dylan riley & robert brenner

SEVEN THESES

ON AMERICAN POLITICS

I
n the weeks following the 2022 us midterms, the mood in the
intellectual penumbra of the Democratic Party swung wildly from
impassioned handwringing to euphoric self-congratulation. Dire
warnings of a ‘red wave’ delivering large congressional majorities
to the Republicans gave way to jubilation at the salvation of democracy.
In reality the results were decidedly mixed. The Republicans took the
House with a narrow majority, while Democrats retained their slim hold
on the Senate. The Republicans swept Florida and flipped a handful
of districts in New York. Reproductive rights had a fairly good night,
but Democrats continued to fare very poorly with non-college-educated
whites––according to one poll, Republicans won over 70 per cent of
white men without a college degree.1

Various explanations have been offered for the weaker than expected
Republican performance, in the context of a deeply unpopular President
and high inflation. Among the leading hypotheses is the poor ‘candidate
quality’ of many Trump endorsees; the Supreme Court’s overturning
of the constitutional guarantee of the right to abortion with the Dobbs
v Jackson ruling this summer; and—at 27 per cent—the relatively high
turnout among young voters. All these points have some plausibility, but
they miss the larger issue. American politics has undergone a tectonic
shift over the past twenty years, linked to deep structural transforma-
tions in the regime of accumulation. These transformations have not
been adequately sketched and theorized as yet; the unforeseen midterm
results are a good occasion to begin to do so.

What we offer here is not a finished argument but a set of seven tele-
graphic theses, flanked by empirical evidence, intended to provoke

new left review 138 Nov Dec 2022 5

 6 nlr 138

further discussion of these critical questions. To that end, we begin with

a brief sketch of the current conjuncture and a clarification of terms.

For most of the twentieth century, us political parties represented

different coalitions of capitalists, who appealed to working-class voters
on the basis that they would promote economic development, expand
job opportunities and generate revenues to invest in public goods. This
was the ‘material basis of consent’ that determined party success at the
polls: a local version of the politics that shaped most capitalist democra-
cies during the long post-war boom. In the us, this produced significant
electoral swings, and big congressional majorities for the winning side:
Eisenhower in 1956, Johnson in 1964, Nixon in 1972. That political land-
scape has now disappeared. Beginning in the 1990s, and definitively
since 2000, Republican and Democrat rule alternates on the narrowest
of margins. Winning an election no longer involves appealing to a vast
shifting centre but hinges on turnout and mobilization of a deeply but
closely divided electorate.

This new electoral structure is related to the rise of a new regime of

accumulation: let us call it political capitalism. Under political capital-
ism, raw political power, rather than productive investment, is the key
determinant of the rate of return. This new form of accumulation is
associated with a series of novel mechanisms of ‘politically constituted
rip-off’.2 These include an escalating series of tax breaks, the privati-
zation of public assets at bargain-basement prices, quantitative easing
plus ultra-low interest rates, to promote stock-market speculation—and,
crucially, massive state spending aimed directly at private industry, with
trickledown effects for the broader population: Bush’s Prescription Drug
legislation, Obama’s Affordable Care Act, Trump’s cares Act, Biden’s
American Rescue Plan, the Infrastructure and chips Acts and the
Inflation Reduction Act.3 All these mechanisms of surplus extraction are

1
‘Exit Polls 2022’, nbc News, source: National Election Pool, accessed 7 December
2022.
2
Robert Brenner, ‘Introducing Catalyst’, Catalyst, Spring 2017, p. 11.
3
Luigi Zingales’s A Capitalism for the People contains excellent descriptive
material on the phenomenon: 43 per cent of the agricultural giant Archer-Daniels-
Midland’s profits were tied to state-subsidized products like corn syrup and
 riley & brenner: US Politics 7

openly and obviously political. They allow for returns, not on the basis
of investment in plant, equipment, labour and inputs to produce use
values, but rather on the basis of investments in politics.4 This new struc-
ture is the real basis of Piketty’s main finding: that the rate of return on
capital now outstrips the rate of growth (although Piketty himself, in our
view incorrectly, presents this as a return to capitalist normality after the
exceptional period of the long boom).5

The rise of political capitalism has profoundly reconfigured politics.

At the elite level, it is associated with vertiginous levels of campaign
expenditure and open corruption on a vast scale. At the mass level, it
is associated with the unravelling of the previous hegemonic order, for
in a persistently low- or no-growth environment––‘secular stagnation’—
parties can no longer operate on the basis of programmes for growth.
They cannot therefore preside over a ‘class compromise’ in the classic
sense. In these conditions, political parties become fundamentally fis-
cal rather than productivist coalitions. Before going on to hypothesize
how these coalitions work, we should first clarify the terms we use for
class analysis.

