In my last essay, I argued that the progress of capitalist development from industrial to postindustrial has worked to marginalize the socioeconomic position of ordinary people.
Yes, we can see how many of these points play out in what used the be the workers party: now the party of latinx (where no working class person would use the term) and "defund the police" and the cities that are heavily controlled by the Democratic party are the worse off for the working poor (worse zoning laws, higher gas and sales taxes, horrible crime and homelessness etc). Politics is all inter-elite signaling now.
For millions of ordinary Americans (up to two-thirds of all Americans, according to one Gallup poll), happiness would be an abundance of well-paying part-time employment opportunities in rural areas where land is cheap. To that end I have rather amateurishly self-published a short book exploring the idea of factories in the countryside run on part-time jobs: the new lifestyle such factories would make possible, how they could be made to run faster and more efficiently than conventional factories, and the new kinds of families, neighborhoods, and small country towns that might develop around them. Here is a link: shorturl.at/pALM5
Or alternatively email me and I will send a free copy: luke.lea@gmail.com
Very insightful, mostly, tho blatantly & tellingly false on authoritarian populism. "[T]he triumph over scarcity shifted the primary focus of liberal egalitarianism from lack of material resources to lack of cultural acceptance." This echoes Keynes from 1930 about The Permanent Problem. Economics does not have to be zero-sum over the mid and long term. Status always is.
These ideas should be tied into the problem of overproduction of elite wannabes - too many who want to be elite managers but NOT risk-taking entrepreneurs; not risking their own careers by founding any company.
"The process of cephalization necessarily spilled over into government: as the economy grew more complex, the task of governance became more complex as well." << if the task of governance is a fair process, this doesn't have to be true. If the democracy elects politicians who want specific results, which democratic votes now imply, than getting those results has become more complex. Often unachievable based on the "vetocracy" against significant changes.
[More Estonian style e-gov't might help with a lot of this]
I like "cephalization" as a word, but it's too complex/ difficult to become popular. Using the complex word "entrepreneur" has been and continues to be a huge negative for popular acceptance.
The college educated elite have internalized the secret, possibly illegal discrimination against Republicans, Christians, pro-life folk as practiced by all "top" colleges in their exclusion of Republicans when hiring. Professors or administrators or normal workers.
The reality of the discrimination is the lack of Republican, pro-life, & Christian professors in college. Ordinary folk judge more based on results than on words.
Tellingly False:
"This is the vacuum that authoritarian populism has rushed to fill. Donald Trump was the first U.S. presidential candidate to claim these voters as his own. Of course he offered them poisonous demagoguery, not actual concern for their outlook and interests,"
"Authoritarian" is an insulting word that only the elite would use against their political rivals who disagree with them. Neither "Authoritarian Left", nor "Authoritarian Democrats" is used, even tho the actions of Dems in power have been and are, objectively more authoritarian.
It would be good to list "authoritarian actions" and compare the support of such actions by the Dems and Reps - noting that banning gay grooming books from kid's libraries is considered quite different than "banning books" in general.
Insulting Trump, without evidence, is usual by Democrats and Never-Trump folk who can't seem to separate their distaste for his non-elite demeanor with the results of his policies: higher median income being MUCH better for ordinary people than Obama, Bush, Clinton or even Bush 41. And far far better than senile Biden.
But it's also true that many Big Gov't pro-life folk haven't had much of political representation other than Trump - your failure to explicitly discuss the divisive abortion issue is common among elites who don't think it's worth mentioning. "Big gov't pro-life" would be a better label for such folk, which is a lot of the upper left quadrant.
"Democracy" is all about "populism" - those against populism are, explicitly or implicitly, against democracy. As so many elites actually are.
I've noticed this in a lot of explanations of why the white, non-college educated working class has been drawn to far right populism and I've noticed here as well. I think it's interesting that a lot of people talk about this drift rightward as if the Right is simply responding to the Left. As though it couldn't be helped that they chose to follow an illiberal, far right movement.
