I’m not a fan of left wing views on “class”. Progressives often define class in terms of income or wealth, which makes no sense to me. I’ve spent time in all 5 income quintiles, from the bottom 20% to the top 20%, and yet I have never identified my “class” with my income.
The following tweet caught my eye:
So the leftist that is currently running for mayor of New York views people in the 1% and the 98% percentile (of income or wealth) as occupying the same class, at least regarding “us versus them” battles with the top 1%. A homeless person living in a back alley in the Bronx is united with an elegant lady living in a condo in New York’s Upper East Side in their battle for “economic justice”? Sorry, I’m not buying that argument.
In the old days, Marxists thought of class in terms of the capitalists, the bourgeoisie and the proletariat. Even that was far too simple, but at least it had a certain logic. Lumping together the 1% and the 98% into one group makes no sense at all.
Is this just harmless rhetoric? I don’t think so. Leftists keep assuming that various groups are part of their coalition–immigrants, blue collar workers, lower income people, and then are shocked to find them voting for a Republican candidate. Leftists don’t realize that workers in California making minimum wage (roughly $33,000/year), don’t view themselves as being in the same class with non-workers living off of various social insurance programs, even if their effective “incomes” are not all that different. And they certainly don’t view themselves as being in the same class as doctors and lawyers making $500,000/year.
Matt Yglesias has a post that relates to this issue:
The name comes from Ruben Gallego’s remarks to Lulu Garcia-Navarro about the importance of articulating an aspirational agenda of material prosperity as part of Democrats’ pitch to working class people:
It was a joke, but I said a lot when I was talking to Latino men: “I’m going to make sure you get out of your mom’s house, get your troquita.” For English speakers, that means your truck. Every Latino man wants a big-ass truck, which, nothing wrong with that. “And you’re gonna go start your own job, and you’re gonna become rich, right?” These are the conversations that we should be having. We’re afraid of saying, like, “Hey, let’s help you get a job so you can become rich.” We use terms like “bring more economic stability.” These guys don’t want that. They don’t want “economic stability.” They want to really live the American dream.
This is, pretty literally, abundance. It’s about economic growth. In a good progressive way, it’s not indifferent to questions of distribution — it’s a pitch aimed at people in the bottom half of the earnings distribution. But it’s not about inequality as such, it’s about raising absolute living standards.
Whenever I hear progressives talk about the 1% and the 99%, I immediately suspect that they understand little about the role of class in America.
