DEALING WITH STATUS IN ORDER TO ADDRESS THE AMERICAN POLITICAL DIVIDE
Why have our political divisions become so huge and so nasty? Is it greed, a matter of the haves wanting to gain a greater share of the national wealth at the expense of the have-nots? After all, widening inequality is a reality and the American Dream is out of reach for most people. Or does political division reflect something cultural, our need for status? Are such strong political passions stimulated by status competition and the need to affirm one’s identity?
My argument is that we identify ourselves in opposition to others, consciously or unconsciously: I am who I am because I am not who you are. This identity concern is at the bottom of our quest for status: I am worthy because you are unworthy. The political divide has worsened in recent years because the gap between economic winners and losers has widened and status differences have expanded. So the professional and white working class are squaring off against each other more and more and indulging in mutual blame. Professionals are defensive due to increasing social and economic inequality which they benefit from but which conflicts with their liberal political views. They like to blame the situation on the white nationalism of the working class which votes against its own economic interests. And the white working class often sees liberals as maintaining an unjust system, doing little to change it, and looking down on them in the process, ample reasons for feeling resentful and seeking political revenge.
My recommendation for dealing with the political divide is to stop blaming other groups for the nation’s problems and to do some self-inquiry. Stop fighting with those on the other end of the political spectrum. It is then possible to seek common values and to acknowledge that differences can enrich rather than divide. I will show how liberals and conservatives can each make distinctive contributions to our political dialogue. What is at least equally important, though, is to take back power from the systems and people that wield it. Self-inquiry liberates energy for courageously opposing systems that no longer serve the country and for building and creating. After all, things cannot continue as they are without our cooperation.
I will first take a look at what status is and why it is so pervasive and powerful. Then I will examine the tangled relationship between culture, economics, and politics in postindustrial societies. A particular concern will be to understand the effects of affluence on values and how this has affected recent political dynamics. This exploration gives us a context for understanding the role of status-seeking in American society and how it influences our political reality. Then my focus will shift to the political outlooks of the white working class and the professional class, showing how their competition for status drives much of American politics, what is often called the “culture wars.” Instead of viewing culture in isolation from class conflict, I will situate it within changing economic conditions. The crucial role of race in this status competition will also be highlighted. Then I will suggest a way to lift American politics to a better place and what it will require from all of us.
What Is Status?
What is status and what makes it so important and all-pervasive? Cecelia Ridgeway, sociologist and author of Status: Why Is It Everywhere? Why Does It Matter? (2019) says that status is “basically the esteem that other people have for us, how we are seen by others, how we’re evaluated, the worth they attribute to us in the situation.” She points out that we need a way to assign status so that we can cooperate with each other and achieve our goals. Since we are interdependent, when we act together we have to organize how we are going to do it. There must be leaders and a division of roles ideally based on competence. The problem of racial and class inequality arises because our group membership is an important basis for assigning who will lead, have higher status, and be the most handsomely rewarded. We rely on common-sense beliefs that have developed over time and apply them in daily life whenever we make decisions about status. And these beliefs are often based on stereotypes about gender, race, class, age.
The way we make our decisions about status can change; the status hierarchies are not set in stone. For example, gender hierarchies have begun to shift, although the top leadership positions are still overwhelmingly in the hands of white males. But class and racial hierarchies have been more resistant to change. Take the example of race in the United States. First there was the material reality of slavery where total control over the enslaved made it seem that they were less competent, had less to contribute, and were incapable of leadership. Since black people were not allowed to develop most of their abilities, it appeared that they inherently lacked these abilities. It was a self-fulfilling prophecy. Once black people had more opportunities, they quickly developed many skills. But it was only around the time of the civil rights movement in the 1950s that they were able to start using their abilities and skills to alter the structures that were responsible for their bottom position in the status hierarchy.
