The top three occupations being “owner,” “cop,” and “real estate broker” screams “petite bourgeois ie” to me. Granted, the owners are mostly owners of small firms, like florists or fishing charter operators, but firms they are. (The cops are not the Capitol hill cops, but cops who came from elsewhere.) It’s also extremely suggestive that there are no credentialed members of the professional-managerial class present at all; only one lawyer, no accountants, no psychiatrists; the closest we come is an occupational therapist. There are also no labor aristocrats, save one union VP. The working class rioters are flexible in their arrangements; no Amazon workers, but a contractor, a programmer, an arborist/chimney sweeper, etc. This flexibility shades over into the lumpenproletariat: “Supplier” is my polite coinage for dealer.
Blue-skying fiercely, here: If we wanted to construct a narrative that the Capitol Seizure–and the reaction to it–was a civil war between the classical petite bourgeoisie, being squeezed both by the corporate behemoths and Covid, and the arriviste PMC, newly come to class consciousness in the Trumpian cauldron, that wouldn’t be so hard to do, would it?
chismosite
this data is based on 107 rioters (out of possible thousands who were there) who have been charged and whose case data is available so far
A conservative estimate is that about 700 people stormed inside the capitol. Extrapolating from whose been charged with the # of people there, we get that:
- 9.3% were small business owners
- about the same as the 9% of American small business owners
- 4.7% were cops
- 23.5 times larger than the 0.2% of American cops
- 2.8% were real estate brokers
- 7 times higher than the 0.4% of American real estate agents