Social classes, in our view, are structural positions linked by relations

of exploitation. The dominant class extracts labour effort from—that
is to say: ‘exploits’—the subordinate class. That labour effort is the
basis of the dominant class’s control over the social surplus, which in
turn accords it a leading role in determining the overall developmental
dynamic of the society in question. Different class structures emerge

ethanol, while the number of earmarks in Federal bills rose from 10 in 1982 to
4,128 in 2005. Zingales also provides a vivid account of the functioning of the mort-
gage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, described as huge private monopolies
which ‘use their political connections to make money at the expense of taxpayers’:
Luigi Zingales, A Capitalism for the People: Recapturing the Lost Genius of American
Prosperity, New York 2012, pp. 44, 79, 45.
4
The dramatic intensification of lobbying could be understood as a form of ‘politi-
cal accumulation’, different of course from its feudal forebear, but nonetheless
highly distinctive.
5
Thomas Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, Cambridge ma 2014, pp. 449–
450. Piketty shows the rate of return on capital substantially outstripping the rate of
growth after 2012 but does not quite explain the meaning of this inversion.
 8 nlr 138

from the qualitatively distinctive ways in which dominant classes

extract the labour effort of their subordinates. For example, under capi-
talism, owners of means of production typically extract labour effort
from workers in the production process after the purchase of labour
power—the capacity to work—in a market. In contrast, under feudal-
ism, lords typically do not extract labour effort in the actual production
process but subsequent to it, through the application or threat of force.
Several points follow from these general positions.

First, the purpose of ‘class analysis’, in our view, is to identify the nerve
centre of the entire social order with a view to its possible transcend-
ence. It is not, therefore, pace the late brilliant Erik Olin Wright, a theory
of ‘social stratification’, or a procedure designed to provide a social car-
tography of ‘life chances’. In fact, the categories of mainstream social
science are far better at doing that than is class analysis. Olin Wright’s
work constitutes a tacit admission of this, in that his ‘class map’, which is
organized according to the criteria of property, authority and expertise, is
unrelated to his underlying Marxist theory of what class is: a set of inter-
locked positions constituted by relations of exploitation.6 Thus, especially
under capitalist conditions, there may be gaping differences in ‘life
chances’, income and lifestyle within the working class. Indeed, in the
normal course of affairs, we would expect real class relations to be almost
invisible as an everyday reality to most social actors, most of the time.

Second, and relatedly, in our usage the expression ‘class politics’ refers
to the politicization of the main relationship of exploitation in the class
structure under discussion. In capitalist society, this means the politi-
cization of the wage-labour/capital relationship—and, in particular,
attempts to exert political control over how the social surplus is invested.
Class politics in this sense is a rare event; in advanced-capitalist societies,
most politics tends to be non-class politics, as explained in Thesis One
below. Finally, our argument is that a new structure of exploitation is in
the process of emerging in the advanced-capitalist world; accordingly,

6
For an excellent exposition of the difference between class as ‘life chances’ and
class in the Marxian sense, see Erik Olin Wright, ‘The Shadow of Exploitation
in Weber’s Class Analysis’, American Sociological Review, vol. 67, no. 6, 2002.
Unsurprisingly, dividing the population by occupation rather than class provides
a much more accurate account of ‘life chances’; see for example Kim Weeden
and David Grusky, ‘The Case for a New Class Map’, American Journal of Sociology,
vol. 111, no. 1, July 2005.
 riley & brenner: US Politics 9

we must also be witnessing the emergence of a new class structure,

axed around relations of ‘politically engineered upward redistribution’.
We have tried, however briefly and telescopically, to characterize these
new class relationships using the notions of fiscal coalitions and status
groups. To grasp their specificity we need to place the contemporary
moment in an appropriate theoretical and historical perspective.

Thesis One. A new non-class, but robustly material, politics has emerged since
the 1990s. The us political scene has long displayed a profoundly para-
doxical aspect: while ubiquitously structured by class, it is marked by an
almost complete absence of ‘class politics’.7 The parties, at their apexes,
minister to different fractions of capital, but at their bases are oriented
to different fractions of workers. Thus, neither the Republican nor the
Democratic Party is, or has ever been, a ‘working-class party’; it is correct
to interpret these parties as parties of capital. Yet despite this fundamen-
tal orientation, they must both seek to appeal to the material interests
of those who ‘own only their own labour power’, since this sector makes
up the vast majority of the American population. Any party that com-
petes in electoral politics must to some extent respond to working-class
interests. Despite the talk of identity politics and ‘post-material values’,
us politics has a clear material mass base. But it is not a class politics,
because naturally neither Democrats nor Republicans seek to mobilize
the many workers who vote for them against capital; nor do they attempt
to exert effective political control over capital, especially in the era of
‘political capitalism’. Thus we have, in our formulation, material-interest
politics without working-class politics.

This interpretation is rooted in a particular understanding of the relation-

ship between working-class politics, class structure and class formation.

7
As Mike Davis put it, speaking of the late nineteenth century, ‘The increasing
proletarianization of the American social structure has not been matched by an
equal tendency toward the homogenization of the working class as a cultural or
political collectivity. Stratifications rooted in differential positions in the social
labour process have been reinforced by deep-seated ethnic, religious, racial and
sexual antagonisms within the working class.’ Davis offers an account that could be
read as a materialist version of American exceptionalism: Mike Davis, ‘Why the us
Working Class Is Different’, nlr i/123, September–October 1980, p. 15.
 10 nlr 138

We argue that class structure within capitalism under-determines class

politics. This under-determination, inherent in the structure of the rela-
tions of exploitation under capitalism, is particularly acute in the us
for historical reasons, two of which are worth emphasizing: the emer-
gence from the 1870s of a racialized system of labour control in the
South (‘Jim Crow’); and mass immigration, which created a basis for
‘ethnic’ stratification.

