16 The Four Classes of American Politics

Since the 1960s, American politics has been dominated by four social classes. These are the urban bourgeoisie, the rural bourgeoisie, the urban proletariat, and the rural proletariat. Every American political issue can be sufficiently explained by reference to these four classes.

I’m unscrupulously borrowing the terms from Marx because the relative relationships of the classes bear the same oppressive and antagonistic character as his own opposition of bourgeoisie and proletariat. Please don’t confuse my use of them for any deep appreciation for Marxist political theory; it is my hope that you bring your own networks of associations to these terms, holistically, as elsewhere in the Framework.

Defined more technically:

The urban bourgeoisie are 3c individuals that live in large cities. They are the class most deeply embedded in institutions of a national scale; they control the private colleges, the media corporations, federal agencies, most large industries, and any corporation with a greater than regional presence in the US. Increasingly, the urban bourgeoisie is composed largely of the Professional Managerial Class (the PMC), a class of bourgeoisie that control corporations not through ownership of their assets, but through their domination of managerial positions within them. They identify with these corporations both culturally and as a function of the stock investments upon which their retirements are staked. I might elsewhere refer to them as haute bourgeoisie. Their political interests are represented by the Democratic Party.

The rural bourgeoisie are 3c individuals living in small towns and rural areas. They dominate the more local institutions across the breadth of the country. Their vanguard consists of small business owners, as well as any of the relatively prestigious jobs which are necessary in every small community— doctors, lawyers,  teachers, police officers, and the like. I might elsewhere refer to them as petit bourgeoisie. Their political interests are represented by the Republican Party.

The urban proletariat are the non-2n3c individuals who live in urban areas. The largest component of this class are black Americans, so a large body of urban proletariat are 2o3c; however, any individual insufficiently 2n3c to succeed with corporatist institutions is swept into the urban proletariat. This includes such few urban 2n3c’s as have achieved sufficient solve to experience executive dysfunction. Their political interests are not represented.

The rural proletariat are the non-2n3c individuals who live in rural areas. They contain the fastest-growing  body of 2x3n individuals, and a growing majority of 2n3c’s experiencing the executive dysfunction of solve. They have begun a political takeover of the Republican party.

The History of American Politics since the 1960s

Prior to the counterculture which cast America into solve, almost everyone in America was 3c, whatever their disposition on the 2nd level. Peak-3c was reached either during or shortly before the Boomer generation. Since the 1960s, however, mass disenchantment with the 3c disposition has caused the fairly rapid collapse of the Capitalist-Corporatist institutions which incentivized 3c and upheld 3c conditioning. 3c conditioning has diminished from the outside inward, beginning with the most rural areas in America and creeping towards the cities.

The bourgeoisie of the 1950s and prior formed a more-or-less united front; this was not so much a conflictual front “against” the proletariat, as it was a unity by which almost everyone was culturally bourgeois, and exceptions to this rule were marginal and marginalized.

The splintering of the bourgeoisie into urban and rural factions was not owed to crises of consciousness imposed by mass solve— most 3cs both urban and rural have yet to crack their dispositions to any meaningful extent, and so their unity as a class has not been impacted by the cresting of the 3c wave. Instead, it was the product of economic developments, specifically the rise of automation, globalization, and computerization which gutted local industry in America.

The traditional role of the petit bourgeoisie had been as small-business owning middlemen, skimming off the top of transactions between the factories which produced goods and the consumers which purchased them. Automation, computerization, and globalization disrupted this role, and the movement of national chains into small towns across the country decimated the small-business owners who formed the bulk of the class. Their wealth and political power were drained into the ranks of the haute bourgeoisie, who through their residence within urban centers were well-positioned to assume control of the large corporations which exploited economies of scale to achieve national reach. The haute bourgeoisie gradually expanded, as the upper strata of the urban proletariat ascended into the PMC faction of the urban bourgeoisie, a faction which by dint of numerical superiority came to dominate the class.

At this point— around the 1980s— the beleaguered rural bourgeoisie, losing their political voice, began violating one of the most sacred  institutions of the bourgeoisie, the 3c hierarchy of submission and domination. It is a principle of the hierarchy that conformity and influence are entangled; this entanglement bears with it a political dimension. Those at the bottom of the pyramid, the unwashed masses of the proletariat, are not supposed to vote. While on an individual level politicians are expected to hustle for every vote they can get, on the level of party platforms the proles are not intended to receive representation. However, seeing their soft-power collapsing with the loss of their economic power, the rural bourgeoisie took the unprecedented step of enfranchising the proletariat.

