Families are always rising and falling in America. Nathaniel Hawthorne
Free market capitalism is far more than economic theory. It is the engine of social mobility – the highway to the American Dream. George W Bush
We used to be so proud that our country offered far more economic opportunities than the feudal system in Great Britain, with its royal family, princesses and dukes. But social mobility in the UK is higher than in the US. Our social rift is as big as it was in the 1920s. Robert Reich
Social mobility has been on my mind of late. That’s not unusual – as the name of this Substack newsletter indicates, I’m obsessively interested in matters pertaining to social class.
But it seems social mobility has been on many people’s minds in recent weeks. So, let’s examine three social mobility-related vignettes from across the globe.
The US The overnight success – almost literal overnight success – of Oliver Anthony, a North Carolinian factory worker and aspiring country singer, is now transfixing not just Americans but people throughout the Anglosphere.
The Nine papers’ Thomas Mitchell, who seems to be positioning himself a Gen Y Peter FitzSimons, penned a droll thinkpiece a few days ago exploring his horror at falling in love with what appears to be – at least in part – “a conservative catchcry”.
To summarise, Anthony recorded a tune he’d penned – ‘Rich Men North of Richmond’ – in his backyard and uploaded it to YouTube, where it immediately caught fire. I’m not sure how much of thing charts are nowadays, but at the time of writing Anthony’s song is number one on America’s “Billboard Hot 100” chart. Probably more significantly, his song has racked up over 30 million YouTube views.
Most of the song is something Woody Guthrie, Pete Seeger, or, at a stretch, Bob Dylan might have belted out. As the title suggests, the song is a cri de coeur from a young blue-collar man – a pale, stale male, to use the progressive terminology – who believes he’s been screwed over by business and political elites. (“Rich Men” is self-explanatory; “North of Richmond” is a reference to Washington.)
Anthony is all too aware that nobody, least of all the contemporary Identitarian Left, now has much use for white, working-class men (at least until a war needs fighting). He observes, “Young men are putting themselves / Six feet in the ground / ‘Cause all this damn country does / Is keep on kicking them down / Lord, it’s a damn shame / What the world’s gotten to / For people like me / And people like you”.
About 85 per cent of the song is, as our academic friends might say, “unproblematic”. But as Mitchell and many others have observed, leftists’ enjoyment of the song is marred by two things.
First, both Anthony and his fans look like the kind of reactionary, low-income, low-information, Capitol-attacking Trump voters that Professional Managerial Class (PMC) types have been having nightmares about since about 9pm on November 8, 2016.
Second, Anthony expresses some right-wing sentiments in the song. He laments that fact his “bullshit pay” is “taxed no end”. (As I’m sure many Democrat-voting PMC types would be quick to point out, members of Anthony’s class don’t pay that much tax and, on average, take more out of the system than they put into it.)
There’s also a strange verse where Anthony, after lamenting the fact that “We got folks in the street / Ain’t got nothin’ to eat”, launches into a strange – and to many ears – nasty rant about short, morbidly obese people using taxpayer dollars to buy “bags of fudge rounds”.
(It looks as if Anthony, like many members of his class, struggles with his weight and I suspect he may be addressing his personal demons here. But the verse has overwhelmingly been interpreted as Anthony “punching down”. Or engaging in “downwards envy,” as taxpayer-funded PMC journalists might observe.)
Anthony has described himself as a political centrist. It’s probably more accurate to say that, like most normal people, he has a not particularly coherent suite of left-wing and right-wing views. He believes – accurately, in my opinion – that people like him have long been screwed over. (His song starts and ends with the following verse: “I’ve been selling my soul / Working all day / Overtime hours / For bullshit pay”.)
But the fact that Anthony realises he’s getting economically arse raped by those positioned several rungs up the socio-economic ladder doesn’t stop him from judging what once might have been labelled the lumpenproletariat or unrespectable poor. It’s possible, indeed common, for people to believe they aren’t getting a fair go while also being firmly convinced that those in other classes, or an irresponsible faction of their class, are being grievously overindulged.
