This is Democracy – Episode 74: The Evolution of the American Working Class

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Jeremi Suri: Welcome to our new episode of This is Democracy. Today we’re going to discuss a topic that’s ever present in American history, but particularly important now and in the lead up to our new elections and the aftermath of elections in 2016 and 2018. The question of the role of the working class in American history. What is the working class? Who are they? Where does the concept come from? How do we think about that concept in relationship to the evolution of our democracy today? We have with us not only an expert on this topic, but someone who’s probably, over the course of the last three, four decades, done some of the most important work on understanding the changes in American democracy and American politics. My colleague and friend, Michael Lind. Michael is the author of a brand new book that I have just been reading and it’s really wonderful. It’s really a learned essay, hope you’re comfortable with my saying.

Michael Lind: It’s a long essay.

Jeremi Suri: It’s wonderful.

Michael Lind: Learned, maybe.

Jeremi Suri: Well, learned long and it’s in many ways in the tradition of long form journalism of an earlier generation. Michael Lind’s new book is called, “The New Class War, Saving Democracy from the Managerial Elite”. Michael has written countless other books on issues in American politics, religion, society, in the media. He has been very active throughout the world of think tanks and policy and now he’s my colleague at the LBJ School of Public Affairs here at UT. Michael, it’s great to have you here.

Michael Lind: Thank you for having me.

Jeremi Suri: My pleasure. Before we turn to our discussion with Mike, we have Zachary with his scene setting poem today. What’s the title of your poem today?

Zachary Suri: “Picturing America’s Working Class”.

Jeremi Suri: Let’s hear it.

Zachary Suri: Why is it that whenever I picture America’s working class, my mind flutters between the image of a bus stop in a small German town during a power outage in an English dubbed sci-fi television show and the angularity of looking at a McDonald’s sign through the highway supports. Or in my mind are just some false recollection of car part assembly plants in Wisconsin where all the workers seem to be balding white men in worn blue buttoned down shirts. Some recreated picture of a Springsteen song in Williamsport, Pennsylvania that time we drove from Ithaca to Gettysburg. In this dream state where we’ve vagrants of the 21st seem always to float, organized labor is the Pajama Game and a title number. Working class synonymous for pickup trucks and worrying about car insurance. But no one is really sure who these mystical majorities are and, in somewhat of a devious way, we aren’t really sure they ever existed. Why did the George Bailey’s of this new decade race time itself through Amazon warehouses? Why did they feel they are the concluding note of a slide whistle? Why is it that struggling men in Lake Charles, Louisiana vote against welfare and health care when it’s really their fair share and their care? Why is it that Birmingham isn’t too far from Seattle, but old McDonald and his old Kentucky home is like stepping through the vibrations of a Bluegrass song to find a fiddle from a block ago that was a violin? Why do we keep pressing the drill press into the same block of wood? Those inevitable decades when it all floats to the top? A re-Gilded Age that any machine tool on a container ship on its way to China could talk to us about for hours? Why do we keep dropping the coins onto those old charity change collectors with a quarter spins round and round and slips in a spiral down the cochlea into a gaping hole to find we’re really looking at the backside of a geyser spewing coins up into the one percent?

Michael Lind: Brilliant.

Jeremi Suri: You did cover a lot with that. Wow. Well, what is your poem about?

Zachary Suri: My poem is really about this image of the American working class that so many of us have that to every generation seems like an ideal that we’re working towards, but at the same time, it feels very distant. It’s about the mythology of the working class in American society and its relationship with money.

Jeremi Suri: Right. Wow and all the references to it in our daily lives. Mike, what do you think? How do we think about the working class? Is this a good place to start?

Michael Lind: Yeah. I think there are stereotypes. If you go to Rockefeller Center in New York, these very thick-necked Euro-Americans building dams and construction workers. The working class has always been much more diverse than that, of course. The nature of work has changed dramatically in the 21st century and our popular perceptions have not caught up. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the 10 most numerous jobs, numerous in terms of new jobs being created, are all in the fields of leisure and hospitality, retail, and health care. Only one of those jobs, a registered nurse, requires education and so this really undercuts two of the narratives we have about the working class in the 21st century. There’s kind of the, I would call it the neoliberal meritocratic narrative. All the jobs of the future or in tech and require steam education, science, technology, and in math. Then there’s the other narrative, which is good jobs are factory jobs where you go into whistle blows and you take your lunch bucket and you retire after 30-40 years on the job with a good pension. The meritocratic vision of the tech workers, just numerically, there aren’t that many of those jobs and never have been. That’s kind of a future that never happened, and then you have this past that did happen but isn’t coming back so that’s the big challenge.

