The social reasons for Bush's victory
Nov. 7th, 2004 06:36 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
fpbEven those among the Democrats whose reaction to shattering defeat has not been "We are right and there is absolutely no problem at all with what we say and do," there is a strong and understandable reaction against looking at themselves as they are, and as others see them. It is equally difficult to make the case in this context, since, as the reaction shows, the vast majority of LJers live and move and have their being in the very same mental dimension that is the essence of the modern Democratic party, and that the rest of America finds so objectionable. What I am going to write is going to be intensely distasteful to most readers.
What puzzles thoughtful Democrats is why the lower classes of America should vote for a party which is run in the near-complete interest of the ultra-rich, and whose economic policy has effectively ran labour into the ground, devastated traditional manufacturing, lost over a million jobs and McDonaldized what work is left. It is a good question. But the mere asking of it shows that the Democrats themselves are not a part of that lower class. They look at it from outside: they wonder at its ways and its priorities. They come to the industrial rust-belt suburbs and the rural centre of the country as strangers, out of touch with its culture, unable to penetrate its mystery; and are rejected. And yet the mystery is not really so mysterious.
In a sense, the Democrats have managed to make themselves invisible to themselves. By assuming that the only real class difference, and the only real class conflict, was that between relative poverty and relative wealth, they have become unable to see the kind of things they are. For to a working-class American from the heartland, the Democrats are no less rich people than the worst of the Republicans; only they are marked with that particular kind of brand of Cain that is called "elitist".
The grave mistake is to imagine that there is only one rich class in modern society. There are at least two, as exclusive, as divided from each other, as either of them is from the relatively poor. The fact that the Democrats cannot make the imaginative leap to seeing themselves as socially different both from the rank capitalists who make up the bulk of Republican numbers and from the middling folk who vote for them insures that the Democrats will always lose.
One of the major products of modern society is an infinite and ever-flowing stream of work of the mind. Newspapers, magazines and books; advertising; theatre and music; cinema and television; and the hundreds of thousands of jobs that relate, one way or another, to these. Thousands of people are paid to write, not novels or editorials, but DIY textbooks, tourist guides and joke collections. Thousands of people are draftsmen, commercial artists, secondary workers in theatre, advertising... you name it.
This class cannot be identified with the ordinary labourer who lends his/her strength and even his/her technical skills to a master for hire. They are employing something else than technical skill: they are, to some extent, making use of their mind. Of course, the shades of social distinction are vague and uncertain at the edges, and there is little to separate a top craftsman in, say, goldsmithing or catering, from a technical artist who makes use of his/her skills purely for hire. But if you move your attention from the limits to the centre of the respective social classes, then there is plenty to separate a factory or farm labourer from an advertising copywriter or a session musician. Their worlds, their kinds of work, their priorities in life, are not the same. However conscientious and skilful a labourer may be, he will not receive prizes for top quality work; he will not vest his soul into the perfecting of it. He will do the work as best as he can, take his money, and go home; and the emotional centre of his life will not be his work, but his family and his circle of friends.
The intellectual worker's life is different. No doubt, there are thousands of hacks who approach their work with no more commitment than a (slack) farm labourer, and churn stuff out without consideration; God knows I have met them. But at the heart of each field of work there is an inherent demand on the self. In the arts, and art-related fields, quality becomes a surpassing consideration more or less from the moment when two human beings start working together. Even the meaning of that popular phrase, "work ethic", is different in the two fields. To a labourer, it means "a fair day's work for a fair day's pay" - you pay me for so much work and I will do it to the best of my ability and in the times you set me. To the intellectual worker, it means not stopping until something is done as well as it can possibly be done, even if the monetary reward is not worth the labour. For there are other rewards: in particular, the consideration of one's peers and public. I will not say that a cartoonist or detective writer will gladly starve if s/he has a gilded statuette on his/her mantlepiece awarded by other cartoonists or detective writers; but it will make up for late nights, tons of caffeine, rows with the Significant Other, and lack of interest from one's relatives. No field, however mercenary and meretricious, fails to develop a regard for quality within its products: professionals vote for, and value, quality awards in pornography, advertising, or Mills & Boon romance writing.
