As I noted yesterday, last evening I accepted an invitation to speak on a panel…
The dislocation between the PMC and the rest of the working class – Part 2
I mentioned last week in this blog post – The dislocation between the PMC and the rest of the working class – Part 1 (November 11, 2024) – that I had been reading the 2021 book – Virtue Hoarders: The Case Against the Professional Managerial Class (published by Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press) – written by US cultural theorist – Catherine Liu It is now an open access document. It provides a brutal critique of the professional-managerial class, which she thinks has become so associated with the aspirations of the capital class’ that it has lost any progressive force in society. Here is Part 2 of that discussion.
The Post World War 2 period has been marked by many features but one that is clear is that the emergence of mass education focused on transitioning people into university-level outcomes and the proliferation of white-collar, service related occupations as the manual jobs declined has given rise to the expansion of the ‘middle class’.
The neoliberal period, by contrast, has been characterised by, among other things, the hollowing out of that class or rather by forces which have pushed the lower-earning occupations within that class down the ladder and the vice versa.
So many workers who were enjoying job security and well-paid employment are now closer to the precariat than they were.
But there remains a solid core of well-paid workers in the white-collar workforce who are well educated and maintain ‘liberal’ values.
Politicians from the Right often attack universities for being havens of Leftist thinking.
The so-called – Culture war – are really:
… a metaphor for “hot-button” politics about values and ideologies, realized with intentionally adversarial social narratives meant to provoke political polarization among the mainstream of society over economic matters …
The term ‘wedge politics’ is used in a similar way.
The former Australian Prime Minister, John Howard promoted the ‘conspiracy theory’ that Australian universities harboured “left-wing sentiments” and had “become hostage to left-wing dogma” (Source).
But these ‘Leftists’ within and beyond the university sector are not an homogeneous class.
The Monthly Review Press article (February 24, 2021) – The New Dangerous Class? The PMC and Virtue Hoarding – argues that:
… today’s leftism presents itself as an immense accumulation of subcultures, all seeking moral differentiation from a fallen cultural majority.
The author believes that in this observation “lies the root controversy over the “professional managerial class” (PMC).”
In her book, Catherine Liu opens with the observation:
For as long as most of us can remember, the professional managerial class (PMC) has been fighting a class war, not against capitalists or capitalism, but against the working classes.
She argues that over the last 100 years or so there has been a transition from the – Progressive Era – a period in US history spanning 1901 to 1929, which was marked by “widespread activism” aimed at contesting the emerging problems that Capitalism was creating among the working class and society – “rapid industrialization, urbanization, immigration, and political corruption as well as the enormous concentration of industrial ownership in monopolies … the spread of slums, poverty, and the exploitation of labor.”
The PMC during this period “supported working-class militancy in its epic struggles against robber barons and capitalists”.
However, now, they interpret struggle and activism in a different way, which is the basis of her critique of the PMC and its ‘leftist leanings’.
The PMC now are:
… fighting to defend innocent victims against their evil victimizers, but the working class is not a group they find worth saving, because by PMC standards, they do not behave properly: they are either disengaged politically or too angry to be civil.
The idea that the educated classes display a hostility towards the working class and adopt a sense of elitism is not new.
The work of author – Barbara Ehrenreich and her then husband – John Ehrenreich – in the 1970s, first introduced the term – Professional–managerial class.
The PMC according the Ehrenreichs were a “social class within capitalism that by controlling production processes through occupying a superior management position, is neither proletarian nor bourgoeisie”.
The PMC was occupied by “scientists, lawyers, academics, artists, and journalists”.
While the Ehrenreichs focused on the mechanisms whereby this class, through their education and networks, advanced the interests of capital, Catherine Liu focused more on the disdain that the PMC have for the lower-paid occupations – the sense of superiority and virtue.
A good recent example that we are all familiar with was the reaction of the educated London-based progressives to the Brexit Referendum outcome.
The sort of vitriol that was expressed towards the northerners in the industrial areas who voted to Leave was very expressive of what Catherine Liu considers endemic among the educated Left.
The descriptors ranged from they are just ignorant people, who were unable to understand the complexity of the issue and would soon experience ‘buyers remorse’ to claims the Leave voters were straight-out racists and xenophobes.
Go back through Twitter and you will see the slurs – I could name names but I won’t.
