Why were all of these things happening not just to our neighbor but to my mom? It would be years before I learned that no single book, or expert, or field could fully explain the problems of hillbillies in modern America. Our elegy is a sociological one, yes, but it is also about psychology and community and culture and faith. During my junior year of high school, our neighbor Pattie called her landlord to report a leaky roof. The landlord arrived and found Pattie topless, stoned, and unconscious on her living room couch. Upstairs the bathtub was overflowing — hence, the leaking roof. Pattie had apparently drawn herself a bath, taken a few prescription painkillers, and passed out. The top floor of her home and many of her family’s possessions were ruined. This is the reality of our community. It’s about a naked druggie destroying what little of value exists in her life. It’s about children who lose their toys and clothes to a mother’s addiction.

This was my world: a world of truly irrational behavior. We spend our way into the poorhouse. We buy giant TVs and iPads. Our children wear nice clothes thanks to high-interest credit cards and payday loans. We purchase homes we don’t need, refinance them for more spending money, and declare bankruptcy, often leaving them full of garbage in our wake. Thrift is inimical to our being. We spend to pretend that we’re upper class. And when the dust clears — when bankruptcy hits or a family member bails us out of our stupidity — there’s nothing left over. Nothing for the kids’ college tuition, no investment to grow our wealth, no rainy-day fund if someone loses her job. We know we shouldn’t spend like this. Sometimes we beat ourselves up over it, but we do it anyway.

More:

Our homes are a chaotic mess. We scream and yell at each other like we’re spectators at a football game. At least one member of the family uses drugs — sometimes the father, sometimes both. At especially stressful times, we’ll hit and punch each other, all in front of the rest of the family, including young children; much of the time, the neighbors hear what’s happening. A bad day is when the neighbors call the police to stop the drama. Our kids go to foster care but never stay for long. We apologize to our kids. The kids believe we’re really sorry, and we are. But then we act just as mean a few days later.

And on and on. Vance says his people lie to themselves about the reality of their condition, and their own personal responsibility for their degradation. He says that not all working-class white hillbillies are like this. There are those who work hard, stay faithful, and are self-reliant — people like Mamaw and Papaw. Their kids stand a good chance of making it; in fact, Vance says friends of his who grew up like this are doing pretty well for themselves. Unfortunately, most of the people in Vance’s neighborhood were like his mom: “consumerist, isolated, angry, distrustful.”

As I said earlier, the two things that saved Vance were going to live full time with his Mamaw (therefore getting out of the insanity of his mom’s home), and later, going into the US Marine Corps. I’ve already written at too much length about Vance’s story, so I won’t belabor this much longer. Suffice it to say that as imperfect as she was, Mamaw gave young Vance the stability he needed to start succeeding in school. And she wouldn’t let him slack off on his studies. She taught him the value of hard work, and of moral agency.

The Marine Corps remade J.D. Vance. It pulverized his inner hillbilly fatalism, and gave him a sense that he had control over his life, and that his choices mattered. This was news to him. Reading this was a revelation to me. I was raised by parents who grew up poor, but who taught my sister and me from the very start that we were responsible for ourselves. Hard work, self-respect, and self-discipline were at the core of my dad’s ethic, for sure. There was no more despicable person in my dad’s way of seeing the world than the sumbitch who won’t work. I doubt that I’ve ever known a man more willing to do hard physical labor than my father was. Knowing what he came from, and knowing how any progress he made came from the sweat of his brow and self-discipline on spending, he had no tolerance for people who were lazy and blamed everybody else for their problems. This is true whether they were poor, middle class, or rich (but especially if they were rich).

Anyway, Vance talks about how the contemporary hillbilly mindset renders them unfit for participation in life outside their own ghetto. They don’t trust anybody, and are willing to believe outlandish conspiracy theories, particularly if those theories absolve them from responsibility.

I once ran into an old acquaintance at a Middletown bar who told me that he had recently quit his job because he was sick of waking up early I later saw him complaining on Facebook about the “Obama economy” and how it had affected his life. I don’t doubt that the Obama economy has affected many, but this man is assuredly not among them. His status in life is directly attributable to the choices he’s made, and his life will improve only through better decisions. But for him to make better choices, he needs to live in an environment that forces him to ask tough questions about himself. There is a cultural movement in the white working class to blame problems on society or the government, and that movement gains adherents by the day.

Hence the enormous popularity of Donald Trump among the white working class. Here’s a guy who will believe and say anything, and who blames Mexicans, Chinese, and Muslims for America’s problems. The elites hate him, so he’s made the right enemies, as far as the white working class is concerned. And his “Make America Great Again” slogan speaks to the deep patriotism that Vance says is virtually a religion among hillbillies.

Trump doesn’t come up in Vance’s narrative, but in truth, he’s all over it. Vance is telling his personal story, not analyzing US politics and culture broadly. It’s also true, however, that the GOP elites set themselves up for their current disaster, by listening to theories that absolved themselves of any responsibility for problems in this country from immigration and free trade (Trump is not all wrong about this).

The sense of inner order and discipline Vance learned in the Marine Corps allowed his natural intelligence to blossom. The poor hillbilly kid with the druggie mom ends up at Yale Law School. He says he felt like an outsider there, but it was a serious education in more than the law:

The wealthy and the powerful aren’t just wealthy and powerful; they follow a different set of norms and mores. … It was at this meal, on the first of five grueling days of [law school job] interviews, that I began to understand that I was seeing the inner workings of a system that lay hidden to most of my kind. … That week of interviews showed me that successful people are playing an entirely different game.

What he’s talking about is social capital, and how critically important it is to success. Poor white kids don’t have it (neither do poor black or Hispanic kids). You’re never going to teach a kid from the trailer park or the housing project the secrets of the upper middle class, but you can give them what kids like me had: a basic understanding of work, discipline, confidence, good manners, and an eagerness to learn. A big part of the problem for his people, says Vance, is the shocking degree of family instability among the American poor. “Chaos begets chaos. Instability begets instability. Welcome to family life for the American hillbilly.”

Vance is admirably humble about how the only reason he got out was because key people along the way helped him climb out of the hole his culture dug for him. When Vance talks about how to fix these problems, he strikes a strong skeptical note. The worst problems of his culture, the things that held kids like him back, are not things a government program can fix. For example, as a child, his culture taught him that doing well in school made you a “sissy.” Vance says the home is the source of the worst of these problems. There simply is not a policy fix for families and family systems that have collapsed.

I believe we hillbillies are the toughest goddamned people on this earth. … But are we tough enough to do what needs to be done to help a kid like Brian? Are we tough enough to build a church that forces kids like me to engage with the world rather than withdraw from it? Are we tough enough to look ourselves in the mirror and admit that our conduct harms our children? Public policy can help, but there is no government that can fix these problems for us. These problems were not created by governments or corporations or anyone else. We created them, and only we can fix them.

Voting for Trump is not going to fix these problems. For the black community, protesting against police brutality on the streets is not going to fix their most pressing problems. It’s not that the problems Trump points to aren’t real, and it’s not that police brutality, especially towards minorities, isn’t a problem. It’s that these serve as distractions from the core realities that keep poor white and black people down. A missionary to inner-city Dallas once told me that the greatest obstacle the black and Latino kids he helped out had was their rock-solid conviction that nothing could change for them, and that people who succeeded got that way because they were born white, or rich, or just got lucky.

Until these things are honestly and effectively addressed by families, communities, and their institutions, nothing will change.

Is there a black J.D. Vance? I wonder. I mean, I know there are African-Americans who have done what he has done. But are there any who will write about it? Clarence Thomas did, in his autobiography. Who else? Anybody know?

Vance’s book sends me back to Kevin D. Williamson’s stunning National Review piece on “The White Ghetto” — Appalachia, he means. This is the world J.D. Vance came out of, though he saw more good in it that Williams does in his journalistic tour. It also brings to mind Williamson’s highly controversial piece earlier this year (behind subscription paywall; David French excerpts the hottest part here) in which he said:

It is immoral because it perpetuates a lie: that the white working class that finds itself attracted to Trump has been victimized by outside forces. It hasn’t. The white middle class may like the idea of Trump as a giant pulsing humanoid middle finger held up in the face of the Cathedral, they may sing hymns to Trump the destroyer and whisper darkly about “globalists” and — odious, stupid term — “the Establishment,” but nobody did this to them. They failed themselves.

If you spend time in hardscrabble, white upstate New York, or eastern Kentucky, or my own native West Texas, and you take an honest look at the welfare dependency, the drug and alcohol addiction, the family anarchy — which is to say, the whelping of human children with all the respect and wisdom of a stray dog — you will come to an awful realization. It wasn’t Beijing. It wasn’t even Washington, as bad as Washington can be. It wasn’t immigrants from Mexico, excessive and problematic as our current immigration levels are. It wasn’t any of that. Nothing happened to them. There wasn’t some awful disaster. There wasn’t a war or a famine or a plague or a foreign occupation. Even the economic changes of the past few decades do very little to explain the dysfunction and negligence — and the incomprehensible malice — of poor white America. So the gypsum business in Garbutt ain’t what it used to be. There is more to life in the 21st century than wallboard and cheap sentimentality about how the Man closed the factories down. The truth about these dysfunctional, downscale communities is that they deserve to die.

Economically, they are negative assets. Morally, they are indefensible. Forget all your cheap theatrical Bruce Springsteen crap. Forget your sanctimony about struggling Rust Belt factory towns and your conspiracy theories about the wily Orientals stealing our jobs. Forget your goddamned gypsum, and, if he has a problem with that, forget Ed Burke, too. The white American underclass is in thrall to a vicious, selfish culture whose main products are misery and used heroin needles. Donald Trump’s speeches make them feel good. So does OxyContin. What they need isn’t analgesics, literal or political. They need real opportunity, which means that they need real change, which means that they need U-Haul.

I criticized Williamson at the time for his harshness. I still wouldn’t have put it the way he did, but reading Vance gives me reason to reconsider my earlier judgment. Vance writes from a much more loving and appreciative place than Williamson did (though I believe Williamson came from a similar rough background), but he affirms many of the same truths. If white lives matter — and they do, because all lives matter — then sentimentality and more government programs aren’t going to rescue these poor people. Vance puts it more delicately than Williamson, but getting a U-Haul and getting away from other poor people — or at least finding some way to get their kids out of there, to a place where people aren’t so fatalistic, lazy, and paranoid — is their best hope. And that is surely true no matter what your race.

The book is called Hillbilly Elegy, and I can’t recommend it to you strongly enough. It offers no easy answers. But it does tell the truth. I thank reader Surly Temple for giving it to me.

UPDATE: Hello Browser readers. Glad to see traffic from one of my favorite websites. If you found this piece interesting, I strongly encourage you to take a look at the subsequent interview I did with J.D. Vance about the book. I posted it last Friday, and it has gone viral. This past weekend was a record-setting one for TAC; Vance’s interview was so popular it crashed our server. Take a look at the piece and you’ll understand why. This extraordinary young writer is tapping into something very, very deep in American life right now. I’ve been getting plenty of e-mails from liberals saying how much they appreciated the piece, because Vance tells difficult truths that both liberals and conservatives need to hear.

Voir aussi:

Why Liberals Love ‘Hillbilly Elegy’

Rod Dreher

August 5, 2016

My friend Matt Sitman tweets:

So I finished Hillbilly Elegy. Gonna write a long review. I was right about why conservatives like it so much

— Matthew Sitman (@matthew_sitman) August 5, 2016

Yes, but the more interesting question, at least to me, is why so many liberals like it — or at least why they are writing to me in droves saying how the interview J.D. Vance did with me deeply resonated with them, and inspired them to buy the book. (By the way, that interview was published two weeks ago today, and it’s still drawing so much web traffic to this site that our servers are struggling to handle it.) I’ll give you a sample below of the kind of correspondence I’m getting (with a couple of tweaks to protect privacy). There’s lots of it just like these below:

Mr. Dreher, this article was fantastic.

I grew up in rural Alabama, proudly declared myself “politically somewhere to the right of Attila the Hun”, and enlisted when I was 17. I had a difficult time getting out at 23 years old, several states away from my family, with a grownup’s bills to pay but an MOS that didn’t match the career I was suited for or needed as a civilian. I spent the next several years desperately poor but “self-sufficient” – as far as I knew, anyway.

In reality, of course, I had zero understanding of how taxes work. I saw about a 28% bite taken out of my paycheck, and didn’t understand that FICA/SS didn’t ultimately go to anybody but me, myself, and I, and that I wasn’t actually paying any income tax. I also had heard of but didn’t really understand or care about things like “every federal tax dollar that leaves SC has three federal tax dollars pass by it coming in.”

Truth be told, I wasn’t just unaware, I actively disbelieved that I wasn’t “self sufficient” at all, and I naively thought that I was paying for the “welfare” that the tiny, tiny portion of the population “poorer than me” was getting. I was also completely unaware that I was “desperately poor” at all. I was making $6/hr and I thought I was middle class! I knew people who made $10/hr, and I thought they were on the low end of upper class!
Eventually I made a real career for myself, started my own business, and spent less time scratching and kicking and fighting just to stay alive. The more time and resources I had, the more I learned about how the world, and politics, worked, and the more progressive I became. I am not, today, someone who would normally read articles from a site called “American Conservative”.

But I read yours, and I’m glad I did. What you and J.D. Vance had to say in that article are exactly what I want to hear from the conservative wing of American politics. Speaking candidly, I’m unlikely to be a “conservative” again – I’m a progressive, and likely to stay that way. But what you and Vance said was thoughtful, and reasonable, and – like I try to very publicly be myself, having “been there and done that” – understanding of the realities of the working poor. It’s the real and sensible ballast that even the best of real and sensible balloons (if you’ll permit the analogy between conservative and progressive, and we can both agree to handwave away the fact that the current DNC is neither as real or as sensible as it should be) needs.

That’s probably way too much to slog through, but seriously: thank you.

Another one:

I thoroughly enjoyed this article! The conversation is not one that I have witnessed anyone else having. It is so easy to dismiss people as racist without ever considering from where their views and positions are derived. I am certainly going to read Hillbilly Elegy and look forward to reading more of your articles, By the way I am black, liberal, I most often vote Democrat and I don’t like Trump (for Reasons too high in number to state). I enjoy intelligent conversation and debate and have learned to carefully listen to and understand those who I may disagree with, so I might be educated fully on the issue not just entrenched in my beliefs.

Thank you for a refreshing read in a sea partisan sludge.

Another one, this from a reader who mistakenly believed that J.D. Vance’s experiences were mine. Still, his letter is fascinating:

I wandered in on this article today… and couldn’t stop reading. I’m Californian, a progressive and a Sanders supporter, a former Nader supporter, a former UAW organizer, currently a medical
devices engineer in [state], and have a Ph.D. in engineering. I grew up in a town 5 miles north of the Mexican border in south San Diego, and grew up among Mexican immigrants, many of whom were undocumented… they were my neighbors, my friends, my elders. I myself am an immigrant, came here as a kid with my parents, who were liberals who wanted something better than that right-wing dictatorship in [another country].

But I did grow up around the poverty line. My parents fought hard to stay out of welfare, to stay together, and to teach us the value of work. At 43, I have always worked since I was 14, and have always associated these traits with working-class liberal values… and was quite surprised many election cycles ago to hear silver-spooned class enemies in the GOP pick that up. What did these bastards know about real work? But it also pains me to see the elites, especially the East Coast elites, take over the Democratic Party.

I’m sorry to hear about your experiences at Yale Law. And I’m glad that I didn’t go to a private school, or a school in the East Coast. After moving to [my current state] 3 years ago I’ve found that liberals “out east” (east of the Sierra Nevadas) seem to come from privilege, are more dogmatic, disconnected from the working class, and can be super competitive and vindictive. I even remember starting out as an undergrad and scholarship kid at UC San Diego, how I felt the sting of class. I felt disconnected culturally from the liberals. It wasn’t until friends from high school began shipping back from Desert Storm all crazy and screwed up that I found common cause with these liberals.

As with the folks of Appalachia (I was a member of the Southern Baptist Church… it was a big military town), the defense of our neighborhoods was also paramount to us. What south San Diegans were seeing during the 90s was an entire generation deployed to guard oil fields in Iraq while the princelings of Kuwait lived it up in night clubs, and folks in Sacramento setting up laws that attack immigrants as a cheap shot to get elected. Everything was fine at the border until these demagogues (Republicans in this case) started showing up in our town in staged photo-ops.

Trump does have that appeal of at least pretending to listen to the
broken and forgotten. But just as we were about to forget the vengeance we swore against those who hurt our town, Trump comes by and reopens all the wounds, reminding us that while we might hold some conservative values, Republicans will always see us as sub-human.

I do think dialog and empathy are something of a short supply in
American politics today. The neoliberal policies and unfair trade pacts supported by both parties have been crushing our respective beloved hometowns. And we have a lot more in common than what these entrenched political entities say that we do. I’ve read “Rivethead” and “Deer Hunting with Jesus” and felt this familiarity. I will look for your book.

And here’s another one:

I just wanted to write and tell you that I was fascinated by your interview with the author JD Vance, and I speak as a socialist, agnostic, gay white male who’s never voted Republican in all his years! As a lifelong resident of the suburbs of Houston, Texas, it’s long occurred to me how insulated I am from the struggles of poor and working-class folks today; however my family started out poor, with my parents divorcing when I was six. Luckily our mother was strong enough to help us make it out of the hole by excelling in her profession as a nurse. I remember her telling me that in the days when my sister and I were very young, for Christmas she’d spend $20 on each of us at the dollar store, and she always hoped that we enjoyed our presents. That made me love my mom so much more, and I realized how lucky we’d been to have her, given how things might have turned out. In Houston as you probably know there is a staggering number of people of every imaginable type, and my school years were spent among kids from every walk of life, of every ethnicity and persuasion you can imagine. As an outsider myself, being gay and openly agnostic in an environment where neither was considered acceptable (high school was in the late 90s), I can identify with the feeling of seeming hopelessness, isolation, and fear for the future that Mr Vance describes, though certainly on a different level and for different reasons. I also feel a greater understanding now of the appeal of Trump to certain strata within our society…along with a renewed sense of how dangerous he really is to all of us (not to mention the rest of the world)! I would like to feel as hopeful for the future as Mr Vance seems to, but I’m afraid that until November (though hopefully not after!) I’ll be suffering a case of non-stop indigestion. Maybe we could all use a touch of that hillbilly idealism in our lives.

Anyway, that’s enough rambling out of me. Cheers for an excellent interview, and congratulations for gaining a new reader of the blue persuasion!

I could go on and on. I’m getting so many e-mails like these above that I can’t begin to respond to them all. I’m passing every one of them on to J.D. Vance, though. Interestingly, if I’ve received a single e-mail from a conservative about the interview, I can’t remember it.

I’m genuinely surprised and grateful for all these generous e-mails, and I’m sure J.D. is too. What I find so hopeful about it is that someone has finally found a voice with which to talk substantively about an important economic and cultural issue, but without antagonizing the other side. JDV identifies as a conservative, but his story challenges right-wing free-market pieties. And I’ve gotten plenty of e-mails from liberals who either come from poverty or who work with poor people for a living, who praise JDV’s points about the poor needing to understand that whatever structural problems they face, they retain moral agency.

What do you think, readers? Do you think the runaway success of Hillbilly Elegy, and the powerfully positive response from liberals to a book about class written by a conservative, bodes well for the possibility of constructive engagement around issues of class and poverty? To be sure, I’ve received a handful of letters from angry liberal readers who reject the idea that there’s anything wrong with poor and working class white people that government action can’t solve. I believe, and so does J.D., that government really does have a meaningful role to play in ameliorating the problems of the poor. But there will never be a government program capable of compensating for the loss of stable family structures, the loss of community, the loss of a sense of moral agency, and the loss of a sense of meaning in the lives of the poor. The solution, insofar as there is a “solution,” is not an either-or (that is, either culture or government), but a both-and. From a Washington Post review of the book:

The wounds are partly self-inflicted. The working class, he argues, has lost its sense of agency and taste for hard work. In one illuminating anecdote, he writes about his summer job at the local tile factory, lugging 60-pound pallets around. It paid $13 an hour with good benefits and opportunities for advancement. A full-time employee could earn a salary well above the poverty line.

That should have made the gig an easy sell. Yet the factory’s owner had trouble filling jobs. During Vance’s summer stint, three people left, including a man he calls Bob, a 19-year-old with a pregnant girlfriend. Bob was chronically late to work, when he showed up at all. He frequently took 45-minute bathroom breaks. Still, when he got fired, he raged against the managers who did it, refusing to acknowledge the impact of his own bad choices.

“He thought something had been done to him,” Vance writes. “There is a lack of agency here — a feeling that you have little control over your life and a willingness to blame everyone but yourself.”

Perhaps Vance’s key to success is a simple one: that he just powered through his difficulties instead of giving up or blaming someone else.

“I believe we hillbillies are the toughest god—-ed people on this earth,” he concludes. “But are we tough enough to look ourselves in the mirror and admit that our conduct harms our children? Public policy can help, but there is no government that can fix these problems for us. . . . I don’t know what the answer is precisely, but I know it starts when we stop blaming Obama or Bush or faceless companies and ask ourselves what we can do to make things better.”

The loss of industrial jobs plays a big role in the catastrophe. J.D. Vance acknowledges that plainly in his book. But it’s not the whole story. Anybody who comes to Hillbilly Elegy thinking that it’s going to tell a story that affirms the pre-conceived beliefs of mainstream conservatives or liberals is going to be surprised and challenged — in a good way.

By the way, the viral nature of the TAC interview with J.D. Vance has pushed Hillbilly Elegy onto the bestseller list (more details of which will be available shortly). It’s No. 4 on Amazon’s own list as of this morning. They can barely keep enough in stock. It really is that good, folks. All this success could not have happened to a nicer man. Credit for this spark goes to reader Surly Temple, who gave me my copy of Hillbilly Elegy.

UPDATE: A reader writes to point out:

The Washington Post review you quote states, Perhaps Vance’s key to success is a simple one: that he just powered through his difficulties instead of giving up or blaming someone else.” I think that misses the point of the book. J.D. fully acknowledges the importance of his Mamaw, Marine Corps drill instructors, and wife in changing his outcomes.

My takeaway from the book is that we can help these communities and people, but not from a distance. It takes unconditional, sacrificial love.

He’s right about that, and I shouldn’t have posted that WaPo review without commenting. JDV openly credits his Mamaw and the Marine Corps with making him the man he is today. He does not claim he got there entirely on his own, by bootstrapping it.

Voir également:

RACE, CLASS, AND CULTURE: A CONVERSATION WITH WILLIAM JULIUS WILSON AND J.D. VANCE
THE BROOKINGS INSTITUTION
Washington, D.C.
Tuesday, September 5, 2017

MS. BUSETTE: Thanks Richard. I’m indebted to Richard who had the foresight to invite Bill and J.D. for this conversation well before I arrived at Brookings (…) Today we’re going to be covering some very timely and sensitive topics. Topics that explore who we are as Americans and why we are still struggling with entrenched poverty increasing in equality and the tragic waste of significant human potential; some 30 years after Bill Wilson first published his watershed book, “ The Truly Disadvantaged. ” As we begin this conversation, I want our audience to understand the personal experiences you both bring to your perspectives on poor Americans. Bill and J.D., I’d like each of you to share with us a personal experience from your childhood that had a profound impact on you and your perspectives on poverty, and Bill I’m going to ask you to go first.

MR. WILSON: Thank you. So, in answer to that challenging question, I should point out first of all that “ Hillbilly Elegy ” is a very important book and it also resonated with me in a very personal way because I also experienced the problems of rural poverty. I grew up in a small town in Western Pennsylvania. My father was a coal miner. He worked in these coal mines of Western Pennsylvania and oc casionally he worked in steel mills in Western Pennsylvania. He died at the age of 39, with a lung disease. Left my mother with six kids and I was the oldest at 12 years of age. My father had a 10 th grade education, my mother had a 10 th grade education. My mother who lived to the ripe old age of 94, raised us by cleaning house occasionally. Initially we were on r elief. We call it w elfare now. She got off w elfare and supported us by cleaning house; and what I distinctly remember about growing up in ru ral poverty is hunger. You know, I reviewed a book in the New York Times, Kathy Edin and Luke Shaefer’s book, “ Two Dollars a Day, Living on Almost Nothing in America. ” That book really captured my experiences, and I distinctly remember the times when we went hungry because my mother did not have any money and it was during the winter time and sometimes she had to use her own creativity in coming up with food because she couldn’t draw from the garden.

Now, given my family background, black person, black family in rural poverty; as one of my colleagues at Harvard told me, the odds that I would end up at Harvard as a University p rofessor and capital U on University, are very nearly zero. Like J.D. I’m an outlier. An outlier in — Malcolm Gladwell says in his book “ Outlier, The Study of Success. ” We are both outliers; but it’s interesting that J.D. never talks about holding himself up by his own bootstraps, and that’s something that I reject. I don’t refer to myself that way, because both J.D. and I, were in the right places at the right times, and we had significant individuals who were there to rescue us from poverty and enabled us to escape. We are the outliers being at the right place at the right time, and when I think about your question, that’s one thing I think about; how lucky I was. I had some significant individuals who helped me escape poverty.

MS. BUSETTE: Thank you Bill. J.D.?

MR. VANCE: Well first, thanks Camille, thanks Richard for hosting this. It’s really wonderful to be here and I’m a bit of a fan boy of William Julius Wilson as I wrote Hillbilly Elegy, so it was real exciting to be able to get him to sign this book. I think that the story that stands out to me is, and there’s a bit of a background here which is that you know, I was six or seven years old, and I remember my mom who was trying to get some sort of certification to become a nurse; and eventually after a couple of years, I remember being old enough that she sort of had to test how to draw blood on me, and that was sort of something I volunteered for because I thought it was really cool, because I was a weird kid; and I remember that eventually she made it and she was able to work as a nurse for a couple of years, and this just so happened to overlap with a period w here she was married to a truck driver. A guy who hadn’t graduated from high school, but was able to drive a truck and so you think about those two incomes together, there was this period where I felt like we had genuinely made it where we had this financial stability that was pretty remarkable given the history of my family. And I think the way that it fell apart so quickly and the way that even in the midst of that financial security, life was so chaotic and so unstable and eventually when that very precarious middle – class lifestyle fell apart economically, all of the instability that existed in our home sort of came crashing down upon us; and so, it felt like after this two-year period, we were in an even worse situation than we were going into it. I think you know, one of the things that taught me, and one of the ways I think it influenced the way that I think about poverty and inequality and upward mobility, is that the problems that a lot of poor families face aren’t purely income related. That some of the lessons that you learn, some of the things that you acquire when you are really struggling, they follow you even when you’re not struggling in a purely material sense. And then when a material sense returns, it can make all of those non-material things that much worse off, and I think that way of understanding these problems has really influenced the way that I think about a lot of the problems that I write about in the book.

MS. BUSETTE: Great, thank you very much. Thank you both very much. You know I want to talk a little bit about the place of poverty in the American narrative. And that narrative is complicated. In a recent survey conducted by The American Enterprise Institute and the Los Angeles Times, white Americans linked poverty with laziness and lack of ambition, and when we think of the welfare reform debates from the 1990’s, there were ungenerous terms used to describe the poor. The National Opinion Research Center also released a survey that shows that over the last two d ecades, there has never been such a bigger divide between white Republicans and white Democrats when it comes to the views of the intelligence and work ethic of African Americans. More generally, Americans think of poverty as an individual failure, and i ts opposite financial success is the result of hard work and smarts. I want each of you to reflect on these narratives of poverty and give us your perspective. Bill, I’m going to start with you.

MR. WILSON: Okay, that’s a very challenging question and I ‘m going to try to answer it by also pointing out some differences that I have with J.D. It’s really kind of a matter of emphasis. Not that we differ, it’s just a matter of emphasis. First of all, we both agree that too many liberal social scientists focus on social structure and ignore cultural conditions. You know, they talk about poverty, joblessness and discrimination, but they also don’t talk about some of the cultural conditions, that grow out of these situations, in response to these situations. Too many conservatives focus on cultural forces and ignore structural factors. Now J.D. has made the same point in “ Hillbilly Elegy ” and you also have made the same point in some subsequent interviews talking about the book. Now where we disagree and this relates back to your question, Camille, is in the interpretation of these cultural factors. J.D. places a lot of emphasis on agency. That people even in the most impoverished circumstances have choices that can either improve or exacerbate their situation, their predicaments. And I also think that a gency is important and should not be ignored, even in situations where individuals confront overwhelming structural impediments. But what J.D., and I’d like to hear your response to this J.D., wha t you don’t make explicit or emphasize enough from my point of view, is that agency is also constrained by these structural factors, even among people who you know, make positive choices to improve their lives, there are still constraints and I maintain th at the part of your book where you talking about agency, really cries out for a deeper interrogation. A deeper interrogation of how personal a gency is expanded or inhibited by the circumstance that the poor or working classes confront, including you know, their interactions and families, social networks , and institutions, in these distressed communities. In other words, what I’m trying to suggest is that personal agency is recursively associated with the structural forces within which it operates. And here you know, it’s sort of insightful to talk about intermediaries and insightful to talk about people who aid, who help you in making choices, and you do that well in the book. But here’s the point, given the American belief system on poverty and welfare in which Americans as you point out Camille, place far greater emphasis on personal shortcomings as opposed to structural barriers and especially when you’re talking about the behavior of African Americans. I believe that explanations that focus — don’t get me wrong, you don’t even talk about African Americans in the sense, I’m talking about people out there in the general public. Given this focus on personal shortcomings as opposed to structural barriers in a common for outcomes, I believe that explanations that focus on agency are likely to overshadow explanations that focus on structural impediments. Some people read a book, but they’re not that sophisticated, the take away will be those personal factors and you know, I would have liked to have seen you sort of try to put things in context you know. Talk about the constraints that people have. Now this relates to the second point I want to make. In addition, to feeling that they have little control over themselves, that is lack of agency. You point out that the individuals in these hillbilly communities tend to blame themselves — I’m sorry, blame everyone but themselves, and the term you used to explain this phenomenon is cognitive dissonance, when our beliefs are not consistent with our behaviors. And I agree, and many people often do tend to blame others and not themselves, but I think that when we talk about cognitive dissonance, we also have to recognize that individuals in these communities do indeed have some complaints, some justifiable complaints, including complaints about industries that have pulled off stakes and relocated to cheaper labor areas overseas and in the process, have devastated communities like Middletown, Ohio. Including complaints about automation replacing the jobs of cashiers and parking lot attendants. Including the complaints that government and corporate actions have undermined unions and therefore led to a decrease in the wages or workers in Middletown. You know, I just , I’m sorry, I’m going on too far, I’ll let you respond.

MS. BUSETTE: That was interesting. Now, here’s your chance.

MR. VANCE: Sure. So, I’ll make two broad points. One hopefully more responsive to your initial question, second more responsive to Bill’s concerns. So, first this point about culture, which is a really, really, difficult and amorphous concept to define, and one of the things that I was trying to do with “ Hillbilly Elegy ” is try to in some ways draw the discussion away from this structure versus personal responsibility narrative and convince us to look at culture as a third and I think very important variable. I often think that the way that conservatives, and I’m a conservative, talk about culture is in some ways an excuse to end the conversation instead of starti ng a much more important conversation. It’s look at their bad culture, look at their deficient culture, we can’t do anything to help them; instead of trying to understand culture as this much bigger social and institutional force that really is important that some cases can come from problems related to poverty and some cases can come from a host of different factors that are difficult to understand. So, here’s what I mean by that. One of the most important I think cultural problems that I talk about is the prevalence of family and stability and family trauma in some of the communities that I write about; and I take it as a given that that trauma and that instability is really bad, that it has really negative downstream effects on whether children are able to get an education, whether their able to enter the workforce, whether their able to raise and maintain successful families themselves. I think it’s tempting to sort of look at the problems of family instability and families like mine and say the re’s a structural problem if only people had access to better economic opportunities, they wouldn’t have this problem. I think that’s partially true, but also consequently partially false. I think there’s a tendency on the right to look at that and say these parents need to take better care of their families and of their children, and unless they do it, there’s nothing that we can do. And I think again, that is maybe partially true, but it’s also very significantly false. What I’m trying to point to in this concept of culture, is we know that when children grow up in very unstable families that it has important cognitive effects, we know that it has important psychological effects, and unless we understand the problem of family instability and trauma, not just as a structural problem, or problem with personal responsibility, but as a long – term problem, in some cases inherited from multiple generations back, then we’re not going to be able to appreciate what’s really going on in some of these families a nd why family instability and trauma is so durable and so difficult to actually solve. So, I tend to think of culture as in some ways, this way to sum all of the things that are neither structural nor individual. What is it that’s going on in people’s environments good and bad that make it difficult for them to climb out of poverty. What are the things that they inherit. It’s not just from their own families, but from multiple generations back. Behaviors, expectations, environmental attitudes that mak e is really hard for them to succeed and do well. That’s the concept of culture that I think is most important, and also frankly that I think is missing a little bit from our political conversation when we talk about these questions of poverty, we’re real ly comfortable talking about personal responsibility, we’re really comfortable talking about structural problems. We don’t often talk about culture in this way that I’m trying to talk about it, in “ Hillbilly Elegy. ”

MR. WILSON: Can I just —

MR. VANCE : Sure.

MR. WILSON: No, go ahead J.D.

MR. VANCE: (laughing)

MR. WILSON: No, no, I agree. It’s a matter of emphasis, that’s all I’m saying.

MR. VANCE: So this, yeah.

MR. WILSON: And let me also point out, here’s where we really do agree. We both agree that there are cultural practices within families and so on and in communities that reinforce problems created by the structural barriers.

MR. VANCE: Absolutely.

MR. WILSON: Reinforce. Practiced behaviors that perpetuate poverty and disadvantage. So, this we agree. Too often liberals ignore the role of these cultural forces in perpetuating or reinforcing conditions associated with poverty or concentrated (inaudible).

