The Franken run for Senator from Minnesota has encountered major headwinds.  Franken is a Liberal legend in most of USA because he has authored several books that had beleaguered progressives cheering a champion who at least attempts to slay evil lairs like O’Reilly and Limbaugh.  Yet somehow this fighting-liberal qualification has not convinced Minnesotans that Al Franken is senatorial timber.

And for good reasons.  Franken grossly underestimated the political realities he faces and in the process has made near-catastrophic blunders.  In no particular order, they are:

Class analysis is most commonly practiced by the political left.  In fact, many consider class analysis a Marxist practice to this day.  I personally never found Marxist class analysis very satisfying because I could think of so many examples that did not fit into his scheme.  That did not, however, stop my interest in the subject.

So when I discovered in my early 30s that my favorite political economist, Thorstein Veblen, had postulated a VERY non-Marxist class analysis that described social reality much better than Marx ever did, I was quite excited.  Veblen’s class analysis was several orders of magnitude more complex and nuanced and came buried in an even more complicated intellectual strategy called Institutional Analysis, so it is sometimes difficult to separate out.

What follows is my best estimate of Veblen’s ideas–described with modern examples.  For example, the Business / Industry dichotomy is Veblen’s.  Calling it an example of a rivalry between Predators and Producers is mine–with a hat tip to Ignatius Donnelley.