When Mitt Romney deliberately inverted the division of society into Makers and Takers, students of Thorstein Veblen's Theory of the Leisure Class understood exactly where he was coming from. The heart of Veblen's theory is that work, especially productive work, is held to be the province of the inferior orders, while appropriation of the work of others is to be honored in the highest degree. This is the display of prowess—force or fraud, and nowadays especially financial shenanigans.
Second in importance only to the accumulation of wealth and power in such honored ways is the unmistakable demonstration that one has done it: Conspicuous Consumption in the most useless and wasteful ways that one can afford. The attainment of Too Big to Jail status is the pinnacle of both Conspicuous Consumption and prowess.
Tied in with the denigration of work, traditionally the province of women and slaves, is the reduction of women to property and status symbols; and the elevation to the highest honor of generally worse-than-useless occupations, principally war, those forms of religion that elevate the rich and powerful, politics (when only men of property could vote, or when the votes of others do not count), and the upper-class forms of sport such as hunting and polo. The corollary drawn by the rich is that the rich are more important, smarter, more moral, and more deserving of whatever they might desire than the less rich, and so on down to poor Whites in the South lording it over poor Blacks.
This is serious stuff. Veblen's account of it is also in places laugh-out-loud funny, the funniest work of non-satirical non-fiction I have ever encountered, because of the ridiculousness of those posturing so hard in seeking our approbation.
I will emphasize a few of Veblen's major themes, touched on in the Intro, that help us with our overall objective of Grokking Republicans.
- Conspicuous Consumption at all levels of society
- Denigration of productive work, and honoring non-productive employments: war, politics, finance, sports, entertainment, and religion
- The concept of prowess: force and fraud
- The alliance of the richest and the merely prosperous, even the moderately poor, against the really poor
- The mistreatment of women
Later we can take up some remedies, particularly to war, economic and class oppression, and financial depredations.
Romney and his ilk want you to believe that big businessmen, the 1%, Wall Street and the Chamber of Commerce, the National Bourgeoisie or Haut Bourgeoisie in Marxist terminology, are the Makers and job creators, while half the country are Takers, moochers off the taxes of the rich. In fact, it is self-evidently those who make things (farmers and craft or industrial workers, to begin with) who are Makers, and it is financiers like Romney who are the ultimate Takers. The Leisure Class today are especially the moochers off government favors: tax breaks, subsidies, price supports, legal monopolies on so-called Intellectual Property, regulation by industry insiders, anti-union legislation, science denial, and especially Too Big to Fail and Too Big to Jail. We must particularly note looters who skim off the assets of companies, pile debt on them, and sell the worthless remnants to chumps at grossly inflated values, or sell toxic mortgages to the unwary, specifically targeting Blacks and Latinos.
But Veblen wants you to understand much more about the delusions of the wealthy and those who admire them.
We cannot do justice to the sweep of Veblen's study in a Diary, even several Diaries, so I hope you actually read the book all the way through. It brings together a wide range of anthropology, sociology, economic and social history, and much more. It is impossible to grok Republicans without it. In particular, it goes a long way to explain What's the Matter With Kansas?, a work in which Thomas Frank asked why so many Americans vote against their own economic interests.
In brief, the rich and the Religious Right, the other essential Leisure Class institution, promise the not-so-rich various crumbs from their tables such as trickle-down (Voodoo) economics, and promise the haters in society (racists, bigots, misogynists, Nativists, and others) support in oppressing others. This means both financial and Culture War favors to the haters. In either case, the haters get to consider themselves superior to those they hate, whether measured by riches and power piled up on Earth or in Heaven. This is the entire Republican Southern Strategy. Ronald Reagan's campaign strategist Lee Atwater explained it thus.
It's OK as long as Blacks get hurt worse.
The strategy used to be to fan the hate without ever delivering, but now the Tea Parties, which profess to hate the rich and corporations more than you do, have taken the bit in their teeth and started enacting the entire Culture War agenda in Red states, and trying for real to shut down the Federal government and bankrupt the economy. The Leisure Class is appalled, and open Civil War has broken out in the Republican Party. It can't happen to more appropriate people.
