THE ENIGMA OF WORKING-CLASS CONSERVATISM

By Adolph Reed

REINVENTING THE
WORKING CLASS
A Study in Elite Image
Manipulation
THE QUESTION OF THE RELATION OF THE WORKING CLASS TO CONSERVATIVE POLITICS

immediately begs other questions. Who do we mean by “the working class”?

What do we mean by “conservative politics”? If we take a definition that centers
on people’s location in a hierarchy of social power that is rooted in the
economy—such as that proposed by Michael Zweig’s The Working Class Ma-
jority—many different kinds of people make up the working class. These people
vary widely—as individuals and subgroups, as well as over the course of indi-
viduals’ lives—in the array of political issues they deem important, their ideo-
logical dispositions and electoral inclinations. What counts as conservatism
also is an issue that should not simply be assumed in a pro forma way. For in-
stance, voting for Republicans does not equate automatically with commitment
to a conservative political program. And there is nothing about caring for loved
ones that intrinsically ties those concerns to a politics of populist conservatism.
That link occurs only when those concerns are annexed to a larger political rhe-
toric of “family values,”and the policy and social agendas that accompany it.

New Labor Forum 13(3): 18–26, Fall 2004

18 • New Labor Forum Copyright © QueensA. ReedLabor Resource Center
College
ISSN: 1095-7960/03 print
DOI:10.1080/10957960490501257
I
N CONTEMPORARY POLITICAL DISCUSSION IN THIS
country, of course, the issue of the relation
of the working class to conservative poli-
tics is most immediately centered on the phe-
nomenon of the “Reagan Democrat,” the iconic
working-class voter whose defection from the
Democratic party in national elections marks
the demise of the New Deal coalition. Like a
mythic figure, the Reagan Democrat has be-
come a touchstone in debates about the break-
down of the post-World War II liberal consen-
sus, the redefinition of the scope and limits of
American politics, the future of the Democratic
party, the failures of the left and the labor move-
ment, the intractability of race as a fault line in
American politics, and the tension between
“economic” and “social” issues in working-
class and progressive politics.
Taking stock of, and getting beyond, the
Reagan Democrat notion, however, requires
locating it as a link in a chain of repre-
sentations at the conjunction of conser-
vative politics and the working class. Al-
though this chain arguably stretches back
much farther in time, its proximate lin-
eage in everyday American discourse
descends from a familiar set of images
that the phrase “working-class conserva-
tism” evokes almost as a Pavlovian re-
sponse. These typically revolve around
some version of the Archie Bunker ste-
reotype—a white male, usually patriarchally
sexist, intolerant of homosexuality, bigoted
against people of color, xenophobically patri-
otic and militarist, given to rigidly conventional
morality and authoritarian politics, and fear-
ful of a world in which his slender prerogatives
seem threatened by anyone not like himself. A
darker version of this image was Peter Boyle’s
eponymous character in the 1970 film Joe. The
Reinventing the Working Class
stereotype also has been sustained by more
nearly real-life models. One was Eric Hoffer,
erstwhile dockworker and autodidact philoso-
pher, whose book, The True Believer, attained
some currency in the 1960s. The prowar “hard
hats” who attacked antiwar protesters became
a symbol of working-class conservatism—op-
position to the cultural sensibilities and social
movements of the 1960s, militant support for
the Vietnam War—during the Nixon admin-
istration.
A differently inflected, but overlapping,
variant of this imagery is bound up with the
emergence of the notion of “white ethnicity”
in the 1970s. This image, like the other, is per-
haps inseparably linked to the perception of
“white backlash” that also emerged from the
1960s. The image of “resurgent” or
“unmeltable” white ethnicity was sanctified by
journalists and academics, many of whom
The image of “resurgent”
or “unmeltable” white
ethnicity was sanctified
by journalists and
academics …
would before long be identified as
neoconservatives. In this image, ethnicity ap-
pears as a primordial identity; one basically and
essentially is an ethnic, and being one confers
a set of attitudes and dispositions that are more
“traditional” than “modern,” communitarian
rather than liberal.
Where the “hard hat” inflection of this
version of working-class conservatism is dis-
New Labor Forum • 19
tinctively male, the white ethnic variant is as
likely to be female—embodied in the “tradi-
tional ethnic” wife, mother, family. “Ethnic,”
indeed, has become practically a synonym for
“traditional” attitudes, values, and norms, and
“traditional” has by and large come to mean
embrace of patriarchal norms of household
organization centered on a nuclear unit em-
bedded in a larger, “close-knit” extended fam-
ily, strong-to-aggressive preference for en-
dogamy, active religious identification, adher-
ence to conventional “values,” and an often
militant preference for living in homogeneous
neighborhoods with members of one’s own
group.
