Potential future development: the AI revolution arguably will reduce the numbers and clout of the professional class bourgeoisie as their jobs become obsolete.
Then there is a HUGE disruption. AI is already dramatically impacting entry level jobs.
Young people, especially young men, are not very patient. The larger the cohort of jobless young men, the greater the likelihood that they will do something dramatically disruptive. They increasingly feel like they have nothing to lose, so they will be motivated to tear the system down, both out of frustration, and in the hopes that something might emerge from the ashes that will offer them more opportunity for career, family, and prestige.
To the extent that the job loss impacts the Brahmin Left/PMC/Symbolic Capitalists more than it does people in the category of Working Class/Merchant Class/Manufacturing/Extraction, it will exacerbate the already-significant cultural and political tensions. The people who identify with the hollowing out of American manufacturing, and feel that ‘those people’ were responsible are not going to have any sympathy for a bunch of Communications majors who can’t even find unpaid internships.
But beyond that, digital automation, especially if AI enabled, represents a potential for a much bigger job impact. If self-driving vehicles become pervasive, it could put 3.5 million truck drivers out of work. All those crappy Amazon warehouse jobs are being automated away.
I’m not confident that the past 200 years provides us a useful model for how humans eventually adapt to technology-driven systemic changes in the job market. The job losses could hit very rapidly and pervasively, in years, instead of generations. And we shouldn’t blithely assume that the impacted populations will redeploy themselves to some other equally satisfying form of work. Sufficient levels of automation could conceivably replace most manual and mental work.
Thomas Piketty makes the same point, memorably so, when distinguishing between the “Brahmin Left" and the "Merchant Right" in Capital and Ideology (2020)
Long before Piiketty (and without Piketty's ideological axe to grind), Joseph Schumpeter made much the same observation in "Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy" (1942)!
That is a helpful distinction. The term "bourgeoisie" has always been a confusing one to me.
But you say "both of the two bourgeoisies tend to ignore working-class majorities in the West."
To me, the Bildungsbürgertum, which includes lawyers, doctors, academics, clerics, and civil servants, actually does care about the well-being of working-class majorities, and that's why they tend to vote for Democrats who favor a progressive income tax to help them out. This is especially true of academics who think a lot about how to empower people at the lower end of the economic spectrum.
And it seems to me that the Besitzbürgertum, which includes business owners and independent bankers (large and small), works hard to fool the working class into voting against their own interests by lowering taxes, ending regulations (which are designed to protect workers), and ending government aid for people who struggle.
Those academics and NGO bureaucrats think of ways to empower THEMSELVES (as administrators), and think of people at the lower end of the economic spectrum (and the "historically marginalized") as abstract catergories rather than as individuals with personal agency.
They certainly don't live in the same neighborhoods as those that they (patronizingly) claim that they seek to "help." They invoke "empathy," but fail to recognize that empathy is an individual attribute, to be shared with other individuals.
Meanwhile, the contempt that the Brahman Left holds for the so-called "petty bourgeoisie" (mom and pop) drives the latter into the arms of fascism.
Quite right! The great majority of the still not rich members of the Besitzbürgertum believe in the American Dream, do not care too much about the well-being of other people and consider taxes and regulations as leftist (“communist”) idiocies, and therefore lean to right or even radical-right ideologies.
Perhaps Yascha could have been more precise, but I still accept his basic contention that a huge segment of the elite has realigned its political priorities (note to self: if there isn’t already a law asserting that no level of nuance can be sufficient to avoid accusation of insufficient nuance, then invent one).
To my mind, the most thorough and contemporary explanation of the sides in the Battling Bourgeoisie is “We Have Never Been Woke: The Cultural Contradictions of a New Elite” by Musa al-Gharbi. He introduces the term “Symbolic Capitalists”, explaining that “Professional Managerial Class” and “Creative Class” are only partially explicative. Whether or not al-Gharbi’s new category name is going to gain traction is an open question for me, but the detailed explanation of who those people are is solid and well-reasoned.
To grossly simplify, he describes the Symbolic Capitalists as being people who are oriented around making a living through the manipulation of ideas and abstractions. This encompasses much of the corporate and government bureaucracies, lawyers, teachers, authors, artists, the media, entertainment, and much of the medical profession. In opposition to them, essentially the Merchant Right, are people who make things for a living, like factory owners and factory workers, small business people, farmers, and people involved with mining.
While it is the case that one of those two groups has more education than the other, higher education turns out not to be as strong a correlation as the form of work that they do. al-Gharbi points out that people who have university degrees in fields such as mining, and engineering fields related to manufacturing, are much more likely to be on the political right.
