Populism, Political Realignment, and the Professional-Managerial Class
A book review of 'The New Class War: Saving Democracy from the Managerial Class' by Michael Lind
This review was originally published on January 16, 2021 on the Organization for Positive Peace blog.
In the midst of a severe economic recession, coronavirus lockdowns, and the collapse of American world dominance, aspiring revolutionaries from across the political spectrum are born every day. Disillusioned with the status quo and anxious about the future, today more Americans are eager for radical change than ever before in recent history.
However, before one can be a revolutionary one must, as Martin Luther King Jr. put it, learn to “remain awake through a great revolution.” As King broadened the Civil Rights Movement into a movement against the “triple evils” of racism, poverty, and war, he preached that “one of the great liabilities of life is that all too many people find themselves living amid a great period of social change, and yet they fail to develop the new attitudes, the new mental responses, that the new situation demands. They end up sleeping through a revolution.” King went on to describe the 1960s as a period of “triple revolution”: a technological revolution of automation and cybernation; a revolution in weaponry with the development of the nuclear bomb; and a human rights revolution of the people for freedom throughout the world.
In 2021, we are yet again in the throes of a triple revolution similar but distinct from the one described by King in the late 1960s. We face a technological revolution, deemed a “The Fourth Industrial Revolution” by the World Economic Forum “that will fundamentally alter the way we live, work, and relate to one another” through the applications of “artificial intelligence, robotics, the Internet of Things, autonomous vehicles, 3-D printing, nanotechnology, biotechnology, materials science, energy storage, and quantum computing.” We also face a revolution in weaponry, where these Fourth Industrial Revolution technologies are wielded to bring about “Fifth Generation Warfare,” a postmodern form of warfare that military strategists say is “fought through manipulating perceptions and altering the context by which the world is perceived.” Finally, we are in the midst of a global populist revolt against neoliberal industrial policy and the dominance of finance capital, expressed most clearly in the movement surrounding Donald Trump in the United States.
Writing in the context of this new triple revolution, University of Texas professor Michael Lind published The New Class War: Saving Democracy From the Managerial Elite in 2020. A short but ambitious book, The New Class War strives to explain the contours of the post-1970s political and economic system and the recent populist movements against this “neoliberal revolution from above.” Despite Lind’s self-proclaimed centrist politics, aspiring revolutionaries have much to learn from this book, which has drawn harsh criticism from left-liberal establishment writers affiliated with publications ranging from The New York Times to Jacobin Magazine. In our time of immense ideological confusion and rapid political realignment, Lind’s book shines as a beacon to aspiring revolutionaries striving to remain awake during this great period of social change.
Lind on Neoliberalism, Labor, and Immigration
Unlike many leftist commentators on economics, Lind traces the origins of neoliberalism not to Ronald Reagan, but to Jimmy Carter, whose presidency was witness to the deregulation of the airline (1978), rail (1980), and trucking (1980) industries and the rise in popularity of “supply-side economics” within the Democratic Party. Carter’s neoliberal economic reforms paved the way for free trade agreements like NAFTA (North American Free Trade Agreement), which has been responsible for massive job loss and wage stagnation in the United States.
Lind provides an airtight historical and economic argument that illustrates just how directly free trade agreements have impacted the American working class. One example is his discussion of the “global labor arbitrage,” a practice by which Western corporations like Apple use subcontractors to employ workers abroad who work under labor conditions that would be illegal in the United States. Lind reports that labor arbitrage practices between 1999 and 2009 alone allowed American multinational corporations to lay off 864,600 workers in the US and add 2.9 million workers abroad.
Lind’s emphasis on American corporate offshoring and tax evasion throughout the book stands in stark contrast to many academic Marxist commentators like acclaimed author David Harvey, who has gone so far as to say that Western imperialism is a relic of the past. Contrast Harvey’s grossly incorrect statement that “the historical draining of wealth from East to West for more than two centuries, for example, has largely been reversed over the last thirty years” with Lind’s position that it is “Western-based corporations” and “Western governments” that are to blame for the global labor arbitrage and the super-exploitation of Asian workers. While it is unclear if Lind would overtly subscribe to a theory of imperialism, his analysis of neoliberalism is objectively more anti-imperialist than Harvey’s, which uses Marxist rhetoric to mask an unabashedly pro-imperialist political line.
