Pond Scum and Monsters: Considerations of the "New Class"
In this essay, R.C. Roberts uses Gore Vidal's 1981 article "Some Jews and the Gays" to take a look at the transformation of the "new class" from the evangelical Right to bourgeois liberal center.
In The Nation in 1981, essayist and self-styled propagandist Gore Vidal wrote a wonderful article called Some Jews and the Gays, which you can find here. In this article, Vidal examines an article written by a long-ago bien-pensant shrieker named Midge Decter called “The Boys on the Beach”, relating it to the culture of the American Jewish population and their various bigotries against homosexuals. In DiAngelo-style, Decter wrote her observations from when she had gone to Fire Island Pines twenty years before the publication of her article. With puritan eyes, false “intellectual” modesty, and a sneer hidden by a glass of white wine, Decter writes about what she saw as a change in the homosexual community from people who “...were characterized by nothing so much as a sweet, vain, pouting, girlish attention to the youth and beauty of their bodies…” to people who were “politically militant” and “ill-groomed”.
As she recounts her supposedly objective--and yet harrowing--experience, with Mr. Vidal mocking her at every point, nipping at her heels, I came across a few things that piqued my interest in a sea of incredibly witty, interesting insights. These points of interest, I believe, are applicable in our current situation, as we live out the crumbling of the American Empire, because of how we have come to cope with the problems in the United States reflects a trend of political manqué that has risen and fallen into the political theater since the Cold War ended. These two things, mentioned in Vidal’s article, are the rise of what he dubs “the new class” or né arrivistes, and Vidal’s observation of Midge Decter’s characterization of homosexuals, which strikes a stunningly close resemblance to how our current batch of les identitaires bourgeois looks at all those it does not consider part of their movement.
* * *
In a short, almost Laconic poem called Ode to a Scab, the famous writer Jack London laid out a description of people who, when people go on strike, move into the jobs left open, effectively undermining the purpose of the strike. These were people London referred to as “scabs”. He wrote:
A scab is a two-legged animal with a cork-screw soul, a water-logged brain, a combination backbone of jelly and glue. Where others have hearts, he carries a tumor of rotten principles.
When a scab comes down the street, men turn their backs and angels weep in heaven, and the Devil shuts the gates of Hell to keep him out.
To put it more generally, the scab is someone who, when resistance is given to the way the system puts its boot on the necks of the oppressed, will step in to keep things going. In 1915, when this was written, the scab was more immediate; they took the job of the striker, allowing the strike to leave the company mostly unharmed. Nowadays, however, this can be seen in the way that the managerial class will spot oppression, be it racial, sexual, classist, or otherwise, and turn it into a tool that keeps the oppression going--that is, with new language and more seminars, of course--by making one psychologically dependent on it for their identity. It is a far more complex strategy, but that is because it is for a far more complex age. Every time a change is demanded, in an economic or social manner, the postmodern scab will set out to look at the issue, often beginning their journey by supporting, with words, the cause. But suddenly, when the time for change comes, they’ll change things; suddenly, the leaders are misogynists, the language “is not inclusive enough”, and names given to directly identify the people opposed to the demand are questioned as being “toxic”.
Like pond scum stuck to the bottom of a boat, the les identitaires tend to hold on and bring more scum to it, and eventually the bottom of the boat is covered in scum. If left that way to dry, the boat will inevitably rust, and if you are wondering about the State of our Union, I can assure you the bottom is caked with scum, and it is going to rust. We can already feel the water at our feet.
In his examination of Decter’s essay, Vidal calls this group of people “the new class” or “né arrivistes”, something he determines while explaining how a Jewish woman, a person who is a part of an oppressed minority, could write such moronic, bigoted filth about another oppressed minority, homosexuals. Vidal notes that the Jewish people ought to be more accepting and charitable towards the homosexual population, who was were killed alongside them in Hitler’s Germany. After discussing the similarities, as well as the differences, between the two groups and how these things play out, Vidal takes the time to explain the make up of this “new class”, writing:
“Today, American evangelical Christians are busy trying to impose on the population at large their superstitions about sex and the sexes and the creation of the world. Given enough turbulence in the land, these natural fascists can be counted on to assist some sort of authoritarian—but never, never totalitarian—political movement. Divines from Santa Clara to Falls Church are particularly fearful of what they describe as the gay liberation movement’s attempt to gain special rights and privileges when all that the same-sexers want is to be included, which they are not by law and custom, within the framework of the Fourteenth Amendment. The divine in Santa Clara believes that same-sexers should be killed. The divine in Falls Church believes that they should “be denied equal rights under the law.” Meanwhile, the redneck divines have been joined by a group of New York Jewish publicists who belong to what they proudly call “the new class” (né arrivistes), and these lively hucksters have now managed to raise fag-baiting to a level undreamed of in Falls Church—or even in Moscow.”
