Posts

Economic Elites Drive Trumpian Motion

/8 Comments/in /by

Posts in this series; some of the terms I use are described more fully in these posts.
Trumpian Motion
Negative Responses to Trumpian Motion
Economic Elites Drive Trumpian Motion
Beneficiaries of Trumpian Motion
Notes on Trumpian Motion Series

=====================

The driving force behind Trumpian Motion is the economically dominant class. In this post I look for an explanation, using the framework provided by Pierre Bourdieu as described in David Swartz’ book Culture and Power: The Sociology of Pierre Bourdieu.

Bourdieu studies the way social classes reproduce themselves so that the dominated class accepts domination as a fair outcome based on their lack of personal merit;, and the dominant class sees its power as natural and not the result of their birth, selection and grooming. A good example of the latter is that the academically marginal at best W. Bush got into Yale.

Bourdieu describes several kinds of capital, economic, social, cultural, religious and others. The most important is economic capital, and cultural capital is second. Cultural capital is a form of power based on “… verbal facility, general cultural awareness, aesthetic preferences, information about the school system, and educational credentials…. P. 75.

Swartz offers this summary of Bourdieu’s thinking:

Bourdieu considers conflict to be the fundamental dynamic of all social life. At the heart of all social arrangements is the struggle for power. One of Bourdieu’s key claims is that this struggle is carried out over symbolic as well as material resources. Moreover, it is Bourdieu’s fundamental claim that cultural resources, such as education credentials, have come to function as a kind of capital, and thereby have become a new and distinct source of differentiation in modern societies. P. 136.

The struggles Bourdieu discusses take place in fields. Fields are arenas governed by formal and informal rules of struggle. The field of power has fewer and less clear rules, but it is the most important. P.138. Bourdieu thinks economic capital is engaged in a struggle with cultural capital for domination in the field of power. This field operates as a source of differentiation and ranking in all fields, including political power.

Domination arises from power. The possessors of cultural power (the terms capital and power mean the same thing) have the ability to be dominant in some areas. Thus, artists, physical scientists, social scientists, museum curators, movie-makers, writers, teachers and others possess cultural power. Cultural power includes symbolic power, which controls the way people understand and respond to the social world. Symbolic power manifests itself in all areas of our social lives. I’ll use two examples: our concepts of justice and fairness; and our understanding of the physical universe.

The dominant culture in this country has changed over the last 50 years in the areas of justice and fairness. For example, when Social Security passed, it was designed to give as little as possible to African-Americans, and that was necessary to gain support from Southern Democratic party legislators . That wouldn’t have happened a few years ago (I’m less sure about today). The same thing is true of other forms of discrimination. So, that’s one expression of cultural symbolic power.

The second example of cultural power arises from the hard sciences and technology. Our understanding of the physical universe has increased dramatically, giving rise to huge fortunes and at the same time showing the dangers of the new understandings.

In the US, the cultural elites (those with a lot of cultural power) quit struggling with the economic elites (those with financial assets) and accepted the domination of capitalism. The economic elites largely quit struggling with the cultural elites over almost all matters of justice and fairness, including racism, sexism, and LGBTQ issues.

Economic elites have a mixed record with physical scientists and technology. In general they support it, but in specific instances they attack. For example, we knew from the 1920s on that leaded gasoline was dangerous. The history of getting lead out of gasoline is ugly, as the petroleum and auto industries lied and denied that danger. That opposition was controlled. Industry claimed to use science in its defense, and pretended to rely on their own fraudulent studies and false assertionas about defects in opposition studies.

As our knowledge grew and time passed, there were more and more examples of the free market poisoning the planet and building unsafe products and then lying and denying to cover it up. Just look at seat belts, the Ford Pinto, smog, water pollution, tobacco, other carcinogens, estrogen toxicity, and global warming. The scientists and technicians who study these things have been shouting into the wind about all of them, but industrial giants and their captive organizations fight back with increasing shrillness and personal attacks. With global warming, the attacks have broadened out because the science is so widespread across disciplines, and it now seems that the economic elites don’t care if they wreck the scientific community and discredit scientific methodology.

These attacks would not happen without the implicit assent of the economic elites.

Bourdieu says that economic power requires some other justification for its legitimacy. P. 91. In the Middle Ages that justification came from religion, which linked Monarchs and the aristocracy to divine will. Today it comes from cultural power, and from symbolic power. Or at least, it did before the rise of neoliberalism, a creation of the cultural elites in the field of economics. They purport to have a complete grasp of human nature. They tell the broad public that the market is wonderful and will make everything great. Meanwhile, economists whisper in the ears of the economic elite that they are the natural leaders blessed by the Market; it’s a modern version of Calvinism. Economic elites no longer need the cultural elites to provide legimation, because they are selected by the supreme computer. And so they feel free to attack the holders of cultural capital, to make them the enemy.

And what’s the goal of the rich? As we learn from James Winters and Benjamin Page, the rich have three goals in common:

1. Protecting and preserving wealth
2. Insuring the unrestricted use of wealth
3. Acquiring more wealth.

They don’t want any interference from anyone, especially the 99%. I’d like to think that there are responsible rich people, but I can’t think of a single example of any of the .01% effectively objecting to any effort of their peers to benefit themselves or the entire group of rich people.

