The New Class War E-Book

Michael Lind

• Herausgeber: Atlantic Books
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2020

Beschreibung

An Evening Standard's Book of the Year 'A tour de force.' David Goodhart All over the West, party systems have shattered and governments have been thrown into turmoil. The embattled establishment claims that these populist insurgencies seek to overthrow liberal democracy. The truth is no less alarming but is more complex: Western democracies are being torn apart by a new class war. In this controversial and groundbreaking analysis, Michael Lind, one of America's leading thinkers, debunks the idea that the insurgencies are primarily the result of bigotry and reveals the real battle lines. He traces how the breakdown of class compromises has left large populations in Western democracies politically adrift. We live in a globalized world that benefits elites in high income 'hubs' while suppressing the economic and social interests of those in more traditional lower-wage 'heartlands'. A bold framework for understanding the world, The New Class War argues that only a fresh class settlement can avert a never-ending cycle of clashes between oligarchs and populists - and save democracy.

Leseprobe

About the Author

Michael Lind is the author of more than a dozen books of non-fiction, fiction and poetry. He is a professor at the Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas and a fellow and co-founder of New America. He has been an editor or staff writer for The New Yorker, Harper’s and The New Republic. He is a frequent contributor to The New York Times, Financial Times, Politico, Foreign Policy and The International Economy.

First published in the United States in 2020 by Portfolio,an imprint of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.

Published in hardback in Great Britain in 2020 by Atlantic Books,an imprint of Atlantic Books Ltd.

Copyright © Michael Lind, 2020

The moral right of Michael Lind to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

Every effort has been made to trace or contact all copyright holders. The publishers will be pleased to make good any omissions or rectify any mistakes brought to their attention at the earliest opportunity.

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A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Hardback ISBN: 978 1 78649 955 4

E-book ISBN: 978 1 78649 956 1

Printed in Great Britain

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Contents

INTRODUCTION

CHAPTER ONE

The New Class War

CHAPTER TWO

Hubs and Heartlands:

The Battlegrounds of the New Class War

CHAPTER THREE

World Wars and New Deals

CHAPTER FOUR

The Neoliberal Revolution from Above

CHAPTER FIVE

The Populist Counterrevolution from Below

CHAPTER SIX

Russian Puppets and Nazis: How the Managerial Elite Demonizes

Populist Voters

CHAPTER SEVEN

The Workerless Paradise:

The Inadequacy of Neoliberal Reform

CHAPTER EIGHT

Countervailing Power: Toward a New Democratic Pluralism

CHAPTER NINE

Making the World Safe for Democratic Pluralism

Epilogue

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

NOTES

INDEX

The problem of classes is this: Class conflict is essential if freedom is to be preserved, because it is the only barrier against class domination; yet class conflict, pursued to excess, may well destroy the underlying fabric of common principle which sustains free society.

—ARTHUR M. SCHLESINGER JR.,

TheVital Center: The Politics of Freedom (1949)

No theory, no promises, no morality, no amount of good will, no religion will restrain power. . . . Only power restrains power.

—JAMES BURNHAM,

The Machiavellians: Defenders of Freedom (1943)

Introduction

ON THE NIGHT OF july 14, 1789, legend has it, news of the fall of the Bastille was brought by a duke to the king of France, Louis XVI. “Then it’s a revolt?” the king asked. The duke replied: “No, sire, it’s a revolution.”

On June 23, 2016, a majority of British voters passed the Brexit referendum requiring the United Kingdom to leave the European Union. A few months after that political earthquake, on November 8, 2016, came an even more shocking event: the election of Donald Trump as president of the United States.

Since then, throughout Europe, centrist parties have lost voters to outsider parties and politicians—sometimes on the left but more often on the populist and nationalist right. In the summer of 2018, a coalition of the right-wing populist League and the antiestablishment Five Star Movement came to power in Italy. In Germany, the center-left Social Democrats imploded, losing voters to insurgent movements on the right and left. Nations that were said to be immune to nationalist populism, like Sweden, Germany, and Spain, have seen insurgent populist parties enter their parliaments.