Another important point is that cultures award status according to different criteria. For example, in Europe the skills that the working class possesses, that is, the ability to make things and produce things is more highly valued than in the United States where the emphasis is on mental performance and the ability to use symbols. American workers have experienced less appreciation and lower status over time. This is one reason why the morale of the American working class is so low. In addition, since the 1960s, the well-paying jobs that once enabled a blue-collar worker to be a proud breadwinner have largely disappeared. What then can a manual worker do in circumstances which might badly damage self-esteem? By recognizing that the status hierarchy was set up by fallible people, a worker can reject the idea that self-worth depends on one’s status. It is also self-affirming for workers to make efforts to raise the status of their group by joining unions and becoming politically active.
Now that we have an idea about how status is going to be viewed in this essay, we can explore the big picture. What is the relation between economics and culture which includes status concerns? How does politics reflect culture? What political realignments have been occurring due to cultural shifts?
Culture, Economics, Politics
In Cultural Evolution (2018), Ronald Inglehart views the exploding political divisions within Western societies as partly due to the increasing popularity of postmaterialist values. This shift has threatened the way of life of the people who are left behind by the new social developments. As a result, they have mobilized to stop the further erosion of the old way of life. These socially conservative groups want to preserve familiar values and ways of life in the face of accelerated technological development. As a result, they resist newer cultural trends such as personal expression and autonomy, environmental protection, tolerance of outgroups including immigrants, gender equality, and support for democratic participation and institutions.
The increasing strength of rightwing populism is also the result of increasing economic insecurity as the economic gains of the past several decades have gone almost entirely to the upper ten percent of the population. In contrast, the less educated have seen their real incomes decline, and a sharp decline in their relative socioeconomic position has occurred. Inglehart concludes: “Cultural backlash explains why given individuals support xenophobic populist authoritarian movements — but declining existential security explains why support for these movements is greater now than it was 30 years ago.”
Inglehart has raised some of the most controversial issues concerning historical change and given us his answers. The increasing strength of postmaterialist values has led to a reaction that advocates going back to the way things were in the past. And the rise of postmaterialism is itself the product of a time when the people growing up could take their survival for granted. After World War II, since many people felt economically secure, they accepted postmaterialist values. But in the mid-1970s, more people in postindustrial societies have experienced economic anxiety which has led them to support materialist values.
Although economic trends are the underlying reason for cultural change, culture also affects economics by leading to new political alignments. And so the rightwing reaction against the cultural ascendance of postmaterialism has led to greater support for authoritarian and zenophobic politics which weakens the liberal and leftwing parties. The decline of labor unions that fought for economic equality has also weakened the progressive parties. Since these parties have supported the redistribution of wealth, their decline leads to greater inequality which then produces more economic insecurity and intensifies the rightward turn. Another important factor is that postmaterialists put more emphasis on cultural issues in comparison with wealth and income redistribution. Now that they are very influential within the progressive parties, there is less political pressure from the left to resist rising economic inequality.
It is also clear from Iglehart’s data that economic factors like income and unemployment do not have a great effect upon support for authoritarian populist parties and leaders. In the United States, for example, the percentage of people who supported Trump with yearly family incomes over $100,000 was only slightly greater than those whose family incomes were under $50,000. But there has been a great cleavage between the younger and the older generations. In a March 2017 poll, 20% of those under 30 viewed Trump positively, whereas 52% of people 65 or older supported Trump. In the case of Europe, Iglehart makes the following generalization. “Authoritarian populist support is concentrated among the older generation, the less educated, men, the religious and the ethnic majority — groups that hold traditional cultural values.”
A Political Realignment
The model that Inglehart provides concerning the interrelation of economic, cultural, and political factors is useful for understanding contemporary Western societies and politics. A political realignment has been taking place since about 1968 when the postmaterialists who grew up after the war began having their first political impact. Since then a new political axis has emerged in Western industrialized nations. We need to look at the earlier situation, though, in order to understand the shifts that have taken place.
During the time of scarcity, a Marxist explanation of political cleavages on the basis of economic interests was accurate. In Germany, the Democratic Socialists supported by the working-class were on the left and promoted income redistribution, while the Free Democrats and the Christian Democrats on the right were supported by the more prosperous social groups and advocated lower taxes and less government regulation.
