Golly Gee, There's No Such Thing As Class Anymore!
Our political imagination has had a hard time catching up to this reality—that someone who drives a truck (which are very expensive, by the way) and wears a trucker hat and has literal grime on their hands from work might be better off than someone who’s filing patient financial forms at a desk in a hospital’s back office. It doesn’t fit our traditional image of working-class America. That’s why so many people reach for a definition that is kind of cultural and feels right.
Americans are even doing so in defining themselves. The Pew Research Center released a report just before Labor Day revealing that 60 percent of Americans—across education, income, occupation, and racial and ethnic groups—say they’re “working-class.” This percentage has ticked up over the years, but the term has increasingly taken on a partisan tinge. Two-thirds of Republican voters say the term describes them well, versus 55 percent of Democrats, and Republicans are more likely to do so regardless of their job, level of education, or income. Which means, increasingly, people who vote Republican just describe themselves as working class. Many Democrats worried about winning more working-class voters who vote Republican could just be chasing solid Republican voters who now use that label. That’s a losing game.
As best I can parse this out, she's saying more Americans are calling themselves "working class" while also calling themselves Republicans, so we should stop trying to reach out to the "working class", because this a chimera. Now John Judis, wsho self-identifies as a "longtime leftist", argues that the P:rofessional Managerial Class is made up of Professionals, who are more leftist, and Managers, who are more right-wing (leave aside that this is the fallacy of hypostatization). This means that the class is fractured, which means that it does not exist (aside, that is, from the fact that this is a hypostatization):
In other words, as far as shared class consciousness goes, a diversified working class does not exist. There are many reasons for this. Differences over cultural issues of race and sex and over socio-economic issues like immigration have divided the potential members of a diversified working class. These differences often intersect with differences in political geography, creating a gulf between the world views of small town and metropolitan America. Divisions have also arisen in between private sector industrial and white-collar workers and the unionized public sector workers whose salaries they pay in taxes. These divisions have contributed to the disapproval of unions among workers who might have been expected to support them. Ruy Teixeira and I described some of these tensions in our book, Where Have All the Democrats Gone?
. . . There are still large gaps in income and status between wage-laborers and professionals, and the political leadership that would unite them is absent. The labor movement is weak and divided. No more than a few percent of Americans could even name the current head of the AFL-CIO. Many Democratic Party leaders are still in hock to culturally progressive lobbies, foundations, and think tanks. The organization to which Mamdani and his allies belong, the Democratic Socialists of America, purports to speak for the working class but enthusiastically embraces the most extreme stands on immigration (open borders), crimes (abolish the police and prisons), sex (biological men in women’s sports) and race (reparations). The PMC may be in ruins, but the diversified working remains, at best, a work in progress.
So these writers are both leftists, and they'ere either concluding we should ignore the working class, because it's turning Republican, or despair that professionals and managers are too divided to become part of a diversified working class. But what about the traditional Marxist divide between the workers and the bourgeoisie, something to which only Monica Potts alludes even vaguely? If we can no longer define a coherent working class, can we still define a bourgroisie? Well, I rediscoverd an essay I submitted to The Dartmouth Review in 2007, which they never published, which begins by making this point:
We’ve become squeamish over the past generation on the subject of social class, which is unfortunate, since in the case of the Dartmouth petition trustee dispute, it’s clear that divisions based on social class are playing themselves out. For instance, Peter Robinson, one of the petition candidates elected to the Dartmouth Board of Trustees in 2005, said in an interview with The Dartmouth Review following his election,
I will be the people's Trustee—maybe even the peasants' Trustee. Some of the members of the board, I'm told, attend Trustee meetings by flying into Lebanon in their own private jets. I will be taking the red-eye Jet Blue to Boston and then going north to Hanover on the Greyhound bus.
Yet in the volumes that are being written on the petition Trustees, the class question is the dog that isn’t barking.
That class seems to have fallen off the agenda as a matter for intellectual attention is particularly puzzling in light of the extraordinary critiques of American culture that appeared in the 1950s, 60s, and 70s, such as C Wright Mills’s White Collar and The Power Elite; Vance Packard’s The Status Seekers; Richard Hofstadter’s Anti-Intellectualism in American Life; Ferdinand Lundberg’s The Rich and the Super Rich; and – after an interval that suggests the trend was petering out -- Christopher Lasch’s The Culture of Narcissism. All these books rely heavily on class as part of their social analysis, and it’s worth mentioning that they appear as non-fiction at a time when the American novel was beginning to falter badly (the novel is itself often a vehicle for discussing social class).
I didn'r realize at the time that Jeffrey Hart, the Review's faculty adviser, was sinking into dementia and apparently no longer endorsing my work. Looking at it almost 20 years later, that was a darn good essay. But then, Hart and the Review never produced more than B-listers like Robinson, Laura Ingraham, Dinesh D'Souza, and William S Lind.The point that Mills and Lundberg in particular were making in thr 1950s and 60s continues to be as valid as ever, the true upper class as envisioned by Marx continues to exist, and it's clearly identifiable. We've seen in recent discussions of Ivy admissions, including here, that members of the identifiable upper class maintain mechanisms that overwhelmingly favor their offspring in a theoretically meritocratic admissions process. But it's also recognized that an Ivy degree is a less certain class indicator than attendance at particular "independent" secondary schools -- this was the case, for instance, with Graham Platner, whose class identity was exposed from his semester at Hotchkiss.
They can also be relably identified by having multiple homes in specific zip codes, such as Nantucket, Martha's Vineyard, Aspen, Jackson Hole, the Hamptons, and Hillsborough. They serve on non-profit boards. They are members of particular clubs and secret societies like the Bohemians and Skull and Bones. What's incongruous is that leftist writers like those above are beginning to despair of their ability to identify the working class at all, but the bourgeoisie has always been clearly identifiable.
So, why is RCP trying to convince us class is irrelevant? Isn't it peculiar that writers who claim to be leftists are being paid to do tnis?
