The article from USA Today:
To understand events around the world today, one must think in terms of the class struggle.
To understand events around the world today, one must think in terms of the class struggle.
This
sentence sounds like something that could be written by a doctrinaire
Marxist. But it is nonetheless true. Much of the current tension in
America and in many other democracies is in fact a product of a class
struggle. It’s not the kind of class struggle that Karl Marx wrote
about, with workers and peasants facing off against rapacious
capitalists, but it is a case of today’s ruling class facing
disaffection from its working class.
In the old Soviet Union, the Marxists assured us that once true communism was established under a “dictatorship of the proletariat,”
the state would wither away and everyone would be free. In fact,
however, the dictatorship of the proletariat turned into a dictatorship
of the party hacks, who had no interest whatsoever in seeing their
positions or power wither.
Read more commentary:
Yugoslav dissident Milovan Djilas called these party hacks the “New Class,”
noting that instead of workers and peasants against capitalists, it was
now a case of workers and peasants being ruled by a managerial new
class of technocrats who, while purporting to act for the benefit of the
workers and peasants, somehow wound up with the lion’s share of the
goodies. Workers and peasants stood in long lines for bread and shoddy
household goods, while party leaders and government managers bought
imported delicacies in special, secret stores. (In a famous Soviet joke,
then-leader Leonid Brezhnev shows his mother his luxury apartment, his
limousine, his fancy country house and his helicopter only to have her
object: “But what if the communists come back?”)
Djilas’ work was explosive — he was jailed
— because it made clear that the workers and peasants had simply
replaced one class of exploiters with another. It set the stage for the
Soviet Union’s implosion, and for the discrediting of communism among
everyone with any sense.
Elites of postwar institutions don't want change
But
the New Class isn’t limited to communist countries, really. Around the
world in the postwar era, power was taken up by unelected professional
and managerial elites. To understand what’s going on with President
Donald Trump and his opposition, and in other countries as diverse as
France, Hungary, Italy and Brazil, it’s important to realize that the
post-World War II institutional arrangements of the Western democracies
are being renegotiated, and that those democracies’ professional and
managerial elites don’t like that very much, because they have done very
well under those arrangements. And, like all elites who are doing very
well, they don’t want that to change.
The
postwar era saw the creation of international institutions ranging from
NATO to the United Nations to the World Bank, along with a
proliferation of think tanks and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) to
accompany them. It saw the vast expansion of higher education in the
United States, and the transformation of academic degrees into something
close to must-haves for the upper-middle class. It saw a great
expansion of power on the part of media organizations, and on the part
of government bureaucrats and lobbyists, both of whose numbers increased
enormously.
But after the turn of the millennium,
other Americans, much like the workers and peasants in the old Soviet
Union, started to notice that while the New Class was doing quite well
(America’s richest counties now
surround Washington, D.C.), things weren’t going so well for them. And
what made it more upsetting was that — while the Soviet Union’s
apparatchiks at least pretended to like the workers and peasants
— members of America’s ruling class seemed to view ordinary Americans
with something like contempt, using terms such as “bitter clingers,” “deplorables” and flyover people.
Class wars in America disguised as culture wars
Suddenly,
to a lot of voters, those postwar institutional arrangements stopped
looking so good. But, of course, the beneficiaries showed no sign of
giving them up. This has led to a lot of political discord, and a lot of
culture war, since in America class warfare is usually disguised as
cultural warfare. But underneath the surface, talk is a battle between
the New Class and what used to be the middle class.
If
you look at the “yellow jacket” protests in France, the election of
Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro and events in places like Italy and
Hungary — or, for that matter, the Brexit movement in Britain — you find
a similar unhappiness with institutional arrangements and the sleek and
self-satisfied elites who benefit from them. People who, in President
Bill Clinton’s famous phrase, worked hard and played by the rules now suspect that the rules were rigged, and that they were treated as chumps.
Talking
about the yellow-vest movement, French geographer Christophe Guilluy
observes: “Immediately, the protesters were denounced as xenophobes,
anti-Semites and homophobes. The elites present themselves as
anti-fascist and anti-racist, but this is merely a way of defending
their class interests. It is the only argument they can muster to defend
their status, but it is not working anymore.”
That’s right. It’s class war masquerading as something else, but people have seen through the mask.
Understanding
this won’t make the conflict less intense, but it might make it clearer
what’s really at stake. What’s happening in America is an echo of
what’s happening in democracies around the world, and it’s not happening
because of Trump. Trump is the symptom of a ruling class that many of
the ruled no longer see as serving their interest, and the anti-Trump
response is mostly the angry backlash of that class as it sees its
position, its perquisites and — perhaps especially — its self-importance
threatened.
Glenn Harlan Reynolds, a University of Tennessee law professor and the author of "The New School: How the Information Age Will Save American Education from Itself," is a member of USA TODAY's Board of Contributors.
