The Great Class Shift

How New Social Class Structures are Redefining Western Politics

Thibault Muzergues

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN:
  9780367342104
• eBook ISBN:
  9781000727432
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Political Campaigns & Elections
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This thought-provoking book offers a new global approach to understand how four social class structures have rocked our political systems, to the extent that no politician or political party can exist today without claiming to be speaking on their behalf, and no politician can hope to win an electoral majority without building a coalition among these classes.

Based on a four-fold analysis - Urban and Liberal Creatives, Suburban Middle Class, White Working Class and the Millennials - this book shows that while many have focused on a supply-side vision of politics to explain the upheavals in our political party systems, a vision centred on demand – and the Weberian take on political parties as vehicles for class interests – is more compelling. In 2016, our political world was changed forever by the victories of Brexit in the UK and Donald Trump in the USA. Far from being confined to the Anglosphere however, changes have also rocked the political landscapes in Europe. As the crisis of 2008 has shaken the foundations of Western societies, shrinking the size of the previously all-powerful middle class, new classes have emerged, and with them a new political demand that new (or old) parties have tried to satisfy.

This book will be of key interest to political practitioners (politicians, advisors/consultants, journalists, political pundits, party builders, and government officials) and more broadly to academics, students and readers of European and Western politics, political sociology, party politics and political parties, and electoral demographics.

PART I

Class shifting

How four social classes came to redefine our electoral landscapes

Ever since September 11, 1789, and the French Constituent Assembly’s vote on the royal veto, during which the deputies who supported an absolute veto sat to the right of the president of the Assembly (that is, the seats of honor) while those backing a suspensive veto moved to his left, the notion of a political division between left and right has gradually taken root in most minds in the West. This was helped by the positioning of the members of parliament in (mostly) half-circled assemblies around the world and the labels that the media invariably have to give to make sense of politics inside and outside of their countries. Yet this divide was never a foregone conclusion, nor is it natural in many countries. Without getting into an anthropological study of parliamentary customs around the world, a very quick look at a Prime Minister’s Question Time in the United Kingdom or most Commonwealth countries shows the relativity of our left-right divide in the very architecture of the parliamentary room: in Westminster-type parliaments, the party in power invariably sits to the right of the Speaker (the seats of honor), whereas the opposition is always located on his left, in a room designed to encourage confrontation (in Westminster the rows of benches face one another and the historical anecdote has it that the space in the middle is the width of two drawn swords). In continental Europe, the semi-circular formation is a legacy of the Roman Senate, which also inspired the architecture of the US Senate – but here again, parliamentary tradition shows how artificial our left-right divide can be, as seats are chosen by the Senators on the basis of their seniority, not their political allegiance. This lack of seating “discipline” is a wonderful testimony to the relative independence of the Senators, but it is also the mark of a political divide that has not crystallized in physical directions: in the United States, the political debate is articulated not between “right” and “left” but rather between progressives and conservatives. Moving back to Europe, this time with a historical perspective, the split may very well have expressed itself differently, in France at least: in the months and years that followed the September 1789 vote, the Assembly crystallized its divisions between a “Mountain” (la Montagne) whose members, seated at the top of the hemicycle, favored a centralized approach to power, and the Girondins, who were more federalist, provincial, and in the context of 1792–1793, more likely to support war. Between them stood the “Plain” (la Plaine), also called more pejoratively the “Swamp” (le Marais) which gathered the moderate MPs that stood in the lower part of the assembly. Left or Right, Up or Down (and right in the Center), many other ways to represent our political divisions are possible, and if the left-right divide has outlived the others, it is probably due to its practicality, importantly in terms of visualization.

