Raymond Klassen – Ideals and Identities

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“You know, I built the structure of that Walmart next to your house!” 

“Do you see that building with the red roof? I built that too.” 

“I rebuilt the engine of my car.”

“That company would be nothing without all the extra work I put in.”

These sentences have been uttered by my younger relative who is now an ex-con re-entering society after 7 years behind bars. I also taught people from diverse genders and ethnic, linguistic, national, and religious backgrounds who had been removed from the workforce and were on worker’s compensation because of workplace accidents. In a conversation about what they missed the most about their discontinued work, they had variously reported,

“I was the best driver in the company. I contributed so much reliable service to our customers, and mentorship to our less-experienced drivers.”

“I provided the nuts and bolts service for people needing home healthcare.”

“I helped provide outdoor spaces that people wanted to live in.”

“I delivered life-saving medicine to people who needed it.”

“I maintained machines that people relied on to live well!”

“I built the bridges that brought people together.”

As I reflect on it now, these positive statements from everyday working-class people were remarkable, but not for the reasons that came to my mind when I first heard them. At first, I thought it was about them articulating what was valuable in their work so they could have a sense of individual pride in their accomplishments. But as I put these statements together with my relative’s statements, something from my earlier writing on work dawned on me: work has a constitutive value. What does “a constitutive value” mean? The constitutive value of work has a twofold meaning: our work builds both our character and the communities we live in – the last of which Hannah Arendt called the human artifice (“The Human Condition” – free download). I will come back to the human artifice shortly.

When I meditate on these statements, a further meaning needs to be articulated, which I only realized recently. When they were spoken, the speakers were each looking for recognition of their contribution outside the considerations of financial compensation and physical capabilities. They were struggling for deep psychological recognition from their social environments for work they had accomplished in the social sphere. They wanted their work to be expressive of their identity and their worth.  We can all identify with both the tendency to think our identity and worth are intimately associated with our work and to seek social recognition for our work. However, by extending these basic frameworks of identity, recognition, and worth about our work as individuals to a broader social level, a particular problem comes into focus: we have improperly valued work for way too long.  Current threats to democratic forms such as political polarization, income inequality, and the swing to the political right of the populations of Western countries can largely be accounted for by how their societies undervalue large portions of the working public. 

In other words, a basic contradiction in the center-left, liberal-democratic order has been exposed. The center-left thought that a combination of globalization, technological-scientific development, and an old-fashioned Protestant work ethic would be sufficient to lead to long-term peace and prosperity. As we can see, that narrative is full of holes.

Reasons for Populast Appeal

This is a fateful time for democracy.  2024 is a decisive moment in North America and in traditional European powerhouses: Germany, France, and Italy. And there are certain similarities in the challenges that we face. Recently, Donald Trump won a convincing victory in the Republican primary caucus in Iowa, making it very likely that there will be a rematch between Donald Trump and Joe Biden in November’s US presidential election. It’s a rematch that most Americans don’t want. 70% say they would rather there be some alternative to these two figures. But it’s more likely than not that we will have that rematch and it’s impossible now to predict the outcome. In attempting to predict the outcome, consider the following unexpected precedents:

• the criminal indictments against Trump, 
• Trump’s promotion of the lie that he actually won the last election and that it was stolen from him, and 
• Trump provocation of the mob to attack the Capitol after he was defeated, to try to prevent the certification of votes. 

Despite all of this, his people have stuck with him. In fact, with every new indictment and criminal charge, it seems that among his supporters, their fervor and support for him – their enthusiasm – strengthens. 

What does this mean for the Democratic Party in the United States and social democrats in Europe? It means that we had better figure out why. Why is it that support runs so deep, and we see rising support for right-wing hyper-nationalist political parties that has recently been confirmed in the most recent EU elections? We had better diagnose the reason. And these center-left parties must account for their blindness.

