From the sectarian left to mainstream socialists, many U.S. leftists put forward dealignment to explain politics today. Jacobin recently dropped an issue on the topic. As long time readers surely know, I have sort of a love/hate relationship with the mag. Its founder has done some good work. As has the mag itself. But the mag has its faults, which I’ve also discussed in a few posts.
But I’m not here just to talk about a magazine. I’m here to talk about dealignment, especially as it concerns class. And especially a recent article on it – ‘From Bowling Alone to Posting Alone,’ by Anton Jäger.
Dealignment
The basic idea behind dealignment is simple enough. Political scientists use the term to describe a situation where many voters drop their allegiances to political parties or groups. They don’t merely switch parties – which would be realignment – but rather they drop out of the partisan game. We see this in the U.S., where far more voters identify as Independents than in earlier decades.
But it’s not merely found among voter preferences. We also see dealignment and fragmentation in the ruling class. As Jäger claims, capitalists once ran the GOP as a fief that united their collective interests under a single political party. Now they bicker among themselves and allow specific capitalist factions to run the GOP. Donald Trump represents the interests not of the capitalist class as a whole, but rather certain dissident wings of capital.
We also see dealignment in the U.S. working class. Contrary to the popular myth that the ‘working class’ (in this myth meaning only the white working class) used to vote for Democrats and now votes GOP (a myth Jäger at times seems to accept), its votes are scattered and fragmented. I’d go one step further and point out that much of the U.S. working class doesn’t vote at all.
What does all this mean for how we interpret our politics, from the rise of Donald Trump to the prospects for the left?
Bowling Alone and Posting Alone
Jäger begins with the claim that U.S. civic organizations declined over the second half of the 20th century. A claim made famous by Robert Putnam in his book Bowling Alone. People turned away from civic orgs and from each other, producing a more individualistic society in the neoliberal area. And, in some ways, the Internet made these problems worse, not better.
As Jäger puts it, the breakdown of civic orgs from the 1970s on stood out as a precondition for the extreme political and social fragmentation we see in the Internet era. After strong social connections break down, people can be driven into their homes, isolated, and put in a position of shouting into the social media void for likes and emojis.
Social media in its current form wouldn’t make much in a society with strong social ties and civic orgs. We’d probably still have an Internet. But it wouldn’t be based around sitting at home posting to social media or gaming all day. We certainly wouldn’t have seen the kinds of extremes unleashed by the early pandemic.
…And Capital and Labor
All this takes us back to where we began – capital and labor. We find forms of dealignment among both capital and labor. And we can interpret these forms as arising from the same forces that produced the breakdown of civic orgs and the rise of people posting alone.
We should also think about how they relate to one another. Many leftists argue that dealignment among workers played a major causal role in dealignment among capital. Since capital no longer faced a united working-class opposition, it no longer needed to think about its collective interests in the face of a threat. And so, breakaway factions of capital form, like the ones Donald Trump represents.
For these leftists, then, the fragmentation of capital gave us Trumpism. He wasn’t produced by the kinds of capitalist crises that lead to fascism. At least on my own account of fascism.
The Limits of ‘Dealignment’
For my part, I think Jäger overstates how dealignment applies to capital. He’s right that capital wasn’t totally united in 2020. And even that it was less united than it was in, say, 1960 or even 1990. But capital did come together in a large bloc to promote Joe Biden over Donald Trump. Many of its most powerful elements – Silicon Valley, Wall Street, the finance industry – tended to support Biden over Trump.
In that sense, capital is far less dealigned than the working class. The working class in the U.S. has few, if any, large formations.
Furthermore, there have always been both major divisions and major points of unity within the capitalist class. Even the New Deal and Great Society programs – the height of working-class power in the U.S. – saw large blocs of capital both for and against them. Capital’s largest and most powerful elements shaped those programs to their advantage. And various other elements of capital formed strong dissident elements to oppose them.
And so, while we find more dealignment of capital in 2020 than earlier, it always existed. Capital has always shown both unity and discord.
The Left and Dealignment
Finally, there’s the matter of the left and its working-class political program and prospects. And the news here isn’t good. It’s far, far behind capital. This should strike us as the most pressing issue. Only by putting together a coalition of working-class people and marginalized people can we defeat Trumpism in the longer term.
