Class War Returns to America
An interview with Michael Lind on the new populism, COVID-19, and the future of American politics
Gregor Baszak: After the Brexit referendum and Donald Trump’s victory in the 2016 presidential elections, you argued in a widely noted essay in the journal American Affairs, which you have since expanded into a book, that a “transatlantic class war” had broken out between neoliberal managerial elites and working-class populists. Who are the managerial elites, and why did these interclass tensions erupt at that exact moment?
Michael Lind: Tensions had been building for half a century until they were finally triggered. I follow James Burnham, the Trotykist who became an early conservative thinker, in defining the managerial class broadly as the educated, credentialed elite, whether it’s found in the private, public, or the nonprofit sector. He argued in The Managerial Revolution (1941) that equivalent managerial elites were replacing the old bourgeois owner-operators of businesses throughout the world, which was the result of the evolution of industrial society. By that broad definition the Soviet nomenclature would be a managerial elite, as would the bureaucrats in the Chinese Communist Party.
I argue in The New Class War, both the article and the book, that these managerial elites are separated culturally from the working class by virtue of their college education. It’s a social, political, intellectual, and cultural divide that’s hardening in societies in Europe and the United States. And these societies on both sides of the Atlantic are converging: The United States is becoming more secular like Europe and Europe more multiracial and multicultural thanks to immigration, which has long been the case in the US.
What happened in 2016 was the delayed reaction of the Great Recession. I think that was a triggering aspect of it. The underlying cause was globalization, particularly in the form of global labor arbitrage, i.e. shutting down industry in the US and Europe and then transferring production to low-wage countries, including China, Mexico, and parts of Eastern Europe. At the same time you had large-scale low-wage immigration, both legal and illegal, which was encouraged by the employers.
The surprising thing is, why didn’t the populist backlash happen in 2008 with the crash? Arguably it did in the election of Obama by voters who repudiated the previous regime by George W. Bush. Obama said he was going to renegotiate NAFTA and bring back manufacturing; he was an outsider, a kind of celebrity, rock-star politician and, in that sense, much like Trump. Then he essentially carried out these former establishment policies: bailing out the banks, but not the homeowners; or launching new trade deals, which both the populist right and the social-democratic left opposed. The tensions grew until you got the genuine populist outbursts of the Sanders and Trump movements in 2016.
People are wasting their time if they’re mistaking the triggers for the cause of these outsider rebellions. You get different triggers in different countries: It was the diesel tax by Macron, which was intended as an environmental measure, that set off the yellow-jacket revolt. Overall, immigration has been a factor, i.e. the free movement of people into Europe. When Merkel authorized large-scale immigration from Syria and the rest of the Middle East into Germany, it meant that under free movement they could come into Britain. So, that was undoubtedly a factor in triggering Brexit. There were different sparks, but my argument is that the kindling, the fuel for these revolts, had been building for decades.
Obama carried out establishment policies: He bailed out the banks, but not the homeowners, and launched new trade deals, which both the populist right and the social-democratic left opposed.
GB: The Trump camp likes to point out that if you look at the rhetoric of the Democratic Party in the ’90s and even under Obama, it was staunchly opposed to illegal immigration. Obama, for example, voted in the Senate to fund a fence along the Mexican-American border. Why did the Democrats change to become this pro-immigration party they’re presenting themselves to be today?
ML: Historically, the two groups who had been very supportive of low levels of immigration were the labor unions and African Americans. Both feared the competition.
In the case of the labor unions, the fear was that immigrants would be used as strikebreakers and replacement workers to wipe out the labor unions. In 1924 immigration restrictions were codified, which was supported by Samuel Gompers, who was the head of the American Federation of Labor, and by A. Philip Randolph, the great black civil rights leader and head of the railway porters’ union who forced President Franklin D. Roosevelt to integrate the wartime defense industry by threatening a March on Washington, which in turn inspired Martin Luther King’s later march. And even Mexican Americans like Cesar Chavez demanded that the US enforce immigration laws because the growers in the Southwest and in California were using unauthorized immigrants to replace his United Farmworkers members, and Chavez was trying to unionize the native Mexican-American farmworkers. The group that favored more immigration and less enforcement was the business elite in the Republican Party.
What changed was a transformation of the parties in terms of their class composition. Gradually, the former social democratic parties and the labor parties, the Labour Party in Britain, the Democratic Party in the United States, and the Social Democrats in Germany, have become dominated by native white, college-educated members of what I’m calling the managerial overclass. They’re allied with native minorities and with immigrants in some cases. It’s really a new party coalition, and if you look at these populist movements on the right, a lot of their members were former socialists, or in France even Communists. These were the old union members from the depressed industrial eras. The same is true obviously with Trump’s swing voters in the industrial Midwest who had historically been Democratic voters.
