The Aristocracy of Knowledge
Blaming inequality on racism is a distraction by the credentialed class to avoid having to answer for education protectionism.
— This is Part Two of a two-part essay following The Righteous Indifference of Credentialism.
One tried and true method of escape from the gravity well of the working poor is to join the military. I myself joined the U.S. Air Force after high school, not wanting to attend university. My grades were mediocre at best and my single mother could barely cover rent let alone assist with any sort of tuition. My desire to leave my hometown in the middle of a Texas desert led me to sign away my freedom only to be shipped off to another desert in the Middle East. Although the U.S military is one of the most diverse communities in the country, one thing that almost all of my fellow airmen had in common was that we were the sons and daughters of the working class. Sure, we were serving our country in dangerous situations and some I’m sure were willing to make the ultimate sacrifice. In reality, enlisted men and women in the U.S. military are the in-betweeners. As sociologists Maria Kefalas and Patrick Carr describe in their book “Hollowing Out the Middle”, veterans (the Seekers) lack the financial resources or the grades to leave home for greener pastures. We are the children who are ambitious enough and have the smarts to maintain forward momentum, however, still lack the critical skills required to thrive in an academic or professional environment. Education does not begin with AP courses in high school, but rather from a much younger age through osmosis via professional parents.
A paper published in 2008 by The Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs at Syracuse University shows that the single greatest predictor of military enlisted service is family income. All that is required to join the military is a high school diploma and relatively decent health. This is one of the reasons why the U.S. military is one of the most racially diverse organizations in the world. Research also shows us that while rural areas in the U.S. account for only 19% of the total population, citizens from these geographical areas make up over 36% of the military. In contrast, 62.7% of the U.S population live in areas classified as cities, yet only 23.7% of city dwellers enlist in the military. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, eighty-two percent of the military is comprised of enlisted men and women without a college degree. Enlistment is often a necessity for some but ultimately the opportunity to be given purpose along with a middle-class paycheck and healthcare is literally worth fighting for. However, there is a price to pay for this upward mobility. The Congressional Research Service’s recent study of conflict casualties tells us that during Operation Iraqi Freedom enlisted service men and women were killed ten times more often and had seventeen times the number of injuries as compared with commissioned officers (military members with a college degree). Even now in the twenty-first century the children of the working class are still an expendable resource.
Over the last twenty years, service in the armed forces in the U.S. as well as Western European nations like the U.K. and France has become a class signifier. Most military veterans lack a college education, and serving the interests of modern U.S. foreign policy is widely antithetical to a left-leaning educated middle class. The naivete of patriotism is to be lightly ridiculed and held at arm’s length. Those of us on the left rarely criticize our veterans since they hold a special place of honor in our society, but I've always felt this awkward reverence was more akin to pity or bewilderment. I’m still puzzled as to why progressives even bother with acknowledging the modern warrior. It’s not as if we consider freedom to be something we’re required to fight for anymore right? At a time when all military action is considered an unwelcome intervention or jingoistic shortsightedness, what is it exactly that the left is acknowledging when we give a nod to veterans? Is it simply a gesture of respect for individual selflessness or sacrifice? Not unlike firefighters who put themselves in harm’s way for the safety of the community, but also not unlike police officers who are seen as tools of violence. I recently attended the Veterans Day Parade on Fifth Avenue with a fellow veteran from the UK and I couldn’t help but notice the demographics of the attending audience. I was surrounded by working class NYC residents who probably came from the outer edges of the boroughs and New Jersey. Those who do not live within the bejeweled isle of Manhattan are commonly referred to as the “bridge and tunnel” folks. The sight of veterans, police officers, firefighters, and civil servants marching with pride down New York City's wealthiest avenue in step with a sousaphone brings back memories of labor union brass bands of yore.