The forces of hatred perfected themselves over slavery in the South, when Southern Baptists taught a combination of racism, the supposed Curse of Ham, and the Divine Rights of the self-proclaimed Southern Aristocracy, including unquestioned male dominance over slave women and their own wives and daughters. Science denial traces to the complaint that evolution means that slaveowners were descended from Black Africans just like the rest of us. This is so heinous a thought that it cannot even be spoken by the deniers. Almost all of the Right's modern hatreds can be traced to this set of Leisure Class delusions. Immigration, absolutely; guns, absolutely; abortion and contraception, absolutely; the racist War on Drugs, absolutely; religious intolerance, absolutely; gay-bashing, I don't know of a specific connection. Anyone?
The Civil War/War of Northern Aggression produced a peak in the notion of Yankee Tyranny that is almost unimaginable today. These forces have been decaying visibly but very slowly since the creation of Jim Crow, and we are approaching another tipping point against them. The South was defeated militarily, then a century later by legislation and court decisions when they lost their death grip on national politics. Now they must lose their majority status in many states by demographic changes and the conversion of many of their children who can no longer be raised exclusively in the bubble. Rev. Dr. William Barber of Moral Mondays calls this existential political contest the Third Reconstruction.
The institution of the Leisure Class goes back much further, even before recorded history. Veblen starts, however, in the middle, at its peak.
The institution of a leisure class is found in its best development at the higher stages of the barbarian culture; as, for instance, in feudal Europe or feudal Japan. In such communities the distinction between classes is very rigorously observed; and the feature of most striking economic significance in these class differences is the distinction maintained between the employments proper to the several classes. The upper classes are by custom exempt or excluded from industrial occupations, and are reserved for certain employments to which a degree of honour attaches. Chief among the honourable employments in any feudal community is warfare; and priestly service is commonly second to warfare…
The leisure class as a whole comprises the noble and the priestly classes, together with much of their retinue. The occupations of the class are correspondingly diversified; but they have the common economic characteristic of being non-industrial. These non-industrial upper-class occupations may be roughly comprised under government, warfare, religious observances, and sports.
That is, upper-class sports such as hunting, swordfighting, golf, and polo. Well, cricket in the British Empire and later Commonwealth. Tennis back when you had to own your own court. Certainly not the more vulgar professional sports.
Manual labour, industry, whatever has to do directly with the everyday work of getting a livelihood, is the exclusive occupation of the inferior class. This inferior class includes slaves and other dependents, and ordinarily also all the women…If there are several grades of aristocracy, the women of high rank are commonly exempt from industrial employment, or at least from the more vulgar kinds of manual labour.
Politics and non-religious academic study beyond elementary mathematics and astronomy do not appear in the higher barbarian cultures, but arise in the next stage of development, followed by industrial management and finance.
At the other end of the anthropological scale,
communities that are without a defined leisure class resemble one another also in certain other features of their social structure and manner of life. They are small groups and of a simple (archaic) structure; they are commonly peaceable and sedentary; they are poor; and individual ownership is not a dominant feature of their economic system. At the same time it does not follow that these are the smallest of existing communities, or that their social structure is in all respects the least differentiated; nor does the class necessarily include all primitive communities which have no defined system of individual ownership. But it is to be noted that the class seems to include the most peaceable—perhaps all the characteristically peaceable—primitive groups of men. Indeed, the most notable trait common to members of such communities is a certain amiable inefficiency when confronted with force or fraud.
The most familiar example in modern times is seen in the movie
The Gods Must Be Crazy. At the next level,
the activities of the primitive social group tend to fall into two classes, which would in modern phrase be called exploit and industry. Industry is effort that goes to create a new thing, with a new purpose given it by the fashioning hand of its maker out of passive ("brute") material; while exploit, so far as it results in an outcome useful to the agent, is the conversion to his own ends of energies previously directed to some other end by an other agent.
Exploit begins with hunting, and industry with making wood and stone weapons, and processing the kills into food, clothing, and other useful articles including bone tools.
Sexism is pervasive in nearly all societies.
