The Death Of Class Consciousness In America—And How To Revive It
Inside the mailbag: SAVE Act ... Medicare for all ... Pam Bondi
BZ: One successful electoral strategy for Republicans has been to convince people on the left that voting is pointless and they should stay home (or vote third-party, which in our current system has the same effect as staying home), whether through sock puppet accounts or by amplifying voices on the left who believe this sincerely.
Is anyone on the other side (obviously not the official Democratic party, but anyone on the left half of the political spectrum) attempting this kind of black ops to get right-wing voters to stay home?
I think the answer is, no, not at scale. Certainly not in collaboration with foreign powers. You’ll occasionally read stories about rogue or unscrupulous operatives or candidates who experiment with these kinds of psyops against the GOP. The one that leapt to mind as I began writing was this episode from 2021, when the Lincoln Project sent five young men dressed as tiki torch-carrying white supremacists to a Glenn Youngkin rally.
As a general rule, these efforts are clumsy and ineffective relative to GOP efforts, and I think we can attribute this to the kinds of distinctions Sartre drew in Anti-Semite and Jew. People who don’t care about truth and meaning feel uninhibited to engage in deception and manipulation, just as people who thrill to violence will happily tempt political violence and pay less of a price for it. We should be more ruthless than we are, but we really should avoid slipping into faithlessness and inhumanity—realms in which we are outmatched down to the level of neurochemistry.
This is what I’d like to get across to Democrats wrestling with what to do about the SAVE Act. There’s a line of thought out there which holds that Republicans introduced the SAVE Act as a juke—purely to trick Democrats into voting against something that sounds like common sense—because in practice, with these coalitions, barriers to the franchise like “must have unexpired passport” would likely harm GOP voters the most. So…why not call their bluff? Why not take the safe vote, and force Republicans to live with the consequences of their trolling? Win-win.
My response is: Set aside the moral implications of erecting needless impediments to voting. Are you sure you’re as mischievous as they are? Are you sure you’ve thought through all the steps they have in mind for after the bill becomes law? Do you know every provision? Did you know that Republicans want to further amend federal election law to give Trump power to curtail mail voting and seize voter rolls and ballots? How do the frontline Dems who voted for the Laken Riley Act feel about that decision in hindsight? Or the ones who thought the savvy move was to help House Republicans pass funding for the Department of Homeland Security.
I try very hard in my work to think like Trump and MAGA, in order to better anticipate where events are headed. I believe I do a decent job relative to my peers. Yet I regularly fail to foresee the kinds of crude, cynical feints that occur to them all the time.
In any case, to make a long story longer, and even more boring: I don’t suspect Dems have unleashed the liberal equivalent of Paul Manafort or Roger Stone to deceive and manipulate the Republican electorate into abstaining or voting third party. Nor do I think they’ll try to judo flip Republicans with the SAVE Act. They’ll try to divide the GOP the old fashioned way, through normal campaign appeals and legislative tactics, and they’ll weigh in on GOP primaries in the hope of drawing unelectable opponents. But that’s about it.
Jared: Really interesting piece - I was particularly struck with the section about the “progressive case standard error” where you aspire for enough class consciousness to build a cross-racial working-class coalition that defeats right-wing politics forever; but you acknowledge we’re not there yet. It seems like there is potential conflict there - pushing for the long term goal of class consciousness vs. focusing on swing voters. You are arguing both are important, but the times that they’re in conflict are probably the times that you and the Yglesias-aligned people are most at odds. We all know the stakes of not winning swing voters right now - can you lay out the stakes of not achieving class consciousness? I’d love to hear your thoughts on why that approach is so important and how we could actually make it happen.
OK, big question.
I’ll confess I was being a bit rhetorically flip about the mountaintop dream of developing enough class-consciousness to defeat right-wing politics for all time. Part of the standard error in progressive thinking is the idea that class consciousness exists in latent form throughout society already, perhaps particularly among non-voters, such that if Democrats promised and delivered them more robust safety nets and worker power, they’d become regular Democratic voters for life, and put national elections out of reach for the GOP.
I don’t think that’s even theoretically possible in the U.S., at least outside unusual, catastrophic circumstances. There are a bunch of reasons people don’t vote, and disaffection with policy is only one factor. Voting is needlessly hard in some places, and could be made easier for everybody. Presidential election votes don’t really count for much outside of a handful of swing states. Our political institutions are sclerotic, so voting doesn’t strike many people as a good way to solve big problems quickly.
Even if we corrected all those systemic defects, and Democrats swung into action to enact a sweeping egalitarian policy agenda—and it had the intended effect of awakening the nonvoting electorate—well, Republicans would probably adjust. Maybe they’d be content with permanent irrelevance like the California Republican Party. But my suspicion is that they’d move left on some issues and experiment with new ways to appeal to voters on other issues. And, thus, over time, class solidarity would weaken.
But there’s “class consciousness” and there’s “consciousness of one’s class” and what really worries me about the medium-term future is the large risk that Democrats never again see any political upside from their factual status as the party that’s better for the economic wellbeing of poor and working people as individuals.
Some in these classes may not perceive this to be true, others may not care about economic policy as much as orthogonal moral or cultural concerns. But there should be some dividend for helping the largest number of people economically, and yet it’s getting harder to find as the parties polarize.
We are a less solidary society than we ought to be, and should of course encourage efforts, in and outside of politics, to build bonds across class. But if workers won’t vote in solidarity with members of their economic station and won’t prioritize their personal economic wellbeing, then politics becomes a pure contest of reason against might. Morally upright ideologies, bare-knuckling it against lies and conspiracy theories and threats of violence and tribal claims to dominance.
How did we approach this particular abyss? Let’s take a trip back in time together.