This only dawned on me recently since I moved my work out of post-secondary and in greater collaboration with the working class. I mean, I have a brother-in-law who is an intelligent working-class man, but I had assumed he was an outlier. I am not, by any stretch of the imagination, working class – but I find myself on the center-left by political affiliation. My parents were staunchly conservative for religious reasons, yet some older mentors I had were center-left because they had an affinity for the working class; they belonged to unions or believed in public funding for visual and performing arts. Just on these anecdotal examples, political affiliation was determined more by religious orientation or by beliefs about fair economic distribution. Economic distribution was a cornerstone to center-left political behavior.

What makes analyzing populism so difficult for social democratic or progressive parties is that one of the reasons for the appeal of figures like Trump, and far-right populist parties, is the deep sense of grievance among a large portion of the electorate, particularly among working people, and those without university degrees. In the past where, perhaps, religious affiliation or economic status were reliable indications of political behavior, education has now become an important marker.  Trump won overwhelmingly among working-class voters without a university degree, especially men without a university degree. In the social democratic parties of Europe,  the progressive parties and movements used to be the parties of working people. These were the parties who represented the people against the powerful, against the privileged. That was true of the Democratic Party back in the day of Franklin Roosevelt and the New Deal. That was true of the social democratic and socialist parties in Europe. This was true of the New Democratic Party in Canada. This was also true of the Labor Party in Britain. But in recent decades, that’s changed. It’s changed in a way that also parallels education. By the 2010s, and by 2016 in particular, when  Britain voted for Brexit and the US voted for Trump, the Democratic Party in the US, like the Labor Party in Britain, had become more attuned to the values, interests, and outlook and cultural dispositions of the well-credentialed, professional classes, than of the working-class voters who once constituted their base of support. In Canada, this is also true of the center-left governing coalition of the Liberal and New Democratic Parties. 

Now how did this happen? I think we need to reconstruct how it happened, and it goes back to the 1980s. It’s something that’s been unfolding over the last four decades. It began with the explicit case against government made by figures like Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher. They argued that government is the problem and unfettered markets are the solution. Even after Reagan and Thatcher were succeeded by center-left parties and politicians, the triumphant faith in the market was never usurped. They moderated, but consolidated, the market faith.  They did not challenge the idea that markets and market mechanisms are the primary instruments for defining and achieving long-term peace and prosperity. They accepted that premise but then tried to show that the harsh consequences of that philosophy could be softened to some extent around the edges. In effect, they embraced a version of the market faith under the banner of a certain version of globalization: a market-driven and, more precisely, a finance-driven globalization. Now they assured us, at the time, that the neoliberal version of globalization they enacted would help everybody. Yes, there would be winners and losers, they argued, but the gains to the winners can be used to compensate the losers. Well, there were gains for the winners. In fact, most of the increase in national income during the age of globalization flowed to the top 20%. The bottom half of the population faced stagnant wages in real terms for four to five decades, in the American case. Now this has produced rising inequalities of income and wealth. 

However, mainstream parties, including the center-left political parties, argued during this period that the solution to inequality is to equip yourself to compete in the global economy by getting a university degree. That, essentially, was the argument. The argument was embodied in slogans that became so familiar we scarcely thought to question them: “If you want to compete and win in the global economy, go to university!”, “What you earn will depend on what you learn.” – This was Bill Clinton’s mantra. “You can make it if you try.” – That was Barack Obama, he used that line 140 times in speeches: “You can make it if you try.” Now this idea, that the answer to inequality was individual upward mobility through higher education, was the central response of center-left politicians and political parties during this period. I’m thinking of Bill Clinton, initially, in the United States, Tony Blair in Britain, and Gerhard Schröder in Germany. They did not address the structural inequalities; rather, they offered bracing advice to those struggling with stagnant wages and job loss due to outsourcing jobs to low-wage countries with few labor and environmental standards. 

