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As a progressive activist, I am dismayed at the election of Ferdinand Marcos Jr., son of the former dictator, by a landslide in the recent Philippine presidential election. But as a sociologist, I can understand why.

The vote for Duterte and the even larger vote for Marcos were propelled by widespread resentment at the persistence of gross inequality.

I am not referring to the malfunction, intended or unintended, of 1,000-plus voting machines. I am not alluding to the massive release of billions of pesos for vote buying that made the 2022 elections one of the dirtiest in recent years. Nor do I have in mind the decade-long online campaign of disinformation that transmogrified the nightmare years of martial law during the senior Marcos's rule into a "golden age."

Undoubtedly, each of these factors played a role in the electoral result. But 31 million plus votes59 percent of the electorateis simply too massive to attribute to them alone.

The truth is the Marcos victory was largely a democratic outcome in the narrow electoral sense. The challenge for progressives is to understand why a runaway majority of the Philippine electorate voted to bring an unrepentant, thieving family back to power after 36 years.

How could democracy produce such a wayward outcome?

Illiberalism Is Popular

No matter how slick or sophisticated the internet campaign was, it would have made little impact had there not already been a receptive audience for it.

While the Marcos revisionist message also drew support from among the middle and upper classes, that audience was in absolute numbers largely working class. It was also a largely youth audience, more than half of whom were either small children during the late martial law period or born after the 1986 uprising that ousted Marcosbetter known as the "EDSA Revolution."

That audience had no direct experience of the Marcos years. But what they had a direct experience of was the gap between the extravagant rhetoric of democratic restoration and a just and egalitarian future of the EDSA Uprising and the hard realities of continuing inequality and poverty and frustration of the last 36 years.

That gap can be called the "hypocrisy gap," and it's one that created greater and greater resentment every year the EDSA establishment celebrated the uprising on February 25 or mourned the imposition of martial law on September 21. Seen from this angle, the Marcos vote can be interpreted as being largely a protest vote that first surfaced in a dramatic fashion in the 2016 elections that propelled Rodrigo Duterte to the presidency.

Though probably inchoate and diffuse at the level of conscious motivation, the vote for Duterte and the even larger vote for Marcos were propelled by widespread resentment at the persistence of gross inequality in a country where less than 5 percent of the population corners over 50 percent of the wealth. It was a protest against the extreme poverty that engulfs 25 percent of the people and the poverty, broadly defined, that has about 40 percent of them in its clutches.

Against the loss of decent jobs and livelihoods owing to the destruction of our manufacturing sector and our agriculture by the policies imposed on us by the World Bank, International Monetary Fund, World Trade Organization, and the United States.

Against the despair and cynicism that engulf the youth of the working masses who grow up in a society where they learn that the only way to get a decent job that allows you to get ahead in life is to go abroad.

Against the daily blows to one's dignity inflicted by a rotten public transport system in a country where 95 percent of the population doesn't own a car.

These are the conditions that most working class voters experienced directly, not the horrors of the Marcos period, and their subjective resentment primed them for the seductive appeals of a return to a fictive "Golden Age."

In the presidential elections, the full force of this resentment against the EDSA status quo was directed at Marcos's main opponent, Vice President Leni Robredo. Unfairly, since she is a woman of great personal integrity.

The problem is that in the eyes of the marginalized and the poor that went for Marcos, Robredo was not able to separate her image from its associations with the Liberal Party, the conservative neoliberal Makati Business Club, the family of the assassinated Benigno Aquino, Jr., the double standards on corruption that rendered Benigno Aquino III's "where there is no corruption, there is no poverty" slogan an object of ridicule, andabove all with the devastating failure of the 36 year old EDSA Republic to deliver.

The rhetoric of "good governance" may have resonated with Robredo's middle class and elite base, but for the masa (masses) it smacked of the same old hypocrisy. Good governance or "tapat na papamalakad" sounded in their ears much like the Liberals' painting themselves as the "gente decente" or "decent people" that led to their rout in the 2016 elections and the ascendancy of Rodrigo Duterte.