In West Germany, the environmentalist Green party entered the parliament in 1983. It was supported by those with postmaterialist values and, in addition to environmental protection, it stood for ethnic diversity and gender equality. In reaction to such cultural openness, people with a materialist orientation enabled a Republikaner party emphasizing xenophobic and authoritarian values to gather strength and by the early 1990s its influence on German politics was great enough to bring about restrictions on political asylum and the entrance of foreigners.
Although a two-party system in the United States hinders new political parties from emerging, Inglehart points out that in 2016 New Politics movements were able to stimulate major uprisings within both the Republican and Democratic parties. Domald Trump, with the support of the older and more insecure voters, won the nomination for president, and Bernie Sanders, backed by younger and more educated voters, strongly challenged for the Democratic presidential nomination.
The American Political Scene
The key features of the American political scene are the strength and depth of the divisions, the increasing fragility of decades-long alliances, and rising populist challenges to the dominant liberal consensus. In broad outline, Inglehart’s model makes clear the reasons for the political divisions, the new political alignment, and liberalism’s increasing weakness, but I want to look more closely at these events to understand them in greater depth, while showing how history and culture have influenced US politics. In the process, I will clarify the role that status plays in dividing people along political lines.
There are two issues that Inglehart does not address. The first is the ways in which class interests and race affect the political divide and how they are related. The second is whether any ethical advance has taken place among the professionals and the managers. The upper-middle-class groups have grown in number and now that they are less concerned with survival issues, it is worth examining whether they have developed greater empathy for those with lower status.
Let me start with some broad generalizations to situate the roles of class and race. I will describe the economic positions of the black and the white poor as a basis for understanding the roles that race and class play in their lives. This will also set the stage for exploring how race is used to divide poor Americans and keep them from organizing to promote their class interests.
White working-class people over the past half-century have experienced not just relative economic decline but also greater social isolation and psychological pain as a result of feeling more marginal and less valued within American society. Much of this is due to the decline of the manufacturing sector of the economy which once provided well-paying unionized work for white males and, to a much less degree, black males. These men were able to decently support their families and they could look forward to their children having an easier and more affluent life than their own. Their self-respect and optimism enabled them to endure the boredom, monotony, and servility of blue-collar work in the manufacturing and mining industries, an endurance that many Americans no longer possess.
For African Americans who have remained impoverished over the past 50 years, there is beyond their economic struggles the pain that comes from having to deal with racial stereotypes, low social rank, and extreme social isolation. It is hard to maintain morale when one’s family and neighborhood have experienced several generations of lack of opportunity, poverty, social breakdown, and neglect. The deck has been stacked against the black poor for a very long time so it takes a lot of faith and optimism for them to persevere. The black working class has also experienced hard times, since the loss of manufacturing jobs overseas took away a source of mobility for the black poor. It also resulted in keeping the average income levels of black people from rising closer to white levels and the wealth gap between the two groups has continued to increase.
The Politics of the White Working Class
Many working-class whites think that African Americans since the 1960s have been given too much at their expense, a belief that has been part of a Republican divide-and-conquer strategy to set whites against blacks and elevate racial divisions over class solidarity. However, less affluent sectors of all colors have experienced a decline in their economic fortunes, while the upper middle class of managers and professionals, and especially the business elites, have greatly benefited economically. The top five percent were able to increase their income from 1970 to 2018 by three-and-a-half times that of the rest of the population.
Globalization is one reason for greater wealth and income inequality. Imports from nations where workers are paid lower wages keeps wages down in the US and also leads to greater unemployment in the manufacturing sector. But the shift from manufacturing to a knowledge economy also favors the capitalist and professional classes. What’s more, the capitalist class launched a successful attack against the professional elite under the banner of lower taxes, getting rid of the welfare state, and reducing the role of government. A majority of rural and suburban whites took their side since such policies were viewed as favoring hard-working white people rather than black people looking for government handouts.