Individual Economic Karma

Understood clearly, the project of globalization was buttressed by an ideological rationale: the individual was primarily, and mostly, responsible for their lot in life. Individual economic karma became the rationale for the growing divide between winners and losers. It was summed up in these familiar slogans: The idea that everyone should be able to rise as far as their efforts and talents will take them. Politicians, including center-left politicians, intoned this mantra again and again. Michael Sandel has called it “the rhetoric of rising”. In less rhetorical terms I call it individual economic karma. It captures what Max Weber meant in the Protestant Work Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (free download): social mobility is important because it emphasizes, rightly, the importance of removing barriers to achievement.

Individual economic karma, rising, and social mobility have egalitarian resonances. It goes something like this: Whatever your family background or class or race or ethnicity or gender or sexual orientation, you too should be able to progress as far as your effort and talents would take you. Who could disagree? But despite its seemingly egalitarian bent, this faith in individual economic karma entrenched, rather than challenged, inequalities of income and wealth. It didn’t propose to alleviate these inequalities by reconsidering the economic policies that produced them. Instead, it offered this workaround of individual upward mobility through higher education. 

What the elites missed – the elites who delivered this message: “If you want to succeed, if you want to thrive, if you want to escape wage stagnation, go get a university degree!”  – was the expressed insult implicit in this advice. The insult was this: “If you’re struggling in the new economy,  and if you don’t have a university diploma, your failure must be your fault.” That’s the implication. Since, at the very same time, there is a primary emphasis on individual upward mobility – “You can make it if you try!” – that tightened the hold of the belief in social mobility as essential to success. So, even as the divide between winners and losers deepened, there was more to this than simply growing inequality of income and wealth. What accompanied that inequality, that economic inequality, was changing attitudes toward success. Those who landed on top came to believe that their success was their own doing, the measure of their worth, and that they therefore deserved the bounty that the market bestowed upon them. And, by implication, those who struggled,  those left behind, must deserve their fate too. 

This way of thinking about success arises from a seemingly attractive ideal: individual economic karma and a social order based on the possibility of social mobility. The principle says: In so far as chances are equal, the winners deserve their winnings. 

Now, progressives and center-left politicians would be quick to acknowledge that chances are not truly equal. Children born into low-income families tend to stay poor as adults. As a consequence, they will say, ‘Simply increase equality of opportunity. Simply make good on the promise to bring everyone up to the same starting point. If only we could do that, then the results would be fair.  Then the winners would deserve their winnings.’ 

But that was too narrow a project. It missed, for example, the fact that even if we could achieve truly fair equality of opportunity, it would still be morally questionable to claim that the winners deserve their winnings. You can see this by imagining a race in which everyone begins at the same starting point, not only in formal terms, but where everyone also has had the same access to good training, good coaching, good nutrition, and the best running shoes: Then, that’s fair equality of opportunity. It’s still predictable who’s likely to win the race: The more gifted runners, for example. And, so what this way of thinking about success obscures is the role of accident,  luck, and contingency in life, even in a society where we manage to bring everyone up to the same point of the race. It leads the successful – this way of thinking, this image of society as a competitive race – the successful to forget the luck and good fortune that help us on our way. It leads us successful in forgetting our indebtedness to those who make our achievements possible.

It leads to, say, my forgetting that the store where I get my food was built by my non-university educated, ex-con relative. 

And it also leads to a kind of hubris among the winners. It leads the successful to believe the hype of their own success and invites them, almost, to look down on those less fortunate than themselves, especially when the source of access to upward mobility is a University degree.  I have previously written and presented this in my, “Social Mobility and the Purpose of Liberal Education,” In it, I concluded that the idea of social mobility creates a distorting cross-pressure on what education is supposed to be.

