The New Class War

by Michael Lind

  * * *

  —

  THE AMOUNT AND composition of immigration that is best for one country may not be best for another. But certain principles should guide immigration policy in any nation organized on the basis of democratic pluralism. A pro-labor immigration policy would seek to minimize split labor markets which can be gamed by employers who can pick and choose among different categories of workers with different legal rights.

  The most fundamental labor right is the right to quit a job and find another, without needing to leave the country. For this reason, indentured servitude in the form of guest worker programs, which bind a worker to a single employer as a condition for working in a country, is a political abomination. Guest worker programs threaten all workers in the sectors in which they are permitted by allowing employers to hire bound serfs instead of workers who can respond to mistreatment or low pay by quitting. For this reason, all or most temporary guest worker programs that allow employers to hire foreign nationals as indentured servants should be abolished. If foreign nationals, other than a tiny number of foreign orchestra conductors and visiting professors, are allowed to work at all in a country, they should have the status described in the US as “legal permanent residents” (green card holders).

  To further thwart divide-and-rule schemes by employers, all working-age immigrants should have rights that are identical to those of native and naturalized workers, including the right to take part in collective bargaining and the right to rely on the national safety net on equal terms. Rather than deny welfare-state benefits to low-wage workers, it is better not to import low-wage workers.

  The sole exception to identical rights for citizen-workers and legal immigrants should be the right to vote. And to minimize the existence of substantial numbers of workers who are not citizens and cannot vote, the naturalization of immigrants who seek to become citizens should take place in as brief a period as possible. To this end, in 2007 in the New York Times I proposed reducing the waiting period for legal immigrants to become citizens of the US from five years to two years.32 Better yet, legal immigrants should be allowed to vote as soon as they have applied for citizenship.

  Denying employers the ability to pit different groups of workers against one another also makes it necessary to enact amnesties for illegal immigrants in countries like the US where large numbers of unauthorized foreign nationals, allowed to settle in the country by corrupt politicians in the interest of economic elites, are de facto citizens. Rewarding foreign nationals for violating immigration laws is an evil. But it is the lesser of two evils, compared to allowing employers to have continuing access to large pools of illegal immigrant workers who can be mistreated and intimidated. Like legal immigrants, amnestied illegal immigrants without criminal records should be made citizens as rapidly as possible to deny employers access to workers who cannot vote. Needless to say, the purpose of an amnesty in denying firms and households access to a split labor market would be thwarted, if future illegal immigration were not adequately deterred, chiefly by reducing the demand for it by means of severe penalties on law-breaking employers.

  As John B. Judis has observed, “Without national control over multinational corporations and banks and without control of borders and immigration, it is very hard to imagine the United States becoming a more egalitarian society. . . . Globalization is incompatible with social democracy in Europe or with New Deal liberalism in the United States.”33 The national economy should serve the national working-class majority, and the global economy should serve national economies. Every democratic nation-state should tailor both its immigration policy and its trade policy to promote the interests of the members of its working-class majority, native-born and foreign-born alike. In the era that succeeds neoliberalism, the “four freedoms” of neoliberalism—freedom of movement for people, goods, services, and capital—should be replaced by the “four regulations.”

  Epilogue

  TECHNOCRATIC NEOLIBERALISM HAS BEEN the governing philosophy of the Western democracies since the late twentieth century. But it is not the natural or inevitable ideology of the managerial elite. On the contrary, modern managerial elites in different countries and in different eras have governed on the basis of various ideologies—democratic pluralism in New Deal America and postwar Western Europe, neoliberalism in the West from Reagan and Thatcher to Obama and Macron, National Socialism in Hitler’s Germany, Marxism-Leninism in the Soviet Union and the People’s Republic of China.

