If they want to survive Trump, progressives must get smarter

Three pieces to start your week

Greetings,

For understandable reasons the election of Donald Trump brought a stampede of new subscribers. Welcome to you all. I only wish we might have met in happier circumstances.

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Today I want to flag three issues around the vexed issue of the politics of class, and how my class of liberal progressives might fare better if they (we) moved away from authoritarianism.

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1/ No one likes to be scolded

To anyone brought up in the old world of class politics the most astonishing stat from the US election is that the majority of working-class and poor households –  those earning less than $50,000 a year (Circa £40,000) voted for Trump. To make things worse for leftists of the materialist school, a majority of upper-middle-class and, indeed, upper-class voters on $100,000 (£80,000) or more voted for Harris.

The poor vote for a right-wing party promising tax cuts for the wealthy and the rich go left, and vote for a party promising at least some redistribution of their own wealth.

Where is your class analysis now, comrades?

The best explanation of working-class Trumpism came from the economist Adam Tooze in his Ones and Tooze podcast for the Foreign Policy journal. There’s a gap in his analysis, which I will get to later. But let us first praise Tooze for recognising why many poor people find the progressive bourgeoisie oppressive.

Along with the rich and the poor, Tooze says, there’s – 

“A third social class, let's call it the professional managerial class who are credentialed by the education system, and occupy positions of authority within the economy and society at large.

“And they exercise control, directly often, over working-class Americans, that starts literally at the beginning in kindergarten or elementary school where you have a college educated person taking charge of your kid. And it goes all the way through to the hospitals where your kids are born and your parents die and the folks that regulate what you can build in your front yard and everything else.”

Trump and those around him, most obviously Elon Musk, are rich enough to do what their working-class supporters are not allowed to do and scorn the values of the middle-class prudes and scolds who tell them how to behave and how to think.

“Trump and co can say out loud what many ordinary Americans think, which is that they simply can't get with the highfaluting ideas of everyone from the school teacher to the librarian all the way up to the fancy Ivy League professor and the folks on television who want to talk about complex norms of transgendered identities or structural racism or climate change.

“I mean, is it really surprising that white women without college degrees preferred Trump over Hillary and then Harris by a margin of 25 to 28%?”

There is plenty of good analysis on why people do not want to be the passive recipients of state benefits – “I don’t want your charity! – but prefer to have the power to earn their own living.

Equally, to the despair of leftists from Karl Marx onwards, the native working class can always see immigrants as threats to their jobs and living standards. Working-class conservatism is hardly a new phenomenon, after all.

What is new, or at least refreshing, is centre-left commentators speaking with Tooze’s frankness.

Nevertheless, whenever I read, or in this case, listen to left-wing journalists and academics describing what has gone wrong for the left, I try and put myself into the position of the centre-left politician.

“OK, Adam,” a Keir Starmer or a Kamala Harris might say. “So, if I promise to slash social security or clampdown on immigration, will you and other middle-class leftists defend me?”

I suspect the honest answer would be “no, I will denounce you as sellouts”.

There is a further problem. It is one thing for progressives to recognise that, in the eyes of many, the professional managerial class can be oppressive. But it is another to challenge your friends and colleagues and persuade them to behave better.

Some changes ought to be easy. In the US in particular trans ideology in its extreme form, and the notion that only whites can be racist, have become left-wing versions of creationism: anti-scientific arguments sustained by faith and the intimidation of sceptics.

I can see them being dropped or modified. But what about progressive arguments that are clearly true?

Are we meant to start lying about the reality of man-made global warming or to pretend that vaccines cause autism?

A help here is the old advice that how you think matters as much as what you think.  By far the best step for progressives to take is to stop gifting the right a huge political advantage by trying to silence critics

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2/ The silent majority and the SILENCED majority

Trump, like right-wing leaders everywhere has exploited the progressive willingness to no-platform opponents, and upheld conservative traditions as he did it.

In 1969, Richard Nixon used the phrase “the silent majority” to describe the Americans, who weren’t hippies or students protesting against the war in Vietnam but ordinary, decent and patriotic citizens.

(In the 19^th century, a happier and more poetic time, “the silent majority” referred to the dead.)

Implicit in the right’s notion of a silent majority is that the majority is being silenced.  Progressives control the arts, theatre, television and all varieties of storytelling, along with schools and universities. They use their power to censor and stigmatise anyone who disagrees with them.

It most certainly was not true in 1969. But there is enough truth in the charge today for the lack of respect for freedom of speech to cause immense damage to progressive causes.