The New Class War
Page 3
In reality, affluent investors, managers, and professionals in global hubs like New York, San Francisco, and London are paid for the services or capital they provide to major industries or firms, most of which have physical production or transportation facilities elsewhere. The fortunes of many San Francisco tech executives depend on legions of underpaid factory workers in China and other countries, on energy-hungry server farms located in remote rural areas, and on massive communications and transportation infrastructures stretching over vast distances among cities and nations and maintained by blue-collar workers.
Michael Cembalest of J.P. Morgan Asset Management writes that without US heartland regions, “cities would not be able to grow as they have, and/or the US would be highly reliant on geopolitically insecure and costlier imports of food and energy, and be exposed to volatile weather, environmental and exchange rate conditions out of its control.” As a tongue-in-cheek thought experiment, Cembalest allocated the 538 votes in the electoral college that elects the US president to American states on the basis of two equally weighted factors, their populations and their food and energy production: “Texas, the Midwest and the Rockies gain electors, while East Coast states and Michigan lose them.”7 Without any irony William Jennings Bryan, the leading agrarian populist of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, would have approved, having declared: “The great cities rest upon our broad and fertile prairies. Burn down your cities and leave our farms, and your cities will spring up again as if by magic; but destroy our farms, and grass will grow in the streets of every city in the country.”8
Most of the physical production that remains in Western nations, like manufacturing, agriculture, and mining, including fossil fuel extraction, along with infrastructure construction and upkeep, occur far from the fashionable downtowns and affluent, inner-ring suburbs where most of the managerial overclass lives and works. Overclass elites in urban hubs therefore can favor stringent environmental regulations at little cost to themselves. Heartland communities are more likely to be sensitive to the costs of environmental policies than hub city managers and professionals. What is more, the property-owning, working-class majorities of the heartlands are also likely to be more sensitive to environmental restrictions on what property owners can do with their property than the denizens of the hubs, where not only the working poor and the working class but also many professionals must rent because they cannot afford to own homes. And most working-class individuals in low-density regions rely on their personal cars or trucks for commuting, shopping, and recreation.
The French yellow vest riots of the winter of 2018–19 illustrated the intersecting fault lines of class and place in environmental policy. Although France is responsible for only a negligible amount of global greenhouse gas emissions, in order to advertise France’s moral leadership in combating global warming, President Macron’s government raised taxes on diesel-fueled cars and trucks. The costs of this exercise in virtue signaling fell disproportionately on working-class and rural citizens, dependent on their automobiles and trucks. Their spontaneous protests escalated into months of violence in Paris and other French cities, forcing Macron’s government to abandon the policy.9 Subsequently in 2019 the conservative party in Australia, based in low-density working-class areas, came from behind and defeated a progressive party that pushed environmental regulations that threatened jobs and low living costs in the periphery.10
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LIKE DEBATES ABOUT the environment, debates about trade are battlefields in the class war. The overclass population living in hubs continues to tout the benefits of trade liberalization among high-wage and low-wage countries, including slightly lower prices for consumers for imports from low-wage nations, but much of the Western working class is no longer listening. As manufacturing jobs disappear overseas, disproportionately affecting the livelihoods of the working class in the heartland, more and more disaffected Americans look to leaders who promise to change the trade balance, economic orthodoxy be damned. In 2016, according to the economists David Autor, David Dorn, Gordon Hanson, and Kaveh Majlesi, voters in US regions exposed to Chinese import competition were more likely than others to support the outsider candidacies of Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders: “Trade-exposed [congressional] districts with an initial majority white population or initially in Republican hands became substantially more likely to elect a conservative Republican, while trade-exposed districts with an initial majority-minority population or initially in Democratic hands also became more likely to elect a liberal Democrat. In presidential elections, counties with greater trade exposure shifted towards the Republican candidate.”11
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THE MOST IMPORTANT of the many divisions between the overclass in the hubs and the native working-class voters in the heartland is the clash over immigration policy. Like trade policy in today’s era of transnational production, immigration policy is essentially labor policy. Immigration has always been a flash point in the class war between employers and workers.
