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2 ‘Middle-class shits’: political apathy and the poetry of Derek Mahon ‘Wonders are many and none is more wonderful than man’ Who has tamed the terrier, trimmed the hedge And grasped the principle of the watering can. Clothes pegs litter the window ledge And the long ships lie in clover; washing lines Shake out white linen over the chalk thanes. Now we are safe from monsters, and the giants Who tore up sods twelve miles by six And hurled them out to sea to become islands Can worry us no more. The sticks And stones that once broke bones will not now harm A
Alberto Garzón: ‘There’s still a lot of work to do among abstainers, like the marginalized people in my home region of Malaga who won’t have a sandwich to eat this Christmas.’ Jean-Luc Mélenchon: ‘Don’t fool yourself Alberto, the poor aren’t going to vote. You must learn from the Latin American experience. You win with the support of the middle classes; once you’re in office, you can reach the marginalized with social policy.’ (Meeting between French new-left leader Jean-Luc Mélenchon and Spanish left-wing leaders, Madrid, January 2015) 1 The rise
early 1920s, about two million Jews had migrated to the United States and the Jewish population in Britain increased from about 60,000 to 300,000, changing the size and character of Anglo-Jewry. ‘It converted’, Schneier Levenberg, the leading intellectual of Poale Zion in Britain, later noted, ‘what was by then an increasingly middle class and religiously latitudinarian community, acculturated to British habits and ideals, into one composed predominantly of proletarian, Yiddish speaking immigrants, mainly Orthodox in religion but with pockets of radical, even
-expanding market driven by rising living standards and a growing population. 12 Between 1947 and 1960 personal disposable income in the United States rose (in real terms) by 17 percent, while the population increased from 141 to 181 million. 13 Middle-class consumers in the United States were able to spend their newfound wealth on a variety of new products, from automobiles to washing machines to television sets (the last of which were present in nine out of ten households by 1960). Part of the growth of a consumer society in postwar America was the emergence of the teenage
legacy of the Third Way is exerting a heavy influence on social democracy’s capacity to respond to crisis. The chapter considers three dimensions to this: first, there is the question of ideology and world-view and particularly the way that social democratic ideology has, since the 1990s, been oriented around market making and the middle-class subject; second, there is the question of institutional change and the privatisations and financialisation of the Swedish model; and, third, an issue that is not dealt with specifically in the A paradigmatic case of social
cultural life of the working- class bettor. Indeed, within working- class communities greyhound tracks were not necessarily the social pariahs that they have often been presented as being by many middle-class MPs, religious groups and anti-gambling associations. Indeed, greyhound tracks offered a variety of experiences and were not the glum and guilt-ridden denizens that many middle-class critics presented them as being. They assumed an important and dominating position within the lives of 124 124 Going to the dogs a relatively small proportion of the working
often reveal a bias through their representations. That is, researchers often reify subcultural participants as resistant and avant garde versus an imagined Mainstream that both researchers and subcultural informants regard as banal and conformist. She further charges that such classifications have a hidden classed and gendered disdain, since many of the subjects of subcultural research tend to be articulate middle-class men, hiding behind a classless subcultural guise. In Thornton’s research of ravers in
Asian subjects. On the Indian subcontinent, across the twentieth century, such principles and presuppositions were first disseminated as ways of approaching social worlds and soon instituted as dimensions of experience and affect within everyday arenas, at the very least middle-class ones. In this scenario, the blueprints of modernization actually distilled the meanings of the modern, articulating an
that tacitly handed the game over to big business and the global ‘super rich’ – and short-changed the key constituents of their respective centre-left political parties: the middle class and 112 Citizenship, republicanism and democracy the working class. This was a huge setback for citizens everywhere, as like it or not, conditions in the United States and Great Britain often set the tone for the world economy. For all the excitement in recent years behind the rise of ‘global civil society’ and the impact of online social networks in inspiring new generations of
Trafalgar Square since the pro-Boer demonstration at the time of the South African war’.3 But if the Progressives had won this fight, they did not win the battle at the polling booth. In 1907 the Unionist-linked Municipal Reform Party took control of local government in the metropolis for the first time. Charles Masterman, a Liberal politician, claimed that the Municipal Reformers’ breakthrough had resulted from their ability to harness class interests. According to Masterman, the suburban middle classes swarmed to the polls ‘in feverish hordes…to vote against a truculent