“Notes” in “Virtue Hoarders”
Notes
Introduction
Steve Fraser, The Age of Acquiescence: The Life and Death of American Resistance to Organized Wealth and Power (New York: Basic Books, 2015).
Michael Pollan’s account in The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals (New York: Penguin 2006) of People’s Park, food co-ops, and the organic food industry tells a fascinating part of the story of countercultural aspirations.
Gabriel Winant, “Professional Managerial Chasm,” n+1, October 19, 2019, https://nplusonemag.com/online-only/online-only/professional-managerial-chasm/.
For more on this topic, see Leo Krapp and Catherine Liu, “Meritocracy Agonistes,” Damage Magazine, September 1, 2020, https://damagemag.com/2020/08/31/meritocracy-agonistes/.
John Ehrenreich and Barbara Ehrenreich, “The Professional-Managerial Class,” in Between Labor and Monopoly Capital, ed. Pat Walker, 5–48 (Boston: South End Press, 1979), originally published as “The New Left and the Professional-Managerial Class,” Radical America 11, no. 3 (1977).
Julius Krein, “The Real Class War,” American Affairs 3, no. 4 (2019), https://americanaffairsjournal.org/2019/11/the-real-class-war/.
Amber Frost, “The Characterless Opportunism of the Managerial Class,” American Affairs 3, no. 4 (2019), https://americanaffairsjournal.org/2019/11/the-characterless-opportunism-of-the-managerial-class/.
To strengthen the working class in its struggle for legitimacy against the domination of what Lind calls the managerial elites, he argues for the restoration of working-class power in its historic forms: against economic domination, the guild would represent working-class interests; the ward would represent working-class interests in the realms of government and culture—“the congregation would exercise countervailing power on behalf of working-class citizens against media elites and overclass academic elites.” Michael Lind, The New Class War: Saving Democracy from the Managerial Elite (New York: Penguin Portfolio, 2020), 136.
See Adolph Reed’s banning by the New York Democratic Socialists of America. Michael Powell, “A Black Marxist Scholar Wanted to Talk about Race: It Ignited a Fury,” New York Times, August 14, 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/14/us/adolph-reed-controversy.html.
Ehrenreich and Ehrenreich, “Professional-Managerial Class.”
Siegfried Kracauer, The Salaried Masses: Duty and Distraction in Weimar Germany, trans. Quentin Hoare (London: Verso, 1998); C. Wright Mills, White Collar: The American Middle Classes (London: Oxford University Press, 2002); Christopher Lasch, The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in an Age of Diminishing Expectations (New York: W. W. Norton, 2018).
Barbara Ehrenreich, Fear of Falling: The Inner Life of the Middle Class (New York: Twelve, 2020).
Bret Easton Ellis, American Psycho (New York: Vintage, 1991).
Fraser, Age of Acquiescence, 211.
Culture of poverty is a controversial and highly criticized term, coined by anthropologist Oscar Lewis in his study of an impoverished family in Mexico City called Children of Sanchez (New York: Vintage, 2011). Daniel Moynihan’s “The Negro Family: The Case for National Action” (March 1965) also focused on family and culture as the sources of immiseration. https://www.dol.gov/general/aboutdol/history/webid-moynihan.
“Transgressing” the Boundaries of Professionalism
Alan Sokal, “Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity,” Social Text 46/47 (1996): 217–52, https://physics.nyu.edu/faculty/sokal/transgress_v2/transgress_v2_singlefile.html.
https://physics.nyu.edu/faculty/sokal/SocialText_reply_LF.pdf.
Elizabeth Warren and Teresa A. Sullivan, The Fragile Middle Class: Americans in Debt (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2001).
John Cassidy offers a short and comprehensive account of the global political fallout of the 2008 crisis in the New Yorker on the tenth anniversary of the crash, “The Real Cost of the 2008 Financial Crisis,” https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/09/17/the-real-cost-of-the-2008-financial-crisis. See also Adam Tooze, Crashed: How a Decade of Financial Crises Changed the World (New York: Penguin, 2018).
For an account of how obscure debt instruments were created and proliferated before the crisis of 2008, read Gillian Tett’s Fool’s Gold: The Inside Story of J.P. Morgan and How Wall Street Greed Corrupted Its Bold Dream and Created a Financial Catastrophe (New York: Free Press, 2010). For a more character-driven version of the crash, see Michael Lewis’s The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine (New York: W. W. Norton, 2010) and Adam McKay’s film of the same name starring Christian Bale.
Paul Kari, “A Decade after the Housing Crisis, Foreclosures Still Haunt Homeowners,” https://www.marketwatch.com/story/a-decade-after-the-housing-crisis-foreclosures-still-haunt-homeowners-2018-09-27.