Lind goes on to describe in detail how low-wage immigrant labor is weaponized against the American working class as a part of this corporate labor arbitrage strategy. He quotes Robert Shapiro, a senior adviser to Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign and former economic adviser to Bill Clinton, who admitted in 2019 that employers prefer immigrant workers to domestic workers across many industries precisely because they can pay immigrants less in wages.
Lind then dissects common economic, demographic, ethical, and political arguments for increased mass immigration, arguing that exploitative “guest worker programs” in countries like the United States do nothing but relegate immigrant workers to a position of indentured servitude while simultaneously undercutting the wages of the domestic working class. He then reveals the true motive of the “sanctuary city” laws which—according to the mainstream media and cultural left—were enacted from a place of overflowing compassion in response to Donald Trump’s immigration policies. Lind writes that sanctuary cities, in fact, “save money for managers and professionals by maintaining their access to local pools of low-wage, untaxed, unregulated, off-the-books nannies, as well as other luxury service labor that allows college-educated professionals to maintain their privileged lifestyles.”
Lind’s commentary on immigration is particularly significant because he highlights truths that are inconvenient for many of his professional class colleagues. The contradictions he foregrounds are all the more striking if we recall that it was arch-neoliberal Ronald Reagan who passionately advocated for open borders, touting the “fine relationship” the United States could have with Mexican immigrants whose cheap labor would inflate corporate profits. With a left that has gone out of its way to silence voices, such as Angela Nagel’s, who have had the courage to point out the neoliberal origins of open borders immigration policy, Lind’s writing on immigration becomes all the more important to study.
Hubs and Heartlands, Somewheres and Anywheres
This background brings us to the most compelling argument of The New Class War: today’s class war is fought between “hubs” and “heartlands.” Lind rejects the common trope of “the urban-rural divide,” proposing instead the language of “hubs” and “heartlands” to capture the reality of the political, economic, and cultural clash between “high-density urban business districts and inner suburbs on the one hand and, on the other, low-density suburbs and exurbs.”
Lind’s formulation has two major advantages: first, it avoids the racial association of “rural” with “white” and “urban” with “diverse.” Indeed, Lind cites evidence that the majority of both African Americans and Latinos are no longer in the hubs, but instead are members of the heartland working-class majority, along with white workers, living in low-density suburbs and exurbs. Second, the hubs and heartlands theory not only illustrates the economic divide between these two Americas along the lines of service industries in the hubs and goods-producing industries in the heartlands, but also the vast cultural gulf between the people who inhabit these increasingly isolated worlds. Lind, to use one of many examples, points out the shock with which the hub elite would react to the fact that the average American lives within eighteen miles of his mother.
Drawing on journalist David Goodhart’s 2017 book, The Road To Somewhere, Lind describes the heartlands as comprised of “Somewheres,” the working-class Americans who place more importance on their membership in organic local communities than on their often low-status jobs. In contrast, the “Anywheres” who increasingly make up the majority of the hubs strive to become “citizens of the world” by abandoning their regional accents, cultural traditions, and hometown social circle in order to pursue a high-status career path and cosmopolitan lifestyle. “Anywheres” have used their demographic increase in the hubs to wrest control of city politics from working-class organizations and leaders, and to tightly manage academic discourse through immense over-representation in hub universities.
Lind’s discussion of urban hubs fits a city like Philadelphia to a T, where a previously stable urban working class is being pushed out by Anywheres who flock to the city for elite education and employment opportunities. This has not only led to severe economic impacts on the city’s historic residents—many of whom are now been pushed into the heartlands—but is also transforming the culture of the city, which has long been a center of African American music, religion, and political activity as well as a stronghold of working-class “white ethnic” city politics and culture. Community churches and mosques, local bars and jazz clubs, and multigenerational family homes are being replaced with an Anywhere monoculture of coffee shops, university buildings, and luxury condos.
Populist Politics and Political Realignment
Lind’s economic history coupled with his hubs and heartlands theory leads him to a potent definition of neoliberalism: “a synthesis of the free market economic liberalism of the libertarian right and the cultural liberalism of the bohemian/academic left.” The professional class in the hub cities has combined its bohemian left cultural politics with the economic liberalism of the managerial elite to form a united front against working-class people and their institutions. This direct antagonism between the professional-managerial class and the working class has resulted in an explosion of populist movements in recent years.