Moreover, the Marcos base was not a passive, inert mass. Fed with lies by the Marcos troll machinery, a very large number of them eagerly battled on the internet with the Robredo camp, the media, historians, the leftwith all those that dared to question their certainties. They plastered the comment sections of news sites with pro-Marcos propaganda, much of it memes either glorifying Marcos or unfairly satirizing Robredo.

Generational Rebellion

This protest against the EDSA Republic had a generational component.

Now, it is not unusual that a new generation sets itself against that which the old generation holds dear. But it is usually the case that the younger generation rebels in the service of a vision of the future, of a more just order of things.

What was unusual with the millennial and Gen Z generations of the working masses was that they were not inspired by a vision of the future but by a fabricated image of the pastthe persuasiveness of which was enhanced by what sociologists like Nicole Curato have called the "toxic positivity" of Marcos Junior's online persona. He was reconstructed by cybersurgery to come across as a normal, indeed benign, fellow who simply wanted the best for everyone.

From the French Revolution to the Philippine Revolution to the Chinese Revolution to the global anti-war movement of the 1960's to the First Quarter Storm, it was the left that usually offered the vision that youth latched on to to express their generational rebellion.

Unfortunately, in the case of the Philippines, the left has simply been unable to offer that dream of a future order worth fighting for. Ever since it failed to influence the course of events in 1986 by assuming the role of bystander during the EDSA Uprising, the left has failed to recapture the dynamism that made it so attractive to youth during martial law.

The left's decision to deliberately sideline itself during the EDSA Uprising led to the splintering of the progressive movement in the early 1990s. Moreover, socialism, which had served as the beacon for generations since the late 19th century, was badly tarnished by the collapse of the centralized socialist bureaucracies in Eastern Europe.

But perhaps most damaging was a failure of political imagination. The left failed to offer an attractive alternative to the neoliberal order that reigned from the late 1980s on, with its presence on the national scene being reduced to a voice yapping at the failures and abuses of successive administrations.

This failure of vision was coupled with the incapacity to come up with a discourse that would capture and express people's deepest needs, with its continued reliance on stilted, formulaic phrases from the 1970s that simply came across as noise in the new era. There was also the continuing influence of a "vanguardist" mass organizing strategy that might have been appropriate under a dictatorship but was disconnected from people's desire for genuine participation in a more open democratic system.

The times called for Gramsci, but much of the left here stuck with Lenin.

This vanguardism in mass organizing was coupled, paradoxically, with an electoral strategy that de-emphasized class rhetoric, threw overboard practically all references to socialism, and satisfied itself with being a mini partner in elections with contending factions of the capitalist elite. To be sure, one cannot overemphasize significant state repression exercised against some sectors of the left, but what was decisive was the perception that the left was irrelevant or, worse, a nuisance by large sectors of the population as memories of its heroic role during martial law faded away.

Nature abhors a vacuum, as they say, and when it came to capturing the generational energy of working class youth in the late EDSA period, that vacuum was filled by the Marcos revisionist myth.

The Coming Instability

This is the history against which the 2016 and 2022 elections unfolded. But the great thing about history is that it is open-ended and to a great extent indeterminate.

As one philosopher observed, women and men make history, but not under conditions of their own choosing. The ruling elite may strive for control of where society is headed, but this is often frustrated by the emergence of contradictions that create the space for the subordinate sectors to intervene and influence the direction of history.

The Marcos-Duterte camp is currently gloating behind the faade of calls for "burying the hatchet," and we should expect this froth to overflow in the period leading up to June 30. Beginning that date, when it formally assumes power, reality will catch up with this gang.

The Marcos-Duterte alliance, or what is now the circle of multiple political dynasties around the Marcos-Duterte axis, is a connivance of convenience among powerful families. Like most alliances of this type, which are built purely on the sharing of spoils, it will prove to be very unstable.

