Class Interest, Liberal Style

...On election night the No on 3 campaign held a packed victory party at the Park Plaza Hotel...

...At least until the phone rang for your next Weld-Silber conversation...

...to come out for Weld...

...Now, a year later, whatever visions of unity I had during the No on 3 campaign are long gone...

...Even the young Irish guys from the Dorchester Laborers local who knew that cutting taxes meant lost construction jobs also believed that 3 was wrong...

...Confidently (she was a waitress—she had to be one of us) I asked what she thought of Question 3. "It's easy for you teachers to be against it," she said bitterly, "but what about the real working people...

...Mostly laid-off construction workers...

...I only want to suggest that public reality now makes it very difficult for enlightened people truly to want what they think they want...

...Perhaps one day in our political future liberalism will cease to be an option, and perhaps in some places it already has, but a year ago in Massachusetts there was still a liberal safety valve...

...As I write, the Weld administration is trying to eliminate the dependents allowance from unemployment benefits, while in some carpenter's locals unemployment is 75 percent...

...A friend spent half an hour making the case for Silber as Hitler...

...That's me...

...So throughout the years of its collapse the liberal left has become more and more a movement for cultural purification and less and less a movement for economic equality...

...They are dedicated liberals, and given a better choice they wouldn't live in an all-white suburb...

...And I am a labor lawyer, too...

...maybe for some activists eventually to shout through bullhorns what they only let slip in private— that they fear and despise the people whose cause they might once have championed...

...Later, when I asked who Helen Furlong Metros was, she pointed to herself...

...I am willing to march, sign, speak, vote, donate—but not eat in when I can go to Siam Garden...

...Its watchword is "offensive...

...Surprised and impressed, I finally asked if he thought everyone else in the room was for Silber...

...He talked about how bad times were for the unions, and how selfish people had become, especially the yuppies without children who didn't care about the future...

...The Globe itself endorsed him, and with that Weld's campaign manager announced that Dukakis liberals "now feel it is acceptable" to vote Republican...

...But she was just angry...

...Now the ward leaders were talking about an election day blitz, phone calls, visibilities, and we were all catching each other's confidence...

...The meeting room was like a vision of coalition politics...

...Together with about fifty doctors, nurses, and patients, we marched outside against budget cuts and Question 3. The hospital staff took turns using a bullhorn to describe the effects of cuts in their own department...

...They never even have to leave their exurbs, their "edge cities" —everything they need is out there, privately paid for...

...Weld wants to deny general relief, the last resort of the destitute, to people in drug treatment, to ex-offenders, to people forty-five and older with no recent work experience—to anyone who isn't physically disabled or a child...

...Are my principles (justice, fairness, community) hopelessly at odds with my instincts (good schools, safe neighborhoods, stable property values...

...It turns out that I was struggling down during a decade—the 1980s—when the top fifth in America was pulling away from the other four-fifths, isolating itself by neighborhood, school, income, spending patterns, as never before...

...In the old days, it was pretty clear when the American economy was `good' and when it was 'bad.' " Geoghegan is referring to the separate economies for lawyers and steelworkers...

...The publishers don't want class—they only prod my friend for Race, Ethnicity, and Gender...

...Maybe he wondered about me...

...These days I hear of thirty-five-year-olds in corporate jobs taking out nursing-home insurance...

...When I hear that the median family income in America is $29,000 a year (in 1986), I take out my passport and wonder what country I have wandered into...

...It's a situation ripe for something...

...You could vote against Question 3, a businessinspired ballot initiative to roll taxes back by $2 billion or more...

...I have nothing against righteousness...

...he was certainly angry...

...perhaps only the presence of a sign-holder from Roxbury kept him from cursing blacks...

...I vowed never to eat at a new Tex-Mex theme restaurant where you paid $8.95 for quesadillas...

...On the one hand, hardening class division— everyone admits this except a few Republican policy experts...

...We all cheered the sight of Jim Braude, the tall, cerebral advocate for progressive taxation, and Arthur Osborne, the cigar-smoking head of the state AFL-CIO, hugging each other and pledging that this was only the beginning...