John Ehrenreich and Barbara Ehrenreich, Death of a Yuppie Dream: The Rise and Fall of the Professional Managerial Class (New York: Rosa Luxembourg Stiftung, 2013), http://www.rosalux-nyc.org/wp-content/files_mf/ehrenreich_death_of_a_yuppie_dream90.pdf.
Ehrenreich and Ehrenreich, 11.
Ruth Milkman, Stephanie Luce, and Penny Lewis, “Changing the Subject: A Bottom Up Account of Occupy Wall Street in New York City,” https://www.researchgate.net/publication/268126261_Changing_The_Subject_Occupy_Wall_Street's_Achievements_and_Prospects_In_Comparative_Perspective.
Milkman, Luce, and Lewis, 25.
Ferdinand de Saussure, Course in General Linguistics, 10th ed., trans. Roy Harris (Peru, Ill.: Open Court Editions, 2011).
Saussure.
Angela Nagle, Kill All Normies: On Line Culture Wars from 4Chan and Tumblr to Trump and the Alt-Right (London: Zero Books, 2017).
Gabriella Coleman, Hacker, Hoaxer, Whistleblower, Spy: The Many Faces of Anonymous (London: Verso, 2014).
For an overview of the Project and the responses it evoked, see https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/08/14/magazine/1619-america-slavery.html; https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/01/1619-project-new-york-times-wilentz/605152/; https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2019/09/06/1619-s06.html?mod=article_inline.
Tom Mackaman and David North, “The New York Times and Nikole Hannah-Jones Abandon Key Claims of the 1619 Project,” World Socialist Website, September 22, 2020, https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2020/09/22/1619-s22.html.
Richard Sennett and Jonathan Cobb, The Hidden Injuries of Class (New York: W. W. Norton, 1972).
The PMC Has Children
Paula Fass, The End of American Childhood: A History of Parenting from Life on the Frontier to the Managed Child (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2016), 222–23.
Fass, 222.
Elizabeth Warren and Amalia Warren Tyagi, The Two Income Trap: Why Middle Class Families Are (Still) Going Broke (New York: Basic Books, 2016).
Judith Warner, Perfect Madness: Motherhood in the Age of Anxiety (New York: Penguin, 2004).
Megan Erickson Kilpatrick, Class War: The Privatization of Childhood (London: Verso, 2015).
Judith Sealander, The Failed Century of the Child: Governing America’s Young in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003).
Benjamin Spock, Dr. Spock’s Baby and Childcare, 9th ed. (New York: Pocket Books, 2011).
Benjamin Spock, Dr. Spock’s “The First Two Years” (New York: Pocket Books, 2001).
Jefferson Cowie, Stayin’ Alive: The 1970s and the Last Days of the Working Class (New York: New Press, 2010), and Jennifer Silva, Coming Up Short: Working Class Adulthood in an Age of Uncertainty (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013).
Amy Chua and Jed Rubenfeld, The Triple Package: How Three Unlikely Traits Explain the Rise and Fall of Cultural Groups in America (New York: Penguin, 2015).
Amy Chua, Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother (New York: Penguin, 2011).
Amy Chua, “Why Chinese Mothers Are Superior,” Wall Street Journal, January 8, 2011, https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052748704111504576059713528698754.
Mihir Zaveri, “Yale Law Professor Is Suspended after Sexual Harassment Inquiry,” New York Times, August 24, 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/26/nyregion/jed-rubenfeld-yale.html.
Julia Brown, “Law Students Demand Rubenfeld’s Permanent Removal, Greater Transparency,” Yale Daily News, October 12, 2020, https://yaledailynews.com/blog/2020/10/12/law-students-demand-rubenfelds-permanent-removal-greater-transparency/.
The Varsity Blues case involved Rick Singer, college counselor to the wealthy, including actors, heiresses, and captains of industry, who all paid him to doctor test results and athletic records to gain admission for their less-than-successful progeny. For a brief summary of the college admissions scandals, see https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/12/us/college-admissions-cheating-scandal.html.
Caroline Ratcliffe, Child Poverty and Adult Success (Washington, D.C.: Urban Institute, September 2015), https://www.urban.org/sites/default/files/publication/65766/2000369-Child-Poverty-and-Adult-Success.pdf.
D. W. Winnicott, Playing and Reality (New York: Basic Books, 1971). See also Winnicott, “Transitional Objects and Transitional Phenomena,” International Journal of Psychoanalysis 34 (1953): 89–97.
D. W. Winnicott, The Child, the Family and the Outside World (Cambridge, Mass.: Perseus, 1984), 10.
The PMC Reads a Book
“Transcript: Obama on What Books Mean to Him,” New York Times, January 16, 2017, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/16/books/transcript-president-obama-on-what-books-mean-to-him.html.
“‘Mockingbird’ Moments: ‘Scout, Atticus and Boo,’” NPR, https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=128387104.
