To be fair, this article is not just about how bad Mayor Pete is, it applies to every advocate of centrist neoliberalism (those who promote Reaganomics and light government and quasi-free markets with just enough regulations to squelch worker rights and prop up moribund corporations, all for proceeds of indebtedness to be funnelled up to the financial class of Wall street rentiers). Neoliberals are found on either political aisle, but both Left wing and Right wing neoliberals tend to congress towards the “centre”. The political Centre is, by the way, where almost no one in ordinary main street life finds themselves, it is a ghost town in the general populace, most centrists are a rare species found in Washington and Manhattan, and Chicago University. There are no votes to be found there, which is why, when neoliberals are pitted against a cadaver like Mitch McConnell or a cad like Trump, the ghoul and the gagger tend to win.
But it is not the new polls showing Buttigieg would lose to Trump (a reversal of prior polls) which I am concerned about in this essay. This essay concerns something more systemic, it concerns gentrification of cities and the cult of “vibrancy”. This is part of what is causing a real divide in western democracies, and it is a particularly pernicious divide. Gentrification of the town of South Bend Indiana is one of the reasons to think Mayor Pete is not a person you want running the worlds most powerful democracy, not unless you are wealthy and privileged.
I am referring as source, and recommending, Thomas Frank’s book of essays Rendezvous with Oblivion, and in particular the chapter “Dead End on Shakin’ Street”. Frank describes the trend in urban planning and local government reformation projects he calls the “vibrancy” industry or cult. This is a key buzzword in the way the media and politicians dress up the anti-democratic process of city and suburb gentrification.
Now, why is this a problem? Well, for that you need a much wider perspective, and Frank’s previous book “Listen, Liberal: Or, What Ever Happened to the Party of the People?“ is the place to go for the answer. There you will find convincing evidence and anecdotes showing that Reagan’s neoliberalism was adopted by Clinton and Obama, and is inherited by Biden, Buttigieg and Harris. The idea is that the USA Democratic Party is no longer the legitimate “party of the Left”, it has abandoned the working class, and has become a party of the well-educated elite, the privileged, the credentialed, the professional class, the “creative class” (as if any class of people own creativity!). The true story does not end there though, because the other half of Frank’s research and reporting on modern life is that the other party in the USA, the conservative Republicans, are even worse: for they have embraced neoliberalism to an even greater extreme, but dressed it’s austerity in fake populist rhetoric which at once pretends to champion the hard working labourer while in policy actualities repeatedly and viciously turns to stab them in the back (gutting unions, Wall Street bailouts, privatization of what should be universal social services, farm and home foreclosures, deficit hawkery to the extreme) and in public terms has embraced racist and xenophobic dog-whistling. You can read such accounts in Frank’s previous two books “What’s the Matter with Kansas?” and “Wrecking Crew: How Conservatives Ruined Government“. These should be mandatory reading for anyone living in the American midwest or post-industrial farmland, mining country and heartland.
Gentrification is only a small part of the neoliberal project. On it’s own, gentrification is not obviously a bad thing. It becomes horrific only when you see the effects on poor families. They never get to share in the fruits of investment in gentrification, they get thrown out of their apartments when the rents increase, and thanks to AirBnB industries they will never be able to afford to return to the vibrant city. Anyone who thinks the rich deserve their riches and the poor deserve their plight belongs in the same exact mix as Nazi eugenicists and white supremacy zealots. The credo of such ideologies is based in social darwinism, the idea that you get what you deserve, and society is all the better for rewarding those who work hard and depressing those who do not. The flaw in such ideologies is obvious if you bother to do on-the-street research. Most low income workers expend more energy, suffer more psychological damage, and are placed in greater crippling debt than and wealthy folks who might occasionally find themselves short of paid employment. There is no level playing field here. There are no just deserves when it comes to being in poverty. Poverty is as self-perpetuating as wealth and privilege, and one’s character, one’s virtue, and desire to work hard have little to do with this. If you work ultra-hard and start at the bottom, it is still mostly a lottery to see if you will rise in power, prosperity and privilege in society.