Large corporations and other mega organizations hire large numbers of what you refer to as Symbolic Capitalists and the Merchant Right. However, my experience is that the two groups, unfortunately, tend to be siloed with the Symbolic Capitalists in corporate locations and the Merchant Right providing goods and services in decentralized locations. Many Symbolic Capitalists are unfamiliar with the products and services that their organizations deliver while many of the Merchant Right do not understand the outside forces that influence their products and services.
It's interesting to consider how these two bourgeois groups differ economically and culturally
In an economic sense, roughly speaking, the owners think selfishly: "Why should the government take what I've earned and give it to someone else?" Whereas the professional intellectual class tends to be more in favor of spreading the wealth around. And this is because, if you study the issue at the collegiate level, you learn that it tends to lead to the happiest societies.
This is why I think the right is wrong about this issue.
Culturally, if I may say it very crudely, we are basically looking at the difference between high-brows and low-brows–the people who read the NY Times and the people who get their news from social media.
Seeing it in this new way clarifies a lot for me. So I am so thankful to the author for pointing this out!
Now I am asking myself what I think about this distinction, in light of this new insight.
Up front, I am definitely on the left, in both ways. (And I think this might be genetic, at least as much as socialized. But that's a theory for another time.)
And I understand why the right FEELS the way they feel, economically. But I think, if you really study the finer aspects of economics, it's easy to see that their ideas would lead to bad consequences for society as a whole.
I think an economics of greed is bad for the country. I think an economics of cooperation and wealth redistribution is a good thing. Helping people at the lower end of the economic scale meet their basic needs leads to a stronger overall economy and a higher quality of life for society as a whole. Trust me, you want to live in a country with lots of middle-class people making good wages. You do not want to live in a country with a lot of poor, desperate people.
Allow me to be crude and indelicate. Culturally, I think the high brows love to live in cosmopolitan areas, and low brows tend to want to live among people like themselves. And low-brow people hate it when people talk in high-brow ways.
I understand the low-brow attitude. And I am not condemning it in any way. A lot of people don't want to waste their free time studying minute details of abstract concepts. They feel like they have better things to do. I totally get that. I'd put my sister in this crowd. Bless her heart. She's a good and generous person. Anyone who knows her would say so. And I love her.
But the problem is that the lowbrows have started to think they know the subjects of the highbrows (the experts) better than the highbrows do. This is how we ended up with Trump, Hegseth, Bondi, Noem, Patel, and the rest of the parade of incompetents.
Ideas need to be judged on merit, independently of who has them. Too many people are allowing these decisions to be influenced by rank partisanship.
"Culturally, I think the high brows love to live in cosmopolitan areas, and low brows tend to want to live among people like themselves"?
Cut the crap! High brows love to live among people like themselves. I should know. I lived in Park Slope for ten years, and my sister still lives in Great Neck.
"And low-brow people hate it when people talk in high-brow ways"?
...and rightly so! I also lived in Daly City for seven years. How do you think my (mostly Asian, largely Filipino) working-class neighbors felt when hearing that (would-be sophisticated, "high-brow") song about how they live in "little boxes" and "they all come out the same"?
"The lowbrows have started to think they know the subjects of the highbrows (the experts) better than the highbrows do"?
...again, rightly so, when they see the "experts" (like Nurse Ratched) as presuming to run their lives!
"Too many people are allowing these decisions to be influenced by rank partisanship"?
Exactly! That cuts both ways -- and sadly so. What goes around comes around.
Cultural affinity matters to a lot more people than the rich/poor distinction and this is a real problem for someone like myself who conceives of politics and history materially.
Remember those shirts of Obama with the Shepard Ferry art, but it said "SNOB" underneath? They definitely signaled a lot about the wearer and what motivated their politics, to the frustration of the part of the left that values labor organizing and programs to help the poor.
It isn't actually contempt. It is *Ressentiment* (and I absolutely mean that in the Nietzschean sense).
Orwell described the dynamic in 1984 - a resentful middle who wants to replace the high enlists the low in a revolution, but the middle becomes the new high and the low get put back in their place.
I'm an econ PhD so I'm kind of a "class traitor", but think of it from the perspective of someone who spent a lot of time and money and effort in getting credentials. How do you think they feel when they see people become substantially richer than them through appealing to the masses in a market? How do you think they feel when bedroom coders make billions in Silicon Valley (or at least did, back in the early days of it)? The Credentialled Class absolutely RESENT the richest of the Merchant class, and see the Merchants as their cultural inferiors (yet when the distribution of material rewards doesn't follow that cultural hierarchy, they absolutely get angry).
