Dear Citizens and Elected Officials:
Conservative columnist David Brooks had a particularly obtuse and narrowly focused hit piece on Senator Bernie Sanders in Friday’s New York Times, and I felt I had to respond. Here’s the link at www.nytimes.com/…
His column was entitled “The Bernie Sanders Fallacy: No Virginia, there is no Class War.” By Friday evening, the column had drawn some 3,000 comments, stirring up a hornet’s nest, pro and con.
Here is the essence of Brooks argument:
“… the core problem is not capitalists exploiting their workers; it’s the rise of productivity inequality. It’s the companies and individuals who don’t have the skills to take advantage of new technologies.
The real solution, therefore, is not class war to hammer successful businesses. It’s to boost and expand productivity for everybody else. That’s done the old-fashioned way — by having better schools and better vocational training, by having more open competitive markets, by creating incentives to expand investment, by making sure superstar businesses don’t use lobbyists to lock in their advantages.”
I don’t know how that strikes you, but to me it is the re-run of the Bill Clinton formulation, while evading the tragedy of his de-regulation of finance that went along with the whole Neoliberal world view. It is a package deal. And it is in essence a “classless” view of society view: classes are only temporary, everyone’s “movin’ on up” to borrow the song from a TV show of the mid-1970’s. In the American view, everyone will get some type of advanced or specialized degree or training, all will be middle class or better, and voila, no underclass, no working class. Even the AFL-CIO seems to endorse some of the core argument; they’re supposed to be defenders of the working class, a place and category which is apparently only temporary though. When the AFL-CIO was winning, they get the workers out fast, up and into the middle class. In purely material terms, only of course.
So Mr. Brooks, you want to make the long and troubled history of the working class into the class disappearance act, which has not happened, culturally or economically, and in fact, the 19th century problem has come back to haunt the West despite what the Clintonians proclaim has been “our” finest moment — Neoliberalism’s, that is. I saw with regret Martin Wolf of the Financial Times declare, in a November “debate” with Yanis Varoufakis, the victory of capitalism in moving millions of Asian peasants onto their pathway into the global middle class. It was certainly that, in part, but it’s missing the Western side of the story, which is not a happy one. And in other writings, Wolf has acknowledged that.
Of course, if conservative Catholics like Bill Barr get their way, a return to a repressive culture will supply the national libido with the appropriate constructive outlets, like the constant lifetime training for those missing capitalist productivity skills, which, given the dynamism of the system, make an engineer’s skills obsolete in two years. And then all will be well. What’s conservative about this, the destruction of careers as humans used to know them, entire fields of training and knowledge get tossed on the viability scrap heap even before rust has appeared. For a truly scary reminder of what this side of conservatism means, in some hands at least, welding conservative Christianity’s strict code of personal morality to capitalism’s amoral secular competitiveness, and ruthlessness, a Game of Thrones Hobbesian universe if ever there was one, brutal towards traditional culture and Nature too, take a glance at this bio of Trump’s Attorney General, William Barr in the January 20th print issue of the New Yorker: www.newyorker.com/… “Sword and Shield” by David Rohde.
Presumably for David Brooks and Barr as well, Marx was the author of the crude version of “class struggle”, with some truth and a lot of clarifications supplied by later interpreters, like Antonio Gramsci, Rosa Luxemburg and Michael Harrington, to name a few, yet the author of the 1848 Communist Manifesto had a number of penetrating insights and a good deal of awe about how capitalism was turning all the Ancien Regimes of Europe, and the world, upside down. And that capitalist generated turmoil has never ceased, that permanent ongoing Revolution of means and control of human economic life. Better conservatives, like Nathaniel Hawthorne, had different visions of where it led, that “Celestial Railway”— and the final stop wasn’t in Heaven.
I couldn’t help but think about something I just saw, and then read, by chance, about just such turmoil, looming over my boyhood hero’s head, Mickey Mantle, the Yankee baseball star, from Bill Barr’s very own New York — in part. Just like the capitalist culture echoed in Brooks and Barr, the one that produced Mickey Mantle in the early 1950’s, the blonde Adonis from Oklahoma country, came to the big depraved city of New York, a product of a miner father obsessed with discipline and upward mobility (and became a white hope to counter Willie Mays?)... Yet the cultural and class differences in America can tear people apart. A new reading of Mick’s life tells a much more complex story of an authoritarian father the Mick loved but never could please, drilling him every night with help from his grandfather to learn how to switch hit (here’s some skills training, Mr. Brooks) and some counter-intuitive sexual traumas that don’t fit into this virtuous rural cultural projection. And I haven’t yet grasped what influence Mickey’s mother had on him, if any. Mantle was a terrible husband and worse father in psychological terms...how could that happen coming from a conservative, rural, All-American background? He did, however, send part of every measly Yankee pay check to members of his family, trying to make up for his physical absences.
And so there’s plenty of class irony in Mickey’s story: the rural poor striver who gets paid terribly for his prodigious natural and acquired talents, and eventually lays part of the groundwork for the players revolt, their near feudal relationship with management; at the same time Mickey is poorly paid, he is swept up, in the early fifties in every type of commercial advertising hurricane, and becomes part of every boy’s aspirations. Nothing in Mantle’s upbringing, however, prepares him to deal with capitalist commercial celebrity, and he retreats into excessive partying and boozing with his accommodating teammates, bonding with them, not his wife and sons.
Indeed, the story Jane Leavy tells, more than the documentary, which is sad enough, reminds me very much of the unwinding of the layers of spin which America tells itself to hide class realities, something which Steve Fraser also does very well in his 2019 book “Class Matters.”
Sorry; I just happened to see a powerful documentary on Mantle at You Tube which then led to the biography, in summary article form, from Jane Leavy, author of “The Last Boy: Mickey Mantle And the End of America’s Childhood.” (2011). And it also sent me to wondering about the parallels with Tiger Woods, he from a higher social class, as I understand his life, but a similar domineering father who programmed him, just like Mickey, at a ridiculously young age, starting at 2, to master golf; and then, at a certain point within his marriage, Woods went off on a sexual binge, as if to fling off all that impossible self-discipline imposed upon him at such a young age. This, it seems to me, is the hidden yoke of conservative striving and self-discipline, wrapped tightly around the one way upward escalator that is the American Dream, even as the “Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism” tear away all the protective shielding of that hyper-self discipline. Are these distant, yet connected previews of the more mundane despairs of working class Americans, captured in the telling phrase “Deaths of Despair”?