At the most abstract level, workers pursuing their economic interests

under capitalism can choose between two main strategies: individualist
and class-collaborationist, or collective class-based action.8 Through the
first strategy, in some ways the most natural one, workers pursue their
interests as owners of the ‘special commodity’, labour power. This can
assume many forms; but fundamentally, all non-class worker material-
interest politics is centred on improving wages and job opportunities
within the system of private appropriation. This is not working-class
‘class politics’, because in this politics workers neither act, nor conceive
of themselves, as a class. At one pole of this non-class politics stands
collective bargaining; at the other, anti-immigrant and racist politics. In
the contemporary us, with its large group of relatively highly educated
workers, credentialling and the defence of the value of credentials is also
a common non-class strategy. The various fractions of the working class
organized to protect the value of labour tend to coalesce as what Weber
termed ‘status groups’, deploying political-ideological means to manage
competition. This form of politics tends to fragment and isolate workers
from one another.

The alternative is working-class ‘class politics’. Workers pursuing a class

strategy link redistributive demands to a broader attempt to exert politi-
cal control over the social surplus produced by workers and appropriated
by capital. They also conceive of themselves as members of a class, in
a society divided by classes. The pursuit of working-class politics is
always risky for individual workers, as it requires a large group to act

8
Robert Brenner, ‘The Paradox of Social Democracy: The American Case’, in Mike
Davis, Fred Pfeil and Michael Sprinker, eds, The Year Left: An American Socialist
Yearbook, New York 1985, p. 39.
 riley & brenner: US Politics 11

in solidarity. It is always tempting, and often highly rational, for indi-

viduals to withdraw from the class strategy and opt for the status-group
approach, in an attempt to increase returns on the sale of their unit of
labour power. Meanwhile, the only mechanism that can hold workers
together as a ‘class’, rather than as a ‘sack of potatoes’ of sellers of labour
power, is class struggle. The significance of class struggle lies, therefore,
not only in the contest between labour and capital, but just as centrally in
the struggle to transform the inherently isolated and atomized owners of
labour power into a collective agent, to break through the rigid carapace
of the commodity form and set in motion the working class as a histori-
cal subject. As Rosa Luxemburg put it, drawing the lessons of the 1905
Russian Revolution: ‘The proletariat require a high degree of political
education, of class consciousness and organization. All these conditions
cannot be fulfilled by pamphlets and leaflets, but only by the living politi-
cal school, by the fight and in the fight, in the continuous course of the
revolution.’9 Working-class class politics, in short, is constituted in the
context of class struggle.

Working-class politics in this sense has been a highly unusual occur-

rence in us history. There were only two brief spells of it in the
twentieth century. The first, which ran from 1934 to 1937, saw the pas-
sage of the 1935 Wagner Act (gutted in 1948). The second, extending
from the mid-60s to the early 1970s, brought the Voting Rights Act
and the Great Society programmes. But these bouts of class politics
quickly petered out. The reformist political layers they threw up were
able to win some material gains for ordinary people, but only under
the favourable economic conditions of the long post-war boom. When
this faded, giving way to the long downturn, bureaucratic union lead-
ers and Democratic politicians could only impose concessions on
their mass base.

Since the 2010s, there has been an uptick in class struggle, but members
of the working class continue to pursue their interests overwhelmingly

9
Rosa Luxemburg, ‘The Mass Strike, the Political Party and the Trade Unions’
[1906], in Peter Hudis and Kevin B. Anderson, eds, The Rosa Luxemburg Reader,
New York 2004, p. 182.
 12 nlr 138

as owners of labour power, rather than as a class. This is not to say that
nothing has changed. For one thing, there is now a wider variety of
bases from which class-collaborationist or status-group politics can be
pursued.10 Up until the 1980s, these politics could broadly be described
as reformist, or ‘social-democratic’—premised, like all social-democratic
politics, on the prospect of economic growth. But the politics of the
present period does not hold out even the hope of growth. It is a politics
of zero-sum redistribution, primarily between different groups of work-
ers. It is distinct from social-democratic politics, not because it is not
a class politics—that is equally true of social democracy––but because
it is not a growth politics. Thus the two main us political parties no
longer appear as alternative growth models, but rather as different fiscal
coalitions: maga politics, which seeks to redistribute income away from
non-white and immigrant workers, and multicultural neoliberalism,
which seeks to redistribute income toward the highly educated.11 Both
tend to atomize and fragment the working class.

With this conceptual framework in mind, let us offer some basic

evidence about the character of the us working class. As a first approx-
imation, the working class can be conceptualized in terms of its
relationship to the main assets of society. Workers are all those who do
not enjoy income from rents, dividends or interest payments. As Table
One shows, only 21 per cent of households are asset owners (exclud-
ing home ownership), leaving approximately 79 per cent of households
with no access to such forms of income. It might be thought that this
overstates the size of the working class, for perhaps there exists a large
self-employed group that enjoys neither assets nor wage income. But
as Table Two shows, only about 11 per cent of households has any self-
employment income, and many of these are undoubtedly disguised
wage-earners. Putting these two pieces of evidence together, we can
establish a lower bound for the quantitative extent of the working class.
Even assuming that all households with self-employment income are
owners of their main means of production and do not rely on wages,
68 per cent of the us population would be in the working class.

