Reinventing the Working Class: A Study in Elite Image Manipulation

Author(s): Adolph Reed

Source: New Labor Forum , Fall, 2004, Vol. 13, No. 3 (Fall, 2004), pp. 18-26
Published by: Sage Publications, Inc.

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 THE ENIGMA OF WORKING-CLASS CONSERVATISM

By Adolph Reed

REINVENTING THE
WORKING CLASS
A Study in Elite Image
Manipulation

The question of the relation of the working class to conservative politics

immediately begs other questions. Who do we mean by "the working class"?

What do we mean by "conservative politics"? If we take a definition that centers

on people's location in a hierarchy of social power that is rooted in the

economy - such as that proposed by Michael Zweig's The Working Class Ma-
jority - many different kinds of people make up the working class. These people

vary widely - as individuals and subgroups, as well as over the course of indi-

viduals' lives - in the array of political issues they deem important, their ideo-
logical dispositions and electoral inclinations. What counts as conservatism
also is an issue that should not simply be assumed in a pro forma way. For in-

stance, voting for Republicans does not equate automatically with commitment

to a conservative political program. And there is nothing about caring for loved

ones that intrinsically ties those concerns to a politics of populist conservatism.

That link occurs only when those concerns are annexed to a larger political rhe-

toric of "family values,"and the policy and social agendas that accompany it.

New Labor Forum 13(3): 18-26, Fall 2004

Copyright © Queens College Labor Resource Center
ISSN: 1095-7960/03 print
DOI: 1 0. 1080/ 1 095796049050 1257

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 CONTEMPORARY POLITICAL DISCUSSION IN THIS stereotype also has been sustained by more
nearly real-life models. One was Eric Hoffer,
country, of course, the issue of the relation

of the working class to conservative erstwhile

poli- dockworker and autodidact philoso-
pher,
tics is most immediately centered on the phe-whose book, The True Believer, attained
nomenon of the "Reagan Democrat," thesome currency in the 1960s. The pro war "hard
iconic
hats"
working-class voter whose defection from who attacked antiwar protesters became
the
a symbol of working-class conservatism - op-
Democratic party in national elections marks
the demise of the New Deal coalition. Like a position to the cultural sensibilities and social
mythic figure, the Reagan Democrat has be- movements of the 1960s, militant support for
come a touchstone in debates about the break- the Vietnam War - during the Nixon admin-
down of the post- World War II liberal consen- istration.

sus, the redefinition of the scope and limits of A differently inflected, but overlapping,
American politics, the future of the Democratic variant of this imagery is bound up with the
party, the failures of the left and the labor move- emergence of the notion of "white ethnicity"
ment, the intractability of race as a fault line in in the 1970s. This image, like the other, is per-

American politics, and the tension between haps inseparably linked to the perception of
"economic" and "social" issues in working- "white backlash" that also emerged from the
class and progressive politics. 1960s. The image of "resurgent" or
Taking stock of, and getting beyond, the "unmeltable" white ethnicity was sanctified by

Reagan Democrat notion, however, requires journalists and academics, many of whom
locating it as a link in a chain of repre-
sentations at the conjunction of conser-
vative politics and the working class. Al- The image of "resurgent"
though this chain arguably stretches back or "unmeltable" white
much farther in time, its proximate lin-

eage in everyday American discourse ethnicity was sanctified

descends from a familiar set of images
that the phrase "working-class conserva-
by journalists and
tism" evokes almost as a Pavlovian re- academics . . .
sponse. These typically revolve around
some version of the Archie Bunker ste-

reotype - a white male, usually patriarchally would before long be identified as

sexist, intolerant of homosexuality, bigoted neoconservatives. In this image, ethnicity ap-
against people of color, xenophobically patri- pears as a primordial identity; one basically and

otic and militarist, given to rigidly conventional essentially is an ethnic, and being one confers
morality and authoritarian politics, and fear- a set of attitudes and dispositions that are more

ful of a world in which his slender prerogatives "traditional" than "modern," communitarian

seem threatened by anyone not like himself. A rather than liberal.

darker version of this image was Peter Boyle's Where the "hard hat" inflection of this

eponymous character in the 1970 film Joe. The version of working-class conservatism is dis-

Reinventing the Working Class New Labor Forum • 1 9

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tinctively male, the white ethnic variant is as antibusing campaign, became a national sym-
likely to be female - embodied in the "tradi- bol of working-class conservatism even though

tional ethnic" wife, mother, family. "Ethnic," she was a lawyer, and her father was a judge. It
indeed, has become practically a synonym for was sufficient that she was Irish-American and

"traditional" attitudes, values, and norms, and Catholic.

"traditional" has by and large come to mean It is significant that both these images of
embrace of patriarchal norms of household working-class conservatism date from the late
organization centered on a nuclear unit em- 1960s and 1970s. They reflect the state of think-

bedded in a larger, "close-knit" extended fam- ing in American intellectual life - among so-
ily, strong-to-aggressive preference for en- cial scientists, policy intellectuals, and journal-

dogamy, active religious identification, adher- ists in opinion-shaping publications - about

ence to conventional "values," and an often class, ethnicity, modernization, and politics at
militant preference for living in homogeneous the time, as well as persisting folk notions of
neighborhoods with members of one's own how human populations are sorted and differ.
group. Crucial among these ideas or casts of mind was
This imagery also had what looked modernization theory, which captured much
enough like real- world referents to give it the of the social science imagination and shaped
verisimilitude of common sense. From the the conceptual foundations of its key narra-
1940s through at least the mid-1960s, open tives.
housing struggles in northern cities frequently
enough erupted into dramatic expressions of CULTURE STANDS
white opposition to blacks' attempts to move IN FOR CLASS
into previously segregated neighborhoods.
THEORY PROLIFERATED AS
(Yonkers, NY, kept this tradition alive through
the 1980s.) The early 1970s brought similar
MODERNIZATION
supplanting theco-United States faced the role of
British and French
opposition to school desegregation and bus-
lonialism, and geared up for the Cold War's
ing to achieve that desegregation in particular.
struggle for hearts and minds in Latin America
In both instances, rhetoric of home and fam-
and the officially decolonizing areas of Africa
ily, ethnic homogeneity, and neighborhood
and Asia. It proceeded from century-old ste-
stability - infamously summarized by presi-
reotypes about cultural differences between
dential candidate Jimmy Carter in 1976 as "eth-
those societies and the industrialized West.
nic purity" - were prominent in shaping the
Central among those stereotypes was the
language of opposition. And women were fre-
premise that people in what would be called
quently visible in the forefront of these pro-
the Third World, and on Europe's periphery,
tests. Class, ethnicity, and religion - mainly
lived in a timeless present, largely outside the
Catholicism - swirled together in this imagery,
major currents of modern history, governed by
with any one signifying, or standing in for, the
primordial traditions. The West was held to be
others. For example, Louise Day Hicks, who
defined by a different character type - future-
rose to national visibility and local political
oriented rather than present-oriented, rational
prominence as a leader of Boston's vicious

20 • New Labor Forum A. Reed

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rather than emotional and superstitious, pub- nomic mobility, were cultural and behavioral,
lic-regarding rather than private-regarding, not structural. Thus, class distinctions were
individualist rather than communalist. The treated as deriving more from cultural or atti-
policy goal was therefore one of identifying tudinal differences than from location in a sys-

strategies for cultivating these modern values tem of social and economic reproduction. In
and dispositions in "traditional" societies to both cases the bias toward culturalist interpre-
enable them to modernize and de-

velop the fruits of capitalist democ-

racy and industrialization. Merging class into

The frame of reference around

which mainstream elite discourse

culture . . . depoliticized
about domestic political and social inequality by freeing it of
life increasingly cohered over the
1950s and early 1960s assumed that
the stigma of injustice
ideological cleavages and sharp and removing it from the
political conflict had been resolved
in the United States. In this view, domain of political
the material constraints that typi- action.
cally underlie such conflict had
been overcome by the promise of
steady economic growth. A regularly increas- tations accommodated an interest in asserting
ing standard of living marked the "affluent so- nonconflictual models of political change, an
ciety," in which cultural concerns would re- interest that was rooted in the Cold War's an-

place economic ones and in which political de- ticommunist imperatives. Also, as in modern-
cisions would be ever more consensual and ad- ization theory, it was specifically "traditional"
ministrative. Popular books by sociologists patterns of values and attitudes that were held

Daniel Bell ( The End of Ideology) and Seymour to retard mobility. One of the more popular
Martin Lipset (Political Man) proclaimed the sanctifications of this view was the sociologists

"end of ideology." Dunlopism was the most Daniel Patrick Moynihan and Nathan Glazer's
coherent expression of this happy- face view in 1963 book, Beyond the Melting Pot, which pur-

the postwar industrial relations system, as la- ported to examine how different racial and eth-

bor-management cooperation was projected as nic groups' cultural dispositions affected their
the path to - and enabled by - continuing assimilation into the American mainstream.

growth and rising living standards. (They published a new edition in 1970, with a
Although this perspective was just the new introduction reflecting the consolidation
opposite of the imperative of ideological com- of white ethnic resurgence as a culturally com-

petition that drove modernization theory, the monplace trope.)

two nevertheless shared important features. Merging class into culture appealed to
Like modernization theory, this view assumed opinion-shaping elites for three reasons. First,
that the sources of inequality, or lack of eco- in locating the source of individuals' or groups'

Reinventing the Working Class New Labor Forum • 21

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failure to realize the promise of upward mo- the culture of poverty idea, at least as it entered
bility in personal or cultural attributes, this view public discourse, firmly rooted the sources of
preserved the conviction that the postwar re- inequality in the behavior and attitudes of poor
gime of economic growth could in principle people themselves.
lift all seaworthy boats and that growth there- Conservative social scientists like Edward

fore was an appropriate alternative to redistri- Banfield - for example in his 1958 book, The
bution. Second, doing so depoliticized inequal- Moral Basis of a Backward Society - had pro-
ity by freeing it of the stigma of injustice and pounded such culturally based arguments to
removing it from the domain of political ac- explain lack of economic or social mobility
tion. Third, culturalist explanations of inequal- among "lower class" whites. The Moynihan
ity also had the virtue of being normatively Report, though, reflected and spurred a discur-
ambivalent enough to appeal to both liberals sive shift akin to the gradual sharpening of le-
and conservatives. gal and status distinctions between slaves and
Over the 1960s, as biologically based ar- indentured servants and narrowing of those
guments for racial inequality became increas- between slaves and free blacks that occurred in

ingly untenable in mainstream political and seventeenth century Virginia. The merger of
intellectual discourse outside the South, cul- class and culture became increasingly a frame-
ture came to do the work that biology could work for marking racial distinctions. The same
no longer perform in defending inequality by stereotypes of cultural and behavioral charac-
rooting it in nature rather than social or politi- teristics that had been held to hinder upward
mobility became reinvented as roman-
tic and laudable in images of the cultur-
The merger of class and ally solid, "traditional" white ethnics.

culture became These revalued images, often tinted with

nostalgia and condescension, emerged

increasingly a framework and were articulated in contraposition to

the disparaging images of the pathologi-

for marking racial cal black family, the dysfunctional, dis-
distinctions. organized culture of poverty, and even-
tually the dangerous, nearly subhuman
"urban underclass." "Working class" it-
cal processes. The most controversial moves in self as a category in popular discourse became
this direction had to do with the mythology racialized, as well as gendered. Banfield him-
about the so called black family proposed by self illustrated this shift in his early 1970s books,
Moynihan in the 1965 Johnson administration The Unheavenly City and The Unheavenly City
report, The Negro Family: A Case for National Revisited, which reformulated his arguments
Action, and racialized appropriations of the for application to black Americans in inner cit-
"culture of poverty" idea coined by anthro- ies and to tie them to punitive policy recom-
pologist Oscar Lewis. Although Lewis insisted mendations.

that such interpretations misread his argument, What all this adds up to is a notion of the

22 • New Labor Forum A. Reed

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working class and its political characteristics through which, at least partly, to define them-
that conflates ethnicity, attitudes, religion, selves and to label their aspirations.
place of residence, race, gender, and simplistic
notions of "blue collar" employment. This is
PREEMPTING INTRACLASS
fundamentally a folk theory, more allegory than
SOLIDARITY
social science. It is also partly the expression of

a particular ideological point of view and pro- UNDERSTAND WHY THIS NOTION OF WORK-

gram. Characterizing the working class in eth- ing class identity appeals to the right it
nic and religious terms in that way, and by "val- may be useful to return to the analogy of
ues" and attitudes, makes the appearance of colonial Virginia. The simultaneous efforts to
working-class conservatism a self-fulfilling homogenize free and enslaved blacks and to
prophecy. The working class is, in effect, that sharpen the customary and legal distinctions
population of white working people who ex- between slaves and indentured servants created

