Haha, I guess this is a fair response, but you're misinterpreting my point. I'll explain. I don't think he "made it up", and I don't want to accuse him of blam

Haha, I guess this is a fair response, but you're misinterpreting my point. I'll explain. I don't think he "made it up", and I don't want to accuse him of blaming somebody, but I don't know how else to put it. In so many words, he basically says that, at the end of the day, the culture he's writing about is riddled with it's own shortcomings and needs to be brought to an end. Whether he alludes to historical economic strife or not (he does some), his ultimate assessment is that it's too late to do anything but save these poor souls. He communicates this idea with a lot of contention, because otherwise he would have been dismissed much sooner. A lot of the issues he writes about are legitimate, but he takes a mistaken turn towards accusing the traditions and personalities of his family. It's not a 2-dimensional issue. Those traditions and parsonalities exist, but they are far more principled than the neoliberal traditions he promotes. And for whatever truth there is to his historical explanations, there is loads more that he avoids. His insistence on attributing present-day tensions to something like "outdatedness" is extremely ignorant. The word for this turn that he takes is just hopelessly congruent with neoliberalism, and, unfortunately, it does serve his agenda quite well. He's got a partnership with a VC who aims to capitalize on techish business deals in the rust belt. Presumably, the VC aims to play savior and ultimately rip a lot of people off.