The next problem is to define who is “on the right” or “on the left”, and what makes a politician belong to either category. Here, too, a comparative approach in time and space tells us that there is no straightforward answer. Most pundits have grown accustomed over the past century to turn this question into an economic contrast between supporters and opponents of state intervention in the economy, but this has not always been the case. Going back to the French Revolution, the political conflict between Girondins and Montagnards concerned the nature of the State (federal or centralized) and the possibility of an offensive war to save the revolution. Similarly, in the United States, those supporting the rights of the federal states and those backing a strong central state dominated the debates of the young republic virtually all the way up until the Civil War (and pretty much until World War I). Depending on space and time, the left/right marker could change position: in 1870–1875, the French left incorporated all the supporters of a Republican regime against a monarchist majority that stood on the right of the hemicycle; in 1900–1905, violent squabbling took place between the advocates of a strict and militant separation of Church and State (they sat on the Left of the National Assembly), and those on the right that defended the alliance of the altar and the throne (albeit a Republican one). In the same period, this divide mostly overlapped with another issue: the guilt or innocence of an army captain of Jewish background the infamous Dreyfus Affair. In truth, the divide in Europe only started to crystallize to its more familiar form in the post-Great-War period, with the first full-blown successes of workers’ parties – for example, with the election of SPD’s Friedrich Ebert as Reichspräsident in 1919 Germany, or that of the first Labor government in 1924 in the United Kingdom. From then on, the preservation of a free-market (or corporate) economic model became a trademark of the right, while adherence to Marxism was seen as a staple of the left, which differentiated itself between a radical wing willing to achieve its goals through revolution (Leninist, and later Trotskyist, Maoist, etc.), and moderates convinced that socialism could be attained by democratic means.

This differentiation held up to the contemporary period and is still used, somehow lazily, by political experts and actors, although it has become much less relevant since the 1990s. With the bankruptcy of the Socialist model and the economic successes of the United States, communism, socialism, and other state-isms had lost credibility, and the Washington Consensus became a dominant system of principles driving political, social, and economic debate alike. As a result, all mainstream political parties adopted liberal economic platforms in order to have a chance of keeping or returning to power, and the differentiation between the old left and right became one of style rather than of substance. While the right generally admitted a cultural victory of the left (with the adoption of some sort of societal liberalism in the 2000s, notably, in the United Kingdom and Germany), the left went through its economic Damascene road much earlier, in the 1980s and 1990s – first, by abandoning socialism as a doctrine, for example in France, where François Mitterrand had to lead a monetarist U-turn in 1983 to save the convertibility of the French Franc against the Deutsch Mark. Only 12 years later, Prime Minister Lionel Jospin pushed his Party to change its economic platform to the extent that it remained Socialist in name only. Jospin was following the general mood in the West, as other leaders of the European center-left such as Felipe Gonzalez in Spain or Andréas Papandréou in Greece had done the same a few years before. In the late 1990s and very early 2000s, this “modern left” sanctioned the obsolescence of Socialism: intellectually supported by the “Third Way”,¹ Tony Blair and Gerhard Schröder blurred the economic distinction between right and left to such an extent that the Millennium-period was marked by a virtually unanimous consensus on the principle of liberally minded reforms and the promotion of individual freedoms.

Directly or indirectly, the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, changed the world as we knew it, including our perception of the political divide. From this moment onwards, the societal consensus that had characterized the 1990s weakened irremediably, leaving way to a more confrontational approach: between the pro-war and the anti-war camps, between those seeking to tighten up security and the passionate defenders of civil liberties, between the supporters of a European constitution and the defenders of national sovereignty. However, despite the strong challenges mounted by the first populists of the 1990s and 2000s (from Ross Perot in the United States to Jean-Marie Le Pen in France, or Pim Fortuyn in the Netherlands), some traces of the general consensus could be found, and in the end the system as such stood firm, despite some major setbacks (such as the rejection of the European constitution in France and the Netherlands in 2005). Looking back at the 2000s, the general overview is that of a stronger (but usually contained) confrontation between the old left and the old right, with varying degrees of conservatism or progressivism in Germany, France, Poland, the United Kingdom, or the United States.

