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View Full Version : John Derbyshire On Today’s Forgotten Men—The American White Working Class



Mister D
02-04-2013, 04:40 PM
Snip

It was, however, not the NYP’s editorial pages that got me thinking about the Forgotten Man, but the news pages. It covered Barack Obama’s speech in Las Vegas, as of course it should have done; but it decorated its coverage with three “case studies” to illustrate the problem the President claimed to be addressing. [Obama’s immigration ‘campaign’, (http://www.nypost.com/p/news/national/immig_campaign_CAZNwufttDLAe9TxBuPipN) By Geoff Earle, January 30, 2013]

Case Study #1: Martha Guolotuna, owner of an autobody shop (apparently a clean one (http://www.bbb.org/new-york-city/business-reviews/auto-body-repair-and-painting/emanuel-auto-body-shop-inc-in-long-island-city-ny-90194)) in the borough of Queens, who “departed Quito, Ecuador (http://www.vdare.com/articles/memo-from-mexico-by-allan-wall-192), for a new life in the United States 18 years ago.”


Case Study #2: Yenny Quispe, occupation not given, who “has been in America for 10 years after fleeing Peru with her mother and brother to escape her abusive father.”
Case Study #3: Tania Gordillo, apparently unemployed, who “came to the United States in 1995 from Ecuador and learned what it’s like to be undocumented.”
The main impression these thumbnail “case studies” give is a whiny sense of entitlement. Ms. Guolotuna wants to “be treated like everyone else.” Ms. Quispe has “been waiting a long time.” (Though not as long as a Family First Preference (http://www.legalmatch.com/law-library/article/waiting-periods-and-quotas-for-family-based-visas.html) visa applicant from the Philippines, which currently requires an 11-year wait—in, of course, the Philippines. For a Fourth Preference Filipino/a the wait time is 19 years.) Ms. Gordillo is “tired of constantly looking over my shoulder.”
Least gruntled of all are white non-Hispanic workers, who in addition to seeing their wages stagnate or decline have been insulted by race preferences (http://www.vdare.com/posts/jesse-helms-rip) (“Affirmative Action”) and disproportionately shut out (http://www.adversity.net/fed_stats/OPM2007/001_blacksFY2006.htm) from government jobs, which have been fenced off as a make-work reservation for low-ability minorities.


Snip

The fate of the current Open-Borders efforts by Congress and the President will be a test of this apathy theory. If indeed the white working classes are so demoralized and passive that they will accept this further insult to them, to their livelihoods, and to their children’s future, then we shall indeed have “comprehensive immigration reform” and the inevitable following surge of tens of millions more cheap workers.
If, on the other hand, there is a successful 2007-style push-back (http://www.vdare.com/posts/we-love-the-smell-of-victory) against “reform,” then there is life in the American white working class yet. And we sad augurs will mock our own presage (http://www.farlimas.com/Shakenew/sonnets/paraphrase/sonnet107p.html).
If—though this may be too much to hope for—if, in addition, there were to be just one big, noisy demonstration by non-Hispanic whites, preferably with a few windows broken in government offices, I might even believe that the war against the white working class (http://www.vdare.com/articles/the-war-against-white-trash) that has been going on all over the Western world this past forty years, might be entering a new, more hopeful, phase.
Aux armes, citoyens! (http://www.artinthepicture.com/paintings/Eugene_Delacroix/Liberty-Leading-the-People/)

http://www.vdare.com/

Chris
02-04-2013, 08:06 PM
The Forgotten Man by Amity Shlaes was a free-market criticism of Hoover's and Roosevelt's interference in the market that led to today's entitlements.

Mister D
02-04-2013, 08:16 PM
The Forgotten Man by Amity Shlaes was a free-market criticism of Hoover's and Roosevelt's interference in the market that led to today's entitlements.

I gave the wrong link. He discussed her book a bit.

http://www.vdare.com/articles/john-derbyshire-on-today-s-forgotten-men-the-american-white-working-class

Shlaes is probably best known for her 2009 libertarian-contrarian account of the Great Depression, The Forgotten Man (http://www.amazon.com/The-Forgotten-Man-ebook/dp/B000ROKXXI/?_encoding=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=9325&linkCode=ur2&tag=vd0b-20). She borrowed her title from an 1883 essay (http://www.blupete.com/Literature/Essays/Best/SumnerForgotten.htm) by classical liberal William Graham Sumner (http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/573450/William-Graham-Sumner). The Forgotten Man is the hapless middle- or working-class schmuck who ends up paying for the grand schemes of social improvement foisted on a nation by politicians, political entrepreneurs (http://www.lovelandpolitics.com/politicalentrepreneurDEFINITION.html), ideologues, and do-gooders.

continues...

Chris
02-04-2013, 08:19 PM
And that schmuck now pays for others' entitlements.

Mister D
02-04-2013, 08:19 PM
Yes, he does. Hopefully, he will become as outraged as the people he pays for.