10
Brenner, ‘The Paradox of Social Democracy’, p. 85.
11
Dylan Riley, ‘Faultlines’, nlr 126, November–December 2020.
 riley & brenner: US Politics 13

Table 1: Households with Interests, Dividends or Net Rental Income

With Interest, Dividends, or Net Rental Income 25,218,729 20.6%

No Interest, Dividends, or Net Rental Income 97,135,490 79.4%
Households 122,354,219 100.0%

Table 2: Households with Self-Employment Income

With Self-Employment Income 13,437,280 11%

No Self-Employment Income 108,916,939 89%
Households 122,354,219 100%

Sources: Social Explorer; us Census Bureau

Accordingly, at this level of generality, Marx’s claim that the nineteenth-

century working class constituted the ‘vast majority’ of capitalist society
remains correct.12

Nevertheless, it would be the height of dogmatic stupidity not to recog-

nize the profound divisions within the working class—divisions which
have never been adequately mapped within the Marxian tradition. The
problem can only be hinted at here with a few empirical signposts,
pointing to education, labour-market sectors and ‘race’. To start with
the phenomenon of education: it is commonplace in the us today to
equate the ‘non-college-educated’ with the ‘working class’. On theoreti-
cal grounds this conflation is highly problematic, because ‘education’
is not a resource comparable to asset ownership. A degree on the wall,

12
This also corresponds to Piketty’s research, which shows that the bottom 50 per
cent of the income distribution owns almost nothing. Of the us, Piketty writes: ‘the
top decile owns 72 per cent of America’s wealth, while the bottom half claims just
2 per cent: Capital in the Twenty-First Century, p. 322.
 14 nlr 138

from however prestigious an institution, produces no income. In our

view, any concessions to notions of ‘cultural capital’, ‘human capital’ or
the ‘professional-managerial class’ are ultimately a capitulation to one
of the oldest ideological canards of bourgeois society: the idea that such
societies are made up predominantly of independent proprietors selling
their wares on the market. Even the mostly highly educated worker, if
she or he lacks assets, must enter into a wage relationship—that is, they
must subordinate themselves to capital in order to gain a livelihood.

This does not mean that education is economically irrelevant; on the

contrary, in the us, education is clearly correlated with higher wages.13
The distribution of the population according to the possession, or not, of
a higher degree thus says something important—not so much about the
working class, but about a significant fraction of it. With this in mind:
what percentage of the us population enjoys, at least potentially, the
benefits of a higher degree? As Table 3 below shows, a third of the us

Table 3: Educational Attainment for Population 25 Years and Over

Less than High School 25,562,680 11.5%

High School Graduate (Includes Equivalency) 59,421,419 26.7%
Some College 64,496,416 28.9%
Bachelor's Degree 45,034,610 20.2%
Master's Degree 20,210,271 9.1%
Professional School Degree 4,863,846 2.2%
Doctoral Degree 3,247,592 1.5%
Population 25 Years and Over 222,836,834 100.0%

Sources: Social Explorer; us Census Bureau

13
For a vivid description of the inequalities produced by the tertiary education sys-
tem in the us, see David Grusky, Peter Hall and Hazel Rose-Markus, ‘The Rise
of Opportunity Markets: How Did It Happen and What Can We Do?’, Daedalus,
vol. 148, no. 3, Summer 2019, pp. 19–45. The authors describe the vast resources
that ‘middle-class’ families spend on private education. What they do not adequately
emphasize is that the families who most assiduously pursue these strategies are
still wage earners, as their children are likely to be.
 riley & brenner: US Politics 15

Table 4: Industry by Occupation For Civilian Population 16 Years and Over

Agriculture, Forestry, Fishing and Hunting; Mining 2,658,413 1.7%

Construction 10,416,196 6.7%
Manufacturing 15,617,461 10.0%
Wholesale Trade 3,971,773 2.6%
Retail Trade 17,195,083 11.0%
Transportation and Warehousing; Utilities 8,576,862 5.5%
Information 3,066,743 2.0%
Finance and Insurance; Real Estate; Rental and Leasing 10,319,201 6.6%
Professional, Scientific and Management; Administrative; 18,312,454 11.8%
Waste Management Services
Educational Services; Health Care and Social Assistance 36,315,080 23.3%
Arts, Entertainment and Recreation; Accommodation 14,651,909 9.4%
and Food Services
Other Services Except Public Administration 7,516,616 4.8%
Public Administration 7,271,189 4.7%
Total Employed Civilian Population 16 Years and Over 155,888,980 100.0%

Sources: Social Explorer; us Census Bureau

population over 25 has a ba certificate, and around 38 per cent have only
high school or equivalent. This leaves 29 per cent having ‘some college’,
often a two-year ‘associate’s degree’ in a professional skill, such as nurs-
ing. At the higher levels of the tertiary education system, the percentages
are quite small. Only 9 per cent have a master’s degree, and barely 2 per
cent have either a ‘professional school degree’, such as the md required
to become a medical doctor, or a ‘doctoral degree’, such as a PhD. It is
worth emphasizing that a plurality of the us population faces the labour
market as basically unskilled labour.

The working class is also heterogeneous in terms of its sectoral compo-

sition. Workers in the industries of the ‘historical working class’ make
up a distinct minority: ‘Agriculture, Forestry, Fishing and Hunting,
and Mining’, ‘Construction’, ‘Manufacturing’, and ‘Transport and
Warehousing, and Utilities’ together account for approximately 24 per
 16 nlr 138

cent of the employed population, while the single category of ‘Educational

Services, and Health Care and Social Assistance’ constitutes over 23 per
cent. A substantial portion of those working in these fields likely have
some sort of credential.

