• • Subscribe to all Hudson Feeds
  • Create your own Hudson Feed
  • Subscribe to the Hudson Podcast
  What is a Podcast?
  What is RSS?

X Close

In Canada and the United States, the holiday honoring workers and the union movement is celebrated on the first Monday of September, as Labor Day, to avoid the radical connotations of May Day. In some parts of Europe, by contrast, May Day is still celebrated with enthusiasm by socialist and far left parties who share in the idealism of earlier, nineteenth-century workers’ struggles. However, relations between “the progressive intelligentsia” (who style themselves the vanguard of the proletariat) and the so-called proletariat itself have almost always been problematic. Even leaving aside the excrescences of Soviet Communism (and its various offshoots), the record of Western “progressive” intellectuals with regard to real workers has been questionable at best.

The emotional valuations of the social classes required by Marxism were, to a large extent, arbitrary. For instance, the “petit bourgeois” (the lower middle-class) were utterly despised, even though they often had to live a hardscrabble existence and despite the fact that many in the intelligentsia themselves came from well-to-do backgrounds. Moreover, when confronted by the social conservatism of much of the proletariat, left-wing intellectuals fell back on theories of “false consciousness” and came to embrace what classical Marxism had derisively termed the lumpenproletariat (the lowest substratum of society, especially criminals and vagrants). The 1960s generally, and in particular the thought of the psychiatrist and anticolonialist intellectual Frantz Fanon, marked the repudiation of the “embourgeoified” proletariat in favor of what classical Marxism would simply have called the lumpen.

The classical Marxist categories, however, may have some residual usefulness in explaining what really was going on in the United States in the second half of the twentieth century. What Marxism termed the petit bourgeoisie and the proletariat are arguably the socially conservative core of the country today, regardless of formal party affiliations. To extend slightly the argument made in James Burnham’s political classic, The Managerial Revolution (1941), the haut bourgeoisie (upper class)—with a scant few exceptions—has morphed into the managerial New Class, which today includes the superrich, most sports and media celebrities, and high-ranking bureaucrats and social experts. This New Class has allied with and adopted elements of the lumpenproletariat’s “countercultural” lifestyles, in a direct affront to the more traditional morality of the middle and working classes. This precipitous behavioral shift among most of the upper class was aptly termed “the revolt of the elites” by the eminent social critic Christopher Lasch, in his 1995 book of the same name.

Political analyst Kevin Phillips argued in the 1960s that the winning combination in American politics was “social conservatism plus economic liberalism” (or the acceptance by conservatives of the welfare state). Roosevelt’s New Deal appealed, rhetorically at least, to Americans’ sense of decency and portrayed itself as the only way out of the Great Depression. Conservatives of that day had appeared to trap themselves in what seemed like a rhetorically difficult defense of economic privilege and a foundering laissez-faire capitalism. The New Deal strategy of class-war rhetoric has been a continuing staple of Democratic Party appeals to American voters ever since.

Ironically, however, beginning in the 1980s, much of the Republican Party’s appeal came to be based on a formula of social liberalism plus economic conservatism. The “yuppies” of the 1980s, for example, were typically fiscally conservative and socially liberal. Today’s “compassionate conservatism” may be a hopeful-sounding term, but in practice it also has tended to leave socially liberal policies in place.

The results of the 2000 U.S. Presidential election, with a massive heartland colored red and the urban and coastal areas colored blue, supports this type of analysis. The contemporary social class that David Brooks has called the Bobos (short for “bourgeois bohemians”) are the core of left-liberalism today, and are centered in big cities. Like most “progressive” intellectuals, including their European predecessors, they are put off by those who do productive labor, viewing them as irredeemably backward and full of hidebound attitudes. This Labor Day, they will not be celebrating actual laborers, but a politically correct image of them that has never been reflected in reality.

Opinions expressed do not necessarily reflect those of the Hudson Institute.