It is not constructive to focus animosity on Donald Trump and his followers, especially the perpetrators of the Capitol riot. The problem is far deeper — the conditions that make it possible for demagogues like Trump to win over poor whites through appeals to white nationalism. Of course, those demagogues also promise economic benefits by reversing the trend toward globalization and bringing back manufacturing jobs that went abroad long ago and coal-mining jobs in an industry that causes environmental harm. Even though Trump did not deliver on such promises, his support of working-class complaints and the extreme contempt he engendered in much of the professional class was enough to gain him the allegiance of many working-class whites, and, among some, even their unswerving loyalty.
I don’t want to fall into the trap here of viewing all white working-class people as easily manipulated by elites. This broad-brush view is tempting for those who define themselves as well-educated and aware; it gives them a reason to justify their feeling superior to the white working-class. A 2018 study concluded that the white working class could be viewed in terms of five political categories: those who were reliably Democratic, 33 percent; those who leaned Democratic, 7 percent; true independents made up 10 percent; those who leaned Republican, 7 percent; and those who were reliably Republican, 44 percent.
So it is important to make clear that when I am referring to the white working-class, I am singling out the 50% who tend to identify themselves as Republicans. These are the people who deserted the Democratic Party from the 1960s onward as Democrats became identified with the civil rights movement and Republicans supported anti-black policies that won over many poor whites. The psychological underpinning of racism is the feeling among these poorer whites that no matter how bad their economic situation and social status, at least they are above black people. This has been the bargain that the American capitalist class made with poor white people in the 17th century.
The basic needs of economically desperate people include having enough food for their children and being able to take care of elderly family members. In the midst of a downward economic slide, poor whites would like to maintain some vestiges of dignity if possible. One way to salvage their sinking social status and self-esteem is to have their values affirmed. Republican support against secularism, abortion, gay rights, feminism, immigration, and affirmative action has won over large numbers of the less affluent who are Christian nationalists.
American society should create conditions so that the number of postmaterialists will increase, since economic security makes it easier to focus on developing mind and spirit. But it is not sufficient to bring about the end of racism, since better economic fortunes and a rise in social status alone will not lead people to become antiracist, although they often become less anti-black. Antiracism does not mean to refrain from overtly racist behaviors while allowing the racial status quo to continue. I want to emphasize that no amount of economic equality will lead to greater racial equality without a corresponding inner transformation. The inner work needs to be done. After all, as I will show later, white postmaterialists have not become antiracist despite their economic security.
The Status of the Professional Class
In societies like America that base status on money to a large degree, the relentless pursuit of wealth is driven by status needs. This money fixation helps to explain the political motivations of many in the capitalist class, although more recently the competition has shifted away from securing wealth to the manner in which it is given away: philanthropy. But what about the political motivations of the professional class?
The professional class has ritually affirmed the identity politics of racially and culturally marginalized groups in return for their support of Democratic Party candidates in elections. Such support enables the professional class to maintain its cultural leadership and elite status as well as its economically favorable position while carrying out centrist policies that are not sufficient to bring about racial or class equality. By allying with racial and cultural minorities, they feel moral superiority as the party of humanity in favor of liberty and justice for all. This is one important way in which they gain status and satisfy their need for self-esteem. And they can look down on working-class whites opposed to racial equality and the economic elites opposed to narrowing class differences.
As Thomas Frank has pointed out in Listen, Liberal (2016), there are two parallel hierarchies in the United States, the first one is based on money and made up of the business elites who control the Republican Party, and the second one is based on status and led by the professional class which controls the Democratic Party. Both act in their own class interests. The professional class tends to be fiscally conservative and socially liberal; it feels contempt toward working people and organized labor. These are the Clinton Democrats who pursue centrist policies that benefit the professional class but not the working class.
Frank wonders why under Obama, surely a liberal president, inequality continued to expand. The matter is complicated by Obama’s health care legislation which did actually help some poor people but fell far short of what was actually needed. Of course, Democrats can say that it was Republican opposition that prevented Obama from going further. But since the 1960s, well-paying jobs and status have depended on successfully navigating the educational meritocracy, that is, graduating from a top university. It wasn’t always the case that you had to have a college degree in order to get ahead.
