E pluribus unum — or maybe not.
Here and here are two articles that came out this past week, and should be essential reading for those trying to make sense of the current crisis. The articles deal with the US, but the broad principles apply to Europe as well. I’m not personally endorsing every component of these two pieces, but when taken together they characterize an argument that we all need to grapple with. This argument consists of a few main points:
- The left and center-left has long focused its concerns primarily on the poorest third the population (or thereabouts), which is entirely justified and understandable. However, we’ve lost the middle third. The policy proposals of the Democrats in the US, Platforma Obywatelska in Poland, and many other similar parties will not provide much assistance to that middle third, on the grounds that limited resources need to be directed to those who need them the most. That’s fine, except the middle third has also seen its situation worsen, and people there feel neglected. Pundits rightly point out that the typical voter for the far right is not at the bottom of the income scale, but in fact is at or a little above the average. It doesn’t follow from this fact that their fears are unwarranted or hypocritical.
- The left and center-left has come to be identified with professionals, the intelligentsia, the urban communities where cultural diversity and “sophistication” is valued. Those of us who live in such communities insist (correctly) that the real elite of society, the actual holders of power, stand far above us. This is the foundation of the rhetoric of the 99% vs. the 1%. The problem is that people in the aforementioned middle third see absolutely no commonalities with us educated professionals. They look at us and see people who are much more prosperous than they are, but who don’t appear to understand “hard work” (insofar as work is seen as the production of something of economic value).
- For our part, those of us in the professions value education and expertise over the pursuit of economic value for its own sake. In fact, when someone claims that universities should justify their existence by preparing people for the workforce, we insist that our vocation cannot be reduced to mere job training. We are highly attuned to identity politics, but only the identity politics of those who are in that poorest third. When those in the middle third evoke identity politics or nationalism on behalf of whites, we (correctly) decry their racism and white nationalism. Even those of us with origins in the middle third are very angry right now. When people of the white working class complain that we educated professionals hold them in contempt, they aren’t entirely wrong. Over the past year they’ve voted for Brexit, for Kaczynski, for Trump, and in doing so proven to us that they are, in fact, advocating values that we find repulsive.
But here’s the problem: the only possible way to preserve both liberal constitutional democracy and broadly distributed economic justice requires an alliance between the poor, the middle, and the professionals. We all need to recognize that identity politics will not get us to that alliance, regardless of how much we talk about allies and intersectionality. The identity politics of the universities and the big cities will sustain an alliance with the most exploited and oppressed segments of society (blacks and Latinos in the US, refugees and ethnic minorities in Europe). The identity politics of the white middle and working classes will lead them only to a dead end of all-consuming hatred with no effective policy options to actually improve anyone’s lives. The nationalists in the US and Europe will learn the hard way, and we just have to pray that the world survives their lesson.
Prosperity, stability, and democracy will be on firm ground again only when we all recognize that the foundation for politics must be that which binds us together, not that which rips us apart. E pluribus unum only works if we both acknowledge the “pluribus” and also pursue the “unum.” Those on the left have recently been celebrating the first part of the phrase while assuming that the second would take care of itself, while those on the right think they can enforce the second by quashing the first. How do we convince everyone to move back towards the entire aphorism?
If I had a good answer to that question, I’d be optimistic about the future.