That being said, elites during the 1980s – 2010s came to so valorize a university degree, both as an avenue for achievement and as the basis for social esteem, that they had difficulty understanding the hubris a social system based on social mobility can generate. and they had difficulty understanding the harsh judgment it imposes on those who haven’t been to university. As Sandel recounts, the term “meritocracy” was coined relatively recently in the late 1950s by Michael Young. He was a British sociologist affiliated with the Labor Party. After World War 2, the class system was beginning to break down, and some working-class kids were able to attend good schools and compete for jobs: all of that was a good thing. But what Michael Young glimpsed then, and what Trump voters (or Pollievre voters in Canada) voters have realized was that the more fully realized the meritocratic ideal – the ideal of individual economic karma – became, the harsher would be the judgment on those who didn’t prevail. We’ve come to see meritocracy / social mobility as the name of an ideal, an aspiration, or even the definition of a just society. But for Michael Young, who coined the term, that’s not how he thought about it. He saw it as a kind of dystopia that would create a competitive society of winners and losers, with the winners looking down, and the losers feeling humiliated. And he predicted that there would be a populist revolt that would overturn the meritocratic elite in the year – he predicted – 2034. He was right, except that the populist revolt came 18 years ahead of schedule in America, in 2016.  So this is what brought us to this moment. 

Globalization and Democracy 

Now, there’s a lot of ugliness in the rhetoric of figures like Donald Trump and hyper-nationalist right-wing populists throughout Europe. I have seen the ugliness first-hand in my instruction of working-class people in acquiring English. And that ugliness poses peril to pluralistic societies, and democracy; it strikes us so profoundly that it can also distract us from asking the most vital question. Why do the grievances, run so deep that nothing we offer working people or those who are struggling with wage stagnation and inequality seem to register? So, part of my suggestion is that we have to try, difficult though it may be, to disentangle the legitimate grievances that animate right-wing support of people like Pollievre or Trump from the ugly sentiments with which they are entangled. That’s not an easy thing to do, especially in the heat of political campaigns. 

I’m afraid it’s not going to be enough to say,  as I think President Biden or Prime Minister Trudeau have been saying: ‘Democracy is on the ballot and it’s a choice between democracy and authoritarianism.’ As true as that is, the Democratic Party in the United States, or the Liberals or New Democrats in Canada, and social democratic parties generally, have to go further. THEY NEED TO OFFER A COMPELLING VISION OF WHAT DEMOCRACY REALLY MEANS.

Democracy has to mean something more than just leaving office when you lose. It has to mean that, even that’s no longer assured. But that’s a pretty low bar for a definition of democracy.  A fuller vision of democracy has to address people’s sense – their legitimate sense – that their voices don’t matter. It has to address the widespread sense of disempowerment. It has to address the sources of mistrust of elites, of political institutions, of experts, especially of economists. 

And I think social democrats and progressives need to recognize that a lot of that mistrust is well-earned. It’s been well-earned, looking back over the way that center-left elites who have promoted the neoliberal version of globalization have governed for the past four decades. Now it’s worth thinking back to the heady confidence of that time. The age of globalization was a triumphant time. The Berlin Wall had fallen, then came the breakup of the Soviet Union. This was heralded as a vindication of liberal capitalism, seemingly the only system left standing (Fukuyama, “The End of History,” free download). Political leaders celebrated the flow, the unfettered flow, of goods, people, and capital across national borders, not only for its promise of prosperity but also as an open, tolerant,  cosmopolitan alternative to the parochial place-bound political economy of the past. People spoke of a world without walls. A world without walls, drawing on the metaphor of the Berlin Wall falling. But this became a kind of high-minded euphemism for an economy in which national allegiances mattered less, and the unfettered flow of goods and capital mattered more. Many, including myself, objected that these new fluid arrangements enabled companies to send jobs overseas to low-wage countries.  Many objected that moving capital into and out of countries at the click of a mouse could prompt a destabilizing financial crisis. The proponents of globalization strikingly replied: ‘Globalization is inevitable.’ It’s a fact of nature beyond politics. We heard this first from Margaret Thatcher, who often said, referring to the rigors of a free market, laisser-faire economy, she often said: “There is no alternative.” But she wasn’t the only one. Center-left political leaders of the 1990s  reiterated this claim of inevitability. Bill Clinton said, “Globalization is not something we can hold off or turn off; it is the  economic equivalent of a force of nature, like wind or water.” Or Tony Blair, in Britain, said, globalization is as unalterable as the seasons -“I hear people say we have to stop and debate globalization. Well,” he  said, “you might as well debate whether autumn should follow summer.” Now although this was depicted as a force of nature beyond human agency or control. These were center-left political parties who were enacting this agenda demanding that governments enact an extensive list of quite contestable economic policies. And we’re familiar with what those policies were and what the results were. What they didn’t foresee is that this confidently asserted version of neoliberal globalization would not only inequality and economic and social dislocation. It would pave the way for the populist backlash that expressed itself fully in 2016. 

