Forming a More Perfect Union
Steve Sailer
February 05, 2020
Michael Lind, an old-fashioned New Deal nationalist progressive, argues in his new book, The New Class War: Saving Democracy From the Managerial Elite, that the compromises made in the 1920s–1950s that cooled off the previous class war, such as entitlements, immigration restriction, and high taxes, are overdue once again.
Of course, the class struggle of the past several decades has been a rout so far. As investor Warren Buffet explained to economist and comic Ben Stein in 2006, “There’s class warfare, all right, but it’s my class, the rich class, that’s making war, and we’re winning.”
Lind contends that what the U.S. needs now is not more globalism or more populism, but what in 1952 economist John Kenneth Galbraith labeled the countervailing power of democratic pluralism. Or to reduce Lind’s high-minded jargon to the basics: restored union clout.
Otherwise, corporations will engage in “global labor arbitrage,” a game that American workers can’t win if they are only allowed to bargain as individuals. “Only power can check power,” Lind concludes, suggesting that the bottom two-thirds or so of society mostly only have power in numbers.
Of course, organizing along lines of class was easier before diversity became so divisive. Franklin Delano Roosevelt used to be admired for Social Security and winning The Big One, but recently he’s mostly notorious for redlining.