One of the most annoying, yet oft-used phrases heard within my denomination is the ever popular: “Speak truth to power!” It also doesn’t help that it’s usually uttered with no small amount of self-congratulating sanctimony.
Yet despite this, and as a Christian, I actually agree with the phrase. Challenging the “strong” who exploit and oppress the “weak” and vulnerable is one of the central themes of biblical faith. Jesus, after all, was the preeminent “underdog,” as was both Israel and the early church.
So why am I so dismissive of a phrase with which I heartily agree?
In order to speak truth to power, one first needs to determine who holds it. This requires a thorough investigation into the social, political, and cultural milieu of our times. Opposing exploitation, in other words, is pointless unless one rightly determines who is exploiting whom.
The target of the mainline church’s ire often seems misdirected. It unwittingly challenges the oppressed in favor of those doing the oppressing. Like the phrase itself, the identified culprits are holdovers from the 1960s, hostages to a time warp that fails to account for an ever-changing world.
In a fascinating new book entitled, The New Class War: Saving Democracy from the Managerial Elite, Michael Lind demonstrates just how Western culture has changed since the 1960s.
In general, he argues that power is manifest in three basic realms: the government, the economy, and the culture. Understanding how power is distributed and cross-pollenated within these three realms is key.
As discussed in previous posts, there has always been and ever shall be a ruling class, an elite. The question is how they rule and how a given system functions under their leadership.
We Americans, of course, tend to discount such an obvious fact, believing somehow that, unlike Europe, we live in a classless society. This is simply untrue, though our class hierarchies are admittedly less overt. We don’t have dukes and duchesses, for instance. Yet, in truth, we are hardly free from class distinctions, much less class warfare.
Lind contends that the first such class war in the West began in the mid-19th century as the pre-modern agrarian social structure, consisting mostly of hereditary landowners and field workers, gave way to the modern world of industrial or service workers, on the one hand, and, on the other, bourgeois capitalists, later joined by university credentialed managers and professionals.
The obvious tension between these two classes was effectively resolved with the advent of the Great Depression, which had imperiled both economic and social cohesion, and the threat of totalitarian aggression from abroad. Out of a need to unify the nation in meeting these challenges, a system of power-sharing was established.
The New Deal consensus, in other words, forced the ruling class to make concessions to the working class whose concerns were given considerable and unprecedented weight. Here Lind’s three “realms” of government, economy, and culture saw a remarkable degree of integration and cross-pollination.
After the war, this power-sharing arrangement continued. It came to be called “interest group liberalism.” The 50s and 60s, in other words, were characterized by a considerable degree of interaction between and among the various classes and cultural entities.
A “tripartite” arrangement of “democratic pluralism” consisting of Labor, Business, and Government, combined with a booming postwar economy, enabled the average citizen a heretofore unknown quality of life. Perhaps even more significantly, countless “bottom-up” organizations and civic groups (the church included) flourished, each given a genuine say in how life was to be ordered and lived out.
Yet this was all to change. As Lind writes, “Between the 1960s and the present, as declining fear of great-power conflict gradually reduced the incentives of Western elites to make concessions to Western working classes, the postwar system has been dismantled in a revolution from above that has promoted the material interests and intangible values of the college-educated minority of managers and professionals, who have succeeded old-fashioned bourgeois capitalists as the dominant elite…What has replaced democratic pluralism can be described as technocratic neoliberalism.”
“In the realm of the economy,” he explains, “corporations have promoted de-unionization and labor market deregulation to the detriment of workers. Firms have also embraced global labor arbitrage, in the form of offshoring production to poor workers abroad or employing immigrant workers, to weaken unions and escape the constraints of national labor regulations.”
“Meanwhile, in the realm of politics and government, parties that were national federations of local, mass-membership organizations have given way to parties controlled by donors and media consultants.
“At the same time, many of the powers of democratic national legislatures have been usurped by, or delegated to, executive agencies, courts, or transnational bodies over which college-educated professionals have far more influence than the working-class majority, whether native or foreign-born.”
“Finally,” he concludes, “in the realm of culture, including media and education, local religious and civic watchdogs have lost power, often as a result of activism by judges born into the social elite who share their libertarian economic and social views with their university-educated peers.”
