Arlie Hochschild – who wrote an article titled “Let Them Eat War” in 2003 accurately predicting that President Bush would use fear of terrorism to manipulate blue collar voters into voting for him, against their own best interests, in the 2004 presidential elections – says in the current Mother Jones:
I’m continually appalled by the Bush administration. But I’m also an optimist. The whole mess we’re in — the trade of butter for guns, clear skies for soot, good will for Abu Ghraib, an open society for a closed one, live soldiers for dead ones — this whole mess could be reversed. It would only take a change of heart among just a few percent of blue-collar voters the next time around. But the change of heart depends on understanding and exposing a certain underlying logic of our present situation — that Bush is manipulating feelings of anguish, fear, anger (especially among those faced with job loss and lower wages) with one hand, while pursuing policies that exacerbate exactly those situations with the other. In my next piece, I’ll be continuing to chip away at that underlying logic, the one I first tried to lay out in “Let Them Eat War” with a modest faith that, at the end of the day, reason will win out.