Unlike previous forms of American populism, such as the white backlash against the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s and traditionalist backlash against the sexual revolution of the 1970s, the essence of this new populism is neither racial nor religious. Instead, it represents for Lind “an ongoing counterrevolution from below against the half-century-long technocratic neoliberal revolution from above imposed by Western managerial elites.”
The unique character of this current populist uprising has brought about a staggering political realignment in the United States. Previously the party of a majority of working-class voters, the Democratic Party has been hijacked by the managerial elite and their professional class allies. Lind reports that, after the 2018 midterm elections, forty-two of the wealthiest fifty congressional districts were represented by Democrats. Likewise, between 2010 and 2018, white voters with a college degree went from 40 to 29 percent of Republican voters, while white voters with less than a college education increased from 50 to 59 percent of the Republican electorate. Even more striking are the exit polls from the 2020 presidential election, which showed significantly expanded support among Black, Latino, and Native American voters for Donald Trump in particular and Republicans in general.
This kind of realignment over the course of just ten or so years deserves the attention of any serious student of American politics, and has led The New Yorker to ask after the 2020 election: “Can Republicans Become a Multiracial Working-Class Party?” Even The New York Times, unrelenting for the last four years in its position that Trump’s victory in 2016 was fundamentally about white supremacy, was forced to admit after the 2020 election that “many Trump voters, after all, voted for Barack Obama in 2012, which suggests they’re not incorrigible racists” and went on to declare: “The Democratic Party’s biggest problem today is its struggle to win over working-class voters.”
What is the Future for Labor and the Human and Who Will Lead Us There?
Lind himself is not optimistic about the current populists, who he calls “a symptom of a sick body politic, not a cure.” Despite his repeated criticisms of populism and populist politicians in The New Class War, left-liberal author Anand Giridharadas writes at The New York Times: “So eager is Lind to be sympathetic to populists that he begins to take their talking points at face value.” Frequent Jacobin Magazine contributor Carl Beijer rakes Lind over the coals in a haphazard defense of “Marxism,” claiming that Lind’s theory of class ignores “the 1%” and puts too much blame on professional class elites who apparently ought to remain untouched by critique.
Lind’s book certainly could have used some improvements. First, he does not address anti-war sentiment as a contributing factor to Trump’s electoral success, which would have only strengthened his argument. Second, his dismissal of “socialism” and “Marxism” and uninspiring call for “democratic pluralism” comes off as flippant and dogmatic. Third, despite his useful critiques of “bohemian left” multiculturalism, Lind could have developed his thesis further by drawing on thinkers like W.E.B. Du Bois, Henry Winston, James Boggs, Philip Foner, and Noel Ignatiev, who provide a rich body of work on race within the American working class.
Despite these shortcomings, Giridharadas’ and Beijer’s criticisms of Lind are of an entirely different nature. What The New Class War and Lind’s 2020 article, “The Double-Horseshoe Theory of Class Politics,” do is call into question the interests and values of the left-liberal intelligentsia itself, interests and values that align uncannily well with the World Economic Forum’s proposed “Great Reset” to usher in the Fourth Industrial Revolution. Authors like Giridharadas and Beijer interpret Lind’s argument as an existential attack on their very being and, in so doing, prove his point that the professional-managerial class does indeed act as a class.
Lind himself is undoubtedly a member of the same professional class that he subjects to harsh criticism in The New Class War. He is not asking those of us objectively positioned in this class strata to move out of the hubs and into the heartlands and become populist ideologues. What he is asking us to do is to be honest about the pivotal professional class role in attacks on the working class in the form of gentrification, academic propaganda against poor and working people, and tacit if not open support for the neoliberal project as a whole. Only then is it possible for intellectuals and other professional class individuals to, in Amilcar Cabral’s words, “be reborn as revolutionary workers, completely identified with the deepest aspirations of the people to which they belong.”
Lind correctly notes that what the professional-managerial class wants is a “workerless paradise” where value has been unmoored from labor. This elite fantasy is at the core of the first two facets of our triple revolution today, where work and war are digitized and responsibility is so dispersed that we have no idea where value comes from or whether a war is even happening. We cannot put hope in a class that aims to usurp not just human labor, but the human being itself. Instead, our only hope is the third element of today’s triple revolution: the masses of poor and working-class people and their political and spiritual strivings to overcome the dictates of the technocratic neoliberal world order. Though the current populism of their resistance is far from perfect, its instincts to defend labor and the human being from planned obsolescence provide fertile ground for the revolutionary movement of our times.