From a recent Chomsky interview:
Each time labor has been attacked — and as I said, in the 1920s the labor movement was practically destroyed—popular efforts were able to reconstitute it. That can happen again. It’s not going to be easy. There are institutional barriers, ideological barriers, cultural barriers.
One big problem is that the white working class has been pretty much abandoned by the political system.
The Democrats don’t even try to organize them anymore.
The Republicans claim to do it; they get most of the vote, but they do it on non-economic issues, on non-labor issues. They often try to mobilize them on the grounds of issues steeped in racism and sexism and so on, and here the liberal policies of the 1960s had a harmful effect because of some of the ways in which they were carried out.
There are some pretty good studies of this. Take busing to integrate schools. In principle, it made some sense, if you wanted to try to overcome segregated schools. Obviously, it didn’t work. Schools are probably more segregated now for all kinds of reasons, but the way it was originally done undermined class solidarity.
For example, in Boston there was a program for integrating the schools through busing, but the way it worked was restricted to urban Boston, downtown Boston. So black kids were sent to the Irish neighborhoods and conversely, but the suburbs were left out. The suburbs are more affluent, professional and so on, so they were kind of out of it.
Well, what happens when you send black kids into an Irish neighborhood? What happens when some Irish telephone linemen who have worked all their lives finally got enough money to buy small houses in a neighborhood where they want to send their kids to the local school and cheer for the local football team and have a community, and so on?
All of a sudden, some of their kids are being sent out, and black kids are coming in. How do you think at least some of these guys will feel? At least some end up being racists. The suburbs are out of it, so they can cluck their tongues about how racist everyone is elsewhere, and that kind of pattern was carried out all over the country.”
It was actually a lot worse than that. White kids were regularly harassed, robbed and beat up by Blacks in both their own schools where Blacks were bused in and in the Black schools where the Whites were sent. I am not necessarily opposed to busing Black kids to White schools, but I am dead set against busing White kids against their will to Black schools. Even the former is not done anymore. The whole idea seems a waste of time, energy, money and even gasoline!
I have seen several White men aged 22-45 or so who went through education in an integrated school where apparently Blacks were bused in. The terrible behavior of the Black kids left a mark on them, and they are now permanent hardcore White racists. Often these effects stem all the way back to junior high and high school. It is true these are your formative years, and things that happen to you in these years have a great effect on you for the rest of your life, including in the formation of your views, including political views.
It’s sad when someone is a racist at age 45 due to what happened to them when they were 12 or 16, but that’s why it goes with human beings. We are not logical computing machines, we are emotional animals of flesh and blood like those dogs and cats running around your house. Screw logic. Logic doesn’t enter into much human thinking. Emotion does, and emotion is often less than reasonable.
I think it is about time we on the Left admit how bad we blew it back then with some of our lofty pie in the sky ideals. More importantly, the whole thing has been a massive failure, as the schools are more segregated than ever. So in addition to being a bad idea, it didn’t even work! Total fail. Not only did we create millions of new racists, we also created a lot of new rightwing Whites who hate the Left and are determined to vote for the forseeable future. Many of them still hate us on the Left for “sucking up to the non-Whites” and “hating White people.”