Jeremi Suri: Right. The past being the factory, the auto worker who has good benefits.

Michael Lind: Yeah. As I pointed out in the book The New Class War, we think of these factory jobs as being good jobs because somehow there’s something mystical about a factory. In fact, they were terrible jobs in the 1920s and they were good jobs in the 1950s because of organized labor.

Jeremi Suri: Right.

Michael Lind: Because of collective bargaining and government reform. If history had gone somewhat differently, let’s say if health aids and white-collar service workers had unionized in the 1940s and ’50s, but not steel workers and auto workers, we might to this day think of, “Oh, hospital, orderly job, that’s a great job.” It keeps you out of the horrible factories.

Jeremi Suri: Right. So part of the point here it seems to me is that the working class as an identity is something that’s been made and unmade with every generation, is that fair?

Michael Lind: Yeah. That’s right. Of course, the working class grew up with the capitalist class and they’ve evolved together for most of history and for the first part of American history. The two groups were landlords and peasants or farmers. They would chattel slaves, tenant farmers, whatever.

Jeremi Suri: So the capitalists in your definition are those who owned the financial resources and the resources related to land and production and the working class are those who were working on someone else’s resources.

Michael Lind: That’s right. The working class has always existed, but it was in very small numbers. The Latin term proletarian publicized by Marxists means someone who owns no property. Has to sell his or her labor in order to survive, in order to eat and have shelter. What I call the first class war took place beginning in Britain, the first industrial nation, and then in other countries as they industrialized, when the children and grandchildren of farmers or farm labor moved to the cities became landless laborers thus creating an enormous crisis because they couldn’t fall back on the village, on their neighbors, on farming. They were completely dependent on their wages. This first class war, I argue, ended after much strife by about 1945 in the Western democracies, when you had a class compromise brokered and more or less imposed by national governments. Largely in the interest of wartime mobilization but then it lasted after that.

Jeremi Suri: That’s what brings a kind of golden age for the working class.

Michael Lind: Yeah. That’s right. I think the prior stage of wartime mobilization tends to be neglected. Where you look at, for example, unionization in the United States, this was a constant struggle from below. And it never really succeeded until actually during World War I, when Woodrow Wilson brings in Samuel Gompers, the head of the American Federation of Labor into the government. Franklin Roosevelt does the same thing by means of what is called the maintenance of membership rule. Union membership just shoots up because that’s a condition imposed by the federal government on employers who want to get government contracts during the war. Both after World War I and World War II, employers had a counter-revolution, which was quite violent in the 1919 strikes and then in the 1920s, and they more or less successfully repealed all of these gains after the Wilson administration. It took longer for them to hack away at this after World War II. But by 2020, private sector unionization now is down to less than seven percent.

Jeremi Suri: One of the points you make in the book is that working people, whether they are working people in rural areas, urban areas, etc., they have less voice in our society. That builds upon what you described very well in the book, the prevalence of working class voices in this period after World War II, one thinks of the role of unions in American politics. But beyond that, in day-to-day life in communities, why is that the case at that point, at that period?

Michael Lind: Well, I follow Max Weber in thinking of different realms of society and the three realms I talk about are power, economics, and the culture. In all three of those working class people had their interests and their values amplified — not necessarily for the good of society but in their own interests — through trade unions, through religious organizations, churches and synagogues, which were much more well attended and more powerful and influential in the 1950s and 1960s, then they are now in out more secular world. Finally, through local political machines. In looking back from today’s partisan politics, conservatives don’t like unions. A lot of secular progressives are anxious about organized religion. Liberals and conservatives pretty much always hated local political [inaudible] with their corrupt bosses and their [inaudible] and all of that. But what these institutions did was, first of all, they organized work. I’m using the term working class mostly for high school educated workers, so about 70 percent of the population.