  It is not necessary for the managerial overclasses of Western nations to be overthrown in order for technocratic neoliberalism to be defeated. It is only necessary for existing Western managerial elites to abandon technocratic neoliberalism for a different governing philosophy—preferably one that is better, like a new democratic pluralism, rather than one that is as bad or worse. Most members of the elite under the new policy regime will have been members of the elite under the old one. The fact that most ruling classes include large numbers of opportunistic careerists is a blessing in disguise. It means that a radical revolution in policy can take place, without a radical replacement of personnel.

  What would motivate the managerial overclass to abandon technocratic neoliberalism? The answer is fear. History demonstrates that ruling classes of any kind are reluctant to share power with the ruled unless they are afraid of the ruled or afraid of rival countries.

  Fear of the ruled is a weak motive. Popular revolts seldom turn into revolutions, unless the rebels are supported by dissident members of the ruling class or a foreign elite, like the French monarchy that bankrolled and supported US independence from Britain for its own purposes.

  Fear of national defeat in war—hot war, cold war, or trade war—is more likely to compel elites to undertake reforms than fear of uprisings from below. In the twentieth century, the need to promote business-labor collaboration and cross-class harmony and to reduce racial strife in the world wars and the Cold War overcame the natural resistance of Western elites to sharing power, if only briefly, with organized labor.

  If today’s technocratic neoliberalism is succeeded in the future by a new democratic pluralism, it is likely to be in the context of renewed great-power competition. In order to compete effectively with rival powers, patriotic factions within the overclass who put long-term national solidarity and national productivity above the short-term self-interest of their class may lead to the replacement of globalist neoliberalism with a new national developmentalism, combined with cross-class negotiations in the interest of social peace on the home front.

  The experience of contemporary East Asian democracies—Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan—proves that neoliberalism is not the only model for a high-tech modern democracy. In comparison with the US and Europe, these nations admit few immigrants and have offshored industrial production to a far lesser degree. Unlike in the West, there has been no radical elite-imposed rupture in their social systems between the mid-twentieth century and the present. As a result, although they have populist politicians now and then, and suffer from other problems, including low birthrates, they have experienced nothing like the populist rebellion against neoliberalism that is shattering political systems in Europe and North America.

  In a contest between the economic model represented in different ways by Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan, minus their traditional export-oriented mercantilism, on the one hand, and, on the other hand, the rentier-dominated oligarchic model represented by Brazil and Mexico, it would be foolish to wager on the latter. North American and European democracies cannot and should not emulate modern East Asian developmental states in every detail. Still, it should be a cause for concern that, since the Cold War, the United States and Western Europe have been moving along the spectrum, as it were, away from East Asia toward Latin America.

  * * *

  —

  MANAGERIAL ELITES ARE destined to dominate the economy and society of every modern nation. But if they are not checked, the
y will overreach and produce a destructive populist backlash in proportion to their excess.

  If there is not to be perpetual conflict among the two permanent classes of technological society, the new class war must come to an end in one of two ways.

  One possibility is that there will be a new cross-class compromise embodied in a new democratic pluralist order, providing the working-class majorities in Western nations with far greater countervailing power in politics, the economy, and the culture than they possess today.

  The alternative—the triumph of one class over the other, be it the overclass led by neoliberal technocrats or the working class led by populist demagogues—would be calamitous. A West dominated by technocratic neoliberalism would be a high-tech caste society. A West dominated by demagogic populism would be stagnant and corrupt.

  Given the weakness and disorganization of national working classes, in the absence of a new democratic pluralism the most likely possibility is that today’s class war will come to an end when, in one Western country after another, the managerial minority, with its near monopoly of wealth, political power, expertise, media influence, and academic authority, completely and successfully represses the numerically greater but politically weaker working-class majority.

  If that should occur, the future of North America and Europe may look a lot like the present of Brazil and Mexico, with nepotistic oligarchies clustered in a few swollen metropolitan areas surrounded by hinterlands that are derelict, depopulated, and despised. What Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1927), with its managers in skyscrapers and its oppressed factory workers underground, was for an earlier industrial era, Neill Blomkamp’s Elysium (2013), with its sybaritic elite in orbit and its desperate earthbound slum-dwellers, might prove to be for the era that succeeds neoliberalism—a prophecy in the form of a nightmare.