The us working class is of course also deeply split by ‘race’. About 70 per
cent of the population identifies as ‘white’ and around 13 per cent as ‘black’,
but regional variations are wide; for example, 56 per cent of Californians
identify as ‘white’ and 6 per cent as ‘black’. Furthermore, the category
of ‘Latino’ or ‘hispanic’ cuts across the ‘white’ category. Nationally about
10 per cent of the ‘white’ population identifies as ‘hispanic’ or ‘Latino’,
meaning that ‘non-hispanic whites’ make up about 60 per cent of the
us population, and around 40 per cent in the large immigrant states
of California, Texas and Florida. These identities famously constitute a
fertile terrain for non-class or status-group politics.

How to summarize this basic configuration? The working class, under-

stood as those who do not own assets and therefore must subsist on
wage income, make up between 68 and 80 per cent of all us house-
holds. But this class is profoundly split by education level, sector of
economic activity and ‘race’. These divisions are rooted in the logic of an
overall configuration in which owners of capital are effectively exempt
from attempts at meaningful redistribution. This perspective allows
us to bring together education and race in a single conceptual frame-
work. ‘Credentialling’ and ‘race’ can be thought of as forms of social
closure that emerge within a us working class organized primarily in
terms of internal redistribution. To put the point as pithily as possible,
‘whiteness’ or ‘nativeness’ should be understood as the ba of the non-
college-educated, and possession of the ba should be understood as the
‘whiteness’ or ‘nativeness’ of the college-educated.

Thesis Two. Bidenism offers Keynesianism without growth. Bidenism is a

peculiar phenomenon. For an accurate characterization, we first need
to acknowledge the ambitious scale of the Administration’s agenda. The
draft Build Back Better legislation passed by the Democrat-controlled
House in September 2021 was based, like its predecessors, on lar-
gesse distributed through political means to capital; at $2.2 trillion,
 riley & brenner: US Politics 17

it not only rivalled the cares Act in size but would have introduced
new moves, however limited, towards universal health insurance, paid
family leave, subsidized childcare and early childhood education. Its
shrunken descendant, the Inflation Reduction Act (ira) signed into law
in August 2022, provides $738 billion over ten years, through a fiscal
mix of two-thirds tax cuts, one third direct expenditure, to stimulate
green capitalism—solar and nuclear power companies, agribusiness,
home-energy efficiency, electric vehicles—lower the price of medicines
and extend the existing subsidy to the Affordable Care Act ($64 billion,
over three years).

The new agenda embodies two peculiarities, however. The first con-
cerns its conditions of emergence. Although the American version of
the Keynesian welfare state was never the direct consequence of class
politics—it had at least as much to do with wartime mobilization—
historically, it was premised on a prior wave of working-class militancy.
By contrast, the post-2020 expansionary policy has no such basis; it is
largely a fortuitous response to the Covid pandemic and perhaps also
to the rivalry with China—indeed, the continuity between Bidenomics
and Trumponomics lies precisely here.14 The second peculiarity is
the economic environment in which the new agenda operates. Every
other Keynesian welfare state has been based on a booming economy;
Bidenomics, in contrast, is a programme of deficit spending with-
out growth. There is very little evidence of a real return to American
manufacturing profitability.

How then are we to understand this strange creature? A brief narra-

tive of how Biden came to occupy his current position may be useful
here. Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign in 2016 was as strongly
committed to neoliberalism as the three prior administrations had
been—appealing to the Democratic Party’s natural constituencies
among the credentialled fraction of the working class in the twin terms
of expertise and diversity, but proposing virtually nothing by way of

14
‘Bidenomics could be seen as a step towards recasting the centrally monetized,
debt-driven capitalist regime in a more compensatory form—a neo-third way,
driven both by the populist shock and, above all, by competitive friction with a ris-
ing China’: Susan Watkins, ‘Paradigm Shifts’, nlr 128, March–April 2021.
 18 nlr 138

economic growth. Had Clinton won, this would have represented the
ongoing hegemony of multicultural neoliberalism in its pure form.

Trump’s surprise victory blocked that path. This electoral break with
multicultural neoliberalism was then compounded by the pandemic.
Although Trump himself resisted at every step of  the way the obvi-
ous and rational response to the Covid-19 crisis, his Administration
nonetheless opened a path towards a new form of politics due to the
unavoidable necessity of countering the pandemic. The Federal state
intervened massively to sustain the lives of many ordinary working-class
Americans—the opposite of what Trump and his collaborators pro-
claimed they wanted. This produced a bizarre situation, in which Trump
discredited the very policies his Administration had pursued, especially
with regard to masks and mass vaccination.

These contradictions were wrongly read as personal foibles. In fact,

Trump’s erratic behaviour concentrated and exemplified the contra-
dictory historical circumstances that led the Republicans willy-nilly to
become the first American party to make moves toward a guaranteed
basic income. Trump’s constant self-discrediting, his ludicrous formula-
tions about bleach as an antidote to Covid and so on, were an attempt to
avoid acknowledging that the policies forced upon him by the pandemic
were appropriate and effective. His Administration could legitimately
claim some credit for the extraordinarily rapid development of effective
vaccines—but as Trump himself discovered, this could seriously alien-
ate the maga base.15

