CHAPTER THREE

Battlers and elites

The fundamental class distinction made by anti-PC campaigners — the contrast between, on the one hand, the sound common sense of working-class battlers and, on the other, the censoriousness of the progressive elites — eventually became so commonplace that many people simply accepted it as a factual description of how society worked.

This was even more remarkable given that throughout most of the 20th century a quite different theory of class prevailed, one derived (however distantly) from various socialist thinkers — and, most importantly, Karl Marx.

Class was about the relationship that prevailed between different groups of people involved in creating social wealth. In particular, it pertained to how people accessed the so-called means of production: the resources, tools, and institutions they required for their labour.

For most of human history, the land itself served as the primary means of production. Capitalism only became possible when the mass dispossession of the peasantry from their fields created a substantial group — a class — who had no way to survive other than by selling their ability to labour. Such was the basis of the working class, differentiated from both the big capitalists, who owned or controlled factories, offices, mines, hospitals, and other means of production, and the little capitalists (or middle class), who were self-employed as farmers, contractors, lawyers, doctors, shopkeepers, or in other small enterprises.

Marx didn’t argue that workers were the most oppressed people in society. On the contrary, he stressed that peasants and the unemployed were generally far worse off than wage labourers. Nor did he insist that workers were invariably radical or were devoid of backward prejudices. Instead, he simply pointed out that because humanity depended on labour, they wielded, at least potentially, tremendous power — a power that, in certain circumstances, could transform the world.

On this basis, the left — and indeed most people in the first half of the 20th century — traditionally identified the working class as the key driver of progressive politics.

The understanding of class associated with anti-PC was quite different.

Though the battler/elite distinction evolved from many sources, the version most often articulated today originated from an important group of conservative American theorists.

What was known as ‘new-class theory’ arose in debates about the nature of the Soviet Union in the late 1930s and early 1940s. Iconoclastic socialists, appalled at the brutality of Soviet society, identified the importance of a managerial layer in running Stalinist Russia. Initially, new-class theory sought to recuperate the socialist idea from association with Stalin’s repression by suggesting that the bureaucrats had warped an originally liberatory project. By the end of World War II, however, many of these dissident American leftists were moving to the right. As neo-conservatives, they then drew on that old analysis to explain, and condemn, the social ferment in America in the 1960s.

They recognised that the postwar boom had created a massive expansion in white-collar work: a substantial new layer of jobs associated with the growth of the public service, the expansion of higher education, and the increasing importance of information technology. Many commentators — both at the time and since — understood what was happening as a ‘middle-classing’ of the West: a social shift that made the blue-collar working class (and hence class analysis in general) less important. Extrapolating from their assessments of how the Soviet Union worked, the neocons concluded that they were witnessing the rise of a new ruling layer, an intellectual elite comparable to the bureaucrats who governed the Stalinist states of Eastern Europe.

The distinctive outlook of the New Left reflected, the neocons said, this novel phenomenon: a so-called new elite of intellectuals imposing on mainstream, decent America its politics, its attachment to the counterculture, its unconventional sexual morality, and its liberal ideas about drugs.1

Irving Kristol, the neocon pioneer, identified what he called the ‘new class’ with ‘a goodly proportion of those college-educated people whose skills and vocations proliferate in a “post industrial” society.’ He listed, by way of example, scientists, teachers, communication workers, lawyers, and doctors in the public sector, staff in the upper levels of the government bureaucracy, and so on.

In reality, as Barbara Ehrenreich pointed out, college-educated people — or, at least, university academics — were not necessarily supportive of the student revolt. Most professors were politically conservative, with even ostensibly progressive academics such as Eugene Genovese denouncing the student rebels for their ‘nihilistic perversions’.2

Furthermore, while the expansion of white-collar work after World War II did create a new middle class, it also created a massive layer of white-collar workers. In retrospect, this was the more significant development: the ‘proletarianisation’ of occupations that were once prestigious, with the logic of the factory spreading to various kinds of intellectual labour. Office staff, teachers, nurses, IT workers: all were subjected to a regimentation once exclusively applied to blue-collar workers in ways that made class more rather than less relevant.

