Just in time for today's announcement about the Trans-Pacific Partnership, Paul Theroux writes in the Times about the hypocrisy of billionaire philanthropists:
Every so often, you hear grotesquely wealthy American chief executives announce in sanctimonious tones the intention to use their accumulated hundreds of millions, or billions, “to lift people out of poverty.” Sometimes they are referring to Africans, but sometimes they are referring to Americans. And here’s the funny thing about that: In most cases, they have made their fortunes by impoverishing whole American communities, having outsourced their manufacturing to China or India, Vietnam or Mexico.
Next, two pieces from the current issue of Dissent, which includes twenty-some "arguments on the left" from leftists of just about every description. One of these is by the editor emeritus of Dissent, Michael Walzer, who argues it's time for the left to turn its attention "back to class":
In recent years, the politically significant and effective insurgencies in the United States have all been particularist in character, reflecting the politics of difference: the key examples are the civil rights movement, the feminist movement, and the movement for gay rights. Each of these has been victorious—or, better, each of them has been a partial success, like all our successes. They leave a lot of work still to be done (as the militants of Black Lives Matter can tell us), but, still, we have won important battles on behalf of women and black and gay Americans. And the United States has become, with regard to each of these groups, a more egalitarian society than it once was. At the same time, however, with regard to the overall population of the country, we have become less egalitarian, more radically hierarchical. Inequality has grown in the very years in which we were winning greater equality for particular groups of Americans—and despite the fact that these are very large groups. Significant numbers of women and black and gay Americans have moved up the social hierarchy, but the hierarchy has gotten steeper.[...]
Each of the particular movements was founded by people who felt the urgency of their own oppression—and demanded change in their own name, for themselves. And they were right. The particularist movements were and still are necessary and important. So each of the movements...deserves our support; their victories will make life better for people who need, right now, a better life. But, again, their victories will not produce an egalitarian society.
It is time to think about class.
In Jedediah Purdy's contribution to the forum, he proposes "An Environmentalism for the Left." Does that sound redundant? It shouldn't, as Purdy explains:
Although modern environmental politics emerged in the radical ferment of the early 1970s, leftists were suspicious from the outset of its easy mainstream appeal and its elite constituency. The same doubts persist today. The venerable Nature Conservancy’s close partnerships with corporations and focus on “ecosystem services” that can be monetized are just one reminder that environmentalism’s institutional mainstream fits comfortably with neoliberalism. Consumerist appeals to eco-consciousness (think of the local-sourcing policies and the prices of anti-union Whole Foods) suggest that environmentalism is about image and market choices. Despite decades of talk about environmental justice, the movement remains disproportionately white, elite, and motivated by romantic attachment to high mountains, old forests, and charismatic animals. Even treating climate change as an “environmental” question obscures issues of global justice—the ways that the world’s rich are much more responsible for, and less vulnerable to, the problem than the poor.
