Mad Dog has been rapt lately, over Mark Mazower's description ("Dark Continent") of Stalin's effort to bring the Soviet Union into the industrial age by moving peasants, the masses of Russians and Ukrainians, off the farms and into the factories. Stalin was clear eyed enough to see that his country was "ten to one hundred years behind" in industrialization, and that it was vulnerable to invasion and subjugation until and unless it could build factories, and their products--airplanes, trains, munitions, telegraphy and telephone wires--at a scale to compete with rearming Germany, France and the rest of Europe, not to mention Japan and the United States.
As Lenin had before him, Stalin realized that achieving the ultimate communist goal of a classless society, a cooperative rather than competitive society could not be achieved in a single bound, and he was willing to allow a certain amount of private enterprise and private property to boost production and to move toward massive industrialization. If an elite class of technocrats, intellectuals and scientists emerged briefly to get to that Promised Land, he was practical enough to allow that to happen, at least in the short run, to gain long term goals. He did not allow ideology to distract him from his priorities.
Putting down Mazower's book, Mad Dog tuned into the PBS Newshour last night, and was fascinated to see a typically excellent Paul Solman story about a community college in North Carolina which was trying to expand its programs for educating young people in the trades--plumbing, machinists, construction, carpentry, auto mechanics, electricians, HVAC--and he watched fascinated as the head of the local chamber of commerce said that what was dragging down growth in the Durham, N.C. area was the dearth of trained workers. Investors who wanted to build a new furniture factory in town needed workers who could use the computer driven lathes and machinery. Home builders, developers of "mixed use" construction projects needed workers who can put up the walls, wire, provide plumbing.
What is needed in America right now is not a good five cent cigar or more college graduates with B.A.'s in English or medieval history but tradesmen, trained machinists, people who can build things, the president of the community college said.
Mad Dog found himself nodding along. Like the Soviet leaders of the past, community success depended on seeing the need and filling it. You want industry, you need trained workers. And industry cannot or will not take on the task of teaching a population to read and write and to tie its shoes and to do sums and to use a ruler. Industry wants all that stuff provided so it can do what it knows how to do.
Much as Mad Dog loved Obama, he was disquieted by Obama's insistence that the way into the future ran only through college. In Obama's case, of course, success had in fact run through college. The son of a single mother of modest means, going to Columbia, an Ivy League college led to Harvard Law and he could catapult from the untouchable class to the upper class in a matter of seven years.
But that story would not necessarily work for the White son of the Nebraska farmer or for the Ohio steelworker who just got laid off.
As Portsmouth (NH) mayor Deaglan McEachern once asked, "How many of you in this audience today, raise your hand, could call a plumber or an electrician today and expect to see one show up within the week?" And he went on to add, "Plumbers, electricians, carpenters--these are workers who cannot be outsourced to China. We need them here, present and available."
So Obama and the Democrats were off trying to get everyone a B.A. degree and that struck many folks in Red States as an insult, not to mention impractical.
And here, on PBS Newshour, were folks trying to solve the problem. And the President of the community college saw something in the demographics which he thought was part of the problem: No women were applying for spots in the trades training programs. His college was missing out on half the population when it came to filling spots in his trades program.
There may be many explanations for this absence of women, but one of them is not that women cannot do these jobs.
Mad Dog worked with a woman who was his medical assistant, making around $25,000 a year and he was surprised to learn she had graduated from the Lawrence Vocational Technical high school where she had learned HVAC skills, but after two years in the trade she told Mad Dog she got driven out by men who didn't want any women around, doing their male jobs. She had given up a job which paid three times what she was making as a medical assistant.
And here was the guy in North Carolina trying to provide a stream of women to the trades. But he was told by Trump officials he could apply for funding to recruit and train students but he had to eliminate the word "women" for his "Program for Recruiting and Teaching Women for the Trades" application.
He had found a private group of women entrepreneurs who wanted to funnel women to his program, but their application for federal funds was rejected because they wrote they were aiming to provide tradecraft training to "women and people of nonbinary genders." Strike out that language and reapply," they were told.
And Mad Dog felt this slightly sea sick feeling rising within him--he found himself agreeing with the Trump MAGA mob on this one, which is disorienting and vertiginous.
Sure, go out and recruit women, and people who are non binary, but not because they are women or non binary. Recruit them because they can do the job and you are interested in anyone who can do the job, not especially women or non binary folks.
Women and non binary people will either be smart enough to see an opportunity for a career or they won't, but they shouldn't be encouraged, trained or hired for the irrelevant reason of their gender.
You might want to address the problems they will face once they are trained up for a male dominated profession, but the medical profession and legal profession have coped with this, and now more than half of medical school places are filled with women and not because they were recruited as women.
So we had the practical problem of getting more people into trades being contaminated with the problem of getting women and non binary people a benefit.
Once again, the success of the MAGA crowd may not derive from their better argument but from the weakness of their opposition's argument.
Not that long ago, a woman began her remarks to the local Hampton Democrats meeting with "My name is Sheila ___. My pronouns are she/her."
It was all Mad Dog could do to not erupt out of his chair and scream, "I don't care what your friggin pronouns are! My pronouns are 'Who Cares?" Luckily, for all involved and for the decorum of the meeting, which always teeters on the fractious, Mad Dog suffered a well aimed elbow into his ribs by his ever alert partner in crime, with whom he canvasses neighborhoods looking for voters every election cycle. She knew what Mad Dog springing to his feet would mean and she brought him down decisively.
Looking forward to the 2026 elections, maybe the Democratic Party ought to take a good look at itself and its priorities. Maybe cleaving to insistence on diversity is not the right thing to do. If diversity happens, wonderful. Should people be seen as equal before the law and the government? Of course. But should that result be the reason for admission into job training programs or universities?
Maybe the rotten core of the Party is that blindness to what really matters.
CODA:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=529yhXKDVFE