One would not be surprised if after a year, the Marcoses and Dutertes will be at each other's throatssomething that might be foreshadowed by Vice President-elect Sara Duterte's being denied the powerful post of chief of the Department of National Defense and given instead the relatively powerless position of Education Secretary.

This inevitable struggle for power will unfold against a backdrop of millions realizing they have not been led to the promised land of milk and honey and the 20 pesos per kilo of rice, disarray in a business sector that still has memories of the crony capitalism of the Marcos Sr. years, and splits in a military that will have to work overtime to contain the instability triggered by the return of a controversial dynasty that the military itselfor a faction of whichcontributed to overthrowing in 1986.

But probably the most important element in this volatile scenario is a large sector, indeed millions, who are determined not to provide the slightest legitimacy to a gang that have cheated and lied and stolen and bribed their way to power.

In voting for Marcos, 31 million people voted for six years of instability. That is unfortunate. But that is also the silver lining in this otherwise bleak scenario. One of the world's most successful organizers of change observed, "There is great disorder under the Heavens but, hey guys, the situation is excellent."

The inevitable crises of the Marcos-Duterte regime offer opportunities to organize for an alternative future, and this time we Filipino progressives better get it right.

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Opinion | Progressives Need to Understand Why the Son of a Hated Dictator Won the Philippine Election - Common Dreams

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One of the more notable aspects of the otherwise sleepy Ontario provincial election has been the endorsements announced by labour unions.

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While it was once typical to see the NDP dominate on this front, incumbent Premier Doug Fords Ontario Progressive Conservative party is elbowing in.

This past week, the PCs sent out a release celebrating how the thumbs up they received from the Ontario Pipe Trades Council brings to six the number of unions that have endorsed their re-election. (Others include the IBEW Construction Council of Ontario and the International Brotherhood of Boilermakers).

While the NDP still got the nod from the much more activist Ontario Federation of Labour as well as the Ontario Public Service Employees Union, theres no spinning this trendline as positive for them. None of the six unions endorsing the Ontario PCs this time around did so during the last election in 2018.

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A lot of this support can be explained by specific Ontario policies on the file that labour minister Monte McNaughton has focused on this past term. But its also part of a broader phenomenon of the progressive left becoming out-of-touch with the working-class and blue collar voters who used to form a significant chunk of their voter base.

This isnt a phenomenon specific to Ontario either. Its currently a big focus for American political strategists both those on the right who want to woo over even more blue collar votes and Democrats who want to get back some of that common mans touch that Bill Clinton was known for.

The Left has lost the white working class and is bleeding working class people of color at a rate no one expected, writes Jason Nichols, senior lecturer in the African-American Studies department at the University of Maryland College Park, in a recent Newsweek op-ed.

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Nichols says vaccine mandates and pandemic school closures have played a role in this voter migration. He argues that while there are no quick fixes to this lagging support for progressives it is very possible to address specific racial justice issues and simultaneously address the issues of working people of all backgrounds.

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While there are some progressive activists and politicians who seem to want to make almost everything about race (and gender and sexuality), often in an acrimonious way, it could just be that during these challenging economic times voters of all backgrounds are more interested in coming together to find solutions than being pushed further apart by identity politics.

This battle is now playing out in real time in the Ohio Senate race that pits relative newcomer Republican J.D. Vance against longstanding Democratic Congressman Tim Ryan.

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As a recent Washington Post story explains: [Ryan] will try to separate himself from those aspects of the Democratic Party that have alienated working-class voters. Beyond the issue of crime and funding the police, he will highlight problems on the border and the issue of immigration. He will run hard against China and free trade pacts generally.

The emphasis on woke politics in left-leaning circles has clearly seen them increasingly move away from the everyday reality of voters of all backgrounds. Theyre now being punished in the polls and ballot box because of it.

If your primary motivations as a voter are identity politics and climate alarmism, the left still has a lot to offer you. But if youre more focused on the cost of living, jobs, infrastructure and good schools, the advantage now goes to right-leaning politicians. As the economic situation worsens, this will only prove more so.

The big question in the months and years ahead is whether progressives will realize theyre out of touch and course correct, or choose to stay on the same path.

