The New Class War

by Michael Lind

  Basic civil rights should be identical everywhere within a nation, and in a federal system social insurance is most efficiently handled at the national level. But there remain many local institutions that can be provided as amenities for all local residents—public clinics, public libraries and museums, city and county parks, even public golf courses, basketball and tennis courts, and swimming pools. To ensure that what Ganesh Sitaraman and Anne Alstott call “public options” like these are adequately funded even in poor localities, they should be financed by national revenue-sharing schemes allocated on a per capita basis for public goods to be chosen by local citizens.5

  The rootedness of most working-class Americans and Europeans in their hometowns and regions is often lamented by the intellectuals of the managerial overclass: Why don’t the lazy losers in heartland communities show some initiative and move to the Bay Area to invent an app, or relocate to London to work in finance? But the geographic immobility of the working class is both a political challenge, in a world of mobile capital, and a political opportunity—an opportunity to build multigenerational communities instead of transient labor camps.

  In his book Human Scale Revisited, Kirkpatrick Sale quotes the British historian H. D. F. Kitto’s fable about an Athenian citizen from the time of Pericles who visits the Athenian Club in London:

  The Greek replies, “How many clubs are there in London?” The member, at a guess, says about five hundred. The Greek then says, “Now if all these combined, what a splendid premises they would build. They could have a clubhouse as big as Hyde Park.” “But,” says the member, “that would no longer be a club.” “Precisely,” says the Greek, “and a polis as big as yours is no longer a polis.”6

  Rebuilding democracy at the local level is not enough. In a post-neoliberal democratic pluralist regime, provincial and national legislatures must regain some of the power that they have lost to executives and judges.

  Strengthening legislatures in which working-class majorities have at least some influence against overclass-dominated executive and judicial branches does not necessarily require formal constitutional reform. After all, the neoliberal revolution from above in the last half century in the West was carried out by managerial elites in parliamentary and presidential regimes and countries with proportional representation and plurality voting systems alike. What was done without formal constitutional revision might be undone without it as well.

  There is no point in having a representative legislature enact laws that can then be subverted in the process of implementation by civil servants hostile to the values of the legislators. To be complete, representative democracy requires representative bureaucracy.

  In a modern administrative state, much de facto lawmaking will continue to be undertaken by administrative agencies; it is simply impossible for legislatures to identify and prescribe for all applications of a statute in advance. But even in the administrative state the power of the working class can be increased by assigning decision-making to independent agencies overseen by multimember commissions, at least some of whose members might have working-class constituents and affiliations, instead of centralized, insulated bureaucracies staffed at the highest levels by graduates of the Ivy League, Oxbridge, and the grandes écoles.

  * * *

  —

  FINALLY, IN ADDITION to the need for countervailing power in the economy and politics there is a need for countervailing power to check the domination of the culture by the university-credentialed managerial elite. As the philosopher John Gray has observed, value pluralism is likely to be a permanent characteristic of modern democratic societies, so it is necessary to work out what he calls a “modus vivendi” among subcultures within the same country with profoundly different views of reality and morality—not only secularists and traditional religious believers but also believers in new supernatural or secular creeds.7

  A value-pluralist modus vivendi is the opposite of the authoritarian imposition of the values of the ruling class on a religiously diverse population. Nineteenth-century Imperial Germany waged a Kulturkampf (culture war) on behalf of Protestantism against German Catholics. In the United States before World War II, mainline Protestants used the public schools to promulgate a generic Protestant religiosity in which the children of Catholics, Jews, and Protestant sectarians like Jehovah’s Witnesses were compelled to participate. In France, the tradition of “laicity” inherited from the Jacobins of the French Revolution has similarly viewed the public school as a means of repressing religion and stripping subcultures of their particular identities.

  Today religious and philosophical diversity are again under threat from the ruling classes of the transatlantic West. For many members of the highly secularized university-educated overclass, premodern religious traditions and the secular Western Greco-Roman heritage have been replaced by ever-changing social science fashions, while clerical and humanist authorities have been replaced by academics, foundation-subsidized activists, and even corporate executives as the moral arbiters of society. “Corporations Are Replacing Churches as America’s Conscience” was a headline in the neoliberal zine Vox in 2017.8

  The evolution of managerialism in the West has replaced the distant and snobbish—but thankfully indifferent—bosses of the post-1945 years with a new “woke” corporate elite. Under the cross-class settlement in the mid-twentieth-century West, once the whistle blew, the proletarian could leave the factory gate for the safety of a world that excluded the bosses, a world of working-class neighborhoods, churches, clubs, and taverns. Under technocratic neoliberalism, however, the boss class pursues the working class after the workday has ended, trying to snatch the unhealthy steak or soda from the worker’s plate, vilifying the theology of the worker’s church as a firing offense and possibly an illegal hate crime to be reported to the police, and denouncing the racy, prole-oriented tabloid Internet as “fake news” to be censored by the guardians of neoliberal orthodoxy and propriety.