Biden emerged triumphant on the ruins of Clinton’s project, once

behind-the-scenes moves by the Democrat leadership had orchestrated
the defeat of Bernie Sanders. Bidenism is also, however, and crucially,
a specifically post-Trump phenomenon. To win in 2020, Biden had to
take advantage of the historical contradictions that were biologically
embodied, as it were, in Trump’s mindlessness. Initially Biden therefore
had the wind at his back, because he seemed the best available political
leader in the fight against Covid. This in itself forced a break beyond
Clinton’s multicultural-neoliberal politics, even though Biden had been
a Delaware neoliberal stalwart since the 1990s. As his domestic agenda

15
Jill Colvin, ‘Trump reveals he got Covid-19 booster shot; crowd boos him’,
Associated Press, 20 December 2021.
 riley & brenner: US Politics 19

shows, Biden came to embody, briefly and accidentally, something

like a new New Deal. The Trump–Biden fiscal response to the Covid
recession between March 2020 and March 2021 was over $5 trillion,
five times greater than the 2008 fiscal stimulus, and almost a quarter
of gdp. Crucially, $1.8 trillion of this went straight to individuals and
households via stimulus checks and unemployment benefits, topped up
by $600 a week between March and July 2020, with a further round of
$2,000 checks disbursed in January 2021.16 To this, Biden’s subsequent
legislation in 2021–22—the Infrastructure Act, chips, the ira—added
another $2 trillion.

In a strange way, then, Covid represented a functional equivalent of the

sort of class politics that had helped to generate the New Deal and Great
Society policy packages. But the peculiarities of this agenda’s genesis
also marked its limits. For although the Biden Administration—which
had taken care to flatter and incorporate willing Sandernistas, not least
Sanders himself—put forward policies that were objectively pro-worker,
this was all done sotto voce, within the constraints imposed by a com-
plete renunciation of any attempt to redistribute profits. The fate of the
Biden experiment was also determined by the prevailing economic con-
ditions. The pursuit of a quasi-New Deal fiscal programme without the
requisite capitalist growth has predictably contributed to rising infla-
tion, already stoked by pandemic-era demand shifts and supply-chain
disruptions, followed by the food and fuel price spikes of the Ukraine
war. In turn, the cost-of-living crisis has discredited Biden domestically.
Thus, the paradox of Bidenomics: a relatively pro-worker policy package
has led to deep unpopularity, with midterm disapproval ratings on a
par with Trump’s.17

10

Thesis Three. The hypothesis of ‘class dealignment’ is an inadequate frame-

work for understanding American contemporary politics. According to this
approach, whose most sophisticated and informed left exponent is Matt

16
See Richard Duncan’s three-part series, ‘2008 vs 2020’, Macro Watch, Third
Quarter 2022.
17
Amina Dunn, ‘Biden’s job rating is similar to Trump’s but lower than that of other
recent presidents’, Pew Research Center, 20 October 2022.
 20 nlr 138

Karp, at one time us politics was class politics, but now it is structured
by identity.18 The ‘class dealignment’ analysis undergirds a politics that
would seek to repolarize the population in class terms, which, so the
thinking goes, was the basis of reformism in its New Deal and Great
Society manifestations. This position both over-emphasizes the class
character of American politics prior to the collapse of the New Deal coa-
lition and under-emphasizes its robustly material but quite obviously
non-class basis in the current period.

To reiterate: reformist or welfare-state policies in the us (and else-

where) were never the direct result of class insurgency. At least as
important was wartime mobilization, which not only lifted the us
out of the Great Depression but also produced many of the era’s most
ambitious policies: the build-out of the veterans’ hospital system, for
example, or the gi Bill. Furthermore, the continuation of the compara-
tively minimal American ‘welfare state’ found its key basis of support
not so much in the working class as in the stratum of reformist officials
that emerged from the rare and brief bouts of class politics mentioned
above. The political project of this mid-century group of union offi-
cials and Democratic Party operatives was oriented towards ensuring
the continuing profitability of American capitalism, since they rightly
saw profitability as the cornerstone of their own viability. This stratum,
therefore, consistently sought to impose individualistic and collabora-
tionist solutions on workers, seeing their autonomous mobilization as
a threat. As the long boom turned into the long downturn, it offered
little but austerity to the workers it ostensibly represented. There is
thus no basis for conflating the Keynesian welfare state in the us with
class politics.

Second, the notion of class dealignment offers no positive description

of the basis of American politics today. While it captures the important
fact of Democrats’ continuing struggles to attract white workers—and,

18
See Matt Karp, ‘The Politics of a Second Gilded Age’, Jacobin, no. 40, 2021. Karp
writes: ‘Blue-collar workers remained fiercely divided by geography, race, religion,
ethnicity, and culture—in a word, identity—with white Southerners and Catholics
voting for Democrats, while northern Protestants and African Americans (where
they could vote) backed Republicans’: p. 99. We would not dispute that these splits
were crucial; but we would challenge the idea that they involved identity as opposed
to material interests. In fact, the identity splits within the American working class
are profoundly material.
 riley & brenner: US Politics 21

increasingly, non-white workers—without a college degree, it fails

to explain how white workers as white workers, or native workers as
native workers, are being remobilized in the Republican coalition. Nor
does it explain the equally puzzling fact that the highly educated are
being remobilized in the Democratic coalition.19 Perhaps the most
striking thing about American politics today is that the Republican
Party has made a concerted and highly successful effort to court the
less-educated fraction of the working class; indeed, the political for-
tunes of the gop are increasingly linked to this layer.20 But to describe
these tectonic shifts as rooted in ‘identity’ is misleading, or at least
highly partial.

