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by
Joel Kotkin
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September 6 - September 10, 2020
growing immersion in work at the expense of family life.
The old bourgeois emphasis on the importance of family is being replaced in many societies by a preference for single and unattached living.
individual empowerment over family obligation.
Daniel Bell
“new class”
profoundly divergent from the traditional bourgeois norms of self-control, industriousness, and personal responsibility. Instead, it favored a new type of individualism, unmoored from religion and family, whic...
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The yeomanry will need to recover the family values and ambition that once built a thriving middle class, as a defense against falling backward into a more serflike status. More broadly, the future of democracy will depend also on societal values that help elevate people from the lower classes to the middle, from single persons to responsible parents, from propertyless to owners.
China’s great wealth derives from a “worker-made” economy that would fit a classically Marxist definition of exploitation.
The broad-based upward mobility once seen in the West—and more recently in Korea, Taiwan, and Singapore—may never come to China. Wages in the manufacturing sector are not high enough to lift people into the middle class,
The challenges confronting China’s migrant workers today are part of a broader global trend of weakening prospects for the working class:
This promise of a better future for all has been evaporating, and one reason is the decline of private-sector unions.
Unionization of the workforce has declined in large part because industrial jobs have been disappearing.
The median lifetime incomes (over an assumed thirty-year working life) of American men in all occupations who entered the labor market in 1983 were up to one-fifth lower than those of the cohorts who began work in 1967.
Upward mobility—the essence of capitalist promise—has declined markedly in virtually all high-income countries.
Future technological advances could further intensify the pressure on the working class globally.
labor policies of the newer generation of tech giants
many low-status workers today are sinking into what has been described as the “precariat,” with limited control over their working hours and often living on barely subsistence wages.
One reason for this descent is a general shift away from relatively stable jobs in skill-dependent industries or in services like retail to such occupations as hotel housekeepers and home care aides.
From 20 to 30 percent of the working-age population in the EU15 and the United States, or up to 162 million individuals, are doing contract work.
Gig workers lack many basic protections that full-time workers might have, such as enforcement of civil rights laws.
The downward economic trajectory of the working class has been amplified by cultural decline. The traditional bulwarks of communities—religious institutions, extended family, neighborhood and social groups, trade unions—have weakened generally, but the consequences are most damaging for those with limited economic resources.
Social decay among the working class echoes what occurred in the first decades of the industrial revolution, when family and community structures and bonds of religion buckled and often broke.
when towns and counties lose manufacturing jobs, fertility and marriage rates decrease, while out-of-wedlock births and the share of children living in single-parent homes increase.
In developed nations, as the middle classes are being proletarianized and the working classes fall further behind, the longstanding alliance between the intellectual left and the working class is dissolving.
The general acceptance of capitalism by the working class, as well as questions of race and culture, led many on the left to seek a new coalition to carry the progressive banner.
Across Europe, traditional parties of the left now find their backing primarily among the wealthy, the highly educated, and government employees.
Even more than disagreements over immigration and cultural values, differences in economic interests have driven a wedge between the established left and the working class. The agenda promoted by the leftist clerisy and the corporate elite—on immigration, globalization, greenhouse gas emissions—does not threaten their own particular interests. But it often directly threatens the interests of working-class people, especially in resource-based industries, manufacturing, agriculture, and construction. Environmental policy in places like California and western Europe has tended to ignore the
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The lifestyles of the middle and working classes are often criticized by the very rich, who will likely maintain their own luxuries even under a regime of “sustainability.”
Those in today’s intellectual left are concerned about the planet and about international migrants, but not so much about their compatriots in the working class.
As the major left-leaning parties in high-income countries have become gentrified, the political orientation of working-class voters is realigning.
In November 2016, more white American millennials voted for Donald Trump than for Hillary Clinton.
More broadly, a sense of betrayal among those being left behind by progress is leading to defections from mainstream parties of both right and left.
we may be “sleeping on a volcano.”
At the core of these rebellions against the political mainstream lies the suspicion among the lower classes that the people who control their lives—whether corporate bosses or government officials—do not have their interests at heart.
The contemporary versions of peasant rebellions, particularly in Europe and the United States, are in large part a reaction against globalization and the mass influx of migrants from poor countries with very different cultures.
Political and cultural elites in particular have elevated cosmopolitanism and “diversity” above national identity and tradition.
Much of the support for populist parties comes from the working class and lower-middle class, who are more exposed to the disruptions and dangers that the migrants have often brought, and are generally more burdened by the public expense of accommodating them.
The conflict over immigration divides largely along class lines.
The tech oligarchs in particular like to hire from abroad:
Ironically, the people who most strongly favor open borders are welcoming large numbers of immigrants who do not share their own secular, progressive values.
The British writer David Goodhart describes a cultural conflict between the cosmopolitan, postnational “anywheres” and the generally less educated but more rooted “somewheres.”
As long as the political and economic elites ignore these preferences, populist rebellions against establishment parties will likely continue and could become more disruptive. Elite disdain for traditions of country, religion, and family tends to exacerbate class conflict around cultural identity.
Like some of the populist movements in Europe, the American populist right has adopted many of the class-based talking points, although usually not the policies, associated with the pregentrified left.
In the higher echelons of the clerisy, the response to the populist revolt has mostly been revulsion.
In the late 1920s and early 1930s, the proletarianization of the middle class resulted in widespread support for Communism, Fascism, and National Socialism.
Democratic capitalist societies need to offer the prospect of a brighter future for the majority. Without this belief, more demands for a populist strongman or a radical redistribution of wealth seem inevitable.
the issue boils down to whether people—not just those with elite credentials and skills—actually matter in a technological age.
Chicago’s crime is heavily concentrated in the poorer districts, as is typical of big cities: according to one study, 5 percent of the nation’s streets account for half of the urban crime.
Over a period of fifteen years, the number of manufacturing jobs in Chicago was cut in half, and it now stands at the lowest level in modern history.7 Meanwhile, the middle class has been decimated.
Today the world’s great cities—Paris, London, Tokyo, New York, San Francisco—are attractive to those who already have wealth or the most impressive academic credentials, but less promising to the middle and working classes. The engines of upward mobility have stalled.
