HOW JOURNALISM ABANDONED THE WORKING CLASS:

Racism is still a blight on American life. But wokeness is not how we heal; it has simply redefined the problem to the benefit of educated elites. By focusing on immutable characteristics like race, the woke moral panic has allowed economic elites to evade responsibility for their regressive view that elites should not only exist but rule. And in presenting race rather than class and income as America’s deep and worsening divide, the purveyors of wokeness have ended up comforting white, liberal elites, even as they have called them white supremacists.

It would have been impossible without the media. Once a tool to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable, today American journalism comforts the comfortable, speaks power to truth, and insists on an orthodoxy that protects the interests of the elites in the language of a culture war whose burden is given to the working class to bear. In his book “What’s the Matter With Kansas,” Thomas Frank famously asked why white, working-class voters were voting against their own economic interests. But in 2016, when they voted in their own economic interests, those in the media called them racists.

The cost of erasing people who are economically working class from the conversation, the cost of concealing rather than exposing the class divide, has deepened and perpetuated inequality. This is plainly a disaster for anyone who truly cares about a more just society. And certainly for any nation that wishes to see itself as a democracy.

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