Military service has become a mark of pride for the working class and one of the few remaining options for upward mobility. There are those who can afford to avoid the call of duty and those who have little choice. Patriotism has become an immediate signifier of class as it is brandished by those who continue to bleed for the state and shunned by those who fear its proximity to nationalism. Consider the culturally diminutive meme “‘Murica” and its delivery in the unrefined dialect of a ruralite. In a post-Trump American left, patriotism is now perceived as a smoke signal for ignorance. Recall the “patriotism is racism” posters in protests leading up to the 2016 election or the mainstream media’s allusion to MAGA rallies being some nascent form of Nazism. In some ways, the left’s distrust of patriotic fervor is not unfounded. The American “bond of common faith” as Robert Kennedy once put it has been abandoned by the factions of the left and co-opted by the extreme right as a panoply of deformed permutations that have become exclusionary in nature. In his op-ed for the New York Times, Jefferson Cowie crisply defines the bifurcation of American progressives and our perspective on contemporary patriotism: “On one track can be found a cosmopolitan economic elite that embraces a multicultural world order shaped largely by the politics of corporate globalization. On the other track are radical critics of the racism and imperialism of the American state who often support local community and transnational solidarity but maintain a deep cynicism, even despair, about the American project.” Meanwhile, there are hundreds of thousands of Americans who leave their friends and family behind, give up the freedoms often taken for granted by civilians, and risk their own lives for the opportunity to earn federal subsidies for their education and attain employable skills. The Montgomery G.I. Bill provides the single largest incentive for military enlistment for a one-hundred percent volunteer-based military organization.
Historically, the more access a society has to education, the more equality there is. There are just over sixty million Americans that fall below the U.S Census Bureau’s officially designated poverty line. Only nine percent of these citizens are likely to ever go to college. According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, citizens without a four-year college degree are twice as likely to be unemployed and earn nearly half as much as those with a college-level education. Four out of every ten Americans live paycheck to paycheck and struggle to afford basic needs. Recent studies show that our methods of calculating the federal poverty level are antiquated and inaccurate (we still use the same model developed in the early 1960's). How exactly do we quantify poverty? At what point does our mental, physical, and emotional health begin to suffer from the abysmal experience of financial insecurity? In his recent interview with Ezra Klein, author and endocrinologist Dr. Robert Sapolsky discusses his book “Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers: Stress and Health” and argues that the “doom loop” of poverty is a significant and quantifiable negative contributor to rationality and responsible decision making, not to mention health in general.
Between the years of 1980 and 2015, the number of workers in occupations requiring an average or above average preparation and education rose 68% from forty-nine million to eighty-three million. In the same period, the number of workers in occupations requiring average or above average social and analytical skills rose 83%. Jobs calling for higher levels of physical skills which are usually associated with blue-collar jobs rose by only 18% between 1980 and 2015. The education level of the majority of physical workers was high-school or less. As America joins the global economy, labor competition is becoming more intense and the need for higher levels of education is becoming more critical for economic survival and social mobility. How then are we to expect the lower classes to survive this great economic shift when the statistics are so plainly stacked against them? With the growing chasm of economic disparity between the educated and the uneducated, formal education has become a clear watermark for social and economic class.
America is the land of opportunity where nobility isn’t inherited but earned on an equal playing field and everyone begins at the same starting line from birth to participate in the great race toward “success”. However, if we were to admit to our own class association, we would undermine the fundamental American creed that we are ALL equal. A recent study by Pew Research shows that while over 70% percent of American citizens identify as “middle-class” only fifty percent actually qualify. Only six percent of households who earn over $100,000 consider themselves upper-class. Sociologists, economists, anthropologists, and other researchers have been trying to define what middle-class actually means. However, the complex interaction of multiple variables like education, occupational status, home-ownership, wealth, income, and culture makes for a moving target that is difficult to pin down or generalize. The concept of middle-class has become so strongly associated with American-ness, that to suggest that it’s shrinking is to admit ideological defeat. Moreover, slicing the middle-class identity into further subgroups like lower or upper-middle-class or to illuminate the steep drop-off into the abysmal depths of poverty which lies at ever-closer proximity to the traditional middle is to dilute the American project. This reality is difficult for many to face and is perhaps why some have decided that racial or cultural identity is the fountainhead of societal regression. To relegate socioeconomic class to the background as a tertiary challenge to race and culture is to abandon tens of millions of our fellow citizens to be victimized, ironically, by yet another form of discrimination. Historian and author Nancy Isenberg argues in her book “White Trash. The 400-Year Untold History of Classism in America” regarding an uncomfortable truth: “…the poor are always with us. A preoccupation with penalizing poor whites reveals an uneasy tension between what Americans are taught to think the country promises — the dream of upward mobility — and the less appealing truth that class barriers almost invariably make that dream unattainable.” This cognitive dissonance has driven the disillusionment of the twentieth-century American identity, with few people having the courage to break the silence of class awareness for fear of being labeled a bigot.