Jeremi Suri: Non college-educated.

Michael Lind: Non college-educated. Your only resource if you’re an ordinary, non college-educated worker, you don’t have personal financial resources. You don’t have professional expertise. You have numbers. Ordinary people have numbers in these organizations, whether they were religious congregations, federations of local political parties, or federations of unions. They organized a lot of people into a single force. It was not a policy-making force in either of these three realms, but they had veto power. The veto power took the form of the threat of a strike in the unions. The threat of a boycott of Hollywood movies and TV shows if you offended Catholic or Protestant or sometimes Jewish sensibilities, and the threat of denying renomination, back when we didn’t have primaries, and when the local party bosses, you had to get their approval. As these three different institutions, the union, the religious congregation, and the local political machine, have atrophied for different reasons over the past half-century, just naturally — It’s not a conspiracy or anything. I’m not writing about cabal. People like us, college-educated people, we’ve just inherited more and more power that was once shared more broadly.

Jeremi Suri: Got you. Zachary, you wanted to comment on this?

Zachary Suri: Yeah. I want to ask how much of the image of a declining working class in America that both left and right have today, how much is that a function of the working class becoming more diverse, both in terms of more secular and more liberal voices, and racially? How much of the supposed decline of the working class comes from a feeling of progressive change?

Michael Lind: Well, I think the actual working class was always diverse.

Zachary Suri: Yeah.

Michael Lind: There was a labor aristocracy to use the Marxist term. The white male industrial workers compared to African-Americans who were — the unions generally supported civil rights, but that local unions didn’t necessarily do it.

Jeremi Suri: There were very nepotile.

Michael Lind: There were local nepotistic rules and things like that —

Jeremi Suri: The AFL and CIO are quite different.

Michael Lind: …they kept out minorities. But I would push back against the suggestion that’s sometimes made was that there was a trade-off. That while the working class has declined, that civil rights have increased. The two most important African-American civil rights leaders in the 20th century were A. Philip Randolph and Martin Luther King Junior. A. Philip Randolph was the railway porter union.

Jeremi Suri: You are right, of course.

Michael Lind: He was a labor leader.

Jeremi Suri: Pullman sleeper cars.

Michael Lind: That’s right. He was the chairman of the March on Washington, the title of which in 1963, where Martin Luther King Junior made his “I Have a Dream” speech, the march for jobs and freedom. So jobs, collective bargaining, were intimately linked in the civil rights era. Then of course, Martin Luther King Junior was a pastor in a somewhat socially conservative church. Most people don’t realize this, Billy Graham and King were friends and they seriously considered going on a nationwide revival, where they would preach their version of evangelical Protestantism. Graham from a very early period, insisted on integrating all of his religious revivals in the Southern states, whatever the local rule. So what the civil rights leaders wanted was to bring African-Americans into the existing new deal order with organized labor and all of that. It wasn’t their intent to end up with this globalized neoliberal system where unions wither away and also becoming more secular. Because to this day, a lot of working class African Americans and Latinos are more socially conservative than a lot of white progressive.

Jeremi Suri: So is what’s driving this really the the decline of these other institutions is that a set of attacks upon them? Because it seemed to be a system that worked pretty well the way you describe it in the 1950s and 60s.

Michael Lind: I think organized labor is really the key to it. If you look at where you get the rise of these populist movements in the second half of the second decade of the 21st century, whether it’s the US, UK, France, Italy, Germany, it’s deindustrialized regions. Either they were long in decline, a lot of them were hit by this wave of subsidized Chinese import competition, which, according to David Autor and his colleagues, very rapidly wiped out millions of jobs. So automation had something to do with it. But there was also just this tsunami. Those groups had been the core of the central left and the Social Democratic parties in this 1945 to late 20th-century era. As they declined, the central left parties essentially have a new coalition. It’s increasingly upper middle-class, college educated native whites, and this is on both sides of the Atlantic. I think we’re now sufficiently close to Europe and we can make some broad generalizations — to Western Europe, not Eastern Europe, that’s a different thing than Western Europe –minorities and immigrants. By no means not all of them, but majority.