What you’re seeing is a realignment. In the 2000s, many Democrats became convinced that they didn’t have to appeal to the old white working class in the Rustbelt and other areas anymore. They just had to wait, and Latino migration would gradually create a permanent Democratic majority.
GB: In The New Class War, you paint a picture of relatively harmonious class relations after World War II. The state was actively engaged in regulation, and unions were empowered to negotiate sector-wide wage levels. To some this sounds eerily like Trump’s campaign slogan to Make America Great Again by returning to former national glories. Vox’s Ezra Klein, for example, described you as a “smarter Trumpist” who wants to give the populist revolt a coherent program. How do you respond?
ML: I didn’t vote for Trump, but I try to be an objective analyst. I’m trying to explain why demagogic populism, which is a destructive force, like Trumpism, rises. And my explanation is that it’s a delayed reaction against the prior rise of technocratic neoliberalism, which is an increasingly oligarchic system.
What we’ve seen over the last half century is a disintegration of the intermediate institutions that used to connect working-class people in the US with the government and gave them some influence.
The trade unions are obviously an important example, and in the private sector they’ve almost completely collapsed. The unions you hear about in the news are the public-sector unions, which are mostly made up of college-educated people, so there’s a class difference even between the teachers’ unions which are full of college-educated professionals and, say, the steel and farm workers’ unions, which are more or less extinct now. The other institutions were the local political machines. Even when I was young, the Democratic Party and the Republican Party were actually federations of local and state clubs. They were membership organizations. Now, they’re just labels that billionaires like Trump and Bloomberg can try to purchase. Finally, in the US, and this is also true in Western Europe, the churches, Protestant and Catholic, were mass-membership organizations with a lot of cultural and political influence. And whatever you think of that influence, they did represent the views of many working-class people.
That’s why I argue in The New Class War that the danger is not that particular views are not represented among the parties, but that all of the parties are essentially monopolized by a single class, the college-educated elite. That’s where you get a situation of the kind we’ve had in the US in the South historically and in many Latin American countries where the population is just disengaged from politics because politics is a game played among elite families.
The alternative is this third way, however realistic, of democratic pluralism, in which you have institutions and mechanisms by which the working class can extort concessions from the managerial elite. Essentially, the working class has to have some leverage to have bargaining power because elites in world history generally do not share power unless they’re afraid of something. It can be fear of the people they govern, so they grant them at least some limited concessions.
So, I’m pessimistic in the sense that unless we get some kind of condition, either external or domestic, that will frighten elites into sharing power again, then they will not share power. In that case, we’ll alternate between technocratic neoliberalism and the demagogic populism by someone like Trump who comes along and challenges the whole system — usually ineffectually because in these kinds of societies, it’s very difficult for these populist tribunes of the people to have any lasting structural effects.
When I was young, the Democratic Party and the Republican Party were actually federations of local and state clubs. They were membership organizations. Now, they’re just labels that billionaires like Trump and Bloomberg can try to purchase.
GB: Are COVID-19 and the global lockdown that followed from it such a condition? Given how much power executive arms of governments worldwide have amassed in response to the virus, however, it looks like we’re in for the very opposite of power sharing. The economic crisis that’s sure to follow may cause an even stronger wave of populist backlash against the technocratic elites who are literally running the show right now, in many cases unchecked by their legislatures.
ML: Wars and cold wars can pressure national elites to make concessions to national majorities as the price of national mobilization against external rivals. The COVID-19 pandemic so far has had the opposite effect. Paradoxically, because all countries are fighting this internal enemy, international military tensions have been reduced.
The lockdowns in response to the pandemic are demobilizing and demoralizing, isolating and impoverishing many workers while reducing their leverage. Essential workers in a few key sectors may enjoy more bargaining power. On the other hand, mass unemployment has created a new reserve army of potential replacement workers whom employers can deploy as scabs.
Because the harm done by the coronavirus and the economic consequences of the lockdown fall disproportionately on the working class, the pandemic may lead to a further shift in wealth and income upward to parallel the shift in power to executive branches and in the US and other places to unaccountable central banks. In the US, the crisis to this point has accentuated the pre-existing divide between technocratic neoliberals on the center and left, who want to delegate ever more discretionary power to central bankers and scientific experts, and demagogic populism on the right, which is already being hijacked by the conservative establishment in the service of the elite causes of forcing workers back to work quickly and cutting the deficits run up during the pandemic by slashing social insurance entitlements for working class majorities, like Social Security.
In short, unlike an intense Sino-American rivalry or other great power competition, the pandemic is likely to further entrench executive rule on behalf of the managerial overclass and weaken the countervailing power of legislatures and trade unions even more, for at least a decade or longer.
