The poor, poor, put-upons want you to shut up and know your place
When professor Elizabeth Warren was still teaching about The Coming Collapse of the Middle Class and “the two-income trap” during the aughts, she presented data on why, even with two earners in the home, Americans were struggling to make ends meet. It was not that they were spending frivolously. Pay stagnation, childcare costs, and health care inflation meant that it now takes two incomes to keep a family afloat (barely) when once it took one. And this was before the financial collapse, the Great Recession, and the election of the first black president on a platform of “Hope.”
Everyone today feels put upon. Everyone feels squeezed. People are expected to support an economy with their time and labor that does not support them in return. During the pandemic shutdowns, many discovered they could make do with less work and less stress. Americans took the advice of the ironically named Johnny Paycheck from 1977. The Great Resignation followed. Take this job and shove it.
The sense of being undervalued is pervasive in the latest focus group from The New York Times, this one with eight conservative men. Except they seem to believe the alienation the feel is unique to them:
The men didn’t see themselves fitting into American society today. They didn’t feel free to be themselves in the culture. Seven of them said they felt like a stranger in their own country…. Several felt the cost of saying what they really think is sometimes just not worth it, evoking worries among some Americans about free speech and cancel culture. And they had strong views about masculinity and gender; they seemed aware that their views are out of step with modern culture and will offend some but still felt their views were obviously correct.
Christians, too, feel themselves put upon in a diversifying culture they no longer feel able to dominate. Nearly two-thirds of Americans still identify as Christian, but that number is shrinking. It was nearly 82 percent on 2001, and higher in 1990. Like the white-heavy Republican Party’s grip on the American electorate, Christians’ sense of being confidently in control is slipping. Both groups (and they overlap) resent it.
Thus the rush by both groups in Republican-controlled legislatures and in the courts to re-exert as much white-Christian cultural dominance as they can while they still can.
Slate’s Dahlia Lithwick and Mark Joseph Stern examine an effort I’d not noticed before now:
On April 24, the Supreme Court will hear Kennedy v. Bremerton School District, a case that was carefully engineered to return prayer to public schools. Kennedy marks an effort to overturn nearly 60 years of precedent protecting schoolchildren from state-sponsored religion by flipping the First Amendment on its head. The case erases the rights of children who wish to avoid religious coercion at school, fixating instead on the right of school officials to practice their religion during the course of their formal duties. It is the culmination of a decadeslong battle to reframe government neutrality toward religion as unconstitutional discrimination against people of faith. And it is chillingly likely to succeed.
It would be a mistake, however, to view Kennedy as a mere doctrinal shift in constitutional law, as radical as that doctrinal shift would be. This case is also the product of the Republican political campaign aimed at restoring public schools’ authority to indoctrinate students with Christianity. The campaign is on the brink of success in the courts because proponents of school prayer have perfected a tactic that reverses the victim and offender.
Today, school officials who coerce students into prayer go on the offensive, claiming that any attempt to halt their efforts at religious coercion is actually persecution of their religious beliefs. Supervisors, lawmakers, and judges who attempt to shield children from being indoctrinated are recast as anti-Christian bigots.
Poor, poor, put-upon two-thirds of the population and nearly half the electorate.
The Kennedy case arose out of a Washington state football coach conspicuously holding post-game prayers on the 50-yard line. When challenged based on First Amendment grounds, Kennedy made a spectacle of it and eventually sued the school district for violating his First Amendment rights. When the case first came before the Supreme Court, the justices punted based on “unresolved factual questions.” But with the addition of Amy Coney Barrett to the team leaning toward “insisting that the separation of church and state is actually unconstitutional,” say Lithwick and Stern, the court could rule that “the government is not barred from endorsing or coercing religion in schools; it is required to do so.”
It was weird when my Catholic family moved South in the 1960s to see preachers leading prayers before high school football games (where Dixie was still a standard fight song). When I transitioned from Catholic elementary school to a public high school, it was weirder to see teachers lead prayers in classrooms. Those of us in the denominational minority (and non-Christian students) were supposed to know our places, shut up and go along. Or we “Yankees” could step out in the hall and draw hairy eyeballs from teachers and classmates.
That’s the world the poor, poor put-upons want to bring back. One where they are in charge and everybody else had best know it. And never, ever question the economic underpinnings of your sense of alienation.
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