Somehow we’ve duped ourselves into believing that there are only three socioeconomic categories in America: poor, middle-class, and the rich. However, the strata have become more fluid and complex in the last half-century, and even more so in the last twenty years. The new global economy activated a sorting mechanism which has reshuffled the class deck and citizens have begun to wake up only to find that they are no longer a card-carrying member of the middle-class. What started as a thin and permeable layer between the working and middle classes has, through decades of globalist policy, grown to become a class in and of itself with millions of citizens forming its membership.
In the early years of online rage culture, I remember watching YouTube videos of white middle-aged men and young female college students screaming with dueling jabbed fingers. By rewarding engagement, algorithms amplified the bifurcation of political discourse and polarized the nation. The immediate nature of smartphones made documentation and distribution of rage possible within seconds. This "social justice porn" didn't just further ignite ideological conflict, it suffused the psychological burden of catastrophe. Anyone could watch the same video, regardless of their ideological orientation, and get a little dopamine from it (and perhaps a bit of cortisol to boot). They have become a failed proxy, and an impediment to rational discourse. In general, however, rage culture remains proximal to the synthetic dichotomy of liberalism versus conservatism. Justice Democrats' upheaval within the democratic party shows an ideological movement with cosmopolitan roots that values equality, particularly non-whites. What this social justice movement continues to fail at recognizing is that the majority of American citizens who are victims of socioeconomic inequality are, in fact, white. America is more than just a tapestry of multicolored racial constructs. We are a Venn diagram of the human condition characterized by a multitude of sets. Whether these different sets exist is subordinate to which set has the greatest impact on equality. As a nation, we ignore the set of class at our own peril.
As French President Emmanuel Macron legislated the diesel tax in 2017-2018, he acted on what he and his cabinet believed was responsible governance to curb climate change's existential threat. The Paris Agreement was historical in that it was the largest coalition of countries to ever agree on a shared environmental policy. The irony of the Paris Agreement lies in its name. In order to meet carbon emission targets, a cosmopolitan bubble out of touch with the rest of the country enacted a diesel tax that disproportionately affected the working classes. Working and lower class citizens calling themselves gilets jaunes (yellow vests) from the suburban and rural counties flooded into Paris on buses in order to express their outrage in the city streets. In their eyes, Parisians represented the French elite. Educated, overpaid, and pampered. Those living outside the cities believed Parisians lived in a utopian bubble and had little regard for the working class. One yellow vest protester told the French paper Le Monde: “The elites are talking about the end of the world while we’re talking about the end of the month.” Another yellow vest protester was reprimanded by a store employee for smashing his window. “Why are you doing this? I work here. I’m an employee. At least I have a job!” The protester then responded: “Of course you have a job. You live in Paris!"
Watching these scenes unfold on television, I realized the French seemed divided into two realities facing separate versions of the apocalypse. Apocalypse 1 is climate change, which was predicted to occur in slow motion over a century based on empirical evidence and inaccessible academic scrutiny. We are living through Apocalypse 2 right now, the collapse of economic liberty for the working class. Whether it’s the price of chicken, college tuition, or a liter of diesel at the pump, the economic margins in France have become paper thin. Precarious circumstances have made it increasingly difficult to see beyond a single pay cycle. Many French feel that their traditional way of life is under attack by the globalists in Paris.