This presents it as though the Right has no agency, as though cultivating the Southern Strategy to animate people wasn't the intention. This flip of the Left losing the working class also coincided with the Civil Rights Act. Something I don't think you mentioned (although I agree with a lot of your analysis so far) is that this sense of status and dignity that most of these white men enjoyed was also supported by a social hierarchy that benefitted them. They had to fight very hard for their rights as laborers and it's also true that they didn't have to compete with women and other non-white working class people because those people were cut off from full political agency. So the loss of status these men experienced wasn't just losing their jobs from globalization and facing the less spiritually fulfilling service jobs, it was also that even the status of being white men was taken from them.
The Right offered no actual political remedy for their problems of their towns decaying (although I know you do talk later about how politics has become less and less about solving real problems). Instead they offered them an appeal to hierarchy. A neo-Confederate model around the nexus of racism, sexism and religion. It's been studied that the best predictor of voting for Trump is racial anxiety, not economic anxiety. The median Trump voter actually has a higher income than the average Democratic voter. Arlie Hoschild has found that the most hardcore Trump voters tend to be people in economically depressed areas who are doing well themselves.
I can't help but be bothered by you calling them "ordinary people". As if everyone who is not a non college-educated white man is not ordinary. American fascists also contend that there are "real Americans" (white, male, heterosexual) and there are outsiders.
Based on our current political system, if anything, these rural, social conservative areas are overrepresented (the existence of the Senate alone proves that). I think what this illiberal turn of the Republican party is about is how conservatives main focus has always been to reinforce hierarchy. But the far right populists believed that Reagan type conservatives didn't go far enough to push back the tides of social liberalism and so, in order to achieve their goals, they are willing to tear down democracy. Of course, their desire for liberal prosperity to only flow to the rightful few is in tension with how actual liberalism works. As you said in another piece, this kind of choice is called dystopia.
I just think that the idea that these populist movements are driven by a lack of political power is not true. If anything, I think it's driven by the precarity class. A class of people who are not the top elite but are just well off enough that they can engage in the political process and are envious and angry that a more well-off living standard doesn't seem to be in the cards. I've seen this in both the left and the right. In far left populist communities, these are usually overeducated, mostly white people who know how the political process works but are angry that the middle class life they hoped would await them after college has been denied. I think the political process has been captured by those people. The people who want to undermine liberalism, the foundation of which all of our prosperity relies on.
As a Southern woman, let's just say I struggle to imagine these white, working class men you're talking about don't have a lot of political power already. I don't think these people were tricked into voting for elite right wing plutocrats against their own economic self-interest. If anything, it's a long standing alliance that allows them to reinforce the hierarchies they want.
I agree with you a lot about the loss of dignity in work and the social decay many parts of the country are experiencing. What I don't agree with is this contention that somehow the Right is just reacting to the excesses of the Left. There was no perfect time in the beforeland where the Left unified the working class in a way that didn't also rely on other power constellations staying relatively stable. There is also going to be a political opportunity to engaging these people's racial animus but I think a more relevant question is what to do about it. Not to coddle these people and act as though the Left needs to feel contrite about standing up for the very real political and social repression minority groups faced. You act way too dismissive of that.
I want to figure out how to help these people and create political solutions because I care about my country and I care about democracy. But I'm not going to buy into their narrative that somehow these people are more worthy of political consideration as if they're the main characters of reality. Joe Biden was the most progressive, union-friendly president in my lifetime and what did the unions members do (unions that he saved their pensions, even)? Many of them voted for Trump. We can't keep pretending that if the Left had done everything right for these people that that would have been enough in their eyes.
The question is how do we progress liberalism and argue for it so that we're able to drown out the political power of people who would like to tear it all down to gain the economic and social rents they feel they deserve.
I know I didn't engage in all of your argument but clearly this comment is long enough. I just wanted to challenge some of the assumptions of this essay.
This is a great piece Mr. Lindsay. A couple of angles that i might add is James Burnham's work of the rising professional managerial class and how older "business operations" has given way to "asset management" which has marginalized people who used to be essentially for a firm but whose jobs can be outsourced. Also there is a distinctive feminine character to the new PMC, such that women can navigate it on balance much better than men can. As such non PMC men have been the most negatively affected by changes in economy.
