The New Class War

by Michael Lind

  In the same way, in understanding the populist eruptions that are burning down long-established party systems in Europe and North America, we must distinguish the sparks from the fuel. In different countries the sparks have been different—in Germany a sudden and controversial influx of Middle Eastern immigrants beginning in 2015, in France a regressive tax that fell heavily on working-class citizens, in the United States the migration of millions of illegal immigrants and the devastation of industrial regions by East Asian imports and the decisions of US companies to shutter their factories and replace them with new ones abroad.

  But what fuels the conflagration, once kindled, is a mass of grievances that have accumulated over years or decades. The class conflict in the transatlantic West has erupted into a roaring conflagration only recently, with the Brexit vote and the election of Donald Trump in 2016, the coming to power of a coalition of populist outsiders in Italy, the yellow vest protests in France, and other political fires. But the class war has been smoldering for half a century.

  For the last two generations, in different decades, and in different Western countries, the occasions of populist protest have been different—the white backlash against the civil rights revolution of the 1960s, the traditionalist backlash against the sexual and censorship revolution of the 1970s, populist resistance to the Japanese import shocks of the 1980s, and then, more recently, mass immigration, globalization, deindustrialization, and the Great Recession. All of these different issues resulted in similar alignments of large portions of the non-college-educated working class against managerial and professional elites.

  Long before Brexit and Trump, their lack of voice and influence made alienated native working-class voters—mostly but not exclusively white—a destabilizing force in politics. In the United States, “hardhats” and “Middle American radicals” were already identified as a social force as early as the 1960s and 1970s, when the foreign-born population of the US was at its lowest point and immigration was not a major issue. The antecedents of Trumpism can be traced to a series of independent presidential campaigns that drew many members of the white working class out of the midcentury New Deal coalition: George Wallace’s independent presidential campaign in 1968, which won Wallace 13.5 percent of the popular vote, and the 1992 campaign of Ross Perot, who captured 19 percent, the highest percentage for a third-party candidate since Theodore Roosevelt ran as the candidate of the Progressive Party in 1912. Although he was a Texan, Perot did poorly among white southerners and did best among high-school-educated whites in the industrial North. In 2000 Donald Trump considered running for president as the candidate of Perot’s short-lived Reform Party.

  In Europe as well, populist nationalism was part of the political landscape long before its dramatic breakthroughs in the second decade of the twenty-first century. In 2002, disaffected former mainstream party voters in addition to the tiny number of far-right voters permitted the anti-Semitic neofascist candidate Jean-Marie Le Pen to make it to the second round in the French presidential elections. The only reason there was a British referendum on membership in the European Union at all was the desire of British conservatives to appease a growing number of populist voters. Before the British “Leave” vote won the Brexit referendum in 2016, Dutch and French voters in 2005 and Irish voters in 2008 had rejected measures promoting greater centralization of the European Union in referendums. In all three countries, political elites later succeeded in maneuvers to ensure that the popular referendum results were nullified.

  As a political phenomenon, then, populism in the West is nothing new. It is an ongoing counterrevolution from below against the half-century-long technocratic neoliberal revolution from above imposed by Western managerial elites. At every stage, populist movements of some sort have resisted technocratic neoliberalism. Again and again, because of their lack of wealth, power, and cultural influence, the populists have lost, becoming more alienated and more resentful. And so the dry wood accumulates to fuel the next conflagration.

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  THANKS TO THE neoliberal revolution from above since the 1960s, on both sides of the Atlantic there are substantial numbers of voters—by no means only white or only working class—who have a coherent mix of public policy preferences that are ignored by national politicians and policy makers. These voters combine support for generous government entitlement like public pensions and health care spending with opposition to high levels of unskilled immigration and moderate cultural conservatism—what the British political scientist Matthew Goodwin calls a combination of economic and cultural protection.1

  How big is this populist group? In 2015, the political scientist Lee Drutman, then my colleague at New America, the think tank I cofounded, used survey data to map voters on two axes—one involving attitudes toward immigration and one involving attitudes toward Social Security. The diagram that resulted has since achieved considerable fame in the small world of social science charts.

  Drutman calculated that in the United States, “populists”—defined as those who favored maintaining or increasing Social Security spending, while maintaining or decreasing immigration—made up 40.3 percent of the electorate, while “moderate leftists” (American “liberals” or “progressives”), who supported maintaining or increasing both Social Security and immigration, made up 32.9 percent, with “moderates” (who wanted no changes in either Social Security or immigration) at 20.5 percent. The two groups that wanted to cut Social Security and increase immigration, “business conservatives” (3.8 percent), who are better described as “neoliberals,” and “political conservatives” (2.4 percent), who might also be described as “libertarians,” made up only 6.2 percent of voters.

