Culture and Class
Class War or Culture War?
Bofem, by Tim Snyder
Trump is staffing his cabinet with billionaires, who will break the government out of incompetence, spite, or avarice. So why not just go for class politics, and forget about everything else? As the country reaches unprecedented levels of inequality, why not just tear off the oligarchs' masks? Why not present them as merchants of death?
We should all know who they are, how wealthy they are, from what sources, and how they profit from holding power. And, in some better future, we should all benefit from anti-oligarchical policies that make us all more free. We have to talk about inequality, about class.
But America cannot get to social justice only by talking about class. I want to consider the last few weeks and months -- the campaign, its outcome, the CEO assassination -- to think through how an effective opposition might work.
The election itself gives is an important clue. Oligarchy could have been halted at the ballot box. Harris would have been very different from Trump on taxes and redistribution. Sure, she might have run from further on the Left, but she was not herself a wannabe oligarch, and would not have built a cabinet of oligarchs. Had the Democrats controlled Congress, her policies would have continued a trend toward redistribution that Biden had begun. Even without Congress, she would have prevented the Trumpian oligarchical orgy. So if people had wanted to prevent rule by billionaires, they could have done so.
Harris suffered from an incumbency problem. It was a "change" election. Around the world and for several years, post-covid, it has been strikingly hard for incumbents to win. The question, though, is why Trump got to be the "change" candidate. Here is a hint of why just referring to class will never be enough. The candidate who would have changed American society in the direction of equality was not the change candidate. The candidate who was associated with wealth was. This can only be understood as culture.
Rule by the wealthy is not change. The wealthy, putting it gently, have been in charge before. The oligarchs don't actually need the support of the voters to have more than sufficient power in the United States. Why did voters support them? I spent most of October in the Midwest and Great Plains, entirely in states that went for Trump (except Illinois). It is harder and harder to have these conversations, but I think I have some notion.
Trump voters saw their guy as the outsider, even though he has already been president once, and has been very present in media for forty years. For Harris voters, the fact that she is Black and a woman make her an outsider; for Trump voters, or at least for many of the ones with whom I spoke, they make her an insider. And that notion that women and Blacks direct a deep state is a cultural construct.
For Trump voters, or at least many of the ones with whom I spoke this fall, Trump's (supposed) wealth also made him the change candidate. Anyone who is wealthy is seen as a daredevil who broke the rules. The image of Trump as a trailblazer was created by the man himself, not by actual earnings. More deeply, though, the notion of the wealthy person as a hero is an American cultural construct. It makes of voting a cultural act: I want to feel like I am a part of that.
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So when people say we need a class war, I sympathize. The grotesque inequality of wealth in the United States is at the root of countless problems. I dwell on this in both On Freedom and Road to Unfreedom. And, of course, in the coming years, cities and states should redistribute wealth and provide social services, thereby helping people to become free. At the national level, though, you cannot just declare a class war, because you cannot decide what class people belong to for them, or tell them what their class interests are. Even basic interests, like staying alive, being safe, or having money, are experienced in emotional contexts. Class anxiety can lead right to oligarchy or fascism or both.
If you are an oligarch, you know this. You win the class war by fighting the culture war. You engage negatively with both class and culture. You never say: "hey, I am Elon Musk, and I care about you, therefore I am writing every American family a check for $5,000." You stay away from numbers and math. You tell a story about how the wealth of the wealthy somehow benefits everyone. And you reinforce the idea that the people who threaten the prosperity of your voters are those who threaten their culture. And so Blacks or immigrants or transexuals (or whoever) are always presented as threatened both prosperity and identity.
On the other side, those who want democracy rather than oligarchy must engage positively with culture in order to engage with class. That people even have a class identity is not given by nature. It is a result of education, experience, camaraderie. The welfare state was curtailed at its foundation in the 1930s and weakened in the 1980s because of racism. Labor unions became effective at defending wages when they became effective at admitting non-Whites. Americans deny themselves the policies that would serve them because of culture, because of who they see as the real people, the real citizens. And that is why we cannot effectively care about economic inequality without practical, everyday understanding of racial other sorts of inequality.
Orwell said that it is a constant struggle to see what is right in front of your nose. Culture can blind us to the obvious. Non-Blacks tend to project onto Blacks political irrationality and "identity politics." But who in America votes consistently with their economic interests? African Americans, in general. And is this because they are somehow free of culture, and just more rational than the rest of us? Perhaps. Or is it rather that they are not subject to the dominant form of identity politics, and can see through it? And that this knowledge is not just the experience of one life, but generationally transmitted, deeply connected to the actual history of the country? The very notion that African Americans are the savviest voters is practically unsayable in American English.
Let me give a second example of how culture frames what we see. Affirmative action by universities on the basis of race has been banned by the Supreme Court. But the largest affirmative action at universities, as an honest admissions officer will tell you, is on the basis of gender. In college admissions, boys with worse grades are favored over girls with better grades. (Did you have to read that sentence twice?) But it is unthinkable that a woman could bring and win a case at the Supreme Court on the basis of the discrimination that girls inarguably suffer in university admissions. That all of this is practically unsayable is a sign of how the culture works.
When we say "identity politics" in American English, we are usually invoking women, or Blacks, or gender or sexual minorities. That is itself a sign of how deeply culture affects our judgements, and by "culture" here I mean a deeply rooted sense, among many of us, of what is normal and therefore unworthy of comment. The most powerful form of identity politics is Trump's, and it goes something like this: "I am a rich white guy who breaks all the rules and who therefore gets to make them, and so you should enjoy the feel of my hand in your pocket as I pick it."