The same type of people were in the words of the Monthly Review Press article:
Stimulated by a postmodern curriculum, graduates encourage–indeed, mandate–wrenching self-examination of whiteness, heteronormativity and patriarchy. Privilege, as they call it.
The PMC now, in Catherine Liu’s words, prefer “to fight culture wars against the classes below while currying the favor of capitalists it once despised.”
One sees this in the way the Leftist debate has unfolded over the last several decades.
Educated workers express dismay if they are inconvenienced by industrial action by the workers in lower-paid occupations.
They also shun industrial action themselves.
The academic union in Australia rarely conducts industrial action and eschews large-scale strike action targetted at disrupting the students’ examination period, for example, because it would hurt the students’ prospects.
The transport workers think nothing of staging a strike at peak-hour because they know that will cause maximum damage to the bosses – to have thousands of stranded commuters stuck on stations waiting for the train that doesn’t come.
But the academics don’t want to inflict costs onto the students, who by their position in society, will inherit the privilege of their teachers.
Catherine Liu extends that point by emphasising that:
PMC elite has become ideologically convinced of its own unassailable position as comprising the most advanced people the earth has ever seen. They have, in fact, made a virtue of their vanguardism … PMC elites try to tell the rest of us how to live …
The PMC is also characterised by a willingness to ‘bend with the wind’ in relation to defining the costs and benefits of activism.
Think about the recent campaign by the Democrats in the US where the American voters were told that the main aspiration was to restore ‘joy’.
At the same time, the administration that was seeking to be reelected into office was approving billions of dollars worth of armaments to be sent to another nation state that was intent on and executing genocide against the Palestinian people.
The call to ‘joy’ was hollow.
There were weasel words about the need for a ‘ceasefire’ and faux shows of sympathy for the tens of thousands children and innocent civilians being killed by the bombs and bullets that the speakers of those words were approving.
But the question – why is the US persisting with this abhorrence? – was always sidestepped with mutterings about ‘Israel has a right to defend itself’ even though what is going on in the Middle East is not an act of self-defence in any reasonable conceptualisation of that term.
The Democrats, like the Republicans, know full well that they could stop the harm being inflicted on the Palestinians but to do so would require them to confront capital interests that control the military-industrial complex in the US.
And that complex funds their political careers, and, often provides them with post-political career pathways.
There are many examples of the ‘revolving door’ phenomenon across the globe.
In Australia, for example, the former head of the peak body of trade unions, then became resources minister in the federal Labor government between 2007 and 2013.
When he left parliament, he was employed by the peak body promoting the oil and gas industry at a time that his political party was claiming to be concerned about environment sustainability.
Another Labor politician and former communications minister left parliament for a job promoting the gambling industry and fell in with the top-end-of-town at a time when evidence was mounting that the rapid spread of betting opportunities in our society was undermining individual and family prosperity.
Another Labor politician, who was a former parliamentary secretary to the Treasurer whose work included bringing in consumer protections against predatory lending practices, left parliament and immediately took a position with a lobbying firm promoting credit expansion.
Countless examples exist.
The point is that these ‘progressive’ voices are nothing of the sort and serve the PMC role to support capital, even if such support is detrimental to the less-educated workers in society.
Another example of the way in which ‘progressives’ have become captured by the elites is the ‘cosmopolitanism’ that allows the ‘Left’ to support the on-going neoliberalism of the European Union.
Even though that cosmopolitanism ends at the EU border, and is thus not a true form of ‘international solidarity’, the progressive Europhiles has managed to convince themselves that it is better to ‘reform’ the EU from within rather than advocated a breakup and restoration of national currency sovereignty.
They know full well that the nature of the politics in Europe and the requirements for treaty change are such that no meaningful change will come unless the whole show is abandoned, but they signal virtue to their class members through this ‘reform’ game.
Yet, the EU is special because the ideology of neoliberalism is not a meagre political choice, but rather is embedded in the legal structure of the Union and voters are unable to purge it at any particular national election.
To purge the neoliberalism, a nation has to exit the EU, with all the attendant consequences.
The PMC support this system and look down on the ‘hoards’, especially the people who work hard in the regional areas, as being too stupid to understand how the EU is working for their benefit.
I have been to many meetings in Brussels over the years and I am always amazed to see the sumptuous food and wine that is served, usually at the expense of the EU (some division or another).
That is where the benefits flow.
Ask an unemployed worker in any French industrial town who cannot afford even simple luxuries how the EU benefits them.