Diane Ravitch, The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice Are Undermining Education (New York: Basic Books, 2011); Ravitch, Reign of Error: The Hoax of the Privatization Movement and the Danger to America’s Public Schools (New York: Vintage, 2014); Kilpatrick, Class War.
Zacarhy B. Wolf, “Why Teachers Strikes Are Touching Every Part of America,” CNN, February 23, 2019, https://edition.cnn.com/2019/02/23/politics/teacher-strikes-politics/index.html.
William E. Schmidt, “Arkansas Skills Test,” New York Times, January 17, 1984.
Gary W. Ritter, Education Reform in Arkansas: Past and Present. Reforming Education in Arkansas: Recommendations from the Koret Task Force (Stanford, Calif.: Hoover Institution Press, 2005), http://www.korettaskforce.org/books/arkansas/27.pdf.
Adam Richardson, “Where No Child Left Behind Went Wrong,” Harvard Business Review, October 27, 2011, https://hbr.org/2011/10/where-no-child-left-behind-wen.
“Child Poverty in America 2017: National Analysis,” Children’s Defense Fund, https://www.childrensdefense.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/09/Child-Poverty-in-America-2017-National-Fact-Sheet.pdf. According to a recent study by the Brookings Institution, for the 16 percent of American children living in poverty, COVID-19 has escalated the emotional damage and educational deprivation from pandemic-exacerbated financial, food, and housing insecurity. Lisa A. Gennetian and Kathy Hirsh-Pasek, “Where’s the Rallying Cry: America’s Children Are Unequally Prepared to Absorb the Impact of COVID-19,” Brookings Institution, May 13, 2020, https://www.brookings.edu/blog/education-plus-development/2020/05/13/wheres-the-rallying-cry-americas-children-are-unequally-prepared-to-absorb-the-impacts-of-covid-19/.
Robin Winks, Cloak and Gown: Scholars in the Secret War (New York: Morrow, 1987); Jefferson Morely, Ghost: The Secret Life of CIA Spymaster James Jesus Angleton (New York: St. Martin’s, 2018).
https://www.thoughtco.com/who-really-receives-welfare-41265.
See Richard Fording and Sanford Schram, “The Welfare Reform Disaster,” Jacobin, August 28, 2016, https://prospect.org/features/low-wages-add/.
July 2015, Kakutani reviews Go Set a Watchman.
Linda Gordon, “Broadside for the Trump Era: The Ku Klux Klan of the 1920s,” March 14, 2018, https://www.versobooks.com/blogs/3688-broadside-for-the-trump-era-the-ku-klux-klan-of-the-1920s.
Ann Case and Angus Deaton, Deaths of Despair and the Future of Capitalism (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2020).
The PMC Has Sex
Jefferson Cowie, Stayin’ Alive: The Last Days of the Working Class (New York: New Press, 2012).
Amber Frost, “The Trouble with the Trauma Industry,” Baffler, no. 31 (June 2016), https://thebaffler.com/salvos/confession-booth-frost.
Kali Hays, “Magazine Ad Revenue Continues to Decline Despite Some Audience Growth,” WWD, July 27, 2019, https://wwd.com/business-news/media/magazines-ad-revenue-continues-decline-despite-some-audience-growth-1203224173/.
Sheila Coronel, Steve Coll, and Derek Kravitz, “Rolling Stone and UVA: The Columbia University Graduate School Report: An Anatomy of Journalistic Failure,” https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-news/rolling-stone-and-uva-the-columbia-university-graduate-school-of-journalism-report-44930/.
Lucia Graves, “Five Years On, the Lessons from the Rolling Stone Rape Story,” Guardian, December 29, 2019, https://www.theguardian.com/society/2019/dec/29/rolling-stone-rape-story-uva-five-years.
Laura Kipnis, Unwanted Advances: Sexual Paranoia Comes to Campus (New York: HarperCollins, 2017).
Laura Kipnis, “Sexual Paranoia Strikes Academe,” Chronicle of Higher Education, February 27, 2015, https://www.chronicle.com/article/Sexual-Paranoia-Strikes/190351, and Kipnis, “My Title IX Inquisition,” Chronicle of Higher Education, May 29, 2015.
Kipnis, Unwanted Advances.
Gabrielle Moss, “Emma Sulkowicz’s Plan to Resist Trump,” Bustle, February 7, 2017, https://www.bustle.com/p/heres-how-emma-sulkowicz-the-columbia-mattress-artist-plans-to-resist-trump-34456.
Sylvie McNamara, “Did Emma Sulkowicz Get Redpilled?,” Cut, October 28, 2019, https://www.thecut.com/2019/10/did-emma-sulkowicz-mattress-performance-get-redpilled.html.
Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey, She Said: Breaking the Sexual Harassment Story That Launched a Movement (New York: Penguin, 2019).
We use cookies to analyze our traffic. Please decide if you are willing to accept cookies from our website. You can change this setting anytime in Privacy Settings.