  It is no wonder that the working classes of the Western democracies are rebelling against their arrogant and meddlesome overlords. As we have seen, one reason for the success of demagogic populist politicians in the US and Europe is their willingness to mock the pieties and flout the etiquette that the aggressive managerial overclass seeks to impose on working-class majorities from above.

  In order to discourage overclass moral imperialism from provoking popular backlashes that can be exploited by populist false messiahs, the modus vivendi in a democratic pluralist society must guarantee coexistence among different creeds and subcultures. In the United States, the threat to pluralism from the religious right, represented by the Moral Majority and the Christian Coalition, which sought to legislate sectarian values into law, has been thwarted and is unlikely to return. Moreover, religious affiliation in the United States is declining to the low levels long found in Europe.

  But churches, synagogues, and mosques are among the last remaining influential nonprofit institutions that are not funded and controlled by donors and foundation program officers with identical social views who reside in a few major hub cities. And religious institutions that are distasteful or threatening to the secular managerial ruling class are likely to be important in any vigorous and authentic working-class politics.

  Creedal congregations should be defined broadly, to include secular groups like American Atheists and neo-pagan creeds like Wiccans, who according to some reports now outnumber Presbyterians in the United States.9 Whether its belief system is secular or supernatural, each creedal congregation must have the legal right to organize and govern itself internally on the basis of its own beliefs and traditions, regardless of whether these offend modern technocratic neoliberal ideals. Tax laws should be more generous to creedal congregations that raise their money from their own members than to nonprofit organizations that raise funding from the rich and from donor foundations endowed by the rich.

  At the same time, provision mus
t be made for creedal congregations to defend themselves by taking part in public policy making that affects their missions. For example, legislation should require the participation of a representative range of secular and supernaturalist creedal groups in government boards and commissions that oversee media policy and education policy to ensure that the values of all major subcultures in the nation are acknowledged and given deference. Today in the US it would be unthinkable for a civil rights commission to have no African American or Latino members. It should be equally unthinkable for a commission or agency that makes rules for the media, public school curricula, or college accreditation to include no devout Catholics, Protestants, Jews, Muslims, and members of other major religious or secular creeds.

  Restoring the countervailing power of the multiracial, religiously diverse working-class majorities in Western democracies means defying familiar categories of right and left. Today it may mean defending the institutional independence of religious communities and tomorrow the promotion of pragmatic municipal socialism. Institutions capable of aggregating the collective power of working-class citizens in the twenty-first century would resemble historic precedents like the Salvation Army and old-fashioned Milwaukee-style “sewer socialism” (municipal ownership of public utilities), rather than the social justice and climate change NGOs funded by billionaires and run by progressive overclass professionals or, for that matter, the free market agitprop groups funded by the libertarian rich.

  Like their working-class constituents, contemporary membership-based movements would mix sentimental patriotism with economic egalitarianism and religious communalism with support for social insurance entitlements and free public goods. They would probably combine crude demotic speech and civic rhetoric in ways quite alien to managerial-class conservatives, centrists, and progressives alike. In the best sense, they would be vulgar.

  CHAPTER NINE

  Making the World Safe for Democratic Pluralism

  FOLLOWING THE COLD WAR, neoliberals in the US and Europe promoted a vision of a new world order that was liberal and democratic. Unfortunately, that vision included a lot of liberalism and very little democracy.

  As we have seen, technocratic neoliberal elites sought to drain democratic national governments and elected legislatures of authority, even as the Clinton, Bush, and Obama administrations sought to spread democracy by bombing and invading countries with undemocratic regimes from the Balkans to the Middle East and Central Asia. In newly liberated countries, citizens could vote, but the new democracy like the old ones was limited in its sovereignty in the economic realm by transnational trade and investment treaties and bodies like the World Trade Organization. At the same time, champions of “the right to protect” and “humanitarian intervention” made state sovereignty conditioned on the willingness of governments to conform to Western notions of civil liberties, violation of which could justify the US and its allies in toppling a regime, invading the country, and occupying it for years or decades.

  The democratic pluralist vision of a democratic world order is quite different from the technocratic neoliberal vision, with its powerful transnational rules combined with weak nation-states and legislatures.