I mean how else can you explain people like Elizabeth Warren (perhaps the purest example of an aggrieved elitist who believes She Should Run America)?
They've actually done studies on this, and people have a strong tendency to support "tax the rich" when "the rich" are defined as THE NEXT TAX BRACKET UP FROM THEM. The desire for progressive taxation is about sticking it to people you resent, NOT about funding social programs to help those you feel sorry for (indeed, Obama let the George W Bush tax cuts expire, but those tax-cuts were actually revenue-positive, so Obama deliberately wanted 'the rich(er than him)' paying higher rates even if it made it harder to fund social services).
Lhfry, you can edit (combine) your two (rather astute) comments by hitting the three dots to the far right of your name. No need to break them up in mid-sentence.
Once you've done that, you can delete the duplication -- and (if you give it a "like" to alert me) I can delete this "advice" comment, too. :-)
Mr Mounk - I have a question for you . Would you consider changing your paid substack subscription pricing structure to permit "discounts" for those of us on low income and low wealth? In effect this is, or could be, "just" an application Econ 101 price discrimination with potentially desirable equity and mutual benefit impacts - but it might take some collective action organizing and governance changes to implement.
Let me explain: I used to have sufficient income be a paying subscriber for your substack and others, eg Timothy Snyder, Paul Krugman , but for affordability reasons I've had to stop many of my favourite annual subscriptions . Taken individually each of these substacks is terrific - but in aggregate they are eating up far too much of my very limited budget .
I'm 79 years old , on a very low pension (despite being an academic economist NZ for 40+ years!) - but have had to do a cull of all the separate subscriptions services I had been buying, including by the way Entertainment subs like Netflix!! Entertainment I can do without, but solid , credible , timely analyses these days I don't want to do without.
Affordability crises hit many of us hard these days - it's not only about housing and food, but access to high quality information and analysis of social and political issues of the kind u so eloquently write about. Would you think about changing "paid". to "free" as Henry Farrell does , I do appreciate that you make a large proportion of your commentary and analysis free. I am sure there are many others like me, whether seniors or not, ex- academics or not, who will be struggling in terms of affordability yet also wanting/needing credible analyses and critical , rapid , commentary sources. Educational discounts offerred by Economist and the Atlantic for example help, but only for those with the income/wealth/human capital to belong to an accredited college: That type of system works for me as a senior on low income (yet highly educated) becasue I'm enrolled as a student at UBC - where I can actually take courses for "free" as a senior BC citizen . This is good for me, but there is a potential perverse reinforcement of income and human capital inequality here , -- one has to actually be educated and wealthy enough to be enrolled in an institution of higher education.
One other way to tackle the affordability [problem would be to suggest to substack a "bundling" option - eg make an annual subscritopion of say X=$100 a year for a bundle of Y=5 substacks of the users choice; X and Y would be chosen as part of an available substack subscription plan. I dont think you can do this on your own, but you may be able to organize with high traffic substack users like yourself , Krugman, Snyder etc. When there isn't effective competition for substack the platform holds all the market power, suppliers like yourself have to (could) organize collectively with a countervailing power. Market power of key components in network industries isn't something new - but it takes collective action to break it down when competition cant.
An interesting and important point. Implicit in your essay (and in much of Yascha's writing) is that while an analysis of conflicting (mainly economic) "class intererests" helps to fuel the dispute between the two groups, culture (including vocabulary) also plays an important part in the dispute. At least in the US, I am convinced that quirky cultural traits of the intelligentsia lead to a peculiar outlook and a bizarre vocabulary in public discourse that has made a major contribution to MAGA's rise.
This is the essay that needs to be written, but i think honest self reflection and critique may be beyond the intelligentsia(as a whole, anyway), perhaps due to their "peculiar"(i would say pretentious) outlook.
"made a major contribution to MAGA's rise" I would go a little further and say the blame for trump is squarely on the lefts shoulders. The election was theirs to lose.
My heart is with you, but you may exaggerate... Biden lost control of his presidency, leading to some important policy errors (admittedly forced by leftists, but it was Biden in the driver's seat). Perhaps his most serious political errors were choosing Kamela, failing to act decisively on immigration, and trying to get re-elected. A tragedy almost worthy of King Lear. Between Biden and Kamela, a corpse or a demon would have won (and perhaps we got a cross between the two?)