The year 2008 changed everything. As with every financial catastrophe (like 1873 or 1929), the Great Recession accelerated social processes that were barely.

Note

1   Anthony Giddens, The Third Way: The Renewal of Social Democracy, London: Polity, 1998.

Bibliography

Anthony Giddens, The Third Way: The Renewal of Social Democracy, London: Polity, 1998.

Max Weber, Wirtschaft und gesellschaft, Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1922.

1

IN THE BEGINNING WAS THE CREATIVE CLASS

The genesis of the great social upheaval that is now turning our political landscapes upside down is to be found in the 1990s. In this era of long-lasting economic prosperity and triumphant liberalism, technical progress and a number of political decisions triggered a series of events that then became social, cultural, and finally political trends. As we witnessed a technological revolution with the advent of the World Wide Web, the automation of factory-based jobs, globalization and free trade agreements changed our economies, with the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and the European Union (which truly came into being with the Maastricht Treaty, before swallowing most of the states of central Europe into its ranks in the 2000s) truly taking the shape we now know during this decade, while China joined the World Trade Organization in 2001. The result of all these changes has been the gradual erosion of the social fabric of the post-war period. That social model was based on a triumphant middle class, which incorporated the vast majority of the population and occupied a political center ground without which no electoral victory was imaginable. The left in both the United Kingdom and Spain had thus been forced to abandon most of their Marxist values and move towards the center in order to be able to take power, whereas the right was divided between a moderate wing that would propose a “light” version of Thatcherism to get to power, and a conservative wing that adopted a more drastic social and economic approach – the European approach being usually less radical in their scope than those of the Anglosphere, as the Thatcherite and Reaganite revolutions had succeeded electorally thanks to exceptional circumstances of economic and social disaster in the late 1970s (repeated strikes and noticeable decline in the United Kingdom, and diplomatic disaster with the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and the Iranian Revolution for the United States), which had prompted the middle class to seek out more radical solutions to their country’s problems.

Stabilized by the late 1980s, the middle class had managed to create an incredibly strong connection within each nation: by absorbing a very large portion of the population (between 70% and 80%), it had made it possible to consolidate social inclusion in an era when class struggle, supported by the Soviet Union, was a social reality but also a real political issue. Indeed, the final victory of the capitalist countries in the 1980s had a great deal to do with the capacity of Western societies to allow the vast majority of their citizens to identify or aspire to join the middle class, which could be summed up with the picture-postcard image of a nuclear family living in (and usually owning) a detached or semi-detached house in the suburbs with a garden and all the modern appliances needed for a happy life: a vacuum-cleaner, a washing machine, a dishwasher, an oven and a microwave, along with the couch and the television, a window to the outside world that enabled the Western middle class to witness the ultimate triumph of its model between 1989 and 1991, with the collapse of the Eastern Bloc. In other words, where the Soviet Union had failed in its promise to give the working class power and prosperity, the West had succeeded by ensuring that the American Dream of the 1950s would become a reality for all throughout Europe and North America, from suburban Los Angeles to the Bavarian countryside or the working-class suburbs in the “red belt” around Paris. In fact, the middle class had managed, in the 1980s, to absorb a large portion of the former proletariat: many workers had been co-opted, in a way, by a generous social protection system (although its ultimate viability in the long term was already the subject of controversy) and programs to support consumption and/or home ownership enabled the workers to contemplate the possibility of living the middle class dream. While Communism had failed to provide prosperity for its working class, the triumphant capitalism of the early 1990s, had managed to give most workers middle-class status.