This imagery also had what looked
enough like real-world referents to give it the
verisimilitude of common sense. From the
1940s through at least the mid-1960s, open
housing struggles in northern cities frequently
enough erupted into dramatic expressions of
white opposition to blacks’ attempts to move
into previously segregated neighborhoods.
(Yonkers, NY, kept this tradition alive through
the 1980s.) The early 1970s brought similar
opposition to school desegregation and bus-
ing to achieve that desegregation in particular.
In both instances, rhetoric of home and fam-
ily, ethnic homogeneity, and neighborhood
stability—infamously summarized by presi-
dential candidate Jimmy Carter in 1976 as “eth-
nic purity”—were prominent in shaping the
language of opposition. And women were fre-
quently visible in the forefront of these pro-
tests. Class, ethnicity, and religion—mainly
Catholicism—swirled together in this imagery,
with any one signifying, or standing in for, the
others. For example, Louise Day Hicks, who
rose to national visibility and local political
prominence as a leader of Boston’s vicious
20 • New Labor Forum A. Reed
antibusing campaign, became a national sym-
bol of working-class conservatism even though
she was a lawyer, and her father was a judge. It
was sufficient that she was Irish-American and
Catholic.
It is significant that both these images of
working-class conservatism date from the late
1960s and 1970s. They reflect the state of think-
ing in American intellectual life—among so-
cial scientists, policy intellectuals, and journal-
ists in opinion-shaping publications—about
class, ethnicity, modernization, and politics at
the time, as well as persisting folk notions of
how human populations are sorted and differ.
Crucial among these ideas or casts of mind was
modernization theory, which captured much
of the social science imagination and shaped
the conceptual foundations of its key narra-
tives.
CULTURE STANDS
IN FOR CLASS
M
ODERNIZATION THEORY PROLIFERATED AS
the United States faced the role of
supplanting British and French co-
lonialism, and geared up for the Cold War’s
struggle for hearts and minds in Latin America
and the officially decolonizing areas of Africa
and Asia. It proceeded from century-old ste-
reotypes about cultural differences between
those societies and the industrialized West.
Central among those stereotypes was the
premise that people in what would be called
the Third World, and on Europe’s periphery,
lived in a timeless present, largely outside the
major currents of modern history, governed by
primordial traditions. The West was held to be
defined by a different character type—future-
oriented rather than present-oriented, rational
rather than emotional and superstitious, pub- nomic mobility, were cultural and behavioral,
lic-regarding rather than private-regarding, not structural. Thus, class distinctions were
individualist rather than communalist. The treated as deriving more from cultural or atti-
policy goal was therefore one of identifying tudinal differences than from location in a sys-
strategies for cultivating these modern values tem of social and economic reproduction. In
and dispositions in “traditional” societies to both cases the bias toward culturalist interpre-
enable them to modernize and de-
velop the fruits of capitalist democ-
racy and industrialization.
Merging class into
The frame of reference around culture … depoliticized
which mainstream elite discourse
about domestic political and social inequality by freeing it of
life increasingly cohered over the
1950s and early 1960s assumed that
the stigma of injustice
ideological cleavages and sharp and removing it from the
political conflict had been resolved
in the United States. In this view,
domain of political
the material constraints that typi- action.
cally underlie such conflict had
been overcome by the promise of
steady economic growth. A regularly increas- tations accommodated an interest in asserting
ing standard of living marked the “affluent so- nonconflictual models of political change, an
ciety,” in which cultural concerns would re- interest that was rooted in the Cold War’s an-
place economic ones and in which political de- ticommunist imperatives. Also, as in modern-
cisions would be ever more consensual and ad- ization theory, it was specifically “traditional”
ministrative. Popular books by sociologists patterns of values and attitudes that were held
Daniel Bell (The End of Ideology) and Seymour to retard mobility. One of the more popular
Martin Lipset (Political Man) proclaimed the sanctifications of this view was the sociologists
“end of ideology.” Dunlopism was the most Daniel Patrick Moynihan and Nathan Glazer’s
coherent expression of this happy-face view in 1963 book, Beyond the Melting Pot, which pur-
the postwar industrial relations system, as la- ported to examine how different racial and eth-
bor-management cooperation was projected as nic groups’ cultural dispositions affected their
the path to—
— and enabled by— — continuing assimilation into the American mainstream.
