Victor Davis Hanson, The Poor, And Live PD

Victor Davis Hanson published an essay Friday in the New York Post, Elites’ divide & conquer failure: How middle class now view their rulers with rightly earned disdain. Hanson emerged with a new set of commentators like the late Angelo Codevilla around the time of 9/11. From the start, I always thought there was more he could have done with any of his themes than he ever actually delivered, but in recent times, I think the problem has grown.

In this piece, he's specifically addressing class, which means he really needs at least to nod his head to Marx, but he doesn't. He writes either as if Marx didn't exist, or Marx is completely irrelevant to the subject, or (possibly more likely), he thinks he underatands Marx and expects the reader to assume he does, so he won't mention him. However, he doesn't understand Marx. We have to back up and see how this matters.

It's important to recognize that Marx had a point, and his basic taxonomy of class and class interests is accurate, something the American populist writer Ferdinand Lundberg instinctively understood. Where Marx and his ideological successors erred was in the question of what is to be done. Marxism suffered an irrecoverable defeat in the late 20th century when its methods collapsed, while capitalism managed to expand world prosperity to the point that India and China generated what might be called large middle classes, but which a populist like Lundberg would call a prosperous working class, which I think is more faithful to Marx's original idea.

This is the point Hanson misses. He divides US society into the "elites", the "masses", and the "truly poor":

Elites have always been ambiguous about the muscular classes who replace their tires, paint their homes, and cook their food. And the masses who tend to them likewise have been ambivalent about those who hire them: appreciative of the work and pay, but also either a bit envious of those with seemingly unlimited resources or turned off by perceived superciliousness arising from their status and affluence.

. . . The elite found in the truly poor — neglecting their old union-member, blue-collar Democratic base — an outlet for their guilt, noblesse oblige, condescension at a safe distance, call it what you will. The poor if kept distant were fetishized, while the middle class was demonized for lacking the taste of the professional classes and romance of the far distant underclass.

This ignores Marx, and while historical and economic circumstances have changed, Marx has a clearer view of the classes.

Marxist Theory maintains that poverty, like wealth, is an inevitable consequence of a capitalist society. Marxists argue that poverty benefits the ruling class, as it ensures that there is always a workforce willing to accept low wages. Similarly, the existence of unemployment and job insecurity means that there is always a ‘reserve army of labour’ able and willing (or, unable to be unwilling!) to take their place if they are not happy. Capitalism and the bourgeoisie therefore benefit from the existence of poverty. It is not simply that there are rich and poor. It is rather that some are rich because some are poor.

In other words, poverty is an alternate state of the working class. In good times, workers will be slightly better off; in bad times, they'll be unemployed, poor, and anxious to find any work at all, which benefits capital. For the past 75 years or so, there's been a phase of capitalist prosperity that's discredited the Leninist strategy of revolution, but that doesn't change Marx's insight that the poor are an alternate state of the workers; the interests of the poor and the workers are aligned, and they are in fact the same class.

Hanson also conflates the poor with a group Marx recognized was a separate class, the Lumpenproletariat:

Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels coined the word in the 1840s and used it to refer to the unthinking lower strata of society exploited by reactionary and counter-revolutionary forces, particularly in the context of the revolutions of 1848. They dismissed the revolutionary potential of the Lumpenproletariat and contrasted it with the proletariat. Among other groups, criminals, vagabonds, and prostitutes are usually included in this category.

The poor are part of the proletariat, the working class. The Lumpenproletariat are a different group, opposed to the interests of the working class, which of course includes the poor. We've seen this vividly illustrated daily in two fairly recont TV series, A&E's The First 48, and Live PD, which was also on A&E until it was canceled there during the BLM panic (it's now been cloned in its original form as On Patrol: Live on the Reelz channel.) Both are the best sort of reality programming, unscripted, with camera crews simply following homicide detectives (The First 48) or uniformed patrol officers (Live PD/On Patrol: Live) in their daily routines.

The homicide detectives are the best illustration of Marx's insight into the Lumpenproletariat. It's well known that most homicides occur in poor inner-city areas, but what's not understood (including by Hanson) is that they're most frequently fratricidal killings among the Lumpenproletariat, drug dealers, pimps, prostitutes, and other petty criminals. And many of these are by no means poor in the conventional sense; they dress extravagantly with flashy jewelry and drive fancy cars, for which they may well kill each other. Their money comes in large measure from exploiting their poor working-class neighbors, something Marx understood.

Hanson accuses the eltes of fetishizing "the poor", but they're actually fetishizing the Lumpenproletariat, the inner-city street criminals who exploit the poor working class. George Floyd was a member of this group, and the BLM riots and the "defund the police" movement were utterly misleading in conflating the interests of the poor working class and the street criminals. Rap artists who get rich and famous adopting the personas of successful street criminals are another part of this phenomenon.

Thus one of the first victims of the BLM panic was the Live PD show, which was accused of glorifying the police. It was certainly the most-watched show on weekend cable, as its revival On Patrol: Live has instantly become as well. Those who watch it see an unmediated portrayal of routine social disorder, DUIs, domestic violence, addiction, homelessness, and petty crime. The police, aware that their conduct is on film, are models of courtesy and restraint, although there are also unavoidable situations where they must use appropriate force. The result is an increased understanding among viewers of the actual nature of law enforcement. Why anyone thought this should be canceled, especially at a time when this understanding should be promoted, is a mystery.

Hanson also disinguishes the "masses" from the "poor", and while the "masses" are opposed to the "elites", the "elites" fetishize the "poor". This is about as un-Marxist as you can get. Marx thought the Lumpenproletariat were an unreliable ally for anyone, much less the workers, but they'll steal from the elites as well if they get the chance. I'm inclined, on the other hand, to extend the definition of "middle class" to include the former working class; the interests of both are in opposition to the "elites", which I think are actually made up of two groups, the truly rich, the rentiers, who amount to much less than 1%, and the "gentry", academics, artists, politicians, high-level bureaucrats, corporate decisionmakers, and media figures who align themselves with the rentiers and associate with them in Ivy schools and similar institutions.

Two recent media figures illustrate the differences. Scott Adams got rich with the Dilbert comic strip that portrays the struggles of the white-collar tech working class -- but once he got rich, he aligned himself with the gentry. Mike Rowe, oddly enough, began as an artist, an opera singer, and gradually identified with the working class. He now spends much of his free time promoting the idea that it's possible to have a rewarding career without a college degree. He continues to be unabashedly pro-Trump, unlike Adams.

I think the contribution Trump has made to the political scene, aided to some extent by thinkers like Codevilla, has been to recognize this expanded definition of the "middle class" to include everything from those in upper-middle white collar jobs down actually to the urban poor, and this is reflected especially in increasing numbers of Latins who now identify as Republican. By the same token, the increasing bitterness of the elites toward such signs shows they're aware of it and will do anything they can to stop it.

Hanson's problem is that he comes to a conclusion -- the "masses" now hold the "elites" in disdain -- that isn't specific enough to be very useful, and the route he takes to get there doesn't add much insight. Bloviation gets us noplace.