Yes, we can see how many of these points play out in what used the be the workers party: now the party of latinx (where no working class person would use the term) and "defund the police" and the cities that are heavily controlled by the Democratic party are the worse off for the working poor (worse zoning laws, higher gas and sales taxes, horrible crime and homelessness etc). Politics is all inter-elite signaling now.
For millions of ordinary Americans (up to two-thirds of all Americans, according to one Gallup poll), happiness would be an abundance of well-paying part-time employment opportunities in rural areas where land is cheap. To that end I have rather amateurishly self-published a short book exploring the idea of factories in the countryside run on part-time jobs: the new lifestyle such factories would make possible, how they could be made to run faster and more efficiently than conventional factories, and the new kinds of families, neighborhoods, and small country towns that might develop around them. Here is a link: shorturl.at/pALM5
Or alternatively email me and I will send a free copy: luke.lea@gmail.com
This is an excellent idea. I think you'd need cheap broadband and cheap electricity to make it work.
Very insightful, mostly, tho blatantly & tellingly false on authoritarian populism. "[T]he triumph over scarcity shifted the primary focus of liberal egalitarianism from lack of material resources to lack of cultural acceptance." This echoes Keynes from 1930 about The Permanent Problem. Economics does not have to be zero-sum over the mid and long term. Status always is.
These ideas should be tied into the problem of overproduction of elite wannabes - too many who want to be elite managers but NOT risk-taking entrepreneurs; not risking their own careers by founding any company.
"The process of cephalization necessarily spilled over into government: as the economy grew more complex, the task of governance became more complex as well." << if the task of governance is a fair process, this doesn't have to be true. If the democracy elects politicians who want specific results, which democratic votes now imply, than getting those results has become more complex. Often unachievable based on the "vetocracy" against significant changes.
[More Estonian style e-gov't might help with a lot of this]
I like "cephalization" as a word, but it's too complex/ difficult to become popular. Using the complex word "entrepreneur" has been and continues to be a huge negative for popular acceptance.
The college educated elite have internalized the secret, possibly illegal discrimination against Republicans, Christians, pro-life folk as practiced by all "top" colleges in their exclusion of Republicans when hiring. Professors or administrators or normal workers.
The reality of the discrimination is the lack of Republican, pro-life, & Christian professors in college. Ordinary folk judge more based on results than on words.
Tellingly False:
"This is the vacuum that authoritarian populism has rushed to fill. Donald Trump was the first U.S. presidential candidate to claim these voters as his own. Of course he offered them poisonous demagoguery, not actual concern for their outlook and interests,"
"Authoritarian" is an insulting word that only the elite would use against their political rivals who disagree with them. Neither "Authoritarian Left", nor "Authoritarian Democrats" is used, even tho the actions of Dems in power have been and are, objectively more authoritarian.
It would be good to list "authoritarian actions" and compare the support of such actions by the Dems and Reps - noting that banning gay grooming books from kid's libraries is considered quite different than "banning books" in general.
Insulting Trump, without evidence, is usual by Democrats and Never-Trump folk who can't seem to separate their distaste for his non-elite demeanor with the results of his policies: higher median income being MUCH better for ordinary people than Obama, Bush, Clinton or even Bush 41. And far far better than senile Biden.
But it's also true that many Big Gov't pro-life folk haven't had much of political representation other than Trump - your failure to explicitly discuss the divisive abortion issue is common among elites who don't think it's worth mentioning. "Big gov't pro-life" would be a better label for such folk, which is a lot of the upper left quadrant.
"Democracy" is all about "populism" - those against populism are, explicitly or implicitly, against democracy. As so many elites actually are.
(Coming from Arnold Kling https://arnoldkling.substack.com/p/links-to-consider-1020 )
I've noticed this in a lot of explanations of why the white, non-college educated working class has been drawn to far right populism and I've noticed here as well. I think it's interesting that a lot of people talk about this drift rightward as if the Right is simply responding to the Left. As though it couldn't be helped that they chose to follow an illiberal, far right movement.
