Can we please stop using "working class" as a synonym for "rightwing"?

Whenever I want a bedrock definition for a term or concept, the Encyclopædia Britannica usually comes to mind early. I learned repeatedly in my basic schooling that it's not fair to use an encyclopedia as a source, at least not in school research papers. But Britannica is still an excellent source. It often includes articles by leading authorities. Famous examples include Sigmund Freud's, "Psychoanalysis," Albert Einstein's "Space-time," James Henry Breasted's "Ikhnaton," Glenn Seaborg's "Plutonium," T.E. Lawrence's "Guerilla," Marie Curie and Irène Curie's "Radium," Bertrand Russell's "Relativity, philosophical consequences of," and Orville Wright on his brother Wilbur.

So, wanting to say something about how sloppily the political press uses "working class," I resorted to Britannica's article Social class:

The upper class in modern capitalist societies is often distinguished by the possession of largely inherited wealth. The ownership of large amounts of property and the income derived from it confer many advantages upon the members of the upper class. They are able to develop a distinctive style of life based on extensive cultural pursuits and leisure activities, to exert a considerable influence on economic policy and political decisions, and to procure for their children a superior education and economic opportunities that help to perpetuate family wealth.

Historically, the principal contrast with the upper class in industrial societies was provided by the working class, which traditionally consisted of manual workers in the extractive and manufacturing industries. Given the vast expansion of the service sector in the world’s most advanced economies, it has been necessary to broaden this definition to include in the working class those persons who hold low-paying, low-skilled, nonunionized jobs in such service industries as food service and retail sales. There are considerable differences within the working class, however, and a useful distinction exists between skilled, semiskilled, and unskilled workers that broadly corresponds with differences in income level. What characterizes the working class as a whole is a lack of property and dependence on wages. Associated with this condition are relatively low living standards, restricted access to higher education, and exclusion, to a large extent, from the spheres of important decision making. Aside from the dramatic rise in living standards that occurred in the decades after World War II, the main factor affecting the working class in the second half of the 20th century was a general shift in the economy from manufacturing to service industries, which reduced the number of manual workers. In the United States and Britain, among other countries, the decline in traditional manufacturing industries left a core of chronically unemployed persons isolated from the economic mainstream in decaying urban areas. This new urban substratum of permanently jobless and underemployed workers has been termed the underclass by some sociologists.

The middle class may be said to include the middle and upper levels of clerical workers, those engaged in technical and professional occupations, supervisors and managers, and such self-employed workers as small-scale shopkeepers, businessmen, and farmers. At the top—wealthy professionals or managers in large corporations—the middle class merges into the upper class, while at the bottom—routine and poorly paid jobs in sales, distribution, and transport—it merges into the working class. [my emphasis]

This view broadly agrees with the approach of classical political economy from Adam Smith to Karl Marx. As James Oakes has written, "Marx was after all, the last of the great classical economists, those who concerned themselves with how wealth was produced and therefore, how labor was organized. We do not think that way anymore, especially not after the revival of market ideology in the 1980s," i.e., the rise to dominance of what is now called neoliberalism. ("The Peculiar Fate of the Bourgeois Critique of Slavery" in Oakes, ed, Slavery and the American South (2003).

While Britannica's definition isn't the be-all and end-all. But it makes the basic distinction that classes are only meaningfully defined in terms of the social and economic system. That's why the popular term "middle class" in the United States, which basically lets 95% of the people plausibly describe themselves as part of the middle class, is so generally useless as a description of any social phenomenon. It shouldn't be too much of an effort to recognize that the the business-owner of a small restaurant chain may actually have a net financial worth less than that of a skilled factory worker who has owned a small house in an major urban area for the last 45 years. But the position of one in the economic order provides a very different viewpoint of the system that that of the other, even if both may agree in favoring some particular set of economic policies. To the restaurant chain owner on the edge of bankruptcy, Donald Trump's idea that American wages are too high may have a more urgent rational appeal than it does to the factory worker with large equity in his house and union-defended pension plan may not see such urgency in adopting such a policy. Which, from the standpoint of the economy as a whole, is deeply irrational, if one believes that the economy should serve the well-being of everyone.