However, at this very time in which the middle class reached its apogee, the system started to show first signs of weakness, and the phenomenon would accelerate during the 2000s before intensifying after the financial crisis of 2008. With the Cold War over, the West found itself with no competitors for global leadership, and the Pax Americana led the way for the globalization of our economy, with the free circulation of goods, people, and capital in a world defined by a very high level of social disparities between countries: as Western workers, previously protected by borders to the east and south, were now left to face competition from foreign workers just as qualified as them but with much lower salary and social expectations. Adding to this the increased automation and robotization, with many of the tasks previously reserved for assistants, secretaries or engineers delegated to a computer, mechanical, and routine jobs progressively became far less precious than capital, as Thomas Piketty has remarkably demonstrated in his work.¹ But as destruction is inevitably accompanied by an equal amount of creation, the value of manual work was progressively replaced by ideas and processes which came to play a more significant role in our economies. As the expanded West de-industrialized (for the benefit of China and South-East Asia in particular), its economic fabric changed and jobs in abstract products and services (financial services, consulting, etc.) gradually replaced industrial tasks that had become uncompetitive in our countries. The ejection of the working class from a shrinking middle class² was to have titanic consequences for our social fabric, making the former core of a New Minority that progressively became aware of its identity after the 2008 crisis as we will see in Chapter 3. But before that, these changes led to the emergence of a new, influential social class which was to transform its economic, and then social prestige into political influence throughout the 2000s, namely the Creative Class.

What is the Creative Class, and who are the Creatives? For the urban studies theorist Richard Florida, who invented the term in the early 2000s (and popularized it in subsequent years), it covers all the intellectual professions that involve the creation, with varying degrees of abstractness, of new procedures, techniques, or concepts. Its members are thus very similar to the “symbolic analysts” already identified by Robert Reich in the early 1990s,³ but Florida’s definition is broader: whereas Reich saw the symbolic analysts in industrial terms, Florida thinks more broadly of professions that involve creativity, including artists, show business or sport professionals.⁴ Florida’s classification also includes occupations in healthcare, law, and education, but an important clarification should be added here: while specialized doctors and lawyers, or indeed university professors, generate and manipulate symbols, concepts, and ideas, making them part of the Creative Class, their more generalist colleagues, are for their part increasingly excluded from it, and can therefore undergo social stagnation or even regression. Indeed, while being a lawyer, general practitioner, or schoolteacher was an enviable social positions in the past, this is no longer necessarily the case today: for example, GPs are confronted with an increasingly heavy workload that is making their job a routine exercise with little time to assess individual patient’s conditions, so that they often end up assessing a series of classic symptoms which in turn will require an equally classic treatment – indeed very often a generic one, as a stressed Social Security service increases its monitoring on their practice. These patients will also often come with a very partial knowledge of medicine – courtesy of Wikipedia and medical websites – and will ask the doctor not to diagnose and cure them, but to prescribe the medicine they believe they need, based on the information they have managed to cobble together online about their symptoms. The process increases the routine element of GPs’ work, and is also applicable to other professions such as generalist lawyers or primary and secondary school teachers. In other words, where the working class creates value by making concrete things (i.e. concrete objects or agricultural products), where the service class creates value by providing a service to the community (i.e. cutting hair, cooking, etc.), the Creative Class creates value by producing ideas that are then transformed into software, films, processes, or applications. And as the Creative Class has grown, it has brought with it an invisible but profound cultural revolution – rising with an economy whose growth is now dependent on ideas, creativity, and knowledge.

Ind...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Foreword
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• PART I Class shifting: How four social classes came to redefine our electoral landscapes
• 1 In the beginning was the creative class
• 2 The suburban (and provincial) middle class: A pro-system rebellion
• 3 The new minority, or the revolt of the white working class
• 4 The Millennials, or the left’s new rebels
• PART II Falling apart or coming together?: Coalition Dilemmas for election victory in a four-class system
• 5 France and the United States: From new fault lines to new coalitions
• 6 North-Western Europe: Divergent scenarios in the economic heart of Europe
• 7 Central and Eastern Europe: Power to the (white) working class
• 8 Southern Europe: The heart of the Millennial Challenge
• Conclusion
• Index