The Rhetorical Priority of Class: It's Economic Incompatibility, Stupid!
I travel in the sorts of circles in which everyone I know stands bewildered by the ascendance of Donald Trump. His rise was difficult to not predict, his message was so extreme and distorted that it not only flirted with, but dwelled in stigma and polluted right wing, ethnic identity politics, and his style of campaigning seemed like it had no chance of keeping up with the professional ground game of the Democratic Party. As those of us in the field of conflict resolution attempt to make sense of how we can be helpful in a world that feels mad to many, we will need to renew our theoretical commitments as much as our political expectations. And the one area where we need the most help can be summed up with the word, class. Class, as a concept, has always been poorly employed in the field, has been less than fully understood by many, if not all, scholars and, most importantly, has been given lower priority than other emphases like those of human rights or diversity and inclusion. My argument for members of the field to consider is, only when we begin to develop a more culturally nuanced and structurally sophisticated understanding of class will we begin to forge the tools we need to engage the most salient conflicts in a productive way in the era of Trump.
Whatever this means in practice, it can in no way represent a retreat from core commitments in the field to confront the abuses of power that derive from cultural and status privilege that have been so effective for scholars in both a theoretical and practical sense, but it does suggest that we face an obligation to place a higher priority on thinking, teaching, and speaking about class dynamics and economic incompatibilities in our work. This means that we need not only think about structures of political economy, although this is critical, but also that we think more carefully about the intersection between structures of economic power and the moral foundations of grievances (narratives identifications, and rhetoric) that derive from enduring legacies of abusive power in the economic arena.If we do not engage this challenge, others will, as Donald Trump and his advisers have done.
What class is not:
Class is a funny word in English: Sometimes it takes on moralistic tones, e.g. classy; sometimes it is used in some loose way to signify social status, e.g., high or low class; and quite often, it is marred by its association with radicalism of various kinds, in particular, the variety associated with Karl Marx and Marxism. This last form is the most interesting and the most useful for making sense of why Donald Trump will be president, but because of the term’s association with Marxist radicalism and American opposition to it, the specter of Marx has made it difficult to generate a class analysis relevant for conflict resolution in the United States. Even worse for clear thinking, because Marxist chiliasm was associated with some of the most violent episodes of the Twentieth Century, class analysis has been associated in the field with the very things we do not advocate: violent escalation, coercive commitments, confrontational bargaining, ideological argument, and the like. But the Marxist stigma with which the concept has been polluted (even though I fully admit that any educated person should read and understand Marx), turns out to be a great distraction that prevents us from conflict resolution with populations that are increasingly described as "the white working class."
What class is:
We need to understand what class is and how it is distinct from other critical concepts like identity, human rights, and security. These four categories, taken together, represent different ways of thinking about incompatibility, i.e., the root cause of conflict in any conflict we might happen to observe. In fact, class is only a placeholder and shorthand for a whole genre of potential incompatibilities that emerge in the course of doing business, earning a living, and trying to get ahead. Any given class analysis may develop rich conceptions of how whole systems and modes of production are flawed to their core, or it may simply speak to implications for the way that taxes are used to pay for schools or how regulations in the housing market could help people to buy homes. Any number of incompatibilities emerge in the genre of economic relations and these incompatibilities have a tendency to produce conflict when the problems generated by the incompatibility are left to fester. Marx knew this, but so did Max Weber, Joseph Schumpeter, and John Kenneth Galbraith. And we also need to recognize that what makes class different from a close cousin like political economy is that it explicitly points to a connection between economic structures and moral evaluations of those structures that live in conflict settings and take on a life of their own, quite apart from the unintentional mechanisms of economic processes.
