The Tyranny of Clichés: How Liberals Cheat in the War of Ideas (31 page)

Regardless, the takeaway is that when talking about the lumpenproletariat, the
thing to remember is that, as Obi-Wan Kenobi said of the denizens of the Mos Eisley spaceport: “You will never find a more wretched hive of scum and villainy.”

The reason Marx’s analysis suffered from such an incontinent stream of classes is that humanity is simply not easily, reliably, or sufficiently categorized by class. In his myopic arrogance he insisted on imposing a single mode of analysis on humanity. It would be like dividing the entire world into those who are left-handed and right-handed. Yes, you would learn and highlight some very interesting things about the differences and interactions of southpaws and decent humans (I don’t trust left-handed people!), but that would hardly unlock the mysteries to every realm of life. Like the proverbial Martian visitor who would rationally deduce that humans were slaves to dogs because we pick up their feces, Marx’s obsession with defining everyone as
homo economicus
caused him to ignore many of the most important facts of life. It is a lesson that not only Marxist economists would do well to learn: To look upon the interactions of the priest and the confessor, mother and child, doctor and patient, soldiers and their comrades, musicians and their audiences as exclusively, or even primarily, economic transactions is to cram the square pegs of your ideology into the round holes of reality.

(This was the genius of fascism’s appeal. Mussolini, a committed Marxist socialist for most of his life, realized that the Italian masses liked the idea of a command economy, but they also liked the idea of being
Italians.
Marxists insisted that factory workers in Florence should have more solidarity with factory workers in Minsk than with the grocery store owner down the block.)

Europeans—and later Asians—found Marxism particularly plausible because class was always a more salient concept on the continent. But Marx mistook cultural arrangements for “scientific” categories. In the United States class played—and continues to play—far less of a role. For most of the nineteenth century, the average American was an owner—or co-owner with his family—of his own means of production. In fact, prior to the Civil War only a fifth of the population lived in cities, and most people lived on their own farms. With the advent of urbanization and industrialization, the working classes—i.e., the proletariat—grew quickly. They also rapidly carved out a lifestyle that made them if not fully
bourgeois (whatever that actually means), then certainly prosperous enough not to feel exploited. Moreover, the working classes saw literally millions of their children enter the upper classes simply by dint of their hard work. The notion that class was an iron cage locking people into a permanent struggle with the ruling classes simply never caught on. Indeed, the majority of those in nineteenth-century American ruling classes—both political and economic—were not born into that status but earned it. As David Brooks writes, “Marx told us that classes inevitably conflict, but sometimes they just blur.”
¹²

Europe had a history of serfdom, Americans left that behind (with, of course, the obvious and odious exception of slavery, an institution which has also proved confounding to traditional Marxists, because it centers on race, not class). Yes, America has had its periods of labor strife—giving false hope to Marxists and other flavors of socialist that the party was about to get started—but ultimately the conflicts in America have been along different fault lines: racial, regional, cultural, and philosophical. And most of them haven’t been bloody, but political. In his famous 1906 book
Why Is There No Socialism in the United States?
Werner Sombart asked, “Why is there no socialism in the United States?” Library shelves groan with books answering that question, but the short answer is quite simple: Because this is the United States, damn it.

To be sure, class is not an exclusively Marxist term, even if all discussions of class have an oily Marxist residue to them akin to the greasy film on the tables at a Chuck E. Cheese’s. Marx’s great rival in academic debates about class was Max Weber, who defined class not so much in terms of income, but social authority. Weber’s vastly superior analysis held that a given society’s organization of classes was contingent on a specific culture, and that income had far less to do with the rankings than the Marxists thought.
¹³
Priests in seventeenth-century France, for example, may not have been particularly wealthy, but they were certainly more influential than the comparatively prosperous blacksmith guild. Lady Gaga is not influential because she’s rich, she’s rich because she’s influential.