Oh, but the common currency means all those exchanges at borders no longer are required – I hear you say.
We no longer have to carry multiple currencies when we travel in Europe – I hear you say.
Except the PMC dominates the travel.
Catherine Liu notes that in the US:
… generations of allegedly neutral experts have hollowed out public goods, degraded the public sphere, facilitated the monetization of everything from health to aptitude, and indebted generations of Americans in a fantasy of meritocracy enhanced social mobility.
On Wednesday, I am talking on a panel at the Rising Tide protest in Newcastle – The People’s Blockade – on the coal industry.
The port of Newcastle is the largest coal export port in the world and Rising Tide are a group of activists that try to continually disrupt the port’s shipping movements.
The Blockade involves activists boating out on anything that floats to block the harbour entrance and in the past has significantly distrupted the coal shipments.
Many progressives reject the Blockade, claiming that we need to reduce reliance on coal exports by introducing a ‘tax’ – a market solution.
My position is that we need to close the coal industry through elected government dictate and forget neoliberal market incentive-type solutions.
The NSW Labor government – which is meant to be progressive and is full of the PMC – has determined the Blockade cannot proceed because it will disrupt the legitimate interests of the big coal corporations, many of which are foreign-owned.
A showdown will occur in Newcastle this week with the police (agents of the state) and the activists.
The point is that so-called Leftist forces are conspiring with the multinational fossil fuel industry and banning protest.
My thinking about this comes down to the following:
1. Many so-called ‘progressive’ commentators have spawned social activity where for example, they consider the female boss of low-paid female workers has more in common than the low-paid female workers and the low-paid male workers in the same workplace.
2. Many so-called ‘progressive’ politicians believe that they have to conduct economic policy to, first of all, appease ‘capital’ which then provides little scope to advance the interests of the broader masses.
3. Many so-called ‘progressives’ argue that economic class distinctions or “left and right” categorisations are no longer relevant and that it is better to study society from the perspective of gender or race or something else (identities).
The PMC is full of those leanings and in that sense I agree with Catherine Liu and reading her work has provided me with a deeper understanding of the problems the liberal (progressive) educated class have in communicating and connecting with the broader span of working class citizens.
The problem for the Left is that it is not a homogeneous grouping.
What I consider to be real progressives start with economic class as the organising framework and then add the identity issues as aspects of the dynamics of that class.
For example, when I was a student we studied racism as a vehicle for capital to advance their interests and divide the working class into competing segments.
If workers of all races realised that their commonality was in their struggle against capital then they might organise more effectively to advance their interests.
Racism is a vehicle to undermine that realisation.
As I noted in Part 1, activists who marched to support the ‘black lives matter’ movement were seen to ignore homeless and poverty stricken black people living in the streets.
Many progressives attack that position as ‘extreme class reductionism’ and consider studying race dynamics independent of the capitalist social relations (relationships to mode of production or economic class) is essential.
That division is at the heart of the matter.
There is no doubt that even among low-paid workers, there is not equal treatment by race and that certainly needs to be exposed.
But ignoring the economic class dynamics doesn’t solve the problem.
I also mentioned in a response to a comment last week that one can distinguish between progressives who hold lexicographic preferences and those who do not.
Lexicographic preferences refer to choices that cannot be ‘traded off’ with price or income incentives.
Many people believe that ‘everything has a price’, which means that no matter how strongly a choice or opinion might be held, eventually a person can be persuaded to take a different view if the price or cost of holding the original view becomes too high.
A person with lexicographic preferences cannot be bought like that.
I noted that in my view this is the difference between a ‘principle’, which is inviolate no matter what the cost of maintaining it might be, and a ‘preference’, which can be varied depending on the relative cost of holding it.
When Bernie Sanders, for example, told the Americans to vote for Harris even though she was supporting the slaughter of children he argued that on other things that matter that Harris would be better.
So he was pushing the idea that there is a trade-off that is acceptable between a horror and what he thinks of as other good outcomes.
A lexicographic person rejects that logic.
I reject that logic.
The problem is that a significant proportion of those on the Left accept it and that is why they can advocate advancing ‘joy’ while the same representatives they are promoting, are actively participating is horror.
Conclusion
I am still researching this literature and might have more to write on the topic in the future.
That is enough for today!
(c) Copyright 2024 William Mitchell. All Rights Reserved.