MS. BUSETTE: So —

MR. VANCE: Absolutely. So, the second point that I wanted to make, and I’ll try to be brief is this question of Agency and whether I overemphasize the role of Agency. I think that for me, this is a really tough line to tow because I’m sort of writing about these problems you know, having in my personal memory, I’m not that far removed from a lot of them. I know that myself, one of the biggest problems that I faced was that I really did start to give up on myself early in high school, and I think that’s a really significant problem. At the same time, I understand and recognize the problem that Bill mentions which is that we have this tendency to sort of overemphasize Personal Agency and to proverbially blame the victim for a lot of these problems. So, what I was trying to do with this discussion of Personal Agency in the book, and I may have failed, but this is the effort, this is what I’m really trying to accomplish. Is that the first instance, I do think that it’s important for kids like me in circumstances like mine, to pick up the book and to have at least some reinforcement of the Agency that they have. I do think that’s a significant problem from the prospective of kids who grew up in communities like mine. The second thing that I’m trying to do, is talk about Personal Agency, not jus t from the prospective of individual poor people, but from the entire community that surrounds them. So, one of the things that I talk about is as religious communities in these areas, do they have the, as I say in the book, toughness to build Churches that encourage more social engagement as opposed to more social disaffection. I think that’s a question of Personal Agency, not from the perspective of the impoverished kid, but from a religious leader and community leaders that exist in their neighborho od. So, I think that sense of Personal Agency is really important. One of the worries that I have, is that when we talk about the problems of impoverished kids and this is especially true amongst sort of my generation, so this is — I’m a tail end of t he millennials here, is that we tend to think about helping people, 10 million people at a time a very superficial level, and one of the calls to action that I make in the book with this — by pointing out to Personal Agency is the idea that it can be real ly impactful to make a difference in 10 lives at a very deep level at the community level. And I think that sometimes is missing from these conversations. And then, the final point that I’ll make is that there’s a difference between recognizing the impo rtance of Personal Agency and I think ignoring the role of structural factors in some of these problems, right? So, the example that I used to highlight this in the book is this question of addiction. So, there’s some interesting research that suggests t hat people who believe inherently that their addiction is a disease, show slightly less proclivity to actually fight that addiction and overcome that addiction. So, that creates sort of a catch 22, because we know there are biological components to add iction. We know that there are these sorts of structural non – personal decision – making drivers of addiction, and yet, if you totally buy in to the non – individual choice explanation for addiction, you show less of a proclivity to fight it. So, I think that there is this really tough under current to some of our discussions on these issues, where as a society we want to simultaneously recognize the barriers that people face, but also encourage them not to play a terrible hand in a terrible way, and that’s wh at I’m trying to do with this discussion of Personal Agency. The final point that I’ll make on that, is that the person who towed that line better than anyone I’ve ever known was my Grandma, my Ma’ma who I think is in some ways the hero of the book. She always told me. Look J.D., like is unfair for us, but don’t be like those people who think the deck is hopelessly stacked against them. I think that’s a sentiment that you hear far too infrequently among America’s elites. This simultaneous recogniti on that life is unfair for a lot of poor Americans, but that we still have to emphasize the role of individual agency in spite of that unfairness and I think that’s again a difficult balancing act. I may not have struck that balancing act perfectly in the book, but that was the intention.

MS. BUSETTE: Thank you.

MR. WILSON: Camille, do you mind if I follow – up because I mean this is an interesting conversation and you just raised a point there about optimism which I think is very, very important. Because you know, one point that resonated with me in your book is that you pointed out, I think it was 2010 – 2011, by the way, I read your book twice you know so (laughter) that’s how I remembered it, and I enjoyed it both times. I’m going to say —

MR. VANCE: That’s good.

MR. WILSON: — it’s a great book. You pointed out that in 2010 or 2011, you were overwhelmingly hopeful about the future, and that for the first time in your life, you felt like an outsider in Middletown, Ohio. And what made you feel like an alien as you put it, was your optimism. And I think that that’s the key. People who have some hope for the future behave differently. And I think that if there were some way to generate hope and optimism among people in Appalachia, or among the Appalachian transplants, you would see a change in their behavior, and this argument applies not only to those in distress rural communities, but also distressed urban communities. And I think immediately of the Harlem Children Zone. The kids who are lucky enough to be a part of — I assume all of you know about the Harlem Children’s Zone. The kids who are lucky enough to be a part of the Harlem Children’s Zone, are kids who develop in the process a hopeful feeling. A feeling that they have a future, and therefore they’re not going to do anything to jeopardize that future. You became optimistic. What factors led you to develop that optimism?

MR. VANCE: Yeah, that’s a good question. I might ask you the same question when I’m done answering —

MR. WILSON: Right.

MR. VANCE: — but you know, the first thing is definitely you know, going back to my grandma. I think if anybody had a reason for pessimism and cynicism about the future, it was her. It’s sort of difficult to imagine a woman who had lived a more difficult life and yet ma’ma had this constant optimism about the future, in the sense that we had to do better because that was just the way that America worked. I mean I think that she was this woman who had this deep and abiding faith in the American dream in a way that is obviously disappearing And in fact, as I wrote about in the book, was I started to see disappearing even you know, when I was a young kid in my early 20’s. So, I think that my grandma was a huge part of that. I also think that the Marine Corp was a really huge part of that, and this is sort of a transformational experience that I write about in the book. The military is this really remarkable institution. It brings people from diverse backgrounds together, gets them on the same team. Gets them marching proverbially and literally towards the same goal, and for a kid who had grown up in a community that was starting to lose faith in that American dream, I think that the military was a really useful way to, as I say in the book, teach a certain amount of willfulness as opposed to despair and hopelessness. So, I think that was a really critical piece of it. You know, at some level, in some cases I think it’s impossible to reconstruct that in the past. I knew that I was a really hopeless and in some cases detached kid early in high school. I knew that by 2010, I was feeling really optimistic about the future and I do sometimes wonder how easy it is to reconstruct what took me from point A to point B, but those two factors are my best guess.

MS. BUSETTE: Did you want to answer his question.

MR. WILSON: You know, even in extreme property, my mother kept telling me, you’re going to college. And my Aunt Janice also reinforced — my Aunt Janice was the first person in my extended family who got a college education, and I used to go to New York to visit her during the summer months, and I said you know, I want to be like Aunt Janice, you know?

MR. VANCE: Sure.

MR. WILSON: Key people in our lives —

MR. VANCE: Absolutely.

MR. WILSON: We are the outliers J.D.

MR. VANCE: Yep.

MR. WILSON: And Malcom Gladwell since.

MS. BUSETTE: Thank you both for that interchange. I think that was incredibly interesting and very illuminating. I want to go back to something you mentioned J.D., which is this question of culture. You know Bill, I know that the term cultural poverty has a very divisive history and still conjures up very vitriolic debates today. But Bill, you have over an extraordinary career, created meaningful distinctions about poverty and within that jargon of poverty and you’ve also situated jobless poverty in particular within changes in the economy. Could you tell us what the experiential differences are between jobless poverty and the employed poor?

MR. WILSON: Well you really see this when you look at neighborhoods. Neighborhoods in which an overwhelming majority of the population are poor, but employed is entirely different from neighborhoods in which people are poor but jobless. Jobless neighborhoods trigger all kinds of problems. Crime, drug addiction, gang behavior, violence. And one of the things that I had focused on when I wrote my book, When Work Disappears is what happens to intercity neighborhoods that experience increasing le vels of joblessness. And we did some research in Chicago and it was really you know, sad, talking to some of the mothers who were just fearful about allowing their children to go outside because the neighborhood was so incredibly dangerous. And I remember talking with one woman and she says — who was obese and she says you know, I went to the doctor he said that I should go out and exercise. Can you imagine jogging in this neighborhood? Because the joblessness had created problems among young people who were trying to make ends meet and they’re involved in crime and drugs and so on. So, I would say that if you want to focus on improving neighborhoods, the first thing that I would do would try to increase or enhance employment opportunities.

MS. BUSETTE: Great, thank you.

MR. WILSON: I have another story. This just reminds me. I was talking with a mother, young mother. Actually, she’s young now from my point of view, middle 30’s and her son had just been shot in the neighborhood, killed. Str ay bullet from a gang fight. She said her son was not a member of the gang, that’s one of the reasons why she was so fearful, so concerned about keeping her children indoors. She said you know Mr. Wilson, no one cared that my son died. His death was not reported in any of the newspapers. It wasn’t reported on the radio, TV. No one cared Mr. Wilson that my son died. And I just keep thinking about these families who live in these dangerous jobless neighborhoods and what they have to endure.

MS. BUSETTE: Thank you. One of the things that comes out clearly from your work Bill, and from your book J.D., is the erosion of social networks and social capital. J.D., your book is really an extended love letter to your grandparents who raised you. Can you tell us a little bit about how the social connections that they had were important to their resilience they showed as parents, as your parents?

MR. VANCE: Sure. So, my grandparents lived in, I think grew up in a little town that had much more robust communities than the town that I grew up in. And so, a lot of the relationships they developed, my grandfather was a 35-year union welder, at Armco. Later, A.K. Steel. My grandmother was a little bit more socially isolated than my grandfather but still had built up a network of friends over that time, and you know, going back to Bill’s point about having diverse networks of people who actually give you a sense of what’s possible and what’s out there, that was really, really, powerful for me, right. So, you know, of my grandparents three kids, one obviously is my mom, but my uncle and aunt were doing pretty well when I was a young kid, and so that gave me this sense of what’s out there, what’s possible. That’s really powerful. My grandfather had a number of friends most of whom were working class like him, but some of whom you know, owned the local businesses or owned local stores or mechanic shops, things like that. So that also gave me the sense of what was possible. And I think ultimately though I went to the Marine Corps and then off to college. I also think the obvious implication is that some of those social networks and connections would have had really powerful economic benefits if I had eventually tried to rely on them. I think that what was so wonderful about my grandparent’s social networks is that they were intact enough for me to still have relied upon them. On the other hand, one thing I really worried about and one thing that I increasingly worried about as I actually did research for the book, is this idea of faith and religion, not just as something that people believe in, but as an actual positive institutional and social role player in their lives. And one of the things you do see, that this is something that Charles Murray’s written about, is that you see the institutions of faith declining in some of these lower income communities faster than you do in middle and upper income communities. I don’t think you have to be a person of faith to think that that’s worrisome. I think you can just read a paper by Jonathan Gruber that talks about all of these really positive social impacts of being a regular participatory Church member. So, you know, I think I was lucky in that sense, but a lot of folks, and when I look at the community right now, it worries me a little bit that you don’t see these robust social institutions in the same way that you certainly did 30, 40 years ago, and even when I was growing up in Middletown. The last point that I’ll make about that, is that (…) these trends often take half a century or more to really reveal themselves and I do sometimes see signs of resilience in some of these communities that I sort of didn’t fully anticipate and didn’t expect when the book was published. So, one of the things I’ve started to realize for example is when we talk about the decline of institutional faith, even though I continue to worry about that, one of the institutions that’s actually picked up the slack are groups like Alcoholics Anonymous and Narcotics Anonymous. They almost have this faith effect. It brings people together. There’s even a sort of liturgical element to some of these meetings that I find really, really fascinating and interesting. So, people try to find and replace community when it’s lost but you know, clearly, they haven’t at least as of yet, replaced it even remotely to the degree that it has been lost which is why I think you see some of the issues that we do.

MS. BUSETTE: Alright, thank you. Bill, I know you have something to say on that —

MR. WILSON: Sure.

MS. BUSETTE: — but I wanted to kind of position the question in a slightly different way than I did for J.D. The economy certainly became significantly since you first penned The Truly Disadvantaged. And what, from your perspective, what effects have those changes had on social organization and poverty?

MR. WILSON: Well, I don’t know if the conditions have changed that much, since I wrote The Truly Disadvantaged. The one big difference is that I think there’s increasing technology and automation that has created problems for a lot of low skilled workers. You know, I mentioned automation replacing jobs that cashiers held, and parking lot attendants held. So, you have a combination not only of the relocation of industries overseas, that I talked about in The Truly Disadvantaged; but now you have increasing automation and technology replacing jobs, and this worries me because I think that people who have poor education are going to be in difficult situations increasingly down the road. You look at intercity schools, not only schools in intercities, but in many other neighborhoods, and kids are not being properly educated. So, they’re not being prepared for the changes that are occurring in the economy. I remember one social scientist saying that it’s as if — talking about the black population. It’s as if racism and racial discrimination put black people in their place only to watch increasing technology and automation destroy that place. So, the one significant difference from the time I wrote The Truly Disadvantaged in 1987, is the growing problems created by increasing technology for the poor.

MR. VANCE: Bill, could I ask a question —

MR. WILSON: Sure.

MR. VANCE: — because this is something I was you know, looking through your book on my Kendall earlier today, and I kept on coming back to this question, and I’m curious what you think. Which is if the civil rights movement had happened in the early 20th century as opposed to the mid-20th century, do you think that black Americans would be more caught up than they are right now? In other words, do you think that it happened, the civil rights advancements happened at a time when technology was just really starting to hammer the economies that they relied on, and if it happened in an area where there weren’t quite the same premiums on human capital, that maybe they could have caught up a little bit better than they have over the past 50 years?

MR. WILSON: So what you’re saying is that if civil rights movement had happened at this time?

MR. VANCE: Sorry, the early 20th century?

MR. WILSON: Oh, the early 20th century

MR. VANCE: Yeah, that’s right.

MR. WILSON: Right.

MR. VANCE: So, if it had happened when we were just transitioning from the proverbial farm to the factory, do you think it would have had a significant difference?

MR. WILSON: I’m not sure.

MR. VANCE: Right, what else can you say.

MR. WILSON: What do you think?

MR. VANCE: — reading The Truly Disadvantaged today, I was thinking maybe the answer is yes, because part of what happened, with the civil rights movement is that the economy was rapidly changing just to some of these legal structures were you know, as black Americans were freed from some of these legal structures. And I do wonder if the economy — it was in some ways as these legal changes were happening in a very positive way, the economy hit black Americans super hard, and I wonder if those legal structures would have fallen at a time when the economy wasn’t changing so rapidly. Maybe things would be a little bit different today?

MR. WILSON: This reminds me of the point that Bayard Rustin raised in the early 1960’s. He said, you know, it’s great to outlaw discrimination and prejudice, but it’s also important to recognize that if you have a referee in the ring, and you say there will be no discrimination, but one fighter has had all of the training and the other fighter has not, which fighter is going to come out ahead? And so, he says much more emphasis has now got to be placed on dealing with these basic economic problems and he told Martin Luther King, Jr. he said look, he says what good is it to be allowed to eat in a restaurant if you can’t afford a hamburger; so, we’re going to have to address some of these fundamental economic problems —

MR. VANCE: Sure.

MR. WILSON: — that are devastating the community. So that reinforces your point too.

MS. BUSETTE: That is a perfect segue to a set of questions that I want to ask you both. It’s about the question of Race in America. We know that racism and discrimination have a long history in the U.S., and that the effects of that history are still experienced by individuals on a daily basis today. When those experiences are aggregated, we can see large mobility, wealth and income gaps between white Americans and African Americans. We are also hearing, and reading and seeing about the culture of the sphere, the opioid epidemic and the disability culture in rural and Rust belt America. So, I’m going to ask a sensitive question. Are there differences between being black, jobless and poor, and being white jobless and poor? And if so, what are they and why? Bill, I’m going to give you the honor of tackling that first (laughter).

MR. WILSON: You know, that’s a very interesting question because I was just — you know J.D. you wrote in your book about the problems of poor whites and it seems that poor whites right now are more pessimistic than any group, and the question is why. I was sort of impressed with your analysis of the white working class and the age of Trump. You know, you pointed out that when Barack Obama became president there were a lot of people in your community who were really struggling and who believe that the modern American meritocracy did not seem to apply to them. These people were not doing well, and then you have this black president who’s a successful product of meritocracy who has raised the hope of African Americans and he represented every positive thing that these working-class folks that you write about did not possess or lacked. And Trump emerged as candidate who sort of spoke to these people. What is interesting is that if you look at the Pew Research Polls, recent Pew Research polls, I think you pointed this out in your book, the working – class whites right now are more pessimistic than any other group about their economic future and their children’s future. Now is that pessimism justified? I think they’re overly pessimistic. I still maintain that to be black, poor and jobless is worse than being white, poor and jobless, okay? But, for some reason, the white poor is more pessimistic. Now I think with respect to the black poor and working class has kind of an Obama effect you kn ow. I think that may wear off and then blacks will become even more equally as pessimistic as whites in a few years.

MR. VANCE: I’d really like for you to run those numbers right now, and see if the rates among pessimism among working class blacks are changed or inverted relative to where they were a couple of years ago. You know, people ask me what I see as the similarities between working class blacks and working-class whites, and what the differences are, and whenever they ask me what the differences are I always say, talk to Bill Wilson, he’s a lot smarter about this stuff than I am. But the thing that jumps out to me most when I think about the differences, is that housing policy, especially housing policy back in the 50’s and 60’s affects modern day black Americans much more than it does modern day white Americans. Especially the working and non-working poor. What I mean by that is that I think that you know, partially because of research that Bill has done and partially for research that a lot of other folks have done. Concentrated poverty is really bad. It’s worse than just being poor. To be sort of socially isolated in these islands of all the other poor people and I think that’s a much more common experience among black Americans because of the residuals effects of housing policy in the 50’s and 60’s, so I think that to me, if I was going to pick one single factor, that was driving the continued difference, I would probably say housing policy. The sort of question of how to you know, is it better or worse to be working-class or sort of poor, jobless and white, versus poor, jobless and black. I think all things being equal certainly poor jobless and black is sort of worse off if you look at wealth numbers, if you look at income numbers, that’s still the case. I do worry a little bit that we don’t have the vocabulary to really talk about the full measure of disadvantage in the country right now. What I mean by that is that we’re pretty comfortable talking about class, we’re pretty comfortable talking about gender, we’re reasonably comfortable talking about race, but when we talk about things like single parent families, family trauma, concentrated poverty. All of these things that would go into what I would call the disadvantage bucket or the privileged bucket, it’s not those three factors, it’s probably two dozen or three dozen factors. We’re really bad about talking about everything except for race, class and gender. And I think that’s one way that the conversation has really broken down, especially in the past few years.

MS. BUSETTE: Alright, thank you.

MR. WILSON: So, this reminds me of your points J.D., reminds me of a paper that Robert Sampson, a colleague at Harvard and I wrote in 1995 entitled Toward a Theory of Race, Crime and Urban Inequality. A paper that has become a classic actually in the field of criminology because it’s generated dozens of research studies. Our basic thesis we were addressing you know, race and violent crime, is that racial disparities and violent crime are attributable in large part to the persistent structural disadvantages that are disproportionately concentrated in African American urban communities. Nonetheless, we argue that the ultimate cause of crime were similar for both whites and blacks, and we pose a central question. In American cities, it is possible to reproduce in white communities the structural circumstances under which many blacks live. You know, the whites haven’t fully experienced the structural reality that blacks have experienced does not negate the power of our theory because we argue had whites been exposed to the same structural conditions as blacks then white communities would behave – – the crime rate would be in the predicted direction. And then we had an epiphany. What about the rural white communities that you talk about. Where you’re not only talking about joblessness, you’re not only talking about poverty, but you’re also talking about family structure. So, here in Appalachia, you could reproduce some of the conditions that exist in intercity neighborhoods and therefore it would be good to test our theory in these areas because we’d be looking at the family structure. The rates of single parent families. We’d be looking at joblessness, we’d be loo king at poverty. So, we need to move beyond the urban areas and see if we can look at communities that come close to approximating or even worse in some cases, and some intercity neighborhoods. This reminds me, I was reading an interview, excellent interview. Remember I wrote to you that first time I read this interview, it was before I even read Hillbilly Elegy and I went and read the book after reading this interview; or maybe it was in Hillbilly Elegy where you refer to the research of the economist Raj Chetty who did some path breaking research on concentrated poverty, single parent families and mobility.

MR. VANCE: Yep.

MR. WILSON: And the reports in the newspapers focused on concentrated poverty and then talk about rates of single parent families which he also emphasized, you see.

MR. VANCE: Yep.

MR. WILSON: But if you want to capture both, it might be good to focus on rural areas like the ones you wrote about, and see if some of the same factors are reproduced that I read about in The Truly Disadvantaged.

MS. BUSETTE: Oh there’s no second book for you (laughter). So, my colleague Richard Reeves has recently published a piece that demonstrated that there’s a century economic mobility gap between black and white men. So, in a sense, the historically lower rates of upward mobility have delayed the economic ascent of black men by a century. Should we be concerned?

MR. WILSON: Could you repeat that?

MS. BUSETTE: Yeah. The historically lower rates of upward mobility have delayed for black men, have delayed the economic ascent of black men by a century compared to white men. So, the question is, should we be concerned, and do we need differentiated sets of policies to address black economic mobility and on the other hand, white economic mobility?

J.D., I’m going to give that to you first (laughter).

MR. WILSON: You should have sent these questions to us ahead of time (laughter) —

MS. BUSETTE: No, no.

MR. WILSON: — so we could have thought —

MS. BUSETTE: That’s the fun (laughter). Yeah, no fun in that.

MR. VANCE: Well, I think you asked two questions. The first was should we be concerned. My answer to that is yes, and I’ll let Bill take the second question (laughter). So, you know, this question of should we have differentiated policies. I think it depends on what we mean by differentiated right. So, to take Bill’s — something he said earlier, this question of technological change and the way that it’s impacting these communities, I think that requires us to fundamentally rethink the way that we approach higher education. That’s been my persistent frustration, thinking about policy over the past couple of years. Is we have this rapidly changing economy. We haven’t changed our institutions or even our institutional thinking to match up to that rapidly changing economy. But if you’re focused on sort of correcting those gaps or if you’re just basically focused on giving help to the people who need it, then you’re going to have a differentiated application of help because black Americans need it, you know, maybe on average more than white Americans. If we talk about sort of the negative effects for example of concentrated poverty, this is something that I really worry about, and back to Raj Chetty, a different paper that he published show that there are these really interesting positive effects of the Moving to Opportunity Study. But my guess is that concentrated poverty equally hurts black and white Americans, it’s just that black Americans experience it more. So, there’s going to be a differentiated effect if you try to rectify that problem, but not because you say we’re going to try to help black people more than white people, just because you’re going to say, I want to help the problem of concentrated poverty and because they’re suffering from it more. That effect will at least be differentiated. But I don’t know, I haven’t thought about sort of whether you should go into it sort of before the fact and try to apply these things differently. My guess is that that’s probably politically not a great idea, and may not be necessary from a moral perspective either, but I’m curious as to what Bill thinks.

MR. WILSON: I agree. Certainly, in this day and age it’s not a good idea. But, if you ask me, what am I most concerned about right now in addressing problems of poverty and so on. I’m concerned about jobs. Although I wouldn’t phrase it this way, I wouldn’t say that we need public sector jobs for black males, I would say we need public sector jobs for people who live in concentrated poverty and that would apply to white males, not only males, but females as well. As well as blacks. But which group would benefit disproportionately from a public sector’s jobs program. It would be black males, because black males have these high prison records; and therefore because of their prison records, many of them find it extremely difficult because of the incarceration rates, many of them find it extremely difficult to find jobs in the private sector. Therefore, at least as a temporary as opposed to a permanent solution, I would like to see public sector job creation for those who have difficulty finding employment in the private sector. When I speak of public sector jobs, I mean the type of jobs provided by the WPA during the Great Depression. Jobs that would improve the infrastructure in our communities, including the under-funded National Park Service, state and local park districts. I just feel that public sector jobs are very, very important particularly for black adults who have been stigmatized by prison records and who thus find it virtually impossible to find jobs in the private sector. Now, saying that. I’m on to no illusion that these programs and a program like public sector job program would garner widespread support in the current political climate, but I feel that we have to start thinking seriously, about what should be done when we have a more favorable political climate, and when people from both parties are willing to consider seriously policies that could make a difference.

MS. BUSETTE: We have time for one more question, and I’m going to start, J.D., with you. So, in a paper by Richard Reeves and another colleague of mine, Eleanor Krouse, that was released today, the evidence is that rural areas with the best rates of upward mobility are the ones with the highest rates of out migration, especially among young people. Should we just accept that some communities are essentially dying, and focus our efforts on helping people move on to other places with more opportunity, or should we be trying to turnaround these blighted areas?

MR. VANCE: That is a really tough one. So, I’m going to try to judicially split the baby here and I’ll probably fail but — (laughter). When I think about should we try to fix these blighted areas, I think that it depends on how we define area, right? Because my concern with some of these out-migration arguments is that we say, if you can’t find a good job in West Virginia, you should move to San Francisco, California, and they’re two concerns with that. The first is that try to convince somebody that they could afford a place in San Francisco, California when it’s a two-bedroom apartment costs you $4,500 a month. So, I think that again, going back to housing policy, that really makes this out migration pretty difficult. The second thing is that you really do — I think we have to understand there’s a difference between out migration from let’s say Eastern Kentucky to Southwestern Ohio verses Eastern Kentucky to San Diego, California, because the former allows you to preserve some important social contacts and social connections. It is cheaper to move there, it’s less culturally intimidating to move there. I mean I cannot imagine what my grandparents would have said if you would have told them in the 1940’s that they had to move to modern day San Francisco. It really would have been, you need to move to an entirely different country. Maybe an entirely different planet. And I think that’s important. So, the way that I think about this problem is that we have to accept that while out migration has to be a part of the solution, we can’t just say every single person in Breathitt County Kentucky has to leave, and Breathitt County Kentucky gets to close up shop. But if we can regionally develop big cities like Lexington, like Pittsburgh, like Columbus, Ohio, that obviously has downstream effects and that allows you to have out migration to places that isn’t so culturally foreign and enables people to maintain those social connections even as they move to areas with higher employment; and oh, by the way, still play a positive role in the communities back home. I think that’s the way that I approach that particular problem.

MS. BUSETTE: Alright, thank you.

MR. WILSON: You know my colleague at Harvard, Robert Sampson and former student Patrick Sharkey who is at NYU have argued for durable investments in disadvantaged neighborhoods to counter the persistent disinvestments in such neighborhoods, and I was wondering if you use that argument and focus on Appalachia for example, what would investments look like? And I’m going to put this question to you J.D., if you’re talking about investments in these communities, would it include such things as hospitals, clinics, road construction, shopping centers, daycare centers, these kinds of things. Would that be helpful? Would those things be helpful?

MR. VANCE: Yes, so I think it would definitely be helpful. One of the concerns I have with what we’ve seen with regional economic development is that it very often happens through the avenue of let me provide you tax credit so that you can open up new retail, right? I don’t think that’s especially durable economic development, right. I mean, I think we have to think of local economies as sort of a pyramid. You need real industries, manufacturing, then you have retail on top of it, but you can’t really rebuild some of these economic centers with just retail. There is actually an interesting bill that’s moving through Congress right now, that would in some ways place long-term capital investment at parity with short-term capital investment like tax credits. That would allow things like Venture Capital investment and much bigger longer – term patient capital to invest in some of these areas and create you know, more durable jobs in more durable sectors. But I also think, and my thinking honestly has probably changed in the past few years, though maybe change isn’t the right word, as I start to think about this a little bit more seriously. When I look at you know, some of the work David Autor has done about the China Shock and the way that it’s impacted some of these areas. I do think that we’ve been so caught up in thinking about long term well-being as purely as a function of consumption, that we haven’t thought about the fact that if you pay three cents less for a widget at Walmart, but half of your community just lost its job, your purchasing power is slightly greater, but your community has lost something really significant. I think that’s been missing from our conversations about economics in jobs, especially on the right, but I really think across the spectrum we focus too little on bringing good durable, high paying work into some of these areas. And consequently, if you look at just a policy across the board, we’ve congratulated ourselves, because purchasing power, even among the low income has gone up, not recognizing the purchasing power that comes from a government transfer is a lot different from purchasing power that comes from a good job.

MS. BUSETTE: Great. Thank you both very much. We are now going to take questions from the audience. So, (inaudible) from Brookings. So, I’d like everybody to be able to say who they are and the organization they’re coming from, and then ask your question please. Thank you. And I’ll take a couple of these. I’ll take yours first and then we’ll take a few more.

SPEAKER: First thing I want to do is thank both of you for such a thoughtful conversation. I mean Camille asked you really tough provocative questions, so it was a great conversation. I think I want to add to the provocative question list here. We haven’t talked much about our politics going forward and how they may play out in terms of things that you both might be in favor of. Bill, you say you’re for a public jobs program, but obviously that’s politically going to be extremely difficult to convince much of the public including many of the so-called white working class that J.D. has been studying. They don’t like government programs. They don’t like handouts. They want I think, as I read it, the literature, including your book, they want real jobs, not government jobs. In fact, they really dislike a lot that they see in first line government workers. With that background and thinking about you know, where does our politics go from here, I happened to have read this weekend, a new small essay by Mark Lilla who is arguing quite controversially that the Democratic party needs to put less emphasis on identity politics. That means staying away presumably from racial divides and culture and all of that. And, do you have any thoughts about generally how we bring the country back together again politically and specifically this notion that maybe the Democratic party is losing the white working-class by putting too much emphasis on immigrants, minorities, women etcetera?

MS. BUSETTE: I’ll let you Gabby — I’ll let you gather your thoughts there.

MR. WILSON: I’ll take a shot —

MS. BUSETTE: Wow, a brave man.

MR. VANCE: I hope that there’s vodka in this (laughter).

MR. WILSON: So you know, I blurbed Mark Lilla’s book.

SPEAKER: Oh, did you? That’s right, I remember.

MR. WILSON: I blurbed it. What’s the title of the book ?

SPEAKER: The Once in a Future Liberal.

SPEAKER: That’s right.

MR. WILSON: The Once in a Future Liberal. Yeah, I blurbed the book. You know, Mark Lilla and a number of other post-election analysts observed that as you point out that the Democrats should not make the same mistake that they made in the last election, namely an attempt to mobilize people of color, women, immigrants and the LGBT community with identity politics. They tended to ignore the problems of poor white Americans. I was watching the Democratic convention with my wife on a cruise to Alaska, and one concern I had was there did not seem to be any representatives on the stage representing poor white America. I could just see some of these poor whites saying they don’t care about us. They’ve got all these blacks, they’ve got immigrants, they’ve got (inaudible), but you don’t have any of us on the stage. Maybe I’m overstating the point, but I was concerned about that. Now one notable exception, critics like Mark Lilla point out was Bernie Sanders. Bernie Sanders had a progressive and unifying populous economic message in the Democratic primaries. A message that resonated with a significant segment of the white lower-class population. Lower class, working class populations. Bernie Sanders was not the Democratic nominee and Donald Trump was able to, as we all know, capture notable support from these populations with a divisive not unifying populous message. I agree with Mark Lilla that we don’t want to make the same mistake again. We’ve go to reach out to all groups. We’ve got to start to focus on coalition politics. We have to develop a sense of interdependence where groups come to recognize that they can’t accomplish goals without the support of other groups. We have to frame issues differently. We can’t go the same route. We can’t give up on the white working class.

MS. BUSETTE: Okay, J.D., did you want to tackle that or —

MR. VANCE: Yeah, sure I’ll —

MS. BUSETTE: — shall we go for other questions?

MR. VANCE: — I can briefly answer. I mean as a Republican who is deeply worried about the American right, this gives me a great chance to rift on the other side. So, just a couple of thoughts as you ask the question and as Bill was responding. The first is that on this question of identity politics, I think that what worries me is that a lot — it’s not a recognition that there are disadvantaged non-white groups that need some help or there needs to be some closing of the gap you know. When I talk to folks back home, very conservative people, they’re actually pretty open-minded if you talk about the problems that exist in the black ghetto because of problems of concentrated poverty and the fact that the black ghetto was in some ways created by housing policy. It was the choice of black Americans. It was in some ways created by housing policy. I find actually a lot of openness when I talk to friends and family about that. What I find no openness about is when somebody who they don’t know, and who they think judges them, points at them and says you need to apologize for your white privilege. So, I think that in some ways making these questions of disadvantage zero sum, is really toxic, but I think that’s one way that the Democrats really lost the white working class in the 2016 election. The second piece that occurs to me, and this applies across the political spectrum, is that what we’re trying to do in the United States, it’s very easy to be cynical about American politics, but we’re rying to build a multi-racial, multi-ethnic, multi-religious nation, not just a conglomeration, an actual nation of people from all of these different tribes and unify them around a common creed. I think that’s really delicate. It’s basically never been done success fully over a long period in human history and I think it requires a certain amount of rhetorical finesse that we don’t see from many of our politicians on either side these days and that really, really worries me.

MS. BUSETTE: Okay, thank you both. I ‘m going to take three other questions and then we can answer them. So, this gentleman here, young lady here with her hand up, and then I’ll take yeah, the person right in the back there. Okay, yeah, on this side first.

SPEAKER: Thank you very much. I’ve known Bill Wilson for years, I’ve known J.D. over the telephone (overlapping conversations) all over town.

MR. VANCE: A fellow Middletonian.

SPEAKER: Yes, I tried to catch you at the book fair on Saturday. The line, for those of you who weren ‘t there, stretched all the way out of the DC Convention Center and down (inaudible) Avenue. I’ve never seen anything like it since the Beatles came to town (laughter). But anyway, yes, I’m a fellow middie, and from class of 65, so I went there before you were born. We just had our 50th anniversary reunion here a couple of years ago. I’m delighted by your book. Folks ask me if I ever thought of writing a memoir, and I said my life was too dull, my (inaudible) was too quiet. When I grew up we were an all-American city. You may have read that in your history books. Back in the 50’s we were one of the all-American cities in America. A few years ago, Forbes chose Middletown as one of 10 fastest dying cities in America. This tells you what’s happened over time. So, I have a lot of things I’d love to inject, but I’m just going to ask one question. As you know I’ve talked before about when I came out of Middletown High in 65 I was able to work at the steel mill at Armco, and make enough money to pay my tuition at Ohio University, go Bobcats. For tuition in 1965 at Ohio U was $770. With room and board $1,240. It wasn’t hard for me, the son of a mother who was a cook and a father who was a factory worker to move up to the middle class, thanks to Ohio’s excellent higher education system. Years later of course you went to the Marines to get a scholarship to go to Ohio State —

MR. VANCE: True.

