One of my favorite discoveries of the pandemic was the podcast You’re Wrong About. I describe it as MythBusters for the major media stories, scandals, and moral panics of the 1980s to 2010s. On one episode co-host, Sarah Marshall, uttered an exasperated throw-away line that has stuck with me for nearly two years. After a long retelling of a sensationalist moment of media coverage by her co-host, Sarah retorted, “come to find out, it was capitalism all along.” She nailed it, perfectly.
So much of what we argue about in the US: the culture wars, climate inaction, housing policy, health care access, school privatization, policing, etc. are just capitalism doing its exploitive thing. The dominant class and their interests drive policymaking. When we take our eyes off that, we can end up in all sorts of weird places and tirades. I have fallen for this at times and this week I want to offer a bit of a mea culpa.
I wrote a piece in 2017 that got a fairly large online response. It was a critique of Boomer politics but on revisiting it, it misses the mark. The culprit is neoliberalism and imperialism, not just the Boomers. Yes, the last forty plus years of US politics are basically inter-generational theft via tax cuts. Yeah, Reagan ushered in an era of disinvestment in infrastructure and the commons that leaves our roads jammed and bridges crumbling. Sure, we spent 8 trillion dollars (8,000,000,000,000 USD) on Forever Wars that could have gone to education, transit, climate mitigation, or countless other things. That’s a pretty damning list and what really irks me is that collectively we haven’t learned much of anything from any of it.
On the other end of the generational hot-take spectrum from my piece, are people who should know better writing “what’s the matter with kids these days?” articles in US media. A generation of journalists that carried around Tamagotchis in the 90s and spent countless hours in AOL & ICQ chats unironically bemoan Gen Z’s embrace of TikTok. Listen, there’s nothing wrong with “the kids” except what is being perpetrated on them by the exploitative practices of late-stage market capitalism.
For example, I offer you the triannual national panic over PISA scores. Each time the numbers are released the usual suspects, who want to dismantle or as they put it “reform” schooling in America, try to collectively rub the noses of the teaching profession in the wet spot of criterion-referenced test scores. These scores aren’t rocket science—they are more a manifestation of what’s happening in society than they are of what’s happening in classrooms:
Fifty-nine percent of kids from low-income families said they’d gone to school hungry, and 46% of those kids said that hunger had hurt their performance in school. Hunger impacts learning and academic performance throughout the year, not just on a specific date. Kids shouldn’t have to worry about hunger on any date—high stress, low stress, test day, normal class day. We have the tools and the resources to ensure every child in this country gets the nutrition they need to learn and grow…
The COVID-19 pandemic pushed millions of families into unemployment, food insecurity, and hardship, exacerbating already unacceptable levels of hunger and poverty. As a result, 1 in 4 kids could face hunger this year. - National Honor Society
I have seen this particular PISA scores panic cycle at least five times in my career. It’s the same routine every time: scores come out, the media runs headlines decrying American ruin, corporate reformers blame unions (even for scores in non-union states), and months of headlines and whitepapers fly to and fro. Can you tell that I am tired of it yet?
It’s a tired merry-go-round and I want off.
As the new year approaches, I’m making some resolutions and I am going to ask you to join me (if you want):
Let’s retire generational hot-takes. Yes, there is very likely mass lead-poisoning among Boomers but even that was due to capitalism.
Let’s also stop blaming individuals for systemic problems. I think I will write more on this next week.
Lastly, I was really bothered by some of the Islamophobia and racism that I saw from self-professed progressives during the Qatar World Cup. Let’s stop holding individuals responsible for the actions of the regimes they live under. No, it wasn’t my fault that George Bush (both of them) invaded Iraq. Why should a random Qatari or Russian, for that matter, catch hell for the actions of their states?