Check out the Postmedia podcast Full Comment with Anthony Furey where youll find engaging feature conversations with interesting Canadians, including recent episodes with Conservative leadership candidates Pierre Poilievre, Leslyn Lewis and Roman Baber.

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From our newsroom to your inbox at noon, the latest headlines, stories, opinion and photos from the Toronto Sun.

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FUREY: Progressives keep bleeding support from the working class - Toronto Sun

Mayor Eric Adams plan to save accelerated education in New York City from progressive critics begins with students like Cassy Thimes daughter: a Black second-grader who would thrive in a gifted classroom that today includes few kids of color.

Shes a top student and a gifted program will give her a more rigorous education and push her to excel, said Thime, who has a doctorate in education and lives in Queens. Now she has classmates who cant even read.

Adams, who took office in January, is diving headfirst into a controversy over academically selective schools thats dividing communities from San Francisco to Fairfax County, Va.

New Yorks second Black mayor rejects the criticism that accelerated learning is racist and must be dismantled because of the low number of students of color who qualify. He believes they should strive for an elite education, too. To help them, Adams and his new schools chancellor, David Banks, are staking a middle ground that embraces both competitive academics and diversity. If this longshot strategy works, New York could influence districts across the country.

As Banks sees it, the problem with selective schools boils down to scarcity there are too few seats for advanced students in elementary, middle, and high schools for all who merit one. So the solution is pretty obvious: Create more elite schools and programs.

New York is starting with the addition of 1,100 seats to the gifted and talented (G&T) program for elementary students this fall. Identifying more advanced Black and Latino students from the get-go means they will be better prepared to qualify for New Yorks elite middle and high schools like Stuyvesant, Bronx Science, and Brooklyn Tech schools that are under constant attack from progressives for admitting just a handful of Blacks and Latinos.

To ensure that Blacks and Latinos fill more of the seats in the expanding G&T program, Adams also has to change the admissions process. Citywide testing, in which all students across New York compete against each other for admission, has been an obstacle. Minority students (not including Asians) took only 16% of the gifted seats prior to the pandemic while making up about 63% of all elementary students, with whites and Asians occupying about 75% of the gifted slots, according to city data.

For this reason, Banks is dropping the citywide written test, which was taken mostly by white and Asian students whose parents signed them up. Now all preschool students will be evaluated by teachers for admission, and the top performing second-graders in each elementary school will also be invited to apply. This approach, employing what academics call local norms, means that students will compete against others in similar socioeconomic groups, reducing any academic advantage that growing up in wealthier school districts may provide.

The likely upshot is that a higher percentage of Blacks and Latinos and a lower percentage of whites and Asians will be admitted into the gifted program, a racial rebalancing that has set off a backlash in other school districts. Asian parents in Fairfax County, Virginia, sued over a racial rebalancing at Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology and lost at the Supreme Court in April.

But G&T advocates in New York are open to the rebalancing, as long as the pie is expanding for everyone and the admissions process is standardized and transparent. Chien Kwok of the Parent Leaders for Accelerated Curriculum and Education, an advocacy group of mainly Asian Americans, hailed Adams plan for embracing the concept that gifted kids in all communities are entitled to a rigorous education.

In the past we were leaving gifted children behind, Kwok said. Now the program is expanding, its no longer a zero-sum game, so Im supportive.

A Win for High Academic Standards

Banks is also promising to bring a similar expansion to the citys selective middle and high schools in the future. If that happens, it would benefit tens of thousands of students in the nations largest school system and send a message nationwide that high academic standards and racial equity dont have to be at loggerheads.

A lot of people are going to watch carefully to see how well this works, said Jonathan Plucker, a professor at the Center for Talented Youth at Johns Hopkins University. And I'm very confident that it will eventually evolve into something that's going to be a huge plus for the country and a big win for excellence in education.

That may be a bullish view considering the obstacles ahead. Banks has been scathing in his criticism of the Department of Education he now leads, calling it a broken, top-heavy bureaucracy that has struggled to make progress over the years in its most basic tasks, such as teaching students to read at grade level.

