A Response to "The Bourgeoisie Has Switched Sides"

Michael Lind on the two types of bourgeoisie.

(Picture via Getty.)

It is sometimes hard to know which pieces will attract wider interest and which won’t. For whatever reason, last week’s article did. And among the many interesting responses to it, there was one by one of my favorite writers: Michael Lind.

In the article, I argued that we are living amidst a strange “Paradox of Infinite Voices and Narrow Minds.” On the one hand, the social media revolution has vastly increased the ease of expressing our opinions, leading to a much more variegated public sphere (in ways both good and bad). On the other hand, those of us who are in some sense members of the professional class are part of a milieu in which the breadth of acceptable opinion is much more narrow than it was in the past. Part of the reason for this paradox, I argued, is a process I called the “Brooklynization of the Bourgeoisie.” The affluent, credentialed class has shifted sharply leftward over the past decades. And since they hold outsized sway over the culture as a whole, this has opened up a cultural representation gap between this milieu and the rest of the country.

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The Bourgeoisie Has Switched Sides

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Lind’s response, which I am sharing with you today, makes a strong point: that we should, really, be distinguishing between two different segments of the middle class. The first segment includes lawyers, doctors, academics, and others who have advanced to their positions by accruing formal meritocratic credentials; the German term for it is the Bildungsbürgertum (roughly: the bourgeoisie of the educated). The second segment includes business owners and prosperous artisans who have advanced to their positions by competing more directly in the free market; the German term for it is the Besitzbürgertum (roughly: the bourgeoisie of the owners). Without preempting Michael’s fire, I will just note that the way in which I used the term “bourgeoisie” in last week’s essay was primarily meant to refer to the first group, since that—perhaps to the detriment of our collective conceptual clarity—is how that term now tends to be used in the United States.

While I am at it, I should also own up to another synecdoche of which I was rightly found guilty by some thoughtful correspondents last week. When I wrote about the “Brooklynization of the Bourgeoisie,” I of course had in mind the parts of Brooklyn that are home to the Bildungsbürgertum; everything I wrote should be taken to apply to Brooklyn Heights or Park Slope but not to Brighton Beach or Sheepshead Bay; I formally apologize for unduly bringing the latter neighborhoods into disrepute.

One last note: If you have not yet added The Good Fight to your favorite podcast app, now is the time to do so. And if you are (or become!) a paying subscriber, you will have access to full versions of all recent episodes—from my conversation about the war in the Middle East with Francis Fukuyama, to my occasionally contentious interview with Ibram X. Kendi to my abortive attempt at a conversation with Klaus Schwab.

But now, without further ado, here is Michael Lind’s response to last week’s piece.

Thanks, as ever, for reading.

—Yascha

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The Two Bourgeoisies

Yascha Mounk’s essay “The Bourgeoisie Has Switched Sides” is as insightful as his phrase “the Brooklynization of the bourgeoisie” is memorable. His analysis could be elaborated by acknowledging that there is more than one bourgeoisie in the contemporary West.

In Germany, there has long been a distinction between the “educated middle class,” or Bildungsbürgertum, which includes lawyers, doctors, academics, clerics, and civil servants, on the one hand, and the “propertied” middle class, or Besitzbürgertum, which includes business owners and independent bankers (large and small), and prosperous, self-employed artisans, on the other.

This social division, if not the terminology, is familiar in the United States. The politics of “expert progressivism” has been based in America’s educated bourgeoisie, who since the 1900s have favored variants of would-be enlightened technocratic government as an alternative to the dreaded extremes of mob rule and plutocracy. Meanwhile, for a century, American businessmen and the politicians and pundits they have funded have denounced “meddling bureaucrats” and “long-haired professors” in pseudo-populist campaigns to delegitimize rival non-capitalist elites.

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We All Live in a Village Now

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The growth of giant corporations run by managers rather than founders, and the bureaucratization of higher education and philanthropy in the United States and Europe, has greatly expanded the offices that can be filled by professionals educated and credentialed as members of the Bildungsbürgertum. These meritocratic managers can easily circulate among the bureaucracies of business, banking, government, and the nonprofit sector, and they tend to share common values instilled in them by prestigious universities.

Today’s propertied bourgeoisie is made up both of small business owners and of entrepreneurs who found companies that grow to immense size. Big and small owner-operators alike tend to share the view that their firm is their personal property. They feel attacked and insulted by government regulators, tax authorities, and workers who try to organize unions or simply demand higher wages.

Right-wing populists on both sides of the Atlantic claim to represent “the people” against “the elites,” when in fact they merely represent the propertied bourgeoisie in its century-long battle against the managerial-professional overclass. A model for today’s anti-intellectual, anti-tax, anti-state demagogic populism can be found in postwar poujadism—the revolt of small proprietors in France in the 1950s led by Pierre Poujade. While demagogic populists like Donald Trump and Nigel Farage can win over working-class voters upset with immigration or alienated by cultural progressivism, their core constituents and donors are the petty bourgeoisie as well as super-rich tycoons who answer only to themselves, like oil men and tech-company founders, as opposed to the CEOs and other temporary, professional managers of bureaucratic corporations and megabanks with many stakeholders.

If I am right, the pattern that Mounk has described so well can be described as a clash of the two bourgeoisies. On one side, technocratic professionals in large organizations of all kinds appeal to science and reason as they define them. On the other side, small capitalists and big entrepreneurs hire demagogic politicians to represent them while posing as anti-system populists. Except in the run-up to elections when they need working-class voters, both of the two bourgeoisies tend to ignore working-class majorities in the West.

Michael Lind is a contributor to Unherd and author of “Hell to Pay: How the Suppression of Wages is Destroying America.”