Reviewing the Value of Work 

So: What do we do about it? Well,  we begin, I think, we need to begin, with a frank and self-critical diagnosis about the role that elites, including center-left and social democratic parties, played in bringing about the conditions for this roiling grievance. And then we need new governing visions, and animating  purposes, to address the legitimate aspects of those grievances. And this requires changing the terms of public discourse. We should focus less, for example, on arming people for competition up the ladder of social mobility, and focus more on the real value of work. We can start by asking what the conditions would be for making life better for those who contribute to the economy and the common good through the work they do, the families they raise, and the communities they serve – even though they may not have a university degree. Those of us who spend our time in the company of the credentialed can easily forget a simple fact: Most of our fellow citizens don’t have university degrees. In most European democracies, the figure of those who do is around 30%, around 33% in Canada, and around 35% in the United States. 30 to 35% have university degrees. Most do not. So why do we have an accelerating economy that necessitates, as a condition of valuable work and a decent life, a university degree that most people don’t have? Now what would be the elements of a political project that took seriously the value of work? It would have to begin by contending the structural sources of inequality, rather than viewing individual economic karmic mobility as an adequate answer to inequality.

The OECD did a study about the prospects of mobility, inter-generational mobility, in  OECD countries and other rich countries. And they asked: How many generations, at current levels of intergenerational mobility, would it take for someone born into a poor family to rise, not to the top, but to the median? In Denmark, it takes two generations. In the United States, Britain, and Austria, it takes five. The American dream is alive and well in Copenhagen. Interestingly, in this week’s EU parliamentary elections, while places like Germany, Italy and France seemed to take a political sharp turn to the right, Nordic countries moved slightly to the left.

So, social mobility is not an adequate answer to inequality. But the problem is not only inequalities of income and wealth. It’s that these inequalities have been translated into inequalities of social recognition and esteem, which is why I classify them as having karmic overtones. There is a moral sense bestowed on the people subject to social systems inspired by social mobility. 

This is why we should focus on the value of labor, not only addressing economic inequality as such. Those left behind by the globalization project not only struggled while others prospered  – that’s the straightforward economic inequality. In addition, they also came to sense that the work they do was no longer a source of social recognition and esteem in society’s eyes, and perhaps also in their own. Their work no longer signified a valued and respected contribution to the human artifice. So any serious response to working-class frustrations has to combat the elitist condescension and credentialist prejudice that has become rife in the public culture. This is why it’s important to put the value of work at the center of the political agenda. 

Making the value of work core to a center-left political vision is difficult. No one argues against the dignity of work.  But people have very different notions of what it means to realize and honor it. The reason this is difficult is that thinking through the meaning of work forces us to confront contested moral and political questions that we otherwise evade. And the central among those questions is:  What counts as a valuable contribution to the economy and, as Michael Sandel has said, to the common good? But perhaps, following Hannah Arendt, we need to also be clear on what we mean by work. Perhaps a better way of asking the question is: what is valuable in our efforts to shape the human artifice? 

Continued in part 2.