The Trump Indictment And The Starbucks Dilemma

A recent episode of the TV series The Food That Built America covered the rise of the upscale Starbucks brand, in contrast to the middle- and working-class Dunkin' Doughnuts. Howard Schultz, a marketing innovator, was inspired by the atmosphere of Italian coffee shops while he was traveling there and saw an opportunity: the episode didn't put it this way, but in effect, he could create a food experience that would remind his target demographic of their junior year abroad.

Through an indirect path, he took over a small boutique gourmet coffee retailer based in San Francisco and Seattle and turned it into a national brand that fed the narcissism of college-educated gentry and convinced them to pay extravagant prices for cups of coffee by giving everything fancy-schmancy names. But the show left out the rest of the story: the gentry has found itself in a precarious situation. Having once retired rich on the basis of one formula, he returned to find that formula was no longer working:

"We are beginning to close stores," because of safety issues, interim CEO Howard Schultz said in a video posted to Twitter [in July 2022]. "This is just the beginning. There are going to be many more."

Starbucks said last week that it is closing 16 stores over safety concerns. Around that time, Debbie Stroud and Denise Nelson, both senior vice presidents of US operations at the company, outlined the efforts that Starbucks is taking to make stores safer in an open letter.

Workers are "seeing firsthand the challenges facing our communities — personal safety, racism, lack of access to healthcare, a growing mental health crisis, rising drug use, and more," they wrote, adding that "with stores in thousands of communities across the country, we know these challenges can, at times, play out within our stores too."

The effort to make workers feel safer could result in more closings, according to Schultz's video, which was first reported by Insider.

This represented a change in policy over a 2018 controversy in which African-American customers complained that they were denied use of the store's tables and restrooms, although they didn't buy the overpriced products on sale there. So the chain responded by virtue signaling and making public an open-restroom policy -- except that public restrooms have increasingly become magnets for all sorts of undesirable activity, including shooting up and illicit sex. So Schultz is now closing stores where the problem is worst, and elsewhere allowing a return to a customers-only restroom policy.

This isn't a good solution, and Schultz seems to be fully aware of the dilemma: he's closing profitable stores on one hand, while he's losing his upscale do-gooder image on the other. This won't work in any long term, and Schultz retired again as CEO just a week ago. The dilemma remains -- how does the upscale gentry accommodate the Lumpenproletariat in an uneasy quasi-alliance while still wanting to feel like they're on junior year abroad?

This brings me back to a point I've been making about Karl Marx here for some time. Just to be clear, I'm a Roman Catholic convert generally aligned with Ven Fulton Sheen and Bp Barron. But as I said a year ago,

I don't disagree with Marx in my view that the objective of the gentry is to make life miserable for the workers. The question has always been precisely how to do this and how far to go. Under the worst despots, the explicit goal is to depopulate them, and this is effectively what's going on in Ukraine, although programs to encourage abortion, transsexualism, and disintegration of families in the more genteel west differ only in degree. As with other worldwide conflicts, each theater has unique conditions.

The particular problem in the US for two generations -- the 1972 election was the tipping point -- has been the disintegration of the New Deal coalition, whereby Franklin Roosevelt forestalled proletarian revolution via an alliance of the Ivy League upper class with the middle and working classes. A major element of the alliance was the alignment of northern wealth with southern segregationist Democrats. The 1960s changed this balance via the Civil Rights movement, with one unintended consequence being the false conflation of middle- and working-class African-American upward mobility with a perceived authenticity among the urban African-American criminal class. This conflation has maintained segregationist impulses favorable to the traditional Democrat agenda, something Scott Adams has most recently discovered.

This quickly led to the success of Nixon's southern strategy, in which the bourgeoisie of both races in the former Confederacy and border states aligned with the party of Reconstruction. The interests of neither the bourgeoisie nor the working class are aligned with Marx's Lumpenproletariat, something even African-American members of the Old Left acknowledged during the Civil Rights years. The 50-year trend since 1972 has been for the working and middle classes to abandon the Democrats, leaving them with a combination of college-educated gentry, the wealthy one-percenters, sexual special pleaders from radical feminists to transsexuals, and the urban criminal class, which now extends to the homeless, the drug addicted, and the mentally ill.

At this point, Democrats, in the process of losing Latins and Asians, can't afford to alienate anyone in the remaining coaltion: the deal seems to be that elderly Democrat stalwarts like President Biden and former Speaker Pelosi can stay in place as long as members of the remaining coalition, especially representatives of the Lumpenproletariat and the sexual special pleaders, have a place -- although the real payoff continues to be to the Ivy League upper class, the entrepreneurial one percent, and the gentry, who are the ones that actually continue to benefit from the alliance.

But here's the problem, which I think Howard Schultz understands in some inchoate way: as Marx understood, the Lumpenproletariat is not a reliable ally -- from his viewpoint, not with the workers, but in general, they're not a reliable ally with anyone, and that definitely includes the one-percenters and the gentry. If you let the street rabble into your restrooms, you get what you deserve.

But let's take a more recent problem, the Trump indictment. I noted over the course of the past week that just about everyone was starting to heave a sigh of relief that maybe the New York grand jury was going to adjourn for a month's vacation without taking any action on Trump -- after all, the case was shaky, and even the Alan Dershowitz gentry had lost faith in it. But at the last minute, just before they went out the door, they indicted.

Well, Alvin Bragg is a politican who identifies with the Lumpenproletariat. His agenda, financed by the one-percenter George Soros, is to treat members of the criminal class with extreme leniency by dropping felony charges and abolishing cash bail. This doesn't affect either the gentry or the one percent, since they live in gated communities or high-security buildings. But it does make their politicians, such as Mr Bragg, unreliable allies.

There seems to be a consensus that the Trump indictment will have unpredictable and likely unintended consequences. As far as we can tell for now, it's driven Trump back up in the polls. There are some people who think the Bragg faction is playing eight-dimensional chess, and giving Trump the nomination will make him an easy target for Biden. But I think it's far too early to make any sure prediction, except that I think the Republicans have learned something over the past few years, while the Democrats have learned nothing.

So far, for instance, Republicans have learned that if they resort to conventional rallies or demonstrations, they expose themselves to Antifa provocateurs and FBI informants, and they're likely not to use that strategy, even as Trump seems to want them to. On the other hand, Democrat allies -- especially the same Antifa types and sexual deviants -- are likely to continue both systematic riots and indivudual sorties like, for instance, the attack of a radical nudist on Paul Pelosi in his one-percent home, or the transsexual who murdered six at a Presbyterian school.

This will inevitably unite the solid citizens, but it won't have an equivalent effect on the remaining Democrat coalition, primarily because a major component of that coaltion is simply not reliable. As Howard Schultz discovered, you romanticize the Lumpenproletariat at your peril.