The Bring the Ruckus website has been updated with four new articles.
-Concede Nothing to Bush: Black Consensus Remains
Intact
>From The Black Commentator
-Voting for Malcolm X By Joel Olson
-The Two Party System: A White Supremacist Structure By Steve Martinot
and
The Virtuous Middle By Joel Olson, which follows below.
For the full text of these articles and more info on BTR, go to http://www.agitatorindex.org/
The Virtuous Middle by Joel Olson November, 2004
November 3 was a difficult day for my liberal friends. Many were deeply depressed by the narrow but sound victory of their arch-enemy, George Bush . Others were defiant, claiming that the elections had been stolen yet again, their anger fueled by internet conspiracy theories about rigged voting machines in Ohio. Either way, they just couldn’t believe that Bush had been re-elected. “How can Americans be so stupid?” one of them exclaimed to me. Another half-seriously suggested that educated people should get more votes than uneducated people, because “idiots” couldn’t be trusted with the full franchise. That day I read about movie stars who refer to the area between L.A. and New York as “flyover states,” i.e. places you fly over but never, ever visit. I kept thinking about how these comments came from people who genuinely saw themselves as on the side of “the little guy.”
When I heard these liberals talk I got angry, too—at them. I’ve lived most of my life in a “red” state. I don’t fear conservatives and I don’t think they’re idiots. I agree with them on many things, such as guns, suspicion of government, and distrust of liberalism. More importantly, though, I was angry because once again the anti-Bush left, in its arrogance and self-righteousness, entirely missed the good news about this election.
This election proved once again that Americans hate elites. This hatred holds the best opportunity—and the greatest challenge—for radical politics in the United States.
Yet the anti-Bush left fails to see this, and therefore hands the opportunity to organize around this anti-elitism over to Christian fundamentalists. In so doing, liberalism’s irrelevance is assured for another four years.
Anti-Bushers can’t understand why working class whites continuously vote for Republicans. How can these people vote against their economic interests and side with the rich scum who run the Republican Party, they ask. They must have been fooled by the devious GOP, they reason. Either that or they’re idiots.
This analysis is wrong. To get a better picture we have to ask a different question. Instead of wondering why middle America sides with the elite we should ask which elites do they hate?
What is an elite? In the United States, the answer is not as straightforward as it might be elsewhere. Like everything else in this country, Americans’ concept of an “elite” passes through the prism of race.
As the political scientist Judith Shklar argues, since the 1820s the majority of Americans have defined citizenship as a sort of “virtuous middle” between aristocratic elites above and the rabble below. Aristocratic elites arrogantly stand over and try to oppress the middle, while the rabble—which primarily meant slaves at first, and then came to mean primarily Black people—tries to drag the middle down into poverty and a life of ill repute. The virtuous middle resists attempts from above and below to degrade them by creating a morality that defines them as the “true Americans” and that lets their interests stand in for the interests of the entire nation.
Historically, this virtuous middle has consisted of the white middle and working classes. In the 1830s the elite above them were bankers and speculators, people who (unlike the virtuous middle) did not produce anything useful toward the development of the nation. The rabble below them consisted mainly of slaves, people who (unlike them) lacked independence and were “lazy.” In fact, seeing oneself as not a slave was the primary ingredient in demonstrating that one was a productive citizen, i.e. a member of the virtuous middle. “Black chattel slavery stood at the opposite social pole from full citizenship and so defined it,” writes Shklar. “The value of citizenship was derived primarily from its denial to slaves, to some white men, and to all women.”
Today the base of the virtuous middle is still white folk. You can see this in who voted for Bush: 58% of whites and 62% of white men. The idle elite has gone from bankers to academics, artists, entertainers, big-city liberals, and others who don’t seem to put in an honest day’s work. And the core of the “rabble” still consists of Black people, who to this day are implicitly defined as a people who do not productively contribute to this society. Frequently other peoples of color and queers are added to the list.
In the 1830s the virtuous middle embraced the “producer ethic.” It held that only those who produced for the republic should have a say in it. Bankers, speculators, and (for some incredible reason) slaves were considered people who did not produce and therefore should not be distrusted. The ethic the virtuous middle embraces today is called “moral values.” It is a deliberately vague term but essentially holds that society should protect their interests economically, politically, and socially, and define them as “American interests.” Many in the virtuous middle also believe the basis of society is the nuclear family (father, mother, children) and that society should be organized in accordance with a literal interpretation of the Bible.
Frequently, the virtuous middle sees the elite and the rabble as in cahoots. Big city liberals want to tax the middle in order to give free school lunches to Black kids and undocumented immigrants. Hollywood holds up the gangsta as a role model. Academics praise “difference” and moral relativism in defense of the cultures of oppressed groups. This alliance of the top and bottom, in the mindset of the virtuous middle, threatens to squeeze the middle out of existence by destroying “family values.”
These “family values” emerged in response to the “culture wars” of the 1980s and early 1990s. These wars were between those who favored a more plural society in terms of race, gender, and sexuality and those who feared the fall of white domination, which they referred to nostalgically as “tradition” or “Western civilization.” The rise of peoples of color, women, queers, and “postmodernists” to positions of influence in academia and other places, they claimed, was contributing to the decline of traditional morality because these groups celebrated welfare queens, immigrants, transsexuals, and the poor rather than trying to reform them. This talk of “moral decline” let whites who feared losing their dominant social status protest it in a “politically correct” way, but the point was clear enough.