GB: There are forces within today’s GOP, like Senators Marco Rubio and Josh Hawley, who seem to be pushing precisely for such a great power competition with China as a way to bail out the American economy. Theirs is a solution that calls for key industries that are deemed vital to national security, such as the production of medical equipment and essential pharmaceuticals or the processing of strategically important rare-earth minerals, to return to the United States. What do you think of their strategy? And do you think they can prevail within the Republican Party? They seem to represent, despite everything, a clear minority position among conservatives still.
ML: In the case of the two main American parties, policy realignment — the adjustment of the party agenda — tends to lag behind political realignment — changes in the electoral base of the party. In the case of the Democrats, these days a party of more educated and affluent whites allied with African-Americans and Latinos, the agenda of business-friendly, globalist neoliberalism and identity politics now fits the party’s base. This was demonstrated by the alliance of neoliberals and African-American voters that defeated Sanders in favor of Biden.
By contrast, there is still a big gap between the increasingly working-class Republican electorate and the mainstream conservative establishment. Hawley and Rubio are trying to make the party more responsive to its new, more downscale working class base, including the Midwestern industrial state voters whom Trump won over together with a significant minority of Latinos. Rubio, Hawley, and others would probably do that even in the absence of competition with China, which, to be sure, makes their task easier by allowing them to appeal to hawkish sentiments on the right. For now, however, the GOP mostly remains the party that the Bush dynasty created — not the old Northern and Midwestern business party that lasted from Lincoln to Nixon, but in effect a new party created between the 1970s and the 1990s, a party based among small business owners in the South and West that is heir to the hostility toward the federal government, welfare, and minorities that was once characteristic of conservative Southern Democrats (the infamous “Dixiecrats.”).
To oversimplify somewhat, the post-Trump Republicans can either revert to being a party of the reactionary Southern and Western gentry or change their agenda to bring in more workers of all races in the industrial Midwest and elsewhere.
GB: To many on the left, the populist refutations of the neoliberal consensus of 2016 and beyond appeared as an outbreak of racism on both sides of the Atlantic. In their eyes, the problem was a white working-class that resented multiculturalism and felt its privileged status threatened. In Germany, for example, this has manifested itself in the rise of the far-right Alternative for Germany. And a renewed conflict with China is sure to evoke memories of the “yellow peril.” Is there nothing to this concern?
ML: The question is, why did former social democrats and Communists in Europe and former Democratic voters in the US switch their votes to these populist parties? If you look at the regions in which they’re located, a lot of them were deindustrialized as a result of import competition, particularly the wave of Chinese subsidized products in the 2000s and before that by Japanese and South Korean imports.
These are the old manufacturing proletariat in manufacturing regions, and they feel betrayed by their former center-left parties, which are now kind of educated hipster metropolitan elite parties. And so they tried something new. That seems more convincing to me than that these folks were liberals all the way until they voted for Obama in the Midwest and then, when a white woman runs to succeed Obama, they suddenly become racists or they’re triggered by Trump. Of course, there’s a mix of xenophobia and economic rivalry, but just because the working class is xenophobic does not mean that the capitalists are not really importing labor to replace them or to lower their wages.
Much to my surprise, all the way until 1999 or so, it was the libertarian right which argued that opponents of trade and immigration were racists. Flash forward 20 years, now supposedly this is a leftist perspective. What has happened? The Democrats in the United States are now largely the former Republicans and libertarians of the late 20th century; the people who were the base of the Democratic Party in 1999 increasingly are Republicans, i.e. the blue-collar white working class. What you’ve seen is this remarkable adoption of libertarian propaganda from the late 20th century on behalf of low-wage employers and on behalf of companies offshoring industry. And now this is portrayed by the so-called left as something progressive and anti-racist.
I’m in favor of mass, fairly rapid amnesty, including the right to vote as quickly as possible for most of the illegal immigrants who have been allowed to come here because they are de facto citizens. But the motive for doing so is to prevent employers from pitting one group of workers with fewer rights against another group of workers. That’s different from letting employers pick the future population of the United States. The US is four percent of the world’s population. If they were allowed to, American businesses would not need to hire any Americans ever. There are hundreds of millions of people who, according to pollsters around the world, say they would like to come to the United States right now — at least, that was the case before COVID-19.
As long as employers can find people in Eurasia, Africa, the Middle East, or Latin America willing to do jobs for much lower wages than Americans of all races are willing to do, then it would just be a buyers’ market in labor for the capitalists and the managers. I don’t know why anyone on the left would want to encourage that. There may be this romantic and to my mind utopian vision of post-national cosmopolitanism, which even the early Marxists by 1900 had abandoned. Marx and Engels imagined an international brotherhood of workers, but both the revisionist Marxists and the Leninists basically decided that this is not going to happen. Thus, you get Lenin and Stalin who have their nationalities policy and their national liberation movements in the Communist tradition, and they just take it for granted that there will be nation states in the post-colonial world. The revisionist Marxists, too, think that they need to work through existing nation states democratically.