It is worth going back to More Like Us, a 1989 book by James Fallows which made the case that the problem with the United States was that it was departing from its own national strengths. The subheading of the book was “Making America Great Again.” Remember, this was a time when Japanese industries were outcompeting and pulverizing American ones. Yet, after spending several years in Japan, Fallows recommended that America remain faithful to its own traditions rather than adopt Japanese institutions and practices. He felt that the United States had become a stagnant society due to its heavy emphasis on credentials and educational testing which restricted entry into the professions and privileged wealthy families. The country no longer encouraged social mobility, reinvention, and immigration; what had once been an open society based on practical ability had lost its way.
If opportunity and social mobility have been closed off to many Americans during the past several decades, it is because the professional class has been furthering its own economic interests at the expense of those less advantaged by birth, wealth, and status. Not only that but the professional class also looks down on those who have not had the same advantages and do not share the same values. Professionals are part of the top 20% economically and have benefited from the current political economy. Clearly, a postmaterialist orientation does not mean that such people are doing the inner work and are willing to promote the common good.
The professional class includes corporate managers who may have Republican leanings so we are not only speaking about Democrats. As the sociologist Robert Bellah and his colleagues pointed out in their influential Habits of the Heart (1985), Americans are now mostly utilitarian (practical) or expressive (therapeutic) individualists. The practical individualists have an older economic orientation and are often materialists, despite their having satisfied survival needs. The expressive individualists have a psychological or therapeutic outlook and are more reliably postmaterialist in lifestyle.
In the view of Bellah and associates, the eclipse of the biblical and republican (civic) individualism that was prevalent in the early days of the republic has led to negative results. Since individuals are no longer viewed as interdependent and as realizing their identity through a community, freedom is endangered. The newer forms of individualism remove the social protections that limit the destructive potential of viewing the self in isolation from others. Therefore, the earlier forms of individualism need to be revived in order to recreate a more helping and caring society.
The practical or economic individualists believe that reason is the avenue to the highest truth but often use reason to provide the means to achieve their ultimately irrational goals, such as making an unlimited amount of money. They may not take into account the ways in which pursuit of short-term self-interest is harmful to them in the long run. Greed often motivates them to accumulate money and money provides them with high status among people with materialist values. Whether liberal or conservative, their faith is in reason, science, and progress. They feel powerful and heroic by controlling nature and others, whereas looking within is viewed as too passive and as offering illusory rewards. Their personal moral code is based on pursuing their own economic self-interest which they assume will contribute to the good of the society as a whole. Unfettered capitalism is seen as creating greater wealth which ultimately benefits all. These are the entrepreneurs, top managers, and some technocrats who oversee the scientific, technological, military, and economic domains.
Those who follow the therapeutic paths view the inner world as the key to bringing about changes that will better people’s lives. They see feeling and intuition as key parts of the self that must be expressed to reach one’s full human potential. But they are not able to get very far in many cases. One reason is that they often think that what makes them feel good is the only thing that counts, so they focus on the inner world to the exclusion of the outer one. This mindset can make them very self-centered since they believe that their own self-realization automatically benefits the entire society. Therapeutic individualists often support the mainstream politics of the Democratic Party. Desiring to keep their options open while pursuing self-realization, they highly value personal autonomy. For them, status arises from having the values of caring and sharing that set the moral tone of American society. Status points also come from upholding cosmopolitan values and being open to the entire world.
Both wings of the professional class are contributing to the very difficult situation that the US and the world are in at the moment. They support political policies which further the economic interests of their own class rather than contribute to the common good. At the same time, they do not recognize that this is what they are doing. The main difference between them is that conservative managers, like the capitalist class generally, support policies that keep non-white people in their place. They oppose identity politics in exchange for the vote of white people who vote Republican. In contrast, liberal professionals take the opposite route in order to gain the backing of disadvantaged groups for the Democratic Party
The Rural Heartland
Is there a way forward? James and Deborah Fallows in Our Towns: A 100,000 Mile Journey into the Heart of America (2018) think so. In their view, the problem with today’s America is that people in the coastal regions do not realize how well many of the other parts of the country are doing. Many local communities facing adversity have successfully adapted to their situations. Although at the national level the country is becoming more divided, polarized, and ungovernable, the tendency has been for local communities to take highly practical approaches when making decisions about their future. They may mistrust the national government but faith in their local governments has been increasing. The country is moving forward locally and regionally in terms of civic governance, immigration, talent dispersal, manufacturing, downtowns, and conservation. America is remaking itself, except at the national level.