SPEAKER: — and so it was possible, but it certainly is tougher now to go from working class Middletown, we don’t have the steel mill jobs in the summer anymore. The five paper mills that we used to have are all gone. All the industries up and down I – 75, all the way to Detroit, General Motors, Frigidaire, GM, Delco Battery, Huffy Bicycle, National Cash Register, and I could go on and on and on, but what Bill Wilson writes about in the you know they’ve gone overseas or other types of chains have gone on. We were talking about automation back in the 50’s, and the 60’s and of course we see what has happened, and it’s still happening. But my question really is we haven’t talked much about those front row kids like yourself there who had a chance to go to college and found a way there. That route has gotten tougher. Do you think we need to do something to make it easier to get higher education? Some schooling beyond high school?

MS. BUSETTE: Okay great, thank you. This woman here with the red sweater. Please, thank you.

MS. RISER : Thank you gentleman, it’s extremely challenging —

MS. BUSETTE: Can you say your name please.

MS. RISER: I will say my name. It’s Mindy Riser and I have worked and continued to with a number of NGO’s across the world concerned with social justice. My question is about a segment of the American population, you haven’t talked about, and that is the aging baby boomers who come in all colors, shapes and sizes. Some of these folks will have social security, which isn’t very much, some will not at all. We’ve talked about the challenges of jobs. What is going to happen to these people, some of whom will not get jobs and will rely on diminishing social security and that is not exactly assured anymore either. So, I’d like you to address that part of the population whose future does not look all that bright.

MS. BUSETTE: Great, thank you. And then we have one way in the back there. She has her hand up. Thank you

MS. LEO: Hi, my name is Chin Leo and I’m a correspondent from China’s Nu Hahn News Agency. Actually, I have two questions for J.D. One is that you mentioned about (inaudible) which could be the third important element from the personal structural agencies to have those poverties. So, I just wanted to maybe categorize say more about this (inaudible) so what it could include. Because when I just read about your book, first I thought it maybe something related to the peace treaty of American, like those people who used to work in the hill. The mountain or the farmers, but it turns out, maybe there is something more or different from that, so can you just say more about it. And second question is about the globalization. I think both of the speakers just mentioned that the process of globalization just, the country being so large to the poverty or just make it a faster pace, for those working class in America no matter white or black to become obvious problem. So, do you think what could be the solution for this or is it really necessary just like President Trump said that anti-globalization could be one of the solutions or a necessary one. Thank you.

MS. BUSETTE: Thank you. So, we have a question on ways to make it easier to get a higher education, what about job opportunities for aging baby boomers and then a special set just for you, where you can you know, if you’d like to, maybe go into a little more about what you meant by culture, and then for both of you if you want to discussion globalization and its effect on poverty in the U.S.

MR. WILSON: Well I just — to answer your question very quickly, forget the political climate, but I’d like to see us increase the Pell Grants to make it possible for folks who don’t have much income, increase the Pell Grants.

MS. BUSETTE: Okay great. J.D., do you want to address any of these?

MR. VANCE: Yes, so my general worry with the college education in the book at large is sort of two things. So, the first is that, I think we’ve constructed a society effectively in which a college education is now the only pathway to the middle class, and I think that’s a real failure on our part. It’s not something you see in every country, and I don’t think it necessarily has to be the case here. There are other ways to get post-secondary education and I absolutely think that we have to make that easier, and I really see this as sort of the defining policy challenge of the next 10 years is to create more of those pathways; because the second born on this is that college is a really, really culturally terrifying place for a lot of working class people. We can try to make it less culturally terrifying, we can try to make for the elites of our universities a little bit more welcoming to folks like me, and this is something that I wrote about in the book, really feeling like a true outsider at Yale for the first time, in an educational institution. I think that we also have to acknowledge that part of the reason that people feel like cultural outsiders is for reasons that aren’t necessarily going to be easy to fix, and if we don’t create more pathways for these folks, we shouldn’t be surprised that a lot of them aren’t going to take the one pathway that’s there, that effectively runs through a culturally alien institution.

MS. BUSETTE: Thank you. Other questions.

MR. WILSON: Yeah, we have to —

MR. VANCE: Oh yeah sorry. There’s a couple of others so yeah, on the baby boomer question I’ll try to be very quick but I don’t necessarily have a fantastic answer to this, but let me add one thought that I had while you were asking that question, which is that in certain areas, especially in Ohio, Kentucky, West Virginia and so forth. I think the biggest under reported problem for the baby boomers is the fact that they are taking care of children that they didn’t necessarily anticipate taking care of because of the opioid crisis. This is the biggest dr iver of elder poverty in the State of Ohio, is that you have entire families that have been transplanted from one generation to the next. They were planning for retirement based on one social security income, and now all of a sudden, they have two, three additional mouths to feed. I think my concern for the baby boom generation is especially those folks of course because it’s not just bad for them, it’s bad for these children who are all of a sudden thrown into poverty because of the opioid addition of that middle generation of the parents, of the kids and the sons and daughters of the grandkids. And then the very last question, culture, I think of as a way to understand the sum of the environmental impacts that you can’t necessarily define as structural rights, so the effects of family instability and trauma that exists in people, the effects of social capital and social networks in people’s lives, You know, all of these things I think add up to a broad set of variables that can either promote upward mobility or inhibit upward mobility; and again I think we very often talk about job opportunities and educational opportunities, we very often talk about individual responsibility and Personal Agency. We very rarely I think talk about those middle layers and those institutional factors that in a lot of ways are the real drivers of this problem.

MR. WILSON: I just want to add just one point. I think that this is too radical to seriously consider right now, but at some point, I think we’re going to hav e to think about it, and that is to give cash assistance to reduce the tax rate for those who are experiencing compounded deprivation. At some point, we’re going to be faced with a problem. We’re going to have to rescue people and some economists are talking about the negative income tax and so on, but it’s something that we’re going to have to be thinking about.

MS. BUSETTE: Great. Thank you. I’m going to take three more. This gentleman here, this lady here. Ignacio?

MR. AARON: I’m Henry Aaron Brookings. My question is for J.D. Vance, I’ve heard in your comments what strikes me as a genuine and heartfelt sympathy for the economic and social circumstances, not only of blue whites in Appalachia, but also for the concentrated poverty in urban areas. You have a genuine sympathy for both. You also stated that you come to this concern as a conservative and as a Republican. Now, in looking at the current political environment, which is I think where we need to start rather that our aspirations for a different environment, we would really like it in the future. Starting from the current economic environment, I note that we’ve spent all of 2017 on a political debate which now seems, from my standpoint mercifully to be coming to an end about doing away with The Affordable Care Act. We are about to have a month long high stakes debate about the child health insurance program which President Trump’s budget proposes significantly to cut. We are confronting the possibility of a major fight over the national debt cap which at least some elements in Congress would like to use as a pressure tool to reduce the size and scope of the federal government. We are debating whether to reform entitlement programs and notably disability insurance, which if one looks at a map of where disability benefits are most received, looks like the map for your book actually. Kentucky, Arkansas, Alabama, Mississippi, Ohio, Pennsylvania. My question is, as a conservative Republican, how do you reconcile the concern you’ve expressed with the apparent agenda from those with whom you identify politically.

MS. BUSETTE: Okay, so we’re going to take two more questions (laughter) in this round. This lady right here and then Ignacio.

MS. DANIELS: Hello, my name is Samara Robard Daniels, I actually married into an Appalachian family myself, so I’ve had a close look at the situation myself. I’m wondering if you had to sort of envision of not being a political leader, but maybe a more philosophical substantive role model, what qualities aside from the typical like you know, honesty and so forth. I mean what would be the sort of gestalt of that leader that would perhaps you know, mobilize. I mean that can happen, but because of the technological age, we don’t have that sort of, you know, more renaissance minded philosophical temperament is not sort of percolating and I’m wondering if you had to envision it, what would be a role model, and similarly for you, what do you see? What would be the gestalt of that leader?

MS. BUSET TE: Alright, thank you. Ignacio?

MR. PESO: Hello, thank you the three of you for the discussion, it was very fascinating.

MS. BUSETTE: Can you say your name?

MR. PESO: My name is Ignacio Peso and my question actually starts with an article I read in the New York Times a few days ago. Maybe it was two days ago. It’s about like the role of private firms also. It was a comparison between the job conditions and years ago, with a lady from Kodak who was able to rise and get an opportune job, get an education, and then in the end the same private firm rising to her position, and right now janitor in Apple, right. I think in this conversation we talk a lot about like the power of stories and how they convey mobilities and talk about like more structural aspects. I was wondering, what is your opinion about like how — what’s the role of private firms in this discussion, and what sort of policies can you envision regarding that. Thank you.

MS. BUSETTE: Okay, thank you. So, we have a question about reconciling your concerns with concentrated poverty with the served agenda of the GOP. A question around what do role models who are sort of embodying you know an un-way out sort of; and when we think about the poverty debate what do those people look like. And then what’s the role of private firms in economic mobility for poor and low-income Americans.

MR. WILSON: Could you repeat the second question?

MS. BUSETTE: What does a leader look like who could possibly lead us towards a set of solutions when we think about poverty in the US ?

MR. VANCE: I guess I’ll start because the question about I think the GOP is directed specifically at me. The first thing that I’ll say about that is that I agree with many of the conservative critiques that are levied sort of against some Democratic policy. I very rarely, at least if we’re defining Republican policies or what comes out of Congress, I very rarely agree with Republican Congress about how to answer those critiques. The way that I broadly look at this philosophically is that there is a distinction and an important one between libertarianism and conservatism. So, I will partially try to answer your question about outsourcing. I think that for example on this question of labor unions, I think that the sort of classic libertarian answer to this question which is really dominant on the right for the past 30 years, is that effectively for a whole host of reasons, labor unions are anti-competitive, they’re bad for non – members and they’re bad for actual firms. Consequently, for cartel reasons, they’re sort of bad from a public policies perspective. I think a better conservative answer to the fact that we’ve gone from 35 percent private labor participation to 6 percent private labor participation, is to recognize that labor unions can be economically destructive to recognize that labor unions as Burke would say, could also be incredibly important social institutions that play a positive role in communities, and so the question is not how do we destroy labor unions, but it’s how do we reform labor unions so they actually work in the 21st century and I think that would answer partially your question about outsourcing. There’s a really fascinating article by Oren Cass of the Manhattan Institute of Conservative Think Tank about how we might reform labor unions so that they actually accomplish something economically important, so that they can rebuild themselves and increase private participation, but I think that’s a conservative idea. Has it come from a Republican Congress? No, it has not. Have I been a constant critic of Republican domestic policy for the past five years, because I think we’re not thinking about these issues; absolutely. The flip side of it, is that I think that much of what I see on the left is or at least sometimes thinks that these cultural problems that I write about and care about, are invisible and don’t actually exist. Now, does that mean that sort of very thoughtful left of center think tank fellows don’t care about these problems? Does that mean that Bill Wilson doesn’t think about these problems? No, but I certainly think that the Democratic party in some ways thinks that these questions of culture and long-term multi-generational environmental effects are sort of inv isible to a lot of their policy making. So, I agree with the conservative critique there and I think the conservatives have to offer some alternative vision which we have failed to do, for not just the past five years, but maybe for a little bit longer than that. So, you know my view of my role in this ecosystem is to try to take us from criticizing a lot of what’s been done in the past that’s wrong, and a lot of those criticisms I agree with, to actually doing something that’s different. But I do think, the last point I’ll make about this, the fundamental hell that we have to get over. The fundamental problem that conservatives have to accept is that sometimes you have to spend money to solve social problems. Not always does that mean that government is always the answer. Certainly, it doesn’t, but I think this sort of baseline constant refusal to accept that sometimes you have to spend money is at the core of our real problem, and if we can get past that, I actually think there might be some good ideas coming out of the right and hopefully I can be a part of that.

MR. WILSON: Let me address the question about the ideal leader. The leader (inaudible) move us forward. For me, a role model would be one who would use the bully pulpit to reinforce and promote the principle of equality of life chances. The philosopher James Fiscan coined the notion principle of equality of live chances, and according to this principle if we can predict with a high degree of accuracy, where individuals end up in the competition for preferred positions, merely by knowing, their race, class, gender and family background, then the conditions under which their motivations and talents have developed must be utterly unfair. Supporters of this principle believe that a person should not be able to enter a hospital ward of healthy newborn babies and predict with considerable accuracy where they will end up in life, simply by knowing their race, class, gender, family background, or the ecological areas where their parents reside. I repeat, for me, a rural ideal role model would be one who would use the bully pulpit to reinforce and promote the principle of equality of live chances.

MS. BUSETTE: Great. Thank you both. We’re going to take a few more questions. The gentleman in the back. The gentleman with the glasses and next to him the gentleman with the orange shirt.

MR. RAWLINS: Quincy Rawlins with the Institute for Educational Leadership here in Washington D.C. You’ve addressed this tangentially, but I wonder, it seems that this may be overly simplistic, by the flip side of extreme poverty seems to be extreme concentration of wealth. Not only in this country but obviously across the world, and I wonder if we can address any of the problems that you guys have talked about without directly addressing the concentration of wealth, and the fact that many corporations and super rich in this country are not paying their fair share of taxes in my view.

MS. BUSETTE: So, we have the gentleman in the glasses and the suit here, next to the gentleman with the orange T – shirt.

MR. COLLENBERG: Hi, Richard Collenberg with the Century Foundation. You both have talked about the effects of concentrated poverty, and I’m wondering what you would advocate in terms of public policy, and I’ll throw out one idea that Bill and I have talked about a little bit. You know, in 1968, 50 years ago, we saw the passage of the Fair Housing Act and since then, racial segregation has declined to a similarity index of 79 to 59. So, a hundred would be pure segregation, zero would be perfectly integrated. Meanwhile we’ve seen an increase in economic segregation, and I’m wondering what you all would think about an Economic Fair Housing Act that would go after the issue of concentrated poverty by addressing the discrimination that goes on in terms of exclusionary zoning, where certain neighborhoods are basically off limits for working class people because of apartment buildings or townhouses aren’t allowed to be built there.

MS. BUSETTE: Thank you.

MR. ASHANAGA: Michael Ashanaga Trans Union. Mr. Vance, you’ve put forward several different roads out of poverty. You know, better education, cultural change, job training, cheaper colleges I guess. But the problem is I see that that does not create jobs. That just creates competition for jobs, so at the end of the day, even if everyone is well educated, wouldn’t there still be a lot of poverty?

MS. BUSETTE: Okay, so we have our question on the concentration of wealth in the U.S., a question about an economic fair housing kind of policy to address concentrated poverty, and then finally, whether the policy prescriptions around creating a better and more educated — more skilled and education workforce actually addresses the true cause of poverty.

MR. WILSON: Let me just say that addressing the problem of concentration of wealth and inequality, that is a major problem that we have to confront. I would say yes, we have to deal with that problem. That has to be high on our agenda, on the public agenda. That’s all I want to say about that, because we could go on and on talking about that. Addressing the question of increase in economic segregation. People don’t realize that racial segregation is on the decline, while economic segregation is a segregation of families by income is on the increase. So yes, I would support your proposal of dealing with exclusivity zoning. Say a little bit more about that. I mean, you just probably said I’ll bet piece on that so we (laughter).

MR. COLLENBERG: Well the basic notion is that you know, here we had some success through a legal policy The Fair Housing Act where we’ve seen this decline in racial segregation, and yet what replaced kind of the old racial zoning from the 1920’s has been economic zoning, and so, it seems to me, that just as it should be shameful to exclude people from entire neighborhoods based on race, it ought to be as concerning to us in our culture and in our policy to have laws that in essence are excluding people based on class. In Montgomery County Maryland where I live, there is an alternative to that policy. It’s called Inclusionary Zoning, where the notion was that if people are good enough to, you know, take care of resident’s kids, if they’re able to teach the children, if they’re able to take care of the lawns, they ought to be good enough to live in these communities as well.

MR. WILSON: That’s why I wanted to give you the floor Rick (laughter).

MS. BUSETTE: Thank you very much. So, J.D., did you want to address any of these questions around concentrated poverty, the Economic Fair Housing kind of Act —

MR. VANCE: Sure.

MS. BUSETTE: — and creating a better skilled and you know, more education workforce, but whether or not that addresses the true cause of poverty in the US.

MR. VANCE: So, on the inequality and concentration wealth, the top thing, I’ll say this one area where I actually think conservative senator Mike Leaf from Utah has had some really, really, interesting ideas. One of the tax reform proposals Senator Leaf has advocated for is actually setting the capital taxation rate at the same rate as the ordinary income rate. Because that’s what’s really driving this difference, right. It’s not ordinary income earners. It’s not salaried professionals. Those Richard Reeve says that’s a problem. It’s primarily actually that folks in the global economy, especially the ultra-elite, folks in the global economy have achieved some sort of economic lift off from the rest of the country and I think that in light of that, it doesn’t make a ton of sense that we continue to have the taxation policy that we do. Frankly, that’s one of the reasons why I am sort of so conflicted about President Trump because I think in some ways instinctively at least the President recognizes this, but we’ll see what actually happens with tax reform over the next few months. The question about job competition is absolutely correct. You can’t just have a better educated workforce but hold the number of workers constant. At the same time, I do think there’s a bit of a chicken and egg problem here right because you know, while the skills gap is overplayed and while it violates all of these rules of Econ 101, one of the things you hear pretty consistently from folks who would l ike to expand, would like to hire more, would like to produce more, is that there are real labor force constraints, especially in what might be called non-cognitive skills, right; and this is a thing that you hear a lot. In my home state if you really want to hire more, and you really want to produce more, and sell more, then the problem is the opioid epidemic has effectively thinned the pool of people who were even able to work. So, I do think that productivity is really important, but I also think that we tend to think of these things in too mathematical and sort of hyper-rational ways, but part of the reason productivity is held back, is because we have real problems in the labor market, and if you fix one, you could help another, and they may create a virtuous cycle.

MS. BUSETTE: Thank you both …

Voir encore:

What Hillbilly Elegy Reveals About Trump and America

Mona Charen

July 28, 2016

A harrowing portrait of the plight of the white working class J. D. Vance’s new book Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and a Culture in Crisis couldn’t have been better timed. For the past year, as Donald Trump has defied political gravity to seize the Republican nomination and transform American politics, those who are repelled by Trump have been accused of insensitivity to the concerns of the white working class. For Trump skeptics, this charge seems to come from left field, and I use that term advisedly. By declaring that a particular class and race has been “ignored” or “neglected,” the Right (or better “right”) has taken a momentous step in the Left’s direction. With the ease of a thrown switch, people once considered conservative have embraced the kind of interest-group politics they only yesterday rejected as a matter of principle. It was the Democrats who urged specific payoffs, er, policies to aid this or that constituency. Conservatives wanted government to withdraw from the redistribution and favor-conferring business to the greatest possible degree. If this was imperfectly achieved, it was still the goal — because it was just. Using government to benefit some groups comes at the expense of all. While not inevitably corrupt, the whole transactional nature of the business does easily tend toward corruption.

Conservatives and Republicans understood, or seemed to, that in many cases, when government confers a benefit on one party, say sugar producers, in the form of a tariff on imported sugar, there’s a problem of concentrated benefits (sugar producers get a windfall) and dispersed costs (everyone pays more for sugar, but only a bit more, so they never complain). In the realm of race, sex, and class, the pandering to groups goes beyond bad economics and government waste — and even beyond the injustice of fleecing those who work to support those who choose not to — and into the dangerous territory of pitting Americans against one another. Democrats have mastered the art of sowing discord to reap votes. Powered by Now they have company in the Trumpites.

Like Democrats who encourage their target constituencies to nurse grievances against “greedy” corporations, banks, Republicans, and government for their problems, Trump now encourages his voters to blame Mexicans, the Chinese, a “rigged system,” or stupid leaders for theirs. The problems of the white working class should concern every public-spirited American not because they’ve been forgotten or taken for granted — even those terms strike a false note for me — but because they are fellow Americans. How would one adjust public policy to benefit the white working class and not blacks, Hispanics, and others? How would that work? And who would shamelessly support policies based on tribal or regional loyalties and not the general welfare?

As someone who has written — perhaps to the point of dull repetition — about the necessity for Republicans to focus less on entrepreneurs (as important as they are) and more on wage earners; as someone who has stressed the need for family-focused tax reform; as someone who has advocated education innovations that would reach beyond the traditional college customers and make education and training easier to obtain for struggling Americans; as someone who trumpeted the Reformicon proposals developed by a group of conservative intellectuals affiliated with the American Enterprise Institute and the Ethics and Public Policy Center; and finally, as someone who has shouted herself hoarse about the key role that family disintegration plays in many of our most pressing national problems, I cannot quite believe that I stand accused of indifference to the white working class.

I said that Hillbilly Elegy could not have been better timed, and yes, that’s in part because it paints a picture of Americans who are certainly a key Trump constituency. Though the name Donald Trump is never mentioned, there is no doubt in the reader’s mind that the people who populate this book would be enthusiastic Trumpites. But the book is far deeper than an explanation of the Trump phenomenon (which it doesn’t, by the way, claim to be). It’s a harrowing portrait of much that has gone wrong in America over the past two generations. It’s Charles Murray’s “Fishtown” told in the first person. The community into which Vance was born — working-class whites from Kentucky (though transplanted to Ohio) — is more given over to drug abuse, welfare dependency, indifference to work, and utter hopelessness than statistics can fully convey. Vance’s mother was an addict who discarded husbands and boyfriends like Dixie cups, dragging her two children through endless screaming matches, bone-chilling threats, thrown plates and worse violence, and dizzying disorder. Every lapse was followed by abject apologies — and then the pattern repeated. His father gave him up for adoption (though that story is complicated), and social services would have removed him from his family entirely if he had not lied to a judge to avoid being parted from his grandmother, who provided the only stable presence in his life.

Vance writes of his family and friends: “Nearly every person you will read about is deeply flawed. Some have tried to murder other people, and a few were successful. Some have abused their children, physically or emotionally.” His grandmother, the most vivid character in his tale (and, despite everything, a heroine) is as foul-mouthed as Tony Soprano and nearly as dangerous. She was the sort of woman who threatened to shoot strangers who placed a foot on her porch and meant it. Vance was battered and bruised by this rough start, but a combination of intellectual gifts — after a stint in the Marines he sailed through Ohio State in two years and then graduated from Yale Law — and the steady love of his grandparents helped him to leapfrog into America’s elite.

This book is a memoir but also contains the sharp and unsentimental insights of a born sociologist. As André Malraux said to Whittaker Chambers under very different circumstances in 1952: “You have not come back from Hell with empty hands.” The troubles Vance depicts among the white working class, or at least that portion he calls “hillbillies,” are quite familiar to those who’ve followed the pathologies of the black poor, or Native Americans living on reservations. Disorganized family lives, multiple romantic partners, domestic violence and abuse, loose attachment to work, and drug and alcohol abuse. Children suffer from “Mountain Dew” mouth — severe tooth decay and loss because parents give their children, sometimes even infants with bottles, sugary sodas and fail to teach proper dental hygiene.

“People talk about hard work all the time in places like Middletown [Ohio],” Vance writes. “You can walk through a town where 30 percent of the young men work fewer than 20 hours a week and find not a single person aware of his own laziness.” He worked in a floor-tile warehouse and witnessed the sort of shirking that is commonplace. One guy, I’ll call him Bob, joined the tile warehouse just a few months before I did. Bob was 19 with a pregnant girlfriend. The manager kindly offered the girlfriend a clerical position answering phones. Both of them were terrible workers. The girlfriend missed about every third day of work and never gave advance notice. Though warned to change her habits repeatedly, the girlfriend lasted no more than a few months. Bob missed work about once a week, and he was chronically late. On top of that, he often took three or four daily bathroom breaks, each over half an hour. . . . Eventually, Bob . . . was fired. When it happened, he lashed out at his manager: ‘How could you do this to me? Don’t you know I’ve a pregnant girlfriend?’ And he was not alone. . . . A young man with every reason to work . . . carelessly tossing aside a good job with excellent health insurance. More troublingly, when it was all over, he thought something had been done to him. The addiction, domestic violence, poverty, and ill health that plague these communities might be salved to some degree by active and vibrant churches.

But as Vance notes, the attachment to church, like the attachment to work, is severely frayed. People say they are Christians. They even tell pollsters they attend church weekly. But “in the middle of the Bible belt, active church attendance is actually quite low.” After years of alcoholism, Vance’s biological father did join a serious church, and while Vance was skeptical about the church’s theology, he notes that membership did transform his father from a wastrel into a responsible father and husband to his new family. Teenaged Vance did a stint as a check-out clerk at a supermarket and kept his social-scientist eye peeled: I also learned how people gamed the welfare system. They’d buy two dozen packs of soda with food stamps and then sell them at a discount for cash. They’d ring up their orders separately, buying food with the food stamps, and beer, wine, and cigarettes with cash. They’d regularly go through the checkout line speaking on their cell phones. I could never understand why our lives felt like a struggle while those living off of government largesse enjoyed trinkets that I only dreamed about. . . . Perhaps if the schools were better, they would offer children from struggling families the leg up they so desperately need?

Vance is unconvinced. The schools he attended were adequate, if not good, he recalls. But there were many times in his early life when his home was so chaotic — when he was kept awake all night by terrifying fights between his mother and her latest live-in boyfriend, for example — that he could not concentrate in school at all. For a while, he and his older sister lived by themselves while his mother underwent a stint in rehab. They concealed this embarrassing situation as best they could. But they were children. Alone. A teacher at his Ohio high school summed up the expectations imposed on teachers this way: “They want us to be shepherds to these kids. But no one wants to talk about the fact that many of them are raised by wolves.”

Hillbilly Elegy is an honest look at the dysfunction that afflicts too many working-class Americans. But despite the foregoing, it isn’t an indictment. Vance loves his family and admires some of its strengths. Among these are fierce patriotism, loyalty, and toughness. But even regarding patriotism (his grandmother’s “two gods” were Jesus Christ and the United States of America), this former Marine strikes a melancholy note. His family and community have lost their heroes. We loved the military but had no George S. Patton figure in the modern army. . . . The space program, long a source of pride, had gone the way of the dodo, and with it the celebrity astronauts. Nothing united us with the core fabric of American society. Conspiracy theories abound in Appalachia. People do not believe anything the press reports: “We can’t trust the evening news. We can’t trust our politicians. Our universities, the gateway to a better life, are rigged against us. We can’t get jobs.”

Conspiracy theories abound in Appalachia. Sound familiar? The white working class has followed the black underclass and Native Americans not just into family disintegration, addiction, and other pathologies, but also perhaps into the most important self-sabotage of all, the crippling delusion that they cannot improve their lot by their own effort. This is where the rise of Trump becomes both understandable and deeply destructive. He ratifies every conspiracy theory in circulation and adds new ones. He encourages the tribal grievances of the white working class and promises that salvation will come — not through their own agency and sensible government reforms — but only through his head-knocking leadership. He calls this greatness, but it’s the exact reverse. A great people does not turn to a strongman.

The American character has been corrupted by multiple generations of government dependency and the loss of bourgeois virtues like self-control, delayed gratification, family stability, thrift, and industriousness. Vance has risen out of chaos to the heights of stability, success, and happiness. He is fundamentally optimistic about the chances for the nation to do the same. Whether his optimism is justified or not is unknowable, but his brilliant book is a signal flashing danger.

— Mona Charen is a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center.

Voir enfin:

Hillbilly sellout: The politics of J. D. Vance’s “Hillbilly Elegy” are already being used to gut the working poor

Conservatives and the media treated Vance’s memoir like « Poor People for Dummies. » Watch his damaging rhetoric work

Jared Yates Sexton

Salon

Mar 11, 2017

When Republican Representative Jason Chaffetz took to the airwaves Tuesday to defend his party’s flailing Affordable Care Act replacement plan, he told CNN, “Americans have choices … so, maybe, rather than getting that new iPhone that they just love, and they want to go spend hundreds of dollars on that, maybe they should invest in their own healthcare.” Pushback was swift as many were quick to point out the Congressman was equating a $700 phone to healthcare costs that can often spiral into six figures, but some were equally shocked by the callousness of his remarks.

Was Chaffetz insinuating that the poor would rather spend money on frivolous things than their own self-care?

To people like myself, who grew up poor, this criticism is certainly nothing new. In conversations with Republicans about the challenges facing my working-class family, I’ve gotten used to being asked how many TVs my parents own, or what kind of cars they drive. At the heart of those questions is a lurking assumption that Chaffetz brought into the light: Maybe the poor deserve their lot in life.

This philosophy, while absurd on its face, effectively cripples any momentum toward helping suffering populations and is an old favorite of the Republican Party. It’s the same reasoning that led Ronald Reagan to decry “welfare queens” and Fox News to continually criticize people on assistance for buying shrimp, soft drinks, “junk food,” and crab legs. It gives those disinclined to part with their own money an excuse not to feel guilty about their own greed.

To further quell their culpability and show that the American Dream still functions as advertised, conservatives are fond of trotting out success stories — people who prove that pulling one’s self up by one’s bootstraps is still a possibility and, by extension, that those who don’t succeed must own their shortcomings. Lately, the right has found nobody more useful, both during the presidential election and after, than their modern-day Horatio Alger spokesperson, J. D. Vance, whose bestselling book “Hillbilly Elegy” chronicled his journey from Appalachia to the hallowed halls of the Ivy League, while championing the hard work necessary to overcome the pitfalls of poverty.
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Traditionally this would’ve been a Fox News kind of book — the network featured an excerpt on their site that focused on Vance’s introduction to “elite culture” during his time at Yale — but Vance’s glorified self-help tome was also forwarded by networks and pundits desperate to understand the Donald Trump phenomenon, and the author was essentially transformed into Privileged America’s Sherpa into the ravages of Post-Recession U.S.A.

Trumpeted as a glimpse into an America elites have neglected for years, I first read “Hillbilly Elegy” with hope. I’d been told this might be the book that finally shed light on problems that’d been killing my family for generations. I’d watched my grandparents and parents, all of them factory workers, suffer backbreaking labor and then be virtually forgotten by the political establishment until the GOP needed their vote and stoked their social and racial anxieties to turn them into political pawns.

In the beginning, I felt a kinship to Vance. His dysfunctional childhood looked a lot like my own. There was substance abuse. Knockdown, drag-out fights. A feeling that people just couldn’t get ahead no matter what they did.

And then the narrative took a turn.

Due to references he downplays, not to mention his middle-class grandmother’s shielding and encouragement, Vance was able to lift himself out of the despair of impoverishment and escaped to Yale and eventually Silicon Valley, where he was able to look back on his upbringing with a new perspective.

“Whenever people ask me what I’d most like to change about the white working class,” he writes, “I say, ‘the feeling that our choices don’t matter.’”

The thesis at the heart of “Hillbilly Elegy” is that anybody who isn’t able to escape the working class is essentially at fault. Sure, there’s a culture of fatalism and “learned helplessness,” but the onus falls on the individual.

As Vance writes: “I’ve seen far too many people awash in genuine desire to change only to lose their mettle when they realized just how difficult change actually is.”

Oh, the working class and their aversion to difficulty.

If only they, like Vance, could take the challenge head on and rise above their circumstances. If only they, like Vance, weren’t so worried about material things like iPhones or the “giant TVs and iPads” the author says his people buy for themselves instead of saving for the future.

This generalization is not the only problematic oversimplification in Vance’s book — he totally discounts the role racism played in the white working class’s opposition to President Obama and says, instead, it was because Obama dressed well, was a good father, and because Michelle Obama advocated eating healthy food — but it would be hard to understate what role Vance has played in reinvigorating the conservative bootstraps narrative for a new generation and, thus, emboldening Republican ideology.

To Vance’s credit, he has been critical of Donald Trump, calling the working class’s support of the billionaire a result of a “false sense of purpose,” but Vance’s portrait of poor Americans is alarmingly in lockstep with the philosophy of Republicans who are shamefully using Trump’s presidency to forward their own agenda of economic warfare. Certainly Jason Chaffetz’s comments are fueled by the same low opinion of the poor as Vance’s, as is Speaker of the House Paul Ryan’s legislative agenda, which is focused on disabling the social safety net.

Though Vance’s name doesn’t appear in the Republican ACA replacement bill, the philosophy at the heart of it is certainly in tune. While the proposed bill would cost millions of Americans their access to care — Vance himself tweeted a link Tuesday to a Forbes article that stated as much while lauding the legislation — it makes sure to benefit the wealthy, gives a tax break to insurance CEOs and moves the focus of health care in America to an age-based model instead of income.

The message is loud and clear: Help is on the way, but only to those who “deserve” it.

And how does one deserve it?

By working hard. And the only metric to show that one has worked sufficiently hard enough is to look at their income, at how successful they are, because, in Vance’s and the Republican’s America, the only one to blame if you’re not wealthy is yourself. Never mind how legislation like this healthcare bill, cuts in education funding, continued decreases in after-school and school lunch programs, not to mention a lack of access to mental health care or career counseling, disadvantages the poor.

Of the problems facing working-class America, Vance writes in “Hillbilly Elegy,” “There is no government that can fix these problems for us.”

And, at least partially, one has to agree.

There is no government that can fix these problems, or at least, no government we have now.

Jared Yates Sexton is an Assistant Professor of Creative Writing. His campaign book « The People Are Going To Rise Like The Waters Upon Your Shore » is out now from Counterpoint Press.