growth and rising living standards. (They published a new edition in 1970, with a
Although this perspective was just the new introduction reflecting the consolidation
opposite of the imperative of ideological com- of white ethnic resurgence as a culturally com-
petition that drove modernization theory, the monplace trope.)
two nevertheless shared important features. Merging class into culture appealed to
Like modernization theory, this view assumed opinion-shaping elites for three reasons. First,
that the sources of inequality, or lack of eco- in locating the source of individuals’ or groups’

Reinventing the Working Class New Labor Forum • 21

failure to realize the promise of upward mo-
bility in personal or cultural attributes, this view
preserved the conviction that the postwar re-
gime of economic growth could in principle
lift all seaworthy boats and that growth there-
fore was an appropriate alternative to redistri-
bution. Second, doing so depoliticized inequal-
ity by freeing it of the stigma of injustice and
removing it from the domain of political ac-
tion. Third, culturalist explanations of inequal-
ity also had the virtue of being normatively
ambivalent enough to appeal to both liberals
and conservatives.
Over the 1960s, as biologically based ar-
guments for racial inequality became increas-
ingly untenable in mainstream political and
intellectual discourse outside the South, cul-
ture came to do the work that biology could
no longer perform in defending inequality by
rooting it in nature rather than social or politi-
The merger of class and
culture became
increasingly a framework
for marking racial
distinctions.
cal processes. The most controversial moves in
this direction had to do with the mythology
about the so called black family proposed by
Moynihan in the 1965 Johnson administration
report, The Negro Family: A Case for National
Action, and racialized appropriations of the
“culture of poverty” idea coined by anthro-
pologist Oscar Lewis. Although Lewis insisted
that such interpretations misread his argument,
22 • New Labor Forum
the culture of poverty idea, at least as it entered
public discourse, firmly rooted the sources of
inequality in the behavior and attitudes of poor
people themselves.
Conservative social scientists like Edward
Banfield—for example in his 1958 book, The
Moral Basis of a Backward Society—had pro-
pounded such culturally based arguments to
explain lack of economic or social mobility
among “lower class” whites. The Moynihan
Report, though, reflected and spurred a discur-
sive shift akin to the gradual sharpening of le-
gal and status distinctions between slaves and
indentured servants and narrowing of those
between slaves and free blacks that occurred in
seventeenth century Virginia. The merger of
class and culture became increasingly a frame-
work for marking racial distinctions. The same
stereotypes of cultural and behavioral charac-
teristics that had been held to hinder upward
mobility became reinvented as roman-
tic and laudable in images of the cultur-
ally solid, “traditional” white ethnics.
These revalued images, often tinted with
nostalgia and condescension, emerged
and were articulated in contraposition to
the disparaging images of the pathologi-
cal black family, the dysfunctional, dis-
organized culture of poverty, and even-
tually the dangerous, nearly subhuman
“urban underclass.” “Working class” it-
self as a category in popular discourse became
racialized, as well as gendered. Banfield him-
self illustrated this shift in his early 1970s books,
The Unheavenly City and The Unheavenly City
Revisited, which reformulated his arguments
for application to black Americans in inner cit-
ies and to tie them to punitive policy recom-
mendations.
What all this adds up to is a notion of the
A. Reed
working class and its political characteristics
that conflates ethnicity, attitudes, religion,
place of residence, race, gender, and simplistic
notions of “blue collar” employment. This is
fundamentally a folk theory, more allegory than
social science. It is also partly the expression of
a particular ideological point of view and pro-
gram. Characterizing the working class in eth-
nic and religious terms in that way, and by “val-
ues” and attitudes, makes the appearance of
working-class conservatism a self-fulfilling
prophecy. The working class is, in effect, that
population of white working people who ex-
hibit the conservative characteristics held to
define the working class, those who opposed
open housing and school busing, who may have
supported George Wallace’s presidential cam-
paign in 1964 and Wallace or Nixon in 1968
and 1972.
