If complacency with the fairness and contentment of the country was still possible in May 2016, within two years it surely was not. It’s not just Brexit: between spring 2017 and spring 2018, Britain also witnessed Theresa May being confronted by the hard truth of austerity, Corbyn’s electoral surge, the horror of the Grenfell tragedy, and the appalling details of the Windrush scandal. Nevertheless, the shocks of the past three years have provoked overdue curiosity about precarious employment, the housing crisis and the cultural margins, which are rarely dramatic enough to attract media or political attention. This genre is not so developed in the UK, perhaps because a nation smaller than California doesn’t require it as urgently. The question is whether figures such as Summers have been paying any attention. From Thomas Frank’s prescient What’s the Matter With Kansas? (2004) through George Packer’s The Unwinding (2013), to Arlie Russell Hochschild’s Strangers in Their Own Land and the meritocratic sneer of JD Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy (both 2016), plus the heartbreaking photo journalism of Chris Arnade, the fragmentation and private tragedies of middle America have received plenty of reportage and reflection. And yet the literature seeking to uncover the hidden middle America has been growing for some years now, even before Donald Trump’s election provoked panic on the part of elites. Why had this latter-day Jack Kerouac not understood his own country before? Summers explained that “economists like me see the world through the prism of models”. This pioneering spirit yielded such insights as that the centre of the country is sparsely populated and surprisingly oblivious to events on the east and west coasts. Summers, who is not known for cultural or political nuance, reported that he had been on holiday across the US. I n October of last year, the Financial Times published an unwittingly comical op-ed by Larry Summers, the former US treasury secretary.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |