There is something almost medieval about the spectacle currently playing out on the banks of the Potomac. In one corner, we have the vulgar real-estate developer turned demagogue, demanding a 250-foot monument of triumphalist marble to consecrate his own ego. In the other, we have nine scions of American liberalism’s premier dynastic brand, rushing into federal court with high-priced attorneys to declare that the sunlight falling upon their family patriarch’s grave is private, consecrated property. It is a lawsuit over shadows, fought between two factions of the same predatory ownership class, while the rest of us wonder how we are going to afford groceries next week.
Let us be completely clear about what this squabble represents. To the political establishment and the cable news chattering classes, this is framed as a profound clash of values: democratic reverence versus authoritarian garishness, Camelot versus Mar-a-Lago. But anyone who has ever carried a lunchbox onto a job site can see right through the coat of paint. This is an intra-class dispute over the branding rights of empire. It is the patrician wing of the American aristocracy clutching their pearls because the nouveau-riche huckster wants to park his gold-plated Cadillac on their manicured lawn.
Back when I was a union steward at the freight docks, we used to have a plant manager who would spend sixty thousand dollars of company money re-carpeting his corner office while telling the forklift drivers there was no budget to fix the hydraulic lines. That is precisely what this monument madness is on a national scale. Donald Trump’s proposed mega-arch is the ultimate capitalist vanity project—a grotesque monument to reaction that will require thousands of hours of skilled, dangerous union labor, all to flatter the vanity of a man who has made a career out of stiffing contractors and union pension funds. It is Caesarism in poured concrete, designed to distract a battered populace from the rot underneath their feet.
Yet the Kennedys and their defenders want us to weep for the aesthetic sanctity of Arlington. They speak of the eternal flame as if it burns for all of us, rather than serving as the holy relic of a family that made its fortune in bootlegging and Wall Street speculation before governing over the Bay of Pigs, Cold War brinkmanship, and the opening salvos of the Vietnam slaughter. Antonio Gramsci wrote from his prison cell that cultural hegemony relies on the ruling class convincing the masses that the private interests of the elite are the universal interests of the whole society. You see it right here: the ruling class builds monuments to its own chieftains, consecrates the ground with working-class blood, and then demands that the rank and file treat their dynastic burial plots as sacred national treasures.
Out on the shop floor, the guys talk about the price of eggs, the interest rates on used pickups, and whether their kids will ever be able to buy a starter home. Nobody at the break table is losing sleep over whether a shadow creeps across the grave of a president who died sixty years ago. Millions of working-class families across this country cannot even afford a decent headstone for their loved ones, let alone federal litigators to protect the azimuth of the afternoon sun over their plots. Unmarked graves and pauper burials are the reward capitalism gives to the men and women who actually dig the ditches, lay the track, and build the cities.
The construction of these imperial monstrosities is an insult to material reality. If we are going to mobilize the ironworkers, the operating engineers, and the cement masons, let it be to replace the lead water lines poisoning our schoolkids. Let it be to build public transit that gets a second-shift nurse home safely at two in the morning, or to construct social housing that drives the private equity landlords into bankruptcy. The working class does not need arches of triumph, nor does it need to worship at the shrines of billionaire dynasties.
History will not judge this era by the height of Donald Trump’s monuments, nor by the legal maneuvers of the Kennedy estate. It will judge us by whether we continued to tolerate a society where billionaires duel over the lighting conditions of their family crypts while the living are ground into dust. The working people of this country ought to tell both camps the same thing: take your architects, take your lawsuits, and take your ancestral titles, and get out of the way of the people who actually run this world.