antoine-roquentin:

So I read it starting a couple days after you sent me this, mostly to wait for Fallout and then the last bit in between Fallout, and its pretty enjoyable. The first part is a Marxist-influenced history of 19th century America, while the second part covers the modern era with a focus on the dueling ideas of the time. Both would be good for beginners in the eras covered, or perhaps for those with an intermediate knowledge looking to make sure they have all the bases covered. It’s one of those books that generally summarizes the main ideas of tons of other books in a couple paragraphs while citing them, so it can be a good jumping off point for deeper reading into specific topics if you consider yourself one of the latter (note I mean to use beginner and intermediate as approximations of how people feel about their own knowledge rather than a way to rank leftists or something). Definitely something I’d recommend. As to where he goes wrong, it’s not in the ideas he brings up but more an inability to take those forward to more conclusions.

For instance, one of Fraser’s main points is that cultural class warfare has replaced economic class warfare. Socialism performed better at the ballot box in America in the early part of the 20th century because European migrants, Slavs, Jews, Italians, Finns, its main base, were familiar with socialism in their home nations. As they became assimilated into a more open whiteness in the mid-century, they weren’t otherized and their children became mainstream Americans immersed in mass media that denied a leftism embracing both civil rights/feminism and class warfare from the Overton Window, leading to class warfare’s only visible instance being an image-based style on the pro-segregationist right. Nowadays, Americans tend to care more that the rich look, talk, and act like them than they care that the rich are fleecing them. Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton, and George W. Bush could be working class heroes not through policies that expanded welfare but by being people you’d “want to have a beer with”. American popular culture has built a dichotomy, best seen among the Republican base, where provincialist trappings like whiteness, blue jeans, trucks, Christianity, country music, heterosexuality, and beer, are signs that you’re a kind Capitalist who treats your workers fairly, while cosmopolitanism, being tolerant of things that aren’t those, is an indicator of being a cold corporate drone intending to force your way of life on others. Fraser attributes this to the Republican base simultaneously being a class that Capitalism has benefited on one hand while on the other being a class that is in fear of Capitalism’s speed at which it destroys other social relations (he quotes Marx’s brilliant imagery of this, “all that is solid melts into air”, and William Buckley’s apt term for the pseudo-class struggle on display, “Country and Western Marxism”).

What he doesn’t take a serious look at is the way that this has been fought on the part of the Democratic base by correctly pointing out that this outlook is filled with bigotry and then incorrectly siding with powerful Neoliberal-oriented corporations to fight it (see for instance how many Fortune 100 companies filed amicus briefs in Obergefell V. Hodges). Fraser notes that the Republican base is a cross-class alliance. Skilled labourers and low-level white collar employees mesh with the owners of privately-owned businesses, what he terms “Family Capitalism”, a form of corporate ownership that reaches into the richest American corporations that are still wholly or largely controlled by single dynastic families, like the Kochs or the Waltons, replicating the late 19th century styles of the Rockefellers and Vanderbilts. This base has been growing in recent years as the number of small businesses have grown, a side-effect of larger businesses both attempting to escape federal regulations and unionization, and trying to create more, smaller lines of products to appeal to boutique markets more than mass markets, by outsourcing, sub-contracting, and franchising. Fraser notes that this newly-minted era of the self as a business has a libidinal power, by framing “going independent” as another form of conquering the American frontier. There’s good detail on this stuff, even if I’m not absolutely accepting of it.

Of course, the Democratic base is also a cross-class alliance. Neoliberal corporations, attempting to appeal to the broadest consumer base possible, went to women, the racialized, and the LGBT community and asked them to divorce their struggles from class struggle in exchange for granting greater civil rights. This is how you get civil rights activists like DeRay McKesson who helps smash teacher’s unions on the side. Fraser sort of traces this to the 1972 Democratic Primaries. The labour movement then tended to back Alabama governor and segregationist George Wallace, who not only displayed all the cultural affections of the white working class but also campaigned on heavily expanding the New Deal social safety net. In contrast, George McGovern actively courted a civil rights coalition that included Gloria Steinem and the anti-war movement while attacking organized labour as too conservative. This dichotomy has held up pretty reasonably in the years since, with the segregationist wing leaving for the Republican Party. Today, one can see it in the 2016 presidential election, as Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton embody the positions of Wallace and McGovern. The former has staked out a position of increasing Social Security and Medicare benefits and opposing the TPP, while the latter has gained endorsements from all the big civil rights players. (In some ways, you can even see this in the Democratic primaries when you look at Sanders’ and Clinton’s demographics, although I’m not implying that Sanders is a segregationist or in any way not the superior candidate on both civil rights and class warfare, just saying he gets what’s left of organized white working class labour’s support).

With leftism out of mass media’s view, every issue in the mainstream media becomes framed in this dichotomy, a Neoliberal-backed “tolerant” position and a national Capitalist-oriented provincialist/bigot position associated with “country and western Marxism”. Look at the immigration debate. The former needs immigration for their own profitability. They allow immigration but force immigrants to be “illegal”, which prevents them from accessing wage and health and safety regulations and ensures that they can only undermine the wages of workers already in America. The provincialist position that there should be no immigrants period because they undermine wages is the only one that’s allowed to show up. A position where borders are opened, unemployed Americans are put to work providing them with basic needs and ensuring they have the proper training to access workplace protections, and wages are eventually put on an upward path, is simply unthinkable (“There Is No Alternative”). So white working class sympathies often get placed into the only class-conscious position on the board, the Republican one. Of course, it takes two parts of the dichotomy to build this false display of choice, but only the Republican part gets significantly talked about in Fraser’s book, while it’s both that the left needs to mount a sustained assault on. But that’s a major quibble I have with the American left in general, that it shields the Democratic Party from more serious criticism because it believes the party can be somehow redeemed for the working class, instead of recognizing it as the predominant Neoliberal party in America.