Jeremi Suri: Does that mean the Democratic Party in the US, the SPD in Germany —

Michael Lind: The Labor Party, SPD. I explain this in “The New Class War” by drawing on the sociologist Edna Bonacich’s idea, the split labor market, where you have groups that are ethnically distinct or religiously, or they may be of the same race, different religion, whatever. But different groups were willing to work for different wages. If you look at this new central-left coalition, these are people who were doing well, and it may seem paradoxical because it’s this kind of hourglass coalition of very well paid professionals, but also rather poorly paid immigrants, in particular, in Western countries. But the immigrants are doing better than they were; they’re aspirational, so to them life is getting better than it was in the old country. Then you have these, often in the former manufacturing areas, downwardly mobile or at least a stagnating native white working class, but by no means all native white working class. Throughout the book, I insist on qualifying this. I say it’s mostly, but not entirely white. If you look at the voters for Brexit in Britain, one third of BAME voters, Black and Middle Eastern voters, voted for Brexit.

Jeremi Suri: Really?

Michael Lind: Yeah, if you look at 29 percent of Latinos voted for Trump and much hire for Abbott in Texas. So it’s not a matter of white working class, it’s the mostly white working class.

Jeremi Suri: Why do they see these figures, Zachary referred to them in his poem, who seem two be cutting off their benefits, as the people they want, those who are attacking healthcare provisions and other things.

Michael Lind: Well, I think if you look at the three realms and you have these, let’s say, working class British Labour voters who switched massively for the Conservatives from Labour, and they think of the Labour Party as being metropolitan professionals who look down their noses at them culturally. In the realms of culture, politically, they feel they don’t have much voice. Then let’s say the Labour Party says, “Well, we’ll offer you 500 pounds more a year.” That’s not enough. So it’s not just about money. It’s about this perception of who is on our side. This is where I think the disintegration, particularly of the federated political parties as machines, and the disintegration of the unions really has crippled the center-left, because there’s a concept in political ccience called identity-vouching. That is, someone who shares your identity can vouch for an idea or a movement or reform, you trust them. As opposed to someone from a completely different group who parachutes in and says, “This is good for–” “Well, who are you? What standing do you have? What authority do you have in our community?” There’s a lot of data that shows that unionized working class whites in the US vote in a more liberal direction than the non-union ones. That’s because the union officials whom they trust can explain what the party line shows nationally. The reverse of that is also important. It means that discontent can bubble up from below. We have these political elites now, where the parties are kind of free-floating labels that Trump can buy, or billionaires, Steyer and Bloomberg and so on. So how did they found out about what people are thinking? Down at the grass roots they commissioned pollsters. But a pollster is not a substitute for the local precinct captain.

Jeremi Suri: Sure. Part of what I’m understanding in your book, and in your explanation here, is that there is this group and part of our society that’s being left further and further behind. It’s not just that they’re being left behind economically, they’re being culturally left behind. Why is it that this doesn’t overlap with the Evangelical movement? You draw distinction there also, you say that there’s a breakdown in traditional religious elements that held these groups together. But yet the Evangelicalism has grown significantly in our society.

Michael Lind: Well, not necessarily, if you look at the last decade, and contrary to what a lot of people were saying, the Evangelical churches are losing membership. All of the Christian churches in the United States, as well as the liberal branches of Judaism, are shedding younger people. The mainline Protestant churches are collapsing the most rapidly. Catholicism is shedding people and its ranks are being renewed by immigrants from Latin America, from Africa, from other regions. But the Evangelicals, about a third of the population, last time I checked was Evangelical. But if you go to Millennials, it drops to like 10 percent.

Jeremi Suri: Interesting.

Michael Lind: The biggest reason that young Evangelicals give for leaving Evangelical protestant churches is they say it was too politicized; it became a wing of the Republican Party and it’s anti-gay. They use that again and again and again.

Jeremi Suri: So they’re in a sense, running away from the Republican Party, as they ran away from the Democratic Party before.

