The New Class War

Description

In both Europe and North America, populist movements have shattered existing party systems and thrown governments into turmoil. The embattled establishment claims that these populist insurgencies seek to overthrow liberal democracy. The truth is no less alarming but is more complex: Western democracies are being torn apart by a new class war.
 
In this controversial and groundbreaking new analysis, Michael Lind, one of America’s leading thinkers, debunks the idea that the insurgencies are primarily the result of bigotry, traces how the breakdown of mid-century class compromises between business and labor led to the conflict, and reveals the real battle lines.
 
On one side is the managerial overclass—the university-credentialed elite that clusters in high-income hubs and dominates government, the economy and the culture. On the other side is the working class of the low-density heartlands—mostly, but not exclusively, native and white.
 
The two classes clash over immigration, trade, the environment, and social values, and the managerial class has had the upper hand. As a result of the half-century decline of the institutions that once empowered the working class, power has shifted to the institutions the overclass controls: corporations, executive and judicial branches, universities, and the media. 
 
The class war can resolve in one of three ways:

   • The triumph of the overclass, resulting in a high-tech caste system. 
   • The empowerment of populist, resulting in no constructive reforms
   • A class compromise that provides the working class with real power
 
Lind argues that Western democracies must incorporate working-class majorities of all races, ethnicities, and creeds into decision making in politics, the economy, and culture. Only this class compromise can avert a never-ending cycle of clashes between oligarchs and populists and save democracy.Michael Lind is the author of more than a dozen books of nonfiction, fiction, and poetry, including The Next American Nation and Land of Promise. He has been an editor or staff writer for The New Yorker, Harper’s, The New Republic, and The National Interest. He has taught at Harvard and Johns Hopkins and is currently a professor of practice at the Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas at Austin.Introduction

On the night of July 14, 1789, legend has it, news of the fall of the Bastille was brought by a duke to the king of France, Louis XVI. “Then it’s a re­volt?” the king asked. The duke replied: “No, sire, it’s a rev­olution.”
 
On June 23, 2016, a majority of British voters passed the Brexit referendum requiring the United Kingdom to leave the European Union. A few months after that political earth­quake, on November 8, 2016, came an even more shocking event: the election of Donald Trump as president of the United States.
 
Since then, throughout Europe, centrist parties have lost voters to outsider parties and politicians— sometimes on the left but more often on the populist and nationalist right. In the summer of 2018, a coalition of the right-wing populist League and the antiestablishment Five Star Movement came to power in Italy. In Germany, the center- left Social Demo­crats imploded, losing voters to insurgent movements on the right and left. Nations that were said to be immune to nationalist populism, like Sweden, Germany, and Spain, have seen insurgent populist parties enter their parliaments.
 
Under Emmanuel Macron, a former civil servant and in­vestment banker who defeated the national populist candidate Marine Le Pen in 2017, France at first seemed immune to up­heaval. “Emmanuel Macron’s victory in the French presiden­tial election clearly demonstrates that the populist dominos in advanced economies outside the Anglo- Saxon world were not even close to falling,” Jacob Funk Kirkegaard, a senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics (PIIE), a free market think tank in Washington, DC, declared in May 2017, in an essay entitled “Macron’s Victory Signals Reform in France and a Stronger Europe.” Nearly a year later, in April 2018, Will Marshall of the Progressive Policy Institute, an ar­chitect of the “New Democrat” movement associated with the Clintons, published an essay in Politico arguing that the French president proved that promarket neoliberal centrists could de­feat the forces of populism and nationalism: “How Emmanuel Macron Became the New Leader of the Free World.”
 
Then, beginning in November 2018, protests that were initially directed against the impact of an increase in fuel prices on suburban, small- town, and rural French working- class citizens escalated into months of violent clashes among police and protesters that filled central Paris with tear gas and burning cars and ignited protests across France.
 
“Then it’s a revolt?”
 
“No, sire, it’s a revolution.”
 
Indeed it is. Europe and North America are experiencing the greatest revolutionary wave of political protest since the 1960s or perhaps the 1930s.3 Except in France, the transatlan­tic revolution to date has remained nonviolent. But it is a rev­olution nonetheless.US