It began with Reagan’s alliance with Evangelical Christendom. The Evangelicals were and are a parochial embarrassment to secular, intellectual America. They are ruled by a small faction of rural bourgeois conmen in the manner of a personal fiefdom, but the rank-and-file consist of a mash of dispositions; largely, 2o3o for the women, and 2o3c or 2c3c for the men. By aligning the Republican party with the substantive political aims of these voters— namely, the restriction of abortion— Reagan’s campaign crossed an invisible Rubicon of bourgeois politics. The enactment of symbolic concessions to the proletariat had always been at the core of American politics; it was, in fact, what most of the public-facing business of government consisted of. But these symbolic concessions were never meant to have real weight, the votes of those at the bottom of the pyramid should never have been allowed to constrain the behavior of their betters; this was a violation of the chain of submission and domination of which American society substantively consisted^[1].

The ensuing decades amounted to a fighting retreat, in which the rural bourgeoise lost more and more of their national political cachet (When was the last time a Democratic candidate seriously asked “Will it play in Peoria?”) and substituted it with material concessions to their underclass. At the same time, both the  urban and the rural proletariats grew more and more recalcitrant under the influence of countercultural solve, which elucidated the horrible consequences of corporatist Fascism to anyone sufficiently disenfranchised to listen to it.  This created a push and pull effect, by which the bourgeois propriety which upheld bourgeois soft power in both city and country was eroded by cultural forces, and the hard power of the rural bourgeoisie in their control of the platform of the Republican party was bargained away one piece at a time to their skeptical, rebellious underclass.

The urban bourgeoisie, for their part, have been uniformly, maximally resistant to the enfranchisement of their underclass since the beginning. This is due to two factors; firstly, that the economic losses of the rural bourgeoisie have been passed as gains directly to the urban bourgeoisie, swelling their ranks and offsetting the general collapse of political influence to which all post-60s institutions are subject. Secondly, that the divide between bourgeoisie and proletariat in cities has a profoundly racial dimension; it is much harder for an urban bourgeoisie to truly sink into the proletariat, or vice versa, as differences of both skin color and culture divide them from their underclass. The combination of these factors has ensured that the political concessions of the urban bourgeoisie, through the Democratic party, have been near-universally symbolic rather than substantive.

It’s important to keep in mind here that “symbolic”  and “substantive” here do not refer to whether any particular policy is helpful to the proletariat, but whether it is something the proletariat asks for which the bourgeoisie does not. Abortion is a substantive concession on the part of Republican lawmakers to their base. Educated, powerful Republicans don’t care at all about abortion, because they are infected deep down with the same secularism which affects all bourgeoisie, an indelible effect of purely 3c conditioning.  By contrast, look at universal healthcare; such a scheme is incredibly helpful to the poor— but unless they have experienced it, the poor don’t understand it, and don’t demand it. It was instead an instantiation of the values of the humane, educated urban bourgeoisie. For the Democrats to enact a similar concession, they would have to take up a political position which their black proletarian base supports, to which they themselves are opposed; for instance, opposition to abortion, which massively-Christian black America widely abhors. Much of the educated classes’ bafflement at the tendency of rural people to vote “against their own interests” is explained by this difference, the difference between enfranchisement and pacification.

Between Reagan and the election of Donald Trump, the rural bourgeoisie gradually and by degrees sold their party out from under themselves. Notable escalations included Newt Gingrich’s strategy of haranguing the Clinton administration for the president’s infidelity— which was perhaps the most shocking violation of bourgeois propriety undertaken by any political figure to date, greatly stimulating and gratifying a disenchanted proletariat who had enjoyed watching the Simpsons skewer GHW Bush a few years previously— and George W’ s full throated support for the most deranged elements of the Evangelical right, complete with an artificial Texas drawl.

At each stage, the Democrats entrenched themselves further as the party of the elite, the party of the chain of submission and domination, the voice of the urbane and educated classes which spoke on behalf of their economic and educational inferiors. They flirted with the notion of enfranchising their proletariat only briefly, particularly during Obama’s first campaign, which heaped a mountain of promises at the feet of black America, promises soon washed away by two terms of business-as-usual (a one-and-done betrayal which cost the Democrats so grievously that they have been forced to ever more humiliating lengths in their panicked mandate to substitute symbolic concessions for real ones).

With the election of Donald Trump in 2016, a titanic barrier was crossed in American politics. His campaign was more or less a hostile takeover of the Republican party by the rural proletariat. Trump is certainly a wealthy businessman, but he is decidedly not bourgeois. The most sacred bourgeois values— propriety, conformity, respect for the chain of submission and domination, respect for hard work— were systematically betrayed and disrespected for every minute of his campaign and presidency, from the moment he first descended his golden escalator.

