One of the perennial complaints of the progressive left is that so many working-class Americans vote against their own economic interests—actively supporting Republican candidates who promise to slash programs that provide their families with heating oil, who savage their schools and privatize their Medicare. To some degree the reason is simply that the scraps the Democratic Party is now willing to throw its “base” at this point are so paltry it’s hard not to see their offers as an insult: especially when it comes down to the Bill Clinton– or Barack Obama–style argument “we’re not really going to fight for you, but then, why should we? It’s not really in our self-interest when we know you have no choice but to vote for us anyway.” Still, while this may be a compelling reason to avoid voting altogether—and, indeed, most working Americans have long since given up on the electoral process—it doesn’t explain voting for the other side.
The only way to explain this is not that they are somehow confused about their self-interest, but that they are indignant at the very idea that self-interest is all that politics could ever be about. The rhetoric of austerity, of “shared sacrifice” to save one’s children from the terrible consequences of government debt, might be a cynical lie, just a way of distributing even more wealth to the 1 percent, but such rhetoric at least gives ordinary people a certain credit for nobility. At a time when, for most Americans, there really isn’t anything around them worth calling a “community,” at least this is something they can do for everybody else.
The moment we realize that most Americans are not cynics, the appeal of right-wing populism becomes much easier to understand. It comes, often enough, surrounded by the most vile sorts of racism, sexism, homophobia. But what lies behind it is a genuine indignation at being cut off from the means for doing good.
Take two of the most familiar rallying cries of the populist right: hatred of the “cultural elite” and constant calls to “support our troops.” On the surface, it seems these would have nothing to do with each other. In fact, they are profoundly linked. It might seem strange that so many working-class Americans would resent that fraction of the 1 percent who work in the culture industry more than they do oil tycoons and HMO executives, but it actually represents a fairly realistic assessment of their situation: an air conditioner repairman from Nebraska is aware that while it is exceedingly unlikely that his child would ever become CEO of a large corporation, it could possibly happen; but it’s utterly unimaginable that she will ever become an international human rights lawyer or drama critic for The New York Times. Most obviously, if you wish to pursue a career that isn’t simply for the money—a career in the arts, in politics, social welfare, journalism, that is, a life dedicated to pursuing some value other than money, whether that be the pursuit of truth, beauty, charity—for the first year or two, your employers will simply refuse to pay you. As I myself discovered on graduating college, an impenetrable bastion of unpaid internships places any such careers permanently outside the reach of anyone who can’t fund several years’ free residence in a city like New York or San Francisco—which, most obviously, immediately eliminates any child of the working class. What this means in practice is that not only do the children of this (increasingly in-marrying, exclusive) class of sophisticates see most working-class Americans as so many knuckle-dragging cavemen, which is infuriating enough, but that they have developed a clever system to monopolize, for their own children, all lines of work where one can both earn a decent living and also pursue something selfless or noble. If an air conditioner repairman’s daughter does aspire to a career where she can serve some calling higher than herself, she really only has two realistic options: she can work for her local church, or she can join the army.
This was, I am convinced, the secret of the peculiar popular appeal of George W. Bush, a man born to one of the richest families in America: he talked, and acted, like a man that felt more comfortable around soldiers than professors. The militant anti-intellectualism of the populist right is more than merely a rejection of the authority of the professional-managerial class (who, for most working-class Americans, are more likely to have immediate power over their lives than CEOs), it’s also a protest against a class that they see as trying to monopolize for itself the means to live a life dedicated to anything other than material self-interest. Watching liberals express bewilderment that they thus seem to be acting against their own self-interest—by not accepting a few material scraps they are offered by Democratic candidates—presumably only makes matters worse.
David Graeber (2013), The Democracy Project: A History. A Crisis. A Movement., p123-125
4 replies on “Quote #300: Graeber on the popular appeal of the right”
“if you wish to pursue a career that isn’t simply for the money—a career in the arts, in politics, social welfare, journalism, that is, a life dedicated to pursuing some value other than money…”
This quote is snobbish bollocks. A lot of working class jobs are very much about pursuing values other than money. Care work, for example. Nursing. Lots of manual work like contruction where people take pleasure and pride in doing their job well.
It is the actually the rich who are more often involved in work that is just about making money – people who work in the city for example.
I think you’ve mis-read Graeber here. Or he has misrepresented himself. He does mention the pride of, e.g., nurses in doing work that involves caring (perhaps not in this section). Perhaps the section you quote would be less offensive if we imagined a tacit insertion, like this: “a life dedicated to pursuing some value other than money [and which receives cultural recognition and kudos] as being intrinsically valuable as such”
Graeber is unto something here, but I’m not sure his frame of reference is illuminating. From my own observations, it is true that any profession that you can only enter through internships is off limits for people whose parents are not very well off. Anecdotally, I have also met a significant number of businesspeople in high positions who do have a working class background, so it is true that there is social mobility in business, at least for the moment. But I think it improbable that this would be the whole story. The point is more cultural I think, and it has a lot to do with community. Community is not only about who is in, but also about who is out. When working class people look at left-wing intellectuals and vice-versa, it’s pretty clear that both group’s self-identification (including who is out) are almost completely opposed. The point about the military is illuminating, because not only does it reveal this stark contrast about group identification but also because it’s almost ridiculously emblematic of opposed value systems that are linked to this in-group, out-group dynamic. Not sure I have the right vocabulary in English to make my thoughts on this clear, but hey, here’s a try. What do you think Tom?
George Lakoff makes a similar point to Graeber’s – that the working classes have always voted according to values, not self-interest. He argues that Democrats have been seduced by a “rational” model of the voter, where you just need to explain the facts and people come to agree with you.
a big part of the issue is that the political class (at least in the UK) are so different from the great mass of people (both economically and culturally).