As the United States stumbles toward the last act of its
electoral process two days from now, and the new administration prepares to
take over the reins of power from its feckless predecessor, the obligatory
caterwauling of the losing side has taken on an unfamiliar shrillness. Granted,
the behavior of both sides in the last few decades of American elections can be
neatly summed up in the words “sore loser”; the Republicans in 1992 and 2008
behaved not one whit better than the Democrats in 1980 and 2000. I think it’s fair, though, to say that the
current example has plunged well past the low-water mark set by those dismal
occasions. The question I’d like to discuss here is why that should be.
I think we can all admit that there are plenty of reasons
why Americans might reasonably object to the policies and appointments of the
incoming president, but the same thing has been true of every other president
we’ve had since George Washington’s day. Equally, both of our major parties
have long been enthusiastic practitioners of the fine art of shrieking in
horror at the other side’s behavior, while blithely excusing the identical
behavior on their side. Had the election
last November gone the other way, for example, we can be quite certain that all
the people who are ranting about Donald Trump’s appointment of Goldman Sachs
employees to various federal offices would be busy explaining how reasonable it
was for Hillary Clinton to do exactly the same thing—as of course she would
have.
That said, I don’t think reasonable differences of opinion
on the one hand, and the ordinary hypocrisy of partisan politics on the other,
explain the extraordinarily stridency, the venom, and the hatred being flung at
the incoming administration by its enemies. There may be many factors involved,
to be sure, but I’d like to suggest that one factor in particular plays a
massive role here.
To be precise, I think a lot of what we’re seeing is the
product of class bigotry.
Some definitions are probably necessary here. We can define
bigotry as the act of believing hateful things about all the members of a given
category of people, just because they belong to that category. Thus racial
bigots believe hateful things about everyone who belongs to races they don’t
like, religious bigots do the same thing to every member of the religions they
don’t like, and so on through the dismal chronicle of humanity’s collective
nastiness.
Defining social class is a little more difficult to do in
the abstract, as different societies draw up and enforce their class barriers
in different ways. In the United States, though, the matter is made a good deal
easier by the lack of a fully elaborated feudal system in our nation’s past, on
the one hand, and on the other, the tolerably precise dependency of how much
privilege you have in modern American society on how much money you make. Thus
we can describe class bigotry in the United States, without too much
inaccuracy, as bigotry directed against people who make either significantly
more money than the bigot does, or significantly less. (Of course that’s not
all there is to social class, not by a long shot, but for our present purposes,
as an ostensive definition, it will do.)
Are the poor bigoted against the well-to-do? You bet.
Bigotry directed up the social ladder, though, is far more than matched, in
volume and nastiness, by bigotry directed down. It’s a source of repeated
amusement to me that rich people in this country so often inveigh against the
horrors of class warfare. Class warfare is their bread and butter. The ongoing
warfare of the rich against the poor, and of the affluent middle and upper
middle classes against the working class, create and maintain the vast
disparities of wealth and privilege in contemporary American society. What
upsets the rich and the merely affluent about class warfare, of course, is the
thought that they might someday be treated the way they treat everyone else.
Until last year, if you wanted to experience the class
bigotry that’s so common among the affluent classes in today’s America, you
pretty much had to be a member of those affluent classes, or at least good
enough at passing to be present at the social events where their bigotry saw
free play. Since Donald Trump broke out of the Republican pack early last year,
though, that hindrance has gone by the boards. Those who want to observe
American class bigotry at its choicest need only listen to what a great many of
the public voices of the well-to-do are saying about the people who votes and
enthusiasm have sent Trump to the White House.
You see, that’s a massive part of the reason a Trump
presidency is so unacceptable to so many affluent Americans: his candidacy, unlike those of all his
rivals, was primarily backed by “those people.”
It’s probably necessary to clarify just who “those
people” are. During the election, and even more so afterwards, the mainstream
media here in the United States have seemingly been unable to utter the words
“working class” without sticking the labels “white” in front and “men” behind.
The resulting rhetoric seems to be claiming that the relatively small fraction
of the American voting public that’s white, male, and working class somehow
managed to hand the election to Donald Trump all by themselves, despite the
united efforts of everyone else.
Of course that’s not what happened. A huge majority of white
working class women also voted for Trump, for example. So, according to exit polls, did about a
third of Hispanic men and about a quarter of Hispanic women; so did varying
fractions of other American minority voting blocs, with African-American voters
(the least likely to vote for Trump) still putting something like fourteen per
cent in his column. Add it all up, and you’ll find that the majority of people
who voted for Trump weren’t white working class men at all—and we don’t even
need to talk about the huge number of registered voters of all races and
genders who usually turn out for Democratic candidates, but stayed home in
disgust this year, and thus deprived Clinton of the turnout that could have
given her the victory.