  In light of the fact that populists in the US, defined by this measure, outnumber neoliberals and libertarians combined by more than six to one in the American electorate, why is it that no party—indeed, no wing of either of the two major parties—represents their views? Drutman speculates that neoliberalism is the view of “the wealthy donors who are eager to cut entitlements because they are worried about high taxes and are also eager to expand immigration because they’d like to have more potential employees to choose from.” According to Drutman, both populists and “business Republicans” tend to support the Republican Party. The business Republicans, whose preferences Republican politicians promote, on average make $69,711 a year, around $30,000 more than the Republican populists, whose preferences most Republican politicians ignore.2

  The second-largest group of voters in the American electorate, those whom Drutman calls “liberals,” that is, the moderate left, shares liberal cultural views and support of mass immigration with the free market libertarian right. But on economic policy issues, leftists, agreeing with populists on issues like Social Security spending, find their policy preferences neglected by the much smaller but more influential neoliberal faction of the Democratic Party.

  One way to understand these results is to recognize that in the United States and similar Western democracies there are two political spectrums, one for the college-educated managerial-professional overclass minority and one for the non-college-educated working-class majority of all races. Each of these class-based political spectrums has its own “right,” its own “left,” and its own “center.”

  The overclass political spectrum is bounded on the right by extreme free market libertarianism of the kind associated with the economist Milton Friedman and promoted by the Koch brothers and the Cato Institute in the US. The elite political spectrum is bounded on the left by moderate, market-friendly neoliberalism of the kind associated with the Clintons and Obama in the US, Blair and Brown in the UK, and Schröder in Germany. The center of the elite political spectrum is occupied by moderate business-class conservatives like the Bush dynasty in the US, former prime ministers David Cameron and Theresa May in the UK, Angela Merkel and the Christian Democrats in Germany, and Emmanuel Macron and his supporters in France.


  The “left,” “right,” and “center” of the working-class political spectrum are quite different from the equivalent positions on the overclass political spectrum. The leftmost point on the spectrum combines leftist cultural attitudes with something like old-fashioned European social democracy, supportive of government aid to citizens and socially liberal. The rightmost point is defined by conservative populism—socially conservative on issues of sex and reproduction, but supportive of government programs that help the working class, like Medicare and Social Security in the US. The “center” can be identified with what the sociologist Donald Warren in the 1970s called “Middle American Radicalism”—moderate social attitudes combined with prolabor, New Deal–style democratic pluralism.

  To put it another way, the center of gravity of the overclass is center-right (promarket) on economic issues and center-left (antitraditional) on social issues. In comparison, the center of gravity of the much larger working class is center-left on economic issues and center-right on social issues.

  Populists combined with social democratic leftists make up half or more of the US population, but they are almost completely unrepresented among the college-educated overclass professionals who make up most of the personnel in legislatures, executive agencies, courts, corporate suites, think tanks, universities, philanthropies, and media corporations. This explains why, for the last generation, “centrism” in American politics has been defined as overclass centrism, identified with support for cutting working-class entitlements like Social Security and Medicare in the name of “fiscal responsibility,” while embracing individualistic liberal views of reproduction and sex and, more recently, gender identity. Meanwhile, the “radical center,” the midpoint of the working-class majority’s political spectrum, has either been ignored by politicians and pundits and academics altogether or grossly mischaracterized by overclass journalists and overclass academics as the “far right” and lumped together with neo-Nazis and the Ku Klux Klan.

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  THE SINGLE MOST important factor explaining the rise of populism in the US and Western Europe is the changing class composition of center-left parties between the mid-twentieth century and the early twenty-first. What used to be parties of the native white working class and rural voters have become parties of upscale members of the native white managerial elite, allied with racial and ethnic minorities and immigrants. Following the 2018 midterm elections, forty-two of the wealthiest fifty congressional districts in the United States were represented by Democrats.3 Between 2010 and 2018, whites with a college degree went from 40 to 29 percent of the voters in the Republican Party, while white voters with less than a college education expanded from 50 to 59 percent of the Republican electorate, a trend that accelerated during the campaign and presidency of Donald Trump.4

  The Democratic Party in the US is now a party of the affluent native white metropolitan elite, allied with immigrants and native minorities brought together by noneconomic identity politics rather than by class politics. In Britain, the social base of the Labour Party has undergone a similar shift. In Germany, the Green Party shares the best-educated and wealthiest voters of the managerial-professional overclass with the free market libertarian Free Democrats.5

  The exclusion of the views of large numbers of voters from any representation in public policy or debate has created openings in politics that demagogic populists have sought to fill. Alone among Republican candidates in the 2016 presidential primaries, Donald Trump both denounced the Iraq War as a mistake and opposed cuts to Social Security and Medicare. This combination of views was the exact opposite of the orthodox conservative party line. George W. Bush, after all, had invaded Iraq and had sought to cut Social Security by means of partial privatization. Indeed, Trump’s stance on Social Security put him to the left of then-president Barack Obama, who, like Bush, had proposed cutting Social Security, by the different method of altering how it is indexed for inflation. Trump’s positions were heretical in the Republican Party and the American establishment as a whole. But they were popular with millions of American voters. And so Trump went on to defeat George W. Bush’s brother and would-be successor, Jeb Bush, in the Republican primaries, and then to defeat Hillary Clinton in the electoral college, in part by appealing to former Democratic voters in the Midwest whom neoliberal overclass Democrats had ignored.

