What class do you belong to?
When I was young, “working class” was a commonsense term. It referred to wage workers, to miners and carpenters and secretaries and waitresses, people who were paid by the hour and mostly lived within modest means. Working class people were the primary constituency for union organizing. They almost all voted Democratic (unless, like my family, back in the day their evergreen candidate was Norman Thomas, the Socialist Party’s candidate for President in every election between 1928 and 1948). In 1952 and 1956, my family voted Democratic for Adlai Stevenson and so far as I know, every election thereafter.
My father was a housepainter who died young, my stepfather a plumber and a union stalwart. The phrase “working class” seemed to them to have a plain meaning, as it once did for me. I remember San Francisco as a young adult living in a cheap apartment and taking public transportation everywhere. I fantasized every time I hopped on the 24 Divisadero bus about making a film consisting of one long tracking shot all the way from the route’s origin in the Bayview-Hunter’s Point neighborhood, then a desperately poor one, through the dilapidated Victorians edging the almost as poor Fillmore District, right to its terminus in the ritzy Pacific Heights. The title I had in mind was this: “So you think there’s no class system in the United States?”
The route is still the same, but displacement and gentrification have altered the context for many stops along the way. Just so, for reasons both personal and political, I’m no longer so sure that “working class” has a plain meaning. On the personal side, having freelanced almost all of my working life, my economic reality seemed not very different from my family’s, hoping to meet my obligations month-to-month. But after various paycheck stints as salesclerk and the like, my work became making art or offering advice under consulting contracts to people and organizations involved in that world, which Musa al-Gharbi, who I’ve written about here recently, calls “symbolic capitalism.” That’s a category which seems to beg the question of the old class divisions.
This is coming up now because prescriptions for the Democratic Party are extremely thick on the ground, and a great many of them say, as Bernie Sanders did on November 6, “It should come as no great surprise that a Democratic Party which has abandoned working class people would find that the working class has abandoned them.” Listening to his November 15th podcast interview on The Daily from the New York Times, I was inspired to hear him quote FDR’s 1936 inauguration speech, which began, as so many recent political speeches have done, with an account of all of the previous term’s accomplishments. But then took a different turn:
And then he says — after being president for four years, he says, and I quote, “I see millions of families trying to live on incomes so meager that the pall of family disaster hangs over them day by day. I see millions denied education, recreation, and the opportunity to better their lot and the lot of their children. I see one third of a nation ill-housed, ill-clad, ill-nourished,” end quote.
In other words, what Roosevelt did, he said, look, we’re making progress, but I look out all over this country and I see tens of millions of people who are hurting.
I thought Sanders was right, because FDR’s speech acknowledged the validity of people’s suffering and pledged to respond. To me, this stands in contrast to Harris’s many, many references to the middle class, and the long history of establishment Democrats responding to people’s complaints and fears about the economy by essentially telling them the economy was fine, look at Wall Street, look at the inflation numbers.
But I’ve been reading things that suggest that most people don’t possess the type of class consciousness ingrained in people like me—the post WWII generation, many of them children of immigrants or immigrants themselves, understanding themselves as part of a vast and diverse grouping that stood in contrast to what Sanders characterizes as “the billionaire class.”
I recently had an exchange with an author who is writing an essay about the need for Democrats to build stronger bonds with working class communities. Like many commentators, he expressed the class divide in terms of formal education. It’s true that the numbers line up that way: exit polls show that more voters with college degrees vote Democratic than Republican, and the proportion goes up as advanced degrees are figured in. I have my doubts about whether this correlation is causative, though. It seems to me the socioeconomic factors that make it easier for people to obtain degrees are the cause, and the degree is an indicator of the need to look more deeply at that.
There are many people with college degrees working as waiters, in factories, as builders, as secretaries, and so on, and many others, including myself, lacking higher education credentials and working in fields presumed to require them. There’s been a shift in the raw numbers, but sometimes the discussion seems grounded in the assumption that a degree is a ticket to privilege and an automatic disconnect from ground-level reality—and vice versa. I wonder if a pervasive assumption of intellectual superiority isn’t the actual root of the harm. Snobbery tends not to generate persuasive arguments.
The author explained that he is influenced by sociologists who look at class cultures less through the lens of economic power than through the kind of social ties and cultural tastes people are likely to cultivate. I’ll be interested to learn how this plays out in his writing, but it’s hard to see how that is a better yardstick than economic reality. It seems like almost every taste these days tends toward Taylor Swift or Beyonce or both. I hear legal scholars and academic philosophers waxing rhapsodic about major popstars on their podcasts about the Supreme Court or just the other day, on one about Adorno’s theory of leisure.
It all makes me think of Raymond Williams’ great essay, “Culture is Ordinary” (I wrote about it a long time ago) in which he describes the ways that he and his working-class neighbors in Wales were not intimidated by learning, nor by educational institutions, but by snobs:
I was not oppressed by the university, but the teashop, acting as if it were one of the older and more respectable departments, was a different matter. Here was culture, not in any sense I knew, but in a special sense: the outward and emphatically visible sign of a special kind of people, cultivated people. They were not, the great majority of them, particularly learned; they practiced few arts; but they had it, and they showed you they had it.
Speaking from my own experience, this hits home. At this point, I’m not easily intimidated. But I haven’t forgotten my many youthful encounters with people who “had it, and they showed you they had it.” I knew what class I belonged to both from my own attachment to working-class history and values and from people who belonged to a different class reminding me of their superiority.
Now comes an interesting post from a knowledgeable commentator on economics who writes under the handle Noahopinion and knows his way around the numbers. His point is that “working class” no longer has an agreed-upon meaning (or indeed much meaning at all) and is therefore not a sturdy foundation for a new iteration of the Democratic Party. I’m still not sure I agree with this conclusion, but the data he cites along the way are certainly worth considering.
One longstanding problem with class consciousness in the US is that most people identify as middle class, which is why Harris and other campaigners use that term as if it referred to everyone, and why it’s so difficult to find mutual understanding around questions of class. But did you know know that according to the Pew Research Center, Republicans are more likely to consider themselves working class? I didn’t. Fifty-nine percent (!) of upper income Republicans said so a few months ago, compared to 33 percent of Democrats. The author offers a lot of reasons: cultural solidarity, income volatility, the diversity of work that makes definitions slippery. He concludes that “the idea that lower-earning and non-college Americans can be motivated to rise up against the rich with some combination of pro-union policy, more health care subsidies, higher minimum wage, and fiery rhetoric against billionaires is probably fanciful. As much as people might like class war to be an easy off-the-shelf substitute for identity politics, it’s unlikely to be any more successful.”
What do you think? My heart is still with Bernie’s take on it, but my head is unsure.
Ry Cooder, “The Very Thing that Makes You Rich (Makes Me Poor).