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How to End the New Class War and Save Democracy from The

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How to End the New Class War and Save Democracy from The How to End the New Class War and Save Democracy From the Managerial Elite | Michael Lind No theory, no promises, no morality, no amount January 22nd, 2019 of good will, no religion will restrain power…Only power restrains power. — James Burnham INTRODUCTION Michael Lind is a professor of practice at the LBJ School. A graduate of the Plan II Liberal Arts Honors Program and the Law School at the University of Texas with a master’s degree in international relations from Yale, Lind has previously taught at Harvard and Johns Hopkins. He has been assistant to the director of the Center for the Study of Foreign Affairs at the U.S. State Department and has been an editor or staff writer for The New Yorker, Harper’s, The New Republic and The National Interest. A co-founder of New America, along with Walter Mead, Sherle Schwenninger and Ted Halstead, Lind co-founded New America’s American strategy program, and served as policy director of its economic growth program. He is a former member of the boards of Fairvote and Economists for Peace and Security. Lind has published in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Atlantic, Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy, The International Economy and The Financial Times. He is the author of more than a dozen books including several that were New York Times Notable Books of the Year. To be complete, representative democracy requires WHY DO I CARE? representative bureaucracy. — Michael Lind I'm very interested in the arguments explored in Michael Lind’s new book. Ezra Klein is also coming out with his own take titled, “Why We’re Polarized,” which I have not read. It might make sense to have Ezra on the program as well, though I can’t say I’m particularly excited to read his book. In other words, I’m more predisposed towards the arguments made by Michael than those that Ezra and his ilk seem to be putting forward. I’m more inclined to be persuaded by the view that Americans are divided along class- cultural lines defined by powerful economic and professional realities than I am by the view that race, gender, sexuality, and other biologically conditioned categories and identities are to blame. I’ve never found the later arguments remotely compelling, and quite frankly, I’m relieved that the clamorous, moralizing minority has been silenced in the last year or two, making the atmosphere more conducive to candid and rational discussions about what has been happening in America over the last several years. Though I can’t say I’m on board with every assertion, conclusion, or remedy that Michael puts forward in his book, the overall thesis rings true. I think we see it all around us, not just in the US, but also in Europe, and I look forward to exploring the subject with Michael here today. 1 THREE REALMS OF POWER The overall argument that I think Michael is making in the book is that “only power can check power.” Absent a compromise between the classes (defined along lines similar to those of the late Culture 19th and early 20th century of labor vs. capital or working class vs. managerial class) embodied in a new democratic pluralist order there are only two possible outcomes according to Lind: 1) The domination of the working class by a neoliberal, technocratic elite or 2) the triumph of the working class over the elite by way of reliance on populist demagoguery (e.g. William Jennings Bryan, Donald Trump, etc.). Lind writes: “The alternative—the triumph of one class over the other, be it the overclass led by neoliberal technocrats or the working class led by populist demagogues— would be calamitous. A West dominated by technocratic neoliberalism would be a high-tech caste society. A West dominated by demagogic populism would be stagnant and corrupt. Given the weakness and disorganization of national working classes, in the absence of a new democratic pluralism the most likely possibility is that today’s class war will come to an end when, in one Does What ClassLook War Like? Western country after another, the managerial minority, with its near monopoly of wealth, political power, expertise, media influence and academic The old spectrum of left and right has given authority, completely and successfully represses the way to a new dichotomy in politics among numerically greater but politically weaker working- insiders and outsiders. — Michael Lind class majority.” Three Realms of Power — Michael writes that social power exists in three realms— government, the economy, and the culture: “Each of these three realms of social power is the site of class conflict— sometimes intense and sometimes contained by interclass compromises. All three realms of Western society today are fronts in the new class war.” I want to ask about the history of class war in this country and in Europe, but before we do, maybe it would help to ‘get clear’ on what it is that we are talking about. Q: What does class war look like and what are the symptoms that you Power Exists in Three Realms: Government, Economy, & Economy, Government, Realms: inThree PowerExists are picking up on in making this diagnosis? 