One thing the multiple pathologies of our national press corps are doing is to lazily identify Trump's supporters as the "white working class." Blacks and Latinos are often referred to as ethnic blocs in discussing voting. The fact that a large part of the American working class is black and Latino. The punditocracy thus tends to talk about the white working class as the working class more generally. And they identify this imagined (white) working class as culturally and politically conservative-to-reactionary. Plus, it's a favorite conceit of our Pod Pundits that they speak for this imagined working class. David "Bobo" Brooks periodically indulges this posture. The late Tim Russert made it a part of his thoroughly conventional and Establishment public persona. (See: Michael Carlson, Tim Russert The Guardian 06/15/2008: "Russert, who was born in Buffalo, New York, always defined himself by his working-class Irish roots.")

Molly Ball in The Trumpian Divide The Atlantic Online 05/27/2016 write about a Trump appearance in Anaheim, "the country-club crowd mingled with the Trumpenproletariat."

Even Marcy Wheeler partially falls into this trap in Pat Buchanan, Dick Cheney, and American Exceptionalism Emptywheel 05/29/2016. She's making an important and interesting point about the white supremacist ideology shared by the presumptive Republican Presidential nominee and Spiro Agnew's onetime speechwriters Pat Buchanan: "Buchanan not only talks about declining economic prospects of white working class men, the relatively improved fortunes of people of color, but especially about the plight of white men losing their myths of superiority, losing the myth that white men made this country and led the world without the often-coerced labor and deaths of lots of brown people."

But it's at best an overstatement to assume that the "declining economic prospects of white working class men" is a particularly distinctive feature of Trump's support. The economic prospects of working class men have declined during the long, bipartisan dominance of neoliberal/Herbert Hoover/Angela Merkel economics that began in the US with St. Reagan's Administration. And Trump certainly does attract a significant number of white working class voters.

But like the Tea Party movement, those attracted to Trump are more affluent voters. Nate Silver wrote earlier this month (The Mythology Of Trump’s ‘Working Class’ Support Five Thirty Eight 5/03/2016):

It’s been extremely common for news accounts to portray Donald Trump’s candidacy as a “working-class” rebellion against Republican elites. There are elements of truth in this perspective: Republican voters, especially Trump supporters, are unhappy about the direction of the economy. Trump voters have lower incomes than supporters of John Kasich or Marco Rubio. And things have gone so badly for the Republican “establishment” that the party may be facing an existential crisis.

But the definition of “working class” and similar terms is fuzzy, and narratives like these risk obscuring an important and perhaps counterintuitive fact about Trump’s voters: As compared with most Americans, Trump’s voters are better off. The median household income of a Trump voter so far in the primaries is about $72,000, based on estimates derived from exit polls and Census Bureau data. That’s lower than the $91,000 median for Kasich voters. But it’s well above the national median household income of about $56,000. It’s also higher than the median income for Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders supporters, which is around $61,000 for both.

These figures, as I mentioned, are derived from exit polls, which so far have been conducted in 23 primary states.1 The exit polls have asked voters to describe their 2015 family income by using one of five broad categories, ranging from “under $30,000” to “$200,000 or more.” It’s fairly straightforward to interpolate a median income for voters of each candidate from this data; for instance, we can infer that the median Clinton voter in Wisconsin made about $63,000.

As I indicated earlier, a meaningful structural definition of working class doesn't map simplistically onto income or net worth data. But it's a more useful measure than the customary Pod Pundit definition of working class as people without four-year college degrees.

Silver concludes his column:

This is not to say that Trump voters are happy about the condition of the economy. Substantial majorities of Republicans in every state so far have said they’re “very worried” about the condition of the U.S. economy, according to exit polls, and these voters have been more likely to vote for Trump. But that anxiety doesn’t necessarily reflect their personal economic circumstances, which for many Trump voters, at least in a relative sense, are reasonably good.