Voir enfin:

J.D. Vance, the False Prophet of Blue America

The bestselling author of « Hillbilly Elegy » has emerged as the liberal media’s favorite white trash–splainer. But he is offering all the wrong lessons.

Sarah Jones

The New Republic

November 17, 2016

J.D. Vance is the man of the hour, maybe the year. His memoir Hillbilly Elegy is a New York Times bestseller, acclaimed for its colorful and at times moving account of life in a dysfunctional clan of eastern Kentucky natives. It has received positive reviews across the board, with the Times calling it “a compassionate, discerning sociological analysis of the white underclass.” In the rise of Donald Trump, it has become a kind of Rosetta Stone for blue America to interpret that most mysterious of species: the economically precarious white voter.

Vance’s influence has been everywhere this campaign season, shaping our conception of what motivates these voters. And it is already playing a role in how liberals are responding to Donald Trump’s victory in the presidential election, which was accomplished in part by a defection of downscale whites from the Democratic Party. Appalachia overwhelmingly voted for Trump, and Vance has since emerged as one of the media’s favorite Trump explainers. The problem is that he is a flawed guide to this world, and there is a danger that Democrats are learning all the wrong lessons from the election.

Elegy is little more than a list of myths about welfare queens repackaged as a primer on the white working class. Vance’s central argument is that hillbillies themselves are to blame for their troubles. “Our religion has changed,” he laments, to a version “heavy on emotional rhetoric” and “light on the kind of social support” that he needed as a child. He also faults “a peculiar crisis of masculinity.” This brave new world, in sore need of that old time religion and manly men, is apparently to blame for everything from his mother’s drug addiction to the region’s economic crisis.

“We spend our way to the poorhouse,” he writes. “We buy giant TVs and iPads. Our children wear nice clothes thanks to high-interest credit cards and payday loans. We purchase homes we don’t need, refinance them for more spending money, and declare bankruptcy, often leaving them full of garbage in our wake. Thrift is inimical to our being.”

And he isn’t interested in government solutions. All hillbillies need to do is work hard, maybe do a stint in the military, and they can end up at Yale Law School like he did. “Public policy can help,” he writes, “but there is no government that can fix these problems for us … it starts when we stop blaming Obama or Bush or faceless companies and ask ourselves what we can do to make things better.”

His great takeaway from life in America’s underclass is: Pull up those bootstraps.

Set aside the anti-government bromides that could have been ripped from a random page of National Review, where Vance is a regular contributor. There is a more sinister thesis at work here, one that dovetails with many liberal views of Appalachia and its problems. Vance assures readers that an emphasis on Appalachia’s economic insecurity is “incomplete” without a critical examination of its culture. His great takeaway from life in America’s underclass is: Pull up those bootstraps. Don’t question elites. Don’t ask if they erred by granting people mortgages and lines of credit they couldn’t afford to repay. Don’t call it what it is—corporate deception—or admit that it plunged this country into one of the worst economic crises it’s ever experienced.

No wonder Peter Thiel, the almost comically evil Silicon Valley libertarian, endorsed the book. (Vance also works for Thiel’s Mithril Capital Management.) The question is why so many liberals are doing the same.

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In many ways, I should appreciate Elegy. I grew up poor on the border of southwest Virginia and east Tennessee. My parents are the sort of god-fearing hard workers that conservatives like Vance fetishize. I attended an out-of-state Christian college thanks to scholarships, and had to raise money to even buy a plane ticket to attend grad school. My rare genetic disease didn’t get diagnosed until I was 21 because I lacked consistent access to health care. I’m one of the few members of my high school class who earned a bachelor’s degree, one of the fewer still who earned a master’s degree, and one of maybe three or four who left the area for good.

But unlike Vance, I look at my home and see a region abandoned by the government elected to serve it. My public high school didn’t have enough textbooks and half our science lab equipment didn’t work. Some of my classmates did not have enough to eat; others wore the same clothes every day. Sometimes this happened because their addict parents spent money on drugs. But the state was no help here either. Its solution to our opioid epidemic has been incarceration, not rehabilitation. Addicts with additional psychiatric conditions are particularly vulnerable. There aren’t enough beds in psychiatric hospitals to serve the region—the same reason Virginia State Sen. Creigh Deeds (D) nearly died at the hands of his mentally ill son in 2013.

And then there is welfare. In Elegy, Vance complains about hillbillies who he believes purchased cellphones with welfare funds. But data makes it clear that our current welfare system is too limited to lift depressed regions out of poverty.

Kathryn Edin and H. Luke Shaefer reported earlier this year that the number of families surviving on $2 a day grew by 130 percent between 1996 and 2011. Blacks and Latinos are still disproportionately more likely to live under the poverty line, but predominately white Appalachia hasn’t been spared the scourge either. And while Obamacare has significantly reduced the number of uninsured Americans, its premiums are still often expensive and are set to rise. Organizations like Remote Access Medical (RAM) have been forced to make up the difference: Back home, people start lining up at 4 a.m. for a chance to access RAM’s free healthcare clinics. From 2007 to 2011, the lifespans of eastern Kentucky women declined by 13 months even as they rose for women in the rest of the country.

If you are born where I grew up, you have to travel hundreds of miles to find a prosperous America.

According to the Economic Innovation Group, my home congressional district—Virginia’s Ninth—is one of the poorest in the country. Fifty-one percent of adults are unemployed; 19 percent lack a high school diploma. EIG estimates that fully half of its 722,810 residents are in economic distress.

As I noted in Scalawag earlier this year, the Ninth is not an outlier for the region. On EIG’s interactive map, central Appalachia is a sea of distress. If you are born where I grew up, you have to travel hundreds of miles to find a prosperous America. How do you get off the dole when there’s not enough work to go around? Frequently, you don’t. Until you lose your benefits entirely: The Temporary Assistance for Needy Families program (TANF), passed by Bill Clinton and supported by Hillary Clinton, boots parents off welfare if they’re out of work.

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At various points in this election cycle, liberal journalists have sounded quite a bit like Vance. “‘Economic anxiety’ as a campaign issue has always been a red herring,” Kevin Drum declared in Mother Jones. “If you want to get to the root of this white anxiety, you have to go to its roots. It’s cultural, not economic.”

At Vox, Dylan Matthews argued that while Trump voters deserved to be taken seriously, most were actually fairly well-off, with a median household income of $72,000. The influence of economic anxiety, he concluded, had been exaggerated.

Neither Drum or Matthews accounted for regional disparities in white poverty rates, and they failed to anticipate how those disparities would impact the election. Trump supporters were wealthier than Clinton supporters overall, but Trump’s victories in battleground states like Wisconsin, Michigan, and Ohio correlated to high foreclosure rates. In Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Michigan, Trump outperformed Mitt Romney with the white working class and flipped certain strategic counties red.

But Matthews was right in at least one sense: Trump Country has always been bigger than Appalachia and the white working class itself. You just wouldn’t know this from reading the news.

In March, Trump won nearly 70 percent of the Republican primary vote in Virginia’s Buchanan County. At the time, it was his widest margin of victory, and no one seemed surprised that this deeply conservative and impoverished pocket in southwest Virginia’s coal country handed him such decisive success. And no one seemed to realize Buchanan County had once been a Democratic stronghold.

The media class fixated on the spectacle of white trash Appalachia, with Vance as its representative-in-exile.

A glossy Wall Street Journal package labeled it “The Place That Wants Donald Trump The Most” and promised readers that understanding Buchanan County was key to understanding the “source” of Trump’s popularity. The Financial Times profiled a local young man who fled this dystopia for the University of Virginia; it titled the piece “The Boy Who Escaped Trump Country.” And then there was Bloomberg View: “Coal County is Desperate for Donald Trump.” (The same piece said the county seat, Grundy, “looks as if it fell into a crevice and got stuck.”)

And then Staten Island went to the polls. A full 82 percent of Staten Island Republicans voted to give Trump the party’s nomination, wresting the title of Trumpiest County away from Buchanan. The two locations have little in common aside from Trump. Staten Island, population 472,621, is New York City’s wealthiest borough. Its median household income is $70,295, a figure not far off from the figure Matthews cites as the median income of the average Trump supporter. Buchanan County, population 23,597, has a median household income of $27,328 and the highest unemployment rate in Virginia. Staten Island, then, tracks closer to the Trumpist norm, but it received a fraction of the coverage.

No one wrote escape narratives about Staten Island. Few plumbed the psyches of suburban Trumpists. And no one examined why Democratic Buchanan County had become Republican. Instead, the media class fixated on the spectacle of white trash Appalachia, with Vance as its representative-in-exile.

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“A preoccupation with penalizing poor whites reveals an uneasy tension between what Americans are taught to think the country promises—the dream of upward mobility—and the less appealing truth that class barriers almost invariably make that dream unobtainable,” Nancy Isenberg wrote in the preface to her book White Trash. If the system worked for you, you’re not likely to blame it for the plight of poor whites. Far easier instead to believe that poor whites are poor because they deserve to be.

But now we see the consequences of this class blindness. The media and the establishment figures who run the Democratic Party both had a responsibility to properly identify and indict the system’s failures. They abdicated that responsibility. Donald Trump took it up—if not always in the form of policy, then in his burn-it-all-down posture.

No analysis of Trumpism is complete without a reckoning of its white supremacy and misogyny. Appalachia is, like so many other places, a deeply racist and sexist place. It is not a coincidence that Trumpist bastions, from Buchanan County to Staten Island, are predominately white, or that Trump rode a tide of xenophobia to power. Economic hardship isn’t unique to white members of the working class, either. Blacks, Latinos, and Natives occupy a far more precarious economic position overall. White supremacy is indeed the overarching theme of Trumpism.

But that doesn’t mean we should repeat the establishment failures of this election cycle and minimize the influence of economic precarity. Trump is a racist and a sexist, but his victory is not due only to racism or sexism any more than it is due only to classism: He still won white women and a number of counties that had voted for Obama twice. This is not a simple story, and it never really has been.

We don’t need to normalize Trumpism or empathize with white supremacy to reach these voters.

We don’t need to normalize Trumpism or empathize with white supremacy to reach these voters. They weren’t destined to vote for Trump; many were Democratic voters. They aren’t destined to stay loyal to him in the future. To win them back, we must address their material concerns, and we can do that without coddling their prejudices. After all, America’s most famous progressive populist—Bernie Sanders—won many of the counties Clinton lost to Trump.

There’s danger ahead if Democrats don’t act quickly. The Traditionalist Worker’s Party has already announced plans for an outreach push in greater Appalachia. The American Nazi Party promoted “free health care for the white working class” in literature it distributed in Missoula, Montana, last Friday. If Democrats have any hope of establishing themselves as the populist alternative to Trump, they can’t allow American Nazis to fall to their left on health care for any population.

By electing Trump, my community has condemned itself to further suffering. The lines for RAM will get longer. Our schools will get poorer and our children hungrier. It will be one catastrophic tragedy out of the many a Trump presidency will generate. So yes, be angry with the white working class’s political choices. I certainly am; home will never feel like home again.

But don’t emulate Vance in your rage. Give the white working class the progressive populism it needs to survive, and invest in the areas the Democratic Party has neglected. Remember that bootstraps are for people with boots. And elegies are no use to the living.

Sarah Jones is a staff writer for The New Republic.

Voir enfin:

Washington: A world apart

What is this?

Zip code ranking

This map highlights in yellow the nation’s Super Zips — those ranking highest on income and college education. The largest collection of Super Zips is around Washington, D.C. Learn more about this metric.

Story by Ted Mellnik, Carol Morello

Graphics by Emily Chow, Wilson Andrews

Published on November 9, 2013

A photograph hanging in Cherry Farley’s home office in a neighborhood of big houses and big ambitions reminds her what it means to have no home at all.

The image is an aerial view of Saigon, taken by her father from a helicopter as the family was fleeing Vietnam in 1975, when Farley was 10.

The family wound up in North Carolina, where her parents found blue-collar jobs at a cotton mill. But they went to college at night and became engineers, an achievement that allowed Farley and her two siblings to grow up in a modest three-bedroom house with one bathroom.

Now Farley and her husband, Michael, who was raised on a farm and went to college on a ROTC scholarship, work for defense contractors. Their combined income affords them a spacious five-bedroom house with 3.5 baths. Two of their three daughters have left for college, so it’s just the three of them now.

“I’ve come a long way,” said Farley, 46, pondering her path from a refugee camp to one of the country’s most affluent and educated Zip codes. “This is a wonderful area. I’m not sure all the people who live [here] recognize that. If all you’ve ever known is an upper-middle-class life, it’s hard to see how nice we have it.”

Farley resides in Clarksville, Md., a bedroom community midway between Washington and Baltimore where the median household income tops $181,000, more than triple the national average.

An astonishing 98 percent of River Hill High School’s graduates head to college. Volvos, Mercedes-Benzes and BMWs are scattered throughout the student parking lot. Even pets get in on the refined tastes of their owners; in a small shopping center near the school, a shop specializing in organic dog food is next door to the organic grocery store.

Finding Super Zips: The Washington Post analyzed census data to find Zip codes where people rank highest on a combination of income and education. They are Super Zips.

The ranks, ranging from 0 to 99, represent the average of each Zip’s percentile rankings for median household income and for the share of adults with college degrees. Super Zips rank 95 or higher. This approach is adapted from one used by author Charles Murray.

The map at top shows the nation’s 650 Super Zips. Among them, the typical household income is $120,272, and 68 percent of adults hold college degrees. That compares with $53,962 and 27 percent for the remaining 23,925 Zips shown. Only Zips with at least 500 adults are displayed.

Clarksville sits in one of the nation’s “Super Zips” — a term coined by American Enterprise Institute scholar and author Charles Murray to describe the country’s most prosperous, highly educated demographic clusters. On average, they have a median household income of $120,000, and 7 in 10 adults have college degrees.

Although these areas would be considered rare in much of the country, they’re fairly ordinary by Washington standards.

A Washington Post analysis of the latest census data shows that more than a third of Zip codes in the D.C. metro area rank in the top 5 percent nationally for income and education. But what makes the region truly unusual is that so many of the high-end Zip codes are contiguous. They form a vast land mass that bounds across 717 square miles. It stretches 60 miles from its northern tip in Woodstock, Md., to the southern end in Fairfax Station, and runs 30 miles wide from Haymarket in Prince William County to the heart of the District up to Rock Creek Parkway.

One in four households in the region are in a Super Zip, according to the Post analysis. Since the 2000 Census on which Murray based his analysis, Washington’s Super Zips have grown to encompass 100,000 more residents. Only the New York City area has more Super Zips, but they are a much smaller share of the total of that region’s Zip codes and are more scattered.

Largest clusters of elite zips

Here are the nation’s largest contiguous Super Zip collections, and their nearest major city or area, ranked by number of households.

1. Washington

2. E. Manhattan

3. San Jose

4. Boston

5. Oakland

6. Bridgeport

7. Newark

8. Chicago

9. N. of Los Angeles

10. Long Island

11. W. Manhattan

12. Trenton

13. Philadelphia

14. San Diego

15. S. of Los Angeles

Zip codes are large swaths of territory, and people from many different walks of life live in them. But many Washington neighborhoods are becoming more economically homogenous as longtime homeowners move out and increasing housing prices prevent the less affluent from moving in. The eventual result, in many cases, is a Super Zip. And because the contiguous Super Zips are surrounded by areas that are almost as well-off, it’s possible to live in a Super Zip and rarely encounter others without college degrees or professional jobs.

“It’s a megalopolis of eggheads,” said William H. Frey, a demographer with the Brookings Institution. Frey said Washington is an example of how the country is compartmentalizing itself into clusters of people with different backgrounds and world views.

“It’s a magnet for people who grew up elsewhere and came here because they want to be in a place that has an atmosphere of intellectual curiosity. But it means we’re somewhat isolated. A lot of people here may study and advocate for what’s going on in the rest of the country, but they can’t feel what’s going on if it doesn’t touch them.”

The growing number of people living in Super Zips here is redefining and reshaping the region, turning modest inner-suburb neighborhoods into upscale enclaves and outer-suburb farmland into sprawling housing developments, often gated.

Yet many who live in these rapidly evolving communities do not think of themselves as rich or elite. The cost of living, particularly for housing, eats up a large chunk of the two incomes it typically takes to afford a comfortable home in a good school district.

Life surrounded by affluence can also breed worries that might seem absurd to people who do not live in Super Zips — such as whether to hire a professional tennis coach to help a child make the school team, or get an iPhone for a child in elementary school. Some question whether their children can achieve the same level of comfort as adults they know now.

So do the children themselves.

“My parents set me up with something great,” said Heather Burns, 23, adding that she grew up hearing her Loudoun home town of Ashburn described as “Cashburn” — as in “cash to burn.”

Burns said being raised in an area with good schools gave her a foundation to succeed. Even so, she said she may soon move away: “I can’t afford to keep up their lifestyle.”

The ‘skyboxification’ of America

An aerial view of a subdivision in Clarksville, Md. In this Clarksville Zip code, 75 percent of adults hold college degrees and the median household income tops $181,000. Figures at the high-achieving River Hill High School show 98 percent of graduates head to college. (Photo by Linda Davidson/The Washington Post)

Although the wealthiest Americans have always lived in their own islands of privilege, sociologists and demographers say the degree to which today’s professional class resides in a world apart is a departure from earlier generations. People of widely different incomes and professions commonly lived close enough that they mingled at stores, sports arenas and school. In an era in which women had fewer educational and professional opportunities, lawyers married secretaries and doctors married nurses. Now, lawyers and doctors marry each other.

A recent analysis of census data by sociologists Sean Reardon of Stanford and Kendra Bischoff of Cornell highlighted how middle-income neighborhoods have been fading away as more people live in areas that are either poor or affluent.

In 1970, 65 percent of families lived in middle-income neighborhoods; four decades later, 42 percent did.

Meanwhile, the share of families living in affluent neighborhoods doubled, from 7 percent to 15 percent, as did families living in poor neighborhoods, from 8 percent to 18 percent.

Some sociologists think the trend is isolating well-to-do Americans from the problems of the poor and the working poor, and impeding upward mobility that has long been part of the American dream.

“So much of opportunity in America depends on what sociologists call social capital,” said Stephen Klineberg, a Rice University sociologist. “Who you know. Who’s willing to invest in your skills.”

As the affluent become more isolated, the working class and the poor become confined “to communities where no one has a college education and no one has connections to the world,” Klineberg said. “The social capital that’s so necessary for upward mobility is more difficult to come by than it was in the old days when there was broad-based prosperity.”

Michael Sandel, a Harvard philosopher who wrote “What Money Can’t Buy: The Moral Limits of Markets,” calls the parallel lives led by the affluent and everyone else the “skyboxification of American life,” characterized by skyboxes in public arenas and faster security lines at airports.

The impact may be greater on children who grow up with a distorted view of the world, because they don’t know anyone from a different socioeconomic class.

“We ought to worry about what this means for society when kids who are the most advantaged don’t grow up with much experience or understanding of how the other 95 percent live, particularly the bottom half,” said Reardon, who studies the consequences of income inequality. “Will they be less empathetic? Do they understand what it’s like to grow up poor?”

‘Not everyone lives like this’

Pastor Gayle Annis-Forder prays with Jonah Taylor, 5, and his brother, David Taylor, 7 at the Linden-Linthicum United Methodist Church in Clarksville, Md. To counterbalance the area’s affluence, the church sponsors youth service missions to places like Appalachia. (Linda Davidson/The Washington Post)

The Rev. Gayle Annis-Forder of Linden-Linthicum United Methodist Church in Clarksville tries to bridge the gulf of class difference by sponsoring youth service missions to impoverished places such as Appalachia.

“We try hard to give young people opportunities to understand not everyone lives like this,” Annis-Forder said. “Otherwise, how would they know they’re living in a bubble?”

Several teenage church members spent a weekend helping to repair an elderly woman’s small house on a winding country road. For some, the experience was an eye-opener.

“I don’t usually encounter people who aren’t like us,” Zach Hannan, a River Hill High School senior who hopes to become a doctor, said as he joined adults replacing a damaged kitchen floor. He added, “I’m not used to seeing small houses.

Pastor Gayle Annis-Forder administers communion at the Linden-Linthicum United Methodist Church in Clarksville, Md. The church is in a Zip code in which 75 percent of adults hold college degrees and the median household income tops $181,000. The church also sponsors youth service missions to places like Appalachia. (Linda Davidson/The Washington Post)

Hannan said that he has accompanied his parents, both psychologists, on cruises to Europe and Alaska and that most of his friends have been to Europe, too. Working nearby, Brandon Pelletier, who headed to Ohio State University this fall to study business, said his friends all have smartphones and shop for high-end clothes at the local mall.

“Polo is big,” he said of the Ralph Lauren brand.

Breanna LaTondre, who recently graduated from Marriotts Ridge High School in Marriottsville, wants to become an architect and design shelters for impoverished and disaster areas. That’s different from most of her friends, who aspire to become doctors and engineers like their parents, she said.

She has gone on six church missions to Appalachia and New Orleans, where she has met people living in flimsy house trailers and converted chicken coops.

“It was the first time I’d seen anyone who lived that way merely because they couldn’t afford better,” she said. “In Howard County, if your house doesn’t have a garage, you’re considered poor.”

Farley, a former PTA president, said some parents go to great lengths to ensure that their children succeed in some of the most desirable schools in the country. Many pay for private tutoring to help students prepare for their SATs or shell out for college resume-building summer camps and trips.

“I know people who have housed a soccer pro in their house for the summer, to train their kids,” she said.

Still, Rhonda O’Guinn, a real estate agent who has lived in the River Hill section of Clarksville since 1995, said outsiders unfairly cast it as elitist. She said many neighbors do volunteer work, and rush to help in a crisis.

“This area gets a bad rap for affluenza,” she said. “When I first moved here, I wouldn’t tell people I lived here. I’d say I live in Columbia. If I said River Hill, they’d say, ‘Oh, you live over there.’ ”

A neighborhood in transition

Annika Harley, 11, and her mother, Anna Mangum, play on their trampoline in Fairfax County. Mangum analyzes health policy for hospitals and health care systems and has neighbors on Overbrook Street who work for the State Department, World Bank and USAID. (Linda Davidson/The Washington Post)

Many of the Super Zips in the Washington region didn’t start out that way.

A sorting out is underway in the Sigmona Park neighborhood of Fairfax County, near Falls Church. Census data show that median households incomes in the Zip code approach $102,000. Six in 10 adults have college degrees.

Most of the houses on Overbrook Street used to look like one Brian Sherry grew up in during the 1970s. Now, he shares his childhood home of 1,200 square feet, with three bedrooms and one bathroom, with his wife, Lisa, and their 10-year-old daughter.

Up and down the street, mansions are being built on lots where much smaller houses were razed; two sold recently for about $1.5 million.

In the top drawer of a dining room sideboard, Sherry keeps a neighborhood newsletter dating, he estimates, from the late 1960s or ’70s. It lists the professions of Overbrook’s residents — a land surveyor, a Marine major, an interior designer, an insurance agent, a teacher, a lawyer, an FBI agent and an engineer. But also a bus driver, a hairdresser, a policeman, a maintenance worker and a secretary.

“Today, it’s mostly government workers,” said Sherry, a contractor. “There are six, seven, maybe eight lawyers. Doctors. Some of their kids go to private school. They all seem to have professional house cleaners and professional landscapers.”

The Sherrys, who left college to start working and earn money, are among a handful of residents who didn’t graduate from college.

“You don’t live in this neighborhood doing what we do,” said Lisa Sherry, who works in the cafeteria at Haycock Elementary School, mainly because the job pays benefits. Even without a mortgage, she walks dogs to make ends meet. Her parents help, covering their granddaughter’s horseback-riding lessons. But the contractor’s family can’t afford the new porch Lisa Sherry would love to build. And she worries that the financial pressure will increase when their daughter enters high school and sees her classmates wearing nice clothes and playing sports that require expensive club memberships.

“It’s hard in this area if you try to keep up,” she said.

Then she paused and added, “Maybe things would be different if I had a college education.”

In some ways, Michelle and A.J. Valinote have the life the Sherrys yearn for.

The couple, who live with their three children down the street, are graduates of Marymount University. A.J. works as a government contractor designing software. Michelle is a human relations assistant manager for a consulting firm.

They moved to the neighborhood seven years ago, and soon put on a small addition that gave them a fourth bedroom and a third bathroom, including one on the ground floor.

Their three children, ages 5 to 11, attend parochial schools, where A.J. volunteers for playground duty. Fundraising auctions at the school reflect the status of the parents. A congressman whose son attends the school donated a tour of the Capitol. A store owner contributed items imported from Italy. Another father who owns an indoor bounce house arena donated blocks of playtime there.

Despite the advantages of living in a modern-day version of Lake Wobegon, where all the kids are above average, residents worry. Many of them, having grown up less economically comfortable, are keenly aware of what it took to get where they are in life. They know that the world has only grown more competitive since then. Will their kids believe big houses and luxury vacations come easy?

Video: Hear what others have to say about the pressures and privileges of living in the Washington area.

Even with good jobs, many residents find it difficult keeping up with the cost of living. And neighbor envy is not uncommon.

Michelle Valinote looks longingly at the large additions some neighbors have made to their homes, and she wishes they could afford the same. Living in the Washington area has simultaneously shielded them from the vagaries of economic downturns, and made it more difficult to keep up.

“We have decent salaries. If you’d have asked me when I was going to college if I’d ever make the amount of money I’m making now, I’d have laughed,” said A.J., who grew up in a semi-rural county outside Philadelphia where only half his high school classmates went to college. “But with the mortgage and tuition, despite having decent salaries, it’s not a cakewalk.”

Some people worry that their children may be too far removed from the way most people live — not just materially but in terms of social values.

Nathan Kulp, 8, W. David Kulp III, Heather Kimmel and Rachel Kulp, 11, are seen at their home in Great Falls, Va. Kimmel, a neuropharmacologist, has a doctorate from Emory University and grew up on the Eastern Shore. Her husband, W. David Kulp III, is a nuclear physicist who works at the Pentagon. (Linda Davidson/The Washington Post)

“I do get a little concerned they don’t realize the spectrum of intellectual diversity,” said Heather Kimmel, a neuropharmacologist at the Environmental Protection Agency who lives just off Overbrook Street. “We talk to them a lot about it, that not everyone has a college degree and a big house.”

Kimmel, who has a doctorate from Emory University, grew up on the Eastern Shore. Her father, who met her mother in college, taught at a university. But most of their neighbors were blue-collar workers, including their mailman and a paralegal whose husband worked for the local power company.

Her husband, W. David Kulp III, is a noted nuclear physicist who works at the Pentagon. But he grew up in Allentown, Pa., watching the implosion of blue-collar manufacturing.

The couple do not live lavishly. Kimmel, for example, drives a 15-year-old Volkswagen. The divide they feel is intellectual, they said. When Kulp travels outside the region, he says he realizes that people he meets don’t talk much about things such as foreign policy and countering nuclear terrorism, as he does at home with other people with advanced degrees. Instead, he said, “people elsewhere talk more about what they see every day.”

“They mention ‘those people in Washington,’ ” he said, echoing a common feeling that the words are perjoratively pinned on everyone who lives in the region, not just its politicians and bureaucrats.

Anna Mangum lives with her two children behind Kimmel and Kulp, in a three-story house surrounded by a white picket fence.

An executive at a health-care association, she earned her bachelor’s degree from the University of Virginia, two master’s degrees from Berkeley, and went to Scandinavia as a Fulbright scholar.

Many of Mangum’s neighbors are also products of the best schools in the nation and the world, and now work at the kind of jobs that abound in Washington — associates at large legal firms, consultants, think tank scientists and nonprofit executives. Graduates of Harvard, MIT, Duke and the London School of Economics live a few doors away.

While she was growing up in nearby Falls Church during the 1970s and ’80s, Mangum said, the area did not seem as overtly affluent as it is today. Many of the neighboring houses like hers have been transformed, with spacious additions, or replaced by much larger houses.

But the biggest change she notices is how many women have well-paying jobs, sometimes earning more than their husbands do.

“Yes, nationally more women work outside the home than in the ’60s,” she said. “But locally, the additional change is that so many now work in these higher-level jobs.”

Mangum is glad the schools have a community service requirement, exposing children to people who have less. Her son works in a thrift shop and at the Humane Society.

Life in the bubble, she said, carries its own burdens, particularly for children growing up knowing that a four-year college degree is the minimum expected of them, and most will need go on to graduate school.

“It’s a paradox,” she said. “People have lush lives, with all the things they have. But the pressure is intense.”

Story byCarol Morello, Ted Mellnik

Photos by Linda Davidson

Graphics by Wilson Andrews, Ted Mellnik, Emily Chow

Videos by AJ Chavar

Production by Katie Myrick, Tim Richardson, Tim Wong, Connor Jennings

Editing bySydney Trent, Carrie Camillo, Jade-Snow Joachim, Mark Miller

Map powered byMapBox

Data fromAmerican Community Survey, U.S. Census, ESRI

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VIDÉO – « Fainéants », « gens qui ne sont rien », « illettrées »… quand Macron est accusé de faire du « mépris de classe »

ARCHIVES – Emmanuel Macron est au cœur d’une nouvelle polémique. Ses propos, tenus devant la communauté française d’Athènes ce vendredi, sur « les fainéants, les cyniques et les extrêmes » qui voudraient l’empêcher d’agir, n’ont pas manqué de faire réagir l’opinion. Certains y ont vu un mépris de classe pur et simple. Retour sur les sorties polémiques du chef d’Etat.

09 sept 2017 18:20Antoine Llorca et Christopher QUAREZ

Qu’il soit ministre de l’Économie, candidat, ou désormais président de la République,  tout au long de sa (courte) carrière politique, Emmanuel Macron a multiplié les déclarations polémiques sur la « France d’en bas ». Des propos qui poussent à croire, pour une partie de l’opinion en tout cas, que le chef de l’État pratique un certain « mépris de classe ».

« Les fainéants »

Ce vendredi, Emmanuel Macron a lâché une nouvelle formule choc. Face à la communauté française d’Athènes, il s’en est pris à ceux qui tentent de freiner son action. « Je serai d’une détermination absolue. Et je ne céderai rien, ni aux fainéants, ni aux cyniques, ni aux extrêmes. Et je vous demande d’avoir chaque jour la même détermination. Ne cédez rien », a-t-il clamé. « Les  fainéants », un terme fort qui n’a pas été du goût de tous. « Quel mépris pour ceux qui le nourrissent », s’est emporté Nicolas Dupont-Aignan. Marine Le Pen s’est elle aussi offusquée du terme, tout comme Jean-Luc Mélenchon, qui invite ces mêmes « fainéants » à descendre dans la rue les 12 et 23 septembre. Pour Pierre Laurent, le constat est simple : « Emmanuel Macron n’aime pas les Français ».

Face à la polémique montante, l’Elysée a tenu à mettre les points sur les i. Le président n’a pas voulu désigner quiconque « ad hominem », nous a-t-on indiquer. Il parlait de façon « générale » de « tout ce qui n’a pas été fait en termes de réformes structurelles depuis quinze ans ». Une explication qui n’a pas forcément convaincue.

En vidéo

Macron fustige « les fainéants » et créé un (nouveau) tollé

« Les gens qui ne sont rien »

Le 29 juin, son discours d’inauguration de la station F à Paris, à l’inauguration du plus grand incubateur de start-up au monde, Station F, installé dans la Halle Freyssinet à Paris, ancien dépôt ferroviaire, avait lui aussi été remarqué. « Ne pensez pas une seule seconde que si demain vous réussissez vos investissements ou votre start-up, la chose est faite, non. Parce que vous aurez appris dans une gare. Une gare, c’est un lieu où l’on croise des gens qui réussissent et des gens qui ne sont rien », avait déclaré le président de la République.

« Tabagisme » et « alcoolisme » dans le Nord

Candidat En Marche ! lors de la présidentielle, il avait aussi eu des mots malheureux en visite à Noeux-les-Mines, dans le Nord, en janvier dernier. Emmanuel Macron déclarait alors : « Après la fermeture des mines, rien n’a été fait. Il est très important de rendre hommage aux personnes qui y ont travaillé (…) l’alcoolisme et le tabagisme se sont peu à peu installés dans le bassin minier. Tout comme l’échec scolaire. Il faut traiter cela en urgence afin de rendre le quotidien de ces personnes meilleur ».

Vivement critiqué, il a avait, par le biais de son compte Facebook, publié un communiqué corroborant ses propos : « Ces comportements ne viennent pas de nulle part (…) Quand un bassin de vie se paupérise, ses habitants sont frappés de plein fouet. Emmanuel Macron, conforme à sa volonté de nommer les choses et d’affronter la réalité, ne retire donc pas un mot de ce qu’il a dit ».

« La meilleure façon de se payer un costard, c’est de travailler »

Ministre de l’Économie, Emmanuel Macron, s’est également fait remarquer. En déplacement à Lunel, dans l’Hérault, en mai dernier, le bras droit de François Hollande a été pris à partie par deux grévistes, des opposants à la loi Travail. « Si vous n’aimez pas que la France soit bloquée, arrêtez de la bloquer ! (…) Vous n’allez pas me faire peur avec votre tee-shirt : la meilleure façon de se payer un costard, c’est de travailler », avait-il lancé, agacé par les attaques verbales.

On se souviendra aussi de sa première interview en tant que ministre de l’Économie sur Europe 1, quelques jours seulement après la polémique sur les « sans dents », associée à François Hollande. Sur la question des tarifs et délais d’attente du permis de conduire, que le gouvernement envisageait de réduire, Emmanuel Macron avait pris pour exemple la situation préoccupante des salariés des abattoirs Gad : « Dans les sociétés dans mes dossiers, il y a la société Gad : il y a dans cet abattoir une majorité de femmes, il y en a qui sont pour beaucoup illettrées ! On leur explique qu’elles n’ont plus d’avenir à Gad et qu’elles doivent aller travailler à 60 km ! Ces gens n’ont pas le permis ! On va leur dire quoi ? Il faut payer 1.500 euros et attendre un an ? Voilà, ça, ce sont des réformes du quotidien, qui créent de la mobilité, de l’activité ! ».

