The New Class War: Saving Democracy from the Metropolitan Elite

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A century ago, social elites on both sides of the Atlantic embraced eugenics because it supplied a new rationale—Darwinian fitness—to replace the medieval chain of being in explaining why the ranking of social classes and races was rooted in “nature” and shouldn’t be tampered with. To prevent what she called “the decay of the American race,” Mary Harriman, the widow of the railroad baron E. H. Harriman, funded Charles Davenport, a professor of zoology at Harvard with an illustrious Puritan pedigree, who advocated preventing inferior races from migrating to the United States. Another upper-class eugenics campaigner was Madison Grant. A pioneer of environmentalism, Grant was also the author of The Passing of the Great Race: Or, the Racial Basis of European History (1916), in which he recommended “a rigid system of selection through the elimination of those who are weak or unfit—in other words, social failures.”

Indeed, the predecessors of today’s eugenicons, American eugenicists of the 1920s, would have objected to the very idea of a pan-white category. Many of them believed that there were three European “races”—the Nordic, the Alpine, and the Mediterranean—and that Jews and people of Arab descent like Hanania weren’t white people at all, but “oriental” Semites who should be kept from immigrating lest they pollute the American gene pool. In a 1921 Good Housekeeping essay titled “Whose Country Is This?,” soon-to-be Vice President Calvin Coolidge declared: “There are racial considerations too grave to be brushed aside for any sentimental reasons. Biological laws tell us that certain divergent people will not mix or blend. The Nordics propagate themselves successfully. With other races, the outcome shows deterioration on both sides.” For Coolidge, coding Italians or Poles as the amalgamated “white” equal of the distinctly Nordic race would have been a category error. Rather than criticize actual policies, Lind describes his target as so sweeping it cannot be named or defined. The “Quota Project,” he warns darkly, is “the radical restructuring of the U.S. and other Western societies on the basis of racial quotas, so that all racial and ethnic groups are represented in equal proportions in all occupations, classes, academic curriculums, and even literary and artistic canons.” You can understand how Lind might be accurately characterizing the beliefs of some people. But who is actually carrying out this agenda? And where? If there is a single major institution anywhere in American society that has come close to proportional representation, I haven’t heard of it. To the extent it’s possible to tell what he’s even talking about here, Lind seems to be hyperbolically characterizing the circa-2020 push to slightly ramp up the same affirmative-action policies that have existed for decades — and even that push is petering out. The Next American Nation: The New Nationalism and the Fourth American Revolution. Free Press. ISBN 9780029191033. [32] [33] Over the past two decades our country has lurched from false start to collapse, and then reaction. The story can be repeated across the Western world, and no one has told it better than the US political analyst Michael Lind, an academic and prolific writer, with decades of experience in the Washington beltway. This patronising view extends to Hispanic voters, Lind claims, noting that 29% of them voted for Trump in 2016. “If those groups vote for Republicans, they’re accused of betrayal or of suffering from false consciousness.”America could use more incisive critics of professional-class liberalism. But only the GOP has use for intellectuals who preach “ bothsideism” in populist tones. Unfortunately, Lind’s penchant for doing the latter mars his efforts to serve as the former. If the eugenicons were without influence, they could safely be ignored. The problem is that the they have a large and apparently growing influence within the conservative establishment, and are even finding a sympathetic hearing in New York’s so-called post-left scene: some former Bernie Sanders and Democratic Socialists of America types who—owing to bitterness over cancellation, publicity-driven addiction to épater les bourgeois, or both—now increasingly toy with “race realism.” JR: Your comment about the necessity for a “common identity” suggests you reject the idea of multiculturalism.

But I wonder if you could just describe what you think are the other cultural divides between these two classes in terms of the approach to identity politics or the approach to questions of social liberalism? Do you see huge divides over some of those fundamental questions of culture and society in relation to this class war? In The Next American Nation (1995) Lind foresaw the political realignment in class politics years before it erupted in the surge of national populism and right-wing demagoguery. He has more recently developed his ideas in The New Class War (2020).

I am not sympathetic to either school of thought but I find the reactionaries--the ones making excuses for the rioters and insurrectionists--to be particularly objectionable. Big Is Beautiful: Debunking the Myth of Small Business (with Robert D. Atkinson). MIT Press. ISBN 9780262037709. [18] [19]