...A depression in the city can be a boom in the edge city...

...So people in the city are chronically angry...

...there was a woman from Chinatown and several blacks from Roxbury and Mattapan...

...Silver wanted to clean up state government, Weld wanted to get rid of it...

...The coincidence of these campaigns, the mood swings they produced in middle-class liberals, revealed one of the terrible secrets that lie in the belly of the left's catastrophic failure...

...Silber, of course—who else...

...I'll go a little farther: the ideal of economic equality has been quietly dropped not just because it seems hopeless but also because achieving it would mean a change of a great deal more than attitude...

...I'm not leveling at liberals the easy charge of hypocrisy...

...But I would rather it surged on the solid ground of self-interest than in the weightless atmosphere of self-righteousness...

...But, he told me, "if the politicians fuck us over this time . . ." He slammed a fist into his open hand...

...And in the last days, even as No on 3 was surging, I sensed that it was becoming O.K...

...The reasons for doing so were complicated, but my point here is that even on $6 an hour it wasn't easy...

...Everyone could quote the slurs that Silber barked like someone with Tourette's syndrome: the state had become "a welfare magnet" for Cambodians, working mothers sacrificed their kids to "third-rate day care," health money shouldn't be spent on the very old who were "ripe to go...

...WINTER • 1992 • 51 Class Interest After the meeting, I fell into conversation with a heavy, chain-smoking older man (ten years younger than he looked) from the East Boston "Italian" Laborers local...

...What if greater equality meant that I had to accept a lower standard of living —would I want that...

...And he seemed to catch the mood of a good many people who were nonetheless voting against 3. I spent an hour holding signs with a mechanic from South Boston who cursed Dukakis and all politicians, cursed gay activists, cursed the deficit and the waste of tax money...

...No one had to stand up and sing "Solidarity Forever" for us to feel it...

...The campaign leadership's sticker, the one you saw in middle-class neighborhoods, said "No on 3—It Goes Too Far...

...56 • DISSENT...

...Property taxes had skyrocketed, she had mortgage payments, she couldn't afford her auto insurance...

...she usually picked up about 14,000 votes...

...Of course my project had been doomed from the start, of course I was priggish and deluded...

...Prison labor has been discussed as a substitute for some state jobs in order to save on costs...

...This was too mealy-mouthed for the union guys, whose pick-up trucks sometimes showed the sticker with the second half ripped off...

...For Governor Weld, true to his word, has done everything in his power to abolish the state government that 60 percent of the people voted to maintain in some viable form...

...I can extinguish my last homophobic impulses, I can keep in mind the difference between fear of crime and WINTER • 1992 • 53 Class Interest racism, I can give to the homeless man outside the ATM while recognizing the social forces that have put him there, I can bring my own plastic bag to the supermarket...

...Question 3 was defeated 60-40...

...it's simply that you're more likely to have to choose which name to use than to think about declining wages—especially if your own have increased...

...And when you have almost no political power, it's easier to get rid of insulting speech than to raise wages...

...Some were here out of principle, others out of self-interest, but these motives were no longer to be easily distinguished...

...Not only that—in where I lived, what I drove, what I wore, the beer I drank, I attempted to drop several socioeconomic classes from the one into which I was born...

...The polls showed that we'd come from way behind to several points ahead...

...It wasn't easy...

...But it's also misleading: CREG should really be REG...

...the other was an angry Democrat who had managed to offend Cambodians, blacks, working mothers, environmentalists, abortion rights activists, and the elderly...

...Silber was an angry Democrat, Weld was a rich Republican...

...But how do I get rid of real, implacable inequality...

...I asked a friend who went what the crowd was like...

...people began announcing it with a 52 • DISSENT Class interest kind of defensive defiance, as if they were justifying a healthy taste for pornographic videos...

...A friend who is putting together a literature textbook for freshmen has been told unequivocally that he has to include a certain quota of RCG—or, more recently, of CREG, for Class, Race, Ethnicity, and Gender (the acronyms themselves are a sign of atrophy, political lifelessness...

...We might as well have never defeated it...