Of course, we should pass policies that address economic inequality where and when we can. But there are barriers to the success of this at a national level, barriers that the coming Trumpomuskovite regime will raise even higher. The oligarchs understand all this, and those who wish to resist or defeat them must know how to turn a vicious circle into a virtuous one.
The work that has to be done on American racism is hard, and it is part of the work that has to be done on American social injustice. This might seem to make matters harder. But it doesn't, really. The impossible is harder than the difficult, and so avoiding the impossible is a good idea. Trying to do things that are impossible, like addressing class without addressing culture, is not the right use of energy.
And in an important way these realizations makes matters easier. The work that needs to be done in the culture has to be done every day. But that means that it can be done every day, in small ways, by all of us.
Some of that everyday work involves our analysis of the election. Personally, I hold the unpopular view that Harris ran a good campaign, if not a perfect one, and that the reasons she lost -- anti-incumbency, the internet generally, Twitter bias, Musk's money, Trump's talent, media cowardice, U.S. history -- were not things we can really blame her for not overcoming in a few months. I do agree with some lines of critique: I think that she should have let Walz be Walz, and used more grandiose language about her economic policies.
Where I disagree is the notion that Harris lost because of her "identity politics." She did not run her campaign on "identity politics" in the sense that is meant. Harris did not emphasize being Indian, or Black, or a woman. Trump's campaign, however was identity politics from start to finish. Trump ran as a rich white guy and won; Harris ran as an American and lost.
Trump succeeded because of his identity politics, which brings race and class together in a certain way. By connecting the desire for change with emotions that make it impossible, he (and many others) generate, in the end, sadopopulism: a politics that works not because all benefit but because some learn to take pleasure in the greater suffering of others. Deportations have to be understood in this light: they are a spectacle of the suffering of others. So does mass incarceration.
A test for this, as we have been recently reminded, is health. Persuading people that it is normal to pay for shorter lives is the litmus test of sadopopulism. In America, we do in fact pay exorbitant amounts of money to harmful middlemen who kill us by denying us care that we could afford if their scam did not exist. (It is a sign of our cultural problem that we say "insurance" or "health care" when we mean "death grift.") The recent assassination of the CEO of the misnamed company UnitedHealthcare brought the middleman problem into focus. On the internet, people on the Right joined people on the Left is sharing family stories of expense, uncertainty, suffering and death.
Will it matter that almost everyone agrees? Why did people who want better health care vote for Trump? Why do we not have a single-payer system? Who do we pay so much more and get so much less than other people in other countries? Why was it so hard for both Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, who were very popular presidents, to pass the kind of health care reform they favored? Part of it is, of course, that we have too much money in politics (a class factor, let's say); but part of it is that many people who would gain security, prosperity, and lifespan from a better system don't want it if they have to share it with others (a culture factor, let's say).
How this will play out under the coming Trump regime is a test. If Trump were a true populist, which he is not, he would seize on the issue of health care to gain support from Americans all over the political spectrum (this is an idea I steal from Kate Woodsome). The grifter king must protect all grifts. UnitedHealthcare, a company that makes lots of money by delivering a lethal absence, represents just the sort of capitalism that a Trump regime must celebrate. Indeed, the plan in the middle term (RFK JR.) seems to be to make us all sicker, so that even more advanced grifts are possible.
And so in Trumpomuskovia a way will have to be found to change the subject from health care, to blame the Blacks or the migrants or the trans people for all the lethal dysfunctionality, to connect the assassin himself to some conspiracy of unlikable figures, or something. It's not clear just how this will work -- most likely, the first move will be not to move at all, in the reasonable hope that the policies of January and February and March will be so frightening that people will forget about health care. And maybe this will work.
If it does, we can look forward to a new kind of fascism. In the traditional sort, your children had to die on the front to perpetuate a vision of racial glory. In this iteration, your children have to die of diseases so that people who are already billionaires can become wealthier. The Trumpomuskovian policy will be to keep the death-grift billionaires we have, and create new ones by ending vaccinations and thereby opening the snake oil market.
This is a deepening of class differences, between the wealthy and the long-lived and the financially and existentially precarious. It is possible future thanks not only to greed, but also to a culture in which we don't see our own health care problems as everyone's, and in which we can be easily drawn, by personal fears that activate prejudice, away from seeing ourselves as part of a larger class of people who could be living better and longer lives.
All the same, it won't be enough to be outraged at the terrible injustice in the abstract. Even when the issue is life itself, "class not race" won't work. We need the mode of outrage at the numbers. But we will also need the mode of empathy for African Americans and others whose marginalization has been used to keep health care -- and good policy generally -- from coming about. This is the most important effort, over time. How shock, including the shock of illness, strikes a population depends on how that population has prepared itself. And, yet, we will also need empathy for people who voted for Trump and who get sick. People change their minds, but not usually when they are suffering alone. This is a different kind of move, hard for different reasons, but necessary.
About class, about differences in wealth, we need clarity, and we need outrage. But we will not get far without equal clarity about race. Without empathy for others, we cannot see ourselves. Without empathy, every inequality can get worse, and will. But Trump and Musk and other oligarchs can be stopped when they try to blame our health care debacle on those who suffer the most from it. They can be stopped when they try to ban vaccines and profit from further disease and death. With empathy, health care might just be an issue where the oligarchy fails to consolidate, and the people begin to hear themselves speak.