To improve the gifted program, teachers most of whom are not certified to teach gifted students need to be trained. Nor does the city have anything like a well-designed and up-to-date curriculum to challenge gifted students. Currently, gifted instruction varies greatly from school to school, and often doesnt go much beyond the general education curriculum mandated by the state.

The chancellor will also have to contend with a dozen advocacy groups and parents in several of New Yorks 32 districts that are ideologically opposed to competitive academic programs that separate students by abilities. These groups, such as New York Appleseed, have lobbied for years to abolish accelerated schools and place students of wide-ranging abilities as much as six grade levels apart in the same general education classroom to reduce racial segregation. The advanced students will help those who are academically behind, the theory goes, and everyone wins.

Progressives came close to achieving their goal, called Brilliant NYC, at the end of Bill de Blasios run as mayor last year. They are appalled that Adams rejected it in favor of a G&T redesign that they consider inherently elitist and without value to any students.

The gifted and talented program is very contentious and this new administration is going backwards by expanding it, said Allison Roda, a professor of education at Molloy College who helped develop Brilliant NYC. Gifted and talented has always been used as a tool to segregate students and avoid integration.

Flight From NYC Schools

The mayors buildout of gifted education, announced in April, was one of his first major policy decisions, reflecting an urgency to reverse the flight of wealthier families from the school system.

Even before the pandemic, according to Banks, families were leaving the troubled system in which 65% of Black and Latino students never achieve reading proficiency. The enrollment drop has been most acute among younger, white, and affluent students, with the system losing almost 5% of students in pre-kindergarten through third grade in 2020-2021. That means less state funding for city schools.

One hundred and twenty thousand families decided to vote with their feet and to say we are going to find other alternatives for our children, Banks said in a speech on March 2. Thats an indictment of the work that we have done.

But the city is nowhere near the point of satisfying demand for accelerated education, even though G&T programs are typically no more expensive than general education classes. Today, the program reaches only a small fraction of students, with about 15,000 out of 65,000 rising kindergarten families vying for 2,400 seats, mostly in more affluent sections of the city. Manhattans upper west and east sides are rich in programs, while some low-income districts in the Bronx and Brooklyn have very few or none.

The long distance that young kids in low-income or remote areas have to travel to get to a G&T program is one reason so few blacks and Latinos participate. Cassy Thime, who lives with her daughter in Rockaway Beach, Queens, is more than eight miles from the nearest program.

By bringing the program to all school districts, and adding 100 new G&T kindergarten seats, Adams is taking a small first step in what needs to be a much bigger expansion if he hopes to meet the demand. The city is also creating 1,000 new seats for students in the third grade spread throughout all the districts an age when a childs giftedness becomes more apparent. Banks said the additional seats were the baseline, not the ceiling, of a program he expects to grow.

New Admissions Screening

In order to be admitted to the gifted program in the past, four-year-old preschoolers had to earn a top score on a written test an approach that both sides in the G&T debate deemed inappropriate. Preschoolers have no experience with written tests, and they are far too young to understand that its a gateway to a better education through college.

The other problem is that Black and Latino families have been less likely than whites and Asians to register for testing, partly because gifted programs dont exist in many poorer neighborhoods and parents may not have heard about them.

Banks says the screening of all kids in preschool provides the fix. Rather than giving students a test, preschool teachers will look for signs of giftedness in how children draw, read, speak, or add and subtract, and then recommend the top performers for the program.

But teacher screening comes with its own issues. For starters, preschool teachers currently lack the training to identify gifted traits a specialty in itself as they evaluate kids for the fall program. This opens the door to a selection process filled with bias, from a teachers subjective views of what constitutes giftedness to pressures from administrators to meet diversity goals.

Without deep intensive training, teachers often recommend the compliant children, not the one that's thinking out of the box, or the incessant questioner, or the one that's completely disorganized, said Elissa Brown, a former director of the Hunter College Gifted Center and co-president of GiftedNYS. So, you're going to get biased teacher ratings around who is gifted.