These observations point us in a different direction. Rural people want to take their life in their own hands, rather than being told what to do by the national government, which is led by liberal elites with a distorted view of the country’s heartland. Losing well-paying jobs in middle age due to technological change or globalization is demoralizing, but young people are finding or building new opportunities in both agriculture and manufacturing. They are also contributing to a politics of solution rather than fueling a backlash of resentment and bitterness. American creativity resides in people who are often viewed as peripheral to the fate of the nation. From the Fallows’s perspective, America is becoming itself again.
Of course, there is a real problem in the rural areas, as the Fallows team acknowledges in the case of older people who have suffered due to economic change. But they ignore the cultural dimension which was analyzed in Frank’s What’s the Matter with Kansas? (2004). For Frank, a backlash was sweeping the country in which many rural people saw themselves as victims of the liberal establishment so they enthusiastically lined up behind right-wing candidates. They believed liberal elites were threatening Christian values by supporting abortion and gay marriage and destroying individual freedom by imposing gun control. In their view, liberals controlled the media and the culture and were inundating the country with messages of pleasure, sex, opposition to religion, and hostility toward traditional family values.
From a status standpoint, these rural people feel marginalized in the national conversation. Their outlook is viewed as backward and out-of-date. But their values may be quite forward-looking. They are opposed to bigness and willing to cooperate at the local level where people can play a role as democratic citizens within a community that cares about all its people. The religious people among them are often evangelical and embrace Christian nationalism. They may oppose giving equal rights to people outside their own religious and ethnic group. The religion that many of them cherish may be characterized by city people as “fundamentalist”: narrow-minded, intolerant, restricting. When liberals make quick judgments of a negative kind about these people, they fuel the politics of resentment.
The status competition between conservatives, mostly rural, and liberals, mostly urban, often has a class element as working class people and professionals square off against each other. The culture wars that involve these two classes should be seen as status competition because status confers self-esteem. It gives us a feeling of worth: we are not insignificant beings destined to perish who count for nothing in this vast universe. But the winning of status is ultimately destructive because it requires people to proclaim their dislike of the other class as the price of belonging. Many liberals and conservatives squander their energies in cultural and electoral politics designed to produce victory and vindication rather than a better life for all. Courage is needed to do self-inquiry and to let go of the customs and institutions that do not serve us. Then we can design a political system that is not based on status competition.
A More Just and Peaceful Society
Self-inquiry requires us to reach deeply into the well of our inner values. Without self-inquiry, it is difficult to get free from the need to feel superior to others. We have a sense of lacking something, of not being good enough, of being unworthy, and of being subject to decline and death. To feel that we count for something, we become very attached to categories that distinguish people on the basis of race, class, gender, sexuality, religion, or politics. They are the source of our identity and the vehicle of our self-esteem.
We need heroes so we join powerful groups to feel less subject to the merciless whims of fate. In other words, we engage in status competition. The need to overcome feelings of insignificance and vulnerability makes it clear why postmaterialists are not ushering in a peaceful and just society. Ultimately, overcoming race and class divisions requires inner development so that we stop comparing ourselves with others and no longer define our group identity in opposition to that of other groups. True status and self-esteem come from oneself, not others.
It comes down to a question of empowerment. Have we done the inner work so that we are courageous enough to step into our own power and become active citizens? In this individual effort, we are supported by our community. When others become active in community service, nonviolent protest, and the creation of alternative institutions, we feel encouraged and are motivated to join in. Independence is a good thing when we make use of our opportunities and actively create our own lives and the kind of society we want rather than leave the decisions to those at the top of the pyramid. But it requires a recognition of our interdependence — we are in the same boat together. We need each other and no single person can bring about a better world. The challenge is to let go of the need for status that comes at the expense of others. Can we love ourselves so much that we don’t need to have a higher status than those whom we identify as different? Can cultural differences be the source of enrichment and mutual learning rather than division?
