Sarah Smarsh

speaker

73 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Nov 2024 last heard Nov 2024

Sarah Smarsh’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

Trend

recordings per month · last 12 months

No recordings in the last 12 months.Older appearances are listed below; set an alert to hear about the next one.

Appearances

newest first · ▶ plays the moment

The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart · Left Behind: Why Democrats Lost the Working Class · 14 Nov 2024 podcast

I think this might go back to culture actually and the way that that relates to class as an identity. So here's the thing. Even if you got in on that gravy, that gravy itself is unto a class and a mode of thinking and a relationship to economy that actually threatens your way of life and your place in your community and your skills. And so what I'm getting at here is like –

The folks who I know who do manual labor or would identify as members of the working class, even in the service industry and and all sorts of jobs, they're very proud of their work. They aren't actually trying to get out of work. Some of them like to work.

Their identity has to do with that steel, or their identity has to do with that wheat field, or with that hammer, or even with that relationship they have with customers, waiting tables, and so on. So It's like trying to say to a bunch of folks that are looking at everything in a macro way, here on the ground, we're talking about the dignity of our work.

We're also defending our rights and we're trying to get more money and we're trying to get you to back off working us into the ground. But that's not the same thing as saying we actually don't, like our gig and feel very proud of the skills that we have. And by God, we could talk about AI all you want, but for the time being, we need people who have those skills and they know it.

So while I don't think it's a bad idea what you're talking about, I think it's two different realities in terms of a relationship to capital, how you build it, and how you value yourself.

If a worker hands over just like the inherent value of her ability to fix a sink and now she's swimming with the real sharks trying to get ahead, swimming in the gravy, if you will, that's maybe a really precarious way to be because they've already got you beaten every other way. At least they don't know how to fix their sink.

Oh yeah. Like a scandalous percentage of let's say Walmart employees are on food stamps. The scandal, by the way, to be clear, is that Walmart is underpaying its workers, not that anyone needs to seek out assistance. It was my meaning.

Well, I think that we can... maybe answer the question by just pinpointing or teasing out who is that government? Who's there? It's mostly pretty well-off folks, affluent folks. A lot of them went to the same Ivy League schools. There has been modest but somewhat heartening and hopeful diversification of Congress and the ranks of government along gender and racial lines.

If you look at class, though, very rare is the lawmaker who has a background with direct experience of poverty or the working class or throw in rural America and you're down to like people you can count on one hand.

Yeah. I think it was a meat grinder.

Um, but, uh, but yeah. And God bless him. He had a good run. Um, So what I'm getting at here is I'm not so sure that it's that the structures themselves are unresponsive by definition, but rather the folks who are driving, who are behind the wheel have – Enormous class blind spots and often racial blind spots and gender blind spots as well.

But across the board, there is just a gross inability to truly understand race. the day-to-day lives of the average American. And that's true in both parties, of course. I talked about the little trick that the Republicans pull off meanwhile earlier. But if the Democrats also have that problem and then they're telling you you're wrong, that the economy sucks, recipe for disaster.

Yes, 100%. So when I moved to New York in my 20s, a question I often got was, how did you get out? And I think the idea was it was a compliment. And I actually love the place I'm from. I live there again now in rural Kansas, happily. But I had no choice in terms of my career path and my goals and my aspirations professionally and academically, but to leave.

I'm kind of a homecomer, if you will, who returned home. um with the on the Odyssean journey um but uh that's how I ended up back in Jersey same thing Yeah, you get it. But yes, home and place. And I believe those things often kind of relate to class. But the capitalist and industrialized and globalized and urbanized way of looking at reality often leaves place out of the equation.

Boy, is that still a tie that binds, I find, when I talk to people about my work. um, all colors and ethnicities and, and, uh, uh, political stripes, even, you know, where I'm from, you just, you say, where are you from? And what, uh, so your daddy was down at, oh, you worked at that grain elevator. And, um, and there's different versions of that all, all over this beautiful country, of course.

And, um, if, if all of the policy and the aspiration that you're talking about, you know, something we haven't mentioned yet is how like, um, the Democrats, uh, throughout that campaign, uh, John, I don't think I heard him say the word working class once, the term. Maybe I missed it. It wasn't in an important economic policy speech.

It wasn't mentioned in 82 pages of a policy book that I read about their economic plan. But the reason I point that out is because it's always about the middle class. We're talking about how do we get you in the middle class? We know you want to be in the middle class. We're jerking off the middle class with every overture we make with our messaging, exalting the notion that

And meanwhile, we're defining like the demarcation line as a college degree.

And so the notion is, so if we know you want to make it and you want to get into the middle class, I know people that are perfectly happy with their modest lives in a rural landscape and they're proud to be doing the work of tending and protecting a piece of land. Yeah. And maybe they're extremely well self-educated, read a bunch of books.

But if the current pathways are like, and now you've got to leave your home and go take this coding class and now enter this completely different world that you don't even want. I mean, you know, like another thing, of course, the What's the saying about New York? If you can make it there, you can make it anywhere.

Showing 21–40 of 73 · page 2 of 4