On its face, “new class” seems an odd idea, an almost random polemi-jargon—a word developed purely for the sake of a polemics’ ability to sound a certain way—and could be scoffed at, as such. If one, however, does a little research, one will note that Vidal’s use of the phrase “the new class” comes from three separate political theories: Marxism, neoconservatism, and liberalism. To the first, one ought to read Milovan Đilas’ The New Class: An Analysis of the Communist System, where the notion itself was long a product of analysis by Marxist and communist thinkers that came before him, like Trotsky, Bakunin, Kropotkin, and Makhno. To the second, one need only look to Frederick Hayek’s Road to Serfdom, as well as in Karl Popper’s The Open Society and its Enemies, which were twisted and appropriated by the neoconservative salaud. To the third, one needs to look into John Kenneth Galbraith’s The New Industrial State and The Affluent Society. If people in America really believe in their calls for “unity”, I think I have found something each of these political identities agrees on. What kind of black magic is this, you might be asking?
Getting that incredibly drab--but nonetheless necessary--set of citations out of the way, I bring up this convergence of political ideology en passant to give context to good ol’ Vidal; the new class he speaks of--political preferences be damned--firstly exists in all political imaginations, however deranged or unhinged they are, and most things political require at the onset something unhinged or delusional. But secondly, “the new class” Vidal brings up is the product of the post-Cold War, the era we have only barely made it out of; a class of people with a purely social relation to the economic means of production in this country.
In Gore Vidal’s era, particularly when he wrote this article, this “new class” were rich evangelicals (divines) and members of the media (publicists) who, with a lack of contribution to the country in any meaningful manner, saw it as their role to intervene in the affairs of the people, to declare what should and should not happen. They’re soccer moms yelling at the top of their lungs, a wine in hand, trying to coach their kid on how to play football. They are people, being without skills, competence, or decency, who believe only in their ambition to be others’ managers.
In our era, evangelicals still exist, rich and redneck divines who go about, preaching to people who want to listen. They are just as delusional as before, and humans are just the mark for them to con, but the problem with Christ Inc. is that it must now compete with other, new, virtual conspiracies; in nurturing the American propensity to believe nearly anything they are told, the divines have accomplished what the faux-tolerant, permissive gaggle of the beau monde of the bourgeois claims to want; the creation of Americans with wide open minds. So open, in fact, that everything is accepted but nothing sticks. But the evangelicals no longer hold that place in “the new class”; their worship of the god of “family values”, to paraphrase Vidal, is out of vogue. They are the conservatives of the past, and the Banana Republicans of the present.
Now, we have the “woke queens”; superficially observant, finger wagging puritans who look in your recycling bin for that non-recyclable beer bottle or in your windows to see how you treat your son that they are certain, without having talked to the kid, wants to wear a dress. Their privilege grows a mysterious repentance ash on their foreheads on the February of every year, during Black History month, only for it to disappear the other eleven months of the year or as soon as any protest by the African American community has disappeared from our media spectacle. They approach you with their phones on record and bother you, wanting to snitch on you to your supervisors because, unlike them, you have to go to work everyday to survive and what do they care if you lose that job? With the zeal of the evangelical, outing this and that person for their sexual preferences, the woke queen will go about looking for your prejudices and biases, carrying on a virtual auto-da-fé against that which isn’t like themselves. Without the intelligence or attention span to write a satirical piece, unwittingly fearful of having to be with their thoughts for any length of time, the woke queen will make memes from shows that they consider acceptable and lampoon those they find undesirable. They still pray to the god of “family values”, they just have changed how that family looks, and what values those are, and pretend it is progress, rather than an opportunistic appropriation of a protean class structure.
This is “the new class” for us; the pond scum on the bottom of the boat, the scab that keeps the system going, the “woke queen” with a singular desire; to manage the world, rather than change it.