And did not the left encourage us to vote for harris? Did not the left alienate the working class, causing huge shifts in voters who would traditionally have voted left?
Sure, biden and harris can be the fall guys, but its not as if they acted alone. The left created the space trump stepped into. He simply reaped the rewards of the lefts failures.
I guess we'll see what happens in november, but voting against trump is not the same as voting for the democrats, and that distinction is important. Say what you will about trump but his supporters *believe* in him. Thats something the left could do with more of, but have yet to produce.
As much as i dread more of the maga right, i have no faith in the left. Im a voter without a party*, and im not alone.
*it really doesnt matter in my state, itll go right regardless. What does matter though is that my state(wv) used to be a Democratic stronghold, bc most of us here are poor! And it wasnt *taken* by the right, it was *lost* by the left.
Dividing the already divided to weakness and keeping them so is a necessary means of those who own and thus completely control the means of production and everything thus produced according to their own ends, those owners whom we sometimes call The Elite, lately also The Epstein Class. The "lefty" as "intellectual" bourgeoisie has seen its own role as "educating" the "workers" of "blue collar" class (how are they bearers of any "property" enough to make a difference?) but their "progressive" attitude has sucked. Their Woke (not that of the actually downtrodden who cannot but be awake to, aware of the boots on their necks as they are at the bottom of the s-pile) The DEI Woke Left has NOT been Inclusive of those who had gravitated "right wards" and taken NOT taken responsibility for excluding them. How stupid does a university professor have to be not to see this? Or at least see no need to DO anything to say it?
How come the self-anointed "smart" bourgeoisie cannot see their complete lack of inclusion, their evident complete lack of interest in actually examining their own premises?
It should be noted that the medical sector in particular has shifted as things went from individual private practices to doctors as checkmark credentials in big orgs.
Lind is spot-on in differentiating between "two bourgeoisies", one credentialed by "cultural capital" (education) and the other by "economic capital" (property) - to use the terms of Pierre Bourdieu, who did a lot of work on this concept. It might be helpful to visualise the distinction using Bourdieu's framework of four blocs on an X and Y axis: the top two squares being the wealthy(-ish), and the left/right half representing a divide in culture/education. The bottom two squares lack wealth, but are divided by tastes, which each shares with the wealthy square above it.
The left two squares represent formal education, split between two versions "with and without wealth". The "Brooklyn bourgeoise" would be the top left square: wealthy and educated, and able to project its values to the bottom-left square, the educated but less wealthy (local schoolteachers, struggling graduates, etc).
The right two squares represent property, again split between a "with and without wealth" version. The propertied bourgeoisie referred to in the article - e.g. small business owners; those with property but without wealty - is represented by the bottom-right square. The top-right square then represents
Or, think of it in these terms. The top two squares: the Hilary/Kamala class - wealthy through education; and the Trump class - wealthy without formal education. These then project/share values to the two squares below.
- A small-town graduate may not have the wealth of Kamala or Hilary, but feels connected to them through shared values, shared speech
- Meanwhile, a local shopkeeper won't have the wealth of Trump, but can tell from his cheeseburgers and plain-speaking that he is "one of them".
- i.e.: if each person won the lottery tomorrow, their weakth would change, but their tastes and values would not.
So you end up with two types of bourgeoisie, and two types of mass base, each in a pair based on certain shared values and culture and habits. Meanwhile, the two top and two bottom "economic" pairs - Kamala and Trump; Kamala-voters and Trump-voters - share many things in common. They move in the same circles. But neither economic pairing considers themselves to be the same, because of differences in values. The Kamala-voter and the Trump-voter each *imagines* themselves to have more in common with the famous/privileged individual based on tastes, rather than with their neighbour who has a similar level of wealth.
I called what I perceived to be growing elite fault lines the 'schism of the elites,' and I perceive it to be primarily ideological: on one side those who understand that their class prejudices are narrow and hypocritical, and want to reform but strengthen Western culture. On the other, status-hungry ideologues who have tied their sense of identity to the project to erode and dismantle the West. Every other contentious issue seems to be downstream from that one.
Less we forget, De Toqueville noted that Americans have great freedom but it gets expressed with less diversity of political thought than in Europe. Has that changed?
Potential future development: the AI revolution arguably will reduce the numbers and clout of the professional class bourgeoisie as their jobs become obsolete.
AI is going to go full Pol Pot on the credentialtive, creative class and when the paychecks stop, what then.
Then there is a HUGE disruption. AI is already dramatically impacting entry level jobs.