Michael Lind: Yeah, but it doesn’t mean that they’re going to be incorporated — What is the Democratic party? Last week I went online because I was thinking when I was growing up and in Austin, there was a Travis County Democratic Party and there was Jake Pickle our representative. But it was a structure, it was like a club. My high school educated, farm-bred grandmother and her African American neighbors did things in it; it was a club. So I went online to seen how I could join the Democratic Party, and it’s very opaque, if you’ve ever tried this experiment. I haven’t checked the Republicans, I assume the same thing. You get a page says, “Donate.”

Jeremi Suri: Of course.

Michael Lind: Then you go through some of city, county, some of them will say volunteer. But nowhere do you get the flowchart, or who’s in charge, or if this is a club. The fact that you leave the Republicans doesn’t mean you necessarily join the Democrats if there’s nothing to join.

Jeremi Suri: Right. That makes a lot of sense. Zachary?

Zachary Suri: I want to ask you, how do we reconcile the deep and very duly felt economic anxiety of the working class in America? How do we reconcile that with the appeal that leaders around the world use in the form of hatred? How do we reconcile hatred with this deep economic anxiety? Are they connected in any way?

Michael Lind: Well, you have demagogues who can mobilize ethnic resentment and racism. But I think usually demagogues are successful when they are for fairly popular middle of the road things. They don’t advertise the dark, nasty sides of it. The demagogue comes from the Greek word for leader of the people. If Trump, he makes all these racist, bigoted comments, I think it’s a mistake to say that’s the chief source of his appeal with his voters as opposed to, he’s going to stand up to China on manufacturing. He’s going to get the economy —

Jeremi Suri: Though on immigration these things come together, right? He’s not going to let other people come into the country who don’t look like the working class, right?

Michael Lind: That’s not true. If you look at the Republican immigration bill, it would accelerate the non-white majority in the United States and that’s the one that Trump supports. What it would do is it would shift the category from family unification, which is largely Latin American now, though it won’t be a decade from now, to this skilled meritocratic patterns they have in Canada. The vast majority beneficiaries of those will be college-educated people from Asia, Africa, and also Latin America. One thing that people don’t realize is Latin Americans, apart from Mexicans and Central Americans in the US, have much more income than the average white American because they’re professionals. They’re college students. West Africans have very high incomes in the US because most of them are professionals. Look, I’m not defending Trump.

Jeremi Suri: No, no.

Michael Lind: He has used various dog whistles and so on. But there is no republican plan anywhere that would reduce non-white immigration and increase white immigration from Europe. That just doesn’t exist.

Jeremi Suri: Right. Even though he has said that.

Zachary Suri: But you don’t see Trump as coming from a long-standing hatred in American society and racism that’s been here from the beginning, that has been hidden for the past few decades. That’s what many have argued.

Michael Lind: No. For one thing, the racism is there, it’s not terribly hidden. It’s been declining according to every measure, including intermarriage, which is the ultimate measure of declining racism. You also can’t explain, either in the US or Europe, a variable by a constant, particularly declining constant. If you look at far right par — In the National Front in France under Marine Le Pen, has capitalized on a lot of this populist discontent. But you can’t say it’s just racism because they were racist in 1980 and 1990 and 2000. What is it? Why do you get this influx of former socialist and often former communist voters from industrial regions in France. I think it’s involved with globalization, and immigration to some extent, and it’s economic.

Jeremi Suri: Right. It’s interesting. This is the phenomenon of the voters who say they like Trump and Bernie Sanders.

Michael Lind: There was a fascinating study by David Autor and his colleagues that showed that the higher the damage done by Chinese import competition and manufacturing areas in the Midwest, the more likely voters were to favor either Trump or Sanders.

Jeremi Suri: Right.

Michael Lind: Right. Because they thought the mainstream centrist Bush, Republicans, Clinton, Democrats, had let them down.

Jeremi Suri: Right.

Michael Lind: The pure racist, nativist parties get maybe five or 10 percent. Anything they get above that, they are opportunistically operating on other issues. Just to follow up on that point, where the mainstream parties have addressed this, for example, the central-left in Denmark, where they tightened up on immigration, which was a big issue — the same thing happened in Sweden, where they tightened up — the far-right parties shriveled .

Jeremi Suri: Interesting.

Michael Lind: Because they lost those floating voters and they shrank to their natural base, which is there, but it’s not that big.