When you gentrify cities you pull in this professional class of high income white collar workers, and they do not like at all to see themselves as working class (defined by working for a boss who has more power than you — most of us are working class, even the creative professionals). This has created a serious divide in America (and other western democracies in the Global North).
The old divide used to between the rich and the poor, or the upper class and the working class, and this divide was what made social democratic parties and traditional “Labour” parties (in the UK, Australia and NZ) so popular and successful, this was the type of party Franklin Delano Roosevelt led, and which led a country out of It’s greatest depression and a world war, followed by the greatest period of middle class prosperity that today only the Chinese middle class can hope to rival (if they can tackle rising corruption and pollution). The working class were always a powerful coalition of the lower class blue collar workers and the middle class white collar workers. But not any more. Thanks to gentrification and the “vibrancy” craze.
Now days most urban professionals view themselves as haughtily above the blue collar working class, and they vote neoliberal. They resent being told they are in the 99%. They aspire (or maybe delusionally believe) they are in the wealthy 1%, residing in their McMansions.
The modern divide in society is a tripartition. There is the class of the privileged, which is split between the well-educated professionals (largely Democratic Party elite) and the big money oligarchs (the Republican Party elite), with the rest being working class poor who have no genuine power, no representation, but who in desperation are turning to the worst sort of populism — the fake and horrific populism of a proto-fascist like Trump, or to the austerity mad paleoconservatives of the Tea Party. The main divide is between the educated credentialed elite (whose interests both neoliberal agendas serve) and the rest of us, the workers who may be educated or not, may be credentialed or not, but who reject the cruelty and technocracy of the elites. We are the ones who currently have no say (in terms of real power) in our supposed “democracies”. Our voice is like this essay here, reverberating out into the void in all honest political enervating terms.
We desperately need the self-serving sanctimonious professional workers everywhere to wake the f___k up, and join the rest of the working class in global solidarity.
I feel these folks have a hard fall awaiting them. The rise of global oligarchy is only going to throw more middle class families onto the trash heap of relative poverty and economic anxiety if fiscal conservatism and privatization trends continue. This will only be all the more fuel for Trumpism, which will not die when Donald Trump exits the Whitehouse. The next “Trump” will be smarter, shrewder, more destructive, more fascist. Watch out, for example, for the rise of a maniac like Tom Cotton. Or it might be a far-right evangelical like Marco Rubio, resurrected.
I’ve plugged Frank’s book. There is also a good interview on The Majority Report with author Samuel Stein talking about the undemocratic trends in inner city gentrification, you can watch it here: Capital City: Gentrification and the Real Estate State w/ Samuel Stein – MR Live – 8/13/19
The privileged credentialed elite who suddenly find themselves without a job, because their medical practice got automated, or their legal practice got subsumed by GoogleLaw, or their journalism got overrun by script bots, will cry out, and if their only solace is a centrist wanker neoliberal who is lecturing them to go back to school to get a job in nursing or a growth industry like e-sports gaming, you can bet they will turn about and forget all their niceties and polite latte sipping airs of tolerance and they will turn to the fascist fake populist mountebank who is promising them their jobs back. Folks, those jobs will never come back. You will soon find yourself sympathizing with the coal miners. Heck, the coal miners will now be ahead of you, because they learned the lesson earlier, and will have either retrained to be nurses, soulless programmers for mechanical turk-like code farms, or Über drivers, or social workers, or will have found riches in E-sports or some other venality.
If you do not form worker cooperatives, seize ownership of your work place, and vote yourself a pay rise and fewer work hours when you get robots in to ease your workload, then you are going to be replaced by either a robot or a cheaper labourer eventually. It will not be the fault of “the immigrants” (they will be out of a job too), it will be the direct decision of your boss who seeks to extract profit from your labour, and to eventually eject you entirely from the work place. If it is not your workplace, if you do not make it your workplace, you will have no real say in this.
And there is no remedy other than for a true political movement of the Left, of the entire working class, blue collar plus white collar, to come together again in solidarity and proclaim collectively, “Enough with the thievery of oligarchy, we demand a fair wage for a fair days work for all, and an end to obscene executive salaries and rentier capitalism.” Or, if you like shorter sound bites, “Bernie 2020”.
One Over Epsilon 