A similar class showdown was already taking place in parallel with the 2016 presidential election in British society between urban cosmopolitans and the rest of the country (and continues to do so). Once again, corporate media painted a dichotomy in the national discourse. On the left, the discussion was and still is framed as a binary ideological issue based on xenophobia rather than one of class struggle. In spite of blaming the right for their lack of compassion, the left is also forgetting that a key argument for Brexit is that it represents a revolt against a distant and elite ruling class. It is these elites who have lied to them, disenfranchised them and their families, destabilized their job security, and traded the concerns of the lower classes for greater wealth within the larger economic bloc of the European Union. The Brexiteers see the "United States of Europe" as a neo-liberal utopia accessible only to those with adequate credentials or economic mobility. In the British lexicon, the phrase "metropolitan elite" is intuitively associated with those who want to remain in the EU. Those with credentials, higher incomes, and access to social, financial, and cultural capital living within the M25 in London want to continue the European experiment while retaining their right to move freely. People from the working class, who EU remainers define as "low-information", have little interest in European affairs because the EU has never been a tangible market for them. When a British family struggles to make ends meet, Europe might as well be a million miles away. Even if they wanted to move freely throughout Europe, these citizens lack the resources.
In the 2015 general election, twenty-five percent of the UK Independence Party said that they voted as a protest vote against the three establishment parties. This should have been a bellwether for the ruling class but was interpreted as a frustrating aberration. Among the forty-four million registered voters, over thirty-three million participated in the Brexit referendum, the largest act of democracy in British history. Fifty-two percent of these voters decided to leave the EU. While only eight percent of the British public strongly identify with a political party, over forty percent identify with either side of the Brexit debate. Twenty years of oblivious governance and austerity had estranged the ruling class from its working-class constituents. It is not surprising that members of Parliament from every party in both the British and European parliaments spent years undermining the Brexit process in an effort to sabotage the largest democratic vote in British history. In the course of the last few years, many members of the British parliament have slowly walked backwards on their promises to their constituents, deciding that they know what's best for the future. In the opinion of many Brexiteers, the betrayal of a democratic vote by a ruling elite is backed by a cosmopolitan credentialed class that believes the voters who voted for Brexit were not fully aware of what they were voting for and should be given the opportunity to vote again in a second referendum.
As with Brexit, Trump's election was a total and absolute shock to the left, which gave rise to a salivating call for retribution. As a result of Trump's victory, the left erupted into a cornucopia of identity and civility memes. It was this reactionary call to action that flooded the internet to form a nebulous mob hell-bent on undermining a genuine populist movement. Less than 24 hours after the inauguration of the champion of the working class, the largest women's march in American history was organized. It was as if the Democrats and their corporate media distribution system wanted to reiterate how out of touch they were. In this abstract dichotomy, both sides seemed to believe in a ruling elite, although Democrats defined it more specifically to only include white males. The liberal corporate media mocked the inaugural rally for the size of its crowd and belittled a working class victory. In a sense, this dismissal was acceptable because Trump's claim to representation in Washington was illegitimate, as though democracy only justified itself if certain moral values were met. The National Parks Service released the photo of the inaugural crowd to a corporate media feeding frenzy. Despite being ignorant of the significance of an American class uprising, I thought it was a pathetic attempt to undermine Trump's ego.
Eventually, the left's obsession with removing Trump via the specter of collusion with Russia became rabid, and had the advantage of avoiding addressing the issues that motivated his presidency in the first place. The similarity between a sandbagged Brexit and the debacle that was the fizzled Russia scandal smacks of an anti-democratic ethos that is at best disconcerting and at worst dangerous. Trumpism is but one of several modes of Western working-class populism that is beginning to self-realize. We were fortunate that Trump was simply too useless to wield such a powerful conservative mandate. The left should take a long hard look at the true cost that democracy will have to pay for the ridicule it has heaved upon this working class revolt. Our nation risks the rise of a more calculating demagogue until we address the real source of Trumpian resentment.
