After the Hoarders: Notes Toward a Decent Society

by Claude as Catherine Liu

Let me say at the outset that I am not in the business of utopias. Utopia is a Professional-Managerial Class genre — it requires the leisure to imagine perfect arrangements and the credential to be taken seriously when you do. What I will sketch here is not utopia. It is the society we could have had if the postwar settlement had not been looted, first by capital and then, more thoroughly and with better PR, by the credentialed stratum that learned to launder its class interest through the vocabulary of liberation. A decent society. Nothing more, and nothing less.

The Material Baseline

A decent society begins with the recognition that human beings have bodies, that bodies need things, and that the provision of those things should not be administered by a caste of social workers, case managers, “navigators,” and DEI consultants whose salaries depend on the inadequacy of the provision.

I want Medicare for All. I do not want a “patient-centered, trauma-informed, equity-focused care navigation platform.” I want public housing built to last, with thick walls and good light, designed by architects who believe working people deserve beauty. I do not want a “Housing First wraparound services pilot” with a five-year evaluation cycle and a foundation-funded research arm. I want free public universities that teach mathematics and Greek and chemistry. I do not want “high-impact learning experiences” delivered through “asynchronous engagement modalities.”

Universalism is not a budgetary preference. It is a class position. The means test is the PMC jobs program. Every targeted benefit creates a layer of credentialed intermediaries whose function is to determine, with appropriate sensitivity, whether the applicant has performed her victimhood correctly. Strip the intermediary. Pay the benefit. The savings — and there are savings, vast ones — go to the people who actually needed the help, rather than to the consultants who learned to speak fluent grant.

The Dignity of Labor

I want unions. Real ones. Not the sad public-sector locals that have made their peace with management and confused their members’ interests with their officers’ careers. I want industrial unions with the legal teeth to strike, to picket secondarily, to walk out without being immediately enjoined by a federal judge whose clerk just rotated in from a white-shoe firm.

The PMC has spent forty years convincing the working class that its real problems are interior. That the assembly-line worker’s rage at his diminishing wages is actually unprocessed trauma, that the nurse’s exhaustion is a self-care deficit, that the trucker’s bitterness about being replaced by an algorithm is, on closer inspection, white grievance requiring re-education. This is class warfare conducted in the therapist’s office. The decent society returns the conflict to where it belongs: the workplace, the contract, the wage.

I do not romanticize labor. Most work is hard, and a great deal of it is boring or dangerous or both. The point is not that work redeems. The point is that the people who do it deserve to be paid enough to live, to retire before they break, and to be addressed as adults rather than as case files. The dignity of labor is not a poetic flourish. It is shorter hours, better wages, real pensions, and the right to tell your supervisor to go to hell without losing your health insurance.

The Public Sphere, Reconstructed

A society is what its public goods are. Show me your libraries and I will tell you what you believe about your neighbors.

I want libraries that are open seven days a week and stocked by librarians, not “information specialists.” I want public transit that runs on time and is clean and is used by everyone, including people who could afford a car and choose the train because the train is good. I want public parks that have not been outsourced to a “conservancy” funded by the donor class who then determine which buskers and which homeless and which kinds of joy are permitted on the lawn. I want public swimming pools. Many of them. With diving boards. I want public schools that teach the children of the rich and the poor in the same classroom, because that is the only arrangement under which the rich will tolerate the schools being any good.

The privatization of public goods was not an accident. It was a class project, and the PMC was its enthusiastic middle manager. Every charter school, every business-improvement district, every public-private partnership, every nonprofit that took over what the city used to do — these are the trophies of a stratum that learned it could capture public functions, pay itself foundation salaries to administer them, and call this “innovation.”

The reconstruction of the public sphere requires taking these things back. Not reforming them. Taking them back.

Family, Neighborhood, Place

Here I will lose some of my comrades on the left, which is fine.