  For democratic pluralists, free and fair elections are a necessary but not sufficient condition for genuine democracy. A country run by an aristocracy or oligarchy is a democracy in name only, even if citizens are free to vote for competing aristocratic or oligarchic factions. According to democratic pluralism, electoral democracy in the political realm, narrowly defined, must be accompanied by power-sharing arrangements among classes and subcultures in the realms of the economy and the culture. These power-sharing institutions, like tripartite labor-business-government wage-setting institutions, need not resemble one-person, one-vote political democracy. But there must be social checks and balances in addition to political checks and balances. And decisions should be based as much as possible on hard-won and lasting consensus among negotiating parties, classes and creeds, not on fluctuating numerical majorities.

  The democratic pluralist version of democracy necessarily puts great emphasis on national sovereignty—external sovereignty, not internal sovereignty. All of the various schools of thought that inform the democratic pluralist tradition—English pluralists, French solidarists, Catholic corporatists, and New Deal defenders of countervailing power in the broker state—reject the eighteenth-century idea of unlimited popular sovereignty shared by the American and French revolutions. For democratic pluralists, the state—usually a nation-state, but sometimes a multinational state or independent city-state—is not a mass of individuals to whom a general will can be attributed, but a community made up of smaller communities.

  But while democratic pluralism rejects the idea of the unlimited internal sovereignty of any group, including “the People” as a whole, external sovereignty is indispensable. The reason is that the negotiations and compromises among communities that are the essence of democratic pluralism can only occur within the fixed boundaries of a political community with fixed membership. Cross-class compromises among labor and business, for example, are pointless if businesses can unilaterally annul the contracts at any time by transferring operations to foreign workers or bringing foreign workers into the country to weaken or replace organized labor. The various cross-class settlements in the US and Europe from the 1940s to the 1970s would not have been possible if employers had been able to use large-scale tax and regulatory arbitrage and offshoring and access to high amounts of low-wage, non-union immigrant labor to escape the constraints imposed on them by “new deals” with organized labor and democratic national governments.

  For this reason, a world order that can support many countries organized along democratic pluralist lines will be quite different from a neoliberal world order in which most decision-making has been transferred from nation-states to supranational institutions or from national legislatures to national executive bureaucracies and judiciaries. Rejecting neoliberalism at the national level requires the rejection of neoliberalism at the global level as well. A world safe for democratic pluralism will not be a neoliberal world order.

  * * *

  —

  THE ECONOMIST DANI RODRIK has argued that “democracy, national sovereignty and global economic integration are mutually incompatible: we can combine any two of the three, but never have all three simultaneously and in full.”1 If Rodrik’s trilemma, or “impossibility theorem,” is correct, then global integration should be sacrificed to the need to preserve and strengthen the peace treaty among the classes at home.

  At the global level, this requires abandoning the ideal of a rule-governed global market for an à la carte approach to cross-border integration. Rich and poor countries alike should be allowed to use national developmentalist strategies tailored to their particular needs.2

  The term “developmental state” was used by scholars like Chalmers Johnson, Alice Amsden, and Meredith Woo-Cumings to describe the post-1945 regimes of Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, and Singapore, which relied on export-oriented strategies as part of programs to industrialize and catch up with the West.3 But as the economists Erik Reinert, Ha-Joon Chang, and Michael Hudson, among others, have demonstrated, the mercantilism of Renaissance and early modern Western city-states, kingdoms, and empires was a version of developmentalism.4 Britain before the 1840s, Imperial Germany, the US before World War II (and to some degree to this day), Gaullist France, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, and China have all had state-sponsored systems of national industrial development and technological innovation.

  National economic development has two goals—widespread national productivity and widely shared national prosperity. Productivity growth must be encouraged in all sectors, not just a few advanced industries that glitter in a morass of stagnation. And the gains from growth must be shared among the managerial overclass and the working-class majority.

  The two goals—productivity and prosperity—cannot be separat
ed. If productivity is increased but the gains are concentrated in a tiny oligarchy, the country will lack a mass home market of consumers as an adequate base for globally competitive industries with increasing returns to scale, something that remains important in our less-than-global economy. The country will have temporarily purchased national productivity at the price of class peace. If, by means of redistribution, incomes are equalized but productivity stagnates or declines, the country will fall further and further behind more productive foreign rivals. The country will have temporarily purchased class peace at the price of national productivity.

  In the system that succeeds today’s neoliberalism, global integration should be subordinated to the need to preserve and strengthen the democratic pluralist peace treaty among the managerial class and the working class at home, while government, business, and organized labor work together to promote technological modernization and shared gains from growth. The neoliberal argument that governments must not interfere in globalization, and can therefore only compensate the losers or help them to adapt, must be rejected. It is not necessary to reject trade and immigration as such. But democratic nation-states can, and should, engage in selective globalization. They should adopt strategic trade policies and selective immigration policies in the interest of national productivity, national solidarity, and the bargaining power of citizen-workers and legal immigrants in negotiations with employers.