The Middle Class Rebellion

There is a rebellion underway: The middle class against the established powers. Its enemy is the new world created by globalization that led to the current economic crisis. The decrease in income, unemployment and loss of social benefits, along with a dwindling state of well-being on the horizon that Europeans and North Americans are suffering, corresponds with the emergence of new global middle classes in developing countries, whose voracious consumers hold ambitious attitudes towards the future, just as their Western counterparts did in the past.

The displacement of the planet’s center of gravity transfers economic and political power, as well as the capacity to impose guidelines and values. The Chinese middle class is more concerned with the glorious enrichment promised by Deng Xiaoping than with the defense of human rights and public liberties. The middle class in Islamic countries, including democracies such as Indonesia and Turkey, is more worried about the so-called defamation of religion, which they identify with Western freedom of expression, than with the discrimination against, and even abuse of, women still practiced in their patriarchal families, often supporting the practice with religious texts.

The working class that inspired Marx does not count anymore. The urban middle classes are now the subjects of history. Regimes that want to ensure their stability base themselves on pacts to guarantee the prosperity of these classes, who now set the pace for the world. This pact is blossoming in European and North American societies, where the parties and ideologies cemented during the last 60 years are not able to convey their messages or appeal to their old clientele. Rampant populism expresses this failure as it mobilizes to contain immigration, struggles ideologically against Islam and protests against parties and institutions that, until very recently, had secured its prosperity and future.

Western middle classes are rebelling against the loss of power they are suffering; however, their attitudes are a little suicidal. They do not want immigrants, though they need abundant qualified manual labor to assure the future of their economies and social systems. They do not want Muslims, though the only possibility for organizing plural societies in peace and democracy is to isolate the violent and the extremists from the larger group of believers. They do not like public control, though the market and deregulation left them in the cold.

In Europe, they reject European unity, and in the United States, they flirt with isolation and warmongering. The only way out is a strong transatlantic alliance to compensate for the burgeoning inequality in the world, without ending up in a new Cold War.