Under Emmanuel Macron, a former civil servant and investment banker who defeated the national populist candidate Marine Le Pen in 2017, France at first seemed immune to upheaval. “Emmanuel Macron’s victory in the French presidential election clearly demonstrates that the populist dominos in advanced economies outside the Anglo-Saxon world were not even close to falling,” Jacob Funk Kirkegaard, a senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics (PIIE), a free market think tank in Washington, DC, declared in May 2017, in an essay entitled “Macron’s Victory Signals Reform in France and a Stronger Europe.”1 Nearly a year later, in April 2018, Will Marshall of the Progressive Policy Institute, an architect of the “New Democrat” movement associated with the Clintons, published an essay in Politico arguing that the French president proved that promarket neoliberal centrists could defeat the forces of populism and nationalism: “How Emmanuel Macron Became the New Leader of the Free World.”2

Then, beginning in November 2018, protests that were initially directed against the impact of an increase in fuel prices on suburban, small-town, and rural French working-class citizens escalated into months of violent clashes among police and protesters that filled central Paris with tear gas and burning cars and ignited protests across France.

“Then it’s a revolt?”

“No, sire, it’s a revolution.”

Indeed it is. Europe and North America are experiencing the greatest revolutionary wave of political protest since the 1960s or perhaps the 1930s.3 Except in France, the transatlantic revolution to date has remained nonviolent. But it is a revolution nonetheless.

TO QUOTE THE saying of the radicals of the 1960s: the issue is not the issue. If the immediate issues that animate mostly native working-class populism in particular countries—immigration and trade for Trump, immigration and sovereignty for Brexiteers, high levels of Muslim immigration for German and Scandinavian populists, fuel prices and other domestic policies whose costs fall chiefly on the peripheral working class, in the case of the French yellow vest protestors—are not the issue, then what is the issue?

The issue is power. Social power exists in three realms—government, the economy, and the culture. Each of these three realms of social power is the site of class conflict—sometimes intense and sometimes contained by interclass compromises. All three realms of Western society today are fronts in the new class war.

The first class war in the West began a century and a half ago, in the early stages of industrialization, when the premodern agrarian social structure was shattered by the emergence of the two major modern social classes: industrial or service workers on the one hand and, on the other, bourgeois capitalists, later joined by university-credentialed managers and professionals. Reforms were partial and limited, until the imperative of mobilizing entire national populations for war made ending class conflict a necessity.

During and after World War II, the United States and its Western European allies, often on the basis of wartime precedents, adopted versions of what I describe in this book as democratic pluralism. In the America of Truman and Eisenhower, the Germany of Adenauer, the Britain of Churchill, and other Western democracies, power brokers who answered to working-class and rural constituencies—grassroots party politicians, trade union and farm association leaders, and church leaders—bargained with national elites in the three realms of government, the economy, and the culture, respectively. In the era of democratic pluralism, the societies of the North Atlantic enjoyed mass prosperity and reduced inequality.

Between the 1960s and the present, as declining fear of great-power conflict gradually reduced the incentives of Western elites to make concessions to Western working classes, the postwar system has been dismantled in a revolution from above that has promoted the material interests and intangible values of the college-educated minority of managers and professionals, who have succeeded old-fashioned bourgeois capitalists as the dominant elite.

What has replaced democratic pluralism can be described as technocratic neoliberalism. In the realm of the economy, corporations have promoted deunionization and labor market deregulation to the detriment of workers. Firms have also embraced global labor arbitrage, in the form of offshoring production to poor workers abroad or employing immigrant workers, to weaken unions and escape the constraints of national labor regulations.

Meanwhile, in the realm of politics and government, parties that were national federations of local, mass-membership organizations have given way to parties controlled by donors and media consultants. At the same time, many of the powers of democratic national legislatures have been usurped by, or delegated to, executive agencies, courts, or transnational bodies over which college-educated professionals have far more influence than the working-class majority, whether native-or foreign-born.

Finally, in the realm of culture, including media and education, local religious and civic watchdogs have lost power, often as a result of activism by judges born into the social elite who share their libertarian economic and social views with their university-educated peers.

The technocratic neoliberal revolution from above, carried out in one Western nation after another by members of the ever more aggressive and powerful managerial elite, has provoked a populist backlash from below by the defensive and disempowered native working class, many of whom are nonwhite (a substantial minority of black and ethnic British voters supported Brexit, and in the US an estimated 29 percent of Latinos voted in 2016 for Trump).4 Large numbers of alienated working-class voters, realizing that the political systems of their nations are rigged and that mainstream parties will continue to ignore their interests and values, have found sometimes unlikely champions in demagogic populists like Donald Trump, Nigel Farage, Boris Johnson, Marine Le Pen, and Matteo Salvini.

