The Pandemic
I spend most of my time with working class people. I spend some of my time in the petit bourgeois non-profit and activism world, which is ok, but there is quite a large gulf between professional activism and the people they aim to serve. This is probably my biggest frustration in life and it has even crept into our marriage. No worries, all is fine on the home front, but we have found ourselves more at odds politically recently.
I see a lot of petit bourgeois types shame and demean the working class because of low vaccination rates. I think part of this is because it’s raced and classed redneck and for some unknown reason, we are the only oppressed group left that it’s ok to scapegoat, but I guess that’s neither here nor there. It is not a redneck thing. There are working class neighborhoods in every major city with similar vaccination rates to the American South, which as I have argued repeatedly, is a working class region.
But why?
Simply, working class people don’t trust governing institutions and why should they. We’ve been lied to, manipulated, and abused for well over a generation and you can’t blame a group of people for not trusting their abuser.
Let me give an example: the obesity “epidemic.”
About ten years ago, it was fashionable to say that obesity was an epidemic that was costing Americans upteen billions of dollars a year and this was based on essentially one measure and that’s body mass index. Oh by the way, most of the people that needed fixing were working class. The solution - eat right and exercise. Much of this has been thoroughly deconstructed by Julie Guthman. The fact is that no one knows why people are getting bigger or really if it’s even that big of a problem. It could be stress, environmental toxins, epigenetics, or diet and exercise, just to name a few. And as quickly as it was an issue, once the funding ran out, it disappeared.
There’s millions of examples like this. Advertising has gotten so sophisticated in that it is basically just trying to use media to associate positive feelings with a product. Same with news media - positive feelings with a political point of view. Eventually, people instinctively recoil from this type of manipulation and control and basically just stop trusting anything.
Enter the pandemic. First of all, governing institutions utterly failed to even provide the most basic response and protections for the people of the US. Next, there’s finally a vaccine and a large section of the population, mostly workers, doesn’t take it. Why? Because of years of manipulation and control over stupid shit like obesity cultivated deep feelings of distrust of governing institutions among the working classes.
And what we have now is the result - widespread institutional failure because a large enough section of the population no longer trusts governing institutions.
I don’t know how you get it back besides doing what we’re doing and trying to build trustworthy institutions and, full disclosure, we may suck at it.