And I'll close by suggesting that generalizations about Trump's "working class" support should make a careful distinction between white Southern working-class Trump supporters and those not from formerly Confederate states.

It's important in these things to maintain the ability to walk and talk at the same time. Gender is also fundamental in shaping social consciousness. And "whiteness" is a key part of American political and social consciousness. So both function as distinct influences on political decisions, as Adele Stan reminds us in these two American Prospect articles: Will Trump’s ‘Man Card’ Play to Women? and, White Supremacy and Trump's Battle for the 'Soul of America' 05/06/2016, which also emphasizes the Pat Buchanan tradition.

Rightwing revisionism on the Second World War

Pat Buchanan did an interview on 07/23/08 with Scott Horton of Antiwar Radio, in which he gives a pro-Hitler-Germany "revisionist" version of the beginning of the Second World War.

I won't try to refute his points here. But I will mention four books that address the history that Buchanan blatantly distorts and provide reality-based versions of events. Jeffrey Record's The Specter of Munich: Reconsidering the Lessons of Appeasing Hitler (2007) discusses the European political situation in 1938 and the outlooks of the various international players. This gives a non-Goebbels version that contrasts dramatically with Buchanan's. I keep citing that Jeffrey Record book because it's just plain good on several levels.

Much of the material is available online in Record's August 2005 paper for the US Army's Strategic Studies Institute (SSI), Appeasement Reconsidered: Investigating the Mythology of the 1930s. He also deals with a subject in the current Summer 2008 issue of Parameters, Retiring Hitler and "Appeasement" from the National Security Debate.

Starting around 26:00 in the interview, Buchanan offers his own version of Holocaust revisionism, which turns on a pure propagandistic discussion of the initial phase of the mass killing in 1941 and makes the Wannsee Conference into a key turning point in initiating the Final Solution, as distinct from organizing and implementing it. Christopher Browning's The Path to Genocide: Essays on Launching the Final Solution (1992) addresses the origins of that event. On the timing of the decision-making, the chapter, "Beyond 'Intentionalism' and 'Functionalism': The Decision for the Final Solution Reconsidered", is particularly useful on dating the decision-making process. (More recent documentation has further strengthened the base timeline he lays out.)

Gaming the timing of the original decision on initiating the Holocaust is a favorite trick of Holocaust deniers. In fact, I heard Browning say in a public lecture a number of years ago that it was David Irving's frivolous claim that Hitler didn't know about the Holocaust that spurred real scholars to pinpoint more precisely what they could definitively say about that decision point.

Any good history of the Holocaust would also show how Buchanan's characterization of German policies in the conquered territories (including Austria) is ludicrously benign. Raul Hilberg's The Destruction of the European Jews, originally published in 1961 and revised in a 1985 edition, is one of many such good histories.

On the question of Hitler's long-range intentions on both the killing of the Jews and on the need for Lebensraum (living space), Hitlers Weltanschauung by Eberhard Jäckel, originally published in German in 1969, has become a classic. Those two goals, gaining Lebensraum in "the east" (Russia) and removing the Jews from Europe, were the two key goals to which Hitler held throughout his political career. Buchanan denies that the Lebensraum concept was important to Hitler's foreign policy, and at least calls into question the intensity of Hitler's hostility toward Jews. His arguments on both are ridiculous.

Two essays by Jäckel in English addressing those topics are available online: Refutation of the absurd thesis that "Hitler Is innocent in the murder of Europe's Jews" and Once More: Irving, Hitler and the Murder of the Jews. The copyright date shown at the Table of Contents page is 1993.

(The display of those essays at the cited links is a bit confusing; you have to select "Next" after the end of the text to go to the next page. The first essays has six pages, the second only one, which immediately follows the first essay.)

Tags: pat buchanan, second world war

Some of the "isms" we're having to talk about these days

Mussolini and Hitler

January is only half over. But already the liberal blogosphere find ourselves contending with often-weirdly-provoked discussions of racism, anti-Semitism and (gulp!) fascism.