  Only power can check power. Only a major reassertion of the political power, economic leverage, and cultural influence of national wage-earning majorities of all races, ethnicities, and creeds can stop the degeneration of the US and other Western democracies into high-tech banana republics. To supplement conventional electoral politics, reformers will need to rebuild old institutions or build new ones that can integrate working-class citizens of all origins into decision-making in government, the economy, and the culture, so that everyone can be an insider.

  Reconstructing democratic pluralism in North America and Europe to permit cross-class power sharing is a challenge as difficult as it is urgent. The alternative is grim: a future of gated communities and mobs led by demagogues at their gates.

  Acknowledgments

  Twenty-five years ago in my first book, The Next American Nation, I described the growing consolidation of political power, economic control, and cultural authority by the managerial overclass. Events and trends since 1995 in the United States and Europe have vindicated most of my analysis. Following three decades in which I lived and worked in Washington, DC, and New York City, I have grown pessimistic that overclass domination can be checked by conventional electoral democracy, unless it is supplemented by the kind of cross-class power-sharing institutions I describe in this book under the name of democratic pluralism.

  The New Class War is based on two essays in American Affairs. I would like to thank its editors, Julius Krein and Gladden Pappen, as well as the editors of The Breakthrough Journal and National Review, where some of the material in this book originally appeared.

  I am grateful to Dean Angela Evans of the Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs of the University of Texas at Austin for giving me the opportunity to serve as a professor at my alma mater in my home town. I owe thanks to Anne-Marie Slaughter, CEO of New America, for allowing me to continue my relationship with New America, the think tank I cofounded, as a fellow.

  I’m deeply indebted to Bria Sandford, my editor at Portfolio, and to my agent, Kristine Dahl, of International Creative Management.

  Limited space prevents me from listing all of those who have influenced my thinking on the topics in this book. Among contemporary scholars, who may reject some or all of my arguments and conclusions, I would like to acknowledge intellectual debts to Julius Krein on managerialism; David Marquand on pluralism; Edna Bonacich on split labor markets; Theda Skocpol on mass-membership organizations; Sheri Berman and Wolfgang Streeck on the history of social democracy; David Goodhart, Eric Kaufmann, Matthew Goodwin, Christophe Guilluy, and Nancy Fraser on populism, nationalism, and social class; Yascha Mounk on undemocratic liberalism; James K. Galbraith, Robert D. Atkinson, Dani Rodrik, Erik Reinert, Ha-Joon Chang, and Robert Kuttner on the economy; Daniel McCarthy on palliative liberalism; Reihan Salam, the late Vernon M. Briggs, and the late Richard Estrada on immigration; and Lee Drutman, Ruy Texeira, and Thomas B. Edsall on electoral coalitions.

  I have benefited over many years from reading and conversing with Sherle Schwenninger, Walter Russell Mead, Joel Kotkin, John Gray, Roberto Unger, Emmanuel Todd, and Marshall Auerback. And I am especially indebted to John B. Judis, with whom I have discussed and debated the subjects of nationalism and democracy for a quarter of a century. Their views, as well, may differ from mine.

  Finally, I would like to pay tribute to Ernesto Cortes Jr., whose life’s work proves that countervailing power is more than a phrase.

  Notes

  INTRODUCTION

  1. Jacob Funk Kirkegaard, “Macron’s Victory Signals Reform in France and a Stronger Europe,” PIIE, May 8, 2017.

  2. Will Marshall, “How Emmanuel Macron Became the New Leader of the Free World,” Politico, April 22, 2018.

  3. For good overviews of the rise of populist parties and movements, see John B. Judis, The Nationalist Revival: Trade, Immigration, and the Revolt Against Globalization (New York: Columbia Global Reports, 2018) and The Populist Explosion (New York: Columbia Global Reports, 2016); Roger Eatwell and Matthew Goodwin, National Populism: The Revolt Against Liberal Democracy (New York: Pelican, 2018); Christophe Guilluy, Twilight of the Elites: Prosperity, the Periphery, and the Future of France (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2019).

