American academic Richard Sennett, who has been teaching in London for five years, returns to New York and takes the cultural and political temperature
Saturday October 23, 2004 The Guardian
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In a book that has come into its own this autumn, What's the Matter with Kansas?, Thomas Frank ponders how poor people in that heartland state, threatened with loss of work, lack of health insurance, or mounting family debt, address these woes. Preventing abortion or gay marriage seems some sort of solution; economics gets translated into culture. Like the retired union organisers in Fanelli's who yearn for the working-class politics of New York in the years after the Great Depression, Frank invokes "false consciousness" to explain what's happening now.
Translating economic into cultural insecurity is nothing new. Nearly 40 years ago, when we researched The Hidden Injuries of Class , Jonathan Cobb and I found white workers in Boston blaming drop-out hippies and black ghetto culture for their own, unrelated labour and communal problems. And as an ideal, the cultural conservatism of the working classes idea stretches back into the 19th century and across the ocean, as in Disraeli's famous image of "angels in marble", the working classes whose everyday solidity awaits the sculpting hand of conservative leadership.
What is new is the class map. Ironically, the British conservative Ferdinand Mount has drawn it in his new book, Mind the Gap. In the last generation, large numbers of people have come to feel excluded from the "skills society" or "meritocracy" of Blair's Britain and Clinton's America. These are people whose beliefs in self-discipline, hard work and family sacrifice do not yield much control over their own lives. As Mount points out, they feel left out and treated by the more agile with - at best - indifference. At Spiegelman's talk, he got a good laugh by saying he didn't know anybody in the American heartland.
Loss of control is an economic fact, but a subtle one. More than in Britain, the wealth of America's middle classes has stagnated as the upper 10th has dramatically improved. To counter this stagnation, the middle class has taken on consumer debt it can barely manage, as Robert Manning has recently documented in Credit Card Nation. People have tried to spend their way into status, and now the bills are coming due, as personal bankruptcies have taken off.
The same loss of control appears, famously, in the shrinking number of jobs. The familiar villain is outsourcing of work to Mexico, China or India, but the familiar villain misleads. Auto-mation has finally arrived in America, shrinking white-collar service jobs and manufacturing alike. In the past 20 years, for instance, the US steel industry increased its productivity by four per cent while cutting its labour force from about 212,000 to 79,000 - a transformation due mostly to automation. Again, young people now leaving university find themselves offered jobs that formerly went to secondary-school graduates. As in Britain, low-wage immigrants in America flourish in the cracks of the formal economy, but their children and grandchildren increasingly do not.
Is it "false consciousness" to counter these changes by prohibiting abortion or gay marriage? Translating economics into culture is both irrational and logical. In the wealthiest country on Earth, the economic engine rouses Ricardo's ancient spectre of uselessness; the class map is shrinking the number of people who matter, who are included. The new class map breeds fear, and the counter to fear is to assert that the old values matter. By shifting the centre of gravity, you assert your own value when confronted with conditions you can do nothing about.
How this translation works is exemplified by perhaps the most controversial book to appear in America this season, Samuel Huntington's Who are We? He is well known to Brits for his previous book, The Clash of Civilizations , which argued an inevitable global conflict between Islam and the west; this new book minia turises the same argument within America. Now Mexicans appear as local Muslims, an alien, unmelting presence refusing to play by American rules. The book is less remarkable for its ethnic prejudices than for its invocation of "traditional" American values, wrapped up in a Protestant non-conformist, small-town, package; Huntington proudly asserts he is "anti-cosmopolitan", world-travelled Harvard professor that he is. Though most Mexican immigrants happen to live in abject poverty, that is not the point; he is "defending America".
This is indeed an apology for soft fascism. Fearful of the present, the outside, the alien, the defender of America looks backward to a mythical golden age in Puritan New England. But now the white anglo-saxon Protestant is armoured with a computer. The culture of soft fascism cannot be reduced to the traditional bogeymen of the American left: even in its liberal years, the United States was an ardently religious country; Americans were ardent nationalists even when they fought for Europe in the two world wars. Nor is the appeal of soft fascism to be treated with simple contempt. The terror attack tripped a domestic switch about experiences of marginality that people have trouble naming and about which they can do little. Abroad, Bushism registers a wounded national honour; at home, confusion about living honourably.
In the years I've lived in London, I've often been asked why American intellectuals were so slow to respond to the threats of soft fascism. In a way this criticism is unfair; while the New York Times temporarily lost its nerve, the New York Review of Books didn't. It's certainly true that individuals like Susan Sontag were attacked for being disloyal for saying things about American imperialism that are commonplace in London. (She also didn't lose her nerve.) And until this year - and perhaps too late - policy-makers and thinkers in the Democratic party were on the defensive.
A kind of archaic residue from the McCarthy era is one explanation. Though most 20th-century wars were fought under Democratic presidents, liberals have had to prove their patriotism as conservatives have not. But the denizens of my local - myself included - provide more of an answer.
For a long time the American intellectual left has been out of touch with the American people. It has spoken in the name of the people but not to them. Now, in the reconfigured landscape of economics, class and culture, however, the educated, cosmopolitan liberal is a social victor. Even the sculptor in Fanelli's struggling to make ends meet is a social victor; nobody can rob him of his work and worth.
The right has perhaps understood that victory better than the victors themselves, in giving fresh life to the taunts of "cultural elitism" aimed at the intellectual left. The attack embodies a classic dilemma: when a young man with a good degree and an expensive lap-top attacks injustice, the ordinary person feels patronised.
For the past four years, the rich and powerful in America have capitalised on just this social distance, between the cultural elite and people beset by anxieties about personal insufficiency and mutual respect. The victors have defended themselves by saying, but we are just like you, loyal Americans; the defence rings false because they aren't domestically the same. Those bewildered glances out of Fanelli's window, the knowing sn-words at Cooper Union, are signs of an inequality as ambiguous as the word "American".
The books I've touched on evoke what could happen as a result of the anxieties besetting the country now, their exploitation on the right, and indifference, bewilderment, or paternalism on the left. The solution to soft fascism may, however, lie far beyond party politics.
Richard Sennett teaches sociology at the London School of Economics. His most recent book is Respect in an Age of Inequality (Penguin, 2004).
full at: <http://books.guardian.co.uk/departments/politicsphilosophyandsociety/story/0,6000,1333956,00.html>