This disrespect was a grand, ludicrous dialectic of countercultural solve. Republican leadership, and indeed the rank-and-file, neither expected nor desired Trump’s Primary victory. However, the dangerous game they had played for 4 decades had finally reached its inevitable conclusion. Bourgeois domination over American political life, like all political power, was predicated on the willing consent of their underclasses. So long as the institutions of Capitalism provided a clear, convenient route by which intelligent Americans could ascend up the chain of submission and domination, the underclasses opposing bourgeois hegemony would necessarily be ignorant, slow to move, and composed of individuals disinclined to participate. However, with the collapse of these institutions— beginning with the fragmentary network of small businesses supporting the petit bourgeois class—more and more relatively intelligent individuals sank into the proletariat, and more and more substantively intelligent individuals were possessed by such disgust for the system that they refused to join it. What ultimately was lost among the underclasses was respect for the norms and values of the political system which oppressed them, and this loss of respect was well-suited to Trump’s bombastic, clownish, pro-wrestler triumphalism.

With these 60 years behind us, it’s not difficult to understand why Trump’s election occurred, or why it was met with such deranged, teeth-gnashing hysteria by the urban bourgeoisie. Their petit bourgeois fellows, whose economic demise lined their pockets, have completely lost control of their underclass, and sink daily into the disenchantment of solve. As the last bastion of bourgeois control, the haute bourgeoisie of the Democratic Party have no choice but to double, triple, quadruple down upon the regimen of symbolic concessions by which they lash their underclass into submission. Racial and cultural differences ensure that they cannot, like their rural fellows, sink gently into the good night of proletarian populism. And yet, this risk must haunt them— the risk that a populist candidate, empowered by capitalism-dissolving solve, will do to them what Trump and four decades of neglect did to the Republicans.

Modern Political Issues Through the Lens of the Four Classes of American Politics

With the necessary history established, we’ll next run through a brief overview of modern American political issues, explaining the positions of the two dominant parties by reference to the four classes of American politics.

Through these individual analyses, a general principle emerges— the less resolvable a particular issue is, the more vehement partisan political figures will be in their support of their team’s position on it. This is a consequence of the nature of hysteria spirals, which at a micro-level constrain the operation of bourgeois politics. Any 3c individual who finds themselves embedded in a hysteria spiral is incentivized to dig themselves as deeply inside the bubble of unreality of which it is composed as possible. However, where hysteria spirals frequently collide with an intransigent, non-participatory public, they are liable to collapse, and with their collapse comes a just apportionment of shame. Therefore, the less falsifiable a particular point of view is, the safer it is from the perspective of a 3c political operative looking for a lie with which to ingratiate themselves to their tribe.

Abortion is the foremost example of this tendency. The question of when human life begins is extremely fraught.

Republicans say life begins at conception— but in what real respect is a zygote different from a sperm or egg? To say that it is different because the zygote will grow into a human being if “unimpeded” ignores the substantive, intentional effort required for a mother to bring a child to term. If the intervention of her agency can be discounted, can you not discount the agency by which two potential parents conceive in the first place? Such an argument, taken to its limits, would hold that any potential children are as morally valid as real ones.

Democrats say life begins at birth— but in what real respect is a baby sitting in the womb any different from a baby which has just exited it? Generally speaking, these arguments are avoided by reference to the mother’s free will, her “right to choose”. A counterexample is provided— what if a father could save his child’s life by providing daily blood transfusions for 9 months, with a small but realistic risk of harm? Should he be legally compelled to perform these transfusions? This is a counterintuitively Libertarian tack for a Democratic argument to sail along, which goes some way towards revealing the fact that the expression of conviction here precedes actual conviction. But the fact that many Americans would be perfectly fine mandating relatively safe surgical donations from parents to their small children casts doubt on this argument as well.

Whatever your personal opinion on the matter— and I’m sure my argumentation has some holes— it can’t be argued that the political parties themselves have a more sophisticated take on the subject. It’s not despite but due to the fact that the morality of abortion is difficult that both parties are so shrill regarding it. That most Americans, when their feelings are explored more honestly, intuitively assign a point sometime during gestation as a suitable cut off is a forgotten consideration, because the goal of the parties is not to represent their constituents as a whole, but the classes which empower them (in this case, the rural proletariat for the Republicans, the urban bourgeoisie for the Democrats). That the Supreme Court Justices who presided over Roe v Wade found a remarkably elegant solution to the issue— using fetal viability as a cutoff, because if the American government is willing to assume responsibility for unwanted children after they are born, they should be willing to assume responsibility as soon as these children could be born— doesn’t matter, because the goal of the parties is not to solve the problem in a rational manner. The very insolubility of the case renders it amazing fodder for political agitation.

