To-day, I’m reading: Yet Another Magazine Think-Piece on What So Many People Don’t Get About the U.S. Working Class.. This one is from Joan C. Williams. It’s better than some,^[1] much the same as others. Or at times a bit worse worse: The I do not defend police who kill citizens for selling cigarettes. But… maneuver of cultivating sympathy by dodging blame is stronger in this than in the average hand-wringing piece. In any case, The Atlantic publishes this article regularly about once every 9-18 months; of course the rate ticks up in an election year.

But what I want to look at here is where this article is in the Definitional Chairs game for White Working Class. What’s interesting about it is that it’s relatively overt about what talk about class — or, more precisely, white class — seems to be increasingly employed to do, which is not actually to talk about class in the sense of income, wealth, or economic status — let alone something as wonky as relationship to the means of production. If it’s intended to mark socio-economic status, working class here leans very heavily on the socio and not on the economic. So, for example, we find out that William’s subject is not mainly the white working poor (except when it’s convenient to expatiate on their problems); it’s mainly white people making around $64,000 a years:

The terminology here can be confusing. When progressives talk about the working class, typically they mean the poor. But the poor, in the bottom 30% of American families, are very different from Americans who are literally in the middle: the middle 50% of families whose median income was $64,000 in 2008. That is the true middle class, and they call themselves either middle class or working class.

Overtly, constantly throughout the entire piece, the metric that Williams uses for white class is white educational attainment. And the analysis based on data about white educational class is drawn entirely from data, or from stereotypes, about the distinctive white subcultures marked out by spending time in, or avoiding, the culture of four-year colleges and universities.^[2]

This definitional move becomes the most thoroughgoing when Williams’ writing simply makes it implicit. For example, her claim that:

But women don't stand together: WWC [White Working Class] women voted for Trump over Clinton by a whopping 28-point margin — 62% to 34%. If they'd split 50-50, she would have won. (Williams)

… is sourced to a New Yorker election postmortem article by John Cassidy. The passage from the New Yorker article that Williams is closely paraphrasing doesn’t say anything about working-class; what it says is white women without college degrees, which Williams has simply read and re-written as working class:

White women without college degrees, who make up about seventeen per cent of the voting-age population, voted for Trump over Clinton by a whopping twenty-eight-point margin, sixty-two per cent to thirty-four per cent. If the members of this group had split their votes fifty-fifty, say, they would have delivered a victory to Clinton. But, to a large extent, they voted with their male peers. (Cassidy)

I don’t think Williams is an exceptional case here. I think what she is doing is in fact pretty typical. It’s not the only thing we do when talking about class or, more circumspectly, about class divides among American white folks. But it’s one of the things that people do a lot. The class divides or class conflict in an awful lot of recent think-piece writing putatively about socioeconomic class isn’t between employees and owners but rather something consistently spelled out in terms of statistics about the economic, social and cultural gaps between white people who don’t have four-year college degrees and professional-class white people who do. This is a divide that has obvious economic implications (how long you went to school and what you did there affects what kind of jobs you get) but it’s not primarily an economic division. It is a sociological division. If you want to know why people talking about class or especially speculating about white class divides say what they say, — from just about any political standpoint, left or right — then the first thing to do is to keep in mind that they are talking about something that is as much produced by subculture and institutional cultures within American schools and jobs as it is by any measure of income or wealth. If you want to know why the latest magazine think-piece about Class In America says what it says, the first thing to ask is almost certainly not much of anything to do with the means of production; it’s what the author is thinking and saying, first, about race; and second, about college.

1. ^[1]Because among other things it doesn’t spend too much time on Let Us Now Praise Famous Men poverty-porn gawking (although it briefly refers to that: … a wave of despair deaths in the form of the opioid epidemic), and because despite the usual difficulties, it is relatively up-front in the fact that it’s stipulating a definition of working class which is not the same as what Progressives might go into it expecting, etc.↩
2. ^[2]For example:

   Class migrants (white-collar professionals born to blue-collar families) report that "professional people were generally suspect" and that managers are college kids "who don't know shit about how to do anything but are full of ideas about how I have to do my job," said Alfred Lubrano in Limbo.

   . . . WWC men aren't interested in working at McDonald's for $15 per hour instead of $9.50. What they want is what my father-in-law had: steady, stable, full-time jobs that deliver a solid middle-class life to the 75% of Americans who don't have a college degree. Trump promises that. I doubt he'll deliver, but at least he understands what they need.

   . . . Massive funding is needed for community college programs linked with local businesses to train workers for well-paying new economy jobs.

   . . . National debates about policing are fueling class tensions today in precisely the same way they did in the 1970s, when college kids derided policemen as "pigs." This is a recipe for class conflict. Being in the police is one of the few good jobs open to Americans without a college education. [See what I said about the excuse-making? –RG] ↩

Anarchy is and always has been literally taco trucks on every corner.

This past weekend at FEE, me.^[1]

When Marco Gutierrez, a founder and spokesman for the little-known and sparsely populated advocacy group "Latinos for Trump" recently tried to warn America of the grave dangers of open borders and free migration with the image of "taco trucks on every corner," most viewers, Latino and Anglo alike, seem to have experienced a vision of a possible new utopia. The tag immediately trended on Twitter, not in panic but in near-universal celebration of the possibility.

