A Seat at No Table
After the second world war, American politics failed by their own success. On returning from the war, the philosopher Murray Bookchin went to the GM foundry in Bayonne, New Jersey, where he worked, to organize his fellows around his left-wing political views. They told him, changed from the language used in the Depression, “We aren’t ‘working class’. We are middle class workers.”
There was a new social contract: the populace will enjoy unprecedented levels of ownership and access to consumer goods and “experiences” like travel, and in exchange they will give up their idea of controlling the state. And it worked. Movements like Civil Rights for Blacks and women were largely focused on access to that social contract. Rightwing economists at places like the University of Chicago were weird allies of these movements. One wrote in the 1960s, under the banner of “Human Capital”, that discrimination would lead to increased labor costs. If you just wanted to hire white men, you would have to pay a premium for them. If you would hire women and all colors of people, you could suppress wages and labor power. Or as the feminist Germaine Greer put it, “Women could have marched till their feet fell off. Corporations wanted women in the work force.”
Income equality reached its peak in the late 60s, and has fallen ever since. Because of deindustrialization, women and minorities were seated at a table that had simply been removed. The upwardly mobile in those groups were able to join the Professional Managerial Class, leaving the majority behind. Those women and minorities who were “creamed off the top” of their groups to join the PMC substituted the idea of liberation with that of social climbing. The achievement or frustration of their advancement would continue to leverage references to past collective struggles when it benefited the ascent of individual members. By the end of the 1980s, the editor of Ms. Magazine declared, “The future of Feminism is the Democratic Party.” The apotheosis of these movements, which first sought to join the ranks of “middle class workers” was for a tiny group of individuals to become elite servants of oligarchic power. If you want to exploit the masses, you have to pay Nancy Pelosi first. If you want to destroy Libya, you better make sure Hillary Clinton can loudly proclaim that it was her idea. Why? Because in these terms, “Feminism” had only one final goal, for the ultimate woman to become figurehead of the empire, President.
And for the rest? The collapse of the social contract from the 1960s on. Deindustrialization meant mass unemployment, minorities first. This process didn’t even have to be overtly racist. As Blacks were often “last hired” they would be “first fired” in terms of seniority. The majority of the population was ok with that. Poverty leads to crime, and in the 1980s a new private prison industry was born to receive those people held up by the press as odious. Stereotypes that had waned returned everywhere, “Black people are lazy.” “They don’t want to work.” Drug use was proof that they lacked the self-control that Darwin and the scientific racists of the 19th century had warned about — they were genetically unfit. Books like The Bell Curve, which purported to prove that people of sub-saharan African origin are mentally deficient, got glowing reviews across publications, even, or especially, in the New York Times whose readers, always uneasy about their inherited wealth, like to have the social hierarchy which they rest atop, affirmed by scientific fact. They trust the science.
The ready availability of consumer credit was another way to paper over the decline of equality. Wages would stagnate or decline, but you could borrow. Off-shoring of manufacturing meant lower prices giving the illusion of sustained or increased consumption. Once there was a unionized garment industry in Alabama. It had to go. Now instead of two American t-shirts for $15, you could have three of lower quality for $10 from Walmart via foreign sweatshops. The increasing volume of domestic consumption is still held up as a sign the people are doing better than ever. A housing bubble with utterly fraudulent lending kept the home-ownership ideal alive for a period. My favorite being a man lent $400k to buy a house in Florida based on his income as a mariachi. In the income verification portion of the application that the lender kept was a picture of this gentleman in his mariachi costume. That system, unbelievably, collapsed.
It’s a roost-a-thon. The essential ideological bankruptcy of Middle Class Worker politics, once deindustrialization stranded the majority, has left them nowhere to go. In the early 1980s there was another Black march on Washington D.C, a memorial for the one 20 years prior.; women marched for the Equal Rights Amendment. But corporations already got what they wanted from widening the labor pool. There was nothing now on offer. The Democratic Party championed identity branding in place of material benefits in their public presentation. Practically speaking, they have nothing to offer their voters. The celebration of unique identities in general, and the promotion of a tiny class to manage the downtrodden, would have to suffice. For Black Americans this was a catastrophe that played out a bit like this, “Oh we love your vibrant clothing and dancing!” ‘Can I have a job?’ “No.”
Why even invent that exchange when Hilary Clinton summed it up thus, “Will breaking up the big banks end Sexism?!” To which her audience replies, “No!” As a public performance, this is synecdoche politics, the part standing for the whole. If the DNC put forward a black or female candidate, their power and success would stand in for the benefit of all. It just doesn’t work. Today, only about 20% of the population has any future to speak of, or present with which they have some contentment. While the majority were happy when economic misfortune visited itself upon others, now it has come for them. Empire robs its subjects of external agency. As individualism eroded the possibility of collective action, the body would become political and the last source of leverage. This has produced a hilarious proliferation of identities, styles of self-presentation, as tailored strategies to gain some kind of economic purchase in the industrial rubble. To become a liberal fetish object, and thereby attain homeownership, it is no longer enough to rise in the PMC as merely Black or just female. The head of the Ford Foundation is Black and Gay. Pete Buttigieg is a favorite. Having ticked every box like the perfect apparatchik, Harvard, served in the military, consultant for McKinsey, all proofs of his willingness to serve the worst forces in our world and thereby rise, he lacked that special something. I have heard that he used to date women, but that won’t do. He must be Gay, and married, and with two adopted mixed race children. I doubt he has any attraction outside his reflection. When the old politics of the public-self demanded marriage to a woman, he auditioned them. When the necessary branding changed, who was Pete not to respond to the marketplace of identity? Vox Mercatus, Vox Dei.
And Mayor Pete is lucky that he is my age. If he were younger, he’d have to transition. Transexuality in the young adds decadence and perversion to natural beauty - retaining a basic ability to excite and titillate. But in the old, it is truly pathetic, as our defining sexual characteristics anyway fade, and male and female merge again. Still, age might yet save many young women who want to change sex: I recommend they transition into their grandfathers - same testosterone level, same breasts: all a 21 year old woman has to do is put on an old blazer and call themselves Ray, or Harold. I pity young men dressing up like grandma, but at least it would be hilarious. To be corrected on visiting a friend’s family, in a hushed tone, “Ethan is now Gladys.” These new identities have so little content that those who profess them, who make subjective claims about their “reality”, are filled with inchoate anxiety. Because rather than not having civil rights, they are economic orphans without the ability to trace the origins of their poverty. And as the media and internet have created a hyper-mimetic culture, they become different in exactly the same ways. The mainstream press treats these fashions in pursuit of status, and therefore money, with a naive piety, either liberals accepting everything like some auto-lobotomized mother, “Oh your forehead is a beautiful place for a beautiful tattoo, sweetie!”, or knee-jerk conservatives, hating and moaning about all of the accidental displays and ignoring the essential cause of these behaviors.