This makes for a different social experience. The social life of intellectual workers is projected towards their peers; that of labourers, towards their families and neighbourhood. Intellectual workers have notoriously fragile relationships, caught as they are between the Scylla of finding a Significant Other who knows nothing of their world and therefore has no sympathy with their joys and sorrows, the sacrifices they make and their aims; and the Charybdis of finding their SO among their own colleagues, and so finding a critic and, in the worst scenario, a rival in the home. As a result, divorce and promiscuity are much more frequent among intellectual workers than other classes, and that contributes to distort their view of the world.
But intellectual workers don't starve. The rewards of their trade can be quite considerable. Unlike most kinds of manufacturing, the manufacturing of intellectual product depends to a huge degree on individual talent. When a man or woman finds out that his or her individual work can make the difference between a production flopping or triumphing, it does not take long before they learn to demand a piece of the action. And while these superstars only represent the top froth of the work in a few of the most popular fields, I think it may be said that a considerable amount of well-established professionals in these fields have quite a substantial income.
The important point however is that they are completely different from the rich proper in one substantial fact: they do not have control. The average intellectual worker, journalist or artist, cartoonist or actor, singer or writer, is an employee. The businesses that distribute their work do not belong to them. Attempts to break down the division between employer and intellectual worker are as old as capitalism itself; certainly, no sooner had cinema become an artistic industry than Charlie Chaplin and Mary Pickford led a revolt by exploited artists to set up their own production company, United Artists - which swiftly became just another company. And if even the superstars cannot manage to permanently alter the power relationship between intellectual employee and capitalist employer, so much less can the rank and file.
This means that, whatever their individual circumstances, the relationship of the intellectual worker with the capitalist employer is no less hostile and oppositional than that of the average unionized labourer. Both of them regard the employer as someone who stands there, tells them what to do, and then pockets the result of their work. This is why the intellectual labourer class - which, you will have understood by now, is in my view at the core of the Democratic party - has a strong feeling that their interests are identical to those of the working classes (including in this white-collar wage slaves, whose relationship to their bosses is also one of dependency and opposition).
But this is where the mistake is made. First, the intellectual worker class badly underrates its own power - a power which can feel as oppressive as, and more alien than, that of any employer; and second, they do not realize that social opposition is not only about money. Alienness of experience and values is just as deadly in dividing people.
I suspect I have come near my limit for this article, so the rest of the post will follow later.
What puzzles thoughtful Democrats is why the lower classes of America should vote for a party which is run in the near-complete interest of the ultra-rich, and whose economic policy has effectively ran labour into the ground, devastated traditional manufacturing, lost over a million jobs and McDonaldized what work is left. It is a good question. But the mere asking of it shows that the Democrats themselves are not a part of that lower class. They look at it from outside: they wonder at its ways and its priorities. They come to the industrial rust-belt suburbs and the rural centre of the country as strangers, out of touch with its culture, unable to penetrate its mystery; and are rejected. And yet the mystery is not really so mysterious.
In a sense, the Democrats have managed to make themselves invisible to themselves. By assuming that the only real class difference, and the only real class conflict, was that between relative poverty and relative wealth, they have become unable to see the kind of things they are. For to a working-class American from the heartland, the Democrats are no less rich people than the worst of the Republicans; only they are marked with that particular kind of brand of Cain that is called "elitist".
The grave mistake is to imagine that there is only one rich class in modern society. There are at least two, as exclusive, as divided from each other, as either of them is from the relatively poor. The fact that the Democrats cannot make the imaginative leap to seeing themselves as socially different both from the rank capitalists who make up the bulk of Republican numbers and from the middling folk who vote for them insures that the Democrats will always lose.
One of the major products of modern society is an infinite and ever-flowing stream of work of the mind. Newspapers, magazines and books; advertising; theatre and music; cinema and television; and the hundreds of thousands of jobs that relate, one way or another, to these. Thousands of people are paid to write, not novels or editorials, but DIY textbooks, tourist guides and joke collections. Thousands of people are draftsmen, commercial artists, secondary workers in theatre, advertising... you name it.