In sum, the economic, political, and cultural realms had been transformed from a power-sharing, liberal, democratic-pluralistic system, a bottom-up system, if you will, to a top-down arrangement where decisions are made by a small, self-appointed coterie of all-knowing elites, those whom Lind calls “the overclass.”
The results have been decidedly less than stellar, especially since the end of the Cold War, a time when opposition to the neoliberal, technocratic, transnational system was thought to have vanished.
(Neoliberalism, as Lind helpfully defines it, is “a synthesis of the free market economic liberalism of the libertarian right and the cultural liberalism of the bohemian/academic left.”)
On the economic front, using cheap labor, international trade policies that superseded domestic ones, and favorable foreign tax laws, the global elites have flourished, while the average American has not.
To cite just one example, in 2015 alone, U.S. multinational corporations recorded 43% of their foreign earnings as taking place in five tax havens – Bermuda, Ireland, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, and Switzerland.
On the cultural front, there has been “a shift in the center of gravity from local chapter-based membership associations and church congregations to foundations, foundation-funded nonprofits, and universities [that represent] a transfer of civic and cultural influence away from ordinary people upward to the managerial elite.”
I could go on. As a result of these widespread changes, especially over the last 20-30 years or so, a new populist revolt has arisen (though, to be accurate, populist movements have been a part of the American tradition since its inception). Historically, such movements arise in times of widely perceived injustice and inequality.
This new class war, in short, reflects the failure of the overclass to rule effectively, having produced large-scale de-industrialization, a hollowing-out of the working and middle classes, unprecedented wealth disparities, substance abuse, alarming suicide rates, and an ever-decreasing ability for average citizens to influence decisions that impact their lives.
The response of the overclass to these very real problems, so far, has left a lot to be desired. Facing a backlash of mostly well-deserved anger, the elites have doubled down on their effrontery. Rather than grant the merits of the criticism, they have resorted to demonizing, censuring, threatening, and even criminalizing any and all dissent, presumably out of fear, if not sheer arrogance.
In studied contrast, R.R. Reno, in a recent issue of First Things, argues that “the liberal-progressive establishment [has] largely domesticated anger-politics on the left. As soon as revolutionary anger flares up,” he writes,”it gets affirmed, funded, and coopted…”
“The establishment left,” he adds, “makes radicalism part of the status quo, which by definition makes it something other than radical. This radicalism can be destructive,” he admits, “but it’s unlikely to be destabilizing, which means the liberal-progressive establishment will stay on top. This is why BLM marches do not give elites nightmares.”
Yet while populism is not an especially viable governing philosophy, it ideally ought to serve as a wake-up call to an elite class that routinely denies a large segment of the population any say in how it is to be governed.
As I say, the current state of affairs is not especially encouraging. Rather than listen and seek to address some of the concerns of the majority, our elites are “punching down” at the very victims of their gross mismanagement. They even pit the left against the right, presumably in the hope that people won’t take notice of what they’re actually doing to the country.
I simply do not accept that the United States is what I’ve been told it is – sexist, racist, homophobic, white supremacist. Are there such persons on the fringes of both the left and the right? Certainly. But does either constitute the nation as a whole? Hardly.
So while my church colleagues, seemingly stuck in the 60s, prattle on about speaking truth to power, they betray an almost willful blindness as to where the real power lies.
They seem equally clueless as to how the working and middle classes have been adversely affected by the seismic shifts that have occurred over the last 50 years or so.
What if, in other words, the average person is not the source of all that’s wrong with this country (as our elites would have us believe), but the victim of a system that has enriched itself at his or her expense?
If so, it would seem a bit ironic that the mainline clergy are more apt to identify with today’s managerial/professional overclass than the average parishioner whose middle-class values are all too often mocked and ridiculed by this same group of elites. What, pray tell, might happen if somehow we were willing to take their concerns to heart for a change?
So, yes, let’s speak truth to power. But let’s not pretend we’re on the front lines of the battle when we are more likely, however unwittingly, doing the bidding of those who despise not only us but all that we say we stand for.