culture

These women aren’t anti-Communist because of some weird holdover from the Cold War. They’re anti-Communist because they don’t want other people to have more money if it means that they will have less of it. When people talk about Trump supporters voting against their own interests, they’re eliding this very basic motivation: people voting entirely in their own interest.

To me, that rationale signals just how quietly unstable many of these voters actually find themselves. Even in a place like Idaho, with relatively cheap cost of living, there’s still a feeling […] that the bottom could fall out at any moment. A business could go under, a child could be diagnosed with a chronic illness, a parent could need full-time care and has no savings to cover it. The safety net is gone and the demands of middle-class living, from those family photos to constantly tweaking the design of your kitchen, add up. A lot of families are carrying two car loans, plus thinking about a third when their kid reaches high school age. Being middle class in America today requires a whole lot of consumer debt. The house of carefully balanced credit cards could collapse at any point.

Anne Helen on lifestyle reactionaries.

See also all those “you don’t have to worry about Biden’s tax plans if” memes. I think the influence of middle-class precarity–or even the perception of middle-class precarity–as a driver for reactionary conservatism is very under-examined. It’s the whole thing of, “We struggled and worked hard to get where we are, and we’re still only One Bad Day away from it all ending… so why should anyone else have an easier ride? (Also: please God don’t let anyone else find out how close to the edge we really are…)”

Obviously the Standard Issue Marxist Answer to this problem is a combination of false consciousness and “class solidarity” except… you’re talking about people, the petite bourgeoisie, who fall outside of the standard class solidarity paradigm. There’s a subconscious understanding that communism is not “for” them which—as someone whose middle-class/small-farm-owning Russian ancestors did indeed get thrown in the gulags—is not an entirely unfounded fear. And, yes, no-one is seriously trying to introduce Soviet-style capital-C Communism into any modern liberal democracy, let alone the US… But.

But I think it is kind of, again, underestimated how much middle-class lifestyles do change under even the most coddling of social democracies, and how bad socialist reformers tend to be at messaging around that. So yes, you socialize healthcare and education and install killer public transport systems and a four-day working week, and have basically just made life better for everyone in society. Hooray. But you’ve also taken away pretty much everything the aspirational middle class has been taught to value as life goals. Being able to send your kids to a “good school” doesn’t matter when every school is good and, worse, private schools are treated as the glorified babysitters for the idiot offspring of the parasitic upper-class. Owning a nice car doesn’t matter when the train is much easier and, worse, private car ownership is selfish and planet-destroying. And taking pride in working hard and for long hours has no value when “working hard” is framed as exploitation and anyone who indulges in it is seen as a bootlicking scab.

And yes, incidentally, those are indeed all real examples.

They’re not insurmountable ones, sure, but the point is they have to be surmounted in the first place. You don’t just need to convince the reactionary middle class that they’ll be better off in the democratic socialist workers’ paradise; you have to find some way to scale the wall of existential horror that comes for everyone when they realize everything they’ve been taught to value in life is, at best, bullshit and meaningless and, at worst, actively exploitative. That’s no easy feat, and requires a level of leadership the current donor-and-focus-group-tethered political class doesn’t seem well-positioned to express…