And the soft middle class
Crowded in to the last
For the building was fully surrounded
The American Way of Life will not survive the twenty-first century. The question is whether its death will proceed from revolutionary effort, or from the inertia of the global capitalist system operating as usual. At present, the latter seems more likely.
Most popular-academic treatments of "inequality" assume as a baseline the three decades ("thirty glorious years") following the Second World War. These decades were marked by remarkable growth, relatively evenly distributed thanks to a "great compression" in income distribution, in the popular phrase. Since the oil crisis of the 1970s, to use an approximate turning point, inequality in incomes has grown, the welfare state has retrenched, union membership has cratered, industrial and manufacturing jobs have declined, and the labor market has become increasingly polarized. We may describe "the American Way of Life" as the "middle" that is now "missing:" the plausible prospect of a life of middle class abundance for most Americans, each family its own private kingdom of house, car, and appliance.
The promise of postwar prosperity still haunts our present half a century later, and the horizon of American (and European) electoral politics remains fixed on a return to it, ever more desperately as it recedes further into the past. For the bourgeois "left" this means a return to a robust welfare state; for the bourgeois "right" this means a return of codified racial hierarchies and a violently policed normative regime of gender and sexuality. These two are not mutually exclusive. The bourgeois "right" increasingly feels compelled to disguise its free-marketeering beneath a veneer of contempt for "woke" corporations, and the bourgeois "left" hardly misses a chance to reaffirm its commitment to the police state ("public safety"), empire ("our allies"), and ethnic cleansing ("border security"). The question in either case is how to secure and redivide the imperial dragon's dwindling hoard, in ways that might incidentally benefit the petty bourgeoisie just enough to maintain the legitimacy of the system.
The American Way of Life has been kept on life support variously through temporary booms, monetary expansion, and fiscal stimulus. The zero-interest rate era that followed the 2007–2008 Global Financial Crisis is the most proximate example (also, not coincidentally, when the topic of "income inequality" and the neutered class struggle framing of 99% vs. 1% were front-and-center in the public consciousness). This was a period of easy money, which the American petty bourgeoisie experienced as an unprecedented proliferation of cheap consumer electronics and on-demand services. The bet, which paid off for a time, was that the middle class's existential fears could be assuaged with enough cheap plastic crap. This period came to its logical conclusion in the state response to the COVID–19 pandemic, when the sheer amount of free money necessary to bribe the American petty bourgeoisie into restraining themselves from going to fast-casual chain restaurants for a few months kicked off staggering inflation. The modest increase in interest rates that followed has already permanently restructured significant sectors of the economy, and the American middle class is now horrified by the prices at fast-casual chain restaurants.
This manner of cyclical drama will likely repeat several more times in the coming decades, each "boom" more superficial and unevenly distributed and each "bust" permanently disqualifying yet another strata of American households from the middle class. Each will be exacerbated by secular trends in ecological degradation, as the "natural" disasters occasioned by global heating become more frequent, various, and difficult to escape. We can expect, optimistically, a global average temperature increase of 3 degrees centigrade over the course of the twenty-first century. While the United States may be spared some of the worst outcomes (though wildfires, hurricanes, tornadoes, etc. will nonetheless accelerate throughout North America), the peripheral regions in which its cheap consumer goods are produced will not be. Severe weather and natural disasters will decimate shipping and other transport infrastructure, and extreme heat events will decimate cheap labor forces. Allowing that the United States remains mostly habitable, the global economic disruption caused by ecological catastrophe and its knock-on effects (e.g., the increasingly frequent emergence of novel pathogens) will translate to a marked decline in average quality of life.
Assuming maintenance of the status quo, we can expect the following to proceed, not from conscious policy decisions, but from the untenability of sustaining American petty bourgeois habits for the vast majority:
Absent sustained, conscious efforts to attenuate systemic problems, the typical petty bourgeois American will respond to these symptoms in a fascistic manner, seeing in increased prices a "globalist" plot to take away their treats; in declining home and vehicle ownership a plot to confine their movement and undermine their autonomy; in increased immigration a plot to "replace" the rightful recipients of imperial largess with undeserving racial others; and in greater inequality, a dangerous underclass that must be monitored with ever more security cameras and kept in line with ever more cops. The objective crises of capitalism and climate change, ceteris paribus, will produce a subjective crisis of incipient fascism in the core.
"Fascism" is perhaps a misleading term, as it suggests doctrinal coherence (a clear set of ideas bound together like the fasces), and this was what many feared in the early days of the first Trump administration. But we should not expect that the incipient American fascism will be disciplined and programmatic, led by slick-haired Mercer puppets. There is no need for it to be. The crisis of our present is not like the interwar crisis that produced Mussolini, Franco, Salazar, and Hitler. It is a crisis of protracted decay proceeding from secular trends, not the abrupt catastrophe of total war. Against a backdrop of secular decay, the organic, trapped-animal outbursts of the petty bourgeoisie will do much of the work. Barring an accelerando in the tempo of collapse, no bold new ideology may be necessary.
This is home to a manifesto-in-progress that aims to frankly summarize the situation of the United States in the twenty-first century, with an effort to understand what the possibilities for "socialist" action here are. It comes from a place of deep pessimism, as the reader may have gathered. The authors prefer to think of this pessimism as stemming not from defeatism, but from a rejection of facile, easy solutions. Many "socialists" in the US presume that there is a silent majority ready to be activated. This was the false assumption on which two successive Bernie Sanders presidential campaigns were launched, only to sputter out in predictable defeat. The subjective failure was more devastating: rather than producing a new generation of organizers, the Bernie campaigns produced a new generation of opinion columnists and party hacks. Socialist strategy in the US requires beginning without illusions, without wishful thinking about public opinion data, and without the belief that a route is laid out for us if only we pick the right slogans or figureheads. Any "socialism" that aims to reconstitute the American Way of Life will fail, because the American Way of Life is neither possible nor desirable to save. We must prepare for, if not hasten its demise.