This presents it as though the Right has no agency, as though cultivating the Southern Strategy to animate people wasn't the intention. This flip of the Left losing the working class also coincided with the Civil Rights Act. Something I don't think you mentioned (although I agree with a lot of your analysis so far) is that this sense of status and dignity that most of these white men enjoyed was also supported by a social hierarchy that benefitted them. They had to fight very hard for their rights as laborers and it's also true that they didn't have to compete with women and other non-white working class people because those people were cut off from full political agency. So the loss of status these men experienced wasn't just losing their jobs from globalization and facing the less spiritually fulfilling service jobs, it was also that even the status of being white men was taken from them.
The Right offered no actual political remedy for their problems of their towns decaying (although I know you do talk later about how politics has become less and less about solving real problems). Instead they offered them an appeal to hierarchy. A neo-Confederate model around the nexus of racism, sexism and religion. It's been studied that the best predictor of voting for Trump is racial anxiety, not economic anxiety. The median Trump voter actually has a higher income than the average Democratic voter. Arlie Hoschild has found that the most hardcore Trump voters tend to be people in economically depressed areas who are doing well themselves.
I can't help but be bothered by you calling them "ordinary people". As if everyone who is not a non college-educated white man is not ordinary. American fascists also contend that there are "real Americans" (white, male, heterosexual) and there are outsiders.
Based on our current political system, if anything, these rural, social conservative areas are overrepresented (the existence of the Senate alone proves that). I think what this illiberal turn of the Republican party is about is how conservatives main focus has always been to reinforce hierarchy. But the far right populists believed that Reagan type conservatives didn't go far enough to push back the tides of social liberalism and so, in order to achieve their goals, they are willing to tear down democracy. Of course, their desire for liberal prosperity to only flow to the rightful few is in tension with how actual liberalism works. As you said in another piece, this kind of choice is called dystopia.
I just think that the idea that these populist movements are driven by a lack of political power is not true. If anything, I think it's driven by the precarity class. A class of people who are not the top elite but are just well off enough that they can engage in the political process and are envious and angry that a more well-off living standard doesn't seem to be in the cards. I've seen this in both the left and the right. In far left populist communities, these are usually overeducated, mostly white people who know how the political process works but are angry that the middle class life they hoped would await them after college has been denied. I think the political process has been captured by those people. The people who want to undermine liberalism, the foundation of which all of our prosperity relies on.
As a Southern woman, let's just say I struggle to imagine these white, working class men you're talking about don't have a lot of political power already. I don't think these people were tricked into voting for elite right wing plutocrats against their own economic self-interest. If anything, it's a long standing alliance that allows them to reinforce the hierarchies they want.
I agree with you a lot about the loss of dignity in work and the social decay many parts of the country are experiencing. What I don't agree with is this contention that somehow the Right is just reacting to the excesses of the Left. There was no perfect time in the beforeland where the Left unified the working class in a way that didn't also rely on other power constellations staying relatively stable. There is also going to be a political opportunity to engaging these people's racial animus but I think a more relevant question is what to do about it. Not to coddle these people and act as though the Left needs to feel contrite about standing up for the very real political and social repression minority groups faced. You act way too dismissive of that.
I want to figure out how to help these people and create political solutions because I care about my country and I care about democracy. But I'm not going to buy into their narrative that somehow these people are more worthy of political consideration as if they're the main characters of reality. Joe Biden was the most progressive, union-friendly president in my lifetime and what did the unions members do (unions that he saved their pensions, even)? Many of them voted for Trump. We can't keep pretending that if the Left had done everything right for these people that that would have been enough in their eyes.
The question is how do we progress liberalism and argue for it so that we're able to drown out the political power of people who would like to tear it all down to gain the economic and social rents they feel they deserve.
I know I didn't engage in all of your argument but clearly this comment is long enough. I just wanted to challenge some of the assumptions of this essay.
This is a great piece Mr. Lindsay. A couple of angles that i might add is James Burnham's work of the rising professional managerial class and how older "business operations" has given way to "asset management" which has marginalized people who used to be essentially for a firm but whose jobs can be outsourced. Also there is a distinctive feminine character to the new PMC, such that women can navigate it on balance much better than men can. As such non PMC men have been the most negatively affected by changes in economy.