The Emerging Democratic Majority
John B. Judis & Ruy Teixeira, The Emerging Democratic Majority (New York: Scribner, 2002)
However energetically society in general may strive to make all the citizens equal and alike, the personal pride of each individual will always make him try to escape from the common level, and he will form some inequality somewhere to his own profit.
– Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America (1835)
A leading progressive intellectual and a representative of pragmatist naturalism, Thorstein Veblen (1857-1929), once a graduate student of C.S. Peirce, combined Darwinian biology with a bureaucratic interpretation of modern life. Like most progressives past and present, Veblen was not a Marxist. Veblen felt that all people, rich and poor alike, operate similarly according to the same mechanistic laws. Marx in contrast had an organic view of society. Hegelian contradictions in capitalism would inevitably resolve themselves through conflict, polarizing society into the idle rich and industrious poor, reaching a point where workers would only need to smash the state in order to manage everything themselves. But like Marx, Veblen’s thought had emancipatory intent. Marx viewed workers initially rendered docile through modes of production that generate the self-serving cultural structures (family, religion, property, etc.) strictly beneficial to our richers; workers become free when economic breakdown generates a unitary class-consciousness amongst themselves, thus putting them in motion to remove the richers from the economic picture via revolution. But Veblen’s anti-psychologism and anti-individualism had Darwinian motivations: *all* people in a Veblenist universe, rich and poor alike, instinctively signal status to each other, often through conspicuous consumption and conspicuous leisure. We’re simply hardwired, through millions of years of evolution, to be wasteful and distasteful, irrational and gaudy. Influenced by the austere Taylorism of his age, Veblen proposed a soviet of engineers. Or, as we word it today: technocracy. Letting businessmen, politicians, and/or workers make important decisions, for Veblen, meant rule by irrational passions. The idea was that we’d all be better off if we had the steady, impersonal, professional leadership of disinterested institutions composed of scientists, engineers, and other experts.
John B. Judis and Ruy Teixeira argued, in The Emerging Democratic Majority, that the United States will be entering a lengthy period of progressive political dominance, which ultimately benefits the Democratic Party, though we’re interested here more in the wider implications than the partisan benefits. The book is modeled on Kevin Phillips’ The Emerging Republican Majority, written in 1969, which projected the subsequent decades of conservative vitality in American politics. Judis and Teixeira secured their case with detailed, quantified data. I shall argue that if we examine the wider qualitative implications, Judis and Teixeira are more correct than they think they are. Below, I turn Veblen’s thesis on its head and conclude progressivism appeals to growing ranks of SWPL professionals in the information economy precisely because it is their own form of status signaling: ostentatious indifference and ostentatious detachment, social climbing through self-abasement.
Post-modern culture has been given so many labels that some will draw the conclusion that contemporary life cannot be adequately labeled at all. This is an illusion. Our civilization does have a center of gravity: its coolness. Think of the irreverence of popular music, the self-conscious wink-wink irony of popular comedians, and the self-referential memes and commercials making fun of themselves as memes and commercials. Earnestness opens one to mockery, as in the cases of Sarah Palin, Tim Tebow, etc., not because of any object of their fervent behavior, but on account of their fervency in itself — it strikes us as naive, vulgar, cheesy… not cool. In a cool civilization, everything is to be viewed with neutral separation, our noncommittal commitments to the seriously unserious.
A civilization reaches a state of decadence when its mode of consumption is divorced from its mode of production. And the cardinal vice of America, as everyone knows, is gluttony. A decadent civilization cannibalizes itself, not understanding that all production rests on biological, social, strategic, and technological reproduction. A decadent civilization therefore consumes in a way destructive of its framework of investment, unable to not only innovate, but to tread water, since investment is the choice not to consume now, in order that we can have in the future. Taking away from future consumption eventually destroys present consumption as the future catches up to the present.
In twentieth-century America, the self-interest of the educated and the affluent expressed itself through the Republican Party. During this period, status was still its own status, so individuals found no shame in pursuing their own advantage. One could even distinguish fat cats by their fatness, as obesity signaled high status to the fat-nots. Most laborers, gaunt and haggard in appearance, found employment either on the farm or the factory; professional employment in an office was no mean achievement. But circumstances changed. Today, girth is not a sign of the elite, but of the common, as two thirds of Americans are either overweight or obese. Similarly, even lowly computer janitors can drive SUVs and live in McMansions, even without going to the best schools, or not studying their livelihood when in school, or even going to school at all.
How can any Darwinian, socially-conscious creature signal high status under such conditions, especially when material largesse fails to impress others? This is especially pressing if one studied at and/or has a degree from an elite university — schooling still persists as a flimsy form of status signaling — and earns one’s living with the unwashed masses. An acquisitive lifestyle will not suffice to bestow superior status upon oneself, for flabbiness and wastefulness are within the reach of everyone. Want to be above others? Then show you are above it all. Be cool. Get a weird degree, volunteer to help worthless vagrants, eat organic food, get a tatoo, drive a hybrid car, buy junk from Apple Inc., pretend to like crappy art, pretend to enjoy primitive cultures, become a militant atheist — we can have an endless amount of disinterested interests that do not interest us, each one giving us yet another chance to sneer at the crass, shameless proles. Think of why some people shop at Target while calling it the Tar-shay. It is as if to say, “I’m really not one of those people. I’m better because I know better.”