Somehow, though, pundits and activists who fly to their
keyboards at a moment’s notice to denounce the erasure of women and people of
color in any other context are eagerly cooperating in the erasure of women and
people of color in this one case. What’s more, that same erasure went on
continuously all through the campaign. Those of my readers who followed the
media coverage of the race last year will recall confident proclamations that
women wouldn’t vote for Trump because his words and actions had given offense
to feminists, that Hispanics (or people of color in general) wouldn’t vote for
Trump because social-justice activists denounced his attitudes toward illegal
immigrants from Mexico as racist, and so on. The media took these proclamations
as simple statements of fact—and of course that was one of the reasons media
pundits were blindsided by Trump’s victory.
The facts of the matter are that a great many American women
don’t happen to agree with feminists, nor do all people of color agree with the
social-justice activists who claim to speak in their name. For that matter, may
I point out to my fellow inhabitants of Gringostan that the terms “Hispanic”
and “Mexican-American” are not synonyms? Americans of Hispanic descent trace
their ancestry to many different nations of origin, each of which has its own
distinctive culture and history, and they don’t form a single monolithic
electoral bloc. (The Cuban-American community in Florida, to cite only one of
the more obvious examples, very often vote Republican and played a significant role in giving that
electoral vote-rich state to Trump.)
Behind the media-manufactured facade of white working class
men as the cackling villains who gave the country to Donald Trump, in other
words, lies a reality far more in keeping with the complexities of American
electoral politics: a ramshackle coalition of many different voting blocs and
interest groups, each with its own assortment of reasons for voting for a
candidate feared and despised by the US political establishment and the
mainstream media. That coalition
included a very large majority of the US working class in general, and while
white working class voters of both genders were disproportionately more likely
to have voted for Trump than their nonwhite equivalents, it wasn’t simply a
matter of whiteness, or for that matter maleness.
It was, however, to a very great extent a matter of social
class. This isn’t just because so large a fraction of working class voters
generally backed Trump; it’s also because Trump saw this from the beginning,
and aimed his campaign squarely at the working class vote. His signature red
ball cap was part of that—can you imagine Hillary Clinton wearing so proletarian
a garment without absurdity?—but, as
I pointed out a year ago, so was his deliberate strategy of saying
(and tweeting) things that would get the liberal punditocracy to denounce him.
The tones of sneering contempt and condescension they directed at him were all
too familiar to his working class audiences, who have been treated to the same
tones unceasingly by their soi-disant betters for decades now.
Much of the pushback against Trump’s impending presidency,
in turn, is heavily larded with that same sneering contempt and
condescension—the unending claims, for example, that the only reason people
could possibly have chosen to vote for Trump was because they were racist
misogynistic morons, and the like. (These days, terms such as “racist” and
“misogynistic,” in the mouths of the affluent, are as often as not class-based
insults rather than objective descriptions of attitudes.) The question I’d like
to raise at this point, though, is why the affluent don’t seem to be able to
bring themselves to come right out and denounce Trump as the candidate of the
filthy rabble. Why must they borrow the rhetoric of identity politics and twist
it (and themselves) into pretzel shapes instead?
There, dear reader, hangs a tale.
In the aftermath of the social convulsions of the 1960s, the
wealthy elite occupying the core positions of power in the United States
offered a tacit bargain to a variety of movements for social change. Those individuals and groups who were willing
to give up the struggle to change the system, and settled instead for a
slightly improved place within it, suddenly started to receive corporate and
government funding, and carefully vetted leaders from within the movements in
question were brought into elite circles as junior partners. Those individuals
and groups who refused these blandishments were marginalized, generally with
the help of their more compliant peers.
If you ever wondered, for example, why environmental groups
such as the Sierra Club and Friends of the Earth changed so quickly from
scruffy fire-breathing activists to slickly groomed and well-funded corporate
enablers, well, now you know. Equally, that’s why mainstream feminist organizations
by and large stopped worrying about the concerns of the majority of women and
fixated instead on “breaking the glass ceiling”—that is to say, giving women
who already belong to the privileged classes access to more privilege than they
have already. The core demand placed on former radicals who wanted to cash in
on the offer, though, was that they drop their demands for economic justice—and
American society being what it is, that meant that they had to stop talking
about class issues.
The interesting thing is that a good many American radicals
were already willing to meet them halfway on that. The New Left of the 1960s,
like the old Left of the between-the-wars era, was mostly Marxist in its
theoretical underpinnings, and so was hamstrung by the mismatch between Marxist
theory and one of the enduring realities of American politics. According to
Marxist theory, socialist revolution is led by the radicalized intelligentsia,
but it gets the muscle it needs to overthrow the capitalist system from the working
classes. This is the rock on which wave after wave of Marxist activism has
broken and gone streaming back out to sea, because the American working classes
are serenely uninterested in taking up the world-historical role that Marxist
theory assigns to them. All they want is plenty of full time jobs at a living
wage. Give them that, and revolutionary
activists can bellow themselves hoarse without getting the least flicker of
interest out of them.