But Kristol and his co-thinkers were not interested in an empirical study of class relationships. The neocons might have associated the ‘new class’ with particular occupations (such as in education and the public service), but they were more concerned to identify the ‘elite’ by its ideas rather than its social position. For Kristol, what mattered most about the new class was its hostility to traditional values. The new class was cosmopolitan; it was internationalist; it was enthusiastic about feminism, multiculturalism, and the avant-garde — and it formed, he thought, a kind of fifth column, promoting exotic attitudes quite different from those held intuitively by decent, everyday people.

In their leftist phase, the neocons had been disillusioned by their inability to mobilise working people. In their rightist phase, they accepted as a given that workers were innately, inexorably conservative. It might even be said that, for them and their political descendants, conservatism became constitutive of class.

In 1965, William F. Buckley Jr famously declared: ‘I would rather be governed by the first two thousand people in the Boston telephone directory than by the two thousand people on the faculty of Harvard University.’3 Random suburbanites would, he implied, be far more loyal and sensible than the effete radicals running the campuses.

In other words, the argument always pertained as much to the social conservativism of the masses as to the radicalism of the ‘elites’. It depended on the assumption that ordinary people were traditionalists, repelled by the exotic notions expounded by the ‘new class’. Or, more exactly, it defined ordinariness by conservatism — and then defined elitism by radicalism.

Of course, even in America, the notion that real workers believed the ideas that the neocons attributed to them was always a fantasy, particularly in the 1960s. In reality, as Ehrenreich pointed out, a revolt of American blue-collar workers did take place during that period, but it did not express right-wing or traditionalist values. On the contrary, ‘the late sixties saw the most severe strike wave since shortly after World War II, and by the early seventies the new militancy had swept up autoworkers, rubber workers, steel workers, teamsters, city workers, hospital workers, farmworkers, tugboat crewmen, grave diggers, and postal employees’. The strikers did not embrace the ‘racial backlash’ that conservative intellectuals attributed to them, with ‘black and white workers … marching, picketing, and organising together in a spirit of class solidarity that had not been seen since the thirties’.

On average, American workers were more opposed to the conflict in Vietnam than were members of the middle class. White workers were less racist than their middle-class counterparts — a study from 1966 suggested that ‘the higher one’s class of origin or class of destination the more likely that one prefers to exclude Negroes from one’s neighbourhood’.4 Furthermore, workers were often sympathetic to the very counterculture that new-class theory insisted they opposed: smoking dope, growing their hair, and listening to rock music. Ehrenreich described some of the student radicals she knew deciding to ‘join the working class’ by dressing as squares … only to discover, when they arrived in the factory, that their longhaired co-workers believed them to be narcotic agents.

Nevertheless, America did not experience an equivalent to the enormous general strikes that rocked France in 1968. Much of the union leadership in the US had come to power during the Cold War, and as such formed a deeply conservative bureaucratic layer within the labour movement. In particular, the building and construction unions were dominated by Catholic anti-communism. In one notorious incident in 1970, right-wing leaders organised 200 building workers to physically attack students protesting the Kent State shootings and US involvement in Vietnam and Cambodia.

The apparent conservatism of the ‘hard hats’ gave some credence to the neocons’ contrast between effete, disloyal intellectuals and manly patriots working in construction — as Ehrenreich said, in the corrupt union leaders of the Catholic right, the middle-class neocons eventually discovered ‘a working class more suited to their mood: dumb, reactionary and bigoted’.5

Nevertheless, it would be many years before new-class theory really came into its own. The form in which it was expressed became known as ‘culture war’. The phrase derived from the German term Kulturkampf, coined to describe struggles between religious and secular views in late-19th-century Prussia. The modern usage dated from the 1992 Republican National Convention and the address given there by the American social commentator and activist Patrick Buchanan.