Young people, especially young men, are not very patient. The larger the cohort of jobless young men, the greater the likelihood that they will do something dramatically disruptive. They increasingly feel like they have nothing to lose, so they will be motivated to tear the system down, both out of frustration, and in the hopes that something might emerge from the ashes that will offer them more opportunity for career, family, and prestige.
To the extent that the job loss impacts the Brahmin Left/PMC/Symbolic Capitalists more than it does people in the category of Working Class/Merchant Class/Manufacturing/Extraction, it will exacerbate the already-significant cultural and political tensions. The people who identify with the hollowing out of American manufacturing, and feel that ‘those people’ were responsible are not going to have any sympathy for a bunch of Communications majors who can’t even find unpaid internships.
But beyond that, digital automation, especially if AI enabled, represents a potential for a much bigger job impact. If self-driving vehicles become pervasive, it could put 3.5 million truck drivers out of work. All those crappy Amazon warehouse jobs are being automated away.
I’m not confident that the past 200 years provides us a useful model for how humans eventually adapt to technology-driven systemic changes in the job market. The job losses could hit very rapidly and pervasively, in years, instead of generations. And we shouldn’t blithely assume that the impacted populations will redeploy themselves to some other equally satisfying form of work. Sufficient levels of automation could conceivably replace most manual and mental work.
Thomas Piketty makes the same point, memorably so, when distinguishing between the “Brahmin Left" and the "Merchant Right" in Capital and Ideology (2020)
Long before Piiketty (and without Piketty's ideological axe to grind), Joseph Schumpeter made much the same observation in "Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy" (1942)!
That is a helpful distinction. The term "bourgeoisie" has always been a confusing one to me.
But you say "both of the two bourgeoisies tend to ignore working-class majorities in the West."
To me, the Bildungsbürgertum, which includes lawyers, doctors, academics, clerics, and civil servants, actually does care about the well-being of working-class majorities, and that's why they tend to vote for Democrats who favor a progressive income tax to help them out. This is especially true of academics who think a lot about how to empower people at the lower end of the economic spectrum.
And it seems to me that the Besitzbürgertum, which includes business owners and independent bankers (large and small), works hard to fool the working class into voting against their own interests by lowering taxes, ending regulations (which are designed to protect workers), and ending government aid for people who struggle.
Those academics and NGO bureaucrats think of ways to empower THEMSELVES (as administrators), and think of people at the lower end of the economic spectrum (and the "historically marginalized") as abstract catergories rather than as individuals with personal agency.
They certainly don't live in the same neighborhoods as those that they (patronizingly) claim that they seek to "help." They invoke "empathy," but fail to recognize that empathy is an individual attribute, to be shared with other individuals.
Meanwhile, the contempt that the Brahman Left holds for the so-called "petty bourgeoisie" (mom and pop) drives the latter into the arms of fascism.
You think academics have consolidated power in the US? If only.
Quite right! The great majority of the still not rich members of the Besitzbürgertum believe in the American Dream, do not care too much about the well-being of other people and consider taxes and regulations as leftist (“communist”) idiocies, and therefore lean to right or even radical-right ideologies.
Perhaps Yascha could have been more precise, but I still accept his basic contention that a huge segment of the elite has realigned its political priorities (note to self: if there isn’t already a law asserting that no level of nuance can be sufficient to avoid accusation of insufficient nuance, then invent one).
To my mind, the most thorough and contemporary explanation of the sides in the Battling Bourgeoisie is “We Have Never Been Woke: The Cultural Contradictions of a New Elite” by Musa al-Gharbi. He introduces the term “Symbolic Capitalists”, explaining that “Professional Managerial Class” and “Creative Class” are only partially explicative. Whether or not al-Gharbi’s new category name is going to gain traction is an open question for me, but the detailed explanation of who those people are is solid and well-reasoned.
To grossly simplify, he describes the Symbolic Capitalists as being people who are oriented around making a living through the manipulation of ideas and abstractions. This encompasses much of the corporate and government bureaucracies, lawyers, teachers, authors, artists, the media, entertainment, and much of the medical profession. In opposition to them, essentially the Merchant Right, are people who make things for a living, like factory owners and factory workers, small business people, farmers, and people involved with mining.
While it is the case that one of those two groups has more education than the other, higher education turns out not to be as strong a correlation as the form of work that they do. al-Gharbi points out that people who have university degrees in fields such as mining, and engineering fields related to manufacturing, are much more likely to be on the political right.