Telling Good Class Stories:
Here is a bold thesis that I offer here without demonstration: Donald Trump won the election because he was able to tell a good class story and because he placed priority on that story over others. Trump’s both was and was not the sort of class story that we have come to expect. It drew on many familiar tropes, images, representative figures, and stereotypes but also on others that most of us in the field find offensive and demoralizing. Nevertheless, it was a class story that was compelling in the right demographic groups, in the right geographic areas, and at the right time. This strategic use of the racially and sexually fueled narrative interventions in the class genre won Trump the election. As Arlie Hochschild might describe this strategy, based on the argument in her fantastic new book Strangers in Their Own Land, Trump voters subscribe to what she calls a “deep story” in which line-cutters from other cultures, other backgrounds, and other religious groups are getting benefits that members of the white working class don’t feel they are, and of which they feel they are more deserving. This story describes a systematic form of cheating, in which deadbeats and criminals (who happen to look different) are rewarded while people who work hard and play by the rules (who happen to be culturally marked with traditional privilege) fall behind. It is a story about how to get ahead (or fall behind) and why this is justified (or not). It is a right-wing class story, one with distinct racial, gender, and ethnic investments, connotations, and supports, but it is a class story.
Where we go from here:
The Democratic Party was once known for how well its leaders told class stories. These stories involved unions, progressive taxes, monopolies, child labor, public goods, insurance, public education, mortgages, and so on. Over time, as the pressing challenges of post colonization, civil rights, the gender revolution, and related redresses to former injustices took precedence, class was eclipsed in the rhetorical playbook of the Democratic Party. It’s not so much that these ideas fell away, they just became stale and unconvincing. Every Democratic Party leader will still speak about working people, of economic inequality and even of unions, but few people take these ideas seriously. They are anodyne, unsupported by respected economic theory, formulaic, and anything but dangerous. Danger and passion lie in the other kinds of stories that Democrats and progressives tell. These concern the hot moral concerns of abusive power in the realm of culture: from the privilege of race, to gender, nationality, color, religion, sexuality, or ability status. These issues of abuse of one’s positionality or status (to use an older word) fire the passions of progressives, and are connected to concrete and realizable programs that are placed front and center in Democratic Party rhetoric. Because of their moral valence, these arguments and the larger discursive field in which they are situated take priority over older ideas about the abuse of power present in markets, in non-ascriptive encounters and in critiques of forms of power that have no recognizable aspect of discrimination or exclusion.
It is, perhaps, painful, premature, and unsubstantiated to say that the moves that Bernie Sanders made to shift the narrative focus from status to class would have proven more successful than the more status-oriented campaign that Hillary Clinton ran.
I also worry that people might draw the wrong lessons from the Sanders alternative, namely that his specific proposals were sound or his aggressive attitude was better suited to the moment, or worst of all that it was helpful to have a white man make the class arguments so that white people would follow him. I’m not convinced of any of these things. In fact, I suspect that the coming wave of Democratic Party leaders will be drawn from the ranks of the broad civil rights, status-conscious movement that dominates the Democratic Party, and the new leaders who tell the emerging class stories will be people of color, women, LGBT, people with disabilities, and others. Nevertheless, I suspect that the moral-structural foundation of their arguments will change.
I wrote a book about what might happen if we failed to take class seriously in national politics called The Eclipse of Equality. I argued that the shift from an ecology of class to status narratives had transformed our politics and political culture. By equality, I meant the moral value associated with opposition to the abuse of universalistic forms of power that were indiscriminate in choosing victims. Eclipse referred to the relative rise of particularistic or ascribed forms of power and privilege that derived from cultural or status differences. But the image was meant to suggest that the imbalance of both of these essential forms of critical discourse was only temporary. I predicted that class discourse would return to find a new equilibrium with status discourse. As things happen, the mechanism for this transition was the rise of class rhetoric in the form of Donald Trump’s Twitter account. We have reason to suspect that Trump’s solutions to the incompatibilities in the economy will do little to solve the problems that exist there, but his example will convince Democrats that the terrain of class politics is too powerful to leave open to story tellers on the right. Class is back, and with a vengeance, both in the realm of politics and in that of reconciliation. It is our job to embrace the challenge.