Reply #8: I really do see some interesting possibilities here. [View All]

[QC]

My dad, now retired, was a factory worker when I was growing up. His dad was a miner. Both of them expected to be laid off or canned from jobs. As they saw it, that was just the way things worked, and it sucked, but what are you gonna do about it?

So when the layoff came, they went out and looked for another job. Some of them were shitty. I remember my dad, in the early 70s, taking a job putting tar on roofs for $1 an hour because that was all he could find. He hated it, of course, but hey, what are you gonna do?

Now, though, it's not just blue-collar types who are getting "rightsized." It's the privileged, those who bought into the bossman's old lie that they are better than the guys on the loading dock because they work in the office and have clean hands. They are finding out that the bossman really didn't have any more respect or consideration for them than for the loading dock crew.

It's already having some interesting effects. A lot of the folks who were "cyberlibertarians" three years ago are now sounding like protectionists. There's new interest in so-called "white-collar unions." Yuppies are sweating their $3000 house payments. Brytneigh, Dakota, and Meighan are now facing the possibility of attending public school.

I suspect the newly proletarianized don't find blue-collar anger quite so crude and ridiculous anymore.

These are the sort of people who will get righteously pissed, rather than just write it off as how the system works, like my father did. And these people are the GOP's base.

So we could be in for some very interesting times when those who have high expectations figure out that they're just proles like the rest of the bottom 90%.