* * *
What interests me most about Vidal’s account of the “new class” in America, and what makes their post-Cold War form so interesting is that, beyond Vidal, “the new class” was seen, in many ways, as protean or one that was desirous of power, but perhaps was more willing to consider itself a part this or that other class. That does not mean it ever, truly, integrated into other classes, but it certainly seems to have tried to. The post-Cold War “new class”--the one Vidal is recounting-- seems to prefer to identify itself, to accept and use as a badge this designation. It is a purely American tendency, it seems to me, to turn one’s prejudices and notions into an identity that you then “get to be proud of”--usually when you have nothing else to be proud of--and this something the “the new class” seems to have turned into an art fit for the political stage.
I don’t want to suggest, naively, a straightforward analogy between the two phases of the new-class--analogies are hardly ever accurate, metaphors are better--because the values that underpin both are, obviously, different. Vidal notes the ferocious bigotry of the new-class during his time, writing that:
“Meanwhile, like so many Max Naumanns (Naumann was a German Jew who embraced Nazism), the new class passionately supports our ruling class—from the Chase Manhattan Bank to the Pentagon to the Op-Ed page of The Wall Street Journal—while holding in fierce contempt what they think our rulers hold in contempt: faggots, blacks (see Norman Podhoretz’s “My Negro Problem and Ours,” Commentary, February 1963) and the poor (see Midge Decter’s “Looting and Liberal Racism,” Commentary, September 1977).”
Note, if you will, that the targets of the new-class are different, but there is one pin that holds them together: they support the ruling class, or think they do. The “woke queen”, replacing the divines, will never have a problem with a corporation that does the right kind of dance on the stage; let us accept--as I point out constantly--that Nike has sweatshops and child labor because they were willing to put Colin Kaepernick on their advertising campaign. Look how quickly they turned away from the migrant children in concentration camps--I’m sorry, the official Biden-Harris-ism is “overflow facilities”--as soon as their bought-and-paid-for President and his “yass queen” buddy cop made it into the White House. Whenever a CEO says this or that “forbidden thing”, be it something legitimate or something silly, they will certainly turn on the CEO, demanding he or she be removed. But what don’t they do? They don’t call into question the structure of the company itself; they swat the hand of the ruling class, and from where I am standing, it looks more like a low-five.
To continue, there is a similarity between the two phases of the new-class beyond their support of the ruling class and general disregard of the working class: they both use a projected sense of the worry-free lives of the people they do not like, in order to justify their dislike of these “outsiders”. From Vidal’s piece:
“To hear Decter tell it, fags had nothing to complain of then, and they have nothing to complain of now: “Just to name the professions and industries in which they had, and still have, a significant presence is to define the boundaries of a certain kind of privilege: theatre, music, letters, dance, design, architecture, the visual arts, fashion at every level—from head, as it were, to foot, and from inception to retail—advertising, journalism, interior decoration, antique dealing, publishing… the list could go on.””
Sound familiar? Perhaps, I should add this quote too:
“In new-class circles it was an article of faith that television had been taken over by the fags. Now I happen to have known most of the leading producers of that time and, of a dozen, the two who were interested in same-sex activities were both married to women who… did not drink. Neither man dared mix sex with business.”
In the article, Vidal makes note of how these accusations can be paralleled to the Nazi accusations against the Jewish, that “[t]hey had taken over German medicine, teaching, law, journalism. Ruthlessly, they kept out gentiles; lecherously, they demanded sexual favors.”
What is interesting about this is not merely the notion of a group of people having some unspeakable, unconfirmable, but nevertheless “known” control of this or that industry, which anyone who has spent time with a “woke queen” is fairly aware of this claim being used against the system--often in a form where, if someone does something “bad”, these woke queens lock onto to some aspect of them that they disapprove of, be it race, gender, political affiliation, etc--which is just one of their many household conspiracies. The more interesting aspect of all of this, in fact, is that the new-class will project onto their preferred enemy and project their social and economic privilege onto them; white, cis-gendered men are generally seen as people working in offices and having higher-level, managerial jobs. It is an article of faith, still, that their enemies hold control over places in various industries, but who it is happens to be different.
Why is this the case? Well to return to Vidal, he writes:
“[Decter] ticks off Susan Sontag for omitting to mention in the course of an essay on camp “that camp is of the essence of homosexual style, invented by homosexuals, and serving the purpose of domination by ridicule.” The word “domination” is a characteristic new-class touch. The powerless are always obsessed by power.”