The separate pathway into the program for third-graders is almost certain to bring in many more Black and Latino kids. The top 10% of students in every elementary school in the city, based on their second-grade marks in four core subjects, will be invited to apply. The pipeline will draw equally from wealthier schools with many white students in places like in Park Slope, Brooklyn, and threadbare schools with mostly kids of color in areas like Harlem.

This local norms approach has significantly boosted diversity in gifted programs in places like Montgomery County, Maryland, and Houston. In Colorados Aurora Public Schools, a pilot project drawing students from 10 elementary schools into a gifted program shrank the under-representation of Latinos to 7% from 17%, and Blacks to 2% from 6%. The success of the pilot prompted the district to expand it to another 10 schools, according to Scott Peters, a professor of education at the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater who co-authored a paper on the use of the local norms admissions process.

The Gifted Mishmash Nationwide

The controversy over G&T is partly a result of Americas scattershot commitment to educating gifted children. New York is one of eight states that have no requirements around gifted instruction, which means many upstate cities like Binghamton and Buffalo ignore it, Brown said.

New Jersey is one of about 25 states that require schools to offer gifted programs for students. Only 16 states, including North Carolina, also provide additional funding for such programs.

As a result, G&T education is a mishmash for the estimated 10% or more of public school students whom researchers have identified as gifted. G&T guidelines, data collection, accountability, oversight of programs, as well as teacher training are spotty across the country and hinder efforts to make improvements, according to the 2019 report by the National Association for Gifted Children.

The quality of gifted instruction also varies greatly. For elementary grades, the most common style differentiated instruction is also the most superficial: Advanced kids are given extra or harder worksheets in a general education classroom, or are asked to be de-facto teacher assistants to help other kids, Brown said. In increasing intensity, other approaches pull kids out of class for a few hours a week or cluster them in groups of four to six with a separate curriculum within general education classrooms. The most robust approach puts gifted students in their own dedicated classroom or entire school the practice used in New York City.

As a result, G&T education is a mishmash for the estimated 10% or more of public school students whom researchers have identified as gifted. G&T guidelines, data collection, accountability, oversight of programs, as well as teacher training are spotty across the country and hinder efforts to make improvements, according to the 2019 report by the National Association for Gifted Children.

The quality of gifted instruction also varies greatly. For elementary grades, the most common style differentiated instruction is also the most superficial: Advanced kids are given extra or harder worksheets in a general education classroom, or are asked to be de-facto teacher assistants to help other kids, Brown said. In increasing intensity, other approaches pull kids out of class for a few hours a week or cluster them in groups of four to six with a separate curriculum within general education classrooms. The most robust approach puts gifted students in their own dedicated classroom or entire school the practice used in New York City.

The concern among researchers is that popular approaches like differentiated instruction dont give gifted children anywhere near the challenge they need to thrive. The gap between the abilities of average and gifted students is too wide for a teacher to adequately instruct all of them at the same time.

Consider IQ: The average score in the U.S. is about 100; most gifted students score at least two to three standard deviations above that, or 120 to 130.

These students are at least one or two grade levels ahead in at least one subject, she said. There are fourth graders who can handle algebra. So why are they still doing simple computation?

The expansion of gifted education in New York is part of the chancellors larger turnaround attempt of the citys $38 billion-a-year Department of Education. Banks, a former school safety officer, teacher, and principal who has butted heads with the bureaucracy in the past, almost immediately eliminated the department position of executive superintendent, saving millions in salaries. He also plans to redeploy DOE bureaucrats into the classrooms where they can help understaffed schools.

To convey the challenges ahead, Banks told the story of a speech he gave at the historic Tweed Courthouse, the grand Romanesque building that serves as the departments headquarters. As Banks was starting his talk, the teleprompter broke, forcing him to ad lib.

Its a classic example, $38 billion, and we cant even get the teleprompter to work, he said in March at The Forum at St. Barts. There are so many pieces of the system that are dysfunctional. Its a massive turnaround.