  Where populists have succeeded in Western countries, they have done so because they have opportunistically championed legitimate positions that are shared by many voters but excluded from the narrow neoliberal overclass political spectrum. In particular, they have given voice to popular concerns about trade and immigration that have been ignored for decades by the managerial ruling class.

  In the late twentieth century, when its electoral base was still the native-born working class, the Democratic Party was more favorable to protectionist trade policies and restrictionist immigration policies than the Republicans, then the party of the employer elite. Thanks in part to the trade issue, many former working-class whites have migrated into the Republican Party in the last few decades, while elite white college-educated professionals and their children increasingly have favored the Democrats. As a result of the changing class composition of the two parties, the older dichotomy of Democratic protectionism and Republican support for free trade has been reversed. According to the Pew Research Center, by a margin of 56 percent to 38 percent, Democratic voters believe that free trade agreements have been good for the US. Among Republicans, those numbers are flipped: by a 53 percent to 38 percent margin, a majority of Republicans believe free trade has been a bad thing. While partisan affiliations have changed over time, the underlying division over globalization among overclass voters and working-class voters has not.

  In immigration policy as in trade policy, the mainstream parties in the US and Europe have reversed positions, reflecting their changing class makeup. The historian of organized labor Vernon Briggs observed that “it is not surprising that at every juncture and with no exception prior to the 1990s, the American labor movement either directly instigated or strongly endorsed every legislative initiative by the US Congress to regulate and to restrict immigration. It also supported all related efforts to strengthen enforcement of these policies.”6

  In the 1990s the US Commission on Immigration Reform was appointed by President Bill Clinton, at a time when the Democratic Party was still influenced in part by the historic skepticism of organized labor toward large-scale immigration. While denouncing bigotry against immigrants, the commission called for reducing legal immigration, shifting the basis of immigration away from family relationships toward skills, and promoting the integration of immigrants.7 In the words of the chair of the commission, Barbara Jordan, the first African American woman from the South to be elected to Congress, “The commission finds no national interest in continuing to import lesser skilled and unskilled workers to compete in the most vulnerable parts of our labor force.”8 Jordan also rejected efforts to blur the distinction between legal and illegal immigration: “To make sense about the national interest in immigration, it is necessary to make distinctions between those who obey the law, and those who violate it. Therefore, we disagree, also, with those who label our efforts to control illegal immigration as somehow inherently anti-immigrant. Unlawful immigration is unacceptable.”9 A generation later, most of the policies proposed by the Jordan Commission are supported by the populist Republican right and denounced by growing numbers of self-described “progressive” Democrats for whom any enforcement of immigration laws is inherently unjust.

  The startling adoption by the American center-left since the 1990s of support for high levels of unskilled immigration, a position historically associated with right-wing libertarians and business lobbies, is partly opportunistic, based on the hope that immigrant voters and their descendants can make possible permanent one-party Democratic control of the US government. And it is partly a reaction to n
ativism by conservatives who mischaracterize Latino immigrants as criminals and “invaders.” But the center-left reversal on immigration policy also reflects the historic shift in the Democratic Party’s white voters from working-class whites to affluent, university-educated members of the white overclass and business and finance. At the turn of the twenty-first century, the severely shrunken private labor movement, while maintaining its skepticism about free trade, gave up its historic public opposition to high levels of legal and illegal immigration as the price of continuing membership in the transformed, more employer-friendly Democratic coalition.10

  Notwithstanding business-financed propaganda about the alleged need for higher immigration of all kinds, proposals to increase numerical levels of immigration remain profoundly unpopular in Western democracies, even among voters who are well-disposed to individual immigrants and immigration in general. In a 2018 Pew Research Center poll of twenty-seven countries that take half of the world’s immigrants, including the US, Canada, and Western European nations, a median of 45 percent wanted fewer or no immigrants and 36 percent were satisfied with the existing number. Only 14 percent thought their countries should allow more immigrants. In the US in 2018, a mere 24 percent wanted to admit greater numbers of immigrants each year, while 73 percent wanted the same number (44 percent) or fewer to none (29 percent). In Germany, where Chancellor Angela Merkel allowed a large influx of Syrian and other refugees in 2015, 58 percent wanted fewer or no immigrants and only 19 percent wanted a higher level of immigration. In both Britain and France, only 16 percent favored raising the level of immigration.11

  A Harvard CAPS/Harris Poll in 2018 found that 64 percent of Americans, including 53 percent of Latinos, favor immediately deporting anyone who crosses the border illegally; 70 percent support more restrictive immigration laws.12 If, as many overclass neoliberals claim, supporting enforcement of immigration laws is motivated solely by “white nationalism,” then overwhelming numbers of Americans, including a majority of Latinos, must be “white nationalists.”