Don’t try to teach a pig to sing, the old adage says, you won’t succeed and you’ll irritate the pig. This bit of folk wisdom mostly distills a long article by labor lawyer Thomas Geoghegan in The New Republic.
Geoghegan’s basic point, the nearly 70% of Americans who are not college graduates were once a reliable Democrat demographic. Except for people of color, Democrats have lost the whole non-college group to Trump and the Republicans. He claims the reason for this is Democrats ignoring social class, and he’s probably correct. Trump speaks to and for this marginalized group.
The author quotes Democrats Sanders, Warren, and Obama to the effect that the answer to the blue collar’s tough times is “more free higher education.” They want to teach “the pig” to sing.
How do you suppose their “fix” sounds to people who didn’t much like the school experience? A lot like telling the first President Bush the answer to his electoral problem was eating more of the broccoli he famously hated.
Cannily, Geoghegan notes that the value of much higher education has been its scarcity. Those with it ended up running civilian and military organizations, supervising those without it. If everybody has it, who is left to supervise?
I don’t recommend the author’s solutions. As a labor lawyer he believes the answer is stronger and more empowered unions. That is like a doctor believing the answer to poverty is better health care. Can you say “self serving”? On the other hand, he’s correct that the Democrats’ approach to working class people - telling them to just “man up” and learn to code or become college grads - isn’t working.
