A Word on 'Polarization'

16 August 2024

Following months of protests against the genocide of Palestinians by Israel, Columbia University’s president has resigned, stating in her resignation letter that “we must do all we can to resist the forces of polarization in our community.” She added that she remains “optimistic that differences can be overcome through the honest exchange of views.”

It is an odd thing to talk about “polarization” in terms of students taking a stance against genocide and their university’s aid and ideological cover for it. What is it that liberals would like to see in the face of the genocide and butchery carried out by Israeli soldiers in Gaza? Of its cowardly air campaign, a form of mass murder that has exterminated blood lines and reduced world heritage sites to dust? Do the liberals really believe that Israeli barbarism is something that we can end with an “honest exchange of views?” Are we not being honest enough for them? Do they think Netanyahu and Ben-Gvir are simply unaware of humanistic arguments against what they’re doing? The students, if anything, have been positively saintly in their conduct, and tightly disciplined in their expression of disapproval, trying almost too hard to avoid stepping on the toes of smirking genocidaires.

The ex-president of Columbia is not the only liberal who fears “polarization”. The Atlantic, the liberal rag du jour of the Trump era, has spent much of the last 4-8 years fretting over it. One article, from the writer Yascha Mounk (a frequent target of disdain from leftist media freaks like myself) mentions that “[u]ntil a few decades ago, most Democrats did not hate Republicans, and most Republicans did not hate Democrats.” Liberals of his type pine for a time when conservatives and liberals could agree on things like gutting the welfare state, throwing millions into prison for non-violent offenses, and on occassion throwing some third world country “up against the wall”, “to show the world we mean business.” The era which Mounk pines for was one in which the federal government had unity in pursuing frankly evil goals, a pursuit which resulted in the hastening of the decline and proletarianization of the petty bourgeoisie, which ushered in the age of mass incarceration and mass surveillance, and which resulted in the deaths of millions of people overseas in wars with unwinnable objectives (wars which, by all metrics, have only made the problem they intended to solve significantly worse).

There is a process of “polarization” going on, but what establishment liberals bemoan is only what appears on the surface, an ideological reflection of growing class polarization. Elite circles are increasingly out of touch with the working class, and the working class is increasingly disinterested in anything political elites have to offer. Pathways into the property-owning petty bourgeoisie are being cut off as high interest rates and housing market speculation increase the cost of housing, and as persistent inflation eats away at the value of uninvested savings. The increased cost of housing has also increased the cost of rent, making the housing situation of many working people more precarious. In the major cities of the US, homelessness and housing precarity have become major problems, while housing affordability seems more distant than ever as politicians of both parties neglect the issue in favor of whatever culture war is being waged that day. Obvious solutions to the housing crises affecting major cities such as the build out of tens of thousands of new public housing units are avoided because so many established petty bourgeois homeowners and landlords would be negatively impacted by the increase in supply of low-cost housing units.

Meanwhile, students are being prepared to enter a world where genocide is cynically brushed off as “self-defense”, where well-financed companies are threatening to automate their career away before they even graduate, and where it is uncertain that they will be able to use their newly gained credential to enter into the middle class as they were promised by virtually every adult in their life. Students who are going five or six figures into debt in order to be able to afford a mortgage in the future will be dismayed to find out that the promise was a false one and they will simply be debtors for many years to come.

The liberals tend to err in identifying the cause of polarization in vague “cultural” differences, rather than disagreements over how we should all live our lives within a shared social system. Our “personal” views come about through our everyday living, through conflicts with specific members of other classes, or confclits with specific social institutions. These experiences are often shared: everyone who’s ever held a job has a story of the arbitrariness and caprice of one of their bosses, or the owner of the company (if they’re not identical). And inversely, every boss and owner knows the struggle over profits, the struggle with their workers over wage rates, the struggle to appropriate as much of the surplus value produced by their work as possible within the limits set by the labor market and the organized power of the working class in that industry (if there is any).

Liberals cannot account for the cause of political polarization because accepting the reality of class power is antithetical to their worldview. In the liberal worldview, the United States is a flawed but noble “experiment” in democracy, where problems are hashed out through the more or less polite exchange of ideas. The reality that there are irreconcilable differences between classes, differences which are resolved or managed through the domination of one class by another (or the the abolition of the class system by the working class, the aim of the communist movement), would require being something other than a liberal.

With this established, we can also call back to the liberal pearl-clutching over leftist analysis of the “economic anxiety” of Trump voters in 2016. Reacting to such claims was a minor journalistic cottage industry in print and on social media. But it is impossible to understand the appeal of Trump - someone who, in 2016 anyway, appeared as an “outsider”, someone who had made it “on their own” - without understanding what informs the psychology of the petty bourgeoisie that voted him into office: their class interests as members of the petty bourgeoisie. Trump’s coalition does indeed benefit from tax cuts and the loss of established labor rights, because they are often small business owners who wish to minimize their tax bill and maximize their exploitation of workers, but are bounded by the law in doing so. What else to do, besides elect people who will change those laws?

What are the “forces of polarization”? Simple: the market economy, from which two great classes, the bourgeoisie and the proletariat, will inevitably emerge. Any talk of polarization which fails to mention class is nonsense. The vast majority of the intractable conflicts we see in US politics today are downstream of the interests of the politically organized sections of each class. This is one area where even the most vulgar model of historical materialism will yield better queries and investigations than the most sophisticated liberal sociological theory.