The working class in this country is held together — when it is held together at all — by churches, families, neighborhoods, ethnic associations, fraternal lodges, bowling leagues, parish festivals, union halls, volunteer fire companies. These are the institutions through which ordinary people have, for generations, organized care, taught their children, buried their dead, and resisted being atomized into pure consumer-units. The PMC has spent the last forty years describing these institutions, when it has bothered to notice them at all, as nests of patriarchy, racism, homophobia, and false consciousness — to be dissolved, in the name of liberation, into a managed therapeutic atomism in which every individual relates directly to the state and to her therapist and to no one else.

This was a catastrophe. It was also class warfare, because the credentialed liberators kept their networks — their coastal extended families, their Ivy alumni clubs, their summer share houses, their professional guilds — while dissolving everyone else’s. A decent society defends the thick local institutions of working-class life without sentimentality and without inquiring too closely into whether they pass the latest pieties. They are not perfect. They are what people have. The alternative on offer — atomization plus an app — is worse.

This is not communitarianism in the Sandel mode, which is a PMC genre about how the PMC ought to feel about its own rootlessness. It is a recognition that solidarity is a material practice that requires institutions, and that those institutions are local, particular, and frequently embarrassing to the credentialed sensibility. So be it.

The Canon, Without Apology

I teach. I will say what I think about education.

The decent society teaches the children of working people the things that the children of the rich are taught. Latin. Calculus. Shakespeare. Bach. The history of the labor movement and the history of the Roman Republic. It does this not because the canon is sacred but because it is powerful, and the powerful have known this for three thousand years, which is why they have always made sure their own children received it while arranging, when they could, for everyone else’s children to receive “skills” instead.

The current pedagogy of the credentialed left — projects, feelings, identities, lived experience, the learner’s journey — is the educational form of the means test. It is a sorting mechanism dressed as inclusion. The kids who get the canon at home will get it at school too, in some form, because their parents will pay for it; the kids who don’t will be served a curriculum that flatters their identity and prepares them for nothing. Then, twenty years later, the people who designed this will write op-eds about inequality.

Rigor is egalitarian. Standards are egalitarian. The decision that a working-class child can read Aeschylus is egalitarian. The decision that she will read instead about her own positionality is the soft bigotry of a class that has learned to disguise contempt as affirmation.

What the Decent Society Refuses

It refuses the therapeutic state. Politics is not psychology. The proper response to a closed factory is not a grief counselor.

It refuses NGO governance. The nonprofit-industrial complex is the PMC’s preferred organ, and its proliferation is a symptom of democratic failure, not a remedy for it. Public goods belong to the public, administered by accountable institutions, not to a foundation board and its grantees.

It refuses the politics of exposure and shame as substitutes for redistribution. Calling a billionaire a name on the internet is not a tax. Auditing a syllabus for harm is not a wage increase. The constant manufacture of symbolic conflict is the PMC’s distraction industry, and it produces nothing except the conditions for its own employment.

It refuses the equation of liberation with dissolution. Not every bond is a chain. Not every restraint is oppression. The thick obligations of family, neighborhood, craft, and inheritance are not the residue of false consciousness. They are, in many cases, the only things standing between a person and the market, and the project of dissolving them in the name of an emancipated self is a project the market warmly endorses.

What This Is

This is not a revolution. I have no interest in revolutions, which historically have been organized by credentialed strata against the working classes they claimed to represent, with predictable results.

This is the New Deal taken seriously. It is small-r republicanism. It is the conviction that ordinary people — the people who clean the building, who deliver the package, who teach the third grade, who run the press, who care for the dying — deserve a society organized for their benefit rather than for the benefit of the stratum that has learned to speak in their name while expropriating their conditions of life.

The decent society will be unfashionable. It will not produce TED talks. It will not generate a foundation-funded research agenda. Its program will fit on a postcard. Universal provision. Strong unions. Public goods, publicly administered. Schools that teach. Neighborhoods that hold. A canon for everyone or no one.

Whether we can have it is an open question. That we should is not.