This class cannot be identified with the ordinary labourer who lends his/her strength and even his/her technical skills to a master for hire. They are employing something else than technical skill: they are, to some extent, making use of their mind. Of course, the shades of social distinction are vague and uncertain at the edges, and there is little to separate a top craftsman in, say, goldsmithing or catering, from a technical artist who makes use of his/her skills purely for hire. But if you move your attention from the limits to the centre of the respective social classes, then there is plenty to separate a factory or farm labourer from an advertising copywriter or a session musician. Their worlds, their kinds of work, their priorities in life, are not the same. However conscientious and skilful a labourer may be, he will not receive prizes for top quality work; he will not vest his soul into the perfecting of it. He will do the work as best as he can, take his money, and go home; and the emotional centre of his life will not be his work, but his family and his circle of friends.
The intellectual worker's life is different. No doubt, there are thousands of hacks who approach their work with no more commitment than a (slack) farm labourer, and churn stuff out without consideration; God knows I have met them. But at the heart of each field of work there is an inherent demand on the self. In the arts, and art-related fields, quality becomes a surpassing consideration more or less from the moment when two human beings start working together. Even the meaning of that popular phrase, "work ethic", is different in the two fields. To a labourer, it means "a fair day's work for a fair day's pay" - you pay me for so much work and I will do it to the best of my ability and in the times you set me. To the intellectual worker, it means not stopping until something is done as well as it can possibly be done, even if the monetary reward is not worth the labour. For there are other rewards: in particular, the consideration of one's peers and public. I will not say that a cartoonist or detective writer will gladly starve if s/he has a gilded statuette on his/her mantlepiece awarded by other cartoonists or detective writers; but it will make up for late nights, tons of caffeine, rows with the Significant Other, and lack of interest from one's relatives. No field, however mercenary and meretricious, fails to develop a regard for quality within its products: professionals vote for, and value, quality awards in pornography, advertising, or Mills & Boon romance writing.
This makes for a different social experience. The social life of intellectual workers is projected towards their peers; that of labourers, towards their families and neighbourhood. Intellectual workers have notoriously fragile relationships, caught as they are between the Scylla of finding a Significant Other who knows nothing of their world and therefore has no sympathy with their joys and sorrows, the sacrifices they make and their aims; and the Charybdis of finding their SO among their own colleagues, and so finding a critic and, in the worst scenario, a rival in the home. As a result, divorce and promiscuity are much more frequent among intellectual workers than other classes, and that contributes to distort their view of the world.
But intellectual workers don't starve. The rewards of their trade can be quite considerable. Unlike most kinds of manufacturing, the manufacturing of intellectual product depends to a huge degree on individual talent. When a man or woman finds out that his or her individual work can make the difference between a production flopping or triumphing, it does not take long before they learn to demand a piece of the action. And while these superstars only represent the top froth of the work in a few of the most popular fields, I think it may be said that a considerable amount of well-established professionals in these fields have quite a substantial income.
The important point however is that they are completely different from the rich proper in one substantial fact: they do not have control. The average intellectual worker, journalist or artist, cartoonist or actor, singer or writer, is an employee. The businesses that distribute their work do not belong to them. Attempts to break down the division between employer and intellectual worker are as old as capitalism itself; certainly, no sooner had cinema become an artistic industry than Charlie Chaplin and Mary Pickford led a revolt by exploited artists to set up their own production company, United Artists - which swiftly became just another company. And if even the superstars cannot manage to permanently alter the power relationship between intellectual employee and capitalist employer, so much less can the rank and file.
This means that, whatever their individual circumstances, the relationship of the intellectual worker with the capitalist employer is no less hostile and oppositional than that of the average unionized labourer. Both of them regard the employer as someone who stands there, tells them what to do, and then pockets the result of their work. This is why the intellectual labourer class - which, you will have understood by now, is in my view at the core of the Democratic party - has a strong feeling that their interests are identical to those of the working classes (including in this white-collar wage slaves, whose relationship to their bosses is also one of dependency and opposition).
But this is where the mistake is made. First, the intellectual worker class badly underrates its own power - a power which can feel as oppressive as, and more alien than, that of any employer; and second, they do not realize that social opposition is not only about money. Alienness of experience and values is just as deadly in dividing people.
I suspect I have come near my limit for this article, so the rest of the post will follow later.
