David Brooks divides the American electorate into three groups: a reactionary “proletariat” comprised of Trump-supporting working people concerned about threats to their values and position in society; a “precariat” of socialist millennials stuck in the gig economy with limited wealth, prospects, and security; and a middle group exhausted by Trump and his excesses, but worried that the alternatives could be worse. Is he right?
As is typical with Brooks, there is some truth in this concept, but not enough. My reactions are as follows:
- Trump’s core supporters are retired people and small business owners, who, in Marxian terms, are petit bourgeois. Calling these people a “proletariat” is misleading at best.
- A large majority of millennials have regular jobs and are not dependent on the gig economy.
- The exhausted middle actually contains a wide range of ideological positions, as described below.
- The “proletariat” is larger and far more influential politically than the “precariat.” Only one of them is a danger to our liberal democratic system, and it isn’t the “precariat.”
It would be more accurate to divide the American electorate into four groups: a small group of social democrats, which includes, but is larger than, the Brooks “precariat;” liberals, who believe in evolutionary changes to the system, not a revolution; conservatives, who prefer to keep things the way they are, if at all possible; and reactionaries, who want to make the white patriarchy great again through any means necessary. In this scheme, conservatives and liberals match up with the Brooks exhausted middle, and may well have more in common with each other than with the extremes, but they do not agree on the pace of change, and it is unclear whether they will unite to get rid of the current administration. The conservatives are the swing voters. We’ll see.