On Politics

Lambert here: This post is where I am today on this topic, and I think most readers will recognize the ideas. As I write more about class, my views on this topic will almost certainly evolve.

The Democrat core (“base”) is not the working class, and has not been for some time; rather, it’s the professional-managerial class (PMC; citations too numerous to list, but see unrepentant Democratic strategist Ruy Tiexiera 2025). This has presented difficulties for them, since the PMC (the 10%) — if backed by the oligarchs in the ruling class — can govern, but is too weak, and not numerous enough, to govern on its own, let alone rule.1

Further, the Democrats can’t appeal to the far more numerous working class as a class, in a way that would consciously unite them, because who wants that? After all, their function is to govern on behalf of the ruling class, primarily by making sure that the working class never unifies on the basis of material interests; see under NGOs, and identity politics). 2

Hence the Democrat bundling, through identity politics, of various identity-based verticals around the core,3 the beauties of this strategy being that: (a) demographics would — as Democrats believed — do their work for them (Tiexiera 2002), (b) they didn’t actually have to deliver anything (except possibly recognition, and checks, to those identity-based “voices” hired by their network of affiliated NGOs), and (c) they could indulge in identity-driven moral preening (“deplorables”), as gratifying to them as it is annoying to others (especially conservatives, for whom “owning the libs” has been consecrated as a national pastime).

Campaign tactics and candidate foibles aside, one way to read election 2024 is as a comprehensive rejection of PMC governance. And the PMC wholly earned that rejection. Counter-examples are welcome, but so far as I can tell, there is not one single institution where the public meets the PMC for the provisioning of services that could be said to be healthy or even functional, despite the presence of some exceptional individuals. Not the health care system, not the educational system, not the legal system, not the financial system. Nor any of the increasingly enshittified online services.

Meanwhile, I came up as a Democrat, so I’m still not comfortable discussing the Republican base. That said, it does seem that Republicans — unlike Democrats — brought a gun to gun-fight (or a war, if you take Russell Vought’s heated rhetoric seriously, as I do).3 Indeed, assaulting professional-managerial functions as paying propositions seems to be the Republican version of strategic bombing: Attacking what John Mearsheimer calls liberal hegemony in foreign policy, assaulting the civil service, gumming up the grant-making works, bringing the universities to heel both on policy and on foreign students, completing the destruction of public health: In every case the common factor is to decrease the class power of the PMC — whether domestically (civil service protection) or internationally (“color revolutions” at USAID) — and hence the political power of Democrats, much as Stalin did with the kulaks.

NOTES

1. There’s such a fine line between ruling and governing, and I should write a post on that, but a footnote will have to do. From my online Oxford English Dictionary (simplified):

Govern verb Conduct the policy, actions, and affairs of (a state, organization, or people) with authority: he was incapable of governing the country.

Rule verb Exercise ultimate power or authority over (an area and its people): the period in which Spain ruled over Portugal.

Clearly, the two words are closely allied. However, govern has a connotation of “policy, actions, and affairs”; that is, the domain of the PMC. Rule has the connotation of the exercise of power, policy, actions, affairs be damned; that is, the domain of oligarchs. As Arthur Silber once remarked: “It’s called a ruling class because it rules.” One way to look at DOGE is to see it as an experiment in direct rule by an oligarch, government be damned. A bad metaphor might be this: Dissatisfied with the performance of his firm, the boss storms down to the floor and re-organizes everything. Generally, this is a debacle because the boss doesn’t understand how the floor works (and may not even understand his business). In this case, the boss is ruling (reorganizing) without understanding government (how and why the work is organized as it is). This is a bad metaphor because neither civil society nor the state are firms.

Etymology is always fun even if only heuristic, so allow me to be fanciful: Govern comes from Latin gubernare, ‘to steer, rule.’ Rule comes from late Latin regula ‘straight stick.’ So a governor is like a helmsman, but a ruler is like somebody who beats you with a stick, rather like Sister Mary and her ruler.

2 Come to think of it, identity politics is a lot like colonial rulers retaining power by getting the natives fighting each other, based on tribal or other differences (“But not in the South,” Stephen Potter, Lifemanship, [citation omitted]).

3If you were a Republican who believed that the Democrats decided that Tiexiera’s “coalition of the ascendant” wasn’t delivering a permanent majority to them through organic demographic change, and that Biden decided to build that coalition inorganically, by opening the border to undocumented immigrants and distributing them around the country through a network of Democrat-controlled NGOs, then you might — even leaving aside lizard backbrain issues — be quite happy that your party was on a war footing against an “invasion.”