What Liberals Want

Modern manufacturing. Not your grandpa's sweatshop.

by Ruth Sheets

I am always amazed, perhaps shocked, when I read something by Conservatives and Republicans these days.  I think it’s the audacity of their outrageous claims.  This time, it was an article called “Liberal Nostalgics Don’t Understand Jobs of the Future” by Michael Barone.  It appeared in the townhall.com blog on April 23, 2012.

Barone claims that the current administration’s desire to increase manufacturing jobs means that “liberals” want to bring back the old assembly line jobs of the post World War II era.  Because the “liberals” are nostalgic for these jobs they have no idea what the jobs of the future are going to demand.

What a bunch of bull!  Can anyone really believe that “liberals” or anyone else wants to bring back the mind numbing, brain frying repetition of those jobs?  What “liberals” really want are jobs that pay a living wage.  They want jobs working for companies that respect their workers.  They don’t want workers to be driven to put in mega hours under a threat of loss of their livelihood.  They want work that is meaningful.  They would prefer not to be pawns of employers who are addicted to money and power   

In his piece, Barone finds a way to blame past assembly line workers for the near destruction of Chrysler and General Motors.  Admittedly, the unions did make some unreasonable demands, but they were not the cause of the industry’s downfall.  That came as a result of short-sightedness on the part of the guys at the top of the auto companies.  They refused to believe that cheap, easy oil was coming to an end and that what was left would be controlled by countries/cultures that do not like us and our way of life very much.  

Detroit built gas-guzzlers when they should have been working to develop cool small cars that were safe, comfortable, and efficient.  The creative talent working in the auto industry could have managed that and more.  They also had the power of Madison Avenue on their team.  If handled well,  Americans could have been talked into buying almost anything if it was good enough.

Mr. Barone describes the jobs of the future as ones that people will create themselves, I suppose on the model of Steve Jobs or Mark Zuckerbburg.  It is not the “liberals” who don’t get this, it is the Conservatives who put roadblocks in the way of nearly every attempt to make this a reality.  It was not the “liberals who made irrelevant testing the main indicator of student success in school.  It is not the “liberals” who cut research and development setting back efforts to find new directions for producing the jobs of the future.

The “liberals” didn’t cut assistance to help creative people get businesses started.  It’s not the “liberals” who think college is elitist and a waste of time.  It’s the Conservatives who want to take America back to some imagined golden time, (except for the tax rates which they would like to see as close to zero as possible, of course).

I worry that an argument like Mr. Barone’s is so simple that a lot of people will accept it without thinking critically about whether it is true.   

Oh wait, we don’t get to teach that critical thinking stuff or creativity in schools since it’s not on the test.  We “liberals” had better get busy.