...Over the years the whole unconscious pull of my life—whom I knew, their expectations and preferences, and finally, I had to acknowledge, my own—brought me back like a homing pigeon into the world of espresso coffee and Sam Adams lager...

...This one is so secret, and so painful, that even when hard choices forced it out in the last months of 1990, no one wanted to admit that we had just belched up the problem of class...

...In 1988, while Dukakis was losing to Bush, the unions in Massachusetts were fighting against Question 2, an initiative (by the people who later brought us Question 3) that would have repealed the state's prevailing wage law on construction contracts...

...It went down in nearly every town in the state: in Cambridge we wiped it out almost four to one...

...She walked away, leaving me stunned silent, and then she came back in tears and apologized and hugged me and took my order...

...The other day there was a rally at City Hall Plaza for an extension of benefits...

...If I pointed this out, it made them angrier than anything going on in government or the depressed economy...

...And then, offhandedly, my friend mentioned that he is besieged these days with calls from people in his own line of work looking for job leads— people without employment desperate to be making films about Milwaukee's "working poor...

...It turned out to be her sixth attempt...

...Recently I spoke with a friend who is filming a TV documentary about the "working poor" in Milwaukee who used to have high-wage, blue-collar jobs and now can't keep afloat in the new "service" economy...

...He paused...

...And in the absence of any compelling economic self-interest or any overwhelming anger it became possible to vote their likes and dislikes...

...For once, they were the elite and we had the people...

...It has to do with class," he said...

...We may yet see another surge of social commitment, idealism, solidarity...

...But the alternative of living in Hartford where they work is out of the question: Hartford, the fourth poorest city in the country, is dirty and dangerous...

...they were bewildered by the public's mood...

...Certainly he seemed more like them, culturally, than Silber did...

...Reich calls this trend "the secession of the successful": the top layer of educated professionals, the "symbolic analysts" of the postindustrial world, no longer even live in the same economy as the rest of America...

...Yet it became common to see construction trucks with "Question 2/Bad for You" and "Bush-Quayle" bumper stickers side by side...

...If class divisions have hardened with the years of low wages for most and easy money for a few, then even middle-class liberals have to ask themselves: Who am I? Am I a symbolic analyst with no idea of the real, unwritten life of my country...

...Here was a perfect opportunity to tell this sympathetic crowd how their own problems were part of a larger crisis in health care and to win them over to the side of reform...

...A kind of dissociation arises between values and impulses...

...If you had decided for Silber, you kept it to yourself...

...No steelworkers have come forward to protest the way the texts portray them...

...It came down to the fact that middle-class liberals hated Silber and only disagreed with Weld...

...Perhaps even that won't be security enough...

...I spent my first four years in Boston working as a laborer and carpenter...

...He was arrogant, mean, authoritarian...

...It was inevitable that I would gravitate toward the Japanese-tool-users...

...Maybe two or three ain't...

...I'm Mad, But I'm Not Crazy," the unions' "No on 3" bumper sticker proclaimed...

...I tried once, and the effort was a failure...

...People were talking about schools, hospitals, fire departments, parks, libraries...

...Others were making a case for Weld as Elliot Richardson...

...It's hard to know what's really happening out there...

...I just doubt its staying power...

...Is it possible today to be truly public-spirited on an income above $50,000...

...I think they even sneakingly liked Weld—he lived in Cambridge, he'd gone to Harvard, he came from old Yankee money, he was witty and self-deprecating...

...The furor over multiculturalism, whatever its merits, is at least partly a symptom of liberals' powerlessness and despair...

...All true—but within thirty seconds she'd lost her audience of health care professionals, who probably never thought of themselves as "workers" in the first place...

...During the campaign middle-class liberals didn't see that however "temperamentally unfit" they found Silber, it was only their relative comfort that enabled them to vote on that judgment...

...Class, which involves money but also education, background, taste, even taste buds, is about the hardest thing in the world to overcome...

...On the other hand, the jitters, even among the symbolic analysts—jitters that cause the division to stiffen even as it quakes...

...It's not heartlessness...

...In his affecting book Which Side Are You On?, Thomas Geoghegan, a Chicago labor lawyer, admits that in spite of his work with unions, his professional salary means "I have no idea how anyone else lives, how the bottom four-fifths of the country gets along...