Members of the mostly white overclass elite in the US often personally benefit from lax enforcement of immigration laws. The Pew Research Center reports that in the US, immigrants make up nearly half of all household servants, who are employed by a relatively small number of affluent households.12 As Lynn Stuart Parramore writes for the left-leaning AlterNet, “In the US, nearly half of maids and housekeepers are not native-born, with Latin Americans dominating. (A big chunk of the wealthy is happy to support mass immigration of cheap labor so that these workers can continue to be underpaid.)”13
The adoption by many US hub cities of seemingly idealistic “sanctuary city” laws, which forbid local law enforcement officers from collaborating with federal officials in identifying and deporting illegal immigrants, saves money for managers and professionals by maintaining their access to local pools of low-wage, untaxed, unregulated, off-the-books nannies, as well as other luxury service labor that allows college-educated professionals to maintain their privileged lifestyles. By one estimate, 90 percent of nannies in New York City are paid off the books by employers who ignore employment rules and tax laws.14
High levels of immigration, both legal and illegal, also maintain the populations and economies and real estate prices of overclass-dominated hubs. For decades, there has been a net outflow of US citizens moving out of unaffordable big cities like New York, San Francisco, and Los Angeles and their counterparts in Europe. If international migration had not compensated for the exodus of natives from the 1970s onward, New York City would have lost population and its property tax base would have shrunk by $500 billion over thirty years.15
Absent perpetual repopulation from abroad, cities like New York, San Francisco, London, and Paris might go into demographic and economic death spirals. Luxury industries, including tourist businesses, might cost more in a tight labor market, while urban real estate prices might tumble, with disastrous consequences for the wealth of local elites. At the same time, the flight of natives from the hubs might accelerate further if two-earner professional couples had to pay higher wages to their servants.
In contrast, curtailing low-wage immigration from abroad would not harm and in some cases might help the working classes employed by the production industries and the mass-service industries of the national heartlands in America and Europe. Few of them can afford foreign-born nannies, maids, and gardeners. And if tighter labor markets allow waiters at suburban chain restaurants to earn more, they can also spend more, not only on mass-provided services but also on mass-produced goods like those at the discount furniture outlet at the highway intersection. Tighter labor markets would make it easier for exploited urban immigrants to demand higher wages from miserly employers as well.
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WORKING-CLASS IMMIGRANTS COMPETE with native workers for more than just wages. In modern Western welfare states, lower-paid workers may compete with bette
r-paid workers for limited public resources such as schools, hospitals, welfare services, or, in some countries, public housing. Even in the absence of direct occupational rivalry, this competition for public goods among ethnically divided sections of the working class can provoke resentment.
Within democratic countries, natives and immigrants also compete for status and recognition of their cultures. Under the double standard of what the political scientist Eric Kaufmann calls “asymmetrical multiculturalism,” political and media establishments in Europe and the US, atoning for the white supremacist attitudes of earlier generations, praise immigrants and native minorities and celebrate their cultural traditions. In itself, this is commendable progress. Unfortunately, under the logic of asymmetrical multiculturalism, appreciation of minority and immigrant traditions is often coupled with elite contempt for the ancestral traditions of white native and white immigrant subcultures, which are alleged by overclass intellectuals to be hopelessly tainted by white supremacy or colonialism.16 This is plausible in the case of celebrations of the pro-slavery Confederacy by white southerners in the United States. But America’s Columbus Day holiday, named for a famous Italian, was established as an affirmation of pride in the heritage of working-class Italian Americans who had long suffered from the contempt of elite Anglo-American Protestants. It is not, as today’s sanctimonious overclass left claims, a celebration of the brutal policies of Columbus toward native Americans in the Caribbean. Needless to say, the double standard of Western establishments when it comes to sentiments of ancestral pride provides recruits for racial and cultural nativism and demagogic populism.
Another cultural clash among members of the overclass and the working class within native white majorities in America and Europe involves family relationships and local attachments or the lack of them. The British thinker David Goodhart has contrasted the communitarian localism of less-educated “Somewheres” with the individualistic careerism of educated “Anywheres.”17 For many working-class Somewheres, personal identities as members of particular local communities or extended families are more important than their low-status jobs. In contrast, Goodhart’s Anywheres, educated and mobile members of the managerial overclass, often think of themselves as “citizens of the world”; derive their personal status from their prestigious occupations, not their local or national communities; abandon their low-status class or ethnic or regional accents in order to succeed in metropolitan careers; and jettison ancestral traditions in favor of ever-changing transnational elite fashions.
To members of the overclass accustomed to thinking of geographic mobility in the interest of a professional career as the norm, it may come as a shock to learn that the average American lives within eighteen miles of her mother. Fifty-seven percent of Americans have never lived outside of their home states and 37 percent have spent their entire lives in their hometowns, with the exception of periods of military service or college education.18 Those without a university degree are far less likely to travel across the country or the world in pursuit of career goals. The numbers are similar in Europe.
Reflecting the sacrifice of family commitments to career ambitions that is characteristic of many highly educated and ambitious overclass professionals, a survey of twenty-four advanced industrial democracies showed that, compared to the non-college-educated, university-educated individuals are more likely to describe children as a “burden” rather than as a “joy.”19 Working-class households are far more likely than overclass households to rely on a stay-at-home parent or relatives to care for children. In the United States, 66 percent of those whose education ended with high school say that children are better off when one parent stays at home to raise them; the number plunges to 51 percent for those with a bachelor’s degree or more.20
Urban hubs increasingly are populated by individuals without any children at all. According to the American Community Survey, in 2016 there were more dogs than children in San Francisco.21 Writing in The Atlantic in 2019, Derek Thompson concluded: “The Future of the City Is Childless.”22
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ALTHOUGH RACISM IS declining, racist attitudes linger in the US and Europe, following centuries of institutionalized white supremacy that came to an end only in the mid-twentieth century. Racial and ethnic bigotry undoubtedly motivate the opposition of some voters to immigration.