Buchanan had worked as a speechwriter for Richard Nixon and as communications director for Ronald Reagan. But he’d also built a successful and high-profile career as a broadcaster and pundit. In the election of 1992, he stood for the Republican nomination, seeking to unseat the by-then deeply unpopular incumbent, George Bush.

The Buchanan campaign was an explicit assault on the kind of ideas Bush had expressed to the students at the University of Michigan. Where Bush enthused about open markets, Buchanan denounced globalisation and the New World Order. Bush thought free enterprise would bring equality to oppressed groups; Buchanan warned that white America was being destroyed by multiculturalism and homosexuality.

His was, in other words, a challenge to Bush’s free-market orientation on the basis of an older, nativist social conservatism — and though he didn’t win the nomination, he polled enough votes to alert the Bush team to a substantial constituency on their right. Buchanan was asked to address the national convention and to pull his supporters behind president Bush, the endorsed Republican candidate.

It did not go well. In his speech, Buchanan stressed the importance of the looming contest against Bill Clinton — and, he added pointedly, Hillary Clinton as well. The election would establish what Americans stood for. There was, he said, a religious war taking place:

It is a cultural war, as critical to the kind of nation we shall be as the Cold War itself. For this war is for the soul of America. And in that struggle for the soul of America, Clinton & Clinton are on the other side, and George Bush is on our side.6

The cultural war would, Buchanan said, be fought over ‘the amoral idea that gay and lesbian couples should have the same standing in law as married men and women’, over the ‘right-to-life and for voluntary prayer in the public schools’, over control over ‘the raw sewage of pornography that so terribly pollutes our popular culture’, over opposition to ‘environmental extremists who put birds and rats and insects ahead of families, workers, and jobs’.

The Bush wing of the Republicans was appalled, with the president’s aides concluding that they’d let ‘the brimstone quotient’ get out of hand.7 Bush was, after all, running against Bill Clinton — and though Clinton shared Bush’s enthusiasm for the free-market policies that would later be known as ‘neoliberalism’, he was far more youthful and modern, and clearly comfortable when discussing racism, women’s rights, and other social issues.

In any case, many Republican neoliberals genuinely disliked Buchanan’s ideas about culture. As market fundamentalists, they were more interested in Adam Smith’s invisible hand than the Christian right’s invisible god. They didn’t care about school prayer, and they weren’t invested in abortion; they worried that America First nativism might impede the open trade they advocated. They wanted to spread the influence of the market, not fight about porn.

It was only when Bush lost the election that ‘the war for the soul of America’ became more attractive to Republicans. Culture war came into its own as a strategy adopted by the right against Clinton and, later, deployed in support of the second George Bush.

In some respects, Buchanan’s speech, with its insistence that Republicans fight on the terrain of ‘values’, merely updated an old conservative approach. Nixon had, after all, pioneered the so-called ‘southern strategy’, by which he undercut white support for Democrats in the South with the careful deployment of coded racism. Buchanan struck a similar tone, urging Republicans to ‘take back’ their culture block by block, just as American troops had done when suppressing the mostly black Los Angeles rioters.

Yet, like Bush at the University of Michigan, Buchanan also recognised the difference made by the Cold War. Where Bush thought that the old politics of left and right could be replaced by the struggle for freedom, Buchanan saw the potential for fresh allegiances based on symbolism, history, religion, and morality.

For him, culture war offered a strategy, in the new post–Cold War environment, to align the right with at least some sections of the working class. When, for instance, Buchanan referred to the ‘25 million unborn children destroyed since Roe V Wade’, the idea was to convince voters to no longer think of themselves as socialists or unionists, or Democrats or even workers, but as Christians — and thus to vote with social conservatives against feminists, liberals, and other progressives.

He’d sketched out how this might work by discussing the ‘tough, hearty men’ facing hardships at the James River Paper Mill in New Hampshire.