Voir encore:

« La gauche doit dépasser l’idéologie de la diversité »

L’universitaire américain estime que la défaite de Clinton s’explique par la célébration univoque de la diversité par l’élite intellectuelle progressiste.

Mark Lilla (Professeur d’humanités à l’université Columbia)

Le Monde

08.12.2016 

« Les États-Unis sont devenus un pays plus divers. C’est une évidence. Et cela fait plaisir à voir. Les visiteurs étrangers, surtout ceux venus de pays qui ont du mal à intégrer d’autres groupes ethniques et d’autres religions, sont bluffés de voir que nous y parvenons. Pas parfaitement, bien sûr, mais mieux en tout cas que n’importe quel pays d’Europe ou d’Asie. C’est une belle réussite.

Mais comment cette diversité doit-elle se traduire en politique ? La réponse habituelle de la gauche depuis près d’une génération est que nous devons être attentifs à nos différences et les « célébrer ». C’est un formidable principe de pédagogie morale – mais cela produit des résultats désastreux quand un parti en fait le fondement de sa politique. Ces dernières années, la gauche américaine a cédé à propos des identités ethniques, de genre et de sexualité à une sorte d’hystérie collective qui a faussé son message au point de l’empêcher de devenir une force fédératrice capable de gouverner.

Une des nombreuses leçons à tirer de la présidentielle américaine et de son résultat détestable, c’est qu’il faut clore l’ère de la gauche « diversitaire ». Hillary Clinton n’a jamais été aussi excellente et stimulante que lorsqu’elle évoquait l’engagement des États-Unis dans les affaires du monde et en quoi il est lié à notre conception de la démocratie. En revanche, dès qu’il s’agissait de politique intérieure, elle n’avait plus la même hauteur de vue et tendait à verser dans le discours de la diversité, en en appelant explicitement à l’électorat noir, latino, féminin et LGBT (lesbiennes, gays, bisexuels et trans). Elle a commis là une erreur stratégique. Tant qu’à mentionner des groupes aux États-Unis, mieux vaut les mentionner tous. Autrement, ceux que l’on a oubliés s’en aperçoivent et se sentent exclus. C’est exactement ce qui s’est passé avec les Blancs des classes populaires et les personnes à fortes convictions religieuses. Pas moins des deux tiers des électeurs blancs non diplômés du supérieur ont voté pour Donald Trump, de même que plus de 80 % des évangéliques blancs.
« L’obsession de la diversité à l’école et dans la presse a produit à gauche une génération de narcissiques, ignorant le sort des personnes n’appartenant pas aux groupes auxquels ils s’identifient ».

L’énergie morale déployée autour de l’identité a eu bien sûr de nombreux effets positifs. La discrimination positive a transformé et amélioré la vie en entreprise. Le mouvement Black Lives Matter a été un révélateur pour tous les Américains doté d’un tant soit peu de conscience. En normalisant l’homosexualité dans la culture populaire, Hollywood a contribué à la banaliser dans la vie publique et au sein des familles américaines.

Mais l’obsession de la diversité à l’école et dans la presse a produit à gauche une génération de narcissiques, ignorant le sort des personnes n’appartenant pas aux groupes auxquels ils s’identifient, et indifférents à la nécessité d’être à l’écoute des Américains de toutes conditions. Dès leur plus jeune âge, nos enfants sont incités à parler de leur identité individuelle, avant même d’en avoir une. Au moment où ils entrent à l’université, beaucoup pensent que le discours politique se réduit au discours de la diversité, et on est consterné de voir qu’ils n’ont pas d’avis sur des questions aussi éternelles que les classes sociales, la guerre, l’économie et le bien commun. L’enseignement de l’histoire dans les écoles secondaires en est grandement responsable, car les programmes adoptés plaquent sur le passé le discours actuel de l’identité et donnent une vision déformée des grandes forces et des grands personnages qui ont façonné notre pays (les conquêtes du mouvement pour les droits des femmes, par exemple, sont réelles et importantes, mais on ne peut les comprendre qu’à la lumière des accomplissements des Pères fondateurs, qui ont établi un système de gouvernement fondé sur la garantie des droits).

Quand les jeunes entrent à l’université, ils sont incités à rester centrés sur eux-mêmes par les associations étudiantes, par les professeurs ainsi que par les membres de l’administration qui sont employés à plein temps pour gérer les « questions de diversité » et leur donner encore plus d’importance. La chaîne Fox News et d’autres médias de droite adorent railler la « folie des campus » autour de ces questions, et il y a le plus souvent de quoi. Cela fait le jeu des démagogues populistes qui cherchent à délégitimer le savoir aux yeux de ceux qui n’ont jamais mis les pieds sur un campus. Comment expliquer à l’électeur moyen qu’il y a censément urgence morale à accorder aux étudiants le droit de choisir le pronom personnel par lequel ils veulent être désignés ? Comment ne pas rigoler avec ces électeurs quand on apprend qu’un farceur de l’université du Michigan a demandé à se faire appeler « Sa majesté » ?

Cette sensibilité à la diversité sur les campus a déteint sur les médias de gauche, et pas qu’un peu. L’embauche de femmes et de membres des minorités au titre de la discrimination positive dans la presse écrite et l’audiovisuel est une formidable avancée sociale – et cela a même transformé le visage des médias de droite. Mais cela a aussi contribué à donner le sentiment, surtout aux jeunes journalistes et rédacteurs en chef, qu’en traitant de l’identité ils avaient accompli leur travail.

Je me suis livré à une petite expérience lors d’un récent congé sabbatique passé en France. Pendant une année, je me suis abstenu de consulter la presse américaine et je n’ai lu que des journaux européens. Mon idée était d’essayer de voir le monde tel que le voient les lecteurs européens. Mais cela a été beaucoup plus instructif pour moi de réaliser, à mon retour, à quel point le prisme de l’identité avait transformé le traitement de l’information aux États-Unis ces dernières années. Combien de fois, par exemple, nous ressert-on le sujet sur le « premier ou la première X à faire Y » ? La fascination pour les questions d’identité se retrouve même dans la couverture de l’actualité internationale qui est, hélas, une denrée rare. Il peut être intéressant de lire un article sur le sort des personnes transgenre en Égypte, par exemple, mais cela ne contribue en rien à informer les Américains sur les puissants courants politiques et religieux qui détermineront l’avenir de l’Égypte et, indirectement, celui de notre pays. Aucun grand titre de la presse européenne n’imaginerait d’adopter un tel angle.

Mais c’est au niveau de la stratégie électorale que l’échec de la gauche diversitaire a été le plus spectaculaire, comme nous venons de le constater. En temps normal, la politique nationale n’est pas axée sur ce qui nous différencie mais sur ce qui nous unit. Et nous choisissons pour la conduire la personne qui aura le mieux su nous parler de notre destin collectif. Ronald Reagan a été habile à cela, quoiqu’on pense de sa vision. Bill Clinton aussi, qui a pris exemple sur Reagan. Il s’est emparé du Parti démocrate en marginalisant son aile sensible aux questions d’identité, a concentré son énergie sur des mesures de politique intérieure susceptibles de bénéficier à l’ensemble de la population (comme l’assurance-maladie) et défini le rôle des États-Unis dans le monde d’après la chute du mur de Berlin. En poste pour deux mandats, il a ainsi été en mesure d’en faire beaucoup pour différentes catégories d’électeurs membres de la coalition démocrate. La politique de la différence est essentiellement expressive et non persuasive. Voilà pourquoi elle ne fait jamais gagner des élections – mais peut en faire perdre.
« Une lecture commode de la récente élection présidentielle consisterait à dire que Donald Trump a gagné parce qu’il a réussi à transformer un désavantage économique en colère raciste ».

L’intérêt récent, quasi ethnologique, des médias pour l’homme blanc en colère en dit autant sur l’état de la gauche américaine que sur cette figure tant vilipendée et, jusqu’ici, dédaignée. Pour la gauche, une lecture commode de la récente élection présidentielle consisterait à dire que Donald Trump a gagné parce qu’il a réussi à transformer un désavantage économique en colère raciste – c’est la thèse du whitelash, du retour de bâton de l’électorat blanc. C’est une lecture commode parce qu’elle conforte un sentiment de supériorité morale et permet à la gauche de faire la sourde oreille à ce que ces électeurs ont dit être leur principale préoccupation. Cette lecture alimente aussi le fantasme selon lequel la droite républicaine serait condamnée à terme à l’extinction démographique – autrement dit, que la gauche n’a qu’à attendre que le pays lui tombe tout cuit dans l’assiette. Le pourcentage étonnamment élevé du vote latino qui est allé à M. Trump est là pour nous rappeler que plus des groupes ethniques sont établis depuis longtemps aux États-Unis, moins leur comportement électoral est homogène.

Enfin, la thèse du whitelash est commode parce qu’elle disculpe la gauche de ne pas avoir vu que son obsession de la diversité incitait les Américains blancs, ruraux, croyants, à se concevoir comme un groupe défavorisé dont l’identité est menacée ou bafouée. Ces personnes ne réagissent pas contre la réalité d’une Amérique multiculturelle (en réalité, elles ont tendance à vivre dans des régions où la population est homogène). Elles réagissent contre l’omniprésence du discours de l’identité, ce qu’elles appellent le « politiquement correct ». La gauche ferait bien de garder à l’esprit que le Ku Klux Klan est le plus ancien mouvement identitaire de la vie politique américaine, et qu’il existe toujours. Quand on joue au jeu de l’identité, il faut s’attendre à perdre.

Il nous faut une gauche postdiversitaire, qui s’inspire des succès passés de la gauche prédiversitaire. Cette gauche-là s’attacherait à élargir sa base en s’adressant aux Américains en leur qualité d’Américains et en privilégiant les questions qui concernent une vaste majorité d’entre eux. Elle parlerait à la nation en tant que nation de citoyens qui sont tous dans le même bateau et doivent se serrer les coudes. Pour ce qui est des questions plus étroites et symboliquement très chargées qui risquent de faire fuir des électeurs potentiels, notamment celles qui touchent à la sexualité et à la religion, cette gauche-là procéderait doucement, avec tact et sens de la mesure.

Les enseignants acquis à cette gauche-là se recentreraient sur la principale responsabilité politique qui est la leur dans une démocratie : former des citoyens engagés qui connaissent leur système politique ainsi que les grandes forces et les principaux événements de leur histoire. Cette gauche postdiversitaire rappellerait également que la démocratie n’est pas qu’une affaire de droits ; elle confère aussi des devoirs à ses citoyens, par exemple le devoir de s’informer et celui de voter. Une presse de gauche postdiversitaire commencerait par s’informer sur les régions du pays dont elle a fait peu de cas, et sur les questions qui les préoccupent, notamment la religion. Et elle s’acquitterait avec sérieux de sa responsabilité d’informer les Américains sur les grandes forces qui régissent les relations internationales.

J’ai été invité il y a quelques années à un congrès syndical en Floride pour parler du célèbre discours du président Franklin D. Roosevelt de 1941 sur les quatre libertés. La salle était bondée de représentants de sections locales – hommes, femmes, Noirs, Blanc, Latinos. Nous avons commencé par chanter l’hymne nationale puis nous nous sommes assis pour écouter un enregistrement du discours de Roosevelt. J’observais la diversité des visages dans l’assistance et j’étais frappé de voir à quel point ces personnes si différentes étaient concentrées sur ce qui les rassemblait. Et, en entendant Roosevelt invoquer d’une voix vibrante la liberté d’expression, la liberté de culte, la liberté de vivre à l’abri du besoin et la liberté de vivre à l’abri de la peur – des libertés qu’il réclamait « partout dans le monde » – cela m’a rappelé quels étaient les vrais fondements de la gauche américaine moderne. ».

Voir aussi:

Mark Lilla, poil à gratter de la gauche américaine
Obsédés par la défense des identités ethniques, de genre et de sexualité, les progressistes en oublient le bien commun, déplore cet intellectuel dans un essai paru en août. Aux Etats-Unis, une volée de bois vert a accueilli cette mise en garde.
Le Monde
01.12.2017

Dix jours après l’élection de Donald Trump, le 18 novembre 2016, une tribune parue dans le New York Times a soulevé une vive polémique au sein de la gauche américaine, sonnée par l’élection d’un tel président et l’amère défaite de Hillary Clinton. Son auteur, Mark Lilla, professeur à l’université Columbia et historien des idées, affirmait que « ces dernières années, la gauche américaine a cédé, à propos des identités ethniques, de genre et de sexualité, à une sorte d’hystérie collective qui a faussé son message, au point de l’empêcher de devenir une force fédératrice capable de gouverner ». Face à l’écho de cette tribune, Le Monde en a publié la traduction le 9 décembre 2016.

Royaume perdu

« J’aime provoquer », confie volontiers cet essayiste de renom qui a collaboré notamment à la New York Review of Books et à The New ­Republic. Ses lunettes cerclées cachent en effet un fin escrimeur, qui porte l’estocade avec souplesse mais d’une main ferme. A la fin du mois d’août, il engage à nouveau le combat en développant sa réflexion dans un court essai.

Pour The Once and Future Liberal (« La gauche qui fut et qui sera », non traduit, Harper, 144 pages), ce n’est cependant pas chez Alexandre Dumas qu’il est allé chercher l’inspiration. Le titre évoque plutôt un roman de chevalerie britannique écrit en 1958, The Once and Future King, de T. H. White. C’est en effet d’un royaume perdu à reconstruire dont parle Mark Lilla : la gauche américaine. Car, selon lui, et contrairement aux apparences, « Donald Trump n’est pas le plus grand de nos soucis ». Les progressistes (« we liberals ») devraient davantage s’inquiéter du basculement à droite de la société américaine, une réalité dont le président n’est qu’un symptôme.

Hélas, la gauche ne s’en préoccupe pas. Elle traverse une phase « narcissique » et « suicidaire », affirme Mark Lilla avec une colère rentrée : elle ne parvient plus à définir une vision suffisamment globale et « abstraite » dans laquelle chacun puisse se reconnaître. Le Parti démocrate lui-­même ne fait plus l’effort de s’adresser à la communauté entière des Américains : pour preuve, il seg­mente, sur son site Internet, la population en dix-­sept groupes. Quant aux campus univer­sitaires, principal lieu de diffusion des idées de gauche depuis le recul des syndicats, ils sont le théâtre d’un militantisme radicalisé qui se concentre sur la défense des minorités. « C’est une juste cause, mais les moyens employés nous ont menés dans le mur », expli­que Mark Lilla. Il fustige notamment le mouvement Black Lives Matter, contre les violences policières et la discrimination dont sont victimes les Afro­-Américains, coupable selon lui de ne pas chercher à tisser des soli­darités et de mettre en accusation l’ensemble de la société américaine. Le 2 octobre, Mark Lilla participait à un débat public à l’univer­sité Rutgers (New Jersey) sur l’« identita­risme » qui sévit sur les campus. L’événe­ment fut interrompu par des militants de Black Lives Matter.

IDENTITARISME BLANC

Dans la presse, l’essai de Mark Lilla est reçu avec à peine moins d’hostilité. Le New York Times a ainsi publié une critique l’accusant de « troller » la gauche. Ta­Nehisi Coates, journa­liste au mensuel The Atlantic et vibrant porte­ parole de la colère qu’exprime aujourd’hui la population noire, a lu dans la prose de Lilla une nouvelle manifestation de l’identita­risme blanc qui enjoint les minorités à taire leurs revendications au nom de la recherche du consensus. Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw, influente juriste et créatrice du concept d’« intersectionnalité » – le croisement de plusieurs formes de discriminations –, s’indi­gne dans la revue The Baffler que Lilla s’en prenne à la gauche radicale, alors que le gou­vernement Trump poursuit une politique qui vise à maintenir « le privilège racial » dont profitent les Blancs. L’essayiste a aussi ses défenseurs. Joint aux Etats-­Unis, Jonathan Haidt, professeur d’éthi­que à l’université de New York, décrit Mark Lilla comme « un trésor intellectuel » qui écrit avec esprit, sans recourir au jargon universi­taire. De fait, le style incisif de l’essayiste entre­ mêle les références religieuses, philosophi­ques, historiques et littéraires. Mark Lilla, qui se décrit comme un « no bullshit liberal » (« un progressiste sans bara­tin »), s’attendait à ce rude accueil, pétri de méfiance à l’égard d’une gauche qui affecte des postures radicales dans le confort des campus. Né à Detroit dans les années 1950, « j’ai grandi dans une famille où personne n’avait fréquenté l’université. Lorsque j’ai obtenu une bourse pour l’université du Michi­gan, j’ai été confronté à un snobisme de gauche qui méprisait la classe ouvrière, son attache­ment à la famille, la religion. Cette gauche caviar a suscité chez moi une forte réaction ». Alors très croyant, il se considérait à gauche mais se méfiait des excès des politiques sociales mises en place dans les années 1960 aux Etats­-Unis. C’est ainsi qu’il se rapprocha des cercles néoconservateurs. « A l’époque, le terme avait un tout autre sens qu’aujourd’hui. Cela n’avait rien à voir avec la politique étran­ gère, comme cela a pu être le cas sous Bush fils. Ces néoconservateurs étaient des centristes, ou plutôt des progressistes qui avaient été rattra­pés par la réalité. » Il intègre en 1980 la rédaction de la revue The Public Interest, la principale publication néo­ conservatrice. Il en part quatre ans plus tard, alors que s’affirme la tendance intervention­niste de ce courant de pensée, et reprend ses études pour commencer un doctorat en théo­rie politique à Harvard. « J’ai passé la plus grande partie de mon temps en Italie et en France » , se rappelle-­t-­il avec nostalgie. Il vit alors un moment déterminant de son par­cours intellectuel. « Au cours de mon séjour en France, de 1988 à 1990, j’ai fréquenté les milieux entourant François Furet. J’ai ainsi pu connaî­tre Marcel Gauchet, Pierre Manent et Philippe Raynaud. J’ai alors découvert ce qu’était le répu­blicanisme français. » Aux Etats-­Unis, remar­que­-t­il, les notions de citoyen et de bien commun ont été emportées par l’individua­lisme, tandis qu’en France elles existent tou­jours : la gauche comme la droite peuvent les revendiquer, elles permettent de défendre autant l’éducation publique que la nation ».

« ÉLECTRON LIBRE »

Son nouvel essai démontre à quel point il est toujours imprégné par ces catégories françai­ses, ce qui n’a pas échappé à l’américaniste et historien Denis Lacorne. Les deux hommes se connaissent depuis 2008. « J’étais alors pro­fesseur invité à Columbia et il était mon voisin de bureau », explique Denis Lacorne, toujours très admiratif de cet intellectuel, véritable « électron libre ». C’est donc sans surprise qu’il découvre les préconisations de Mark Lilla pour surmon­ter la crise actuelle aux Etats­ Unis : la gauche doit renouer avec la défense de l’esprit civi­que et du bien commun. « Le seul moyen de sortir de l’im­passe est d’en appeler à quel­ que chose que tous les Améri­cains partagent mais qui n’a rien à voir avec nos identités, sans nier leur existence et leur importance. Une telle chose existe, si seulement les progres­sistes acceptaient d’en parler de nouveau : la citoyenneté » , affirme-­t-­il dans son livre. Mark Lilla craint cependant que le républicanisme fran­çais n’aille parfois un peu trop loin. Interdire aux femmes voilées d’accompagner les enfants lors des sorties scolaires au nom de la laïcité lui paraît une mauvaise idée. « Ce n’est pas en insultant la mère de ces enfants que vous ferez d’eux de fiers citoyens français. » La France pourtant ne lui montre pas une grande reconnaissance. Un seul de ses ouvra­ges a été traduit : Le Dieu mort ­né. La religion, la politique et l’Occident moderne (Seuil, 2011), consacré au retour de la théologie politique. Il serait, du reste, trompeur de le présenter comme un intellectuel n’ayant que la France pour passion. Certes, il a publié un recueil consacré à la nouvelle pensée française (New French Thought. Political Philosophy, Prince­ton University Press, 1994) et s’est intéressé aux philosophes Alain Badiou, Jacques Der­rida et Michel Foucault. Mais, plus générale­ ment, dans ses essais, il cherche à comprendre la « psychologie intellectuelle » , les circonstan­ces personnelles ou historiques qui font qu’un auteur adopte une idée, puis la suit parfois jusqu’au dogmatisme. Ces essais sont une invitation à la modestie. Aujourd’hui, Mark Lilla veut s’affranchir de cette retenue. Encouragé par le succès de son livre dans certains cercles politiques, il envi­sage de jouer les « éminences grises ». Il multi­ plie les réunions avec des donateurs du Parti démocrate, discute avec des sénateurs, Tony Blair a tenu à le rencontrer. La dernière partie de son essai est d’ailleurs un appel aux armes. S’adressant directement à son lecteur, il lui demande de s’engager en politique. Ce n’est qu’en remportant des batailles électorales que l’on pourra protéger les minorités, rappelle­-t­-il. Son livre est par moments ouvertement polémique, mais l’indignation avec laquelle la gauche a reçu un message aussi pragmatique est sans doute un signe des profondes divi­sions qui traversent les Etats-­Unis.

Voir encore:

William Julius Wilson
A leading scholar of urban poverty has a prescription for the ghetto: jobs
Gerald Early

Mother Jones

September/October 1996

“A lot of people are going to call me naive,” says William Julius Wilson about his call for a WPA-style jobs program in his upcoming book, When Work Disappears: The World of the New Urban Poor (New York: Knopf, 1996).

But criticism is nothing new for the 60-year-old sociologist. He first caused an uproar in 1978 with his landmark claim in The Declining Significance of Race that class and economics play a more relevant role than race in the plight of the black urban poor. He continued that argument in 1987 with the equally controversial book The Truly Disadvantaged.

While Wilson takes great pains to articulate the importance of race on urban poverty, his studies highlight the devastating effects of increased joblessness. “Crime, family dissolution, welfare, and low levels of social organization are fundamentally a consequence of the disappearance of work,” he says, disputing conservative claims that the inner-city poor do not share the same basic values as other Americans. For Wilson, ghetto pathologies are the result of jobless poverty, not the cause of it. And he argues for aggressive solutions: government jobs, national health care, new approaches to affirmative action, and suburban-urban consolidation.

“Liberals were intimidated by the Reagan administration,” says Wilson, “and did not want to appear naive by talking about programs that called for government support. I just said, ‘The hell with that. I’m out there. I’m exposed with this book.’ “

In June, Wilson, newly arrived at Harvard after 24 years at the University of Chicago with its tradition of urban social research, was named one of Time magazine’s 25 most influential Americans. He recently spoke about his latest research with Gerald Early, director of African and Afro-American studies at Washington University, for Mother Jones:

Q: Would it be fair to call your new book a defense of the welfare state?

A: If you mean a general term for a state that would approve national health insurance, earned income tax credits, social security, child support, and childcare programs, yes. If you’re talking about the narrow issue of public assistance, I would like to see us move to a more healthy system. But until we come up with certain guarantees — for example, guaranteed jobs where mothers move off welfare — I support welfare very strongly. The worst thing we could do is impose time limits and then expect people to sink or swim once they move off welfare.

Q: But why does the government need to provide work? Why not rely on the private sector for jobs?

A: A lot of joblessness in the black community doesn’t seem to be reachable through fiscal and monetary policies. People have not been drawn into the labor market even during periods of economic recovery. Our study clearly shows that employers would rather not hire a lot of workers from the inner city. They feel people from the inner city are not job-ready, that the kids have been poorly educated, that they can’t read, they can’t write, they can’t speak.

The problems we see today are going to be a hell of a lot worse in 10 years if we’re not willing to face up to them. These kids are just not going to be absorbed into the economy, so what are they going to be doing? Well, we know. They’re going to be making life pretty miserable for a lot of people.

In the short term, we have to have public-sector employment to get people back to work. In the long term, we’re going to have to have programs to ensure that our kids are ready to enter the private labor market.

Q: You argue for “flexible criteria” for evaluating jobs and school. But some conservatives say that, in the long run, it would be better for minorities to have objective, very standardized forms of measurement.

A: If we could come up with standardized testing that could really measure merit — the potential to succeed — that would be fine. But the person who scored well on an SAT will not necessarily be the best doctor or the best lawyer or the best businessman. These tests do not measure character, leadership, creativity, perseverance. Until we come up with standardized tests that can get at those important traits, then I’m for flexible criteria — criteria that institutions over a period of years have developed and shown to be sufficient in helping to identify applicants with these traits.

Q: And this policy should apply to black middle-class kids as well?

A: A black, middle-class kid, even though his parents may be middle income — maybe they’re first-generation middle class — has also been affected by race issues. The black kids are more likely to live in segregated neighborhoods. They’re influenced by styles and habits and patterns of behavior that have racial restrictions that are also not conducive to learning.

If you’re going to compare a middle-income black kid with a middle- income white kid, and, say, you control for family background, family education, and family income, and if this middle-income black kid doesn’t score as well as the white kid on the test, then I say, look, you haven’t taken into consideration the cumulative effect of living in a segregated neighborhood and going to a de facto segregated school. You’re denying a position at Harvard or some other place to a kid that really could make it. That’s why I support affirmative action that’s based on both class and race.

Q: But in your book you argue that race-based or class-based affirmative action is necessary but not sufficient for the kind of social change you envision.I

A: Affirmative action has to be combined with a broader program of social reform that would emphasize social rights: the right to employment, the right to education, the right to good health. Over the years, black leaders have been slow to recognize the need for a very, very progressive agenda. Anytime someone has talked about putting America back to work, blacks should have said yes, but they didn’t. They were so preoccupied with affirmative action that they didn’t provide the kind of leadership that would help some of the other progressive folks. Only now are black leaders beginning to realize the impact of economic issues.

Q: Your critics say your support of race-based affirmative action makes coalition politics difficult — that it only sparks ethnic competition, especially in the Latino community that feels some resentment toward African-Americans for dominating civil rights policies.

A: Well, I think it is difficult to achieve a meaningful political coalition if you have race-based programs that divide members of the coalition. The problem I have, however, is that white people assume an either/or position: Either we have race-based programs or we don’t. What I see is comprehensive social reform that includes race-based and race-neutral programs.

What kind of programs am I talking about? National health insurance. Full-employment policies. Training and education. Childcare programs. Reforms in public schools. In The Truly Disadvantaged, I argued that the race-neutral programs should be highlighted in order to attract support. On the other hand, as long as we have problems that represent the legacy of previous racism — problems that will not be addressed with race-neutral strategies — affirmative action programs are necessary.

Q: Do you think racism is a permanent feature of the American system?

A: Racism should be viewed as an intervening variable. You give me a set of conditions and I can produce racism in any society. You give me a different set of conditions and I can reduce racism. You give me a situation where there are a sufficient number of social resources so people don’t have to compete for those resources, and I will show you a society where racism is held in check. If we could create the conditions that make racism difficult, or discourage it, then there would be less stress and less need for affirmative action programs. One of those conditions would be an economic policy that would create tight labor markets over long periods of time.

Now does that mean that affirmative action is here only temporarily? I think the ultimate goal should be to remove it.

Q: Some black thinkers believe integration wrecked the community and helped produce the inner-city problems we have now. Do you agree? A: I can hardly see how anyone could support segregated confinement of black folks who have talent when they would do better in a broader society. To say that integration caused the current problems of the black community ignores a whole host of other factors, including the willingness of America to tolerate schools that cripple kids.

People talk about how busing exacerbated race relations without addressing the problems of black education. Busing has only affected a very small segment of the black population; the majority of blacks grew up in segregated neighborhoods. There has been a decline in the quality of teachers because of the opening of opportunities for black and white women in other areas — gender integration, if you will, as well as race integration. There are few highly qualified teachers right now, and these teachers tend to be disproportionately concentrated in higher-income neighborhoods.

I don’t know if you’ve been in any inner-city schools, but it’s pretty demoralizing. The kids come to class bright-eyed, enthusiastic — entering first grade really looking forward to school. By the fourth grade they’re just completely turned off, and by the time they enter high school, they see little relationship between school and employment. It’s bad enough you have incompetent teachers and schools that are poorly run, understaffed, and lack material resources. It’s even worse when the kids themselves don’t feel they have any stake in school. And joblessness triggers all kinds of other problems — crime, drugs, family dislocations, neighborhood disorganization.

Q: Do you see any sign that these problems will be addressed politically?

A: Clinton wanted to revive the economy to provide a foundation for his social reforms. He wanted national health insurance. He expanded the earned income tax credit. He stated he wanted welfare reform — welfare reform that would provide jobs for people to move off welfare. The guy has the vision; he just has to deal with all the political variables. I think in his second administration, if re-elected, he’ll be able to.

Q: What is your next step in studying these issues?

A: Unemployment is higher in Europe than in the United States and primarily concentrated in immigrant minority populations, so people are worried about what’s going to happen and if American-style ghettos are emerging in Europe. There are some of the problems there that America sees associated with the lack of economic inclusion — family breakdown, gang behavior, and racial tensions. I get the sense that in Europe they are much more concerned about these issues than in the United States. So I see my research focusing on international problems of social and racial equality. And I think it will help inform a lot of the positions I take regarding domestic strategy issues.

Voir encore:

William Julius Wilson Interview

William Julius Wilson is a University Professor at the John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University. He is a past president of American Sociological Association and recipient of the National Medal of Science.  He is the author of Power, Racism, and Privilege; The Declining Significance of Race; The Truly Disadvantaged; and When Work Disappears. His most recent book, The Bridge over the Racial Divide is a call for inter-racial coalition-building to effect social change.

New River Media Interview with William Julius Wilson
Professor, John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University

QUESTION: How did African Americans fare during the Great Depression and under the New Deal?

WILLIAM JULIUS WILSON: During the Great Depression, African Americans were faced with problems that were not unlike those experienced by the most disadvantaged groups in society. The Great Depression had a leveling effect, and all groups really experienced hard times: poor whites, poor blacks. Now, it’s true that blacks also faced the problem of discrimination, even during the Depression, but for the most part, blacks felt that they were in the same boat as everybody else. They didn’t experience that sense of real relative deprivation as if they were being singled out. And it was clear that it had a psychological uplifting, believe it or not for some blacks to know that others were experiencing similar problems.

There is some evidence that some New Deal programs in some of the states discriminated against blacks. But I have been sort of – I’ve been impressed overall with the relatively fair treatment that blacks received during the New Deal. And if you talk to black leaders like A. Philip Randolph, who also mentioned that blacks in many respects did better during the recession in terms of relative treatment than in other times.

QUESTION: Could you talk about the importance of A. Philip Randolph and his threatened march during World War II?

WILLIAM JULIUS WILSON: Well, for the first time, A. Philip Randolph demonstrated that blacks really have the power to put pressure on the government to move in directions that would enhance the status of blacks. The very idea of having a march on Washington during a war, which would embarrass the United States as they attempt to deal with the, with the enemy, was really a very important symbolic change in the way that blacks were addressing the problems of race in America.

QUESTION: What did the advent of World War II mean for African Americans?

WILLIAM JULIUS WILSON: Well, for one thing it meant that blacks could say that they have contributed to the war effort, even though they were in segregated units. But more important, it opened up job opportunities in factories because of the labor shortage, and blacks experienced fairly rapid mobility during that time. And it also, I think, hastened their entry into blue-collar positions, particularly following the war. I’m talking about factory jobs in urban areas, even in Southern cities blacks were working, particularly in those factories in the South and urban areas that were producing war machinery. Blacks were working in those areas as well. You know, there was a gradual movement of blacks to Northern areas throughout the first half of the twentieth century. And as jobs opened up in Northern industries, there was a fairly rapid increase during the 1940s, so much so that the population of blacks in certain cities quadrupled.

QUESTION: What did this migration mean for the economic and political status of African Americans?

WILLIAM JULIUS WILSON: What it meant was that blacks gradually developed a working class population. Prior to this time, they were overwhelmingly impoverished. You’re talking about well over three-quarters, over 80 percent of the black population characterized as being very poor. But after World War II, you saw the gradual development of a black working class, and eventually a black middle class. So, the entry into these goods-producing industries was a stepping stone into higher status and the development of a fairly sizable black working class.

QUESTION: How did African Americans feel about fighting a fascist regime that persecuted Jews while they themselves faced racial discrimination at home?

WILLIAM JULIUS WILSON: There were some black nationalists who argued that blacks should not be fighting in a white man’s war, that Hitler didn’t do anything to blacks, so why should blacks be involved in this war? But that was a minority view among a small group of black nationalists. Overwhelmingly, blacks identified with the war effort, and they felt that black Americans, white Americans, other Americans, were in real danger if they didn’t get involved in this war in a meaningful way.

To the extent that there was emphasis on fighting racism abroad, some blacks, a small number of blacks, of black leaders, that said why are we spending so much time addressing the issue of racism abroad, you know, fighting racism in Germany, when racism is still very strong in the United States. But to say that this was representative of the black view would be a misstatement. Blacks overwhelmingly supported the war back them, overwhelmingly supported the idea of fighting the kind of racism that the Nazis typified.

QUESTION: I want to talk a little bit about the Moynihan Report, the 1965 report on the Negro family. Could you summarize what Moynihan said in his report?

WILLIAM JULIUS WILSON: Well, the Moynihan Report highlighted the fact that the Negro family was weakening as reflected in the growth of female-headed households, and that the growth of female-headed households would have profound negative implications for the black family, because female-headed families are much more vulnerable to problems in the larger society, much more likely to be impoverished, and much more likely to experience difficulty in socializing children to compete in the broader society. With the absence of a father, the pressures on the mother are all the, all the greater. So, Moynihan was concerned about that, and felt that much more attention should be given to the family structure in the black community.

QUESTION: What kind of a reaction did the Moynihan Report engender?

