The New Class War: Saving Democracy from the Metropolitan Elite

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Although the quote is actually from Kant, it is taken out of context and used in a way that is closer to the classic Burkean critique of rationalist restructuring and reform. footnote 7 Rationalism is unrealistic, this view holds, because it tries to impose abstract notions of what should be on a reality that is both richer and messier than anything ‘petulant, assuming, short-sighted coxcombs of philosophy’ can come up with. In its desire to make a clean sweep of things, it can only wind up doing violence to that which it purports to help. Real reform, by contrast, must come from within. It must develop organically out of the society of which it is a part. Yet, Lind shows little interest in going beyond this landscape of hypocrisy — instead taking it for given that working people have no interest in environmental protection. Telling, in this regard, is his failure even to mention the fact that ecological damage is most likely to impact lower-income communities; shamefully, he doesn’t even mention plans to combine the green transition with job creation, as in Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s “Green New Deal.” The Next American Nation: The New Nationalism and the Fourth American Revolution. Free Press. ISBN 9780029191033. [32] [33] Lind, Michael (2009). Made In Texas: George W. Bush And The Southern Takeover Of American Politics. pp.x–xi. ISBN 9780786728299. According to Lind, social disempowerment constitutes the kindling of populist conflagrations. Demagogues are the spark. Figures like Donald Trump, Nigel Farage, and Matteo Salvini are good at identifying the sources of working-class disempowerment, Lind contends, but are poor at actually redressing them. A truce in the new class war will require more than a few tariffs here, a few immigration restrictions there. What’s needed is a 21st-century version of democratic pluralism.

So, is Michael Lind guilty by association — or does his book help us to understand the shape of class struggle today? Doubtless, his central message is powerful — and will resonate with readers. The current class war, according to Lind, takes place between the metropolitan elites living and working in so-called “hubs” and the working class in the outlying heartlands. These powerful managerial elites have captured democracy, hegemonized and homogenized the culture, and effectively disenfranchised the working class through suppressing trade union organization and turning the working class’s churches into places where money means salvation. The New York Times argued that Lind presented “a highly distorted portrait of Trump supporters as victims” and suggested that Lind should break out of his institutional confines and go into the heartland to do some firsthand reporting of his own. I define democracy differently from most of the people who talk about liberal democracy. I don’t like that term ‘liberal democracy’, because the premise is that it is all very procedural and formal. That is to say, you have free elections, and minorities are not persecuted. But you can still have a very oligarchic society if you have free elections and respect basic civil rights, because most of democracy is about policies and not about rights. I argue that in the middle of the 20th century in all of the Western democracies, there was a substantive democracy – I call it democratic pluralism – in which the power of this managerial elite, which already existed by 1945, was counterbalanced by working-class organisations like trade unions, as well as powerful churches and powerful local political machines. And as those have eroded, by default, the college-educated elites have come to dominate the entire system – not by conspiracy, it is just that countervailing forces have eroded. Institutions that used to magnify the power of working-class people – trades unions, local political parties and religious congregations – have all dissolved for different reasons. By default, power has siphoned upwards in the culture, politics and the economy,” he says. That man, Michael Lind, has long been a heterodox presence in the American commentariat. A professor at the University of Texas and founder of the center-left New America Foundation, he has, at various points in his career, been a neoconservative apologist for the Vietnam War, centrist proponent of entitlement reform, and arch critic of the libertarian right. In recent years, however, he’s become an intellectual guru to the minority of American conservatives who are genuinely interested in formulating a new economic orthodoxy.Therefore, measured by education, I fall into the Democrat classification; but since 1978, having turned to Christ and spending many decades of fellowship with evangelicals, I would thereby be classified as conservative, and/or Republican. If we are victorious in one more battle with the Romans, we shall be utterly ruined,” lamented King Pyrrhus of Epirus, whose costly triumph in 279 BC inspired the phrase “Pyrrhic victory”. In 2020, the Democratic party learned what King Pyrrhus was talking about. They recaptured the White House and narrowly held on to the House of Representatives. And if the Democrats win both Senate runoffs in Georgia, they may yet capture the Senate. But Republicans increased their share of the House, making it easier for them to recapture it in 2022, and they control a majority of state legislatures whose redistricting plans for the US Congress can help the Republican party.

What Lincoln Believed: The Values and Convictions of America's Greatest President. Doubleday. ISBN 9780385507394. [24] ML: Multiculturalism is relevant in societies such as Switzerland or Canada (with its Anglophone and Francophone communities) in which two or more ethnocultural nations permanently retain their distinctness and there is little intermarriage. T he editors have been kind enough to give me space to respond to Michael Lind’s reply to my article on the us Constitution in nlr 232. footnote 1 Lind: I think the biggest divide has to do with views of tradition. That is, if you are a working-class person, you want to pass on the cultural traditions you were raised with. This is bound up in your identity, to the extent that you do not have a separate identity of yourself.

ML: A simple but useful proxy for class is education. Members of the working class do not have four-year diplomas, though they may have some college education. I was criticised for arguing in The New Class War that education, not income, is the major dividing line between classes in the modern West. But in this case, the common-sense view is the correct one: an underpaid professor belongs to the overclass, while a plumber who did not go to university but earns twice as much is a well-paid member of the working class.