Actually Ruling Doesn't Make You Ruling Class?

The reductio ad absurdum of populist posturing

A hypothetical: imagine a majority Protestant country with two political parties. One is overwhelmingly Protestant and the other is majority Catholic with some Protestant supporters. Both parties have diverse economic bases, with both wealthy funders and large middle and even lower-middle and poor popular bases of support, with some industries favoring one party and some the other party, some unions favoring one party and some the other party. Reflecting the fact that the country was predominantly Protestant, the Protestant party was historically the one that, more often than not, won elections, and drew a larger percentage from the upper echelons of society. It was the “natural” party of government.

Over time though, this has changed, and the Catholic party has begun to win more elections, and also to draw more support from the upper echelons of society, even as both parties continue to have economically diverse support bases. That change of fortune reflects a change in the electorate: a drop in the Protestant percentage in the country along with a growing percentage that takes neither Catholicism nor Protestantism seriously. In part as a consequence of those underlying changes, the Catholic party, when it achieves power, has come to put more of an emphasis on making the country less explicitly Protestant in its assumptions and culture, rather than merely fighting for tolerance and equal rights for Catholics and other religious minorities. Some Protestants have interpreted this change as a sign that the other party aims to wipe out Protestantism and even impose Catholic supremacy, and has become radicalized in consequence.

Now here’s my question: would you describe the conflict between these two parties as a class conflict?

There are lots of ways to slice class. I don’t think it’s as simple as saying that wealthier people are all in one class and less-wealthy people are all in another, nor do I think it’s as simple as defining their relationship to the means of production, where everyone is either a capitalist or a worker. The clergy were a class in pre-revolutionary France, and their power wasn’t just a reflection of their wealth. There are circumstances where it might make sense to treat the military as a kind of class of its own, or to treat government employees that way. If someone wanted to posit an important and deep conflict between the interests of service workers and factory workers, I would be open to describing that conflict as between different classes. Even in a single firm, different kinds of white collar employees are arguably members of different classes. I’m open to the notion that our politics is driven by various kinds of class conflict, and if you wanted to argue further that Republicans are evolving into a true workers’ party, I’d be skeptical but I’d listen to the argument.

But if your argument is that “class is about culture” then that strikes me as no different from saying “class is about race” or “class is about gender” or “class is about religion” or “class is about language” or “class is about region” or class is about anything else except about, well, class. Which is to say, you are arguing that class isn’t important, and something else is. And yet you feel compelled to call that something else “class.” Why?

If there is a single ruling class in America, then the CEO of Exxon and the CEO of Disney are both part of it. So are Sonia Sotomayor and Clarence Thomas. So are J.D. Vance and Sherrod Brown. Oprah Winfrey is a member and so is Joel Osteen. Tucker Carlson is in it and so is Thomas Friedman. If you think Donald Trump is a tribune of the working class, as FDR was, I think you are wrong, but feel free to make the argument. But if you think Donald Trump is a member of the working class, or simply not a member of the ruling class, I think you simply don’t know what that word means—or are pretending not to know. Why pretend?

In 1992, when Pat Buchanan launched his crusade to change the GOP, he declared that there was a “religious war” going on in the country, and that the GOP needed to take a side in that war and fight to win it. Did his program have class components to it? Sure it did—Buchanan’s pitch was steeped in class-related rhetoric, because he wanted to convince a quorum of working-class and small-property-owning voters to sign up for his program. But the organizing principle was “religious war” and he said as much.

Buchanan was more an intellectual than a politician, so I don’t expect our politicians to be similarly forthright. But if our intellectuals—particularly those who have dedicated their entire professional lives to fighting the culture war—feel the need to obfuscate in this way, that suggests, to me, a profound insecurity about or discomfort with their actual beliefs. If what you really believe is that there should be a ruling class, and the one we have now is wrongly constituted, including and even dominated by the wrong members, then please say that. Stand up for Bonnie Prince Charlie because you think he is the rightful king. But don’t twist words into their opposites to do so. It’s unbecoming.