...But middle-class liberals weren't mad...

...There were rank-and-file members in union windbreakers from the Laborers, the Sheet Metal Workers, the Ironworkers, and there were teachers and public employees in ties...

...Two men were running for governor of the only state that voted for George McGovern...

...So to drop a notch or two nowadays is to take a very steep fall...

...No on 2 was labor's first attempt in the state to build a coalition with liberals, and it worked...

...His campaign was perfectly suited to an age that lives politically for sound bites, preferably gaffes...

...In private they tossed between William Weld and John Silber like a flu sufferer unable to find a comfortable position in bed...

...They are "linked by jet, modem, fax, satellite and fiber-optic cable" to an everexpanding world economy...

...In the future it won't be enough merely to have an advanced degree and a WINTER • 1992 • 55 class Interest foothold in some island of clean streets...

...This is no longer surprising...

...No wonder class is a submerged topic...

...Then, at least, they wouldn't have to falsify their feelings...

...I know a couple who live in West Hartford...

...We discussed Robert Reich and the top one-fifth, the hidden costs to the symbolic analysts of their own secession, the corporate warnings of skilled labor shortages and the possibility that there will never be enough jobs...

...but one evening I found myself there...

...When I asked him whether he'd made up his mind for governor, he reacted as if I were sounding him out on faith in God...

...This was what she really thought of "the workers...

...One was a wealthy Republican who had supported a candidate to the right of Ronald Reagan in the 1980 presidential primaries...

...Until very recently he'd been ready to vote for 3; but he was also out of work, and South Boston was crumbling, and he decided that there was no point in committing suicide...

...Boston has been rigidly divided for two centuries, with a prominent and powerful elite and a large, entrapped working class...

...Ayear ago I began to realize how little class matters to most liberal-minded people any more...

...In general these days, enlightened people seem to anguish more over whether to say black or African American than over the fact that real wages have dropped in the past decade...

...Suddenly, in spite of their postgraduate educations and personal computers, they found themselves strapped, with a child, living anxiously like imposters among the insurance people and bankers...

...If I try to talk about the 'economy' with anyone in my 'class,' it turns into a wild lunging conversation, and I talk about A, and he or she talks about B, and both of us end up utterly frustrated and angry...

...In 1990, the economist Robert Reich has pointed out, "the top fifth of working Americans took home more money than the other four-fifths put together—the highest portion in postwar history...

...Then a young woman from a national health care reform group stepped up...

...Silber was against 3, Weld was for it...

...Class Struggle" is the New York Times Magazine's punning title for an article on the debate over multicultural textbooks in California primary schools—but nowhere in its account of the tribalist war for the hearts and minds of eight-year-olds does class come up...

...In the middle of Connecticut's budget crisis the husband lost his job at a state agency...

...He truly hated "the rich" —he even used the phrase...

...Five days before the election I went to a meeting at the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers (IBEW) union hall where Boston ward coordinators for "No on 3" were hearing last-hour strategy from the campaign's leaders...

...A gay activist told the Boston Globe, "If we elect Bill Weld, we'll defeat the right wing in both parties with one brilliant stroke...

...Later I talked with this activist, and when I speculated that if the left was ever going to succeed in health care reform or anything else it needed to win back the "Reagan Democrats," the white lower three-fifths, she snapped back: "I think they're ripe for fascism...

...That night I ordered the double cheeseburger special at a greasy spoon in Harvard Square...

...and statewide those liberals who decided that it would only hurt for a minute gave Weld his slim margin of victory...

...I had to watch myself constantly, like a dieter with a sluggish metabolism...

...People said it was a choice between a Republican and a "fascist," and they would sound each other out over the phone, warily, not wanting to give too much away in case their own feelings happened to be the wrong ones...

...The Weld-Silber race showed perfectly how far the politics of correct speech has taken over liberal thinking, and at what cost...

...My accent placed me in the infertile educated classes...

...It's too much for any sensitive person's conscience...

...I represent them...

...Perhaps he was mad...

...Instead, we've made a revolution in our tables of contents...