WILLIAM JULIUS WILSON: It’s interesting that when people talk about the controversies surrounding the Moynihan Report, they fail to realize that he wrote a speech for President Johnson, which was presented at Howard University, a commencement speech, two months before the Moynihan Report was released. And that speech included many of the main arguments of the Moynihan Report. And it’s interesting to note that black leaders praised that speech because it highlighted the problems of the black family and associated the problems of the black family with lack of opportunity in the broader society, and that if you improved the conditions in the broader society you would also improve the conditions of the black family. So it was a call to recognize that the black family is suffering and the way to address these problems is to open up opportunities for blacks so that the families can be strengthened.

But, when the Moynihan Report was released, the controversy that was generated was associated not so much with what the report actually said, but the interpretation of the report. And there were some people who claimed that Moynihan was arguing that the black family was pathological and that the problems in the black community can be traced to the pathological black family. That’s not what the report said. The report said that the black family is growing weaker and that this is something that we should be concerned about, that the growth of female-headed households was becoming, or has become fairly rapid, and therefore we need to pay more attention to these folks. And that if we are going to address the problems with the black family, we need to look at the lack of opportunities facing black Americans and how the lack of opportunities creates strains and stresses that are reflected in family break-ups.

QUESTION: Why is family break-up a problem?

WILLIAM JULIUS WILSON: Single-parent families, family break-ups in the black community are problematic because of the impact on children, and that’s the main thing. Single-parent families, female-headed families are overwhelmingly impoverished families. There is an association between female-headed families and poverty. They talk about the feminization of poverty. So, children growing up in these poor, female-headed families are at a disadvantage, and there’s research that shows that poor, female-headed families are much more likely to have kids who don’t reach the level of achievement in terms of social outcome that we associate with children in married couple families. So there is an association, I think, between poor social outcomes and female-headed families.

The reason that the large proportion of female-headed families in the black community is a problem is not because they’re headed by women, but because these families are overwhelmingly impoverished families. In the United States, there’s an association between poverty and family structure – some people call it the feminization of poverty. But this is quite different from Sweden, where the female-headed family rate is about equal to that of the United States, but poverty is not associated with family structure because Sweden you have a stronger family supports. You have family allowances that provide income. You have comprehensive child care programs. You have wage subsidies for mothers who are working in the labor market. And so the poverty rate of female-headed families is relatively equal to that of married couple families. That is quite different from the United States. And for that reason, I’m concerned about the growth of single-parent families in the black community. And in fact, I’m concerned about the growth of single-parent families across the country, as long as these families are struggling financially.

QUESTION: What exactly did Moynihan say about the relationship between employment, welfare, and family breakdown?

WILLIAM JULIUS WILSON: What Moynihan talked about back then is, I think is true today, and that is joblessness creates problem streams in the family. It leads to family break-ups resulting in an increasing number of families going on welfare. And so if you want to strengthen families, you should provide, the logical conclusion, following his arguments, would be to provide employment opportunities for males, not to mention females. But the lack of jobs increases family tensions, leading to marital break-up, leading the growth of female-headed families, which oftentimes results in greater use of welfare.

[In my own research], what we found was a strong relationship between black male joblessness and single-parent families. We found that employed fathers were two-and-a-half times more likely to marry the mother of their first child than jobless fathers. This is especially true of men under the age of thirty-five. So, in the inner city we found a very strong relationship between male joblessness and female-headed families. And this led us to develop what we call our male marriageable poll index, that is, the sharp decrease in the proportion of males, particularly young males, who are marriageable, that is, who have jobs. And the lack of jobs among males is definitely associated with the growth of single-parent families. There are other factors involved too, but that’s one of the key factors.

QUESTION: Why are jobs so scarce in the inner city?

WILLIAM JULIUS WILSON: Well, they’re scarce for a number of reasons. One is that a lot of industries have relocated to the suburbs and to other areas around the country. Another reason is that the inner cities have experienced a sharp out-migration of working and middle class families, and as they’ve left, a lot of the jobs have, have followed them. Many of these people were involved in businesses and so on. So, I think it’s due to the exodus of higher income families associated with the exodus of jobs and other resources that flow out of the inner city.

QUESTION: Can you talk specifically about the impact of black suburbanization, blacks in the past ten, twenty years leaving the city and going out to the suburbs?

WILLIAM JULIUS WILSON: Well, what you have had is a gradual movement of blacks in the inner city neighborhoods to suburban neighborhoods, and oftentimes these end up as black suburbs. But as the higher income blacks withdraw from inner city neighborhoods, it removes what I call an important social buffer that’s especially important during periods of an economic downturn, because you have, during the economic downturn you have these hard income families who have the resources to keep a lot of the institutions going, like stores and businesses and so on. But the exodus of these families also remove important role models for the kids. A lot of these kids grow up in neighborhoods where a significant proportion of the adults are not working and therefore you, over time, develop a casual or non-work environment, which is significantly different from a, from a working environment, because kids develops the norms and the expectations that are associated with casual or infrequent work, and therefore they are at a disadvantage when they have to compete with kids who grow up in environments where there are many steady breadwinners.

QUESTION: Has there been a problem since the early 1970s of growing income inequality?

WILLIAM JULIUS WILSON: Yes, there has been a really steady increase in income inequality since the early 1970s. And this is in sharp contrast with the period from the mid-1940s to early 1970s. In that previous period, the period after World War II, a rising tide did indeed lift all boats, so much so that the poor were becoming less poor, not only in relative terms, but in absolute terms as well. And it was a really remarkable period. There was no income inequality as such, or I should say during this period the increases in income were fairly comparable, so you had a pattern of very broad economic progress, family economic progress. After 1970, that all changed. The higher income groups continued to experience the increases in income whereas the lower income groups – particularly the bottom 40 percent – were experiencing stagnating or declining incomes. And this inequality increased up through the mid-1990s.

Now, since about 1997, you could argue that the inequality is in remission because of the strong economy, and may remain in remission if the economy remains strong. But there were other factors that contributed to the rising inequality, not just simply economic factors, not just simply a slow-down in productivity growth and economic growth, not just in personal economic forces. But there were social and political factors that contributed to the rising inequality. In the previous period, you had strong unions that ensured that workers got adequate pay increases. You had basic supports for workers, including non-wage benefits. You had steady increases in the minimum wage. You had a thoroughly progressive tax structure. You had a macroeconomic policy that emphasized full employment, and a strong economy. All of these things contributed to the broadly equal pattern of family income progress.

After the 1970s, that all changed. The unions experienced a downward spiral, and therefore workers’ wages suffered as a result. There were very few increases in the minimum wage. The economic policy shifted, or monetary policy took over, and whereas in the previous period it took a backseat to basic macroeconomic policy. After 1973, it became much more dominant and emphasized controlling inflation over everything else. And so much so that in certain situations monetary policy led to the creation of recessions. All of these things worked against workers. Then you had the Reagan experiment, which led to a change in the tax structure, which rewarded the wealthy and resulted in the poorer groups paying more taxes. All of these things contributed to the rising inequality.

The basic difference between the period after 1973 and the previous period is that the nation’s equalizing institutions – unions, public education, the welfare state broadly defined – were much weaker in the present period. And as I said before, the rising inequality has entered a period of remission. But, how long it will remain in remission will depend on how strong, how long the economy with remain strong, and the extent to which we can reinforce some of the positive developments associated with a strong economy by, you know, basic social supports for ordinary families.

QUESTION: What, and very basically, what is the significance of unequal incomes, and what does that mean for society in general, beyond just the income differences?

WILLIAM JULIUS WILSON: Well, when there is this rising inequality, when there is this expanding gap between the haves and the have-nots, it creates an atmosphere that’s not conducive to congenial inter-group relations. The tensions that are associated with the rising inequality are often manifested in racial antagonisms, and ethnic antagonisms, and class antagonisms. I maintain that the period during the first half of the 1990s, the period in which rising inequality reached its peak, was a period in which we came very, very close to a demagogic immobilization of racism in this society. Our leaders, public leaders, were openly demonizing during this period the most vulnerable groups in society – minorities, immigrants, women on welfare – with messages that were resonating with the general population because at that time people were experiencing economic strain, worrying about their future, not fully understanding what is happening to them. And these demagogic messages shifted attention away from the real source of their tensions and problems, shifted away from the real source of the tensions and problems onto minorities, immigrants and welfare poor.

Now, since 1996, the frequency and intensity of these demagogic messages have noticeably declined. People are still worried about their economic future, still concerned about their children’s future, still worried about holding on to their jobs, but they feel a lot better about their economic situation today than they did in the first half of the 1990s, when Congress changed and the conservative leaders felt that their messages would resonate with the general population. I think that social tensions have lessened because of the strong economy, and now is a time where people are concerned about promoting equality, racial equality, economic equality, now is the time for them to build in this shift in the public’s mood.

QUESTION: The title of one of your book is When Work Disappears. What does happen, especially in inner city neighborhoods, when work disappears?

WILLIAM JULIUS WILSON: When work disappears, that is when a growing number of adults are not working, it has an effect not only on individual life, but on family life and neighborhood life as well. Families suffer because it increases strains and tensions in families and often leads to family break-ups, or results in people not following-up an out-of- wedlock pregnancy, for example, with marriage. Children suffer because the father is often absent, and the father oftentimes feeling not being able to pull his weight because he is not working, does not give the kids the kind of attention and love an affection that they deserve because he is removed from the family, his relationship with the family is tenuous. Neighborhoods suffer because joblessness creates crime, and affects the social organization of the neighborhood.

Neighborhoods in which people are poor and working are entirely different from neighborhoods in which people are poor and jobless. Jobless neighborhoods are troubled neighborhood. They’re dangerous neighborhoods that are much more likely to have rates of crime and drug addiction and prostitution – all of the things that are associated with a neighborhood that lacks social organization. When people are working they are much better organized. They’re much more likely to have a neighborhood that’s viable and stable, and that’s why I emphasize that the changing nature of work in the inner city has had a profound affect on life and stability in inner city neighborhoods.

QUESTION: Has there been much economic progress and political progress for blacks, from the Civil War to World War II?

WILLIAM JULIUS WILSON: The progress of blacks from the Civil War to World War II, in some respects was fairly rapid because in the Civil War, you’re talking about the overwhelming majority of black Americans just coming out of slavery. Now, they experienced some progress during the period of Reconstruction. But you really couldn’t speak meaningfully of a black class structure. Blacks were just overwhelmingly impoverished. By the time of World War II, however, you saw the beginnings, the crystallization of a black class structure. You had a fair percentage of people who had reached what we call the middle class. You saw the development of a growing working class population, so much so that they probably represented at that time about 25 percent of the black population. And you saw a dwindling number of truly lower class blacks. So, for the first time you could begin to speak meaningfully of the development of a black class structure by World War II. And if you look at the black class structure at World War II, at the beginning of World War II, with the black class structure at the Civil War, the differences are huge.

QUESTION: In The Truly Disadvantaged, you sort of take somewhat of a middle position with regard to the culture of poverty argument.

WILLIAM JULIUS WILSON: What I did, you see, in The Truly Disadvantaged, as well as in When Work Disappears, I tried to demonstrate the importance of the environment in black life chances. And you can’t capture the importance of the environment unless you recognize the interaction between social conditions and cultural conditions. The two things go together. Sometimes social conditions generate cultural patterns. For example, one social condition is lack of economic opportunity associated with racial discrimination and changes in the economy. And this results in high rates of joblessness. High rates of joblessness over time generate predictable patterns. If you’re not working, over time, you’re much more likely to develop attitudes and orientations and behavior patterns that are associated with casual or infrequent work. And then when you open up opportunities for people, you notice that these attitudes, orientations, habits and styles also change.

So there’s an interaction there between social, structural and cultural. And if you want to fully capture the environment, you have to show how these things interact. If you leave out the cultural dimensions, then you really play into the hands of a lot of people who argue that blacks are somehow biogenetically inferior to whites because they will maintain, well, we control for education and family background and so on, and we still see that blacks score lower on these cognitive tests than whites. This is the argument put forth in The Bell Curve by Richard Hernstein and Charles Murray. But you haven’t controlled for the full environment. You haven’t captured the cumulative effects of racial subordination and isolation, effects that are played out in both the cultural dimension and in the social dimensions. There are cultural responses to chronic subordination. There are social responses to chronic subordination. And so you have to capture these two dimensions and show how they interact and inter-relate if you really want to demonstrate the impact of the environment on the black population.

Voir enfin:

Books

Hillbilly Elegy author JD Vance on Barack Obama: ‘We dislike the things we envy’

His memoir about growing up poor in Appalachia is one of the most discussed political books of the moment. Does he have political ambitions of his own?

Paul Lewis

The Guardian

25 Jan 2017

This time last year JD Vance was a business manager at a Silicon Valley biotech firm, putting the final touches on a memoir about growing up dirt poor in Appalachia. He warned his boss that he might need to take a week of vacation over the summer to promote the book.

“Even that, I thought, was sort of excessive,” he recalls.

Hillbilly Elegy was published at the end of June – and Vance hasn’t stopped talking about it since. Now entering its 25th week on the New York Times’ bestseller list, it is one of the most discussed political books of the moment.

Though it doesn’t mention Donald Trump, Hillbilly Elegy has been hailed as a must-read prism into disaffection among America’s white working class and the rise of the new president. Vance, 32, is a Republican, but his writing has received accolades across the political spectrum. “Anyone wanting to understand Trump’s rise or American inequality should read it,” said Larry Summers, the Harvard economist and Bill Clinton’s former treasury secretary.

“It’s pretty insane,” Vance concedes. “I would say it has changed nearly everything in my life.”

This is the second time Vance’s life has been changed beyond recognition. The first is the subject of the memoir, which charts how he overcame a chaotic upbringing in Middletown, a deprived former steel town in the Ohio rust belt. He belongs to a fiercely proud and loyal clan descended from rural Kentucky and spares few details recounting how the family buckled under the pressures of poverty, drugs and violence.

He and his sister are brought up by their grandparents. Their father is absent, their mother a nurse and drug addict with a constant stream of boyfriends. On one occasion, she demands her young son’s urine so she can pass a drug test at the hospital where she works. On another, she spirals into a rage and threatens to crash a car and kill them both.

“It has definitely been hard on mom,” he says of the book’s raw depiction of their family life. “And that’s something that I struggle with quite a bit.” He hopes readers realize, he adds, “that when you live the life that mom has, it necessarily leaves its scars”.

Vance overcame these obstacles and made it to the marines, and then Yale Law School. But he never forgot his affinity to “white Americans of Scots-Irish descent who have no college degree”, a group for whom, he argues, “poverty is the family tradition”. “Americans call them hillbillies, rednecks, or white trash,” he says. “I call them neighbors, friends, and family.”

The memoir ends shortly after Vance graduates from Yale, where he has learned how to exploit networks and connections that many students at Ivy League schools acquired at birth – but kids from Middletown don’t even know exist.

The book finishes before it can tell the next chapter of Vance’s life: his relocation to Silicon Valley and his move, around April of last year, from the biotech firm to Mithril Capital, the venture capitalist firm founded by controversial billionaire Peter Thiel.

I ask Vance how he got the job. He says he met Thiel during a talk the tech entrepreneur gave at Yale and emailed him years later asking for work. “It was that simple,” he says.

Thiel has become a pariah in liberal Silicon Valley after backing Trump and aiding his presidential transition. Vance, who did not vote for Trump, says he’s never had a meaningful discussion with his boss about the incoming president. He insists Thiel’s reputation is unfounded, claiming he is “super thoughtful and incredibly nice”.

His view on the Bay Area is more conflicted, confessing that the unflinching optimism he sees around him can be “weird”. “This boom is just going to keep on going,” he says, recounting typical San Francisco conversations. “My life is great, my family is great, my job is great, my house is great.”

The positivity is both enviable and, he adds, disconnected from reality in the booming cities around Silicon Valley. “As an economic experiment, if your goal is to promote growth and innovation, it’s incredibly successful. As a social experiment, if you’re meaning to foster a long-term sense of community, and an attachment not just to the people that you see every day but the people that live around you, then it is not going very well at all.”

Poor in San Francisco is “absolutely” worse than the town where he grew up, he explains. “Poor in Middletown is you live in a really crappy, dilapidated house and you get your food through food stamps,” he says. “Poor out here is: ‘I’m sleeping in a street, I have no one who I really depend on’.”

He adds: “There’s this worry that I have that most of the people who live here don’t feel a special attachment to the place, or to the people who are less fortunate who live here”.

‘It is in your face, in your family, in your home’

In the coming weeks, Vance will leave San Francisco – keeping the venture capitalist job if he can – and return to his native Ohio, where he has just founded a nonprofit that will help address the opioid epidemic. It is, he says, a chance to “capitalize on a platform” he has acquired since the publication of the book.

A few days before our interview, a newspaper in West Virginia, which borders Ohio, revealed pharmaceutical companies had flooded the state with a staggering 780m prescription painkillers over a six-year period – equivalent to 433 for every man, woman and child. Vance believes there is a growing appetite among Republicans and Democrats to deal with the opioid epidemic that is ravaging many rural, deprived communities.

“It is in your face, in your family, in your home,” he says, explaining why there is now widespread, bipartisan empathy for addicts. I suggest there’s racial dimension to that claim, that the opioid crisis has predominantly infiltrated the homes and families of white people, prompting a far less punitive response to the reaction to the crack epidemic.

Vance does not disagree: “There’s absolutely been a difference in a way I think the country has responded psychologically to the crack epidemic versus the opioid epidemic. So I think a lot of black Americans are completely justified in being sensitive about that fact.”

There’s been a difference in a way the country responded psychologically to the crack epidemic vs the opioid epidemic

Vance is most interesting when discussing race, which many would argue remains a more significant economic and political cleavage than class. He does not dispute that the prospects for many black Americans are materially worse than for whites but says he is skeptical about the term white privilege, cautioning that it “collapses a poor kid who is the son of an unemployed coalminer into the same group as a rich boarding school kid who grew up in New England”.

Vance is curious why opinion surveys consistently show poor whites are more pessimistic about the future.

He recalls, for example, the differing responses to Trump’s campaign message about economic and social decay. There was uproar when Trump caricatured African American inner cities, blighted by violence and poverty. “But when Trump [delivered] a very similar message – your communities are falling apart, you can’t get any jobs, it’s terrible – to white audiences, they were much more willing to listen.”

‘Obama strikes at the heart of our deepest insecurities’

Trump’s election was seen, at least in part, as a backlash from white, working-class voters frustrated at their relative decline in status in America – symbolized, of course, by its first black president. Vance plays down this explanation, but I bring up a line in his book that seems to hint at a racially toned resentment. “Obama,” he writes, “strikes at the heart of our deepest insecurities.”

“I think that Obama is everything that the American meritocracy values at a time when a lot of us feel like the American meritocracy doesn’t value very much about us at all,” he explains. “It is just sort of like everything about him. He’s like the American ideal at the very moment that we feel like we’re the opposite of the American ideal.”

He adds: “The natural question that comes – especially in the modern political context as part of that – is the fact he has black skin. I think for some people that’s definitely part of it. But I continue to think the racial explanation of the reaction to Obama doesn’t quite capture how much everything about him is both enviable but also dislikable. Because we dislike the things that we envy.”

There is an arrogance to Obama’s demeanour, he adds, that makes him especially difficult to relate to. “He talks in a way that a professor talks, he talks in a way that you sort of aspire to talk if you’re a young law student. Trump talks like a guy at a bar in West Virginia. Trump talks like my dad sitting around the dinner table.”

When I ask about Vance’s own political ambitions he hedges, saying he has no burning ambition to run for office but would not rule it out “because maybe down the road I will”.

His return to Ohio tells a different story. As well as his nonprofit, Vance is also embarking on a listening tour, attending GOP events in the state, and enlisted the support of Jai Chabria, a former top adviser to the Republican governor, John Kasich. As the Washington Post observed: “Every step that Vance is taking is exactly what a sophisticated person in his position who wanted to run for statewide office would do.”

They also happen to be strikingly similar to steps taken by Obama during his earliest strides into politics. He, too, followed an Ivy League law degree with a foray into nonprofit work – in his case, in Chicago – and a memoir, Dreams of My Father, that wrestled with similar themes of family and racial identity and was published shortly before Obama ran for Illinois state senate in 1996.

When I point out the parallels, Vance shakes his head and demurs. “I definitely don’t see myself as doing that,” he says. “It is in some ways hard for me to imagine myself running for office, because the book was so raw. There are a lot of F-words in it.”

But a few moments later, he adds: “You know, you mention a parallel to President Obama. Maybe he didn’t think that either, right? Maybe opportunities just presented themselves and he went forward with them?”

A couple of days after our conversation, Vance emailed the New York Times with an idea for an op-ed. It was published a few days later under the title: Barack Obama and Me.

Voir par ailleurs:

Barack Obama and Me

J. D. Vance

The NYT

Jan. 2, 2017

I first became interested in politics as a middle school student in the late 1990s, when sexual scandal and presidential impeachment dominated national headlines. The opinion leaders of the day seemed to fall into two camps: those who argued that the president’s private life was none of the public’s business, and those who felt the president lied under oath and deserved to face the consequences.

I wasn’t sophisticated enough to have an opinion on that topic, though I watched the impeachment proceedings like an interested spectator at a sporting event. My politics had started to drift to the right of my family, many of them classic blue dog Democrats. Still, I admired President Clinton in a way that happens when someone like you really makes it. He was a poor boy with a vaguely Southern accent, raised by a single mother with a heavy dose of loving grandparents. As my grandmother told me, presidents were almost always rich people, but Bill Clinton was one of us.

Yet it was that very relatability that made Mr. Clinton’s personal failings frightening. The data shows that working-class families like mine face much higher rates of marital strife and domestic instability. Demons like Mr. Clinton’s had haunted my home and family for generations, and at an age when I first began to develop strong feelings about my future, I knew that I wanted to outrun them. I cared little for Mr. Clinton’s elite education, his economic success or even his ascendancy to the most powerful office in the world. I cared that he had managed to build the domestic tranquillity that he lacked as a child. But here, in one sex scandal, he had blown it all up. If a man of his abilities had done this, then what hope was there for me?

I often wonder how many kids look at our current president the way I once looked at President Clinton. Barack Obama was elected during my second year of college, and save for his skin color, he had much in common with Bill Clinton: Despite an unstable life with a single mother, aided by two loving grandparents, he had made in his adulthood a family life that seemed to embody my sense of the American ideal.

I suspected that there were skeletons lurking in his closet, too. Surely this was a man with a secret sex addiction, or at least an alcohol problem. I secretly guessed that before the end of his term, some major personal scandal would reveal his family life to be a sham. I disagreed with many of his positions, so perhaps a dark part of me wanted such a scandal to come out. But it never came. He and his wife treated each other with clear love and respect, and he adored and cared for his children. Whatever scars his childhood left, he refused to let those scars control him.

The president’s example offered something no other public figure could: hope. I wanted so desperately to have what he had — a happy marriage and beautiful, thriving children. But I thought that those things belonged to people unlike me, to those who came from money and intact nuclear families. For the rest of us, past was destiny. Yet here was the president of the United States, a man whose history looked something like mine but whose future contained something I wanted. His life stood in stark contrast to my greatest fear.

Eventually, I achieved something roughly similar to the president’s early, personal accomplishments: a prestigious law degree, a strong professional career and a modicum of fame as a writer. There were many personal heroes in my life: aunts and uncles, a protective sister, a father who re-entered my life at the right time. But I benefited, too, from the example of a man whose public life showed that we need not be defeated by the domestic hardships of youth.

It is one of the great failures of recent political history that the Republican Party was too often unable to disconnect legitimate political disagreements from the fact that the president himself is an admirable man. Part of this opposition comes from this uniquely polarized moment in our politics, part of it comes from Mr. Obama’s leadership style — more disconnected and cerebral than personal and emotive — and part of it (though a smaller amount than many on the left suppose) comes from the color of his skin.

On Jan. 20, the political side of my brain will breathe a sigh of relief at Mr. Obama’s departure. I will hope for better policy from the new administration, a health reform package closer to my ideological preferences, and a new approach to foreign policy.

But the child who so desperately wanted an American dream, with a happy family at its core will feel something different. For at a pivotal time in my life, Barack Obama gave me hope that a boy who grew up like me could still achieve the most important of my dreams. For that, I’ll miss him, and the example he set.

J.D. Vance is the author of “Hillbilly Elegy” and a contributing opinion writer.

Voir enfin:

Examining Trump’s Appeal To Voters

NPR

November 9, 2016

Steve Inskeep talks to NPR’s Scott Detrow and J.D. Vance, the author of one of the most revealing books of the presidential campaign, Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis.

STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:

J.D. Vance is on the line. He wrote one of the more talked about books of this year. It’s called « Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir Of A Family And Culture In Crisis. » It’s about his upbringing in Appalachia. And it was published just as Americans were asking about disaffected white voters supporting Donald Trump, who is now the president-elect. Mr. Vance, welcome back to the program.

J D VANCE: Thank you for having me.

INSKEEP: What did you make of the result overnight?

VANCE: Well, I think like a lot of people I was surprised, maybe not as surprised as everybody else. But, yeah, it was a pretty big shocker.

INSKEEP: When you talked with people back home – which I guess we should explain for people is both Kentucky and southern Ohio for you – did you have a lot of conversations with people about Donald Trump this year?

VANCE: I had some conversations with people about Donald Trump, absolutely (laughter).

INSKEEP: What kinds of things did you hear?

VANCE: Well, I think I heard a lot of the things that people have talked about. I heard a very large amount of frustration, a feeling that things weren’t going especially well, also that the elites didn’t care necessarily about a lot of the folks living in middle America. So I do think that feeling of alienation and frustration really drove a lot of people to make a political decision that obviously a lot of people don’t quite understand.

INSKEEP: You know, I’m thinking about the way that Trump in his speeches – his convention speech and perhaps almost every long speech you gave this year – was spectacularly dark about the state of America. He was described as being way too pessimistic if you looked at the economic numbers and anything else. But did his dark vision make more sense if you were in a small Ohio town that didn’t have a lot of jobs or had a meth problem or had any number of other cultural signs of trouble?

VANCE: Yeah. I think it’s important to ask, too pessimistic for who? And my sense, if you look at the polling, is that the most pessimistic of sub-demographic in our entire country is the white working class. And so, yes, he was very pessimistic. He was very critical of the direction of the country. But there was one group of people in the country for whom that message really made sense and rang true.

INSKEEP: So stay on the line because NPR’s Scott Detrow is with us from our studios in New York City. He’s been covering this election all along. And, Scott, I’m thinking about Appalachia…

SCOTT DETROW, BYLINE: Yeah.

INSKEEP: …Which Mr. Vance knows so well. Ohio is an Appalachian state, the southern part of the state. Pennsylvania – Appalachian State. And you have a lot of people who are culturally from there, their ancestors are from there in places like Michigan. Is there some connection between what J.D. Vance is saying and the results that you were seeing?

DETROW: I think the results do say that. I mean, no poll – no poll – showed that Donald Trump could win Pennsylvania or Wisconsin, but he did. You know, let’s just talk about Pennsylvania for a moment. There’s been a formula in Pennsylvania for decades. Democrats run up big margins in big cities and the suburbs. And the rest of the state, the rural part of the state, the Appalachian corner of the state – it goes Republican.

But the Democrats get the numbers they need from the cities. And the thing is that yesterday Democrats in Pennsylvania talking to me said they felt good. They felt like they had the numbers they needed from Philadelphia and its suburbs. They did not anticipate the swell of support that Donald Trump got from more rural parts of the state.

INSKEEP: J.D. Vance, I want to ask about another aspect about this we – of it. We heard from pollster, Margie Omero, earlier in the program about a fear that many people on the left have that this election is an endorsement of racism, of sexism because of remarks that Donald Trump made, because of the fact that he was endorsed by a newspaper that is connected with the KKK. He received all kinds of support from the so-called alt-right. There’s a fear that it’s an endorsement of all that. Do you feel that this election is an endorsement of that kind of thinking?

VANCE: I don’t think in a wholesale way. There is obviously an element of sort of racial anxiety that animates at least part of Trump’s appeal. But, you know, my sense is the gross majority of people who voted for Trump were not primarily motivated by anything like racial animus. And if we talk like it was, then I think we do ourselves a disservice because we sort of discredit some of the very real things that are going on in this area of the country.

INSKEEP: What is the racial anxiety? Because you said that you thought there was some.

VANCE: Well, you know, I think some folks – and again, I wouldn’t say that everyone or even most people feel like that. But I definitely think that there are some people who are motivated by a certain fear that other people are getting ahead of them in the proverbial line. And that’s some of what’s going on. But again, I think that a lot of folks are more motivated by the sense that things just aren’t going especially well and nobody really cares about them.

INSKEEP: Scott Detrow, let me ask if you have any information on it. I heard anecdotal stories. I can’t cite a number, but anecdotes of people who voted for Barack Obama and then were going to go ahead and vote for Donald Trump, people in the white working class. Did that happen?

DETROW: I think we still need to dig into the numbers to find how much of a shift there was for that. But I think we can say – especially if you look at cities like Milwaukee and Detroit, cities that Hillary Clinton needed to win last night – that she did not do as well in those cities as Barack Obama did in 2012 and 2008. And I think if you look at the gap between Obama’s vote margins there and what Hillary Clinton did, that could have been enough to swing both of those states. So one way or another, there was less enthusiasm from her from voting groups that typically go Democrat.

INSKEEP: J.D. Vance, does it make sense to you that some people in America might have voted for Obama and then voted for the guy who questioned his birth certificate?

VANCE: Yeah, that definitely makes sense to me. I mean, again, I don’t know how large the population is. But my suspicion is that there are a lot of people who were at least relatively attracted to the optimistic message of Obama. And over the last eight years they’ve really had their optimism shattered, and so were willing to go for somebody like Trump.

INSKEEP: Just because he was so different?

VANCE: Just because he was so different. Because he was offering a very harsh critique of sort of mainstream elite opinion. And he was offering it at a time when a lot of folks felt like the elites had failed in various ways.

INSKEEP: J.D. Vance, it’s always a pleasure to talk with you. Thank you very much, sir.

VANCE: Thank you.

INSKEEP: He’s the author of « Hillbilly Elegy. » And we are also hearing this morning from NPR’s Scott Detrow in New York, who’s covered the campaign all along. Scott, thanks to you.

DETROW: Thank you, Steve.

Guerre des mémoires: Du passé faisons table rase (Airbrushing history: It’s social racism, stupid !)

