Class warfare is smoldering in America — and it's about to catch fire
Key takeaways
- Chamel Abdulkarim, of Highland, California, was charged by federal authorities with arson of a building used in interstate and foreign commerce.
- In Lipset s view, America s egalitarian ideology, rapid upward mobility, and individualism fostered what he called a middle-class outlook among workers.
- Today, as I read the news about Chamel Abdulkarim, a worker who set fire to a warehouse used by a major corporation in Los Angeles, I wondered what Lipset would say.
Why this matters: political developments that affect policy direction and public trust.
Chamel Abdulkarim, of Highland, California, was charged by federal authorities with arson of a building used in interstate and foreign commerce. Abdulkarim is accused of intentionally starting multiple fires at a 1.2 million-square-foot warehouse (Photo by Jeff Gritchen/MediaNews Group/Orange County Register via Getty Images) In 1982, Harvard Professor Seymour Martin Lipset used his presidential address to the American Political Science Association to crow about the absence of working-class radicalism in this country — the kind that had so plagued European nations.
In Lipset s view, America s egalitarian ideology, rapid upward mobility, and individualism fostered what he called a middle-class outlook among workers. The absence of an aristocratic or feudal past, he observed, combined with a history of political democracy prior to industrialization, served to reduce the salience of class-conscious politics and proposals for major structural change.
Today, as I read the news about Chamel Abdulkarim, a worker who set fire to a warehouse used by a major corporation in Los Angeles, I wondered what Lipset would say.