‘My friends,’ Buchanan explained, ‘these people are our people. They don’t read Adam Smith or Edmund Burke, but they come from the same schoolyards and the same playgrounds and towns as we came from … We need to let them know we know how bad they’re hurting. They don’t expect miracles of us, but they need to know we care.’

How might Republicans show they cared? Buchanan offered the example of the Californian lumber town of Hayfork, where jobs were at risk because, he said, ‘a federal judge has set aside nine million acres for the habitat of the spotted owl’.8

In reality, America wasn’t shedding millions of industrial jobs during the recession of 1992 because of a meddling judiciary. Small-town factories were closing down because the American economy had been opened up, a policy to which both parties were committed. Yet environmentally minded judges (whose intervention represented the most delegated form of leftism one could imagine) were easy for small-town factory workers to dislike. Rhetoric against them could — in theory, at least — tap into the simmering unease produced by economic restructuring, directing it safely against the supposed perfidy of urban elitists.

Such a strategy might enable right-wing politicians committed to neoliberal reforms to launch skirmishes about patriotism, morality, sexuality, ethnicity, and similar topics, knowing that the ensuing debate would draw what remained of the left away from economics and inequality, and onto the relatively safe (for the right) terrain of culture. The social anxiety fostered by unpopular market policies could thus be displaced into an attack on condescending academics, or inner-city activists, or uppity minorities, or other examples of delegated leftism. With these ‘elites’ portrayed as opposing the ‘common sense’ of ordinary people, progressives could be made to bear the brunt of the rage and tension produced by economic reform, which could then continue unimpeded.

Indeed, an alliance between the neoliberal right and social and religious conservatives might even establish a virtuous circle, in which neoliberalism fuelled culture war, culture war harvested votes for social conservatism, and those votes enabled more neoliberalism. If unemployed factory workers (laid off because of free-trade deals), became incensed about a meddling judiciary, they might vote for anti-environmentalist Republicans, who’d then have a mandate to introduce more free trade.

In his What’s the Matter with America?, Thomas Frank identified what he called ‘the backlash’ as a key strategy for the American right: a way of mobilising ordinary people to vote for the rapacious capitalists of the Republican Party. For him, culture war functioned as a kind of bait and switch, a method by which demagogues of the right convinced ordinary people to vote against their own interests:

The trick never ages; the illusion never wears off. Vote to stop abortion; receive a rollback in capital gains taxes. Vote to make our country strong again, receive deindustrialisation. Vote to screw those politically correct college professors; receive electricity deregulation. Vote to get government off our backs; receive conglomeration and monopoly everywhere from media to meat packing. Vote to strike a blow against elitism; receive a social order in which wealth is more concentrated than ever before in our lifetimes, in which workers have been stripped of power and CEOs are rewarded in a manner beyond imagining.9

This, then, was the logic of culture war.

Like the discourse of anti-PC, it was predicated on two related factors. Corey Robin claimed that ‘all great counterrevolutionary theories’ necessarily cast ‘the people’ as ‘actors without roles, an audience that believes it is on stage’.10 Culture warriors were best able to position themselves as representing working people against the progressive elite in circumstances of relative social peace, since, almost by definition, mass struggles mobilised workers, who were then much less likely to accept that a conservative politician or pundit spoke on their behalf. Conversely, culture war required activists engaged in delegated politics to be cast as villains — like anti-PC, it depended on identifying a perceived or real gap between progressives (such as those liberal judges agitating for the spotted owl) and the rest of society (the unemployed lumber workers).

In this respect, culture war and anti-PC were variants of the same phenomenon: a deflection of social and class tensions into a different realm. In other respects, though, they retained the stamp of the different circumstances from which they emerged. As a product of the education wars, anti-PC presented itself as a liberal or perhaps libertarian response to censorship and authoritarianism. Culture war, by contrast, was more obviously conservative, explicitly tapping into traditional fears and prejudices.

This was what made them work so well together, as the Australian experience would demonstrate.