But having just spent 600 words doing precisely that, I’m not sure analysing – OK then PMCers, ‘deconstructing’ – Anthony or his lyrics is that useful. The interesting thing is that tens of millions of culturally blue-collar Americans have seen their life opportunities contract over the last half-century. Their grandfathers might have gotten a well-paid union job in manufacturing or mining. But the best they can hope for is a minimum-wage job – or more likely, precarious “gig” – working in retail or hospitality. This is presumably why Anthony’s protest song has struck a nerve.
Anthony’s core fan base is fuming about its downward social mobility. It will be a force to be reckoned with with come November 5, 2024.
The UK A few days after hearing ‘Rich Men North of Richmond’ for the first time, I somehow ended up listening to this podcast despite never having heard of the interviewer, guest, or media organisation financing the whole operation.
The podcast’s guest, Dan Evans, grew up lower-middle class in a Welsh town surrounded by struggling mining villages. Evans laboured under the happy delusion he was “posh” for the first part of his life. When he left his hometown to attend university, he was shocked to discover he was merely petit bourgeois, or “petty” bourgeois, as he evocatively styles it. Long story short, Evans ended up writing a PhD thesis on the class structure of his hometown. More recently, he has published a book, A Nation of Shopkeepers: The Unstoppable Rise of the Petty Bourgeoisie.
Evans makes the entirely valid point that political commentators spend a lot of time talking about the working class and the PMC but tend to downplay how politically significant the “petty bourgeoisie – the insecure class between the working class and the bourgeoisie” is. (I’m from solidly petit bourgeois stock myself – my father’s father was a prosperous shopkeeper and, like Thatcher, my mother is a English grocer’s daughter – yet I too am guilty of this selective blindness.)
The petit bourgeoisie has veered both right and left during times of political turmoil in many countries over the last couple of centuries. But the petit bourgeois tends towards conservatism, much to the frustration, disgust and/or bemusement of progressives from either working class or upper-middle class backgrounds. As Evans and many others before him have noted, the petit bourgeois is haunted by a “fear of falling” back into the working class that they or their parents clawed their way out of.
(Those born at or near the top or bottom of a society typically simply inherit their parents’ class position. Those in the middle are tantalised by the prospect of ascending the class structure, and terrified by the prospect of descending it.)
As Evans noted, the petit bourgeoisie was the social base for both fascism and Thatcherism. As might be expected of a self-described “downwardly mobile graduate” – to his obvious distress, Evans’ PhD hasn’t yet resulted in anything other than poorly paid hospitality gigs and a stint as a social worker – Evans is a socialist.
Like many British leftists, Evans has a grudging respect for Thatcher. He somewhat guiltily holds her in high esteem for (a) growing her class and (b) sticking the boot into the traditional class enemy.
In Evans’ account, Thatcher grew the UK’s petit bourgeois through policies such as allowing those in public housing to purchase the “council homes” they were living in, shrinking the state, crushing the unions, and substantially deindustrialising and financialising the British economy. (Accountants are far less likely to take industrial action than auto workers).
Evans noted that around one million Brits were self-employed when Thatcher was elected PM, but four million were when she was pushed out a bit over a decade later. Evans also noted that Thatcher “hated” the working class, especially when it was acting collectively, either as football hooligans or striking miners. I’m not sure whether he believes Thatcher shrunk the British working class, but he certainly believes she gleefully set about disciplining and politically emasculating it.
Evans didn’t put it this directly or concisely, but his argument seemed to be that the Thatcher years were a time of upward social mobility for many, contrary to popular understanding. Yes, many reasonably paid union jobs in mining and heavy industry were vapourised. But it was also the case that lots of people who previously thought of themselves as working class, rusted-on Labour voters bought property and, in some cases, went from being wage slaves to being self-employed small businesspeople. They may not have had much, especially compared to the truly wealthy, but they achieved a measure of prosperity and economic security.
In contrast, lots of Gen Xers, Yers and Zers, who were the first in their families to go to university, have, much to their dismay, ended up as part of the precariat.
