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Comment by throwaway38153 | Hacker News Reader

The current arrangement is high and low vs the middle, or HLvM for short.

The left is composed of two factions, not one. The left is the high within society aligned with the low in society to destroy the middle in society. [1]

When the power of the upper class is not secure, or somehow threatened by a middle class, the upper class forms an alliance with the lower classes. Today, you see the highly capitalized media powers (like Big Tech and primary media corporations) and other "woke" corporations forming an "alliance of the fringes" with historically marginalized groups, against the more traditionalist middle class. In the past, Kings would form an alliance with peasants to fend off nobles.

Bertrand de Jouvenel described this dynamic early in the 20th century, but it's a common refrain throughout history.

Neoabsolutism is a modern framework for understanding this dynamic.

[1] https://neoabsolutism.wordpress.com/2017/07/03/high-low-vers...

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It's quite interesting that I see the same things but opposite conclusions - to me, the "high and low vs the middle" aspect makes sense, but it obviously refers to the Republican party, lead by the interests of the wealthy elite on the backs of votes from lower class rural people and blue collar workers (predominantly the white workers, but as these elections showed, also black working men) against the middle class such as the college-educated skilled workers who range from people with income like teachers and to those who are well off but have no chance to get into the wealthy (0.1% not 1%) class ever.

Interesting. What if you're both right? What if both parties are trying to use HLvM, and nobody represents the middle?

And when you consider that concessions to the lower class by both parties are entirely cultural, linguistic and non-material..

Yes, that's true, and because of that the lower class systematically vote for parties and policies that harm lower class to benefit the wealthy.

Actually, this - class consciousness / false consciousness; the understanding (or lack of it) of the role and interests of the class you're in - was one of key concepts of Marx writings, too bad that this association currently makes many people automatically discard these ideas even if they actually are quite relevant to their interests.

Marx's problem was that he thought of everything in terms of class. If I'm poor, and I know I'm poor, but I also think about something other than class when making political decisions (no matter what that "something" is), then I have "false consciousness". That is, if I don't think about this totally the way Marx says, I'm stupid. Nice.

If you think about your life that one-dimensionally, you're poor in a way that Marxism can't fix.

999 times out of 1000 if I ask a working class American to explain Marx's concept of surplus labor time, they would have no idea of what I was talking about. That is false consciousness.

You're talking as if they rejected the idea. They don't even know what the idea is.

A sizable amount of working class Americans have no idea that people die. They have no idea that their grandparents died. They have been to wakes and have seen the corpse of their grandparents or whomever, but when I talk to them they say their grandparents are elsewhere and enjoying themselves. They do not mean this metaphorically, or that they live on via children or their works or memories. They have no concept that these people are not around any more, permanently. They go to churches where a man stands in front and says this, I guess they believe him. This would be part of false consciousness, although not a needed component of them. They are as ignorant of death as they are of their economic exploitation. They are ignorant and uneducated. If you want to call them stupid as you do, that's your right.

It's false consciousness if they don't know what Marx's concept of surplus labor time is? Riiiiight...

The working class is inconsistent with your model of them. It's your model that's wrong, not the working class.

Piggybacking onto this, since it looks like something the hivemind may disagree with and isn't sourced in your link, breaking down by family income, between $30,000-$150,000 is majority lean rep, outside those bounds is majority lean dem. https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2016/09/13/2016-party-i...

I've been over these stats 4 times and reread the parent comment and its post but still have no clue how one is supposed to tie to the other.

I think the point I'm having difficulty with is the thin majorities in the study. Does the study say much? Or did pew do a study and publish its research just because...well...that's what it does?

If that puts me in some hivemind, so be it.

I'm always finding commonality between Roman history and current events (perhaps because Roman history is the only history I read). For example, last night I was reading one of Cicero's speeches against Catiline, and in the preface for the speech the modern author giving context writes:

"To these men and his other supporters, Catiline offered the policy they longed for - cancellation of debts. It was precisely the policy to win him the support of the desperate from all ranks of society - and one that no respectable politician was prepared to offer"

Catiline has supporters both from the upper classes, where they had borrowed too much money and fallen into debt, and from the lower classes where they didn't have enough money in the first place, as well as dispossessed former soldiers.

It makes me think of some left contingents today where they are supported alike by upper-middle class children who have become burdened by inescapable student loan debt and lower class people who were just always burdened by poverty.

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