...But in Cambridge William Weld beat John Silber by four thousand votes...

...community organizers, union officers, young progressive-taxation types...

...I cannot even begin to guess what the real, unwritten life of my own country is like...

...Or perhaps how little they're aware of how much it matters to them...

...But I was up against some powerful forces...

...This man, born in the depression, still laboring at sixty, had that archaic thing, class consciousness...

...You could go back elated to your own liberal enclave, where everybody had a "No on 3" sticker, imagining that the New Deal was still alive, or the New Populism, or the Emerging Progressive Majority...

...You could stand in the cold with union electricians holding up "No on 3" signs at evening rush hour along freeway entrances in South Boston and show thumbs-up to the truck drivers who saluted you with honks and laugh together at silver-haired men in Oldsmobile Cutlasses who flipped you off on their way home to the exurbs...

...This state of mind 54 • DISSENT Class Interest prevails much more than one realizes: it sometimes takes an accident to make it vivid, as it became one afternoon during the campaign when I went to the public hospital where my girlfriend was a mental health worker...

...Perhaps their mistake was to have tied themselves in any way to the government...

...I decided that if even this man was going to vote against 3, the other side didn't have a chance...

...Even among carpenters there turned out to be a cultural split between the union-card-carrying construction workers who put their tool belts on at 7 A.M., took them off at 3:30, and used Milwaukee power tools in between, and the art-school dropouts who wandered in late, ate sprout sandwiches at lunch, and worshipped Japanese tools...

...Instead, she gave a canned speech full of slogans about how "the workers" suffered while profits were reaped by business and the insurance companies, fueling defense spending, militarism, and so on...

...They were pretty quiet," he said...

...As she stood there holding her forgotten order pad, she went on about a mother-in-law she couldn't afford to put in a nursing home, and cuts in meals for the elderly, in transportation for the elderly, cuts in aid to the towns—until I thought she was about to argue against more tax cuts...

...The waitress, who looked about as old as the East Boston laborer, noticed my "No on 3" button, and saw me notice her "Helen Furlong Metros for State Senator" button...

...Like the instinct for physical comfort, it determines so much about one's life that it's hardly noticed...

...Even wanting to overcome it won't necessarily make it happen...

...but he could be talking about lawyers and architects, or lawyers in Massachusetts and lawyers in Utah...

...As Thomas Geoghegan says, "It is impossible to talk about the American economy now as if it were a single, seamless thing...

...The people you'd expect to be free on a weekday...

...It mattered more that Silber referred carelessly to "a bunch of drug addicts" in Roxbury than that he was willing to spend money on drug treatment and Weld wasn't...

...I can imagine—it never lasts very long—an end to the miserable split between the professor who sneers at the American flag decal on a pickup truck and the construction worker who flips off a state worker holding a Dukakis sign...

...Textbook publishers nowadays speak of the RCG factor—for Race, Class, and Gender...

...In my more hopeful moments I can imagine some good coming from this political darkness we've been living in...

...It's easiest to imagine it happening if they begin to have common interests and to perceive that they do...

...Anyway, there was still Question 3 on which to vote their principles...

...I had to force my right hand down with my left to prick the Silber perforation on the ballot card...

...A cabbie once explained to me why Boston drivers are so rude...

...Entire cities like Chelsea have been allowed to go bankrupt, and the first task of Weld's appointed receiver will be to break Chelsea's union contracts...

...I wore no union windbreaker...

...you will have to make sure none of your money comes from the public sector...

...Out of insularity, out of fatigue, out of fear, it has become normal to liberals that the white lower three-fifths will hate them...

...Bring up equality and people shrug, shake their heads—we don't know how to get there...

...And in Cambridge, where I live, Silber, who seemed to offend people willfully, was regarded as a madman...

...It can be sunny in one part of the exurb and pouring rain in another—particularly as the cost of a safe, decent life grows with the advancing decay of cities, industrial areas, whole regions...

...It only hurts for a minute," a well-known Democratic activist assured his fellow liberals, finding it possible to forget that when Weld made good on his undisguised plan to dismantle state government, uncushioned voters would experience pain much longer...