Large corporations and other mega organizations hire large numbers of what you refer to as Symbolic Capitalists and the Merchant Right. However, my experience is that the two groups, unfortunately, tend to be siloed with the Symbolic Capitalists in corporate locations and the Merchant Right providing goods and services in decentralized locations. Many Symbolic Capitalists are unfamiliar with the products and services that their organizations deliver while many of the Merchant Right do not understand the outside forces that influence their products and services.
It's interesting to consider how these two bourgeois groups differ economically and culturally
In an economic sense, roughly speaking, the owners think selfishly: "Why should the government take what I've earned and give it to someone else?" Whereas the professional intellectual class tends to be more in favor of spreading the wealth around. And this is because, if you study the issue at the collegiate level, you learn that it tends to lead to the happiest societies.
This is why I think the right is wrong about this issue.
Culturally, if I may say it very crudely, we are basically looking at the difference between high-brows and low-brows–the people who read the NY Times and the people who get their news from social media.
Seeing it in this new way clarifies a lot for me. So I am so thankful to the author for pointing this out!
Now I am asking myself what I think about this distinction, in light of this new insight.
Up front, I am definitely on the left, in both ways. (And I think this might be genetic, at least as much as socialized. But that's a theory for another time.)
And I understand why the right FEELS the way they feel, economically. But I think, if you really study the finer aspects of economics, it's easy to see that their ideas would lead to bad consequences for society as a whole.
I think an economics of greed is bad for the country. I think an economics of cooperation and wealth redistribution is a good thing. Helping people at the lower end of the economic scale meet their basic needs leads to a stronger overall economy and a higher quality of life for society as a whole. Trust me, you want to live in a country with lots of middle-class people making good wages. You do not want to live in a country with a lot of poor, desperate people.
Allow me to be crude and indelicate. Culturally, I think the high brows love to live in cosmopolitan areas, and low brows tend to want to live among people like themselves. And low-brow people hate it when people talk in high-brow ways.
I understand the low-brow attitude. And I am not condemning it in any way. A lot of people don't want to waste their free time studying minute details of abstract concepts. They feel like they have better things to do. I totally get that. I'd put my sister in this crowd. Bless her heart. She's a good and generous person. Anyone who knows her would say so. And I love her.
But the problem is that the lowbrows have started to think they know the subjects of the highbrows (the experts) better than the highbrows do. This is how we ended up with Trump, Hegseth, Bondi, Noem, Patel, and the rest of the parade of incompetents.
Ideas need to be judged on merit, independently of who has them. Too many people are allowing these decisions to be influenced by rank partisanship.
"Culturally, I think the high brows love to live in cosmopolitan areas, and low brows tend to want to live among people like themselves"?
Cut the crap! High brows love to live among people like themselves. I should know. I lived in Park Slope for ten years, and my sister still lives in Great Neck.
"And low-brow people hate it when people talk in high-brow ways"?
...and rightly so! I also lived in Daly City for seven years. How do you think my (mostly Asian, largely Filipino) working-class neighbors felt when hearing that (would-be sophisticated, "high-brow") song about how they live in "little boxes" and "they all come out the same"?
"The lowbrows have started to think they know the subjects of the highbrows (the experts) better than the highbrows do"?
...again, rightly so, when they see the "experts" (like Nurse Ratched) as presuming to run their lives!
"Too many people are allowing these decisions to be influenced by rank partisanship"?
Exactly! That cuts both ways -- and sadly so. What goes around comes around.
Cultural affinity matters to a lot more people than the rich/poor distinction and this is a real problem for someone like myself who conceives of politics and history materially.
Remember those shirts of Obama with the Shepard Ferry art, but it said "SNOB" underneath? They definitely signaled a lot about the wearer and what motivated their politics, to the frustration of the part of the left that values labor organizing and programs to help the poor.
The barely disguised contempt of the credentialed (not educated)
Class for the “merchant” class is stunning.
It isn't actually contempt. It is *Ressentiment* (and I absolutely mean that in the Nietzschean sense).
Orwell described the dynamic in 1984 - a resentful middle who wants to replace the high enlists the low in a revolution, but the middle becomes the new high and the low get put back in their place.
I'm an econ PhD so I'm kind of a "class traitor", but think of it from the perspective of someone who spent a lot of time and money and effort in getting credentials. How do you think they feel when they see people become substantially richer than them through appealing to the masses in a market? How do you think they feel when bedroom coders make billions in Silicon Valley (or at least did, back in the early days of it)? The Credentialled Class absolutely RESENT the richest of the Merchant class, and see the Merchants as their cultural inferiors (yet when the distribution of material rewards doesn't follow that cultural hierarchy, they absolutely get angry).