For all their differences, these populist demagogues have launched similar counterattacks on dominant neoliberal establishments in all three realms of social power. In the realm of the economy, populists favor national restrictions on trade and immigration to shield workers from competing with imports and immigrants. In the realm of politics, populists denounce neoliberal parties and factions as corrupt and elitist. And in the realm of culture, populists denounce elite-promulgated multiculturalism and globalism, while deliberately flouting the norms of the “politically correct” etiquette that marks membership in the university-educated managerial elite.

Will populists in Europe and North America succeed in overthrowing and replacing technocratic neoliberalism? Almost certainly not. Populist voters are a substantial and enduring part of Western electorates, but they are only one constituency in pluralistic societies with increasingly fragmented political systems.

Moreover, populist demagogues tend to be charlatans. They are often corrupt. Many are racist or ethnocentric, though these traits are exaggerated by establishment critics who compare them to Mussolini and Hitler. While demagogic populists can win occasional isolated victories for their voters, history suggests that populist movements are likely to fail when confronting well-entrenched ruling classes whose members enjoy near monopolies of expertise, wealth, and cultural influence.

In response to populist rebellions from below, the managerial elites of various Western countries may turn to outright repression of the working class by restricting access to political activity and the media by all dissenters, not populists alone. As an alternative, the managerial ruling classes may try to co-opt populist rebels by making minor concessions on immigration, trade, or domestic policy.

But sharing wealth through redistribution and symbolic gestures of respect are unlikely to end the new class war, if the small managerial overclass is not willing to share genuine power with the working-class majority. Achieving a genuine class peace in the democracies of the West will require uniting and empowering both native and immigrant workers while restoring genuine decision-making power to the non-university-educated majority in all three realms of social power—the economy, politics, and culture.

Demagogic populism is a symptom. Technocratic neoliberalism is the disease. Democratic pluralism is the cure.

THE

NEWCLASS WAR

CHAPTER ONE

The New Class War

THE COLD WAR has been followed by the class war. A transatlantic class war has broken out simultaneously in many Western countries between elites based in the corporate, financial, government, media, and educational sectors and disproportionately native working-class populists. The old spectrum of left and right has given way to a new dichotomy in politics among insiders and outsiders.*

None of the dominant political ideologies of the West can explain the new class war, because all of them pretend that enduring, self-perpetuating social classes no longer exist in the West.

Technocratic neoliberalism—the hegemonic ideology of the transatlantic elite—pretends that inherited class status has virtually disappeared in societies that are purely meritocratic, with the exception of barriers to individual upward mobility that still exist because of racism and misogyny. Unable to acknowledge the existence of social class, much less to discuss conflicts among classes, neoliberals tend to attribute populism to bigotry or frustration on the part of maladjusted individuals or a resurgence of 1930s fascism or the sinister machinations of Russian president Vladimir Putin’s nationalist regime.

Like neoliberalism, mainstream conservatism assumes that hereditary classes no longer exist in the West. Along with neoliberals and libertarians, establishment conservatives claim that the economic elite is not a semihereditary class but rather an ever-changing, kaleidoscopic aggregate of talented and hardworking individuals. According to libertarian conservative ideology, the short-term interests of employers are always identical with those of workers and society as a whole. In conventional conservative thought, meritocratic capitalism is threatened from within by an anticapitalist “new class” consisting of progressive intellectuals—professors, journalists, and nonprofit activists.

For its part, Marxism takes classes and class conflict seriously. But orthodox Marxism, with its secularized providential theory of history and its view of industrial workers as the cosmopolitan agents of global revolution, has always been absurd.