But if bigotry were the sole or major factor inspiring native workers to oppose high levels of immigration, native white working-class citizens in the West should be as hostile to affluent and educated nonwhite immigrants as they are to low-wage nonwhite immigrants. But this is not the case. In the US, attitudes toward immigration are chiefly determined by class; less-skilled workers are more likely to favor immigration restriction than more-educated workers.23 At the same time, there is broad cross-class support in the US and other Western countries in favor of skilled rather than unskilled immigration.24 In the US there has been no significant backlash against East Asian and South Asian immigrants, who tend to be college-educated professionals, comparable to the backlash against less-skilled and disproportionately poor Latin American immigrants, even though Asian immigrants are nonwhite as well. In Britain, working-class populists have complained about “Polish plumbers” and other lower-income immigrants from Central and Eastern Europe who are white. As split labor market theory would predict, the native working-class backlash has been greatest against particular groups of immigrants, nonwhite or white, who are viewed as competitors for jobs or welfare and public services.
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THE GEOGRAPHIC POLARIZATION that is evident in Western democracies, then, reflects the social divide among classes who live in different areas—college-educated overclasses and the disproportionately immigrant working poor in the high-density hubs and the mostly native, mostly white working classes in the low-density heartlands. Their differences over environmental policy, trade, immigration, and other issues reflect conflicting interests, values, lifestyles, and aspirations.
Can today’s new class war, fought on all of these different fronts at once, give way to a new class peace? The history of the last century in the West provides some hope. By the middle of the twentieth century, the first class war between the managerial overclass and the working class came to an end in an uneasy cross-class peace that lasted for a generation. While it lasted, the democracies of Europe and North America enjoyed the greatest expansion of mass prosperity and civil rights in their histories.
How class war gave way to class peace nearly a century ago in the West is the subject of the next chapter.
CHAPTER THREE
World Wars and New Deals
TO UNDERSTAND HOW the new class war in the West came to be, it is necessary to understand how the old class war came to an end.
The first class war of the modern era had its origins in the growth of industrial capitalism in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In different Western countries, industrialization proceeded at different rates and took different forms. But everywhere the social challenges were similar.
The American economist John Bates Clark observed in 1901: “If the carboniferous age were to return and the earth were to repeople itself with dinosaurs, the change that would be made in animal life would scarcely seem greater than that which had been made in business life by these monster-like corporations.”1 The great merger movement of 1895–1904 in the US created huge firms in many industries, including some that still exist, like DuPont, Nabisco, International Harvester, and Otis Elevator. By 1900, more than four hundred US manufacturing establishments—half of them in the iron or steel and textile industries—employed more than a thousand workers each.2
Unable personally to supervise huge concerns and enormous workforces, capitalists were forced to rely on a new kind of professional, the managers, who increasingly were trained in scientific management at newly founded business schools. In one sector of the economy after anothe
r, mass production by workers using advanced machinery replaced small-scale craft production by artisans. The mechanization of agriculture destroyed the livelihoods and communities of tenants and family farmers. Around smoke-spewing factories, shantytowns of workers grew, spawning crises of sanitation, health, and crime. Migrations of rural natives and foreign immigrants to factory jobs in industrial towns produced ethnic clashes and political backlashes.
The US, as it replaced Britain as the most advanced industrial capitalist economy in the world, was the site of some of the worst labor violence, with government and business frequently allied to crush workers in the era from the Civil War to the 1930s. Homestead, Ludlow, the Battle of Blair Mountain—these were the equivalents of the Battle of Bunker Hill and Yorktown and Antietam and Gettysburg in the first American class war.
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IN THE NINETEENTH and early twentieth centuries, five major schools of thought debated the future of industrial society: liberalism, producerism, socialism, corporatism, and pluralism. Economic liberalism has come in several varieties, including the eclectic and flexible “classical liberalism” of Adam Smith, David Ricardo, and J. S. Mill and a more rigidly antistatist ideology, associated with Friedrich Hayek and Ludwig von Mises and Milton Friedman and already called “neoliberalism” by the 1920s. In all its forms, economic liberalism identifies human freedom with commercial transactions in markets, with the state limited to the role of enforcing contracts and perhaps providing minimal social insurance safety nets. Free market liberals tend to view national boundaries as unfortunate and anachronistic barriers to the free movement of capital and workers in a single global market economy.3