What people do not know is how hard government has worked for years to prevent this from happening. The War on Street Food been going on for more than 100 years….

— Why Are There Not Taco Trucks on Every Corner?

See also.

• GT 2014-04-16: Devour Borders: Mexican Food as Revolutionary Praxis
• GT 2013-07-20: Authentic Mexican Food
• GT 2011-05-09: Hipster Food Trucks
• Scratching By: How Government Creates Poverty As We Know It

1. ^[1]Thanks to Jeffrey Tucker for prodding me to write this up, based on stitching together a news hook with bit of my previous writing on immigration, racial panics, and Anglo government’s perennial, ludicrous war on Mexican-American street food vendors.↩

. . . Even the most plain-vanilla presidential races are filled with conspiracy talk. Pundits speculate about secret deals. Reporters chase down candidates' financial ties and look for quid pro quos. Activists parse speeches for secret messages — dog whistles — pitched at frequencies only certain constituencies can hear. Pretty much everyone acknowledges that such small-scale conspiring takes place. And pretty much everyone acknowledges that larger conspiracies are sometimes at work, such as Richard Nixon's sabotage and surveillance operations in 1972. In each party's base, rumors circulate every four years. Under certain circumstances, some of those rumors might find their way to the lips of campaign officials.

But which stories take hold, and why? While there are plenty of reasons the Russia theory would find a receptive audience, given the unpopularity of both Putin and Trump with large segments of the electorate, one element of these accusations may be especially appealing to Trump's foes.

By linking the candidate to Moscow, this narrative suggests that Trump is precisely the sort of threat that he constantly warns against. His political rise began five years ago when he embraced birtherism — the notion that President Obama is a foreigner who has been hiding his origins from the public. The idea that Trump is a foreign pawn flips that script on its head; now it is a prominent birther who stands accused of uncertain loyalties. The Putin story invites voters to reject Trump on Trumpian grounds, a combination that could undermine the man's appeal. But by amplifying anxieties about outsiders, it may reinforce a fear that isn't so far from Trumpism.

Paranoia seems to require being imitated to be understood, Eve Sedgwick once wrote, and it, in turn, seems to understand only by imitation. Like a vast conspiracy, it's everywhere.

–Jesse Walker, Sure, Trump loves conspiracy theories. So do his foes.
Washington Post, 12 Sextilis 2016

Every four years there’s a new presidential election in the U.S., and campaign season lasts a good year or so before the election. So for about one out of every four years, you can expect to see an army of people (both professionals and citizen-militias) ready to corral any call for social change into a machine for political campaigning, and to grab hold of the rhetoric and imagery of radicals and revolutions to put it into the service of well-funded, weakly reformist campaigns to elect a Republican or Democrat to office. Just support the right candidate, and we are going to overthrow the powerful, we are going to stand up for the marginalized and oppressed, we are going to change the world together. By electing a better President than the other candidates who are running for the office. A couple days ago, InfoShop.org was circulating a joke image on Facebook to make fun of this tunnel-vision defining-down of radical goals to the limited circle of respectable electoral politics:

Which, as you might predict, caught a lot of flak from commenters deeply invested in the milieu of Progressive reform politics. One commenter, David STwo, offered a well-worn reply:

Revolutionary change… you mean like posting on Facebook, right?

Well, it’s easy enough to make fun of self-indulgent Facebook political signaling. But I’m willing to accept the challenge. David jokes, but posting on Facebook, for all its limits, absolutely has far more potential to practically contribute to long-term transformative social change than voting for long-shot reformist presidential candidates. The reason being that talking to people online is often self-indulgent and often runs in circles, but like any form of communication, it is potentially a medium of cultural pressure and cultural change. And cultural change, while tricky and partial and always highly imperfect, does a lot more to actually change things from day to day than energy-intensive, practically futile utopian schemes like voting for reformist candidates.

With most Leftists — including most anarchists embedded within the broader Leftist milieu — the standard line is that we are supposed to be looking for radical change in the long term, but in the short term supporting practical reforms. And the way we’re supposed to do that in the short term is by offering critical support or lesser evil votes to reformist candidates. If you take a hard stance against voting or electoral politicking, then you can expect to be met with the routine accusations that you’re prioritizing your radical idealism or purism over real people’s chances to achieve practical, short-term improvements. Those improvements, you will be told, are nowhere near enough, but they matter for people’s everyday lives, and we shouldn’t abandon any hope of making practical improvements until some distant day After The Revolution.

And of course it’s true that partial, gradual improvements on the margin matter for people’s everyday lives, and of course it’s true that they shouldn’t be abandoned for the sake of symbolic gestures. But the problem here is that the standard pro-voting line is a call for symbolic gestures, and offers very little of practical use to making those marginal reforms. The problem isn’t that electoral politics is impure; it’s that it’s impractical. The standard pro-voting line is alluring because of the cultural mystique that surrounds democratic politics in the U.S. But in reality its promise of practical gains through reformist electioneering is nearly the exact opposite of the truth. If significant marginal change is what you want, you are almost certainly doing more good towards that by posting radical political jokes on Facebook than by vocally supporting Bernie Sanders.

