You wanna know why our nation is failing? Just read this article from Salon.com about interviews with women from elite universities who also obviously live in a world of money and class status that many women in the United States do not have.
Then, after reading the article, let's reflect on the lack of the words "democratic socialism," "social democracy," or any compare and contrast with Europe or Canadian policies and experiences, within the article. Not one of these women who graduated from the elite college appear to have brought up what elite women in Europe and Canada know, and what women who may be leaders in local unions or other positions there know, which is that policies providing for state subsidized childcare, which pays those who work in that realm good coin; national health insurance; policies promoting unions, which in turn promote and provide for limits on hours worked, more vacation time, laws stating the employer cannot contact you on your cell phone while you are on vacation, and lunch hours that are true lunch hours; policies where there is a promotion of mass transit to avoid the burdening cost of cars....All of these have more of a positive effect on the lives of women to avoid the type of harsh, rarely go back, decision making that women even in elite backgrounds often face.
The policies we should promote, therefore, are less ideological than they seem, and provide freedom of individual opportunity for that near-half of our human population, and along the way, give freedom to men, too, in the form of kinder and gentler workplaces and longer vacations, for example. However, it is clear there is ideological baggage carried with those who stand opposed to these policies, and, in the U.S.A., there has been in place, for over seventy years, a propaganda system within the corporate-owned media world that continually ignores or, when confronted, castigates us against developing any language that would recognize these policy solutions. Too often the feminist narrative is expressed in terms of individual autonomy, which is important. However, there is a feminist-socialist narrative that our children are starting to feel their way towards--thank you, Bernie Sanders once again! But that feminist-socialist narrative is not quite re-born yet. And maybe, just maybe, we may begin to re-learn that "housewife" work has tremendous economic value, even though it is unpaid. Again, our corporate assumptions have so driven our very comprehension of such things that we do not even know how to engage in public policy discussions about the significance of that single fact.
In short, there should be no dichotomy between identity politics and socialist oriented politics. We just have to decide both are important and promote policies where both work together. The problem I have had with Clinton/Obama/Biden types is they promote what I call "corporate Human Resources department" liberalism. It is the liberalism of Sheryl Sandberg, and her "lean in" garbage. Such a perspective lacks what Barbara Ehrenreich was trying to teach us along the way in "Nickel and Dimed," which is that raising the minimum wage to $15 an hour will help millions of women, many of whom are moms mired in lower paying jobs with terrible work hours that they do not actually choose, and where they fear for their jobs each time one of their children fall sick.*
Oh, and I must say this. By focusing on elite colleges or universities, the authors appear to be ignoring the "leg up" in our society given to those who attend those elite colleges and universities these days. It is now approaching early capitalist accumulation period England, circa 1830. I once met a person who was friends with a human relations manager at a prominent national law firm. She said, "We don't hire people who graduated from a law school near a freeway." That was her way of saying not even UCLA or Boalt Hall (Berkeley) law schools were good enough. It was strictly Ivy League and Stanford grads only. This has occurred across the board in various professions over the past 15 years and has been a relatively sudden change. Yes, there are exceptions, but let's not let the exceptions fool ourselves into sanguinity. For the vast majority of women and men, there are barriers to economic stability that require far more work to overcome than Baby Boomers and Gen-Xers ever had to overcome.
*Here is Ehrenreich at a graduate school level of theorizing that shows her versatility in The Monthly Review, a venerable Marxist journal founded by Paul Sweezy and Leo Huberman in the early days of the Cold War, and which still functions in this still-young century. Ehrenreich remains one of the greatest minds of the past forty years. Her writings since the 1970s are paradigm-changers when reading her. Best place to start: "Hearts of Men." Hands down. Reading that book truly enlightens one's perspective of post-WWII America, one's idea of feminism, and one's sense of how we got here--and to start to wonder where we need to go.