hibit the conservative characteristics held to the basis for new regimes of political and ideo-

define the working class, those who opposed logical solidarity and closed off others. It is
open housing and school busing, who may have within these regimes of solidarity that politica

supported George Wallace's presidential cam- identities take shape, through which the sub-
paign in 1964 and Wallace or Nixon in 1968 stance of class consciousness is formed. Law

and 1972. and customary sanction gradually eliminated

This characterization of a distinctively the possibilities for political identities that
working-class conservatism, embodied in the united black and white servants. At the same

culturalist biases of postwar liberalism, Archie time, they opened possibilities for limited ideo-

Bunker and hard-hat imagery, and that associ- logical solidarity and shared political identity
ated with the rhetoric of resurgent white among indentured servants and other whites
ethnicity, is what underlies the Reagan Demo- on a racialized basis, as members of a popula-
crat image and gives it verisimilitude. The tion defined by shared prerogatives vis-a-vis

Reagan Democrat is a descendant of those ear- slaves and other blacks. Of course, they also re-
lier formulations that undercut class as a cat- inforced solidarity among slave and free blacks.

egory of power and political economy and en- (Kathleen Brown describes, in Good Wives,
sconced it in the political discourse as a Nasty Wenches & Anxious Patriarchs, how the

racialized and largely gendered trope for a cul- elaboration of a male subculture of gun own-
tural conservatism. This view emerged from a ership, hunting and public houses knitted a
combination of the conceptual biases among contingent solidarity along gender as well as
postwar social scientists and liberal policy in- race lines.) As the slave population grew, elites

tellectuals and the programmatic and ideologi- were especially moved to craft institutional
cal limitations of postwar progrowth liberal- bases for uniting the English population as an
ism. It has been stoked and cultivated by right- effective majority in support of their regime.

wing activists and ideologues since the 1960s The basis of right-wing populism since the

and fashioned into an established political 1960s - and since the late 1890s in the South-

identity that is available for people to adopt and has been similar. Its thrust has been to con-

Reinventing the Working Class New Labor Forum • 23

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struct a political rhetoric and an agenda that negotiated. This is true in part because the
plausibly attracts elements of working-class working class itself is no monolith.
whites to identify their political and cultural Second, forms of political conscious-
aspirations in ways that preempt solidarity with ness - in the working class or any other popu-
lation - do not emerge pristinely or
automatically. They inevitably take
Postwar liberal shape within existing regimes of so-

intellectuals' inclination cial hierarchy, and the logic shaping

them typically will reflect pragmatic

to define the working adaptation to those regimes' institu-

class in cultural terms . . . tional imperatives. Colonial Virgin-

ian burgesses recognized that their

and [their] retreat from a actions would alter the political in-
centives available to indentured ser-

social wage policy . . . vants, as well as the larger cultural and

created space for the ideological framework within which

those servants could craft politically

right ... significant identities. Bourbon elites

in the post-Reconstruction South rec-

ognized the same thing. They advo-

the programs and concerns of nonwhites and cated white supremacy in part as a strategy for
the left. Postwar liberal intellectuals' inclin- preempting the threat of political alliance be-
ation to define the working class in cultural tween poor whites and black freedpeople -
terms, and postwar liberalism's retreat from though most no doubt sincerely believed in it
a social wage policy agenda ironically creat- as a social vision. Moreover, experience also
ed space for the right to articulate a political- convinced them that they could securely elimi-
ly conservative working-class identity, in part nate that threat only by disenfranchising blacks
by making use of - and revalorizing - stereo- and thus removing them from the political
types that were already available in public dis- equation entirely. That is, they saw eventually
course.
that it was not enough to exhort to white su-
premacy; they could successfully impose it only
by making politics a "white man's business" in-
WORKING-CLASS ALLIANCES,
stitutionally. So long as blacks could partici-
UP FOR GRABS
pate, as the three decades after Emancipation
IMPORTANT POINTS CONCERNING WORK- showed, it was always possible - even within
ing-class consciousness follow fromthe
this
context of a universal belief in white supe-
analysis. One is that working-class riority
po- - that programmatic imperatives would
litical consciousness is never given. It is always
encourage expressions of political solidarity
constructed, and, like all political identities, it
that overlapped racial boundaries.
is a field of contestation, constantly being re-
The imagery of working-class conserva-