Hopefully this example goes some way towards exposing the extent to which American politics is an intentionally obfuscatory puppet-show; the following examples should do likewise. Keep in mind that wherever a party’s position on an issue isn’t elaborated, they are opposed to their enemy’s position on principle; often, this principle will employ rhetoric which harkens back to the Liberal values on which the country was founded, principles which are always the refuge and whipping-boy of the party out of power.

• Gay and Trans rights are supported by Democrats so fervently as a means of driving support among their young, private college educated base of urban bourgeoisie. Black opposition to these rights is treated as a secondary issue because the urban proletariat remains disenfranchised.
• Affirmative Action is supported by Democrats as a sop to the urban proletariat, an indication that they can ascend past barriers of class given sufficient conformity to bourgeois norms, like Roman freedmen.
• Abortion is used by both Democrats and Republicans as a wedge issue because it is morally insoluble.
• Immigration is opposed by Republicans as a means of appealing to the insecurities of their rural proletariat voter base who rely on manual labor jobs; it is supported reflexively by Democrats who keep their urban proletariat voter base sufficiently disenfranchised that their economic insecurity is a political danger to them, rather than a boon. They use welfare programs as a sop to extinguish this proletarian energy as necessary.
• Gun control is opposed by Republicans as a sop to the 3N intelligentsia who are concerned about government tyranny, as well as the rural proletariat who are likely to use guns for hunting and to protect themselves from interpersonal violence. It is supported by Democrats as a means of appealing to their two bases alike, who see guns primarily through the lens of interpersonal violence and crime. (interestingly, extensive gun control was the norm in the United States until after WW2, when it quickly attached itself to the cause of anti-authoritarianism).
• Election fraud has been brought forth by the Republicans as a means of appealing to their Proletarian base by disrespecting bourgeois norms, now that this base dominates the party.
• Isolationism has been used as the party out of power as a means of countering the party in power. See: Democratic opposition to the Iraq War, Republican opposition to intervention in Ukraine. Isolation is generally supported by 3Ns and 3cs undergoing solve, because they assume that the political establishment is corrupt and inept.
• Police reform has been used by Democrats as a means of symbolically appealing to their proletariat (symbolic because Black Americans actually support stronger police forces). It’s been opposed by Republicans because police are petit bourgeoisie and support petit bourgeois values.
• Democrats support direct welfare to pacify their urban proletariat. Republicans oppose this reflexively, and support indirect welfare through e.g. military contracts to support their rural proletariat.
• Drug control is supported by Republicans as a means of appealing to their rural bourgeois base; Democrats oppose it as a means of appealing both to their urban proletariat and their young urban bourgeois base. Bourgeoisie of all stripes strongly support drug control used selectively against the proletariat when given the choice (see: Clinton super-predators).
• Climate change is supported by the Democrats as an endorsement of urban bourgeois academic institutions, and opposed by Republicans as a means of appealing to their proletariat base, which is skeptical of academia.
• Covid precautions were supported by Democrats as an expression of their power over their proletariat, and opposed by the Conservatives because they were dominated by their proletariat. The onerous restrictions imposed in the name of preventing covid were a direct expression of institutional adherence and control.
• Student loan reform is supported by Democrats as a means of leveraging direct financial incentives towards their haute bourgeois base. It’s opposed by Republicans for this very reason.

Who should 3N’s (and 3N aspirants) vote for?

No one. The proletarian insurgency within the Republican party has yet to shake out into anything resembling a non-3c political agenda; the 3c party establishment is still attempting, however abortively, to ride the wave.

Vote your conscience, of course, if there’s some specific issue you particularly care about. But what a Framework analysis of the American political system reveals, more than anything, is that it has always been a shell game designed to ensure that 3c conformists are allowed to dictate the laws under which citizens of all dispositions operate. The current fragmentation of the bourgeoisie is, from a dispositional perspective, illusory; it is entirely possible that when the Republican party has been completely gutted, the Democrats will find a compromise by which to scoop up the rural bourgeoisie, creating a new hegemony that contends more directly with proletarian populism. The real weakening of the engine of fascistic Capitalism won’t occur within the political system, but within our culture. The hierarchy of submission and domination requires the population to be inculcated 3c; the more people who rid themselves of their 3c pathology— or at least grow so disgusted with it that they are able to resist its most destructive inclinations— the further the institutions of capitalism will collapse. In my opinion, then, the real work of politics across the present interchange of Eros and Thanatos is internal.

I’ll elaborate more on my opinions regarding what the Framework suggests we should be doing in a later chapter, Nonparticipation and Building a Holocaust-Proof Society. For the meantime, I hope this tool of solve has been helpful to you. The next time you’re confronted with any form of political messaging, please take a moment to glance at it through the lens of these four classes. I have a feeling you’ll find that it tells you a lot about what’s really going on in this country.