Evans noted that much of Corbyn’s support came from downward mobile graduates. Just as much of Bernie Sanders’ support did in the US. People like Evans aren’t enthused by Sir Keir Starmer, who they regard as a neoliberal PMC sell-out in the mould of Blair. Nonetheless, they will probably hold their noses and vote for him come the next British election.
China It seems like only yesterday that the punditocracy was waxing lyrical about the ‘China century’ and penning obits for the West in general and the US in particular. Nowadays, most of the punditocracy is insisting China has fallen into the middle-income trap, or is experiencing Japanification, or (an old fave) has gotten old before it got rich.
I don’t know enough about the subject to comment on China’s future growth prospects. But there’s no doubt that, for various reasons, the Chinese economy is now struggling and is likely to continue struggling for the foreseeable future.
That’s having exactly the impact you’d imagine it would have on the unemployment rate, especially the youth unemployment rate. As is standard in Communist societies, the CCP ‘massages’ economic data for political purposes. Even so, the last official “urban unemployment rate” for those aged 16-24 was 21.3 per cent. So, I’m guessing it was at least 30 per cent and possibly north of 40 per cent. But we won’t know either the official or the actual unemployment rate anytime soon because, in an elegant bit of authoritarian problem-solving, the CCP has simply banned reporting the unemployment rate. (China’s National Bureau of Statistics abruptly realised that "The economy and society are constantly developing and changing. Statistical work needs continuous improvement.")
If you’re a young Chinese, you’ve come of age knowing nothing but modern, assertive China. You’ve almost certainly grown up assuming it was merely a matter of time until the Middle Kingdom supplanted the US as the global hyperpower. If you had visited the US, you might have been taken aback by its ancient, crumbling infrastructure. You’ve probably watched in bafflement as Western nations have weakened themselves in an orgy of self-recrimination and self-hatred. At the very least, you would have assumed China would continue to rise, and you would enjoy a significantly more prosperous life than your parents and a vastly more comfortable existence than your grandparents. Only now something has gone horribly, inexplicably wrong. You’ve been studying hard since the age of three, yet you’ve left school or university to find nobody is hiring.
Even ruthless dictators need to maintain the consent of the governed. They typically acquire that consent by facilitating rising living standards, restored national glory, or both. Xi and his comrades can no longer deliver double-digit annual GDP growth. They are struggling to provide even single-digit growth. And with growing prosperity off the table, Xi will be sorely tempted to unite the increasingly restive Chinese people behind him and finally avenge the century of humiliation by bringing a breakaway province back into the fold.
Fun fact: Xi has ordered the Chinese military to be ready to annex Taiwan by no later than 2027.
Ripping read, thanks Nigel. I love this quote: "The interesting thing is that tens of millions of culturally blue-collar Americans have seen their life opportunities contract over the last half-century. Their grandfathers might have gotten a well-paid union job in manufacturing or mining. But the best they can hope for is a minimum-wage job – or more likely, precarious “gig” – working in retail or hospitality."
If the manufacturing jobs have been largely off-shored, the days are numbered for the mining jobs, and the unions no longer seem to be able to ensure decent working conditions for minimum-wage or gig economy jobs, then it makes sense to me that the working class would certainly feel that the left has failed them, and are turning to the right to 'make America great again' -- which can probably be interpreted as restoring social mobility.
Ripping read, thanks Nigel. I love this quote: "The interesting thing is that tens of millions of culturally blue-collar Americans have seen their life opportunities contract over the last half-century. Their grandfathers might have gotten a well-paid union job in manufacturing or mining. But the best they can hope for is a minimum-wage job – or more likely, precarious “gig” – working in retail or hospitality."
If the manufacturing jobs have been largely off-shored, the days are numbered for the mining jobs, and the unions no longer seem to be able to ensure decent working conditions for minimum-wage or gig economy jobs, then it makes sense to me that the working class would certainly feel that the left has failed them, and are turning to the right to 'make America great again' -- which can probably be interpreted as restoring social mobility.
Great minds think alike, Shane!