Frankly, a lot of this open-borders stuff on the left, to the extent it’s not just subconsciously recycling libertarian talking points paid for by the Koch brothers in the 1990s, just seems like a throwback to crude 1875 Marxism before it had been refined. There’s a whole century of thinking on the left that just rejects this. So, why would it be revived now?
For now, the GOP remains the party that the Bush dynasty created — a party based among small business owners in the South and West that is heir to the hostility toward the federal government, welfare, and minorities once characteristic of conservative Southern Democrats.
GB: And the answer lies in the return to an empowered nation state?
ML: It seems to me that the only two coherent positions are global neoliberalism or some kind of socialist or social democratic nationalism, by which I don’t mean blood-and-soil style nationalism, of course. I just mean nation statism, i.e the nation state will be the governmental unit, not the city state or the EU or the United Nations.
So, the Mexican working class in Mexico can have more influence on the Mexican legislature and presidency than it can have on the people who negotiate NAFTA or on the General Assembly of the United Nations. Whether you’re a Marxist or not, the working class in any given country is naturally going to have more influence in its national institutions than it will have in global ones. Whereas the economic and financial elites, if they don’t like the outcome in a particular national system of government, can simply change the venue as they do with these trade treaties through which they can try to override the laws of national legislatures. These treaties are enforced by tribunals whose members are just made up of international corporate lawyers of some sort.
But I reject the idea that there’s a natural affinity between the working classes and globalism. In practice there is no global working class. There are local working classes, nationally but also subculturally, regionally, ethnically, and so on, and the smaller and weaker they are, the more it makes sense in practical strategy for them to exercise their influence in the local territorial institutions they control rather than at the global level.
GB: You seem to desire for the United States conditions similar to those in Germany, where worker representatives sit on supervisory boards of companies through a system of codetermination. Couldn’t you say that that makes unions partners in crime while those companies buy up public assets in economically weaker nations like Greece? From “workers of the world, unite,” we’ve gotten to “workers, business, and the nation, collaborate in plunder.” If we follow down this path, won’t we return to the imperialist foot race we saw more than a century ago where we had some very successful capitalist nations where the working classes benefited from colonial policy, while the rest of the world was open for exploitation?
ML: Systems of power sharing and codetermination are just one possible reform. There are also wage boards, sectoral union bargaining, which is different from codetermination, and other ones that people in the alt-labor movement may come up with. When it comes to defending the interests of foreign working classes that can only be done through strong and independent states answerable to those working classes.
I think it’s utopian to expect, say, German auto workers to try to coordinate and harmonize their policies with auto workers in Tennessee, Arkansas, or Mexico. I just don’t think that’s realistic. The American working class has to be represented by the American government in negotiations with multinational companies and the Mexican government has to prevent German companies from exploiting Mexican workers. That is in itself difficult to achieve, but it’s easier to have a democratic government preventing its people from being exploited by corporations than it is to have some kind of transnational organized labor trying to do the same.
The answer for countries like Greece is a strong, democratic Greek nation state that is independent of the Euro and that can say no to international capital and lay down conditions for it. There’s no substitute for strong nation states. If you look at the difference between Latin American development and East Asian development, it all comes down to the strength of the government, i.e. having a powerful, reasonably non-corrupt and efficient, bureaucratized regime which does have some sense of the national interest and carries out a long-range industrial policy. In Brazil, Mexico, or Argentina, the problem is that the governments are too weak and in some cases too corrupt.
Ultimately, I don’t think there’s any alternative, for the left or anyone else, to get around the problem. You can’t just change the system on a global scale. Each country is either going to be well governed or misgoverned. Political development is a precondition for successful economic development. That goes against the grain of neoliberalism. In that sense neoliberalism and some versions of Marxism are kind of the same. They think the state will wither away, and then you will have these economic forces leading to a brighter future. That’s not my view. I don’t think the state is going to wither away. I think that you have strong, successful states and weak, incompetent, and corrupt states. And that’s the way it’s been, and that’s the way it will continue to be in the future.
About Michael Lind:
Michael Lind is the author of numerous books on economics, history, and foreign policy. A former staff writer or editor for The New Yorker, Harper’s Magazine, and The New Republic, he has taught at Harvard and Johns Hopkins and is a professor at the Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas. His latest book is called The New Class War: Saving Democracy from the Managerial Elite.