A body of thought does exist that can explain the current upheavals in the West and the world. It is James Burnham’s theory of the managerial revolution, supplemented by the economic sociology of John Kenneth Galbraith. Burnham’s thought has recently enjoyed a revival among thinkers of the American center-right.1 Unfortunately, Galbraith’s sociology, along with his economics, remains out of fashion.2

James Burnham was a leader in the international Trotskyist movement in the 1930s before he became a zealous anticommunist and helped to found the post–World War II American conservative movement. Burnham was influenced by the argument of Adolf Berle and Gardiner Means in The Modern Corporation and Private Property (1932), which documented the separation of ownership and control in large-scale modern enterprises, and possibly by Bruno Rizzi’s Bureaucratization of the World (1939).3 In his worldwide bestseller The Managerial Revolution (1941), Burnham argued that in the era of large-scale capitalism and the bureaucratic state, the older bourgeoisie was being replaced by a new managerial class:

What is occurring in this transition is a drive for social domination, for power and privilege, for the position of ruling class, by the social group or class of the managers. . . . At the conclusion of the transition period the managers will, in fact, have achieved social dominance, will be the ruling class in society. This drive, moreover, is world-wide in extent, already well advanced in all nations, though at different levels of development in different nations.4

In his essay “Second Thoughts on James Burnham” (1946), George Orwell provided a succinct summary of Burnham’s thesis:

Capitalism is disappearing, but Socialism is not replacing it. What is now arising is a new kind of planned, centralized society which will be neither capitalist nor, in any accepted sense of the word, democratic. The rulers of this new society will be the people who effectively control the means of production: that is, business executives, technicians, bureaucrats and soldiers, lumped together by Burnham, under the name of “managers.” These people will eliminate the old capitalist class, crush the working class, and so organize society that all power and economic privilege remain in their own hands. Private property rights will be abolished, but common ownership will not be established. The new “managerial” societies will not consist of a patchwork of small, independent states, but of great superstates grouped round the main industrial centres in Europe, Asia, and America. These super-states will fight among themselves for possession of the remaining uncaptured portions of the earth, but will probably be unable to conquer one another completely. Internally, each society will be hierarchical, with an aristocracy of talent at the top and a mass of semi-slaves at the bottom.5

Following the abandonment of communism, the global norm in both developed and developing countries, democratic and authoritarian alike, has been some version of the mixed economy dominated by bureaucratic corporations, bureaucratic government, and bureaucratic nonprofits, which are staffed by university-credentialed national elites who circulate among the three sectors. What Orwell called Burnham’s “great super-states grouped round the main industrial centres in Europe, Asia, and America” exist today under the names of NATO and NAFTA, the EU, Russia’s Eurasian Economic Union (EAEU), and the informal sphere of influence coalescing around China.

While private property rights have not been abolished, even in so-called capitalist countries they have been diluted and redefined beyond recognition. Vast numbers of temporary holders of corporate shares that are frequently bought and resold by intermediaries like mutual funds are said to “own” corporations. Ordinary people with loan repayment or installment plans who in effect are renting houses, cars, and phones from banks or corporations likewise are owners in name only.

Burnham’s theory of the managerial revolution is similar to the economic sociology of the American economist John Kenneth Galbraith. In their politics, the conservative Burnham and the liberal Galbraith could hardly have been more different from each other, despite their shared friendship with the influential conservative editor and journalist William F. Buckley Jr. Yet both believed that a new ruling elite had displaced the old bourgeoisie and aristocracy. In The New Industrial State (1967), Galbraith called the new elite the “technostructure.” In his memoir A Life in Our Times (1981), Galbraith wrote: “James Burnham, partly because he was a stalwart right-winger well out of the political mainstream and partly because he was not a certified academician, never got full credit for his contribution. In early editions of The New Industrial State I was among those in default.”6

While Burnham and Galbraith included engineers and scientists in the new elite, they were not describing a technocracy like the utopian “soviet of technicians” hoped for by the maverick economist Thorstein Veblen.7 The most important managers are private and public bureaucrats who run large national and global corporations, government agencies, and nonprofit organizations. They exercise disproportionate influence in politics and society by virtue of their institutional positions in large, powerful bureaucracies. Some are independently wealthy, but most are salaried employees or fee-earning professionals. Most of today’s billionaires were born into this university-educated, credentialed, bureaucratic upper middle class, and their heirs tend to disappear back into it in a generation or two. Premodern titled aristocrats who survive in the contemporary West are anachronisms who, for the most part, avoid ridicule by disguising themselves as hardworking professionals and managers.

IN MY BOOKThe Next American Nation (1995), I used the term “overclass” to describe this group of college-educated managers and professionals.

How big is the overclass? It’s difficult to measure, but operating on Mark Bovens and Anchrit Wille’s theory that Western democracies are “diploma democracies”—“ruled by the citizens with the highest degrees”—we can count higher education as a market of membership in the overclass.8