Jim Sleeper, an Obama supporter himself, makes the case against other Obama supporters. The whole thing is worth a read, but I thought this part was particularly provocative.
I fear that too many
young whites with bright prospects have no really serious intention of
redressing the growing inequities which the neoliberal world that employs them
is spawning, not just between themselves and poor blacks on the Southside but,
these days, between blacks and blacks, and women and women, let alone between
cool young whites like themselves and the declasse, lumpy white and Latino
workers all around them.
Not that my young friends defend
wholeheartedly the system in which they're prospering. To their credit, it
makes them uncomfortable. But they grasp at mostly symbolic gestures of a
politics of moral posturing that relieves racial and class guilt and steadies
their moral self-regard with smallish contributions to Obama, an Ivy alum whom
they trust to help those people on the Southside without dragging them too
deeply into it; without reconfiguring how we charter our corporations and
re-construe the private and public investments that employ upscale young whites
and well-behaved non-whites; and certainly without redistributing their own
bright prospects and future prerogatives and second homes.
That's definitely something to chew on.
--Jason Zengerle