The truce is dead. The economic elites are attacking the cultural elites. The cultural elites ignored the rise of the rich too long, and now lack the capacity to fight back effectively. And that’s why we are suffering from Trumpian Motion. It hides the gluttonous rich behind a wall of noise and fear.

Culture and Neoliberalism

/18 Comments/in /by

My last series summarizes the state of my neoliberalism project. It turns out that I have mostly focused on the economics of neoliberalism. Another aspect of the project was to learn how we as a society got caught up in neoliberalism. None of the work I’ve done so far has given me much of an answer to that, let alone the question of how we get out of this mess.

That part was relatively straightforward. I had a basic understanding of how to read and learn about neoliberalism. I have a background in dealing with the actual economy; I knew most of the mainstream economic ideas from College where I took several courses; and from continued readings over the years; and I’m reasonably fluent in college-level math. When it comes to culture as a field of study I’m pretty much at ground zero, and to tell the truth, I was surprised to see the emphasis on culture in Critical Theory. So, this will be a different kind of reading.

I’m going to start with Pierre Bourdieu, a French Sociologist of the second half of the 20th Century. Bourdieu and Foucault are perhaps the best known French thinkers of that period today, as existentialism and indeed most straight philosophy have fallen out of intellectual favor. Their kind of thinking is not that common in the US; we don’t exactly have an intellectual class, and we never really valued the life of the mind. We have a lot of experts and a lot of smart and well-trained people, but they are rooted in specific fields, and the number who think usefully beyond their areas is small. Historically, the intellectual was a recognized class in France, and even today many French politicians aspire to the title. Can you imagine a US politician who wants to be thought of that way? We elect regular folk just bursting with common sense, which probably explains something about our inability to solve problems.

But there is another factor: David Brooks. I read parts of Brooks’ New York Times column regularly as a check on my own ambitions. One common form of column is “I read this article and it proves conservatives like me are right and liberals are killing society.” Here’s a lovely example of High Brooksism. I think wants to say that neoliberalism is a bad theory because it emphasizes the isolated individual and rejects communal and social values, but he can’t because neoliberalism is at the heart of conservativism. Too bad, because it would enable him to criticize Republicans and most Democrats, and it would move him outside the boundaries of “both sides do it” and into an open policy space. But, as he says, people over 56 years old like him are clueless, so we get this absurd conclusion from the incoherent mess above it:

Congressional Republicans think a successful tax bill will thwart populism. Mainstream Democrats think the alienation problem will go away if we redistribute the crumbs a bit more widely. Washington policy wonks build technocratic sand castles that keep getting swept away in the cultural tides.

I absolutely don’t want to be like Brooks with his unmoored rationalizations and his pretense of intellectualism. My goal is to see what other people think and try to make sense of it. To that end, I think someone who sees things from a perspective outside my own culture will give me more distance, as was the case with my earlier readings.

I first heard of Bourdieu some time ago, I don’t remember where or when, but the gist was that his book Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste was a must-read. Now I want to read it, because some of the issues around taste seem important in the US, where all our choices seem to define us. But as with Critical Theory, I’m going to start with an overview of Bourdieu to learn some of his basic concepts. So, the next book is David Swartz’s Culture and Power: The Sociology of Pierre Bourdieu. I’ve started it, and it seems very readable.

I have a couple of basic thoughts to start with, and we’ll see if they hold up.

1. I’m pretty sure that culture isn’t the outcome of the economy, as might be the point of early Critical Theory. It seems likely that people’s natural creativity just pours out. I read The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby by Tom Wolfe years ago, and came away with the idea that the people in that car culture, just like the surfers, the anti-war groups, and the disco dancers in Saturday Night Fever were happily living in the shadows of the economy, not straining for success in the broader world, but creating their own milieu with what was at hand. Of course, corporate culture sucked the life out of those cultures, or they died on their own, but the impulse to use the conditions of life in new and inventive ways never dries up. We can watch the process as gaming culture grows up and gets turned into an ESPN sport. I’m sure the kids will be moving on, leaving the olds farther out of touch.

2, When I was growing up, there was this trope about lowbrow, middle-brow and high-brow taste. We have plenty of classifications of people today: tribalists, angry white people, Evangelicals, Berniecrats; personality types like INTJ, and authoritarian submissives; and of course all the marketing categories, like these in Wikipedia. These characterizations feel ad hoc and instrumental, and no matter how fine the segments are, they hardly seem adequate to the complexities of most of the people I have ever met. But we can’t think clearly about a population of 320 million without categories, so some kind of classification seems important.

3. The first book about psychology I read was I’m OK, You’re OK, by Thomas Anthony Harris. I thought I knew something when I was done. Then I read some Freud, Jung, Adler and other actual psychologists (badly, I should add), and realized I had been sucked into a pop psych book. It wasn’t useless, but close. I want to avoid that. More pointedly, I don’t want a system. I think we all come in in the middle, including the Frankfurt School and Bourdieu and Foucault, and try to figure things out as best we can. What I’m looking for is some sort of starting framework that can be used and evaluated and reformed, over and over until it needs replacement by a better framework.

What I don’t want is sloppy, disjointed and internally inconsistent thinking, theories unconnected to data, or random collections of data interpreted ideologically. And no thought leaders, whatever the hell they are. And no David Brooks.