I mean how else can you explain people like Elizabeth Warren (perhaps the purest example of an aggrieved elitist who believes She Should Run America)?
They've actually done studies on this, and people have a strong tendency to support "tax the rich" when "the rich" are defined as THE NEXT TAX BRACKET UP FROM THEM. The desire for progressive taxation is about sticking it to people you resent, NOT about funding social programs to help those you feel sorry for (indeed, Obama let the George W Bush tax cuts expire, but those tax-cuts were actually revenue-positive, so Obama deliberately wanted 'the rich(er than him)' paying higher rates even if it made it harder to fund social services).
Lhfry, you can edit (combine) your two (rather astute) comments by hitting the three dots to the far right of your name. No need to break them up in mid-sentence.
Once you've done that, you can delete the duplication -- and (if you give it a "like" to alert me) I can delete this "advice" comment, too. :-)
Mr Mounk - I have a question for you . Would you consider changing your paid substack subscription pricing structure to permit "discounts" for those of us on low income and low wealth? In effect this is, or could be, "just" an application Econ 101 price discrimination with potentially desirable equity and mutual benefit impacts - but it might take some collective action organizing and governance changes to implement.
Let me explain: I used to have sufficient income be a paying subscriber for your substack and others, eg Timothy Snyder, Paul Krugman , but for affordability reasons I've had to stop many of my favourite annual subscriptions . Taken individually each of these substacks is terrific - but in aggregate they are eating up far too much of my very limited budget .
I'm 79 years old , on a very low pension (despite being an academic economist NZ for 40+ years!) - but have had to do a cull of all the separate subscriptions services I had been buying, including by the way Entertainment subs like Netflix!! Entertainment I can do without, but solid , credible , timely analyses these days I don't want to do without.
Affordability crises hit many of us hard these days - it's not only about housing and food, but access to high quality information and analysis of social and political issues of the kind u so eloquently write about. Would you think about changing "paid". to "free" as Henry Farrell does , I do appreciate that you make a large proportion of your commentary and analysis free. I am sure there are many others like me, whether seniors or not, ex- academics or not, who will be struggling in terms of affordability yet also wanting/needing credible analyses and critical , rapid , commentary sources. Educational discounts offerred by Economist and the Atlantic for example help, but only for those with the income/wealth/human capital to belong to an accredited college: That type of system works for me as a senior on low income (yet highly educated) becasue I'm enrolled as a student at UBC - where I can actually take courses for "free" as a senior BC citizen . This is good for me, but there is a potential perverse reinforcement of income and human capital inequality here , -- one has to actually be educated and wealthy enough to be enrolled in an institution of higher education.
One other way to tackle the affordability [problem would be to suggest to substack a "bundling" option - eg make an annual subscritopion of say X=$100 a year for a bundle of Y=5 substacks of the users choice; X and Y would be chosen as part of an available substack subscription plan. I dont think you can do this on your own, but you may be able to organize with high traffic substack users like yourself , Krugman, Snyder etc. When there isn't effective competition for substack the platform holds all the market power, suppliers like yourself have to (could) organize collectively with a countervailing power. Market power of key components in network industries isn't something new - but it takes collective action to break it down when competition cant.
Over to you - John
An interesting and important point. Implicit in your essay (and in much of Yascha's writing) is that while an analysis of conflicting (mainly economic) "class intererests" helps to fuel the dispute between the two groups, culture (including vocabulary) also plays an important part in the dispute. At least in the US, I am convinced that quirky cultural traits of the intelligentsia lead to a peculiar outlook and a bizarre vocabulary in public discourse that has made a major contribution to MAGA's rise.
This is the essay that needs to be written, but i think honest self reflection and critique may be beyond the intelligentsia(as a whole, anyway), perhaps due to their "peculiar"(i would say pretentious) outlook.
"made a major contribution to MAGA's rise" I would go a little further and say the blame for trump is squarely on the lefts shoulders. The election was theirs to lose.
My heart is with you, but you may exaggerate... Biden lost control of his presidency, leading to some important policy errors (admittedly forced by leftists, but it was Biden in the driver's seat). Perhaps his most serious political errors were choosing Kamela, failing to act decisively on immigration, and trying to get re-elected. A tragedy almost worthy of King Lear. Between Biden and Kamela, a corpse or a demon would have won (and perhaps we got a cross between the two?)
And did not the left encourage us to vote for harris? Did not the left alienate the working class, causing huge shifts in voters who would traditionally have voted left?