This characterization of a distinctively
working-class conservatism, embodied in the
culturalist biases of postwar liberalism, Archie
Bunker and hard-hat imagery, and that associ-
ated with the rhetoric of resurgent white
ethnicity, is what underlies the Reagan Demo-
crat image and gives it verisimilitude. The
Reagan Democrat is a descendant of those ear-
lier formulations that undercut class as a cat-
egory of power and political economy and en-
sconced it in the political discourse as a
racialized and largely gendered trope for a cul-
tural conservatism. This view emerged from a
combination of the conceptual biases among
postwar social scientists and liberal policy in-
tellectuals and the programmatic and ideologi-
cal limitations of postwar progrowth liberal-
ism. It has been stoked and cultivated by right-
wing activists and ideologues since the 1960s
and fashioned into an established political
identity that is available for people to adopt and
Reinventing the Working Class
through which, at least partly, to define them-
selves and to label their aspirations.
PREEMPTING INTRACLASS
SOLIDARITY
T
O UNDERSTAND WHY THIS NOTION OF WORK-
ing class identity appeals to the right it
may be useful to return to the analogy of
colonial Virginia. The simultaneous efforts to
homogenize free and enslaved blacks and to
sharpen the customary and legal distinctions
between slaves and indentured servants created
the basis for new regimes of political and ideo-
logical solidarity and closed off others. It is
within these regimes of solidarity that political
identities take shape, through which the sub-
stance of class consciousness is formed. Law
and customary sanction gradually eliminated
the possibilities for political identities that
united black and white servants. At the same
time, they opened possibilities for limited ideo-
logical solidarity and shared political identity
among indentured servants and other whites
on a racialized basis, as members of a popula-
tion defined by shared prerogatives vis-à-vis
slaves and other blacks. Of course, they also re-
inforced solidarity among slave and free blacks.
(Kathleen Brown describes, in Good Wives,
Nasty Wenches & Anxious Patriarchs, how the
elaboration of a male subculture of gun own-
ership, hunting and public houses knitted a
contingent solidarity along gender as well as
race lines.) As the slave population grew, elites
were especially moved to craft institutional
bases for uniting the English population as an
effective majority in support of their regime.
The basis of right-wing populism since the
1960s——and since the late 1890s in the South——
has been similar. Its thrust has been to con-
New Labor Forum • 23
struct a political rhetoric and an agenda that
plausibly attracts elements of working-class
whites to identify their political and cultural
aspirations in ways that preempt solidarity with
Postwar liberal
intellectuals’ inclination
to define the working
class in cultural terms …
and [their] retreat from a
social wage policy …
created space for the
right …
the programs and concerns of nonwhites and
the left. Postwar liberal intellectuals’ inclin-
ation to define the working class in cultural
terms, and postwar liberalism’s retreat from
a social wage policy agenda ironically creat-
ed space for the right to articulate a political-
ly conservative working-class identity, in part
by making use of——and revalorizing— — stereo-
types that were already available in public dis-
course.
WORKING-CLASS ALLIANCES,
UP FOR GRABS
F
OUR IMPORTANT POINTS CONCERNING WORK -
ing-class consciousness follow from this
analysis. One is that working-class po-
litical consciousness is never given. It is always
constructed, and, like all political identities, it
is a field of contestation, constantly being re-
24 • New Labor Forum A. Reed
negotiated. This is true in part because the
working class itself is no monolith.
Second, forms of political conscious-
ness—
—in the working class or any other popu-
lation—
—do not emerge pristinely or
automatically. They inevitably take
shape within existing regimes of so-
cial hierarchy, and the logic shaping
them typically will reflect pragmatic
adaptation to those regimes’ institu-
tional imperatives. Colonial Virgin-
ian burgesses recognized that their
actions would alter the political in-
centives available to indentured ser-
vants, as well as the larger cultural and
ideological framework within which
those servants could craft politically
significant identities. Bourbon elites
in the post-Reconstruction South rec-
ognized the same thing. They advo-
cated white supremacy in part as a strategy for
preempting the threat of political alliance be-
tween poor whites and black freedpeople— —
though most no doubt sincerely believed in it
as a social vision. Moreover, experience also
convinced them that they could securely elimi-
nate that threat only by disenfranchising blacks
and thus removing them from the political
equation entirely. That is, they saw eventually
that it was not enough to exhort to white su-
premacy; they could successfully impose it only
by making politics a “white man’s business” in-
stitutionally. So long as blacks could partici-
pate, as the three decades after Emancipation
showed, it was always possible— — even within
the context of a universal belief in white supe-
riority—
— that programmatic imperatives would
encourage expressions of political solidarity
that overlapped racial boundaries.