Debout ! les damnés de la terre ! Debout ! les forçats de la faim ! La raison tonne en son cratère, C’est l’éruption de la fin. Du passé faisons table rase, Foule esclave, debout ! debout ! Le monde va changer de base : Nous ne sommes rien, soyons tout ! C’est la lutte finale Groupons-nous, et demain, L’Internationale, Sera le genre humain. Eugène Pottier (1871)

And the Lord said unto Moses, Write this for a memorial in a book, and rehearse it in the ears of Joshua: for I will utterly put out the remembrance of Amalek from under heaven. Exodus 17: 14

To this day, The Bible is the only ancient source that attests the existence of the Amalekites, and no other archaeological or epigraphic evidence of their existence has been found. Wikipedia

Do not look upon him. He is a traitor to the Pharaoh. Let the name of Moses be stricken from every book and tablet… stricken from all pylons and obelisks, stricken from every monument of Egypt. Let the name of… Moses be unheard and unspoken, erased from the memory of men. King Seti (The ten commandments, Cecil B. De Mille, 1956)

Te rends-tu compte que le passé a été aboli jusqu’à hier ? S’il survit quelque part, c’est dans quelques objets auxquels n’est attaché aucun mot, comme ce bloc de verre sur la table. Déjà, nous ne savons littéralement presque rien de la Révolution et des années qui la précédèrent. Tous les documents ont été détruits ou falsifiés, tous les livres récrits, tous les tableaux repeints. Toutes les statues, les rues, les édifices, ont changé de nom, toutes les dates ont été modifiées. Et le processus continue tous les jours, à chaque minute. L’histoire s’est arrêtée. Rien n’existe qu’un présent éternel dans lequel le Parti a toujours raison. Je sais naturellement que le passé est falsifié, mais il me serait impossible de le prouver, alors même que j’ai personnellement procédé à la falsification. La chose faite, aucune preuve ne subsiste. La seule preuve est à l’intérieur de mon cerveau et je n’ai aucune certitude qu’un autre être humain quelconque partage mes souvenirs. De toute ma vie, il ne m’est arrivé qu’une seule fois de tenir la preuve réelle et concrète. Des années après. Winston (1984, George Orwell)

Penny Lane is in my ears and in my eyes There beneath the blue suburban skies… Paul McCartney (1967)

The night they drove old Dixie down And all the bells were ringin’ (…) Back with my wife in Tennessee And one day she said to me, « Virgil, quick! Come see! There goes Robert E. Lee. » Now I don’t mind, I’m chopping wood And I don’t care if the money’s no good Just take what you need and leave the rest But they should never have taken the very best. Robbie Robertson (reprise par Joan Baez)

Le monde moderne n’est pas mauvais : à certains égards, il est bien trop bon. Il est rempli de vertus féroces et gâchées. Lorsqu’un dispositif religieux est brisé (comme le fut le christianisme pendant la Réforme), ce ne sont pas seulement les vices qui sont libérés. Les vices sont en effet libérés, et ils errent de par le monde en faisant des ravages ; mais les vertus le sont aussi, et elles errent plus férocement encore en faisant des ravages plus terribles. Le monde moderne est saturé des vieilles vertus chrétiennes virant à la folie. G.K. Chesterton

L’inauguration majestueuse de l’ère « post-chrétienne » est une plaisanterie. Nous sommes dans un ultra-christianisme caricatural qui essaie d’échapper à l’orbite judéo-chrétienne en « radicalisant » le souci des victimes dans un sens antichrétien. (…) Jusqu’au nazisme, le judaïsme était la victime préférentielle de ce système de bouc émissaire. Le christianisme ne venait qu’en second lieu. Depuis l’Holocauste, en revanche, on n’ose plus s’en prendre au judaïsme, et le christianisme est promu au rang de bouc émissaire numéro un. René Girard

Nous sommes entrés dans un mouvement qui est de l’ordre du religieux. Entrés dans la mécanique du sacrilège : la victime, dans nos sociétés, est entourée de l’aura du sacré. Du coup, l’écriture de l’histoire, la recherche universitaire, se retrouvent soumises à l’appréciation du législateur et du juge comme, autrefois, à celle de la Sorbonne ecclésiastique. Françoise Chandernagor

Si on change les noms, c’est comme si il ne s’était rien passé: il n’y a plus de preuves alors les gens oublient. Eric Lynch (spécialiste de la traite de Liverpool)

Christiane Taubira déclare sans ambages qu’il ne faut pas trop évoquer la traite négrière arabo-musulmane pour que les « jeunes Arabes » « ne portent pas sur leur dos tout le poids de l’héritage des méfaits des Arabes. Ces logiques communautaires influent aussi sur le projet mémoriel La Route de l’esclave, décidé en 1993 par l’Unesco: Roger Botte, chercheur au Centre d’études africaines du CNRS, constate qu’il privilégie également la traite transatlantique du fait de «la pression des représentants du monde arabe et des Etats africains». Eric Conan (L’Express, 2006)

Je rêve de voir les Blancs, les Arabes et les Asiatiques s’organiser pour défendre leur identité propre. Nous combattons tous ces macaques qui trahissent leurs origines, de Stéphane Pocrain à Christiane Taubira en passant par Mouloud Aounit. […] Les nationalistes sont les seuls Blancs que j’aime. Ils ne veulent pas de nous et nous ne voulons pas d’eux. […] Parce qu’il y aurait eu la Shoah, je n’ai rien le droit de dire sur mon oppresseur sioniste ? Stellio Capochichi (alias Kemi Seba)

 Les sionistes sont les nazis du XXI^e siècle. […] Ce qui se passe aujourd’hui en Palestine est mille fois pire que la Shoah. […] Nous abattrons les sionistes, nous abattrons l’impérialisme. […] Que tous les sionistes sur Paris sachent qu’ils ne dormiront plus tranquilles. À mort Israël ! À mort les sionistes ! Stellio Capochichi (alias Kemi Seba)

Les institutions internationales comme la Banque Mondiale, le Fonds monétaire international (FMI) ou l’Organisation mondiale de la Santé (OMS) sont « tenus par les sionistes qui imposent à l’Afrique et à sa diaspora des conditions de vie tellement excrémentielles que le camp de concentration d’Auschwitz peut paraître comme un paradis sur terre ». Stellio Capochichi (alias Kemi Seba)

La notion de « roman » est pour le moins malheureuse. Toute histoire revêt la forme d’un récit, mais ce récit a la particularité de chercher à être vrai. La préoccupation qui ramène la question sur le devant de la scène me semble double. Elle naît d’abord d’une inquiétude devant le fait que l’enseignement scolaire de l’histoire «n’imprime plus». Les élèves l’oublient aussitôt qu’ils l’ont appris. D’où une certaine anxiété devant la perspective d’une société dont les jeunes générations n’auraient plus de lien avec le passé. Or, l’élément de légitimation historique de la conscience collective a en France une importance très grande. Car, depuis la Révolution française, le débat politique s’est organisé sur fond de bataille historique. Au-delà, il y a une inquiétude plus diffuse, qui n’a pas trouvé son langage, sur le fait que les adultes eux-mêmes qui connaissent le récit national sentent qu’il n’est plus adapté à la situation qu’ils vivent. Il y a une perte objective de pertinence du récit que la France s’est donné d’elle-même. (…) L’entrée dans la mondialisation change tous les repères de la vie des sociétés. Elle crée partout une crise identitaire en relativisant la manière dont les identités collectives se sont définies jusqu’à présent. Toutes les sociétés se définissaient du dedans en référence à un passé qui leur servait de généalogie. Le récit national, c’est celui d’un arbre généalogique. Avec la mondialisation, l’axe de toutes les sociétés a basculé de l’histoire vers la géographie. On se définit désormais par la place qu’on occupe dans le monde, avec dans un premier temps l’oubli que cette place est fonction du passé. Mais, dans un second temps, cet oubli fait place à une exigence de redéfinition en fonction de cette situation nouvelle. (…) La place que nous donnons à l’histoire est liée… à notre histoire! Et à la Révolution française, qui a créé un antagonisme radical des mémoires qui s’est manifesté à travers tout le XIXe siècle et a fait du récit de cette histoire chaude un enjeu politique énorme. Sous la IIIe République, on a commencé à rapprocher ces mémoires dans un récit unificateur. Côté républicain, quelqu’un comme Lavisse s’est employé à réintégrer le passé monarchique dans l’histoire de France. C’est avec la Première Guerre mondiale que les deux mémoires se sont tant bien que mal réconciliées autour de la sauvegarde du pays derrière le drapeau de l’union nationale. (…) Je pense qu’il y a une demande d’intelligibilité très forte dans un monde de plus en plus complexe. Il y a un nouveau besoin d’histoire. Parce que si le monde de la globalisation semble «plat» au premier abord, dans la mesure où tout le monde y fait et y cherche à peu près la même chose, autour de l’économie, il apparaît vite que son évolution est commandée par des héritages qui viennent de loin. L’histoire est un passage indispensable pour répondre au besoin vital de comprendre l’environnement dans lequel nous avons à nous orienter. Nous retrouvons, mais sur d’autres bases, une grosse banalité: l’histoire, c’est le détour par la connaissance du passé nécessaire pour rendre compte du présent et permettre de penser l’avenir. C’est en ce sens qu’elle est forcément politique, puisque l’avenir est l’objet de la discussion démocratique. (…) Je n’ai pas vu l’extraordinaire nouveauté que certains ont célébrée dans ce livre [de Patrick Boucheron Histoire mondiale de la France]. On ne peut pas comprendre l’histoire d’un pays hors de ses relations avec ses voisins proches et ses horizons lointains. L’idée n’est pas nouvelle, heureusement. Que je sache, ce n’est pas d’aujourd’hui que l’on parle de Christophe Colomb aux écoliers! La guerre de Sept Ans, c’est de l’histoire mondiale! L’idée que l’histoire aurait été racontée sur un mode hexagonal et qu’on l’ouvrirait désormais au grand large est complètement absurde. Les historiens ne font que ça depuis le début du XIXe siècle. Ils le font différemment selon les époques, c’est tout. L’histoire économique du grand commerce atlantique n’est pas la même chose que l’histoire diplomatique du concert des puissances. Quant à Boucheron, je pense qu’il faut distinguer son dessein idéologique de l’entreprise elle-même. C’est une collection de vignettes monographiques, certaines excellentes, d’autres médiocres, habillées par un projet politique, disons anti-identitaire, pour faire court. Mais le résultat est identitaire. Le paradoxe du succès de ce livre, c’est que les lecteurs y ont vu le moyen d’approfondir ou de renouveler leur connaissance de la France. Le but initial était peut-être de la dissoudre, mais l’effet est de la renforcer en tant qu’objet digne d’intérêt… Ça s’appelle la ruse de la raison. (…) Aucun historien n’est assez idiot pour donner une date de naissance au premier Français. Ils remontent une stratification temporelle. Il n’y a pas d’origines, il y a des antécédents. Cette fausse querelle relève d’une confusion sémantique. Il y a un moment constitutif et politique de fondation de la nation française qui se situe au moment de la Révolution. La France naît à partir du moment où les membres d’une certaine communauté politique commencent à se considérer comme des Français, et a fortiori quand ils se posent comme citoyens d’une nation souveraine. Mais cette nation n’est pas un fruit tombé du ciel. Elle repose sur le socle d’une expérience historique qui a permis cette émergence. Jusqu’où faut-il remonter? Qu’est-ce qui est le plus significatif dans les étapes de cette sédimentation? Ces questions sont destinées à demeurer indéfiniment ouvertes. (…) Je ne vois pas le gain qu’il y aurait à troquer une histoire légendaire qu’on a légitimement critiquée par une autre légende, celle du multiculturalisme. Où serait le progrès? Le problème, c’est l’ethnocentrisme du présent, qui cherche à plaquer nos réalités politiques contemporaines sur le passé. La connaissance historique commence avec la volonté de saisir une vérité du passé indépendante de notre façon de penser et de sentir au présent. (…) Il y a une fonction première de l’enseignement de l’histoire qui est fondamentale, c’est l’intelligence d’une chronologie. Maîtriser le lien de consécution des choses entre elles est essentiel au développement de l’intelligence enfantine. Mais, par exemple, au lieu de faire ce qui a été l’esprit généalogique de l’histoire: partir du passé et des ancêtres pour arriver au présent, on peut partir du présent pour remonter vers le passé. Le monde qui nous entoure sollicite en permanence le questionnement historique: les monuments, le patrimoine, les statues, les noms de rue devant lesquels nous passons tous les jours peuvent permettre de saisir le lien qui nous rattache au passé. On peut l’utiliser davantage dans la pédagogie, en partant du familier. C’est la raison pour laquelle il n’est pas absurde de commencer par les figures hexagonales avant d’aller plus loin. L’objet est de donner à comprendre le cadre dans lequel on va vivre. (…) Nous subissons un effet de balancier. La corporation historienne veut expier son propre passé, elle qui, il n’y a pas si longtemps, diffusait avec bonne conscience une histoire glorieuse. Il n’y a pas si longtemps que l’on enseignait aux enfants les grandeurs de l’empire colonial français. Aujourd’hui, on en souligne les horreurs. Le problème, c’est qu’à chaque fois, c’est une vision hémiplégique qui est proposée. De même, une partie de la profession qui a donné dans les sympathies marxistes met en avant le totalitarisme comme pour faire oublier certains errements passés. Je n’ai rien contre l’enseignement scolaire des totalitarismes, mais si c’est simplement pour dire que c’était très mal, sans expliquer les causes de leur émergence et essayer de comprendre comment ils ont pu advenir, c’est carrément contre-productif. Une histoire morale, déshistorisée, c’est de l’anti-histoire. Si on s’interdit de comprendre pourquoi le nazisme est advenu, on en fait une malédiction susceptible de ressurgir à tout moment, et non plus un fait historique. (…) D’abord, prenons les gens qui font ce genre de propositions pour ce qu’ils sont: un quarteron d’agitateurs médiatiques. Mais c’est un phénomène idéologique dont il faut bien mesurer le sens: la démarche prétend mettre le passé à la disposition du présent. Or, que vous l’aimiez ou non, Colbert fait partie de l’histoire de France. Nous dépendons d’un héritage qui s’impose à nous. Nous avons le droit d’y jeter un regard critique, et éventuellement d’en prendre le contre-pied dans nos choix du présent, mais nous n’avons pas le droit de l’effacer. L’idée que le passé est plastique et qu’il peut être remodelé à volonté est une idée totalitaire. (…) Les totalitarismes constituent un cas à part, car ils ont représenté une imposition violente d’une idéologie mensongère. Qu’on veuille se débarrasser des traces d’un mensonge organisé et tyrannique est légitime. Mais les injonctions contemporaines revêtent un autre sens: elles nous demandent de redéfinir un passé à l’image de nos convictions du présent. Nous autres Français avons une expérience historique en la matière: le vandalisme révolutionnaire, qui prétendait effacer les traces de la royauté, en saccageant par exemple les tombeaux de Saint-Denis. C’est le moment ou jamais de s’en souvenir pour ne pas retomber dans des errements du même genre. Marcel Gauchet

Incontestablement, Donald Trump n’a pas su élever son discours et s’adresser à toute l’Amérique. Parce qu’il n’est pas un politicien orthodoxe, il n’a pas perçu la dimension symbolique de ces événements et ce qu’elle exigeait de lui. En revanche, quand il pointe des violences du côté de l’extrême droite mais aussi de l’ alt-left, cela me semble un constat difficilement récusable. Il y a bien une alt-left, violente ou agressive, et en tout cas très intolérante. Cela va des Antifa à Black Lives Matter et d’autres groupuscules qui occupent, notamment dans la rue, le vide laissé par un Parti démocrate en pleine crise depuis la défaite de Hillary Clinton. Ceux-là tirent tous les débats qui agitent une société américaine très divisée vers un affrontement entre pro- et anti-Trump. Jean-Eric Branaa (Paris-II)

Le bon sens a été emporté par le vent dans ma ville natale de Memphis. Todd Starnes

Notre intention n’a jamais été de choquer. Nous évitons l’utilisation de symboles religieux sur nos emballages pour maintenir la neutralité dans toutes les religions. Si cela a été perçu différemment, nous présentons nos excuses aux personnes qui ont pu être choquées. Groupe Lidl

Des avocats de l’ACLU, l’union américaine pour les libertés civiles (..) ont aidé le suprémaciste blanc Jason Kessler à organiser une manifestation dans le centre de Charlottesville.(…) A la fin des années 1970, l’ACLU avait en effet pris la décision controversée de défendre un groupe néonazi qui voulait défiler à Skokie, une banlieue de Chicago où vivaient de nombreux rescapés des camps de concentration. (…) Dans le cas de Charlottesville, afin de limiter les violences potentielles, les autorités municipales voulaient que la marche pour le maintien de la statue du général sudiste Robert E. Lee ait lieu dans un grand parc un peu à l’écart. Le nationaliste blanc Jason Kessler a fait un procès à la ville et ce sont des avocats de l’ACLU qui l’ont gratuitement aidé à obtenir le droit de faire venir les manifestants – avec leurs torches, drapeaux confédérés, armes, croix grammées et slogans nazis – dans le centre ville. Du point de vue de l’ACLU, le gouvernement utilisait le prétexte de la menace de violence pour marginaliser des opinions peu populaires. En accord avec l’ACLU, le juge a statué qu’il n’était pas constitutionnel pour la ville de limiter le permis de manifester des nationalistes blancs juste parce que les autorités étaient en désaccord avec leurs idées. (…) Cette position demeure pourtant controversée. Après le meurtre de la manifestante Heather Heyer le 12 août, tuée par un sympathisant néonazi qui lui a foncé dessus en voiture, plusieurs membres de l’organisation ont démissionné (…) et des branches locales de l’ACLU ont critiqué la position de la direction. (…) Des porte-paroles de l’ACLU ont commencé par défendre leurs actions dans ce dossier, expliquant que la police n’avait pas bien fait son travail, et que l’ACLU n’était pas responsable du fait qu’en Virginie, il est légal de porter une arme visible. Mais quelques jours après dans une interview pour le Wall Street Journal, le directeur Anthony Romero a changé de cap (…) Pour le politologue Erik Bleich, il s’agit d’une décision importante dans la mesure où l’organisation accepte de prendre en compte le contexte actuel – le fait que les manifestants néonazis puissent être légalement armés dans certains Etats, ce qui n’était pas le cas dans les années 1970  – pour nuancer leur défense absolutiste de la liberté d’expression. (…) Dans Politico, deux défenseurs du premier amendement écrivent que le meilleur moyen de lutter contre les racistes n’est pas la censure et les lois qui pénalisent les discours de haine, comme en Europe, mais la confrontation d’idées dans le débat public. Ils notent que l’antisémitisme est plus prégnant en Europe  qu’aux Etats-Unis, malgré les lois européennes contre l’antisémitisme et le négationnisme.  Slate

George Washington possédait des esclaves (…). Est-ce qu’on va enlever ses statues? Et Thomas Jefferson? Est-ce qu’on va enlever ses statues? Il possédait beaucoup d’esclaves. Donald Trump

Personne ne naît en haïssant une autre personne à cause de la couleur de sa peau, ou de ses origines, ou de sa religion. Les gens doivent apprendre à haïr, et s’ils peuvent apprendre à haïr, ils peuvent apprendre à aimer car l’amour jaillit plus naturellement du cœur humain que son opposé. Nelson Mandela (retweeté par Barack Hussein Obama, 13.08. 2017)

J’ai regardé de très près, de beaucoup plus près que la plupart des gens. Vous aviez un groupe d’un côté qui était agressif. Et vous aviez un groupe de l’autre côté qui était aussi très violent. Personne ne veut le dire. Que dire de l’“alt-left” qui a attaqué l’“alt-right” comme vous dites ? N’ont-ils pas une part de responsabilité ? Ont-ils un problème ? Je pense que oui. J’ai condamné les néonazis. Mais tous les gens qui étaient là-bas n’étaient pas des néonazis ou des suprémacistes blancs, tant s’en faut. Il y avait des gens très bien des deux côtés. Donald Trump (16.08.2017)

Alors que nos prières vont à Charlottesville, nous nous remémorons ces vérités fondamentales couchées dans la Déclaration d’indépendance par le plus éminent des citoyens de cette ville : ‘tous les hommes sont créés égaux; ils sont dotés par le Créateur de certains droits inaliénables. » Nous savons que ces vérités sont éternelles parce que nous sommes les témoins de la décence et de la grandeur de notre pays. George H. Bush et George W. Bush (16.08.2017)

Aux côtés de ceux qui combattent le racisme et la xénophobie. Notre combat commun, hier comme aujourd’hui. #Charlottesville. Emmanuel Macron (17.08.2017)

Je pense que le problème des suprématistes blancs… il était évident qu’il s’agissait d’une attaque terroriste, a déclaré Morgana Wood. Et je pense que le président Donald Trump aurait dû faire une déclaration plus tôt reconnaissant ce fait, et faire en sorte que tous les Américains se sentent en sécurité dans leur pays, ce qui est le problème numéro un à l’heure actuelle. Margana Wood (Miss Texas, 11.09.2017)

Nelson (…) was what you would now call, without hesitation, a white supremacist. While many around him were denouncing slavery, Nelson was vigorously defending it. Britain’s best known naval hero – so idealised that after his death in 1805 he was compared to no less than “the God who made him” – used his seat in the House of Lords and his position of huge influence to perpetuate the tyranny, serial rape and exploitation organised by West Indian planters, some of whom he counted among his closest friends. It is figures like Nelson who immediately spring to mind when I hear the latest news of confederate statues being pulled down in the US. These memorials – more than 700 of which still stand in states including Virginia, Georgia and Texas – have always been the subject of offence and trauma for many African Americans, who rightly see them as glorifying the slavery and then segregation of their not so distant past. But when these statues begin to fulfil their intended purpose of energising white supremacist groups, the issue periodically attracts more mainstream interest. The reaction in Britain has been, as in the rest of the world, almost entirely condemnatory of neo-Nazis in the US and of its president for failing to denounce them. But when it comes to our own statues, things get a little awkward. The colonial and pro-slavery titans of British history are still memorialised: despite student protests, Oxford University’s statue of imperialist Cecil Rhodes has not been taken down; and Bristol still celebrates its notorious slaver Edward Colston. (…)  Britain has committed unquantifiable acts of cultural terrorism – tearing down statues and palaces, and erasing the historical memory of other great civilisations during an imperial era whose supposed greatness we are now, so ironically, very precious about preserving intact. And we knew what we were doing at the time. One detail that has always struck me is how, when the British destroyed the centuries-old Summer Palace in Beijing in 1860 and gave a little dog they’d stolen as a gift to Queen Victoria, she humorously named it “Looty”. This is one of the long list of things we are content to forget while sucking on the opium of “historical integrity” we claim our colonial statues represent. We have “moved on” from this era no more than the US has from its slavery and segregationist past. The difference is that America is now in the midst of frenzied debate on what to do about it, whereas Britain – in our inertia, arrogance and intellectual laziness – is not. The statues that remain are not being “put in their historical context”, as is often claimed. Take Nelson’s column. Yes, it does include the figure of a black sailor, cast in bronze in the bas-relief. He was probably one of the thousands of slaves promised freedom if they fought for the British military, only to be later left destitute, begging and homeless, on London’s streets when the war was over. But nothing about this “context” is accessible to the people who crane their necks in awe of Nelson. The black slaves whose brutalisation made Britain the global power it then was remain invisible, erased and unseen. Afua Hirsch

Avant que Libération ne publie son dossier du 23 août, la plupart des commentateurs français se sont contentés de dénoncer, à juste titre, l’attentat à Charlottesville, la statue du général Lee, les adeptes de la white supremacy, l’attitude du président Trump et le racisme américain en général (qui se maintient à un niveau très élevé, il est vrai), sans jamais voir la poutre dans l’œil de la France. Que dire de toutes ces rues qui portent des noms de négriers comme Balguerie et Gradis à Bordeaux (ville d’Alain Juppé), Grou et Leroy à Nantes (ville de Jean-Marc Ayrault), Masurier et Lecouvreur au Havre (ville d’Edouard Philippe) ? La plupart des maires des villes concernées affirment qu’il ne faut pas changer ces noms, car il convient, paraît-il, de conserver la trace des crimes commis. Mais les noms de rue ne servent pas à garder la mémoire des criminels, ils servent en général à garder la mémoire des héros et à les célébrer. C’est pour cela qu’il n’y a pas de rue Pétain en France. D’autres proposent que l’on conserve ces noms de rues, avec une petite explication. Mais même avec une mention expliquant sa vie, son œuvre, une «rue Pierre Laval, collabo» ne serait guère plus acceptable. C’est pour cela qu’il n’y en a pas non plus. Ce n’est donc pas une solution. Et si l’on veut vraiment transmettre la mémoire, pourquoi ne pas proposer plutôt des rues au nom de Toussaint Louverture, le héros haïtien, ou au nom de Champagney, ce village français dont les habitants prirent fait et cause pour les victimes de l’esclavage, pendant la Révolution ? Il faudrait donc se poser cette question : lequel des deux pays est le plus problématique, celui où il y a un conflit autour de la statue d’un général esclavagiste, ou celui où il y a à l’Assemblée nationale une statue de Colbert, une salle Colbert, une aile Colbert au ministère de l’Economie, des lycées Colbert (qui prétendent enseigner les valeurs républicaines), des dizaines de rues ou d’avenues Colbert, sans qu’il y ait le moindre conflit, la moindre gêne, le moindre embarras ? Et pourtant, Colbert est l’auteur du Code noir, celui qui a organisé en France ce crime contre l’humanité, et aussi le fondateur de la Compagnie des Indes occidentales, de sinistre mémoire. N’est-il pas choquant que personne (ou presque) ne soit choqué ? (…) Nous nous adressons ici aux Français qui, par des contorsions indignes, cherchent encore à justifier l’injustifiable : vos héros sont nos bourreaux. Dès lors, comment pourrons-nous vivre ensemble ? Il y a de nombreux Français, blancs ou noirs, qui ont lutté contre l’esclavage : pourquoi ne pas privilégier ceux-là ? N’y a-t-il pas un lien entre le piédestal où l’on met les esclavagistes et le mépris social que subissent les descendants d’esclaves ? Est-il normal que les territoires d’outre-mer, où l’esclavage a été perpétré, soient encore en 2017 les plus pauvres du pays tout entier ? Est-il normal qu’ils soient dominés, encore aujourd’hui, par les descendants des esclavagistes, qui ont été indemnisés en outre par la République après l’abolition ? Peut-on être à la fois la patrie des droits de l’homme, et la patrie des droits des esclavagistes ? Il y a quelques jours, Emmanuel Macron a affirmé qu’il était «aux côtés de ceux qui combattent le racisme et la xénophobie» à Charlottesville. Nous demandons à Emmanuel Macron d’être aussi aux côtés de ceux qui combattent le racisme et la xénophobie en France et de lancer une réflexion nationale sur la nécessité de remplacer ces noms et statues de la honte par des figures de personnalités noires, blanches ou autres ayant lutté contre l’esclavage et contre le racisme. (…) On ne peut pas être dans l’indignation face à Charlottesville et dans l’indifférence par rapport à la France par rapport à toutes statues, toutes ces rues, qui défigurent nos villes. Il faut décoloniser l’espace, il faut décoloniser les esprits, c’est aussi cela la réparation à laquelle nous appelons le Président. Louis-Georges Tin (Conseil représentatif des associations noires)

Washington possédait des esclaves, et ce dès l’âge de 11 ans, lorsqu’il hérita de son père. (…) A titre personnel, Washington acheta régulièrement des esclaves et en comptait 123 à la fin de son existence à Mount Vernon sur un total de 317, les autres étant propriété de sa femme Martha. Les témoignages divergent sur sa façon de les traiter. De même, sa volonté de les émanciper est très discutée. D’une part, Washington demanda dans son testament que ses esclaves soient libérés après la mort de Martha. D’autre part, il contournait la loi de Pennsylvanie qui déclarait les esclaves libres s’ils passaient plus de six mois avec leur propriétaire : le «grand George» leur fit régulièrement traverser les frontières de cet état afin de remettre les compteurs à zéro… De même, il rechercha un de ses anciens esclaves pour le rendre à son épouse, laquelle voulait l’offrir comme cadeau de mariage. Dans ses fonctions de président, George Washington ne fit rien pour rompre avec le système négrier. En 1793, il signa le Fugitive Act Slave qui autorisait la capture dans n’importe quel état d’un esclave en fuite. A la même époque, il apporta un soutien militaire à la France qui luttait à Saint-Domingue (actuelle Haïti) contre une révolte d’esclaves. Washington ne condamnait l’esclavage qu’en privé, comme auprès du marquis de La Fayette qui l’avait aidé pendant la guerre d’indépendance. (…) Après lui, plusieurs présidents américains furent propriétaires d’esclaves, jusqu’à Ulysses Grant (à la Maison Blanche de 1869 à 1877), dont Thomas Jefferson (1801-1809), qui totalisait 600 sujets et dénonça le «trafic international» sans interdire cette institution aux Etats-Unis. En outre, il fut établi en 1998 que Jefferson était le père de plusieurs enfants de l’une de ses esclaves, Sally Hemings. Lui qui n’hésitait pas à faire fouetter ses esclaves se plaignait de leur «puanteur» et refusait de les émanciper, par crainte d’un «métissage qui ouvrirait la voie à la dégénérescence» (…). Sur les dix-huit premiers présidents de l’histoire de ce pays, treize furent patrons d’esclaves dont huit pendant l’exercice de leurs fonctions. Libération

Débaptiser l’un des rares noms de lieu dédiés à la mémoire de Robespierre dans les grandes villes françaises serait, à notre sens, un signal politique et mémoriel antirépublicain. Quoi qu’on puisse penser de l’action politique de Robespierre (et les interprétations divergentes sont nombreuses, comme nous avons montré dans notre ouvrage (1)), il n’en reste pas moins qu’il a été l’inventeur de la devise « Liberté Égalité Fraternité » qui figure au fronton des édifices publics, qu’il a été (avec bien d’autres évidemment) un combattant infatigable de la démocratie, qu’il a défendu la citoyenneté des pauvres, des juifs, des « hommes de couleur » (comme on disait alors) dans les colonies et qu’il n’a cessé d’être la cible des attaques des royalistes, des anti-républicains et des réactionnaires de toutes sortes depuis deux siècles. Les accusations de « dictature » ou de responsabilité personnelle dans ce que l’on a appelé après sa mort la « Terreur » ont été — depuis fort longtemps — ruinées par la critique historique. Robespierre n’a jamais été le dictateur sanglant et paranoïaque de l’imagerie contre-révolutionnaire, il a été, en revanche, l’un des partisans les plus résolus de la déclaration des droits de l’homme et du citoyen et de la Première république, y compris dans le contexte difficile d’une guerre civile et extérieure. Ajoutons qu’il a été, dès 1790-1791, le porte-parole des patriotes marseillais en butte aux attaques des autorités aristocratiques locales (…) Et vous voudriez que ce défenseur de la Révolution des droits de l’homme et du citoyen, mais aussi de la ville de Marseille, disparaisse des noms de lieux et de places de la ville qui lui a décerné les plus grands éloges ? (…) La Révolution française ne doit pas disparaître de la mémoire marseillaise, nationale et universelle. Tribune d’historiens (2014)

La dénomination attribuée à une voie ou un édifice public doit être conforme à l’intérêt public local. À ce titre, l’attribution d’un nom à un espace public ne doit être ni de nature à provoquer des troubles à l’ordre public, ni à heurter la sensibilité des personnes, ni à porter atteinte à l’image de la ville ou du quartier concerné. Ministère de l’Intérieur français (août 2016)

Plutôt me couper le bras droit que de travailler ou exiger jamais le scrutin pour le nègre et non la femme. Susan B. Anthony

Knowledge of birth control is essentially moral. Its general, though prudent, practice must lead to a higher individuality and ultimately to a cleaner race. Birth control is nothing more or less than the facilitation of the process of weeding out the unfit, of preventing the birth of defectives or of those who will become defective. Margaret Sanger

Toutes les misères de ce monde sont imputables au fait que l’on permet aux irresponsables ignorants, illettrés et pauvres de se reproduire sans que nous ayons la moindre maîtrise sur leur fécondité. Margaret Sanger

Margaret Higgins Sanger (14 septembre 1879 – 6 septembre 1966) est une militante anarchiste américaine qui lutta pour la contraception et la liberté d’expression, ce qui l’amena à fonder l’American Birth Control League (ligue pour le contrôle des naissances), qui devient le planning familial américain sous le nom de Planned Parenthood. Initialement reçues avec beaucoup de résistances, ses idées qu’une femme puisse décider de quand et comment elle serait enceinte, gagnèrent peu à peu de l’audience, tant dans le public qu’auprès des tribunaux. Margaret Sanger a été un élément fondateur dans l’accès à la contraception et au contrôle des naissances. Sa défense de l’eugénisme négatif en fait une personnalité controversée. (…) Après un an d’exil en Europe pour échapper aux poursuites judiciaires, elle fonde en 1921 l’American Birth Control League (ligue américaine pour le contrôle des naissances), qui deviendra en 1942 le planning familial. Cependant les bases idéologiques de Margaret Sanger ont souvent été sévèrement critiquées. Elle défend une forme d’eugénisme, qui selon elle « améliorerait l’humanité » en évitant la reproduction des êtres « indésirables ». Dans cette optique elle projette d’améliorer les conditions de vie des Afro-Américains en favorisant leur contraception, ce qui n’a pas été accepté par tous les noirs américains. Certains militants noirs, particulièrement pendant les années 1970, ont considéré le planning familial comme une tentative de génocide à leur encontre. Cependant Martin Luther King a salué la forme de son action car elle avait établi une tradition de lutte politique non-violente, qu’il utilisera à son tour. En 1925, lors du VI^e congrès du « birth control », elle invite l’anthropologue eugéniste français Georges Vacher de Lapouge. En 1926, l’une de ses nombreuses conférences sur le contrôle des naissances s’adresse aux membres de l’association Women of the Ku Klux Klan à Silver Lake, dans le New Jersey. Elle propose la stérilisation ou l’internement des groupes « dysgéniques » et reçoit à son domicile en septembre 1930 le conseiller d’Adolf Hitler en matière raciale, Eugen Fischer. Pourtant elle déclarera en 1940 « donner [s]on argent, [s]on nom et [s]on influence auprès d’écrivains ou d’autres pour combattre la montée au pouvoir d’Hitler en Allemagne» car elle condamne la politique antisémite de l’Allemagne Nazie et écrit en 1933 : « Toutes les nouvelles d’Allemagne sont tristes et horribles, et pour moi plus dangereuses qu’aucune guerre ayant lieu où que ce soit, car il y a tant de gens bons qui applaudissent ces atrocités et disent que c’est bien. L’antagonisme soudain en Allemagne contre les juifs et la haine profonde contre eux se répand de manière cachée ici et est plus dangereuse que la politique agressive du Japon en Mandchourie… ». Hitler de son côté fait brûler les livres de Margaret Sanger au côté de ceux de Freud. Wikipedia

Votre problème n’est pas du tout un cas rare. Toutefois, il nécessite une attention particulière. Le type de sentiment que vous avez envers les garçons n’est probablement pas une tendance innée, mais quelque chose qui a été acquis culturellement. Pour ce faire, je suggère que vous voyez un bon psychiatre qui peut vous aider à mettre en éveil votre conscience devant toutes ces expériences et les circonstances qui conduisent à cette attitude. Martin Luther King (réponse à un jeune homosexuel, Ebony, 1958)

In the olden days, demonstrators decked out in black, with masks and clubs, would have been deemed sinister by liberals. Now are they the necessary shock troops whose staged violence brings political dividends? Antifa’s dilemma is that its so-called good people wearing black masks can find almost no bad people in white masks to club, so they smash reporters, the disabled, and onlookers alike for sport — revealing that, at base, they perversely enjoy violence for violence’s sake. As the cowardly Klan taught us in the 1920s and 1960s: Put on a mask with a hundred like others, and even the most craven wimp believes he’s now a psychopathic thug. Victor Davis Hanson