The evidence here is now overwhelming. Tables 5, 6 and 7 indicate the

nature and extent of the problem for the Democrats. In the generic con-
gressional ballot, ba holders lean to the Democrats by about 14 points.
Non-ba holders are a mirror image of this, leaning Republican by about
15 points. Among white ba holders the split is similar, but white non-ba
holders indicate a preference for the Republican candidate by a 32-point

Table 5: Candidate Voting Preference

ba+ No ba White ba+ White No ba

Democratic Candidate 55% 39% 52% 31%

Republican Candidate 41% 54% 45% 63%
Don’t Know 4% 7% 6%

Source: nyt Siena Poll

19
Thomas Piketty is on the right track here when he writes, ‘If the Democratic Party
has become the party of the highly educated while the less educated have fled to the
Republicans, it must be because the latter group believes that the policies backed
by the Democrats increasingly fail to express their aspirations.’ Capital and Ideology,
Boston ma 2020, p. 834.
20
The programme of working-class Republicanism is well drawn by Nicholas
Lemann in ‘The Republican Identity Crisis after Trump’, New Yorker, 23 October
2020. Lemann sketches out a scenario of ‘reversalism’, in which the gop, perhaps
under Marco Rubio or Josh Hawley, becomes the natural home of the American
working class.
 22 nlr 138

Table 6: Approval of Joe Biden as President

ba+ No ba White ba+ White No ba

Approve 49% 31% 47% 24%

Disapprove 47% 66% 48% 74%
Don’t Know 4% 3% 5% 1%

Source: nyt Siena Poll

Table 7: Opinion of Donald Trump

ba+ No ba White ba+ White No ba

Favourable 35% 49% 37% 56%

Unfavourable 63% 45% 62% 42%
Don’t Know 3% 6% 1% 3%

Source: nyt Siena Poll

margin. A similar picture emerges in terms of approval ratings for Biden

and Trump. Biden’s approval is completely underwater among voters
without a college degree: two-thirds of non-ba holders disapprove of
him, a figure that rises to almost three-quarters among white non-ba
holders. In contrast, among ba holders his approval hovers at around
50 per cent. The patterns for Trump are the inverse of this. Among ba
holders as a whole Trump is underwater by 28 points, while among non-
ba holders he has a slight advantage. The pattern is similar for white
ba holders, where he is 25 points down. Among white non-ba holders,
Trump has a 14-point positive margin.

This shift of white workers without a college degree to the Republican

Party is best understood not as a process of class dealignment, but
 riley & brenner: US Politics 23

rather as the consequence of the gop’s successful bid to appeal to the

interests of a particular fraction of the working class in nativist and rac-
ist terms.21 The key point is that this segment’s move to the Republicans
should not be explained in terms of attitudes or prejudices; rather those
attitudes should be seen as resulting from this class fraction’s objec-
tive situation. The organization of the white working class as white, or
native workers as native, is in many ways a rational strategy for those
workers who have the opportunity to constitute themselves as such,
in a context where class identity is nowhere evident. By keeping out
immigrants, and keeping down non-whites, the white working class,
or native working class, seeks to increase the value and attractiveness
of its labour power. This is not to imply that such a strategy is based on
an accurate analysis, or that it is likely to succeed. The point is simply
that the policy preferences of the non-college-educated are understand-
able pragmatically without having to attribute to this group a fanaticism
which it does not hold.

The same logic should be applied to those relatively highly educated

workers who vote for the Democrats. This is a step that very few analysts
take. They tend instead to argue, implausibly, that the college-educated
are motivated by ‘values’ rather than economic interests. But the core ‘val-
ues’ that these voters espouse chime remarkably well with their material
interests, which lie in the valuation of expertise. This is probably most
conspicuous in the embrace of science as an ideological value. Although
clearly less regressive than its maga counterpart, this neo-techno-
cratic ideology performs an analogous social function in articulating a
strategy for increasing the value of the particular type of labour power—
credentialled, rather than white—that is widespread in the Democratic
coalition. And it is, of course, just as little a manifestation of working-
class politics as its Republican counterpart. As mass organizations, the
two parties are therefore anchored in different parts of the working class:
the Republicans in its less educated fraction, and Democrats among the
credentialled. In both cases, their appeals are framed in terms that cast
workers as petty-owners of labour power. This mode of politics tends
to further fragment the working class and to push working-class class
politics further away—even though, indeed because, it appeals to highly
specific material interests.

21
The two are not equivalent. It is likely that ‘nativism’ will become more promi-
nent than ‘racism’ if Republicans manage to exploit their appeal to the entire
non-degree-holding fraction of workers.
 24 nlr 138

11

Thesis Four. The Democrats’ relative success in the 2022 midterms is a reflec-
tion of its particular social base. Given the character of the mass bases of
the Republican and Democratic parties, it is unsurprising that Democrats
now seem to outperform the Republicans at midterm elections. They
will undoubtedly continue to do so because the Democrats’ base, being
more educated, is more likely to be engaged in electoral politics. While
the gop currently benefits most from the inequities of the Constitution,
Republicans now have the disadvantage of being firmly tied to the frac-
tion of the electorate that is less likely to turn out for the midterms.22 In
the terms of our analysis, the Democrats’ very success in this electoral
cycle is premised upon, and likely to reinforce, the fragmented nature
of the us working class, rendering it even less likely to act as a coherent
social force. To put the point as directly as possible: Democrats do not turn
out their base by appealing to working-class politics, but rather by appealing to
workers in explicitly non-class terms.