The imagery of working-class conserva-
tism in contemporary politics is most usefully
understood as a tendency shaped by ideologi-
cal options and politically significant identi-
ties that have been available in post-World War
II American politics. Of course, this framework
did not itself come from nowhere; it emerged
from an evolving matrix of ideology, institu-
tional power, and contestation. Specifically,
the partly racialized New Deal compact insti-
tutionalized the support of political positions
compatible with right-wing populism’s subse-
quent appeal. History never starts from scratch;
there is no state of nature. My larger point,
however, is that it is not helpful or accurate to
attempt to determine whether “the working
class” or, more to the point, “the white work-
ing class” is fundamentally conservative or not.
That is an essentializing approach that denies
the crucial role of institutional constraints in
the formation of political identities. This, by
the way, is one problem with the focus on
“whiteness” in contemporary labor his-
tory, as Eric Arnesen has argued in
“Whiteness and the Historians’ Imagi-
nation” (ILWCH: Fall 2001). It fre-
quently reduces to an ahistorical moral-
ity play that imputes to white workers
more agency in influencing social power
than they could have had.
Third, an implication of the fact that
working-class identities do not emerge
automatically is that they are shaped
partly through the efforts of activists who
project and agitate for certain possibili-
ties that are available and against others.
The case of “working-class conserva-
tism” is instructive. Wallace and Nixon
took postwar liberalism’s stereotypes of an el-
ement of the white working class and revalo-
rized them, offering them as the basis of a co-
Reinventing the Working Class
herent, affirmative political identity. Political
scientists James Stimson and Edward Carmines
have examined, in their book, Issue Evolution,
how right-wing activists actually inverted the
Archie Bunker stereotype and even used the
character to signal issue positions appropriate
to the political identity they advanced. Simi-
larly, neoconservatives’ proclamations of resur-
gent white ethnicity were partly linked to ef-
forts to mobilize white working-class resent-
ment against black power politics. In this con-
text, the Reagan Democrat imagery also should
be seen as the prop of an ideological program.
As Marie Gottschalk shows in The Shadow
Welfare State, in every presidential election
since 1952 except 1980, working-class voters
have voted Democratic in higher percentages
than the electorate as a whole. More significant
politically is her finding that in every election
in that period union members in general, and
white union members in particular, have voted
Democratic in higher percentages than work-
… when exposed to
arguments … that stress
… working-class identity
as linked to support for
social protection and
redistribution, most …
workers will respond
affirmatively.
ing-class voters on the whole. I do not mean to
suggest that voting for Democrats is a clear
proxy for any particular type of working-class
New Labor Forum • 25
political consciousness, especially given the
Democrats’ moves to the right over the last two
decades. At the very least, however, these find-
ings underscore the importance of institutions
and activists in shaping class consciousness in
the working class as elsewhere. Moreover, they
suggest that, when exposed to arguments and
perspectives that stress the material bases of
working class identity as linked to support for
social protection and redistribution, most
people who identify as workers will respond
affirmatively. While it is unsurprising that
working-class voters vary in their electoral be-
havior, a fixation on appealing to working-class
Reagan Democrats as such gives too much
ground to the idea that there is an intrinsically
conservative strain in the working class that
must be accommodated. The more important
lesson is probably that we need to project and
cultivate different expressions of class con-
sciousness. This is a project that implies a more
visionary and outward-looking political role for
the labor movement, one that sees the union
partly as a venue for the shaping of class con-
sciousness and the cultivation of broad politi-
cal solidarities along class lines.
26 • New Labor Forum A. Reed
The fourth implication of this analysis fol-
lows from the others. Ironically, the evolution
of the imagery of working-class conservatism
may have been at least abetted by progressives’
teleological assumptions about working-class
consciousness. The culturalist characterizations
of working-class identity were always deployed
partly to challenge Marxist-inspired notions of
class rooted in political economy. Leftists’ pre-
sumptions that there is an authentic working-
class consciousness that will emerge on its own,
or that it is a kind of default worldview, were
vulnerable to contradiction by a more complex
empirical and historical reality. To that extent,
they called forth those alternative views and did
not have adequate responses to them. We need
to dispense with essentialist conceptions of
working-class identity and recognize that there
is no single route decreed by history, God, or
any other force; that political identity within
the working class is and will be various, and
that the challenge of politics is to struggle in
concert with others to cultivate those forms of
class conscientiousness we believe to be most
true and humane. „