Sure, biden and harris can be the fall guys, but its not as if they acted alone. The left created the space trump stepped into. He simply reaped the rewards of the lefts failures.
I guess we'll see what happens in november, but voting against trump is not the same as voting for the democrats, and that distinction is important. Say what you will about trump but his supporters *believe* in him. Thats something the left could do with more of, but have yet to produce.
As much as i dread more of the maga right, i have no faith in the left. Im a voter without a party*, and im not alone.
*it really doesnt matter in my state, itll go right regardless. What does matter though is that my state(wv) used to be a Democratic stronghold, bc most of us here are poor! And it wasnt *taken* by the right, it was *lost* by the left.
Dividing the already divided to weakness and keeping them so is a necessary means of those who own and thus completely control the means of production and everything thus produced according to their own ends, those owners whom we sometimes call The Elite, lately also The Epstein Class. The "lefty" as "intellectual" bourgeoisie has seen its own role as "educating" the "workers" of "blue collar" class (how are they bearers of any "property" enough to make a difference?) but their "progressive" attitude has sucked. Their Woke (not that of the actually downtrodden who cannot but be awake to, aware of the boots on their necks as they are at the bottom of the s-pile) The DEI Woke Left has NOT been Inclusive of those who had gravitated "right wards" and taken NOT taken responsibility for excluding them. How stupid does a university professor have to be not to see this? Or at least see no need to DO anything to say it?
How come the self-anointed "smart" bourgeoisie cannot see their complete lack of inclusion, their evident complete lack of interest in actually examining their own premises?
Michael Lind's (and Yascha's) observations are straight out of Schumpeter ("Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy," 1942)!
Finally, justice for Sheepshead Bay
"Justice for Sheepshead Bay"? Bring back Lundy's!
It should be noted that the medical sector in particular has shifted as things went from individual private practices to doctors as checkmark credentials in big orgs.
Lind is spot-on in differentiating between "two bourgeoisies", one credentialed by "cultural capital" (education) and the other by "economic capital" (property) - to use the terms of Pierre Bourdieu, who did a lot of work on this concept. It might be helpful to visualise the distinction using Bourdieu's framework of four blocs on an X and Y axis: the top two squares being the wealthy(-ish), and the left/right half representing a divide in culture/education. The bottom two squares lack wealth, but are divided by tastes, which each shares with the wealthy square above it.
The left two squares represent formal education, split between two versions "with and without wealth". The "Brooklyn bourgeoise" would be the top left square: wealthy and educated, and able to project its values to the bottom-left square, the educated but less wealthy (local schoolteachers, struggling graduates, etc).
The right two squares represent property, again split between a "with and without wealth" version. The propertied bourgeoisie referred to in the article - e.g. small business owners; those with property but without wealty - is represented by the bottom-right square. The top-right square then represents
Or, think of it in these terms. The top two squares: the Hilary/Kamala class - wealthy through education; and the Trump class - wealthy without formal education. These then project/share values to the two squares below.
- A small-town graduate may not have the wealth of Kamala or Hilary, but feels connected to them through shared values, shared speech
- Meanwhile, a local shopkeeper won't have the wealth of Trump, but can tell from his cheeseburgers and plain-speaking that he is "one of them".
- i.e.: if each person won the lottery tomorrow, their weakth would change, but their tastes and values would not.
So you end up with two types of bourgeoisie, and two types of mass base, each in a pair based on certain shared values and culture and habits. Meanwhile, the two top and two bottom "economic" pairs - Kamala and Trump; Kamala-voters and Trump-voters - share many things in common. They move in the same circles. But neither economic pairing considers themselves to be the same, because of differences in values. The Kamala-voter and the Trump-voter each *imagines* themselves to have more in common with the famous/privileged individual based on tastes, rather than with their neighbour who has a similar level of wealth.
4 squares of intolerable types. So much to hate in each quadrant.
I called what I perceived to be growing elite fault lines the 'schism of the elites,' and I perceive it to be primarily ideological: on one side those who understand that their class prejudices are narrow and hypocritical, and want to reform but strengthen Western culture. On the other, status-hungry ideologues who have tied their sense of identity to the project to erode and dismantle the West. Every other contentious issue seems to be downstream from that one.
https://jmpolemic.substack.com/p/the-schism-of-the-elites
Less we forget, De Toqueville noted that Americans have great freedom but it gets expressed with less diversity of political thought than in Europe. Has that changed?
What came to mind as I was reading is that expression can increase while the range of acceptable views quietly tightens.
Lind’s distinction helps locate that shift in structure, not just opinion.