Voting for reformist candidates has two basic problems: there is an output problem, and there is an input problem.

The output problem is something I’ve written about a lot before.^[1] To justify voting for Bernie Sanders as a strategy for positive social change, you have to have some fairly reliable grounds for thinking that President Sanders will actually govern the way you think he will govern based on his campaign promises and his rhetoric, and that he won’t do anything negative along the way that significantly undermines the positive effects of his platform. I think there are good reasons to consider that hope to be optimistic, or indeed wildly unrealistic. It’s certainly not what the last seven years of Progressive Democratic Party administration would suggest.

But I want to set aside the output problem for a moment. For the sake of argument, let’s grant the most optimistic assumptions, the very happiest hypotheses about how a Bernie Sanders presidency would improve on the status quo in exactly the ways that Bernie Sanders supporters expect.

It doesn’t matter, because even if you assume away the output problem, you still haven’t dealt with the input problem. Whether or not you can count on the output of a political mechanism, even if we assume that a Social Democrat presidency would improve some things over the status quo, you still need to give me some realistic grounds for thinking that my actively supporting Bernie Sanders’ candidacy will somehow, practically, contribute to Bernie Sanders being elected in the first place. I don’t think that anyone doubts that that outcome is still a pretty long shot at best. And whether it is a long shot or a close race or a sure thing, you are going to need to think through the actual practicalities involved in campaigning for votes here, not just bake in a bunch of civics text-book mythology to the effect that Every Vote Is Sacred, Every Vote Is Good.^[2] Realistically speaking, a lot of people in the United States can’t vote at all. An electoral campaign offers no practical opportunities to undocumented immigrants, who cannot vote. It offers no practical opportunities to most documented immigrants. It offers no practical opportunities to disenfranchised felons. It also offers no practical opportunity to me. Any given person’s vote is almost certain to have a statistically neglible effect on the outcome of a big national race. But in my own case, it’s more than just statistical neglibility. In my own case, the practical, real-world situation is that I live in a small, fairly conservative town in east Alabama, and no matter who I vote for, or don’t vote for, I can predict with 99.999% confidence right now that the state of Alabama will still break about 60-40 in favor of whoever the Republican Party happens to nominate, and all of the electoral votes for the state of Alabama will go to that Republican. It’s not just that my vote makes a small contribution to the outcome. It’s that it makes literally no contribution to the outcome. If Bernie Sanders has a shot at winning the election, then I cannot possibly improve his shot by swinging my vote. Even if I convinced every single one of my neighbors for a fifteen mile radius in every direction to vote for Bernie Sanders, I still couldn’t improve his shot at winning the presidency. If he has no shot at winning the election, no matter how hard I might vote in Bernie’s favor, I certainly can’t do anything to chip away at that impossibility from where I am.

It might be nice to indulge in what-ifs about what Bernie might do if elected, but, functionally, telling me to support his campaign is telling me to devote a great deal of my limited time, attention and activist energy to a long-shot political campaign that offers no policy change whatever if it should fail (as it probably will), and whose chances of success or failure my vote cannot possibly influence in the slightest, even if it should succeed. It is not a practical recommendation for me, and it’s not a practical recommendation for any of my neighbors. It is like asking me to campaign against a hurricane hitting Mobile, or voting in favor of Auburn winning all their football games this season. Sometimes rooting and cheerleading are enjoyable ways to spend your time. But if so their value comes from the enjoyment they offer, not the practical advantages they convey, and my support for the Sanders campaign would be, practically speaking, an impractical, purely symbolic gesture in favor of an improbable utopian fantasy.

Now I am an anarchist. I have no problem per se with indulging in symbolic gestures in favor of improbable utopian fantasies. I am accustomed to long shots and unrealistic, utopian dreams. It may be that nothing I could do really accomplishes much, because radical change is hard. But then if I am going to take the time to make a symbolic gesture in favor of an improbable utopian fantasy, then why should I waste my symbolic gestures on hypothetical support for the lesser-disaster virtues of a more liberal state and another Progressive Democrat presidency? I would at least like to make a symbolic gesture in favor of an improbable utopian fantasy that I actually believe in.

Whether or not I should wish for Bernie Sanders to be elected, my supporting or not supporting Bernie Sanders will have exactly a 0% chance of helping Bernie Sanders get elected. Until you have some concrete way of improving on those odds, my view is going to remain that social protest, direct action, honest debate and day to day little pushes on the margin towards radical cultural change are not just more idealistic or pure, but really seriously immensely more immediate, immensely more practical outlets for whatever activist energy I have than cheerleading for yet another long-shot presidential campaign.

Practicality doesn’t come for free with a ballot. Ignoring that doesn’t make you a hardnosed realist, it just makes you another dreamy devotee of American civic religion.

1. ^[1]See for example: Progressive Politics, Direction of Fit, man 5 reformism, Change You Can Believe In, War Speech, etc.↩
2. ^[2]Every vote is needed in your neighborhood.↩