Obsessed with power? My, my, I wonder who else is so obsessed with power, with “domination”. Perhaps they use a different word for it? Something intimidating, something with a long history that they can twist and turn. Perhaps...oppression? The oppressed? You will note--as I noted before, of course, so no need to repeat myself much--the new-class is always talking about the oppressor, far more than they actually focus on the oppressed. The oppressed, to them, are little more than people to be collected, to be pitied, to be given charity, and then forgotten once their guilt is satiated. It is an interesting paradox, isn’t it? Those who will go hand-in-hand with the suits, the cops, and their favorite politicians, promoting this and that corporation, will talk all day, to the Twitterati jihadis and Facebook kooks about oppression and how everyone, even themselves, are responsible and need to do something about it. They will tell you this while also saying that terms like “working class” are “white supremacist”.
* * *
Being one who is partial to the writings of Sartre, I have developed a sort of schadenfreude for the sadomasochistic relationships I see permeate throughout the whole of the United States; more often than not, we see some kind of vague justification or glossing up of a particular aspect of our sadomasochistic relationships. This leads me to a general acceptance that Karl Marx was right on a great number of things in economics--and there are things I disagree with him on, oh the blasphemy!--one of these being the consideration of class warfare as a clash of interests, rather than a clash of lifestyles, of emotions, or of personal convictions. It has been noted, in one of the tawdry memes making its way around Facebook everyday, that one needs to realize that no matter how nice, say, your landlord is, their interests oppose your own.
The new-class, who I have disparaged, may not all be “mean” people; you may even enjoy some of them as friends, coworkers, and so on. But their interests seem, evidently, to be opposed to those who are oppressed. They pick lifestyle over the consideration of interests, the social over the economic, civilization over culture, personal prejudice over history. The thing about the new-class, as Đilas, Hayek and Galbraith all note, is their relationship to the economic conditions of the world is purely social, and so they take movements like movements for the LGBTQ+ community, Black Lives Matter, MeToo, and other social justice groups and they castrate them; they argue for some kind of “social media campaign”, arguing the need to reach out to “sponsors”--the pimps of the corporate world--and eventually, immigrant persons, working class persons, and others are left out as they have--to use the example of the 2018 Oscars who promoted MeToo via “TimesUp”--parties for the ultra-rich and celebrities, where seats cost between $150 to $750 with an invitation and after parties cost over $100,000 per couple.
And what happened? MeToo is hardly heard of, anymore. It had its commercial use sucked dry, and it shriveled up, and it still hasn’t taken on the way working class women are kicked in the teeth by the system, not to mention the way apps like Tinder or Instagram encourage women to commodify their bodies for the sake of attention. A celebrity here and there will bring it up, only to follow it up with a bikini picture--probably at the behest of their agent--with some nonsensical faux-inspirational quote on it. Movements carried off into the upper-echelon of the haute bourgeoisie must become weightless first, without substance but with plenty of content. It must become masochistic to the interests of sadists; it must become the object of our ruling capitalists. To the new-class of the les identitaires, we are all objects in a game of oppression, to be managed and ordered based on an ever elusive virtue.
I noted, and continue to, that America is a scam of grifters, pushed to believe everyone else is a mark except for you--of course--bathing in our bad faith as we project our various devils outward and call it society; and in the case of the new-class, their devils are all social, and so they torture the economically and “other-socially” downtrodden with their phantoms, phantoms they truly believe are evil demons and angels, and they demand that we watch these plays--not free of charge, of course--and that we fear with them the phantoms only they can see. They speak to us of sinners and saints, of glory and their “God”, of the rituals of “self-care” and “self-love” that have saved them from the guilt they might otherwise feel about what they do. Angels and demons, sinners and saints, the Devil and the Good Lord.
But they don’t get it. Of course not. There are only two things in the swamps of America: monsters and pond scum. We know which one they are, and we know which one we need to worry about.
Bibliography
Frost, Amber A'Lee. “Why the Left Can't Stand the New York Times.” Columbia Journalism Review, 2019, https://www.cjr.org/special_report/why-the-left-cant-stand-the-new-york-times.php. Accessed 14 February 2021.
London, Jack. “Ode to the Scab.” The Charnel-House, 9 April 2015, https://thecharnelhouse.org/tag/jack-london/. Accessed 14 February 2021.
Platts, Barbara. “An Evening at the Oscars Isn't Cheap.” Marketplace, 21 February 2019, https://www.marketplace.org/2019/02/21/evening-academy-awards/. Accessed 14 February 2021.
Vidal, Gore. “Some Jews and the Gays.” The Nation, 14 November 1981, p. 1, https://www.thenation.com/article/culture/some-jews-gays/. Accessed 14 February 2021.