“Oh, but the common currency means all those exchanges at borders no longer are required”
Following that logic through it would be better to abandon the Euro completely and adopt the US dollar. After all if monetary policy made far away without reference to local needs is a brilliant idea, then why not go the whole hog? It’s crystal clear that monetary policy for all secondary currencies is following a ‘dirty peg’ with the US dollar anyway.
Therefore I would add one further item to the list. The PMC really loves the ‘One Nation’ concept, as in One Nation worldwide. The end of borders. The end of separate currencies. Wandering around the world, sponging off the back of the workers wherever they happen to be cheapest.
@ Neil Wilson.
But what if “One Nation” (in a global monetary union) meant following the principles of the UNUDHR, and ensured everyone had above-poverty employment, ie, Article 23. a Job Guarantee?
International socialism?
I went straight to university from high school. I was too young and didn’t like what I was studying and dropped out after 1.5 years. I returned to uni in the late-1980s at the age of 24. I was much wiser and more eager to learn. I studied at Flinders Uni and had Bill Mitchell as my Quantitative Methods lecturer, not that it matters here.
Universities were still fun and interesting places back then. I sometimes hung around the student politicians – those involved in the student union, the students’ association, the editors of the student newspaper, and their hangers-on. I was always an outsider amongst them. I went to a public high school and had a modest background; most of these characters went to a private school in the days when fewer kids did and had reasonably wealthy parents. I wore jeans and T-shirts without slogans, except for a Daintree rainforest T-shirt, which was one of my all-time favourites; the males of this group dressed like Alexi Sayle without a tie (sorry, Alexi) or wore what looked like their old private school grey trousers. I had a standard haircut (the same I have today!) and washed my hair regularly; their hair looked as it did when they got up in the morning (deliberately, of course). I would occasionally be uncouth enough to bring up the topic of football or music not produced by Billy Bragg or Tracy Chapman (i.e., didn’t have a protest message). How dare I!
Even at the time, but more so looking back, they were phonies and student snobs, who are probably now part of the PMC. It struck me how they would talk about defending the working class and, without taking a breath, would criticise the behaviour of the sort of people who were clearly common among the working class. They would also be disrespectful to them at times, although they did their best to dissociate with them on campus by keeping to the student union building. They imagined the world would be instantly utopian, with racism, sexism, and ageism instantly vanishing if only the filthy capitalists could be overthrown. They failed to recognise that what mattered was a sustainable and just world, even for people they considered undesirables. They really didn’t know what was required to bring about such a world, and they still don’t! Because they form part of society’s movers and shakers, they are part of the problem – the rise of the Right largely a product of the failure and ineptitude of the Left.
For anyone interested on a short piece I have just had published in Pearls and Irritations on the failure of the Left, go to: https://johnmenadue.com/the-failure-of-the-left/
P.S. I ended up an academic, so I guess some people would consider me part of the PMC. I consider myself to have been privileged. I quit where I was working in 2016 because of workplace bullying and intimidation, which I consider to be a rampant product of the infusion of neoliberalism into organisations of all types. Because of the nature of my published work (it upsets a lot of people) and the fact that I could get a lot of stuff published without the need for research grants, I haven’t been able to get a full-time position at a university because, these days, to get a senior position at a university, you need to prove that you can part-finance your own salary with research grants. I’ve been rejected by heterodox as well as mainstream economics departments. I have been thrown out of the PMC and have therefore been denied the privilege I once enjoyed but never took advantage of. If not for the fact that I do not have children of my own (which resulted in me saving by spending less than what I earned), I would be a member of the precariat. As it is, I live on a modest income, to say the least. Just as well I’m not a big spender.
PMC LHM (Left Hemispherical Morons). When you consider the relationship and influence of both hemispheres to our way of thinking, per Iain McGilchrist et al., then the concept of the PMC is not at all surprising. Left sided dominance has its natural home amongst the managers; their universe is littered with evidence of control and order – process, flow charts, accounts, & etc. They simply do not see the bigger picture – the consequence of their actions. Factor in human behaviour, reward, greed, supremacy, punishment – and you have the perfect conditions for what Johnson, Gill and O’Toole described in 1984.
https://youtu.be/pO1HC8pHZw0?si=XFwzY4dFBMkbyTAP
In my lifetime, I have lived on the edge of the PMC. I’ve had plenty of blue collar and unionised experience, plus have some professional expertise, so might straddle that great divide.
