The Proletarian-Middle Class Realignment

Let's continue down the road I started yesterday, a contrarian-revisionist reinterpretation of "Fabian socialism", which has been the consensus social democrat strategy in the West since the late 19th century. It is effectively a delaying strategy to appear to make concessions to the threat of class revolution, but the concessions, although expensive, are token, while they're made and financed by the middle class and upper proletariat (Paul Fussell's "high proles"), and the institutions of upper-class privilege remain untouched.

One feature of the Trump era is that key demographic groups are beginning to recognize that this strategy in fact doesn't work for them, even though it had been sold as to their benefit. For instance,

Barbara Clark is the perfect example of a voter—whether black, white, Hispanic, or from any other ethnic group—who defies stereotypes. This defiance often leads to voters such as her being overlooked as people who could change not just the presidential election, but also the majority in the Senate.

Clark is a black female who has been a registered Democrat for almost all of her adult life and voted for former President Barack Obama twice.

. . . “After we got Obama in the first time, and nothing happened, nothing changed, I said, ‘Whoa, what’s going on?’ And the local Democrats told me, ‘They won’t let him,’” Clark explained.

. . . “My answer to them was, I said, ‘Well, he’s got to step up and say, “I’m the president.”’ But nothing changed in our community,” she added.

This is echoed in a recent essay by Amity Shlaes, We Are Living In Lyndon Johnson's America:

Counterintuitive as it is to recall, the riots that ripped up Los Angeles and Detroit in the Johnson years [1965-67] came after passage of Johnson’s two great civil-rights laws, not before. As [aide Joseph] Califano reports, the Watts riots so distressed Johnson that he chose to disappear for more than twenty-four hours, an eternity for a chief executive.

. . . Rather than consider the possibility that African Americans were saying they needed something beyond more federal laws, Johnson, upon his return, simply passed further measures, including the Model Cities program, another Washington try at bettering the life of cities’ middle classes and the urban poor.

In short, these experiments were not experiments in the true sense, for they lacked science and accountability. They were actually plays, or Hail Marys, or political forays.

In other words, Johnson's Great Society legislation wasn't so much an effort to address the actual problems of civil rights and poverty as it was to create an impression that something was being done, when on one hand, it wasn't, but on the other, the huge and feckless expense would be borne by middle-and working-class taxpayers in the form of increased taxes and inflation. Shlaes continues,

While in office, Johnson, all politician, never . . . . took time to parse the downside of welfare-state expansion, or to consider that inflation caused by his spending might ravage paychecks. He did not consider that basing American immigration policy on compassion rather than logic or trade-offs would make it difficult for future lawmakers to control the nation’s borders. He did not ponder what increasing longevity would do to the fiscal outlook of his most beloved program, Medicare. In 1966 or 1967, he was too busy to think about all that.

. . . Though a failure of Johnson’s great military buildup in Vietnam is usually offered as the reason he did not choose to run again in 1968, one suspects that an eagerness to avoid seeing the ugly outputs, the results of his domestic work, played a role.

But Shlaes, at least here, doesn't cover Johnson's shift from Southern-state segregationist as Senate Majority Leader to ally of Dr King as president. This is the Johnson who is reported to have said in 1963,

These Negroes, they're getting pretty uppity these days and that's a problem for us since they've got something now they never had before, the political pull to back up their uppityness. Now we've got to do something about this, we've got to give them a little something, just enough to quiet them down, not enough to make a difference. . . I'll have them n****** voting Democratic for the next two hundred years.

This suggests that Johnson's legislative moves weren't made with a pure heart or the best of intentions; his aim wasn't to fix the race issue, it was to "give them a little something", which would in reality be paid out in riots that set the community back for decades.

What we're seeing in the current election season is a growing alignment between all members of the non-college educated middle class against an alliance of the college-educated and the traditionally privileged. It's explained in tis NPR interview:

Well, we're talking about the education line, and whether or not you have a college degree seems to be one of the biggest predictors of how you're going to vote. If you have a college degree, more likely than not, you're voting Democratic. If you don't, more likely than not now, you're voting Republican. And that's a pretty big shift from what we had seen, you know, in the 1980s or '90s, even the early 2000s.

This brings us back to a less-acknowledged feature of the Fabian socialist project, the widening of access to college education. This is coered from different perspectives in David Brooks's Bobos in Paradise and Alan Dershowitz's Chutzpah. Brooks feels that the post-World War II GI Bill and the introduction of the Scholastic Aptitude Test created a genune meritocracy that in particular allowed Jews to compete for upper-middle-class jobs.

Dershowitz has a much more realistic view that the universities simply disguised their existing Jewish quotas under "diversity" criteria while continuing to give admissions preference to legacies, which simply perpetuated the old upper-class privilege. The middle-class applicants who won the admissions lottery were flattered into believing they'd gotten in on merit, so they enthusiastically supported the new regime, while the legacies, admitted the same old way as their forebears, could hitchhike on the prestige of those admitted on grades and SAT scores.

The problem is in the Trump era, the value of a college degree is declining. Once I switched my own career to tech, I found that the de facto qualifications for most IT jobs did not require a four-year degree, and many of my colleagues didn't have one. But if anything, the snobbery associated with a college degree has only increased, so that there's now an alliance between the newly respectable alumni of elite schools -- David Brooks is a perfect example -- and the legacies.

But again, the aspiring upper middle class that participates in the college admissions rat race finances this putative concession themselves, in the steadily increasing cost of the degree, financed by increasingly burdensome student loans. The legacies don't have this problem.

So what we're seeing incresingly is a recognition amonmg a growing segment of the electorate that the Fabian socialist project is a con -- in fact, an expensive con tha's financed by the people it's supposed to benefit. This is a good part of the basis for Trump's cuirrent success.

What's happening is on one hand a growing recognition of Ferdinand Lundberg's insight that I cited yesterday -- US society does at basis resemble a Latin American structure of a large population of peasants supporting a privileged ownership class -- but a relatively recent twist is that a segment of the peasants have been bamboozled into believing their interests correspond with the interests of the owners. But this is just another part of the Fabian socialist con.