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Op-Ed: Genius move? NYC's Black mayor bucks Progressives on the racial chessboard of 'gifted' education - The Center Square

THESE are divisive times in politics and public life; strident voices stoking division are all around. Many of them tell us that the age we live in is shaped by culture wars and cancel culture.

Cheap talk is everywhere surrounded by noise, charge and counter-charge. New media platforms like Rupert Murdochs Talk TV assist loud men such as Piers Morgan to broadcast their ill-informed opinions to the world even when there is next to no audience.

At the same time, how division is talked about and understood has become more problematic. This is true across many areas of life, and particularly in how we frame issues of class and race.

Last week the centre-left Centre for Labour and Social Studies (CLASS) think-tank released The UK Race-Class Narrative Report which explored this terrain and conducted extensive polling and interviews. This illuminates how people see class and race, how it is framed in politics and media, and the consequences in how we conduct ourselves in a divided society.

READ MORE:Kirsty Strickland: Rayner puts the PM off his stride, but not because of her legs

First, it found significant support across the UK public for progressive positions. Thus 58% of respondents said people of colour face greater barriers than white people; 60% think focusing on and talking about race is necessary to advance greater equality; 60% think working class struggles are due to the unfair nature of society; and 65% think wealthy people are wealthy because they know how to use opportunities not because they are more talented or work harder.

Second, dig deeper into the research and it throws light on how people see class in the UK. Class is not understood in relation to inequality and power but as a ladder to climb that is more difficult for many. It is seen as a system with rankings and hierarchies that is rigged against most people.

Third, key in all of the above is understanding the diverse nature of the working class in age, occupation, background, gender, race and ethnicity. Terms such as the white working class are divisive, loaded and racialised, deliberately dividing the working class by race.

Fourth, class is enduring despite decades of mainstream politics and media trying to deny or dilute its relevance. This is not just politicians such as John Major proclaiming that he wanted to turn the UK into a genuinely classless society and Tony Blair saying that I want to make you all middle class but much more pervasive is how class is represented in media.

This typically links working class identity to ancient, obsolete images of cloth-capped men working in manufacturing industry in massive sized plants, usually with pictures of strikes, picket lines and tales of trade union power in the 1970s. The underlying message is that class and working class are relics from Britains past and that today we live in an age of individual aspiration and choice.

Hence one of the major takeaways from this report is the enduring nature of class, even though politics and media attempt to diminish and marginalise it, and to sell us a version of ourselves and society individualised, fragmented and divided, where we are all reduced to atomised customers. Increasingly this account has come up against the very different reality of the UK even before the current cost of living crisis.

The CLASS report proposes that the language of the right of talk about culture wars and cancel culture seeks to disguise the fundamental divisions that exist in society and aims to prevent us holding those with power to account by inventing a whole host of spurious divisions which obfuscate matters of substance and galvanise the forces of reaction.

It is not surprising that right-wingers want to launch culture wars, defend statues the length and breadth of Britain and divert our gaze now. They have dominated the politics of economics for the past 40 years. The grim landscape we inhabit is a direct product of their dogmatic policies with rising poverty and hardship and millions of people unable to feed their families and heat their homes.

Rishi Sunak, the richest MP in the Commons and richest person to be Chancellor, cannot possibly grasp these realities as he is so far removed from them but also because he is a Thatcherite ideologue and product of corporate class groupthink. In this world winners matter if you cannot eat or feed your family it is because you are a failure and it is your fault.

The CLASS report poses that the left across Britain needs a better set of stories to deal with the rights culture wars and to talk about class and race. One aspect on the former is to talk about the issues which unite people and which people care about. But on this the left has shown an ill-ease and nervousness, similar to how it has approached class and race.

It is not enough in todays insecure world just to talk about the abstracts of inequality and privilege which are particular favourites of the left in their critique of neoliberalism. Most people do not see the world by such relational terms, and as for neoliberalism, very few people outside of the left-wing tent or academia has any grasp of what the term means.