It might well be that the PMC, collectively, reinforce the socio-economic class structure, but have also captured most of the decision making that sustains it. I’m alright, Jack.
Fragmenting the working class was and is a highly desirable goal as divide and rule works very well, thank you, both for the governing elite and for wealth owners.
The PMC has always worked as part of that elite.
Does the PMC really owe anyone outside their cadre any responsibility or loyalty ?
Gramscian hegemony within Foucault’s power structures protect power and wealth elites, and always have done.
The notion of a liberal elite, with commitments to wider humanitarianism, seems to be something of a triumph of hope over experience to those disaffected and dispossessed.
Replacing collectivism via the negotiating power of unionised labour, and diverting people through issues involving smaller, often competing cultural political issues is one explanation for the flatlining of wages in the last 45 years, and the still increasing concentration of wealth.
This has been the PMC’s most conspicuous success.
Huge efforts to develop coherent economic theory, through academic work, and that supports neoliberalism have been made.
This then removes moral choice from the implementation of economic policies, such as a central bank raising interest rates to deliberately increase unemployment.
The policies become managerial, and the PMC divorced from ethical considerations.
Since the Big Bang here in the UK, the shackles of credit debt have further helped to limit the overall influence of the working class, as consumer growth required supplementary borrowing by the progressive erosion of wages, even then to cover the essential ‘needs’ of life as well as ‘wants’ for lower waged groupings, as incomes have been deliberately squeezed.
Underpaid and increasingly indebted is a crackin’ means of control.
Especially cunning has been the continuing monetarising of education, when student debt is loaded on to the young, as participation in movements involving political reform become very constrained with existential financial pressures, for that age group most likely wanting to challenge for economic, social and environmental transformation.
And it reduces social mobility big time.
There is no longer a recognisable ‘proletariat’ in the form of an industrial factory based working class, given that most developed economies have 70% service sectors, much of which is split into small units.
Arguably, in the globalised low wage, less developed economies where manufacturing has been outsourced, the workers are now an oppressed neo-serf class, competing across national boundaries but orchestrated by multinational corporations.
They have little ability to collectivise, and few negotiating powers. It is essentially a sweat shop system.
The success of transactionalism, transforming and reducing both interpersonal and group relations, has removed the principle of reciprocity that Polanyi described, and has aimed to create competition where people formerly naturally co-operated, pre-industrially within their class hierarchy, but in industrial societies, integral to left thinking, ethics and movements.
The PMC are those who have effected and sustain this transformation.
Neo-feudalistic models, going back as far as James Burnham’s, 1940 “The Managerial Revolution”, that influenced Orwell’s 1984, emphasise the praetorian guard character of the PMC in sustaining the owners of capital and political elite.
This clique of managerialists then take the controlling and manipulating role, as Kotkin and Varoufakis in his proposition of “Technofeudalism” have described.
Of course, the PMC can then divert as much wealth and power as possible to their own cadre within this highly pyramidal edifice, and have done so, quite successfully.
As for the PMC demonstrating solidarity with the working class, in a wider commitment to social and economic justice, then the deliberate reduction of social mobility has weakened connections.
Even so called leaders of the leading ‘liberal’ managerialists, like Keynes, expected to be the decision makers on behalf of the great unwashed, so no less arrogant in their elitism, no less class oriented, and equally undemocratic. This dislocation is nothing new, and might even be gaining strength.
When the Griffith’s Report was published in 1983 and the principles of general management adopted into the NHS, the new workforce was not recruited with MBA qualification, instead the NHS used the existing workforce. Clinicians were given new titles – Nursing Manager, Director of Clinical Services & etc and promoted with a large salary increase. Within a very short time, said managers distanced themselves from their clinical colleagues and adopted an ‘us and them’ approach. The same happened in professional bodies and regulators – most were dominated by NHS managers, who worked to their own (NHS) agenda.
Maybe we see it as ‘getting on’ – moving away from humble beginnings. It was certainly encouraged in the 1960s, 70s and 80s – that’s why education was deemed so important. But we’ve forgotten our roots and distanced ourselves in the process from the important basics; solidarity, humility and comradeship.