How about progressive icon Joan Baez? Should the Sixties folksinger seek forgiveness from us for reviving her career in the early 1970s with the big money-making hit “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down”— her version of The Band’s sympathetic ode to the tragedy of a defeated Confederacy, written over a century after the Civil War. (“Back with my wife in Tennessee / When one day she called to me / Said, “Virgil, quick, come see / There goes the Robert E. Lee!”) If a monument is to be wiped away, then surely a popular song must go, too Are there gradations of moral ambiguity? Or do Middlebury and Berkeley students or antifa rioters in their infinite wisdom have a monopoly on calibrating virtue and defining it as 100 percent bad or good? Who of the present gets to decide whom of the past we must erase — and where does the cleansing of memory stop? Defacing Mt. Rushmore of its slave owners? Renaming the double-whammy Washington and Lee University? Are we to erase mention of the heavens for their August 21 eclipse that unfairly bypassed most of the nation’s black population — as the recent issue of Atlantic magazine is now lamenting? Revolutions are not always sober and judicious. We might agree that the public sphere is no place for honorific commemoration of Roger B. Taney, the author of the Dred Scott decision. But statue removal will not be limited to the likes of Roger B. Taneys when empowered activists can cite chapter and verse the racist things once uttered by Abraham Lincoln, whose bust was just disfigured in Chicago — and when the statue-destroyers feel that they gain power daily because they are morally superior. The logical trajectory of tearing down the statue of a Confederate soldier will soon lead to the renaming of Yale, the erasing of Washington and Jefferson from our currency, and the de-Trotskyization of every mention of Planned Parenthood’s iconic Margaret Singer, the eugenicist whose racist views on abortion anticipated those of current liberal Supreme Court justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. (Ginsburg said, “Frankly I had thought that at the time Roe was decided, there was concern about population growth and particularly growth in populations that we don’t want to have too many of.”) In my own town, there used to be a small classical fountain dedicated by the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union. It was long ago torn down. (Who wishes to recall the forces that led to Prohibition?) In its place now sits an honorific statue to the clawed, half-human Aztec deity Coatlicue, the hungry earth-mother goddess. Coatlicue was quite a bloodthirsty creation, to whom thousands of living captives were sacrificed. The goddess was often portrayed wrapped in a cloak of skin and wearing a neckless of human hearts, hands, and skulls. Our town’s new epigraph atop Coatlicue is Viva la Raza — “Long live the Race.” Should there be demonstrations to yank down such a racialist and Franco-ist hurrah? Or are the supposed victims of white privilege themselves exempt from the very chauvinism that they sometimes allege in others? Is there a progressive rationale that exempts Coatlicue and its racist plaque, whose sloganeering channels the raza/razza mantras of Fascist Spain and Mussolini’s Italy? Are we to have a perpetual war of the statues ? There is a need for an abolition of memory in the case of Hitler or Stalin, or here in America perhaps even of a Nathan Bedford Forrest. But when we wipe away history at a whim (why in 2017 and not, say, in 2015 or 2008?), we’d better make sure that our targets are uniquely and melodramatically evil rather than tragically misguided. And before we get out our ropes and sandblasters, we should be certain that we are clearly the moral superiors of those we condemn to oblivion. Be careful, 21st-century man. Far more hypercritical generations to come may find our own present moral certitude — late-term and genetically driven abortion, the rise of artificial intelligence in place of human decision-making, the harvesting and selling of aborted fetal organs, ethnic and tribal chauvinism, euthanasia, racially segregated dorms and “safe spaces” — as immoral as we find the sins of our own predecessors. Victor Davis Hanson

What are the proper rules of exemption for progressives when waging war against the dead? Do they tally up the dead’s good and bad behaviors to see if someone makes the 51 percent “good progressive” cutoff that exempts him? Or do some reactionary sins cancel out all the progressive good — at least in the eyes of self-styled moral superiors to those hapless Neanderthals who came before us? Are the supposedly oppressed exempt from charges of oppression? (…) And will toppling statues and erasing names only cease when modern progressives are forced to blot out the memories of racist progressive heroes ? Victor Davis Hanson

From my vantage point, the idea that the way to deal with history is to destroy any relics that remind you of something you don’t like, is highly alarming. It’s bad enough when some insane bunch of fanatics has this idea. When it happens in a supposedly rational, knowledge-based society, it sets a terrible precedent. And by the way it doesn’t even accomplish its aim—quite often, a destroyed monument thereby gains in power and resonance. There are much better ways to process the past. The first problem with projects of cultural cleansing is that they must always, inevitably, be subjective. (…) But even if everyone agrees that Object X should go, later generations may find that decision appalling, a loss to culture, to art, to science, to knowledge and to the historic integrity of the urban landscape. To the Taliban, the ancient Buddhas of Bamiyan were impious remnants of a pre-Islamic age, idols that deserved to be blown up. Now these irreplaceable, priceless and beautiful statues are gone, lost to the world. ISIS dynamited Palmyra (“a heathen site”) and many other beautiful and valuable places in Syria and Iraq, including the tombs of the Biblical prophets Jonah and Daniel and countless other historic treasures. (…) The second problem with this method is that it doesn’t work. Object X will just become one more martyr. (…) can we seriously expect that removing Robert E. Lee from perches in parks will contribute to the elimination of racism in America? Taking a statue away is not a social reform action, it is a pseudo-action to make people feel they are accomplishing something when in fact they are not. Another thing to consider, and perhaps be healthily humbled by, is the temporal nature of our societies, their accomplishments, their battles. Tour the archaeological ruins of any formerly great civilization, and you will invariably encounter inscriptions that have been chiseled away, faces that have been obliterated, heads that have been struck off the rumps of their statues. Someone overthrows or assassinates a predecessor and orders his or her name and image removed. Often, the relevant dynasties have been lost to historic memory, and no one has any clue what their bitterly monumental conflicts were about, who won, who lost, who got slaughtered, what they believed in. What could have remained is their story, and any lessons later humans might draw from it. Erase your story and you erase yourself. Cheryl Benard

Cette polémique est l’illustration de la vague d’ignorance qui submerge notre société au nom de la repentance et du politiquement correct.  (…) l’histoire de Colbert et du Code noir doit avant tout être replacée dans le contexte de l’époque, le XVIIe siècle. (…) Si on ne comprend pas l’histoire dans sa globalité et sa complexité, on ne comprend rien à rien. (…) Il faudra alors effacer toute trace de Jules Ferry à cause de son éloge de la mission civilisatrice de la colonisation, et faire de même pour Gambetta, Jean Jaurès, et même Léon Blum. (…) Plutôt que de débaptiser, il faut instruire et éduquer. Dimitri Casali (historien et essayiste)

Les noms de rue ne sont pas de l’histoire mais de la mémoire. On dénomme une rue pour honorer quelqu’un, pas simplement pour rappeler qu’il a existé.Quand Ian Kershaw écrit une biographie de Hitler, tout le monde applaudit. Mais personne n’accepterait qu’on baptise une voie publique ‘rue Adolf Hitler’ ! (…) Quand une dénomination apparaît comme une agression contre une population, il paraît justifié de changer le nom. Gardons à l’esprit que la mémoire honore, quand l’histoire analyse. Philippe Darriulat (historien spécialiste du sentiment national)

Il faut cesser avec cet héritage d’instrumentalisation politique des lieux, cette façon de réécrire l’histoire n’enseigne absolument rien. Nous héritons d’une période où la traite des Noirs était légale, or les consciences ont évolué aujourd’hui. Il s’agit de nous interroger à partir des lieux qui ont été à l’origine de l’esclavage : les ports. Karfa Diallo (Mémoire & Partages)

Le débat né aux Etats-Unis s’est importé en France : des associations de mémoire réclament que l’on retire les statues et débaptise les rues honorant des personnages historiques controversés, notamment ceux qui ont été impliqués dans l’esclavage. Mais où arrêter le tri dans l’histoire ? (…)  dans une tribune pour Libération, le président du Conseil représentatif des associations noires (Cran), Louis-Georges Tin, s’insurge contre d’autres statues. Dans sa ligne de mire, l’ancien ministre de Louis XIV, Colbert (…) Car Colbert est aussi l’auteur du Code noir qui a, souligne l’universitaire, « organisé en France ce crime contre l’humanité » qu’était l’esclavage. Le président du Cran réclame donc qu’on déboulonne immédiatement la statue de Colbert et qu’on débaptise les rues à son nom, en vertu d’une « décolonisation de l’espace et des esprits ». Et de s’interroger : « N’y a-t-il pas un lien entre le piédestal où l’on met les esclavagistes et le mépris social que subissent les descendants d’esclaves ? ». (…) Ce débat force pourtant à une observation : les noms donnés aux lieux publics sont chargés de connotations politiques. Qui se promène dans les villes de la « banlieue rouge », en bordure de Paris, se verra rapidement rappeler leur histoire communiste : on peut mentionner l’avenue Lénine de Saint-Denis ou la place Maurice-Thorez de Villejuif, honorant le très stalinien secrétaire général historique du PCF. A l’autre extrémité de l’échiquier politique, on envoie aussi des messages : le toujours provocateur maire de Béziers Robert Ménard a débaptisé il y a deux ans la rue du 19-Mars-1962. Ce nom avait pour lui le tort de célébrer les accords d’Evian ayant mis fin à la guerre d’Algérie. A la place, Robert Ménard a renommé la rue… Hélie Denoix de Saint-Marc, un ancien parachutiste, farouche partisan de l’Algérie française. L’odonymie – l’art de nommer des voies de communication – reflète donc bien les luttes pour réécrire l’histoire… généralement au profit des vainqueurs. Ainsi, les figures de la IIIe République, Jules Ferry, Léon Gambetta, Jean Jaurès ou Georges Clemenceau sont dans tous les index de plans de villes. Et comme le souligne Jean-Paul Brighelli dans Causeur, « il y a très, très peu de rues ou places Robespierre en France, alors que des rues Danton, l’organisateur des massacres de septembre, on ne sait plus qu’en faire ». (…) le petit parc situé au pied du Sacré-Cœur. En 1927, (…) avait initialement été nommé « square Willette », en l’honneur du dessinateur de presse polémiste Adolphe Willette. A l’époque, cette dénomination était déjà un acte politique : il s’agissait de se « venger » de l’édification de la basilique du Sacré-Cœur, considérée comme un symbole réactionnaire, en baptisant le square du nom d’un artiste provocateur et anticlérical. En 2004, la mairie du 18^e est revenue sur le square Adolphe Willette, pour d’autres raisons… Une affiche de candidature d’Adolphe Willette aux législatives de 1889 venait d’être exhumée : il s’y proclamait « candidat antisémite ». « Quand le caractère violemment antisémite de l’affiche a été mis en évidence, il a été décidé de changer le nom du square »(…) . L’espace s’appelle aujourd’hui « square Louise-Michel ». Le problème est que dans certaines villes, des pans entiers de l’architecture urbaine sont susceptibles d’être considérés comme une « agression contre une population ». Les villes de Nantes et Bordeaux, par exemple, sont d’anciens ports qui furent les foyers de la traite des esclaves. Et portent à chaque coin de rue la marque de ce passé négrier. Dans la cité des Ducs, les rues Montauduine, Kervégan et Guillaume Grou, entre autres, rendent « hommage » à des armateurs, négociants, politiques, pleinement investis dans la traite des esclaves noirs. A Bordeaux, plusieurs dizaines de voies publiques sont dans le même cas. Que faire ? Tout effacer, tout rebaptiser ? (…) Mémoire & Partages, une association bordelaise qui milite pour une « éducation populaire » autour du passé colonial de la ville (…) préconise d’installer des plaques pédagogiques en-dessous des noms de chaque rue, afin de retracer en quelques phrases les principaux hauts (et bas) faits des personnages ayant donné leur nom aux lieux publics. Marianne

Dans la suite des événements de Charlottesville, Bill de Blasio, le maire de New York, a envisagé publiquement de déboulonner la statue de Christophe Colomb, parce qu’elle serait offensante pour les Amérindiens. A l’en croire, cette statue serait susceptible de susciter la haine, comme la plupart des symboles associés à l’expansion européenne et à la colonisation des Amériques, apparemment. (…) En Grande-Bretagne, on en a trouvé pour proposer d’abattre la statue de Nelson, à qui on reproche d’avoir défendu l’esclavage. (…) Certains n’y verront qu’une nouvelle manifestation du péché d’anachronisme, qui pousse à abolir l’histoire dans un présentisme un peu sot, comme si les époques antérieures devaient être condamnées et leurs traces effacées de l’espace public. Mais il y a manifestement autre chose qu’une autre manifestation d’inculture dans cette furie épuratrice qui excite les foules, comme si elles étaient appelées à une mission vengeresse. Comment expliquer cette soudaine rage qui pousse une certaine gauche, au nom de la décolonisation intérieure des États occidentaux, à vouloir éradiquer la mémoire, comme si du passé, il fallait enfin faire table rase? Nous sommes devant une poussée de fièvre épuratrice particulièrement violente, qui témoigne de la puissance du réflexe pénitentiel inscrit dans la culture politique occidentale contemporaine. On peut comprendre que dans un élan révolutionnaire, quand d’un régime, on passe à un autre, une foule enragée s’en prenne au statuaire du pouvoir. Il arrive qu’on fracasse des idoles pour marquer la déchéance d’un demi-dieu auquel on ne croit plus. Lors de la chute du communisme, l’euphorie des foules les poussa à jeter par terre les statues et autres monuments qui représentaient une tyrannie dont elles se délivraient. Il fallait faire tomber les monuments à la gloire de Lénine pour marquer la chute du communisme. (…) Mais sommes-nous dans une situation semblable? Le cas du sud des États-Unis, à l’origine de la présente tornade idéologique, est assumérment singulier. La mémoire qui y est associée ne s’est pas toujours définie exclusivement à partir de la question raciale, ce qui ne veut pas dire que celle-ci ne soit pas centrale et que la mouvance suprémaciste blanche ne cherche pas à exercer sur cet héritage un monopole. On ne saurait toutefois l’y réduire. Surtout, des Américains raisonnables et nullement racistes sont choqués que des militants d’extrême-gauche détruisent des statues en dehors de toute légalité. Ils acceptent difficilement que toute mention de l’héritage du sud soit assimilé au racisme. Comment ces Américains toléreraient-ils, par exemple, qu’on censure un film comme «Autant en emporte le vent», comme cela vient d’arriver dans un cinéma de Memphis, qui l’a déprogrammé pour des raisons idéologiques? (…) la manie pénitentielle frappe partout en Occident. Elle pousse à démanteler des statues, à réécrire les manuels scolaires, à prescrire certaines commémorations pénitentielles, à multiplier les excuses envers telle communauté, à pendre symboliquement certains héros des temps jadis désormais présentés à la manière d’abominables salauds et à censurer les représentations du passé qui n’entrent pas dans la représentation caricaturale qu’on s’en fait aujourd’hui. (…) Tôt ou tard, on s’en prendra aux statues du général de Gaulle, de Churchill, de Roosevelt et de bien d’autres: d’une certaine manière, Napoléon a déjà été victime d’une telle entreprise lorsqu’on a refusé en 2005 de commémorer la victoire d’Austerlitz. Il ne s’agira plus seulement de réduire en miettes la statue de tel ou tel général qui a servi la cause de l’esclavagisme: tous finiront par y passer d’une manière ou d’une autre, comme si nous assistions à une nazification rétrospective du passé occidental, désormais personnifié par un homme blanc hétérosexuel auquel il faudrait arracher tous ses privilèges. À son endroit, il est permis, et même encouragé, d’être haineux. L’Europe ne sait plus quoi faire de son passé colonial, que plusieurs sont tentés d’assimiler à un crime contre l’humanité. Ses procureurs croient n’accuser que leurs pères, alors qu’ils excitent la tentation victimaire de certaines populations immigrées qui n’hésitent pas ensuite à expliquer leur difficile intégration dans la civilisation européenne par le système postcolonial qui y prédominerait. L’histoire de l’Europe serait carcérale et mènerait directement au système concentrationnaire. Dans le cadre américain, c’est l’arrivée même des Européens qu’il faudrait désormais réduire à une invasion brutale, que certains n’hésitent pas à qualifier d’entreprise génocidaire. On invite les jeunes Américains, les jeunes Canadiens et les jeunes Québécois à se croire héritiers d’une histoire odieuse qu’ils doivent répudier de manière ostentatoire. On les éduque à la haine de leur propre civilisation. Nous sommes devant une manifestation de fanatisme idéologique s’alimentant à l’imaginaire du multiculturalisme le plus radical, qui prétend démystifier la société occidentale et révéler les nombreuses oppressions sur lesquelles elle se serait construite. (…) On y verra une illustration de la racialisation des rapports sociaux dans une société qui se tribalise au rythme où elle se dénationalise. Chacun s’enferme dans une histoire faite de griefs, puis demande un monopole sur le récit collectif, sans quoi on multipliera à son endroit les accusations de racisme. Il faudra alors proposer une représentation du passé conforme au nouveau régime de la «diversité». Ce qui est frappant, dans ce contexte, c’est la faiblesse des élites politiques et intellectuelles, qui ne se croient plus en droit de défendre le monde dont elles avaient pourtant la responsabilité. (…) Très souvent, les administrations universitaires cèdent aux moindres caprices d’associations étudiantes fanatisées, pour peu que celles-ci fassent preuve d’agressivité militante. En juillet, le King’s College de Londres a décidé de retirer les bustes de ses fondateurs «blancs» parce qu’ils intimideraient les «minorités ethniques». (…) ces statues (…) témoignent de la complexité irréductible de l’histoire, qui ne se laisse jamais définir par une seule légende, et ressaisir par une seule tradition. C’est pour cela qu’on trouve souvent des statues et autres monuments commémoratifs contradictoires au sein d’une ville ou d’un pays. Ils nous rappellent que dans les grandes querelles qui nous semblent aujourd’hui dénuées d’ambiguïté, des hommes de valeur ont pu s’engager dans des camps contraires. (…)  L’histoire des peuples ne saurait s’écrire en faisant un usage rageur de la gomme à effacer et du marteau-piqueur. Mathieu Bock-Côté

La décision prise par la municipalité de Charlottesville, dans l’État américain de Virginie, de déboulonner la statue de Robert E. Lee est à l’origine du terrifiant spectacle de néonazis défilant le mois dernier dans les rues de la ville avec des torches, scandant des slogans antisémites et exaltant la suprématie de la race blanche. La statue du général Lee sur son cheval, le chef de l’armée confédérée et un partisan du maintien de l’esclavage dans les États sudistes lors de la guerre de Sécession, était en place depuis 1924, époque à laquelle le lynchage de citoyens noirs était fréquent. Inspirés par les événements de Charlottesville, de nombreux Britanniques se demandent aujourd’hui si la statue de l’amiral Nelson en haut de la fameuse colonne de Trafalgar Square à Londres ne devrait pas également être retirée en raison des positions clairement pro-esclavagiste du héros de la bataille navale de Trafalgar. (…) Cette forme d’iconoclasme, qui repose sur l’idée que détruire une image permet de résoudre les polémiques qui lui sont associées, a toujours revêtu une dimension quasi magique. Lorsque les protestants anglais ont défié la puissance de l’Église catholique romaine au XVI^e siècle, des foules déchainées ont détruit les statues de saints et d’autres objets de culte à coups de pioche et de masse. Au XVIII^e siècle, les révolutionnaires ont fait subir le même sort aux églises en France. Et l’une des manifestations la plus radicale de ces saccages s’est produite il y a un peu plus de 50 ans en Chine, lorsque les Gardes rouges ont détruit les temples bouddhistes et brûlé les livres de la doctrine confucéenne – en fait tout ce qui était ancien et traditionnel – au nom de la Révolution culturelle. (…) pourtant (…) qui pourrait défendre l’idée que les rues et les places des villes allemandes continuent à être nommées en l’honneur d’Adolf Hitler après 1945 ? Déboulonner les statues du Führer, ou des dirigeants soviétiques en Europe centrale et de l’Est après 1989 n’était sûrement pas une erreur puérile. La question est de savoir où fixer les limites. (…) Il est très peu probable que de nombreux Britanniques soient incités à défendre l’esclavage ou le rétablissement d’un empire colonial en Afrique en contemplant la statue de Nelson à Trafalgar ou celle de Rhodes à Oxford. (…) Il n’existe pas de solution parfaite à ce problème, précisément parce qu’il ne s’agit pas seulement d’images taillées dans la pierre. Le ressentiment dans les États du Sud est d’ordre politique. Les blessures de la guerre civile américaine ne sont pas cicatrisées. Une grande partie des habitants des zones rurales de ces États est plus pauvre et moins éduquée que ceux d’autres régions des États-Unis. Ils se sentent ignorés et méprisés par les élites urbaines des côtes Est et Ouest, raison pour laquelle tant d’entre eux ont voté pour Trump. Déboulonner quelques statues ne résoudra pas ce problème et risque même d’exacerber les tensions. Ian Buruma

Attention: un racisme peut en cacher un autre !  (Après Penny Lane, The Night they drove old Dixie down ?)

En ces temps étranges …

Où, politiquement correct oblige, l’on élimine les croix chrétiennes des photos de produits alimentaires …

Ou déprogramme conférenciers ou classiques du cinéma (et occasion accessoirement du premier oscar noir) …

Et où, entre déboulonnages et débaptêmes, l’on propose de dynamiter le Mont Rushmore ou la colonne Nelson …

Pendant qu’entre Antifas et Black lives matter, les casseurs quasi-professionnels et leurs nombreux amis progressistes arborent fièrement des photos du notoire démocrate Che Guevara sur leurs tee-shirts, affiches ou murs …

Et que, des deux côtés de l’Atlantique, les suprémacistes et antisémites noirs ont quasiment pignon sur rue …

Alors qu’un président américain rappelant la violence des deux côtés et le simple fait que, arrêt de Skokie et assistance des avocats de l’ACLU obligent, la manifestation néo-nazie de Charlottesville,  torches, drapeaux confédérés, armes, croix grammées et slogans nazis compris – était parfaitement légale, se voit mis au pilori par quasiment l’ensemble des commentateurs …

Comment ne pas repenser …

Au-delà des cas évidents du nazisme ou du stalinisme …

Et des premiers chrétiens aux premiers protestants et des révolutionnaires français aux maoïstes chinois …

A toutes ces vagues – musulmans bien sûr compris – d’iconoclasme qui ont traversé l’histoire humaine …

Et notamment à la longue et tristement célèbre tradition précisément staliniste …

D’élimination y compris photographique des membres du parti à mesure qu’ils tombaient en disgrâce et devenaient infréquentables …

Et comment ne pas voir derrière ce retour tardif à la damnatio memoriae de nos ancêtres grecs ou latins ou même égyptiens …

Qui comme toute révolution qui se respecte …

De la suffragette raciste Susan Anthony à la fondatrice du Planning familial eugéniste Margaret Sanger …

Sans compter, outre le vainqueur de Verdun, Colomb ou les pères fondateurs Washington et Jefferson tous deux notoires propriétaires d’esclaves …

Voire outre la passionaria du folk Joan Baez reprenant une lamente de Dixie …

Le saint laïc Martin Luther King lui-même …

Devrait logiquement s’apprêter à dévorer, outre les traces mêmes de leurs méfaits, ses propres enfants …

Le véritable racisme social et ressentiment…

D’une élite urbaine surdiplômée furieuse après l’élection d’un président prétendument aussi inepte que Trump …

D’avoir perdu un pouvoir politique dont elle s’estimait seule digne ?

Le Pouvoir des mots
Ian Buruma
Project syndicate
Sep 5, 2017

NEW YORK – La décision prise par la municipalité de Charlottesville, dans l’État américain de Virginie, de déboulonner la statue de Robert E. Lee est à l’origine du terrifiant spectacle de néonazis défilant le mois dernier dans les rues de la ville avec des torches, scandant des slogans antisémites et exaltant la suprématie de la race blanche. La statue du général Lee sur son cheval, le chef de l’armée confédérée et un partisan du maintien de l’esclavage dans les États sudistes lors de la guerre de Sécession, était en place depuis 1924, époque à laquelle le lynchage de citoyens noirs était fréquent.

Inspirés par les événements de Charlottesville, de nombreux Britanniques se demandent aujourd’hui si la statue de l’amiral Nelson en haut de la fameuse colonne de Trafalgar Square à Londres ne devrait pas également être retirée en raison des positions clairement pro-esclavagiste du héros de la bataille navale de Trafalgar. Et il y a deux ans, des étudiants de l’université d’Oxford ont demandé le retrait de la statue du colonialiste Cecil Rhodes installée sur la façade d’un bâtiment de Oriel College, où il avait été étudiant, parce que son point de vue sur les races et le rôle de l’empire britannique est aujourd’hui jugé odieux.Cette forme d’iconoclasme, qui repose sur l’idée que détruire une image permet de résoudre les polémiques qui lui sont associées, a toujours revêtu une dimension quasi magique. Lorsque les protestants anglais ont défié la puissance de l’Église catholique romaine au XVI^e siècle, des foules déchainées ont détruit les statues de saints et d’autres objets de culte à coups de pioche et de masse. Au XVIII^e siècle, les révolutionnaires ont fait subir le même sort aux églises en France. Et l’une des manifestations la plus radicale de ces saccages s’est produite il y a un peu plus de 50 ans en Chine, lorsque les Gardes rouges ont détruit les temples bouddhistes et brûlé les livres de la doctrine confucéenne – en fait tout ce qui était ancien et traditionnel – au nom de la Révolution culturelle.Il est facile de déplorer ce genre de destruction. Des bâtiments séculaires sont réduits à néant et de grandes œuvres d’art sont perdues. L’on est tenté de croire que seules les personnes qui croient au pouvoir magique des images pourraient vouloir les anéantir.

La seule façon raisonnable de traiter les monuments du passé serait de les considérer simplement comme un legs de l’histoire. Ce n’est pourtant pas si simple. Qui pourrait défendre l’idée que les rues et les places des villes allemandes continuent à être nommées en l’honneur d’Adolf Hitler après 1945 ? Déboulonner les statues du Führer, ou des dirigeants soviétiques en Europe centrale et de l’Est après 1989 n’était sûrement pas une erreur puérile. On pourrait également affirmer que les représentations de ces dirigeants et de leurs affidés n’ont pas la même qualité artistique que les églises médiévales anglaises ou les sculptures de la dynastie Tang en Chine. Les statues du général Lee n’ont pas vraiment plus de raisons d’être conservées pour leur valeur artistique.La question est de savoir où fixer les limites. Les personnalités historiques doivent-elles jugées en fonction de la quantité de sang qu’elles ont sur les mains ? Ou faudrait-il définir un laps de temps adéquat ?L’on pourrait par exemple dire que les monuments honorant les criminels ayant vécu dans un passé assez récent, des monuments qui seraient encore source de souffrances pour les survivants, devraient être enlevés. Mais cette approche ne suffit pas en elle-même. L’argument en faveur du maintien d’une statue de Hitler dans un lieu public, si tant est qu’il en existe encore, ne se renforce pas au fil du temps.De nombreux citoyens du Sud des États-Unis estiment que les monuments confédérés doivent être préservés en tant que rappels du passé, comme éléments d’un « héritage » commun. Le problème est que l’histoire n’est pas neutre. Elle peut continuer à avoir des effets délétères. La manière dont nous représentons les histoires du passé et entretenons la mémoire au travers d’objets culturels est une composante essentielle de la façon dont nous nous percevons collectivement. Cette démarche nécessite un certain niveau de consensus, qui n’existe pas toujours, en particulier dans le cas de guerres civiles.Le cas de l’Allemagne d’après-guerre est sans équivoque. L’Allemagne de l’Ouest  comme l’Allemagne de l’Est ont décidé de façonner leur avenir commun en opposition directe au passé nazi. Seule une frange rancunière s’accroche encore avec nostalgie à des souvenirs du Troisième Reich.Les autorités allemandes continuent toutefois à interdire toute exposition de symboles nazis, de crainte qu’ils puissent encourager certains à répéter les heures les plus sombres de l’histoire du pays. Cette crainte est compréhensible et ne paraît pas sans fondement. Cette tentation pourrait même se renforcer à mesure que l’époque du nazisme s’efface des mémoires.

L’histoire récente de la Grande-Bretagne est moins traumatisante. Les opinions de Cecil Rhodes ou de l’amiral Nelson, bien qu’assez conventionnelles à leur époque, ne sont certainement plus admissibles aujourd’hui. Il est très peu probable que de nombreux Britanniques soient incités à défendre l’esclavage ou le rétablissement d’un empire colonial en Afrique en contemplant la statue de Nelson à Trafalgar ou celle de Rhodes à Oxford.La conjoncture dans les États du Sud des États-Unis reste par contre problématique. Les perdants de la guerre de Sécession n’ont jamais vraiment accepté leur défaite. Pour de nombreux habitants des États du Sud, même si ce n’est de loin pas une majorité, la cause confédérée et ses monuments font toujours partie de leur identité collective. Si aucune personne saine d’esprit ne songerait à défendre le rétablissement de l’esclavage, la nostalgie pour le mode vie traditionnel sudiste reste entaché de racisme. C’est pour cette raison que les statues du général Lee situées devant les palais de justice et autres bâtiments publics sont préjudiciables et que de nombreux citoyens, notamment les progressistes de ces États, souhaitent les voir enlevées. Il n’existe pas de solution parfaite à ce problème, précisément parce qu’il ne s’agit pas seulement d’images taillées dans la pierre. Le ressentiment dans les États du Sud est d’ordre politique. Les blessures de la guerre civile américaine ne sont pas cicatrisées. Une grande partie des habitants des zones rurales de ces États est plus pauvre et moins éduquée que ceux d’autres régions des États-Unis. Ils se sentent ignorés et méprisés par les élites urbaines des côtes Est et Ouest, raison pour laquelle tant d’entre eux ont voté pour Trump. Déboulonner quelques statues ne résoudra pas ce problème et risque même d’exacerber les tensions.

Ian Buruma, Editor of The New York Review of Books, is Professor of Democracy, Human Rights, and Journalism at Bard College. He is the author of numerous books, including Murder in Amsterdam: The Death of Theo Van Gogh and the Limits of Tolerance and Year Zero: A History of 1945.

Voir aussi:

Mathieu Bock-Côté : «La chasse aux statues ou le nouveau délire pénitentiel de l’Occident»

Mathieu Bock-Côté

Le Figaro

9 septembre 2017

FIGAROVOX/TRIBUNE – À la suite des événements de Charlottesville, Bill de Blasio, le maire de New York, a envisagé publiquement de déboulonner la statue de Christophe Colomb, parce qu’elle serait offensante pour les Amérindiens. Mathieu Bock-Côté décrypte cette nouvelle guerre contre le passé.

Mathieu Bock-Côté est docteur en sociologie, chargé de cours aux HEC à Montréal et chroniqueur au Journal de Montréal et à Radio-Canada. Ses travaux portent principalement sur le multiculturalisme, les mutations de la démocratie contemporaine et la question nationale québécoise. Il est l’auteur d’ Exercices politiques (VLB éditeur, 2013), de Fin de cycle: aux origines du malaise politique québécois (Boréal, 2012) de La dénationalisation tranquille (Boréal, 2007), et de Le multiculturalisme comme religion politique (éd. du Cerf, 2016).

Dans la suite des événements de Charlottesville, Bill de Blasio, le maire de New York, a envisagé publiquement de déboulonner la statue de Christophe Colomb, parce qu’elle serait offensante pour les Amérindiens. A l’en croire, cette statue serait susceptible de susciter la haine, comme la plupart des symboles associés à l’expansion européenne et à la colonisation des Amériques, apparemment. Au Canada, un syndicat d’enseignants ontarien proposait de rebaptiser les écoles portant le nom de John A. MacDonald, un des pères fondateurs du pays. En Grande-Bretagne, on en a trouvé pour proposer d’abattre la statue de Nelson, à qui on reproche d’avoir défendu l’esclavage. On trouvera bien d’autres exemples de cette chasse aux statues dans l’actualité des dernières semaines.

Certains n’y verront qu’une nouvelle manifestation du péché d’anachronisme, qui pousse à abolir l’histoire dans un présentisme un peu sot, comme si les époques antérieures devaient être condamnées et leurs traces effacées de l’espace public. Mais il y a manifestement autre chose qu’une autre manifestation d’inculture dans cette furie épuratrice qui excite les foules, comme si elles étaient appelées à une mission vengeresse. Comment expliquer cette soudaine rage qui pousse une certaine gauche, au nom de la décolonisation intérieure des États occidentaux, à vouloir éradiquer la mémoire, comme si du passé, il fallait enfin faire table rase? Nous sommes devant une poussée de fièvre épuratrice particulièrement violente, qui témoigne de la puissance du réflexe pénitentiel inscrit dans la culture politique occidentale contemporaine.

On peut comprendre que dans un élan révolutionnaire, quand d’un régime, on passe à un autre, une foule enragée s’en prenne au statuaire du pouvoir. Il arrive qu’on fracasse des idoles pour marquer la déchéance d’un demi-dieu auquel on ne croit plus. Lors de la chute du communisme, l’euphorie des foules les poussa à jeter par terre les statues et autres monuments qui représentaient une tyrannie dont elles se délivraient. Il fallait faire tomber les monuments à la gloire de Lénine pour marquer la chute du communisme. Rien là de vraiment surprenant. Quelquefois, il faut détruire pour créer.

Mais sommes-nous dans une situation semblable? Le cas du sud des États-Unis, à l’origine de la présente tornade idéologique, est assumérent singulier. La mémoire qui y est associée ne s’est pas toujours définie exclusivement à partir de la question raciale, ce qui ne veut pas dire que celle-ci ne soit pas centrale et que la mouvance suprémaciste blanche ne cherche pas à exercer sur cet héritage un monopole. On ne saurait toutefois l’y réduire. Surtout, des Américains raisonnables et nullement racistes sont choqués que des militants d’extrême-gauche détruisent des statues en dehors de toute légalité. Ils acceptent difficilement que toute mention de l’héritage du sud soit assimilé au racisme. Comment ces Américains toléreraient-ils, par exemple, qu’on censure un film comme «Autant en emporte le vent», comme cela vient d’arriver dans un cinéma de Memphis, qui l’a déprogrammé pour des raisons idéologiques?

La question des statues qui perpétuent le souvenir des généraux ou des soldats confédérés aux Etats- Unis est complexe. Mais la manie pénitentielle frappe partout en Occident. Elle pousse à démanteler des statues, à réécrire les manuels scolaires, à prescrire certaines commémorations pénitentielles, à multiplier les excuses envers telle communauté, à pendre symboliquement certains héros des temps jadis désormais présentés à la manière d’abominables salauds et à censurer les représentations du passé qui n’entrent pas dans la représentation caricaturale qu’on s’en fait aujourd’hui.

Cette vision de l’histoire, terriblement simplificatrice, prend la forme d’un procès qui vise d’abord les héros longtemps admirés. Des grands personnages, on ne retient que les idées qui heurtent les valeurs d’aujourd’hui. L’Occident en vient à se voir avec les ye