  4. Rakib Ehsan, “Many Ethnic-Minority Voters Backed Brexit, Too,” Spiked, March 26, 2019; Harry Enten, “Trump Probably Did Better With Latino Voters Than Romney Did,” FiveThirtyEight, November 18, 2016.

  CHAPTER ONE: THE NEW CLASS WAR

  1. Julius Krein, “James Burnham’s Managerial Elite,” American Affairs 1, no. 1, Spring 2017; Matthew Continetti, “The Managers vs. the Managed,” Weekly Standard, September 21, 2015.

  2. John Kenneth Galbraith, American Capitalism: The Concept of Countervailing Power (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1952). According to Galbraith, the power of big business could be offset by large purchasers, cooperatives, chain stores, farmers’ associations, and labor unions: “The operation of countervailing power is to be seen with the greatest clarity in the labor market, where it is also most fully developed (p. 121).

  3. Adolf A Berle Jr. and Gardiner C. Means, The Modern Corporation and Private Property (New York: Macmillan, 1932); Bruno Rizzi, The Bureaucratization of the World, trans. Adam Westoby (New York: Free Press, 1985 [1939]).

  4. James Burnham, The Managerial Revolution: What Is Happening in the World (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1972 [1941]), p. 72.

  5. George Orwell, “Second Thoughts on James Burnham,” Polemic, May 1946.

  6. John Kenneth Galbraith, A Life in Our Times (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 1981), p. 362.

  7. Thorstein Veblen, The Engineers and the Price System (New York: B. W. Huebsch, 1921), chapter vi, “A Memorandum on a Practicable Soviet of Technicians,” pp. 138–69.

  8. Mark Bovens and Anchrit Wille, Diploma Democracy: The Rise of Political Meritocracy (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017), p. 5.

  9. Matthew Stewart, “The 9.9 Percent Is the New American Aristocracy,” Atlantic, June 2018.

  10. Emily Forrest Cataldi, Christopher T. Bennett, and Xiangei Chen, “Fi
rst-Generation Students: College Access, Persistence, and Postbachelor’s Outcomes,” National Center for Education Statistics, U.S. Department of Education, February 2018. See also Grace Bird, “The Impact of Parents’ Educational Levels,” Inside Higher Ed, February 8, 2018; Ronald Brownstein, “Are College Degrees Inherited?” Atlantic, April 11, 2014; Richard V. Reeves, “Dream Stealers: How Entrance into Elite US Colleges Is Rigged in Every Way,” Brookings Institution op ed, March 13, 2019; Richard V. Reeves, “Dream Hoarders: How the American Upper Middle Class Is Leaving Everyone Else in the Dust, Why That Is a Problem, and What to Do About It” (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, 2017). For Europe, see Ludger Woessmann, “How Equal Are Educational Opportunities? Family Background and Student Achievement in Europe and the United States,” Discussion Paper No. 1284 (Bonn, Germany: Institute for the Study of Labor [IZA], September 2004); OECD (2014), “Indicator A4: To What Extent Does Parents’ Education Influence Participation in Tertiary Education?” in Education at a Glance 2014: OECD Indicators (OECD Publishing); Katherine Baird, “Where Do Youth Follow in Their Parents’ Footsteps?” Presented in Session 4.2, “Parents-Offspring Relations and Life Satisfaction,” at the Third International European Social Survey Conference Lausanne, Switzerland, July 13–16, 2016.

  11. Julia B. Isaacs, “International Comparisons of Economic Mobility,” in Julia B. Isaacs, Isabel V. Sawhill, and Ron Haskins, Getting Ahead or Losing Ground: Economic Mobility in America (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution, February 20, 2008), pp. 38–39.