Every so often, the affluent classes lose track of this, and
try to force the working classes to put up with extensive joblessness and low
pay, so that affluent Americans can pocket the proceeds. This never ends
well. After an interval, the working
classes pick up whatever implement is handy—Andrew Jackson, the Grange, the
Populist movement, the New Deal, Donald Trump—and beat the affluent classes about
the head and shoulders with it until the latter finally get a clue. This might
seem promising for Marxist
revolutionaries, but it isn’t, because the Marxist revolutionaries inevitably
rush in saying, in effect, “No, no, you shouldn’t settle for plenty of full
time jobs at a living wage, you should die by the tens of thousands in an orgy
of revolutionary violence so that we can seize power in your name.” My readers
are welcome to imagine the response of the American working class to this sort
of rhetoric.
The New Left, like the other American Marxist movements
before its time, thus had a bruising face-first collision with cognitive
dissonance: its supposedly infallible theory said one thing, but the facts
refused to play along and said something very different. For much of the
Sixties and Seventies, New Left theoreticians tried to cope with this by coming
up with increasingly Byzantine redefinitions of “working class” that excluded
the actual working class, so that they could continue to believe in the
inevitability and imminence of the proletarian revolution Marx promised them.
Around the time that this effort finally petered out into absurdity, it was
replaced by the core concept of the identity politics currently central to the
American left: the conviction that the only divisions in American society that
matter are those that have some basis in biology.
Skin color, gender, ethnicity, sexual orientation, disability—these
are the divisions that the American left likes to talk about these days, to the
exclusion of all other social divisions, and especially to the exclusion of
social class. Since the left has
dominated public discourse in the United States for many decades now, those
have become the divisions that the American right talks about, too. (Please
note, by the way, the last four words in the paragraph above: “some basis in
biology.” I’m not saying that these categories are purely biological in nature;
every one of them is defined in practice by a galaxy of cultural constructs and
presuppositions, and the link to biology is an ostensive category marker rather
than a definition. I insert this caveat because I’ve noticed that a great many
people go out of their way to misunderstand the point I’m trying to make here.)
Are the divisions listed above important when it comes to
discriminatory treatment in America today? Of course they are—but social
class is also important. It’s by way of the erasure of social class as
a major factor in American injustice that we wind up in the absurd situation in
which a woman of color who makes a quarter million dollars a year plus benefits
as a New York stockbroker can claim to be oppressed by a white guy in Indiana
who’s working three part time jobs at minimum wage with no benefits in a
desperate effort to keep his kids fed, when the political candidates that she
supports and the economic policies from which she profits are largely
responsible for his plight.
In politics as in physics, every action produces an equal
and opposite reaction, and so absurdities of the sort just described have
kindled the inevitable blowback. The Alt-Right scene that’s attracted so much
belated attention from politicians and pundits over the last year is in large
part a straightforward reaction to the identity politics of the left. Without
too much inaccuracy, the Alt-Right can be seen as a network of young white men
who’ve noticed that every other identity group in the country is being
encouraged to band together to further its own interests at their expense, and
responded by saying, “Okay, we can play that game too.” So far, you’ve got to
admit, they’ve played it with verve.
That said, on the off chance that any devout worshippers of
the great god Kek happen to be within earshot, I have a bit of advice that I
hope will prove helpful. The next time you want to goad affluent American
liberals into an all-out, fist-pounding, saliva-spraying Donald Duck meltdown,
you don’t need the Jew-baiting, the misogyny, the racial slurs, and the rest of
it. All you have to do is call them on
their class privilege. You’ll want to have the popcorn popped, buttered, and
salted first, though, because if my experience is anything to go by, you’ll be
enjoying a world-class hissy fit in seconds.
I’d also like to offer the rest of my readers another bit of
advice that, again, I hope will prove helpful. As Donald Trump becomes the
forty-fifth president of the United States and begins to push the agenda that
got him into the White House, it may be useful to have a convenient way to sort
through the mix of signals and noise from the opposition. When you hear people
raising reasoned objections to Trump’s policies and appointments, odds are that
you’re listening to the sort of thoughtful dissent that’s essential to any
semblance of democracy, and it may be worth taking seriously. When you hear
people criticizing Trump and his appointees for doing the same thing his rivals
would have done, or his predecessors did, odds are that you’re getting the
normal hypocrisy of partisan politics, and you can roll your eyes and stroll
on.
