Middle Class Ferment

Jul 05, 2013 Editorial

From Brazil in South America to Egypt in North Africa and Turkey in West Asia, there has been an explosion of frustration and dissatisfaction against the governments of the day, expressed in massive street protests. All of these governments, as in Guyana, were elected in “free and fair elections” and all the protests were led by individuals from the newly emergent middle class, dominated by educated youths.
Francis Fukuyama, the famous analyst of macro social change, and the author of the seminal “End of History”, recently offered one explanation in the Wall Street Journal of the dynamics behind the protests. It should be of some interest in Guyana, where the growing middle class shows signs of their alienation from the present political order.
The following, written just before Egypt’s protests, and hopefully accepted as impartial and not “axe-grinding” by this newspaper, is excerpted from Prof Fukuyama’s article.
“The theme that connects recent events in Turkey and Brazil to each other, as well as to the 2011 Arab Spring is the rise of a new global middle class. In the case of Turkey, they object to Prime Minister Erdoðan’s development-at-all-cost policies and authoritarian manner. In Brazil, they object to an entrenched and highly corrupt political elite that has showcased glamour projects like the World Cup and Rio Olympics while failing to provide basic services like health and education to the general public. For them, it is not enough that Brazil’s president, Dilma Rousseff, was herself a left-wing activist jailed by the military regime during the 1970s and leader of the progressive Brazilian Workers Party. In their eyes, that party itself has been sucked into the maw of the corrupt “system”.
“Economists and business analysts tend to define middle-class status simply in monetary terms. But middle-class status is better defined by education, occupation and the ownership of assets, which are far more consequential in predicting political behaviour. Any number of cross-national studies, show that higher education levels correlate with people’s assigning a higher value to democracy, individual freedom and tolerance for alternative lifestyles. Middle-class people want not just security for their families but choices and opportunities for themselves.
“Families who have durable assets like a house have a much greater stake in politics, since these are things that the government could take away from them. Since the middle classes tend to be the ones who pay taxes, they have a direct interest in making government accountable. Most importantly, newly arrived members of the middle class are more likely to be spurred to action by what the late political scientist Samuel Huntington called “the gap”: that is, the failure of society to meet their rapidly rising expectations for economic and social advancement. While the poor struggle to survive from day to day, disappointed middle-class people are much more likely to engage in political activism to get their way.
“While protests, uprisings and occasionally revolutions are typically led by newly arrived members of the middle class, the latter rarely succeed on their own in bringing about long-term political change. This is because the middle class seldom represents more than a minority of the society in developing countries and is itself internally divided. Unless they can form a coalition with other parts of society, their movements seldom produce enduring political change.
“The middle classes have been on the front lines of opposition to abuses of power, whether by authoritarian or democratic regimes. The challenge for them is to turn their protest movements into durable political change, expressed in the form of new institutions and policies.”
In Guyana, the middle class, and all other classes for that matter, have always been divided along ethnic lines. It is left to be seen whether they have advanced enough as a class to rise above race or ethnicity and act in unison to secure the support of the masses of the poor for the good of the country. The important point is that change must be generated peacefully within the democratic system.

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