The Friday following the 2016 election, my wife and I had dinner with some friends. We were all looking forward to letting off some steam and commiserating over the confusing and painful outcome of the election. I remember an emotional discussion about how America had finally shown its true colors as racist and sexist. Under the misguided support of subversive white whispers, we were witnessing a proto-fascist movement. The term "silent majority" had become a liberal dog whistle for those who were bigots but were afraid to speak out for fear of public humiliation. A sweaty demagogue and an online Russian propaganda campaign had fooled the dimwitted bigots. With pitchforks and torches carried to the voting booths, the hoard regressed the country back to the 1950s with a single vote. The echo chamber of the news cycle had convinced us liberals that the most important populist movement in a century was about civility. As I sipped zinfandel and sat among my educated and successful peers in the most expensive city in America, I realized we had missed the central issue. Our long-form essays and demographic analytics of "middle America" had us living in a gilded bubble, indifferent to the needs of the working class and our role in its demise. Crass uncles and cousins had become our shame. The importance of identity had overtaken equal access to education and job security for working poor. Sociology professor and author Frank Furedi writes in his essay "A Perpetual War of Identities" about Stacey Abrams' losing 2018 gubernatorial campaign message: "Her explicit, in-your-face advocacy of identity politics is not just her individual view — rather, it resonates with a wider cultural current that now views appeals to identity as morally superior to appeals to humanity."
As a result of such a devastating blow in 2016, the democratic party reacted like a delirious boxer swinging wildly without landing a solid blow. Hillary Clinton's book, published less than a year after the election, was titled "What Happened" as if somehow the publisher forgot to include a question mark. Attempts to prove that the election was stolen have sucked all the oxygen out of the room, leaving little space for dialogue about the future of the working class. Blue collar and working poor Americans that have supported the middle class for most of the last century are now destined to be left out in the cold by an economic future that moves too quickly. Our socioeconomic gap has grown so wide that it is impossible to hear each other. It seems the democratic party hasn't landed on a message that can appeal simultaneously to the credentialed and working classes. Consequently, the number of precariats is rising. A generation-long populist revolt is taking shape, sharpening its pitchforks for the next round in 2024. Who will be their next target? The ivory towers of the academy with their exorbitant tuition fees who hold the keys to the new middle class?
In many ways, Trump is everything liberals despise. He’s a sexist pig in the age of #MeToo. He’s the racist and entitled white man in the era of black lives matter. He's the post-9/11 Islamophobe. He built walls to keep out the Mexicans, grabs pussy, fucks porn stars, has contempt for the press, and throws rallies to celebrate all of it. Trump is the physical manifestation of the white male id on full display. We are largely helpless in his masterful control of our attention and the unwashed hoard. We want to believe that his voters regret their decision but they don’t. Shaming them feels good. In focusing our disappointment and disgust on a red baseball cap and letting our uncles in Indiana embody the target of our ridicule, there's a catharsis. The thought of wearing a MAGA cap and walking down the street in my own neighborhood in Brooklyn actually terrifies me. You couldn't find a better litmus test for the current political discourse. As Steven Colbert said live to a somber and silent audience during election night as the final results came in: “How did our politics get so poisonous? I think it’s because we overdosed this year, we drank too much of the poison. You take a little bit of it so you can hate the other side and it tastes kinda good. You like how it feels and there’s a gentle high to the condemnation. And you know you’re right, right? You know you’re right.”
It was the media frenzy around the Trumpian revolt that catalyzed my emotional seizures. The whole of my body was saturated with anxiety. Having grown up in a blue-collar broken family in a small town in America, how had I not seen this coming? The blue collar experience has not been much of a part of my life since I moved to New York City. The people that I once knew and grew up with have become an abstract dream fading into the past. Going home for the holidays to visit my family has always been a surreal and awkward experience. There is often ill health, job insecurity, financial stress, unhealthy food, and the silent burden of anxiety. Perhaps it’s just too much real life for me to deal with in such short and intense doses. I find myself returning to the refuge of the airport terminal to return to my metropolis and slipping effortlessly back into the digital economy.
