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The New Class War: Saving Democracy from the Metropolitan Elite

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Meanwhile, the extraordinary growth in America’s college-educated population — along with its wildly disproportionate share of disposable income — bends popular culture and corporate messaging towards professional-class sensibilities. And as blue-collar trade unions declined, and progressive nonprofits proliferated, professionals have assumed unprecedented influence over the Democratic Party in general, and its left flank in particular. This is a political liability for Democrats. A majority of voters remain non-college-educated, and that majority is overrepresented in Congress and the Electoral College. In the aggregate, urban professionals and non-college graduates have disparate discursive norms (a.k.a. “ways of speaking”), attitudes, and issue preferences. To the extent that non-college-educated voters come to see Democrats as the party of the professional class — and the professional class as unjustly lording over media, pop culture, and the economy — an increasingly authoritarian GOP will stand to benefit. One need not endorse Lind’s prescriptions for diminishing the professional left’s outsize power to find value in his diagnosis. Most economic growth and scientific and cultural progress in history are the result of genetic endowments of superior individuals, families, and races. Over the past two decades our country has lurched from false start to collapse, and then reaction. The story can be repeated across the Western world, and no one has told it better than the US political analyst Michael Lind, an academic and prolific writer, with decades of experience in the Washington beltway. An American Manifesto for a Desirable Future" (review of Lind, Michael, The Next American Nation: The New Nationalism and the Fourth American Revolution). Bernstein, Richard, The New York Times, July 5, 1995.

Thanks to various defects in our system of government, there are only two viable political parties in the United States. The leadership of one is currently trying to take money away from capitalists and invest it in public infrastructure, domestic manufacturing, at-home care for the elderly, and a monthly child allowance for all non-rich families (among other things). This party has also advanced legislation that would make it easier for working people to vote in elections and organize their workplaces.Will’s effort to save the right from statism brings to mind the critic Kenneth Tynan’s description of T.S. Eliot’s midcentury bid to revive verse drama, which Tynan compared to the exertions of a swimming instructor demonstrating various moves while standing in an empty pool. The call for judicially imposed anti-statism represents the desperation of elite libertarians who are beginning to lose some of their influence on the American right after having masqueraded for decades as conservatives. Apart from the fact that the supposed genetic elite is now “non-Hispanic whites” (including Jews, Arabs, Irish, and others who were once coded as Untermenschen), American eugenic conservatism has hardly changed at all from the 1920s to the 2020s. Social Darwinism went underground after the Holocaust. But its catechism—now more than a century old and consisting of both axioms and policy prescriptions derived from the axioms—is finding new and faithful devotees. Central to this class war, in Lind’s reading, is the rural-urban divide, which has reared its head in recent electoral contests as well as in social movements such as France’s gilets jaunes. Today’s technocratic liberals want us to believe that metropolitan “hubs” are more productive than the so-called “heartlands.” Yet Lind shows that professionals and managers in these hubs increasingly spend their discretionary income on “luxury services” provided by low-income and mostly immigrant workers. I’ve been appalled to see Republicans as much as Democrats refuse to take this seriously and call out the SEC, because obviously, they have major donors in each. Citadel’s probably the largest donor and the worst offender.

Review: 'Big Is Beautiful' Questions the Virtues of Small Business". The New York Times. April 30, 2018. To which Sailer replied: “If white women don’t wise up to [the] rewards of marrying geeks, the Eurasian kids of the future will tend to do extremely well on the math portion of the SAT and thus will be well set to prosper in the increasingly technology-dominated economy.” Between an oligarchy in technocratic form and outsider populism, Lind predicts that oligarchs with money and connections will win nine times out of 10. But as they turn narrow and nepotistic, the ruling class will further lose their connection to reality. Not only are progressives a minority of American voters, they are also a minority of Democratic voters. According to Pew, in 2020 only 47% of Democrats described themselves as “liberal” or “very liberal”. The majority of Democrats are “moderate” (45%) or “conservative” (14%). And yet, some American intellectuals — who style themselves as champions of greater economic equality and political democracy — insist that workers have no interest in which of these two parties holds power.ML: A simple but useful proxy for class is education. Members of the working class do not have four-year diplomas, though they may have some college education. I was criticised for arguing in The New Class War that education, not income, is the major dividing line between classes in the modern West. But in this case, the common-sense view is the correct one: an underpaid professor belongs to the overclass, while a plumber who did not go to university but earns twice as much is a well-paid member of the working class. Nevertheless, Lind’s insistence that America’s dominant class is a (vaguely defined) professional elite — rather than a smaller cohort of ultrarich capitalists — is tendentious at best. And this is far from the only defect in his political analysis. Its fundamental flaw is a kind of Manichean materialism that casts the aspirations of working-class Trump voters as presumptively righteous, and those of self-styled “progressive” professionals as uniformly exploitative.

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