>From this brief overview we can see that American
citizenship has always consisted of a curious mixture
of equality, privilege, and anti-elitism. All American
citizens are political equals, giving the poor citizen
officially the same political and social status as the
rich. Yet American citizenship has also been a form of
privilege that distinguishes full citizens from those
who are not, such as slaves, Black people,
undocumented immigrants, and queer couples.
This simultaneous sense of equality and privilege is the most significant contradiction of American citizenship. But the seeds of radical transformation lie within this conception of citizenship. In addition to equality and privilege, it also produces a strong sense of anti-elitism because virtuous citizens resent the idle, non-productive elites above them, while the rabble more or less correctly understands its class position in relation to elites and the virtuous middle.
Here’s where the question “what kind of elite?” becomes important. Today, it’s typically not economic elites because the virtuous middle, captured by the American Dream, wants to join them. Instead, ever since the culture wars the virtuous middle has come to distrust the cultural elite: academics, entertainers, cultured liberals, and blue-state snobs who “think they are better than us.” The virtuous middle smells the elitism of these people a mile away, and they hate them for it. We should applaud their good sense.
Of course, by any standard many “red state” suburban whites are elites themselves. After all, they are more educated, earn more, spend more, and enjoy more political power than the majority of Americans and the vast majority of people worldwide. Yet because they have successfully defined themselves as the majority, the virtuous middle does not consider itself an elite but instead the “heart” of America, by which they mean middle class and morally upright. They are thus able to define the “norm” of society and determine who or what falls outside of it: Hollywood liberals, the urban poor, abortion, gay marriage, affirmative action, secularism. (That’s why millionaire and Yale grad Bush is a “regular guy” who believes in God and lives on a ranch, while millionaire and Yale grad Kerry is an elitist who defends abortion and windsurfs.) The virtuous middle demands policies that protect its privileged status and calls them “family values,” all the while presenting themselves as martyrs besieged by cultural elites who threaten their morality, political elites who threaten to tax their wealth, and the rabble who threaten to decay society from below.
Even so, the task of radicals is not to denounce the anti-elitist sentiment of the virtuous middle as ignorant or hypocritical. Instead, we need to redirect this anti-elitism by redefining the concept of “elite” and finding ways to encourage a chunk of this virtuous middle to see its interests as lying with the rabble, not economic elites or family values. But doing so requires a new political vision rather than leftist snobbery.
The world of the virtuous middle is rapidly changing, particularly for whites who have always relied on their racial privilege to get them through tough times. These privileges are no longer as obvious and dependable as they once were. The result is political uncertainty, particularly in a post-9/11 climate. The anti-Bush left sees unemployed coal miners in West Virginian voting for Bush because of terrorism and moral values and thinks that the miners are idiots for voting against their economic interests. But this view fails to recognize that class interests are always bundled with other interests, desires, and fears.
The GOP played on the virtuous middle’s fear of falling in social status, successfully bundling the economy, gay marriage, abortion, and terrorism as all part of a larger attempt to tear at the social fabric. Of course this view is wrong, but that’s not the point. The point is that people rarely think only in terms of class interests. Class permeates every aspect of our lives, but our lives do not entirely boil down to class. Any successful politics that fights to win over a chunk of this constituency needs to acknowledge that. The right understands this much better than the left.
Thus, we should take the battle to the “values” front rather than run from it. “Family values” has a material basis in white privilege. We need to take on this ideology by challenging this privilege and presenting a new set of values.
Where is the source of a new values? Don’t count on the liberals to find it. In diving toward the virtuous middle, Democrats in 2008 will run as far away from the rabble as they can, while still counting on their votes. This is opportunistic and disgusting, but it’s also typical party politics. We shouldn’t expect them to behave any better.
Instead, the basis of such a politics lies in the rabble itself. Black people, for example, have a much clearer sense of who the real enemies of freedom are than the virtuous middle. Gay marriage, which was such a successful “wedge issue” among whites and even many Latinos, had almost no effect on the Black vote, which once again went for the Democrats by a nine-to-one margin. (For more on this, see the article from the Black Commentator, “Concede Nothing to Bush: The Black Consensus Remains Intact”.) The issues that motivated the Black vote? As usual, they’re almost all class issues: jobs, racial justice, health care, etc.
The basis of a radical political vision lies here. The challenge is to get this middle to see elites in the same way as the rest of the working class does. Meeting that challenge means criticizing the virtuous middle frankly, but not dismissing them entirely.
Republicans see vindication from November 2. Democrats see despair. The anti-Bush left sees an idiotic American public. We new revolutionaries should see opportunity. We should marvel at the sophisticated thought processes of Americans, whether from the middle or the rabble, and seek to consolidate and shift it toward a politics of freedom.
The great revolutionary C.L.R. James liked to say that no people were better prepared for a classless, stateless society than Americans. Their inherent suspicion of elites is one of the main reasons for this, he argued. But he always knew that real democracy lies with the rabble and that the challenge was to convince the white working class to abandon its privileges, identify with the Black working class, and struggle against economic elites with them. This election shows that our task today is pretty much the same.
Joel Olson is a member of Bring the Ruckus. His new book, The Abolition of White Democracy, has just been published by the University of Minnesota Press. You can reach him at joelo at agitatoindex.org.
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