Not that I'm hesitant to discuss any of this stuff. Except that in my blogging days I've generally avoided discussing "fascism" in terms of contemporary politics, for reasons I mentioned in my review of Robert Paxton's The Anatomy of Fascism last year. Except for Benito Mussolini's Fascist Party in Italy, which actually called itself the Fascist Party, scholars of the phenomenon have a range of opinions on which historical regimes should be called fascist that would probably surprise most people who haven't dug into the topic a bit.

As much as my poli-sci-geek side enjoys this stuff, until now I've tried to avoid using the term "fascism" when discussing either historical regimes (except Italy) or contemporary movements. Also, in the sometimes eccentric American political vocabulary, "fascism" has been more like a cuss word than a definition. Everyone knows that "fascists" were the people we fought in our prototypical Good War, the Second World War. But beyond that, it hasn't had a whole lot of conceptual content in the ordinary political vocabulary.

Now along comes the National Review's Jonah Goldberg, son of Lucianne Goldberg (who made Linda Tripp and Monica Lewinsky famous), with a completely hack but high-profile argument that only liberals are "fascists". His book, Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left, From Mussolini to the Politics of Meaning, was just published and he's actively promoting it now. So, despite his argument being about as frivolous as it could be in content, I guess we're going to have to learn to talk about fascism explicitly now in current political terms.

Dave Neiwert has been way ahead of this curve. He's been writing for years not only about the real existing far right in the US but also specifically about the concept of fascism and how it applies to today's US political scene. He argues that the present-day conservative movement, including characters like Rush Limbaugh, Mad Annie Coulter and nativist groups who are very much a part of the Republican Party sphere, exhibit certain traits that he calls "proto-fascist". He has been giving Goldberg's book quite a lot of attention, not because it's substantive but because it presents a "teaching moment" to talk about the substantive issues involved and how hackwork like Goldberg's obscures them. One of his latest posts on the subject is The methodology of Liberal Fascism Orcinus blog 01/13/08.

When it comes to anti-Semitism, one of the anti-Obama themes that's floating around cyberspace, and has now broken into the once-prestigious pages of the New York Times, is that Obama is a closet Muslim and is at least soft on anti-Semitism. M.J. Rosenberg discusses this meme in Playing With Fire: Smearing Obama Among Jews TPM Cafe 01/15/08. See also Richard Cohen: Bad for the Jews by Ari Kelman, Edge of the American West blog 01/15/08 and Six degrees of Louis Farrakhan by Henry Farrell, Crooked Timber blog 01/15/08.

This is an instance similar to the infamous "swiftboating" of John Kerry in 2004 in which frivolous charges are cranked out by someone and then are picked up by the Establishment press without any kind of meaningful information provided to readers about the factual accuracy or substance of the charges. This particular technique under discussion in one way resembles the one used in the 1992 campaign when someone floated the completely groundless lunacy that Bill Clinton had once been an agent of the Soviet KGB and then Republicans flogged it by saying, hey, we're not saying it's true but why doesn't he come clean about it?

More-or-less obvious pandering to racist sentiment has been a standard part of Republican Presidential campaigns for some time. So it's no surprise that we're seeing a lot of it surfacing already, especially with Barack Obama one of the most prominent figures in today's Democratic Party. Pat Buchanan is a reliable source of such stuff and he's playing his role. In The Brothers and Sisters War Human Events Online 01/11/08. He reminds today's Republicans of one of those segregationist phrases that's so painfully obvious you wonder why they even bothered to "code" it at all:

This could get ugly. As Hillary's victory in New Hampshire is being attributed to the Bradley Effect - i.e, white racism - any Barack victory in South Carolina will now be attributed to the black vote, what in the Old South they used to call "the bloc vote."

And January is only half over!

Tags: anti-semitism, dave neiwert, fascism, jonah goldberg, liberal fascism, m.j. rosenberg, pat buchanan, racism