The specific political challenge at the deepest level is to no longer identify with our ideology and values against theirs. Many of us identify ourselves with what we see as the good and oppose the evil. We, the good people, strive for victory over evil and set in motion cycles of bitterness and revenge. The creative way to handle a conflict is not to take one side against the other but to integrate the pairs of opposites within a more inclusive framework. We keep the contradictory ideas in our mind at the same time rather than insist that one side must be right and the other side wrong. In this way we have a larger repertoire from which to draw on when we make political choices and take political action.
Take the example of the rural person who values community and localism and the urban resident who emphasizes the importance of individual autonomy and being cosmopolitan. In this case, each side has something important to contribute but neither side has a monopoly on the truth. Listening to the other side brings greater tolerance as the ingroup starts to understand what the people on the other side are all about and why they value what they do. Then it becomes harder to reduce them to a caricature and see them as an enemy. The in-group members may even be open to rethinking their own views or at the very least to stop seeing their way as the only way. This is why dialogue is vital in a democratic society.
But how many of us who benefit from the economic system are willing to go against our class interests, give up our privilege, and take positions that would help those who are continually falling further and further behind? Before Donald Trump was elected, I didn’t give these issues very much thought, and only then did I begin to investigate class issues a little more deeply and reflect more on my own politics. I also felt the need to get a better understanding of the relationship between race and class. Most of all, I had to look more closely at my own motivations as a white male professional.
Am I being honest about the extent to which my life is still governed by status concerns? Do I recognize the ways in which the political economy, though it may benefit me, oppresses working-class people of all races who try to gain a fairer share of economic and status rewards? Once I acknowledge that I am thinking and acting in ways that hurt other people, I can choose to act in individually responsible ways like not wasting water, not relying on fossil fuels for electricity, composting, buying organic food, and creating less pollution. But even more important is to bring about structural changes that will help to usher in a more just society. As Gandhi pointed out long ago during the movement for India’s independence, the Indian people were allowing the British to rule them. The same situation exists today in the United States as well as in many other postindustrial societies.
The various systems with their status distinctions rely on disempowered and passive individuals to carry out their mandates. Yet so many of those people would prefer a different way of organizing their world. But we need to look for solutions in the right place. As Charles Eisenstein points out in “There’s No One Driving the Bus (2022),” we can start by no longer blaming some other group for our problems. It does no good to see the managers of the federal government or large corporations as evil. “Because in their experience, they and their colleagues are not evil people at all. They are good people. They display all the symbols of virtue. They abide by the norms of their in-group. They believe what they all agree a respectable person believes. Anyone who accuses them of villainy seems ridiculous.”
The bureaucrats and managers do what they do because they are part of a system; they are influenced by their overall circumstances. When they encounter events, they interpret them according to the biases of their in-group. We should not automatically attribute their actions to their evil character. There are evil people who lust for power and may occupy high positions, but they are a minority. An irony is that the bureaucrats and managers often feel like they have little power within the organization and are just reacting to situations or doing damage control. Their lives are also not necessarily happier than those of people with lower status and less wealth. They may be faced with scarcity of time, experience much stress, and at a deep level dislike the impersonality of their organization.
The reflex to blame others for our plight comes from the same source as the belief that others can fix the situation. What they have in common is that they absolve the ordinary person of any responsibility. When we believe that there are only perpetrators and victims, we reinforce authoritarian systems and foreclose the possibility of democracy. Voting for those who promise us higher status is not the realization of the vision of democracy that has inspired people to struggle for political freedom. Instead of blaming the system for not giving us the status we think we deserve, we can act in concert, build community, initiate change, and create the space for new ways of being to emerge. Take up our power and choose to actively participate, using this power wisely by creating a just world that brings peace of mind. Take up the challenge of being an active citizen in a democratic community and enjoy the fruits.