2 HISTORY OF CLASS CONFLICT & THE FIVE SCHOOLS According to Lind, “the first class war of the The problem of classes is this: Class conflict is modern era had its origins in the growth of essential if freedom is to be preserved, because it industrial capitalism in the nineteenth and is the only barrier against class domination; yet twentieth centuries. In different Western class conflict, pursued to excess, may well destroy countries, industrialization proceeded at the underlying fabric of common principle which different rates and took different forms. But sustains free society. — Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. everywhere the social challenges were similar. … In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, five major schools of thought debated the future of industrial society: liberalism, producerism, socialism, corporatism, and pluralism. … In all its forms, (1) economic liberalism identifies human freedom with commercial transactions in markets, with the state limited to the role of enforcing contracts and perhaps providing minimal social insurance safety nets. Free market liberals tend to view national boundaries as unfortunate and anachronistic barriers to the free movement of capital and workers in a single global market Liberalism economy. Capitalist and managerial elites in the West have often promoted versions of economic liberalism, from the classical liberalism of the early nineteenth century to the globalist neoliberalism of today…. (2) Producerism is the belief that the economy should be structured by the state to maximize the numbers of self-employed family farmers, artisans, and small shopkeepers in society. The moral ideal of this school is the self-sufficient citizen of a republic with a small-producer majority Producerism whose economic independence means that they cannot be intimidated or blackmailed by wealthy Corporatism elites….(3) Socialists of various kinds—utopian, Christian, and Marxist—denounced capitalism and private property and proposed public ownership of industry and infrastructure….A third philosophy opposed to free market liberalism and state socialism alike, envisioned a harmonious society of state-supervised but largely self-governing “corporations,” by which was meant entire economic Socialism sectors, not individual firms, rather like medieval guilds. The same term, (4) “corporatism,” is often 3 used for both democratic and dictatorial versions of this political tradition….The view of society as a community of self-organized and self-governing communities, under the supervision of a democratic government, is best described as (5) “pluralism,” the term used by the English pluralists of the early twentieth century, like Neville Figgis, F. W. Maitland, G. D. H. Cole, and Harold Laski, Pluralism and by their late-twentieth-century heirs, including Paul Hirst and David Marquand. Five Schools — Q: What are the five major schools of thought that you identified in the book, and why are they important? (liberalism, producerism, socialism, corporatism, and pluralism) First vs. Second Class War? — Q: Why do you focus on “the modern era” (i.e. the period of the industrial revolution) as the analogue for today’s class war? Q: What do the two periods The evolution of managerialism in the West has have in common and what dynamics are similar replaced the distant and snobbish—but thankfully between the classes then and now? Q: Does it indifferent—bosses of the post-1945 years with a matter that the role of the state is much bigger new “woke” corporate elite. — Michael Lind BreakdownDemocratic of Pluralism Old vs. NewClass War vs. Old now than it was then? Ending the First Class War — Q: How did the previous class war come to an end and how important were (1) the fear of revolution and (2) the fear of foreign invasion in incentivizing the country’s elite to push for compromise? BREAKDOWN OF DEMOCRATIC PLURAISM Timeline Lind writes: “Between the 1960s and the present, as declining fear of great-power conflict gradually reduced the incentives of Western elites to make concessions to Western working classes, the postwar system has been dismantled in a revolution from above that has promoted the material interests and intangible values of the college-educated minority of managers and professionals, who have succeeded old-fashioned bourgeois capitalists as the dominant elite. What has replaced Kevin Phillips’ democratic pluralism can be described as technocratic neoliberalism.” 4 Starting the Second Class War — Q: Can you take us through the transformation of the American political-economy from one of democratic pluralism dominated by a community of self-organized and self-governing communities to one of neoliberal technocracy, dominated by a small class of managerial capitalists and wealthy financiers operating through a thinly veiled layer of electoral politics? Neoliberal Democracy vs.
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