An Obtuse Take On The Class Conflict
Kotkin is the author of several books. The New Class Conflict was published in September 2014 by Telos Press Publishing. In this book, Kotkin assesses the changing complexities of class in the United States, which he argues can no longer be understood in terms of traditional political divisions between left and right or conservative and liberal. For Kotkin, the new class order of the twenty-first century is marked by the rise of a high-tech oligarchy, a culturally dominant academic and media (both journalism and entertainment) elite, an expansive government bureaucracy, and a declining middle class.
So he's an expert on class, but in the current essay, Kotkin gets about half of everything wrong. He begins,
US president Donald Trump has disrupted the nature of class politics. In a reversal of long-standing allegiances, working-class Americans – including many minorities – have shifted towards the MAGA right. Meanwhile, the well-educated, the corporate elites and the government-dependent have generally veered leftwards.
This began long before Donald Trump. Labor leader Goerge Meany's refusal to endorse George McGovern in 1972 was much more significant. According to the New York Times on July 17, 1972,
The harsh opposition of George Meany to the Presidential candidacy of Senator George McGovern is creating widespread confusion, deep cleavages and spreading dissension within organized labor.
Labor leaders questioned since the close of last week's Democratic convention said that Mr. Meany was likely to have his way if he asks the executive council of the American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations at its Wednesday meeting to withhold endorsement of Senator McGovern.
. . . Meanwhile, in Rancho La Costa, Calif., the executive board of International Brotherhood of Teamsters voted today to support the re‐election of President Nixon. The leadership of the union has been close to the Nixon Administration, and the endorsement had been expected.
Nixon did a great deal to reshape the Republican alignment, including the Southern strategy and the overtures to labor. He carried 49 states in the 1972 election. Trump and Reagan simply continued strategies originated by Nixon. Kotkin goes on,
Rather than the relatively simple Marxist notion of a proletarian conflict with the bourgeoisie, we are seeing a more splintered and nuanced class politics across the West. These divisions are not simply driven by income, race or education, but increasingly also by how people earn their living, and how tariffs, policies and regulations impact their daily lives. These new class tensions threaten to push politics towards the fringes, both left and right. As society frays, the era of consensus politics is firmly at an end.
Kotkin invokes Marx, but only to say that Marx is irrelevant, things are much more complicated. But if we recognize that Trump is basically following Nixon's paradigm, exploiting an existing Republican alliance between the proletariat and the lower bourgeoisie, things actually become simpler. The working class broadly defined, a work force made up of both blue and white collar, forms a consensus at the center, pretty much the same thing Nixon called the "silent majority", except that beginning to recognize its power, it's become vocal as MAGA.And in invoking Marx, Kotkin ignores Marx's insight that the Lumpenproletariat, the criminal and idle underclass, is the enemy of the proletariat. What's actually been taking place -- and this is a trend that also began generations ago -- is an alliance between the elites and the criminal-idle underclass. Think of Tom Wolfe's 1970 essay "Radical Chic: That Party at Lenny’s":
. . . and now, in the season of Radical Chic, the Black Panthers. That huge Panther there, the one Felicia is smiling her tango smile at, is Robert Bay, who just 41 hours ago was arrested in an altercation with the police, supposedly over a .38-caliber revolver that someone had, in a parked car in Queens at Northern Boulevard and 104th Street or some such unbelievable place, and taken to jail on a most unusual charge called “criminal facilitation.”
These are clearly the seeds of George Floyd in 2020, the canonization of a street addict by the elites, the social tensions surrounding which were a simmering factor that led to Trump's vindication in 2024. Kotkin does seem to sense one change:
Until last year, the oligarchy that dominates much of the world economy (and that of the US) reliably allied with the political establishment, whether in Davos, Washington, London, Ottawa or Brussels. They embraced many of the woke positions on gender, race and especially climate, while largely disdaining MAGA as well as more traditional Republicans.
. . . Now that some oligarchs, like X owner Elon Musk and venture capitalist Marc Andreessen, have come out for Trump, the woke left has started to finally push back against their power over US politics. Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez have launched a ‘fighting oligarchy tour’ to wild applause in the largely oligarch-owned mainstream media.
Except that Sanders and AOC are generally regarded as jokes -- both have been called out for flying in private jets on that same "fighting oligrchy" tour. They're the same thing as the Black Panthers in Leonard Bernstein's 1970 party, absolutely nothing new. Kotkin seems to miss this. He also begins to contradict himself. Of the college-educated bourgeoisie, he says,
Their numbers have expanded globally with the massive increase in college enrollment, which grew almost 80 per cent between 1970 and 2010. People who work as lawyers, environmental consultants and teachers are now reliably Democratic. This slice of the middle class often considers itself both enlightened and fit to lead, thanks to their high test scores and degrees. They tend to have little use for patriotism, family or religion, in comparison with working-class voters.
Yet a few paragraphs later, he says,
Many educated millennials face a world where the ‘good’ jobs are disappearing, while they have to cope with rising rents and exorbitant tuition payments. In the US, some 40 per cent of recent graduates are underemployed, meaning they work in jobs where their college credentials are essentially worthless.
. . . Increasingly, many with college educations (once seen as the ticket to a middle-class life) consider university a waste of time, with more seeking careers in the trades instead.
This has actually become a new feature of Trumpism, but Kotkin doesn't recognize it: the working class broadly conmsidered has come to recognize that college degrees don't pay off, and Trump is taking revenge by cutting federal grants, and likely tax exemptions, to prestige universities. He concludes,
The new class conflict is far more complex than the favoured narrative of the oligarchs vs the people, or the old Marxist battle between industrial workers and the bourgeois merchant class. The only way to address the shift to an increasingly extreme politics comes from finding ways to provide greater opportunities for income and ownership. If we fail in this, the results won’t be pretty.
I think the answer is simpler: the elites have followed the "radical chic" pattern that began in the 1960s and allied themselves with the Lumpenproletariat. Part of this alliance is performance art, as it was in the 1960s. Another part is much more serious, embodied in the Great Replacement theory behind the Biden administration's mass migration policies that appear to have favored deliberately resettling third-world gang members into the US heartland.These aren't fringe conflicts. Kotkin seems to miss this, as he seems to miss what the actual majority is, and its history.