12

Thesis Five. The American left is in the grip of three illusions about domestic
politics. In understanding us politics, it is of the utmost importance to
grasp the electoral strategy of the Democratic Party. In this regard, three
common illusions have plagued left analysis. The first is the notion
that the obvious path to electoral success is to appeal to the American
working class in ‘class terms’. The Democrats have rarely done this,
even, indeed especially, in their New Deal heyday. This illusion relies
implicitly on a prior misconception: that the Democratic Party has been
an electoral failure in recent years. In fact, the question is not why the
Democrats haven’t won more seats, but why they have done so well in
the last three cycles, since 2018. The 2022 midterm results, which seem
again to have defied much common-sense thinking, were successful
by comparable historical standards. They followed a 2020 election in
which the Democratic challenger defeated an incumbent president with

22
By contrast, as Matt Karp has observed, for the Democrats ‘migrating to a more
upscale electorate means that electorate is more likely to vote in off-year elections’.
See the interview with Seth Ackerman, ‘Democrats May Have Won More Suburban
Votes in the Midterms. That Doesn’t Bode Well’, Jacobin, 11 November 2022.
 riley & brenner: US Politics 25

a super-energized base, who won more votes than any other candidate in
history—apart from the one who defeated him.

It is therefore incorrect to present the Democrats as irrationally purs-

ing a non-class strategy. The current Democratic Party has no interest
in appealing to its political base in class terms. The party’s success is
premised on winning over a fraction of the working class in explicitly
non-class terms. Given the Democrats’ actual constituency––that frac-
tion of the working class dependent on credentials to increase the value
of its labour power––its electoral strategies and candidates are hardly
irrational; they have been strikingly effective. Democratic operatives
quite logically will continue to intervene in Republican primaries to pro-
mote the most outlandish candidates, as they did in 2022, because they
are easier to defeat on the basis of straightforward claims to represent
rationality against insanity. That was the obvious lesson that every com-
petent operative drew from the midterms. In other words, Democratic
Party electoral success is likely negatively related to class politics, such
that the re-emergence of such a politics would pose an electoral threat.

The second illusion common in left analysis is the idea that the Biden
Administration has pursued timid, weak or disappointing domestic
policies. This flies in the face of the whole historical experience since
early 2020. In fact, no administration since lbj has proposed the sort of
domestic initiatives Biden has; this would have been absolutely clear if
the Administration had enjoyed a slightly greater advantage in Congress.
As discussed above, Bidenism has been beset by contradictions, but it is
not lacking in ambition on the domestic front.

The third, corollary illusion puts together the two preceding ones to claim
that Biden’s unpopularity and the party’s electoral struggles derive from
his policy timidity. But since Biden, and the Democrats more broadly,
have actually been remarkably successful in electoral terms, and since
they have also pursued some strikingly ambitious policies, this position
can only be described as a compounded illusion. The political problems
Biden has faced in fact derive from the constraints of political capitalism
as a system of accumulation. The new political structure to which this has
given rise prevents the construction of hegemonic growth coalitions and
the associated phenomenon of massive electoral landslides. It produces
instead a vicious, narrowly divided politics of zero-sum redistribution,
largely axed on conflicts of material interest within the working class.
 26 nlr 138

13

Thesis Six. Positive-sum class compromise is impossible in the current period.

The basis of the welfare state, both in the us and Europe, has always
been high profitability, and high rates of investment, in manufactur-
ing. But manufacturing profitability and investment remain weak.
(Even the supposedly most dynamic sectors of the new economy are
in the throes of a crisis.) Political capitalism remains firmly in place,
meaning that redistribution from capital to labour will be extremely
difficult, if not impossible, because of the dependency of profits on
politically engineered upward redistribution. It is perhaps this fact,
above all else, that explains the sudden return of inflation. Inflation is
what one gets when one pursues deficit spending in the absence of a
dynamic capitalism.

14

Thesis Seven. Bidenism’s natural ideology is progressivism, not social democ-

racy. There is one specificity of Bidenism that we have not yet emphasized
sufficiently: its distinctive ideological profile. In direction and tone, the
Administration’s policies represent the interests of the educated fraction
of the working class within the context of political capitalism because
that is the party’s obvious base. In this, Bidenism most strongly resem-
bles late nineteenth-century ‘Progressivism’. The Administration’s social
ideal is a market economy undistorted by monopolies and managed by
an open, meritocratically recruited and diverse elite. The tool used to
implement this vision is the regulatory state, including a metastasizing
diversity, equity and inclusion bureaucracy which has the side benefit
of providing well-paid perches for members of the educated working
class itself. The watchwords of this project are ‘fairness’ and ‘justice’:
terms which do not describe a social ideal at all, but a state of affairs
among individuals.

All of this is worlds away from the notion of democratic control over the
social surplus. We need a language to describe the new Bidenist project;
‘neo-progressivism’ is perhaps the best term. In content and intention
it remains as far from socialism as its social-democratic and neoliberal
 riley & brenner: US Politics 27

forebears; but it is nevertheless a distinctive historical formation which

must be theorized and studied on its own terms.

15

A final note. We offer these theses in an experimental and provisional

spirit. Though rough and unfinished, they hopefully indicate at least
some of the central issues that must be tackled head-on if the current,
exceedingly odd, political period is to be grasped. Time-worn shibboleths
and old patterns of thought will be inadequate to navigating whatever is
coming next.