I’ve posted here before about the workforce at the Rolls Royce factory in Scotland who disabled the engines of the Hawker Hunter jets used by Gen Pinochet in the overthrow of Allende in Chile 1970s. Skilled engineers – but the epitome of working class stopped the mass murder of many thousands of innocent Chilean people in an act of unselfish solidarity. The ‘managers’ were incandescent – the politicians, security forces et al. But the workers held their ground.
One of the more insidious ramifications has been the neutering of the trade union movement by the PWC. I heard once that eventually the meek will inherit the earth. I really hope that comes true.
It is readily apparent that many of the PMC are the guardians and gatekeepers for the power elite/plutocracy. Their goal in the advancing neoliberal era has been to achieve a level of wealth and power that places them well above their peer group origins. Some have always wanted to be captured, as Michael Hudson has explained about Obama’s background in that he was willingly captured and groomed to serve a wealthy property developer family in Chicago before being selected for national politics. We all know how that worked out for Wall Street versus Main Street during the GFC. So visible today is the bankrolling of JD Vance by Peter Thiel. Soon to be a heartbeat away from becoming POTUS.
What now self-describes as the (organised) Left is mostly a waste of space. The in plain sight co-option of the elected classes by the plutocracy combined with a lack of desire to overturn the status quo, coupled to an ignorance of or unwillingness to employ the coercive power of the currency issuing state for the benefit of the many, gives us what we have today. It’s always the same – follow the money. We’ve already established what you are. Now we’re just haggling over the price.
This is the first use of the term “lexiographic” that I have ever encountered. At first I though you had intended “lexicographic” but had mistyped. Your usage appears to be different from other uses I could locate via DDG search. Can you elaborate on it?
Class donors and the Israel lobby ensure zionists get what they want. Being beholden to party donors and lobbying decided so called democracies direction.
Add the clear neoliberal punishment to a large working class population and you can see dehumanising by the hoards who dont care about others, but themselves.
To explain US vile support of Palestinian mass murder and ethnic cleansing.
I would recommend reading The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy
By: John Mersheimer, Stephen Walt.
John Mearsheimer is a realist (to do with why the globe has conflicts for great power status etc)
The book imho, nails it.
Tom Hazeldine’s The Northern Question https://www.versobooks.com/en-gb/products/328-the-northern-question and his recent summing up of the UK elections in NLR are useful here too https://newleftreview.org/issues/ii148/articles/tom-hazeldine-neo-labourism-in-the-saddle
I do think well educated members of the PMC just don’t understand the alienating, exhausting working conditions of precarious working class people who primarily use their bodies in a repetitive, robotic fashion each day to get by. There simply isn’t mental space or energy to waste on post modern niceties when your 50 and scraping plates all day.
What does ‘there is not equal treatment by race and that needs to be exposed’ mean? What is this ‘exposure’ you speak of going and what is it going to achieve?
If you want to see racism at work in the US like at people of color selling and buying houses, and I’m not talking about only those who are of low paying jobs, but I guess for Mr. Mitchel this is an acceptable ‘trade off’ a la what he accuses Bernie Sanders of and not the sort of class struggle ‘lexicographic preference’ he refers to. Of course these preferences are subjective, and it’s easy for Mr. Mitchell as a white Australian to trade that for the ‘greater good’ of class struggle.
Does anyone really think that this is a selling narrative for revitalizing the ‘left’s electoral losses? (I don’t necessarily disagree with the analysis, but don’t see anything politically useful here for moving forward).
When Bernie Sanders ran in 2016, he was accused of being a misogynist by the Hillary Clinton liberals. Are women oppressed? Sure, but to think Clinton would’ve ended gender pay gap when her entire ideology revolves around having many underclasses to exploit was ridiculous.
U.S. had a black President for 8 years and he did nothing for black people. He did however order drone strikes on brown people in West Asia. Not very different from now.
Universal Healthcare, education, housing and employment cuts across race, gender and other Identities. Those who are lowest income benefit the most. The only people who do not benefit from it are the capitalists and landlords in certain sectors.
I don’t think Kamala Harris campaign this time was very identity focused either. She rarely mentioned her gender or race unlike Hillary Clinton, talk about LGBTQ people, she was pushing a softer version of Trump’s xenophobia.
She really didn’t have much of anything, class or identity.
For black people she had:
https://theintercept.com/2024/10/21/kamala-harris-crypto-black-men/
Just discovered this blog – nice to see someone adding much needed analysis to my suspicions that a class war is going on behind the scenes of the economic and wokeism debates. Glad to know I’m not alone.