>>If Alan Wolfe says that what he is doing is to report on typical
>>views held by affluent white married people who live in American
>>suburbs, i.e., a minority of Americans, no one here will object to
>>his claim, but his claim concerns what most Americans think, as his
>>book title advertises.
>>
>>Yoshie
>
>firstly, as i recall, the title refers not to a claim that the
>nation is united as one nation after all in any sort of substantive
>agreement on issues. nor even that these people are to be understood
>as statistically representative. he, rather, follows those (like
>ehrenreich) who note that these are the people who shape US ideology
>in extremely important ways, albeit in very ordinary everyday ways
>in the act of reproduction as what was gramsci term for people who
>shape hegemonic ideologies?
There is no evidence in your posts for your view that Wolfe offers a perspective that you impute to him. Doug wrote: "Alan Wolfe writes, 'According to the General Social Survey, at no time between 1972 and 1994 did more than 10 percent of the American population classify themselves as either lower class or upper class.' He says this to prove that the rest, 90%, are middle class." Any textual evidence from Wolfe's work that contradicts Doug's judgment here?
>see the book for that literature which suggests that, paradoxically,
>what unites "us" is that probably 90% of USers are liberal
>individualists who believe strongly in tolerance. we might not agree
>substantively on much, but i'll bet you'll have a hard time finding
>any data whatsoever to support the notion that USers don't value
>liberal individualism and liberal tolerance.
In the case of Wolfe, what he says on liberal tolerance & individualism is normative, not just descriptive. His own political preference is to affirm liberalism that casually derogates both the Left & the Right as extremisms. What he calls "morality writ small" -- live and let live -- is _& should be_ the American consensus, he suggests. He wants the reader to think that his interviews reflect (1) what every decent person thinks, (2) how things should be, & (3) how things will be in the foreseeable future; _& to act accordingly_. It's Daniel Bell's _The End of Ideology_ in post-cold-war garb, except Wolfe lacks Bell's subtlety -- e.g., Bell's dialectical intuition that the consensus is boring for restless youths who yearn for a cause in a society that disowns causes, thus anticipating the 60s despite himself:
***** ...The new generation, with no meaningful memory of these old debates, and no secure tradition to build upon, finds itself seeking new purposes within a framework of political society that has rejected, intellectually speaking, the old apocalyptic and chiliastic visions. In the search for a "cause," there is a deep, desperate, almost pathetic anger....But the problem is that the old politico-economic radicalism (pre-occupied with such matters as the socialization of industry) has lost its meaning, while the stultifying aspects of contemporary culture (e.g., television) cannot be redressed in political terms. At the same time, American culture has almost completely accepted the avant-garde, particularly in art, and the older academic styles have been driven out completely. The irony, further, for those who seek "causes" is that the workers, whose grievances were once the driving energy for social change, are more satisfied with the society than the intellectuals. The workers have not achieved utopia, but their expectations were less than those of the intellectuals, and the gains correspondingly larger.)....
<http://wsrv.clas.virginia.edu/~tsawyer/DRBR/bell-end.html> *****
Bell is one of the unacknowledged fathers of post-modernism, with its theme of the "betrayal of the working class" and all -- thus Bell is rather interesting as an ideological specimen. In contrast, Wolfe is just a boring booster of proverbial suburbia.
Perhaps you don't recognize Wolfe's political intervention as such because liberalism to you isn't prescriptive because of its allegedly contentless proceduralism. Political content, however, dwells in procedures: "Liberty, Equality, Property, & Bentham."
Yoshie