Class War Within Liberalism

As a working class liberal of a radical leftist bent, we push back against how liberalism has been caricatured and stigmatized. Liberals like us have been erased and silenced, treated as if we don’t exist; even as we probably are closer to the average liberal. Yet we understand why so many complain about ‘liberalism’ as they see it portrayed, according to those who control platforms of speech and have the loudest voices.

What goes for liberalism, in big biz media and corporatist politics, is the so-called liberal class, sometimes disparagingly referred to as limousine liberals or the liberal elite. They are Democratic partisans, typically well-educated professionals, who often are only moderate, weak, and inconsistent on social liberalism or else that their social liberalism is superficial. In some cases, push them slightly and their liberal facade crumbles — underneath might be a conservative disposition, or even some social dominance orientation (i.e., anti-egalitarian elitism).

Think of the Clinton Democrats. In their earlier presidential campaigns, both Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama were still using triangulation to promise the right-wing that, if elected, they wouldn’t support or pass any legislation to legalize same sex marriage rights. This was at a time when the majority of Americans had already shifted to support same sex marriage rights. But the supposed ‘liberal’ class of politicians continued to drag their feet and pander to social regressives.

Or think of what Obama did as president. Most Americans were demanding far left healthcare reforms that would ensure access of high quality healthcare for all Americans. Instead, Obama essentially advocated for Romneycare that was the product of a right-wing think tank. It wasn’t even healthcare reform, rather health insurance reform that primarily benefited insurance companies. Americans weren’t suffering from a lack of insurance but a lack of healthcare.

This goes back a long way. During the Cold War, supposed ‘liberal’ leaders, icons, and thinkers were notorious for their illiberal or even anti-liberal attacks on communists, socialists, Marxists, and fellow travelers. Liberal-minded tolerance went out the window fast. That is to say, when one speaks of a liberal class, the class status tends to trump the liberalism. The rhetoric of liberalism, in this sense, is used to make them feel better and look good.

During that same era, the most radical of liberals often sided with leftists. And from Thomas Paine onward, radical liberals have disproportionately come out of the working class and the poor. There is a class war where working class liberals find themselves trying to defend liberalism against the attacks or else paternalistic condescension of a supposed liberal elite. Of course, it’s not limited to politicians and others of high status.

We know of such people who are of a more everyday variety. A recent example came to our attention. The individual, a white woman, is a solidly middle class professional. Though not wealthy, she is economically comfortable enough to live in a very nice community on the West Coast with housing prices far above what most Americans could afford. So, very much of the liberal class, if closer to the lower end of it.

She is a liberal Democrat, in that she will say the right things and vote the right way, according to the conventions of her liberal community. That is what she is, extremely conventional and conformist. Yet conventionality is a defining feature of conservatism, not liberalism. In social science terms, to be conventional is to be low on the liberal-minded personality trait ‘openness to experience’. So, in being a dispositional conservative, her liberalism is largely skin deep, if there might be some genuine impulse in it.

This is seen in the contrast of symbolic ideology and pragmatic ideology. The former is about identity politics, whereas the latter is about the actual positions one holds. So, on same sex marriage rights, though Clinton and Obama might style themselves as symbolic liberals (if Obama has never publicly identified as a liberal), their actual positions on same sex marriage rights was pragmatic conservatism. There is a conflict between appearance and reality, which is what irritates many people about the hypocrisy of the liberal class. Sadly, that moral failure undeservedly stains all of liberalism.

In case like that of DNC elites with their cynical realpolitik, it’s likely because such politicians measure high on social dominance orientation (SDO), specifically anti-egalitarianism (SDO-E). It’s not to say there is nothing liberal about them, as they probably do measure slightly higher on ‘openness to experience’, but what liberalism they have is limited and distorted. It’s filtered through class status, hierarchical authority, elite privilege, corrupt power, capitalist realism, neoliberalism, competitive individualism, etc.

Anyway, this West Coast lady we know is more of an everyday example. As we said, she is just plain conventional. It’s likely that the only reason she is ‘liberal’ at all, if only as social identity, is because she feels a conservative-minded compulsion to conform to her perceived in-group, which happens to be liberal. But if she had spent her life around conservatives, the exact same conservative disposition might’ve led her to a conservative social identity. She is the kind of person that wouldn’t require much stress, anxiety, and/or fear to turn them illiberal on any number of issues.

Such people don’t actually have a political ideology in the mainstream sense, at least not in terms of consistent principled values. This can be detected when talking to them. The underlying reactionary mentality will always peak through. This happened while a group of us, including this lady, were talking about homelessness. It’s a major problem on the West Coast. And there are few other issues like that to starkly distinguish between symbolic liberalism and pragmatic liberalism.

In that conversation, we mentioned a friend of ours who used to live in the same area as this lady. Our friend moved way for numerous reasons, including the homeless problem, along with worsening crime. But our friend understands homelessness as a systemic economic problem where the homeless are victims of oppressive conditions and failed governance. This pseudo-liberal lady, though, had no such depth of insight, much less a moral compass of compassion and sympathetic understanding.

Her only response was that the homeless in her neighborhood would mean a decline in her house’s value. That is true and there is nothing wrong with pointing it out, but for her that is where the issue ended. Her concern was about the homeless as a problem for home owners, not the problems faced by the homeless. She neither expressed nor indicated any empathy in the slightest toward the struggle and suffering of the homeless themselves. Her attitude was a stereotypical position of social conservatism.

As we were partly talking about the local context here in this Midwestern liberal college town, we mentioned that the homeless around here were different. This town is one of the leading medical centers in the country and so many homeless are here for reasons of treatment, such as mentally ill veterans or others on disability. It’s not the same as the economic desperation and mass unemployment in the big cities on the West Coast.

In making this distinction, we mentioned homeless schizophrenics we know, as we work and hang out downtown. Her only response, once again, wasn’t any kind of moral concern for the people we were talking about. Rather, she was concerned about politically correct language. She said that the proper description was to say the individual was a person with schizophrenia. No schizophrenic we’ve personally known has ever referred to themselves in this fashion. It’s pseudo-liberal bull shit.

We told this lady that, when we were depressed, we were a depressive; and, when we were no longer depressed, we weren’t a depressive. It’s a conditional state, but nonetheless it is the state that accurately described our condition. We didn’t merely have depression. It defined our entire existence, even our physiology as depression affects one on every level, from shrinking the brain to altering personality. Rather than having depression, depression had us. She then told us that we were wrong in how we chose to label ourselves.

It’s not that we are opposed to using better language, if it’s genuinely kinder or more accurate. But there are two things that irritated us. There is the hypocritical inconsistency of it. If we are to apply such language rules, we should do so in all cases. She isn’t a woman but a person with a vagina. Nor is she white but a person with melanin deficiency. Nor is she a homeowner but a person with a home. She isn’t a fake liberal but a person with fake liberalism.

In any case, this is clunky language that does absolutely nothing to improve the conditions of the mentally ill, in the way that calling someone unhoused is yet more language games. This woman was more interested in using the right language to describe a homeless schizophrenic than to face the horrific conditions that led to such a bad outcome. She wants to say the right language to conform to liberal ideology while complaining about such people, as if the one will erase the cruelty of the other.

The unhoused person with schizophrenia is ruining her housing value. Too bad for her. As full-throated liberals, what we care about is helping those in need. When we end the problem of mentally ill people being abandoned on the street, and when all the homeless are housed, then we can debate about proper ways to talk about such things. Substance first, then form later. The immediate and preventable misery of social evils is what matters most. If one doesn’t understand that, then one‘s qualifications as a liberal are questionable.