24 • New Labor Forum A. Reed

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tism in contemporary politics is most usefully herent, affirmative political identity. Political
understood as a tendency shaped by ideologi- scientists James Stimson and Edward Carmines

cal options and politically significant identi- have examined, in their book, Issue Evolution,
ties that have been available in post- World War how right-wing activists actually inverted the
II American politics. Of course, this framework Archie Bunker stereotype and even used the
did not itself come from nowhere; it emerged character to signal issue positions appropriate
from an evolving matrix of ideology, institu- to the political identity they advanced. Simi-
tional power, and contestation. Specifically, larly, neoconservatives' proclamations of resur-

the partly racialized New Deal compact insti- gent white ethnicity were partly linked to ef-
tutionalized the support of political positions forts to mobilize white working-class resent-
compatible with right-wing populism's subse- ment against black power politics. In this con-
quent appeal. History never starts from scratch; text, the Reagan Democrat imagery also should

there is no state of nature. My larger point, be seen as the prop of an ideological program.
however, is that it is not helpful or accurate to As Marie Gottschalk shows in The Shadow

attempt to determine whether "the working Welfare State, in every presidential election
class" or, more to the point, "the white work- since 1952 except 1980, working-class voters
ing class" is fundamentally conservative or not. have voted Democratic in higher percentages
That is an essentializing approach that denies than the electorate as a whole. More significant
the crucial role of institutional constraints in politically is her finding that in every election
the formation of political identities. This, by in that period union members in general, and
the way, is one problem with the focus on white union members in particular, have voted
"whiteness" in contemporary labor his- Democratic in higher percentages than work-
tory, as Eric Arnesen has argued in
"Whiteness and the Historians' Imagi-
nation" (ILWCH: Fall 2001). It fre-
. . . when exposed to
quently reduces to an ahistorical moral- arguments ... that stress
ity play that imputes to white workers
more agency in influencing social power
. . . working-class identity
than they could have had. as linked to support for
Third, an implication of the fact that

working-class identities do not emerge social protection and

automatically is that they are shaped
redistribution, most . . .
partly through the efforts of activists who

project and agitate for certain possibili- workers will respond

ties that are available and against others.
The case of "working-class conserva-
affirmatively.
tism" is instructive. Wallace and Nixon

took postwar liberalism's stereotypes of an el- ing-class voters on the whole. I do not mean to

ement of the white working class and revalo- suggest that voting for Democrats is a clear
rized them, offering them as the basis of a co- proxy for any particular type of working-class

Reinventing the Working Class New Labor Forum • 25

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political consciousness, especially given the The fourth implication of this analysis fol-

Democrats' moves to the right over the last two lows from the others. Ironically, the evolution

decades. At the very least, however, these find- of the imagery of working-class conservatism
ings underscore the importance of institutions may have been at least abetted by progressives'

and activists in shaping class consciousness in teleological assumptions about working-class

the working class as elsewhere. Moreover, they consciousness. The culturalist characterizations

suggest that, when exposed to arguments and of working-class identity were always deployed
perspectives that stress the material bases of partly to challenge Marxist-inspired notions of

working class identity as linked to support for class rooted in political economy. Leftists' pre-
social protection and redistribution, most sumptions that there is an authentic working-
people who identify as workers will respond class consciousness that will emerge on its own,
affirmatively. While it is unsurprising that or that it is a kind of default worldview, were

working-class voters vary in their electoral be- vulnerable to contradiction by a more complex
havior, a fixation on appealing to working-class empirical and historical reality. To that extent,

Reagan Democrats as such gives too much they called forth those alternative views and did

ground to the idea that there is an intrinsically not have adequate responses to them. We need
conservative strain in the working class that to dispense with essentialist conceptions of
must be accommodated. The more important working-class identity and recognize that there

lesson is probably that we need to project and is no single route decreed by history, God, or
cultivate different expressions of class con- any other force; that political identity within
sciousness. This is a project that implies a more the working class is and will be various, and
visionary and outward-looking political role for that the challenge of politics is to struggle in
the labor movement, one that sees the union concert with others to cultivate those forms of

partly as a venue for the shaping of class con- class conscientiousness we believe to be most

sciousness and the cultivation of broad politi- true and humane. ■

cal solidarities along class lines.

26 • New Labor Forum A. Reed

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