FOOD FOR THOUGHT AS WE TRY TO MAKE SENSE OF THE 2016 ELECTION RESULTS: IT IS THE (NEW CAPITALIST) ECONOMY, STUPID!

Richard Sennet, The Corrosion of Character: The Personal Consequences of Work in the New Capitalism (New York: Norton, 1998) ("[C]apitalism now acts on different productive principles. The short-term, flexible time of the new capitalism seems to preclude making a sustained narrative out of one's labors, and so a career. Yet to fail to wrest some sense of continuity and purpose out of these conditions would be literally to fail ourselves." Id. at 122."Yet I had an epiphany of sorts in Davos, listening to the rulers of the flexible realm. 'We' is also a dangerous pronoun to them. They dwell comfortably in entrepreneurial disorder, but fear organized confrontation. They of course fear the resurgence of unions, but become acutely and personally uncomfortable, fidgeting or breaking eye contact or retreating into taking notes, if forced to discuss the people who,in their jargon, are 'left behind.' They know that the great majority of those who toil in the flexible regime are left behind, and of course they regret it. But the flexibility they celebrate does not give. it cannot give, any guidance for the conduct of an ordinary life. The new masters have rejected careers in the old English sense of the word, as pathways along which people can travel; durable and sustained paths of action are foreign territories." "It therefore seemed to me . . . that this regime might at least lose its current hold over the imaginations and sentiments of those down below. I have learned from my family's bitter radical past; if change occurs it happens on the ground, between persons speaking out of inner need, rather than though mass uprisings. What political programs follow from those inner needs, I simply don't know. But I do know a regime which provides human beings no deep reasons to care about one [an]other cannot long preserve its legitimacy." Id. at 147-148.).