Demagogues have been around since the beginning of time, and Trump is simply a reincarnation of the same cult of personality that John Adams warned us about. They corral the sentiments of the disenfranchised and utilize this energy for their own selfish purposes. One can still smell the swamp and blood wafting off Andrew Jackson and his backwater zombies who, not too long ago, creeped out of the woods to give the powder-wigged dandies a lesson in democracy. The myths conjured by demagogues warp the fabric of democracy and undermine the rational concept of an empathetic and humane society. I believe the only way to break this spell is to do the unexpected. We must have compassion for the precariat who are suffering and unable to pull themselves out of the gravity well of a globalized information economy. They are not struggling for lack of trying, but for lack of an on-ramp. We must resist the urge to point the finger and cast hatred toward others lest we become the very thing we seek to eradicate.
Neuroscientist and primatologist Dr. Robert Sapolsky in his seminal research on the effects of poverty on human health (read: “Sick of Poverty” 2006) makes the argument that although material poverty accounts for about a third of chronic stress and anxiety among the lower socioeconomic classes, inequality is, in fact, the largest contributor to toxic stress. Sapolsky argues that our objective socioeconomic status is no better predictor of stress than our subjective socioeconomic status. “It’s not being poor, it’s feeling poor. It’s a relative feeling of rank in society. Experiencing poverty yet being surrounded by resources.” British social epidemiologist Dr. Richard Wilkinson argues in his book: “Mind the Gap: Hierarchies, Health, and Human Evolution” that economic inequality is unnatural, relatively recent in human history, and is a major contributor to human mental and physical health. This perceptual social experience is amplified in capitalist societies like the United States where we are raised and indoctrinated with the mythology that everyone can grow up to succeed, otherwise, you have no one to blame but yourself. This toxic cycle synthesizes the slow infusion of resentment that eventually becomes a social outburst in the form of political revolt, revolution, or even violence.
The politics of the twenty-first century require a more holistic approach to human nature in order to maintain stability and forge a more equitable society. If tens of millions of citizens in Western civilization are feeling disenfranchised by their governments and are experiencing their own relative inequality, how can we possibly expect them to embrace radically progressive and academic policies? Guy Standing, a co-founder of the modern universal basic income movement and professor of development studies at the School of London noted in his recent response to the results of Brexit and the Trump election: “Without security and without building a system with everyone having security, the[se] inequalities… will increase the probability that someone like Donald Trump will win. This is because too many people will be suffering from insecurity and will lose the capacity to be rational. This is a real fear that we should all have.” Even if America and Europe were to purge conservative populism via a progressive tidal wave of retribution at the ballot box, the Trumpians, the Brexiteers, and the Yellow-vesters are still going to be here in the next election. Rather than ridiculing the symptoms of a global economy that we all helped create, society would be better served by an idealism tempered in empathy on the whole; even for those who we feel deserve it the least. To misdiagnose the origins of populism is to erode the voice of those who depend on democracy the most.
Human suffering, regardless of its form, is relative to the reality within which it is measured. The poverty experienced by a poor family in America, if quantifiable by some form of scoring mechanism, couldn’t possibly compare to the poverty experienced by a poor family in the slums of rural India or the streets of City Solais. However, as leading research in human health indicates, it’s the relative nature of inequality that is the greatest determinant of human suffering within the socioeconomic equation. The working class is afraid of what the future holds, and I can’t say that I blame them. By tightening their grip on the keys to higher education, the ruling class are essentially governing upward mobility for the masses in an effort to protect their own future. Those who are born into or trapped within the lower economic strata are statistically destined to remain there and it’s only going to become more difficult for them over the next half-century. These people are my mother, my grandmother, and my uncle. I love them not just because they are my family, but because it is necessary. We can’t pick and choose who deserves compassion and who doesn’t or who should be seen but not heard. The human condition is such that where there is a deficit of compassion, regardless of its ideological origin, we will only ever find suffering.