Class Politics Quotes

“At a certain point in their historical lives, social classes become detached from their traditional parties. In other words, the traditional parties in that particular organisational form, with the particular men who constitute, represent and lead them, are no longer recognised by their class (or fraction of a class) as its expression. When such crises occur, the immediate situation becomes delicate and dangerous, because the field is open for violent solutions, for the activities of unknown forces, represented by charismatic "men of destiny".”
― Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks

“Much of American domestic policy, and almost all of US foreign policy, is determined by elites who are only somewhat constrained by voter preferences and decisions. What seemed remarkable and worthy of sociological inquiry was not Bush's own personal stupidity or viciousness but the lack, until late in his presidency, of a credible challenge to his policies from any significant power base.
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The small achievements of popular forces in post-hegemonic Britain and the Netherlands illustrate the highly limited parameters of reform and redistribution unless and until those reactions create or revivify political organizations that can challenge elites.”
― Richard Lachmann, First Class Passengers on a Sinking Ship: Elite Politics and the Decline of Great Powers

“The pursuit of health became a means for professionalizing middle class of he late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to know and identify itself and to stake claims to responsibility and authority. Health became a key marker of middle-class morality and identity, but its utility as such derived in large part from the way it could distinguish members of the responsible middle class from those beneath them in the social hierarchy who failed to achieve the goal of health.”
― Charlotte Biltekoff, Eating Right in America: The Cultural Politics of Food and Health

“Wilson was the clay-footed prophet of the British-Scots middle class. He created a flatulent rhetoric of national feeling as an antidote to either true national cosciousness or will. He exploited nationalism and religion in order to pursue class politics.”
― Andrew Noble, The History of Scottish Literature, Volume 3: Nineteenth Century