READ MORE:Sister of Sheku Bayoh says Scotland is a racist country

The stakes are high in this terrain for getting it wrong and the political discourse will be increasingly filled with angry white men blowing off with outrage about some petty injustice while not offering any insights into how society is run and how it could be changed for the better.

It is also not enough to hope as John Harris did in The Guardian on Sunday that the serious times we are living in will produce a weariness for the superficial and a yearning for the substantial. That does not happen automatically; it has to be willed. And parts of the media have over decades become even more trivial and blatant in their propaganda witness the Mail and Express on Boris Johnsons many crises.

The CLASS report shows that people still see themselves in terms of collective identities and want to see collective solutions as answers to the problems of the present. But this needs to be advocated, nurtured and advanced through accounts in which people can see themselves, allowing them to recognise that they have power and, as in previous generations, that they have the potential to change the nature of the economic and social order.

After 40 years of a class politics of reaction and the right we have to restate the power of class and the working class, of trade unions and other organisations of workers and work. And that might be a problem for politicians, even on the centre-left in Scotland and the UK, who have grown up accommodating themselves to the politics of individualism in recent decades.

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Gerry Hassan: Progressives in politics must start speaking more on class and race - The National

MAYFIELD VILLAGE, Oh Progressive Insurances most dedicated employee, Flo, is falling in love well, maybe.

In a new advertising campaign, set to launch Monday, May 23, consumers will get another chapter of Flos story -- one that links her to one of the most loved actors in Hollywood -- Jon Hamm.

During the three-commercial series, Flos Love Interest, we find the two were set up on a blind date when he was still a struggling actor. He liked her, but she only seemed interested in saving him money on his home and auto protection.

This unlikely pairing and love story arc is a first for Flo, played by comedian Stephanie Courtney, and Progressives line-up of campaigns and characters.

Flo has been at the heart of Progressives marketing for nearly fifteen years. Weve witnessed her undying love of insurance, watched as friendships have developed, and have even met her family, but one aspect of her life has remained a mysteryuntil now, said Progressives Chief Marketing Officer Remi Kent. In partnering with Jon Hamm, we fan the flames of brand love in a way that consumers can relate to, because who hasnt experienced the awkwardness of unrequited love.

Progressive is set to launch a new advertising campaign, this one following the unlikely pairing of the company's iconic pitch woman, Flo, with Hollywood actor Jon Hamm. (Photo courtesy Progressive Insurance)

The advertising campaign follows Flo navigating an unexpected encounter on the street with Hamm. While he, again, seems eager to capture her heart, Flo only has room for one love in her life: insurance. The commercial series is slated to run nationally throughout the summer on broadcast and digital channels, as well as Hulu. You can watch the campaign videos here.

Years after their unsuccessful blind date -- and his subsequent rise to stardom Hamm once again crosses paths with Flo, rekindling his interest in the apron-clad insurance maven. The three-part journey features Hamm pining for Flos attention, complete with romantic gestures and unexpected insurance emergencies.

Why Hamm?

Like any episodic story, guest stars and are a great way to bring new life into familiar storylines, said a Progressive representative. When choosing our guest stars, we look to identify those who have deep followings or are culturally relevant. Thats why we chose Jon, one of the most well-known actors in Hollywood. Additionally, his name is synonymous with the advertising world thanks to his iconic role on Mad Men, so he was a no-brainer to work with.

Unanswered love is something we can all relate to, so I was thrilled to be able to play a role in this campaign, said Hamm, in a release from Progressive. I really enjoyed the dynamic between Flo and I and was excited to play myself in a campaign with a trusted brand and an iconic character.

Will Hamm win her affections? Will Flo stay true to herself, offering insurance discounts whenever and however she can? We will just have to watch to find out.

Progressive is the third-largest auto insurer in the country and is one of the top 15 homeowners insurance carriers.

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Progressive Insurance to launch new Flo ad campaign with Mad Men actor Jon Hamm as romantic suitor - cleveland.com