aTypical Joe: a gay New Yorker living in the rural South

Thursday, April 05, 2007

What liberal Wal-Mart critics are missing

In his New Yorker piece, Selling Wal-Mart, Jeffrey Goldberg does a fine job of generally skewering the company and in the process demonstrating why, as he phrases it, “there is great mistrust of the press at Wal-Mart headquarters.” Morbo offers a good bullet point list of the piece’s complaints, though I’d say that its larger theme is to wonder how any Democrat, most particularly a liberal Democrat, could, ethically and in good conscience, work at Wal-Mart.

The embodiment of that wonder, held up for ridicule to fine effect, is Leslie Dach, who worked for liberal pols Kennedy and Dukakis (Goldberg helpfully reminds us of the tank ride; Dach, communications director, “...was thousands of miles away in my office at that famous momentâ€Â� ) and the green non-profit National Audubon Society and Environmental Defense Fund. Here’s the last paragraph of the nearly 6,000 word piece:

“It was very smart of Wal-Mart to appoint him to this job,” Kenneth Adelman, the former Reagan Administration arms-control official and one of Dach’s former colleagues at Edelman, said. “He’s brilliant at what he does. He’s a great advocate for Democratic causes.” Each election year, Adelman recalled, he and Dach would stage a mock debate before employees in the Edelman office. “It would always start out seriously, and then get funny,” he said. “I would argue the Republican line, and Leslie played the part of the Democrat.”

Emphasis mine (though it was hardly needed). The fun passage that I, myself, had picked out to highlight for ridicule comes from Wal-Mart’s chief spokeswoman Mona Williams, “a former A. T. & T. executive:”

Wal-Mart’s executives are angry about Democratic attacks on the company. Tovar’s boss, Mona Williams, told me, “Wal-Mart is taking care of the people the Democratic Party says it represents-the poor, the middle class. The Democrats are not taking care of them. We’re like Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society.”

But a funny thing happened on my way to ridicule - I gave it a second thought. I began to think of Wal-Mart from this side, the rural-resident side, of the Wal-Mart divide. With that second thought I realized the Wal-Mart divide is a reflection of the larger, even deeper, mars/venus gulf of culture and experience that divides city and country people. I realized that I live in that divide every day, and that I wish people would start listening to the country-side. Talk with them, not just about them, and certainly not for them.

Country people are complicit in this divide, too. People here hate Atlanta, even as they visit to take in its worldly pleasures and complain that the Atlanta Journal Constitution has canceled delivery to our part of the state (the AJC is to Georgia as the New York Times is to the nation). We’re just not profitable here. And we’re not what urban people imagine rural-life to be.

New Yorkers say they’re “going to the country” when they go to weekend homes in Dutchess or Putnam counties, but country is Sullivan County and New Yorker’s (those from New York City, I mean) don’t go there. Or at least they didn’t when I lived in NYC - city people are dressing up more and more country towns to fit their idealized notions of what country is, so watch out Sullivan county!

With that in mind, let’s parse Mona’s comment. The fact is, the Democrats haven’t done a very good job of delivering on health care or jobs for rural areas or farm policy or poverty programs for rural people. It’s been two years since Christopher Hayes, in How to Turn Your Red State Blue in In These Times, called on progressives to build a movement around credit reform. That idea never gained much traction. Instead we got a criminally venal bankruptcy bill; and we got it with Democratic support.

What did gain traction - or at least plenty of blogger and media buzz - was Tom Schaller’s Whistling Past Dixie suggestion that Democrats should win without the South; focus on the West instead. Its big idea? Turn Southern racism into a “burdensome stone to hang around the Republicans’ neck.” Seriously. From page 18. Wouldn’t a more ethically and morally appropriate Democratic response to Southern racism, given that Democratic complicity ushered in and maintained the Jim Crow South, be to redouble efforts in the South, not write it off as a racist wasteland? Democrats owe as big an apology as any media company, state or corporation that passes a resolution. I haven’t heard one.

As they take back the reigns of power, Progressives best remember:

[P]rogressivism has its own distinctive dangers and defects. Unfortunately, these tend to be less visible from within a progressivist sensibility. They include elitism, paternalism, authoritarianism, naivete, excessive and misplaced respect for the “best and brightest,” isolation from the concerns of ordinary people, an inflated sense of superiority over ordinary people, disdain for popular values, fear of popular rule, confusion of factual and moral expertise, and meritocratic hubris.

Me, I think Wal-Mart has become what GM was when a certain liberal fimmaker came to prominence: past its prime (Goldberg notes, “sales have slowed, and the stock price is stagnant.") and beginning a long slow decline. Liberals will succeed in making the company do this or that, but the big fight is hardly even being fought. That fight, I think, is to reign in corporations in all their many manifestations; to make the corporate entity back into a servant to rather than a dictator of positive social goals.

I remember fondly when Republicans were in the pockets of big corporations, and the Democrats were the party in opposition to that. Now the Republicans are in the pocket of the Religious Right, and Democrats stand in opposition to that. Meanwhile, both are owned and operated by corporations. I used to oppose libertarianism - here it’s sometimes a euphemism for a more socially liberal former Republican - now I’m coming ‘round to a new form of Libertarianism. But for that to work, we have to take our government back. And leave it to the people.

LATER: I’ve changed this post’s title from “Wal-Mart haters” to “Wal-Mart critics.” The change has the benefit of being both less inflammatory and more inclusive.