Judis and Teixeira argue that the coalition behind this era of progressive dominance will be professionals, minorities, women, and, guiltily thrown in as an afterthought, working class whites. If the thesis is true, working class whites are of no great consequence. The shift of the professionals from conservative to progressive will be the lasting component of the political realignment. We’re given an ugly new term — ideopolis — which refers to those quasi-suburban areas loaded with professionals, such as North Carolina’s research triangle, or Virginia’s D.C. suburbs. The point is that previous modes of production tied people down at a single career at a single location all their life, while an information economy renders people more mobile, more transient, with an enhanced role for communication and networking, therefore expecting workers not only to show initiative in adding to their repertoire of skills, but to contribute something to the design, delivery, and so forth, of goods and services. The economy is now less like a giant military drill and more like an ecosystem, with workers expected to resourcefully make their own niche. Our current recession reflects this vast evolution from one way of doing business to another, and while it caught millions of people off guard, it should be embraced, not resisted.
Judis and Teixeira misleadingly make it sound as if professionals demand centrist government, though they are correct that such professionals do indeed have a centrist self-image. The phenomenon is the same as The Onion and The Colbert Report — cool, above-it-all moderates, pleading, with self-aware irony, for what they call civility, or coolness. For the most important thing we should understand about progressives, is that they are, first and foremost, cool. Bill Clinton and Barack Obama are cool, just like Cornel West, Jon Stewart, and George Clooney. George W. Bush and John McCain are not cool, just like Charles Murray, Rush Limbaugh, and Ben Stein. One might suspect that professionals, closely embedded in the creative process, don’t always readily apprehend the organizational value of business management and financial capitalism in terms of putting a process in motion and sustaining it, believing that professionals themselves create value, while others without specialized skills somehow parasitically transfer it. Yet this is only part of the picture. Professionals often aren’t even the recipients of government largesse they vocally advocate — they frequently want to tax themselves and their superiors so their inferiors can receive the goodies. Ultimately, status signalling accounts for why professionals advocate what adds up to Fabian, hard-left, European-style socialism — when one can’t gain status from the advancement of one’s own self-interest, one will invent ways of gaining status from the far more numerous ways of denying one’s self-interest.
While cool progressives, ironic and self-aware, usually distance themselves from their own bullshit, stupid conservatives often take them seriously, and frequently misinterpret minority politics as identity politics. They believe they can gain the support of blacks, Latinos, and unmarried women by having black conservatives, Latino conservatives, and women conservatives run for office. And, weirdly, it makes conservatives feel good, like they’re pulling their weight to support diversity, equality, and the like, which is supremely foolish, because, again, progressives don’t even take themselves seriously when calling others racists, misogynists, and bigots in a cliche-like way. They don’t mean anything deep by it beyond the signalling of status to like-minded individuals.
Consider blacks. The GOP historically has been an anti-slavery, anti-secession, anti-segregation political party — Eisenhower used federal power to desegregate schools in the 1950s, and the Civil Rights Act of 1964 attracted more Republican than Democratic support. Many remarks have been made how Republicans courted support of southern whites starting in the late 1960s; fewer have reflected why southern blacks aligned themselves with the Democrats well before such efforts. The answer is that socialism was always a better fit for American blacks, and blacks liked the Democratic Party more and more as it become more socialistic. It isn’t like blacks were helplessly brainwashed on some sort of Democratic entitlement “plantation.” Remember, blacks comprise most of what I call the “religious left” in the United States — it is not uncommon for leading black activists to be reverends. Blacks are historically accustomed to fighting against impossible odds, and socialism has the same emotional topography of wandering through the wilderness until one arrives in the Promised Land. While everyone wants a dialogue on race, the role of race in racial politics is quite overstated.
We shouldn’t expect much movement in the votes of women and Latinos. Catholic populism, mixed with an element of machismo, will keep the idea of strongmen fighting for the little guy alive in the imagination of Latinos, which is the bread and butter of progressive politics. In the case of unmarried women, progressives allow them to abort icky nerdspawn, while having taxpayers pick up the bill for fatherless thugspawn. Identity politics isn’t strictly about identity politics, because it is about identity politics. Expecting to capture such voters with a conservative who just happens to have the identity in question is fool’s gold.
Existing demographic trends mean we can eventually expect two versions of the Democratic Party fighting over how to spend themselves into oblivion. While the GOP is attacked for its lack of diversity, ironically, one day, the Republican Party will indeed be the party of white people, as it will represent aging entitled white hipsters who will clamor for more resources for an inefficient government health care system, and for what’s left of social security. We witness the seeds of this today; Keep Government Out Of My Medicare, demands the Tea Party. The Democrats will increasingly represent strictly the interests of baby mommas and minorities, who will clamor for more resources for child care, education, housing, nutritional assistance, etc. After all, children don’t choose to be disadvantaged, right? With not enough people in families and businesses, there won’t be support for pro-family pro-business policies. Instead, American society will likely eat itself to death. But, as optimists may remind us, it is never too late to lose weight.
Further Reading:
Allan Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind
D.C. Stove, Darwinian Fairytales