Jeremi Suri: We always like to close, as you know, on a on a positive note. You wrote “The New Class War” too, to try to counsel for positive change not simply to lament the dissolution of the working class. The arguments you make in the book is about the need for a new democratic pluralism. What does that mean? How does that build on your analysis to move our democracy forward around these issues?

Michael Lind: Well, we’re not going to go back to the trade unions and the churches and the local political parties, which were often quite corrupt, of half a century ago. But I think that we will continue to be stuck in this doom loop of very insider-ish, technocratic elite, top-down policy challenged periodically by mostly unsuccessful buffoonish, charlatan-ish, demagogic, populists. How did we get out of this cycle? I think it’s not simply a matter of policy. But you know policy is part of it. But that in itself is kind of a top-down technocratic thing, if we just get wages right, and we get benefits right, then people will be happy and so on. People want power. Power is an independent variable. Right? You can’t go to them and say, “Well, you’re going to be powerless, but we’ll give you more money.” I think that’s condescending. In a way I’m kind of pessimistic. I’m a long-run optimist because the United States and similar countries, even though we may have the same written paper constitution, there’s an informal constitution, informal system, a regime, a settlement, as political scientists call it. This breaks down every couple of decades and then it takes a generation or so to build a new system.

We’re, I think, seeing the gradual collapse of this neoliberal system that started with Reagan and Thatcher and was adopted in some ways by Clinton and Blair, and did some good. You’re not going to go back before. The legacy of neoliberalism in terms of civil rights and liberties and sexual freedom, that will be part of the new system. But I think something’s going to emerge. If it’s stable and if it will incorporate working class people who will be more diverse, it won’t just be white factory guys, it will be people of color who work in the health industry, which may be as central to the economy in the 21st century, as the automobile industry was in the 21st. I’m a long-run optimist. I like to tell the story about Adam Smith, the great economist and moral philosopher. He had a young assistant who came in one day, he’d read in the newspapers that the British empire had lost some battle against the French somewhere. He said, “Professor Smith, Britain is ruined.” Professor Smith supposedly said to him, “Young man, there’s a great deal of ruin in a country.”

Jeremi Suri: In many ways, what you’re pointing out is how that ruin can be productive for change.

Michael Lind: Well, I think this is a hopeful vision. What it means is that one generation is not going to fix all problems for the end of time. It means that every generation there are going to be scheming crooked people, there are going to be villains, there are going to be heroes, there are going to be prophets. Every generation has to rebuild the country either for better or for worse.

Jeremi Suri: Yeah, that makes sense.

Michael Lind: To me that’s an inspiring vision.

Jeremi Suri: Zachary, what do you think? Do you think this is a vision that can draw young people like you who are interested in getting educated and becoming in one sense, part of a meritocratic elite, but on the other hand, concerned about integrating these working class voices? Do you see a future there that Mike is painting for us here?

Zachary Suri: I definitely do. I think what was really powerful, too, about what you’re saying is this idea that we get to remake the economic system of the future. That this is part of the responsibility of a new generation of Americans.

Michael Lind: Your generation.

Zachary Suri: Yeah. I think that this is something that is really important to think about as we look back on the history of America and as we vote moving forward and decide what we’re going to do with our future.

Jeremi Suri: Right. In conclusion, bringing these wonderful points together, it allows me to mention one of my heroes, E. P. Thompson, the great British historian who wrote “The Making of the English Working Class”. His argument was just the argument that Zachary and Mike articulated, which was that the working class was not simply an economic phenomenon, it was a cultural and political phenomenon. It was about power. Economics is not destiny. We can remake our society. A consciousness of this history gives us the leverage to look at the world today and to try to work to adjust it with new institutions.

Michael Lind: Amen.

Jeremi Suri: Mike, your book is a wonderful start on this road. It’s an analysis of this and also helps us to think about our path forward. I highly recommend “The New Class War.” Zachary, your poem opened our eyes to many of the elements of what E. P. Thompson called the culture of the working class. Thank you for sharing with us today. Thank you for joining us on this episode of This is Democracy.

Male Speaker: This podcast is produced by the liberal arts development studio and the college of liberal arts at the University of Texas at Austin. The music in this episode was written and recorded by Harrison Lemke and you can find his music harrisonlemke.com.

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