The distinction between exploit and drudgery coincides with a difference between the sexes. The sexes differ, not only in stature and muscular force, but perhaps even more decisively in temperament, and this must early have given rise to a corresponding division of labour.
Veblen explains that the differences may initially be slight, and they are certainly not universal, but custom in many societies gradually makes sex roles absolute.
In such a predatory group of hunters it comes to be the able-bodied men's office to fight and hunt. The women do what other work there is to do—other members who are unfit for man's work being for this purpose classed with women. But the men's hunting and fighting are both of the same general character. Both are of a predatory nature; the warrior and the hunter alike reap where they have not strewn. Their aggressive assertion of force and sagacity differs obviously from the women's assiduous and uneventful shaping of materials; it is not to be accounted productive labour but rather an acquisition of substance by seizure. Such being the barbarian man's work, in its best development and widest divergence from women's work, any effort that does not involve an assertion of prowess comes to be unworthy of the man. As the tradition gains consistency, the common sense of the community erects it into a canon of conduct; so that no employment and no acquisition is morally possible to the self respecting man at this cultural stage, except such as proceeds on the basis of prowess—force or fraud.
We must skip over almost all of the development of such customs that Veblen reviews and analyzes. Unfortunately, this includes the treatment of women as property, growing out of the treatment of captive women in war. This is the literal starting point of recorded Greek culture in the opening scenes of the
Iliad. Achilles is wrathful over having his beautiful captive Briseis stolen by the Greek leader Agamemnon. The much later tragedy by Euripides,
The Trojan Women, set at the end of that war, invited Athenians to consider the fates of women and children taken as prisoners of war. Veblen held that ownership of women was the starting point for the concept of owning property in general. But that is a topic for another time.
For purposes of grokking Republicans, we must come to the ways that these developments play out in an increasingly industrial age, where science, technology, and capital all become increasingly important. Early in this process traders and craft guild members were quite progressive in political struggles against hereditary aristocracies, but as they pushed the aristocrats aside, and the new money of industrialists and financiers became dominant, the interests of big business and the rich became increasingly conservative, even reactionary, in contrast with other, even newer forces aiming to advance the rights of slaves and then ex-slaves, women, minorities, labor, and so on, questions being raised but not yet answered in Veblen's time.
The distinctions Veblen brought out are not binary. It is not simply prowess vs. drudgery, but an increasingly finely graded system where, for example, the medieval craft guilds came to occupy the highest levels of respect among actual workers who made things, in proportion to the uselessness of their products, with goldsmiths acknowledged to be at the top. Nobody was willing to admit to being at the bottom, where crafts were meant to produce things of ordinary daily use, and were recognized but not organized with special legal privileges. Common blacksmiths, for example, as opposed to swordsmiths, armorers, and other such specialists who supported only leisure class activities.
Similarly, in feudal times some cities were able to demand special privileges from kings and aristocrats, or operate outside their authority entirely, and the burghers of those cities came to occupy special places of honor based on trade, which took up a place in society between manufactures and booty, a place that the traders did everything in their power to exalt, with the success that we see today.
Most of the book is devoted to an examination of the multitudinous variations in Conspicuous Consumption in different societies and periods of history, including but not limited to these, which we must pass over in silence, but which you should definitely read.
He consumes freely and of the best, in food, drink, narcotics, shelter, services, ornaments, apparel, weapons and accoutrements, amusements, amulets, and idols or divinities.
In our time, this can be summed up in the content of the TV show
Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous, which demonstrated Conspicuous Consumption to any degree that might be required, and many programs on the later
Wealth TV channel. The same can be said of the general run of historical fiction that focuses on the doings of the rich and powerful, to which accounts of the problems of the poor are in extreme contrast. They constitute a much smaller though often more important portion of publications. Compare
The Great Gatsby, for example, with
The Grapes of Wrath.
Our interest is in the application of the theory to Republican politics, particularly to political methods of advancing the interests of the wealthy, and of pretending to advance the interests of those lower orders who can be induced to support the wealthy in order to keep some other class down.
We will examine the modern, industrial age development of the Leisure Class, especially its increasing concern with pecuniary issues, as Veblen called them, or high finance, as we would say today, in Part 2, along with Leisure Class politics.