Over the past two or more decades, Americans in particular have become increasingly polarized between a new highly-educated urban managerial class and a working class that has lost much of the political and economic clout it once wielded in the post-war era. From 1945 to around 1973, the economies of most western countries revolved around a tripartite power-sharing arrangement among business, labour, and government. The rule of an educated elite was kept in check by the power of labour unions and other nonpolitical associations which channeled the aspirations of ordinary workers. These were the "little platoons" celebrated by Edmund Burke, and together they constituted what has come to be called civil society.
However, during the dislocations of the 1970s, including the unprecedented coincidence of inflation and recession, this power-sharing arrangement broke down, with leaders like Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan ushering in a neoliberal era of domestic deregulation, open borders, and labour arbitrage. Globalization was the net result, with a rising managerial class dominating policy-making at the expense of especially the unskilled workers who once manned the factories of America's northeast and Great Lakes industrial belt. The central problem with globalization, however, is that it is undemocratic. Because globalization cannot police itself, it tends to empower a transnational class with shallow roots in any particular country. This is what Michael Lind, in The New Class War, calls the managerial elite. In the United States, the Democratic Party represents this elite class of educated urbanites.
The new managerial "overclass" champions all the "correct" causes, from human rights and environmentalism to diversity and inclusion of a variety of claimed minority groups. Yet all this disguises the reality that ordinary people who do not fall within the officially favoured categories are increasingly left out of the neoliberal consensus. The leaders of the managerial class express barely concealed contempt for a "basket of deplorables" (Hillary Clinton) and for those who "cling to guns or religion" (Obama). These are the people who fail to follow their self-appointed enlightened leaders with sufficient enthusiasm. As Lind sees it,
Counter-majoritarian, rights-based liberalism, pushed too far, becomes antidemocratic liberalism. Many of the institutions important to citizens in democracies are subtly altered or delegitimated in a society in which communal interests must be justified exclusively in terms of this or that individual right. Churches and clubs and families, to name three examples, are impossible to justify on the basis of contracts among rights-bearing individuals, as though they were mere business partnerships. So are institutions like labor unions that magnify working-class power by existing in a third realm of collective bargaining between individual rights and majority rule and can function only if membership is more or less compulsory. It is also difficult for a rights-based philosophy to legitimize the nation-state as a community that can demand loyalty and sacrifice from its members . . . .
Overall, the shift of the center of gravity from local chapter-based membership associations and church congregations to foundations, foundation-funded nonprofits, and universities represents a transfer of civic and cultural influence away from ordinary people upward to the managerial elite (63-64).
The rule of the managerial elite has sparked a populist reaction among those left out of the neoliberal regime. In the United States, the Republican Party has become the unlikely home of such people. Unlikely because during much of the 20th century the Democratic Party was the champion of the disadvantaged working classes, legalizing collective bargaining and setting up a modest welfare state under Franklin Roosevelt's administration. Now the Republican Party, once led by northeastern patricians, has become the home of the white working-class followers of Donald Trump.
If Lind is critical of the oligarchical rule of the managerial elite, is he then a populist? He is not, and I think this is significant. Over the past half decade or more, we've seen any number of observers take issue with the pretensions of the chattering classes who mouth the expected platitudes on all the right issues but are tone deaf to the concerns of ordinary people outside of the major metropolitan centres. Such observers then feel compelled to ally themselves with the populist demagogues who exploit the legitimate concerns of their supporters for their own ends. I will not name names here, but we have seen even Christian public intellectuals, rightly concerned over the advance of a French-style exclusive secularism, make this move.
Instead, Lind advocates what he calls democratic pluralism as an alternative to both neoliberalism and populism:
From the perspective of democratic pluralism, technocratic neoliberalism and demagogic populism represent different highways to the hell of autocracy. According to technocratic neoliberalism, an elite of experts insulated from mass prejudice and ignorance can best promote the public interest. According to populism, a single Caesarist or Bonapartist figure with a mystical, personal connection to the masses can represent the people as a whole (84).
By contrast, pluralists rejoice in genuine diversity, not the showy kind trumpeted by the managerial elite. They seek, not to squeeze reality into the constraints of an homogenizing theory, but to facilitate the proliferation of communal formations of all kinds. "For them, a good society is a mosaic of vibrant smaller collectivities—trade unions, universities, business associations, local authorities, miners' welfares, churches, mosques, Women's Institutes, NGOs—each with its own identity, tradition, values and rituals" (85, quoting David Marquand). The clash of opinions in the public square is not a sign of dysfunction, as neoliberals assume. It is exactly what should be happening in a healthy democracy. Here Lind joins the likes of Hannah Arendt, Sir Bernard Crick, Jean Bethke Elshtain, and many others in recognizing that ordinary politics is irreplaceable and that good policy requires, not the muzzling of those deemed politically incorrect, but the open airing of differences within the context of stable institutions and accepted procedures.
In championing democratic pluralism, Lind is evidently trying to bring back something of the mid-century consensus that existed between the end of the Second World War and the first oil crisis of the 1970s. During that time currencies were stable, tripartite power-sharing was in place, a unionized workforce protected skilled and unskilled labourers, and confidence in institutions remained high throughout the western world. In the United States, Republicans and Democrats alike supported collective bargaining, bank regulation, and such welfare-state programmes as Social Security. Grassroots participation in a variety of guild-like organizations was high, and popular participation was channeled through the collectivities listed above.
Can this mid-century consensus be revived or rebuilt for the 21st century? Lind believes not only that it can but that it must, if the US and other western countries hope to avoid degenerating into "high-tech banana republics" (170). To accomplish this, hard decisions will have to be made. For example, a generous welfare state is incompatible with open immigration. Lind believes that guest worker programmes, which amount to indentured servitude, must end, as must the managerial class's dependence on undocumented immigrants who effectively constitute a new underclass lacking legal and economic protections available to citizens and permanent residents. "To supplement conventional electoral politics, reformers will need to rebuild old institutions or build new ones that can integrate working-class citizens of all origins into decision-making in government, the economy, and the culture, so that everyone can be an insider” (170). This may be a tall order, and it will take much effort and good will to accomplish, but it is preferable to the other options on the table.
For further reading:
- Lind, Michael. The End of Progressive Intellectual Life. The Tablet.
- ________. The Real Threat to American Democracy. Project Syndicate.
- Lind's page at LBJ School.
- New America. Think tank founded by Lind.
- New Yorker interview: Michael Lind on Populism, Racism, and Restoring Democracy.
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