It's Class Warfare All the Way Down

dressed up as politics

We must protect open society by crushing everyone who disagrees with the governing class. You’re seeing this sentiment everywhere, and please read this astonishing discussion of German politics. The German establishment is trying to criminalize and eradicate extremism, but using a definition “that embraces all non-establishment politics.” This is already a familiar maneuver in all of the Five Eyes nations, and is rapidly becoming much more familiar.

The indescribably bizarre effort to eradicate Donald Trump, to crush him and grind him and destroy his existence with trials everywhere about everything and hundreds of millions of dollars in fines for taking loans from willing lenders who were repaid at a profit, makes no sense as politics. There’s a depth of repulsion in the effort, a highly personal loathing that makes Ahab look restrained — as there was in, for example, the bafflingly overwrought response to the Freedom Convoy in Ottawa. Our politics are shaped by disgust.

It’s class. It’s class-based loathing, upper versus lower.

This is very strange, because Donald Trump was born in New York City, graduated from an Ivy League university, spent most of his life in Manhattan, is a billionaire, and didn’t rise from anything resembling poverty, while many of the people who despise him on class-focused premises come from actual lower-class or middle-class origins, like the dude with the Indonesian stepfather who was mostly raised by his grandparents because dad vanished and mom wasn’t around much. But it’s class hatred nonetheless.

I’ve talked many times about Christopher Lasch and Angelo Codevilla, and the emergence of a “new elite” that arose from the Second Industrial Revolution, the growth of corporate capitalism, and the political identities of the Progressive Era. Codevilla described a class that isn’t defined by how much money it has, policing its boundaries with performance and posture:

The heads of the class do live in our big cities’ priciest enclaves and suburbs, from Montgomery County, Maryland, to Palo Alto, California, to Boston’s Beacon Hill as well as in opulent university towns from Princeton to Boulder. But they are no wealthier than many Texas oilmen or California farmers, or than neighbors with whom they do not associate…

Professional prominence or position will not secure a place in the class any more than mere money. In fact, it is possible to be an official of a major corporation or a member of the U.S. Supreme Court (just ask Justice Clarence Thomas), or even president (Ronald Reagan), and not be taken seriously by the ruling class. Like a fraternity, this class requires above all comity — being in with the right people, giving the required signs that one is on the right side, and joining in despising the Outs.

This isn’t your grandfather’s class war. An extremely wealthy Nebraska slaughterhouse owner who votes hard right and drinks Coors is a lower class rube with “mere money” that doesn’t mean anything; a performatively radical adjunct professor with a $32,000 salary in Fresno is upper class.

A comment here a few months ago suggested another source of understanding: the “new class” described by the economist Joseph Schumpeter. In this book, scroll down to pg. 145 and start reading about “the sociology of the intellectual.” Schumpeter describes a growing class of professional intellectuals as a product of corporate capitalism; they are people who…

wield the power of the spoken and the written word, and one of the touches that distinguish them from other people who do the same is the absence of direct responsibility for practical affairs. This touch in general accounts for another—the absence of that first-hand knowledge of them which only actual experience can give. The critical attitude, arising no less from the intellectual’s situation as an onlooker—in most cases also as an outsider—than from the fact that his main chance of asserting himself lies in his actual or potential nuisance value, should add a third touch.

Pick a favorite nuisance politician, and look at their professional background. Let’s take Jacinda Ardern as an example: degree in communications, then a job on a campaign staff, then a job on a legislative staff, then a job on a legislative staff in the UK, then the presidency of the International Union of Socialist Youth, then “Labour’s spokesperson for Youth Affairs” and on into elected office. She’s never so much as brushed up against the edges of anything that looks like a job; she has never made or sold anything, insert own Lloyd Dobler reference here, but spent her entire adult life in politics and activism.

A normal route into politics has always been success in business, or success in something, and then, in middle age, a run for office as a second career. The dentist Paul Gosar runs for Congress. Bill Frist became a surgeon in the 1970s, then ran for office in the 1990s. Rear Admiral Ronny Jackson, a retired US Navy physician, now a member of the House. Lawyers, CEOs, gentlemen farmers, the president of the Screen Actors Guild. Something for twenty years, then politics.

Compare this to the new class of politicians. Daniel Andrews. Scott Wiener. Raúl Grijalva. Barbara Lee. Adam Schiff. Take your pick, and go look for yourself. Joe Biden, born in 1942 and in the US Senate by 1972, lodged into the District of Columbia like a tick. College, law school, government job or activism, elected office. Gather a hundred politicians in a room, and there might not be ten minutes of making something between them. They’ve spent their lives in “attending meetings” professions, regulating and arguing about the things other people actually make and do. Schumpeter wrote in 1943 that the weight of the new class would gradually crush the productive class — that a product of corporate capitalism would eventually subsume and smother capitalism. Corporatism, then decomposition.

Donald Trump? Vulgar. A builder. A developer. He spent his adult life being a landlord, one of the identities that disgusts the new class the most, and then dared to enter politics at the top. He is not of the body, not a member of the policy class, but he presumes to lead it. He is, without even a graduate degree in public administration or the credentialing journey through Harvard or Yale Law, a parvenu, arriving suddenly to, of all things, the presidency. It’s the late-progressive version of the neighbors whispering that the new family on the block moved here from a trailer park, can you believe the nerve?

Compare that response to, I don’t know, people like Steven Guilbeault and Justin Trudeau reacting to a thoughtful and remarkably effective political effort mounted by truck drivers. Imagine a curled lip pausing over a cocktail glass. Or compare the way a newly inaugurated President of the United States, a poor farm boy who was a graduate of a Texas cow college, was received in the White House by the staff of an assassinated Hyannisport noble. “The best and the brightest.” Who are almost inevitably wrong about everything, but they stick together.

This is new-class decompositional class warfare against the productive bourgeoisie and its vulgar productivity. Everywhere. If you haven’t already, go read that piece about Germany.