In America, the so-called new class of professors, journalists, education bureaucrats, social workers, and activists makes far less money than the typical orthodontist but has far, far more influence over our culture. Perhaps this is one reason why the term rich is routinely defined in the fine
print of Democratic proposals as income just slightly above what the more successful workers in these fields make. As Megan McCardle has noted, there’s an amusing tendency among liberal financial journalists to call for taxing the rich at rates “just above the level a top-notch journalist in a two-earner couple could be expected to pull down.”
¹⁴

Bill Clinton was a quintessential member of this new class (and you thought I forgot about him). A man never much interested in making money (until he left the Oval Office), he was from his teen years onward fixated on politics. His wife, too, was a consummate champion of the “helping professions.” Clinton’s political success lay in brilliantly updating the Nixonian formula of treating the vast, mostly white, American middle class as an identity politics group without ever conceding that was what he was doing. Inspired by the book
The Real Majority,
written by the political scientist Richard Scammon and (my old boss) Ben Wattenberg, then a Democratic strategist, Richard Nixon appealed to the “silent majority” of middle America, which Scammon famously defined as “unyoung, unpoor, unblack.” Wattenberg and Scammon always intended their analysis to be used by Democrats to win elections, but a Nixon aide by the name of Pat Buchanan saw its merits while the Democrats, still descending into McGovernism, couldn’t. Nixon won reelection in a landslide.

Twenty years later the lesson finally sank in. Bill Clinton marketed his 1992 campaign around the theme of “Fighting for the Forgotten Middle Class.” The brilliant trick, however, was that by 1992, according to Clinton’s pollster Stan Greenberg, fully 90 percent of Americans considered themselves to
be
middle class. In other words, it was a term that seemed to be about “class” but was in reality about everything except class. It was an appeal to classically bourgeois values masquerading as class warfare. The background issues in 1992 were as much crime, welfare, race riots, cultural rot as they were about the “economy stupid.” But a Democrat couldn’t talk about those issues directly, at least not without offending his base or the white middle-class voters he needed to win. Middle-class anxieties were, are, and always have been about more than mere economic concerns. We know this not least because what the cultural elite hated least about the bourgeoisie was
their money.
What they loathed were their values, and merely resented that middle-class values were remunerative. Clinton’s populist appeal to the middle class was a dog-whistle signal
to white voters telling them, in effect, “I get it.” He wasn’t subtle about it.

“And so, in the name of all those who do the work and pay the taxes, raise the kids, and play by the rules, in the name of the hardworking Americans who make up our forgotten middle-class,” Bill Clinton announced at the 1992 Democratic Convention, “I proudly accept your nomination for President of the United States.” And after the thunderous applause died down: “I am a product of that middle-class, and when I am president, you will be forgotten no more.” Translation: This is not the lumpenproletariat’s Democratic Party anymore.

The first two years of the Clinton presidency revealed the dilemma the dog has when he finally catches the car. He ran as a man championing middle-class values, but he violated that pledge when he was seen as making the issue of gays in the military his first priority in office. His battles with feminist “bean counters” (his term) and his personal style lent the impression that he knew what to say to get elected but his heart was still with the damn hippies. His wife’s talk about a new “politics of meaning” only reinforced the perception.

Thanks to Republican victories in 1994 and his own reptilian instinct for political survival, Clinton eventually found his way back to the center, and then hugged it for dear life for the rest of his presidency. He reluctantly embraced Republican-led welfare reform. He poll-tested his vacation itineraries so as to seem more middle class (he preferred Martha’s Vineyard but his pollster Dick Morris tested that with voters and advised him it was too elitist. Better to go camping in Wyoming). And he successfully marginalized middle-class resentments against him by railing against the dangers of “angry white men.”

American affluence has always been a vexing challenge for liberalism. Just as the hard left loathed the bourgeois’ “comfort,” mainstream liberalism despises their complacency. In the 1950s old-style mainstream liberalism had overseen a massive explosion in American prosperity after World War II—thanks to both good fortune and effective policies. But now what? Perhaps liberalism had run its course?

“The fear that liberalism would be thanked for its service and given a gold watch became more acute as the American economy soared after World War II,” notes William Voegeli. He continues:

In 1957, the year before John Kenneth Galbraith published
The Affluent Society
, Arthur Schlesinger tried to redefine liberalism’s mission for such a society. He wrote that the New Deal’s establishment of the welfare state and Keynesian management of the economy heralded the completion of the work of “quantitative liberalism.” Its logical and necessary successor should be “qualitative liberalism,” which would oppose the drift into the homogenized society. It must fight spiritual unemployment as [quantitative liberalism] once fought economic unemployment. It must concern itself with the quality of popular culture and the character of lives to be lived in our abundant society.
¹⁵

Just because the extinction of liberalism was a real anxiety among liberals doesn’t mean that there was ever a real chance that liberals would actually pack it in. If history shows anything about the progressive mindset it’s that there’s always more work to do. Very soon after Schlesinger offered his diagnosis of and prescription for the liberal dilemma, John Kenneth Galbraith would indeed write
The Affluent Society
, which in turn would lead to the Great Society programs which set about not only to transform society in myriad ways, but to do so with a sense of panicked urgency. Ever since, the new class activists in and out of government have recommitted themselves to transforming society through law and bureaucratic diktat, popular culture and K-through-PhD indoctrination.

Not all of these efforts have been wrong or pernicious in intent or result. One of the wonderful things about American culture is that it is fundamentally bourgeois, so it tends to “bourgeoisie-ify” even the most marginal cultural trends. One need only look to see how queer—and straight—theorists who once dreamed of “smashing monogamy” now celebrate the fact that gay men and women can spend their days as committed couples raising children and working to pay off their mortgages. For all of the effort by the campus left and their emissaries in the larger culture, identity politics alone—be it racial or gender quotas, barmy historical revisionism, or grievance peddling in all of its predictable forms—is not strong or compelling enough to overpower the force of our culture or the countervailing pressure to “work hard and play by the rules” that capitalism encourages.

“The
great secret of education is to direct vanity to proper objects,” Adam Smith observed in his first book,
The Theory of Moral Sentiments
.
¹⁶
Smith isn’t talking about manipulation or brainwashing. He’s not invoking Marxist notions of “false consciousness.” No, he’s talking about
educating
people, and you can only educate with the truth. Everything else is indoctrination. Smith believed that the free market and, more broadly, the free society, directs men’s vanity toward its proper objects, the virtues of prudence, restraint, industry, frugality, sobriety, honesty, civility, and reliability. Freedom teaches the virtue of “self-command” which, he writes, “is not only itself a great virtue, but from it all the other virtues seem to derive their principal luster.”
¹⁷

And this is the great and tragic irony. The hurly-burly of America’s cultural politics, while important, even vital, can never unravel the implicit social contract of capitalism which says that if you follow the virtues Adam Smith laid out, you will do just fine. If you teach those values to your kids, they will do better than you. That is true of whites, blacks, Hispanics, gays, and everybody else Maya Angelou listed in her no doubt brilliant poem. That in a nutshell is the American dream. There are no guarantees, but odds are in your favor.

Indeed, that’s the hitch. It is
because there are no guarantees
in a free society that you develop the habits that are essential to success in a free society.
Freedom makes many things harder, which is to say it makes many things more valuable. Without wading into the nitty-gritty of every policy proposal out there, the simple fact is that the Democratic agenda of “fighting for the middle class” amounts to subsidizing the middle class. Both as a philosophical goal and a cynical political strategy, FDR sought to turn vast constituencies—labor unions, blacks, widows, big business, et al.—into clients of the state. FDR wanted to go further, but couldn’t before he died. Nonetheless, the “interest-group liberalism” he left the party with served it well, politically, for more than a generation. It only became a liability for Democrats when mainstream Americans came to realize how it was undermining the health of the overall society, culturally and economically. That realization put Ronald Reagan in office.