The Bourgeoisie Has Switched Sides
What happens when elites all believe the same thing.
About a year ago, Bernard Schweizer and John Tomasi asked me to contribute to a new book about viewpoint diversity. As regular readers of this Substack know, I have long worried about the narrowing of opinion in many professional circles, and am a big advocate of reanimating real debate, especially within elite circles. But it occurred to me that I had not really expressed my ideas on viewpoint diversity and its importance in one accessible essay. So I agreed to contribute to the volume—under the condition of being able to share it directly with you, my most valued audience.
That book is now out. It includes contributions by great writers—and Persuasion regulars—from Jonathan Haidt to Jesse Singal and from Eboo Patel to Henry Louis Gates, Jr. Here is a lightly edited version of my contribution to it; I hope you’ll enjoy reading it.
—Yascha
P.S: I had a rather memorable experience interviewing—or rather, trying to interview—Klaus Schwab, the founder of the World Economic Forum, a few weeks ago. If you have not yet listened to one of the more memorable episodes of The Good Fight, set up the podcast here (or read the transcript)!
The year 2026 is a strange time to worry about viewpoint diversity. In the palm of my hand, I am holding a smart phone which gives me access to a greater diversity of views than has perhaps ever before been available to humans. On social media apps, in podcasts followed by millions of people, and increasingly even in traditional media, I can follow people who argue for communism and for fascism, listen to them making the case for social justice or for Islamic theocracy, or seek out those who will urge me to become a Catholic monk or a Hasidic Jew.
Since the large-scale deployment of artificial intelligence, I can even ask ChatGPT or Claude or DeepSeek to state whatever argument I choose in the tones and the style of any moral tradition that takes my fancy. John Stuart Mill famously argued that it is crucial to hold our beliefs as living truths rather than dead dogmas, something that would only be possible if we were exposed to a genuine diversity of views. “If opponents of all important truths do not exist,” he suggested, “it is indispensable to imagine them and supply them with the strongest arguments which the most skillful devil’s advocate can conjure up.” Today, that devil’s advocate is accessible to any human with an internet connection.
And yet, the unprecedented diversity of viewpoints that is now available to—and to some extent inescapable for—the citizens of modern democracies coexist with a greater homogeneity of thought in key spheres of civil society than has been characteristic of life in the West in any historical epoch since the Victorian period. If you are an artist or an academic or a social worker or a psychologist—or, increasingly, a journalist or doctor or lawyer or civil servant—you likely operate in a social milieu in which the range of respectable opinion is strikingly narrow.
Oddly, that adherence to a narrow band of opinion is largely self-imposed. There are (at least in the United States—the story is sadly rather different in much of Europe) no formal legal constraints on expressing a different point of view. The modes of censorship that leading social media companies, in clandestine cooperation with the state, imposed for the past decade have largely disappeared. There is even a good living in refusing to toe that line: You can accumulate a lot of fame and perhaps ascend to the highest echelons of political power by assailing those respectable nostrums, turning yourself into an angry pundit. But if you happen to be a normie professional who simply wants to enjoy a good career and a peaceful life, the incentive to pay lip service to a list of narrow articles of faith remains overwhelming.
Homogeneity breeds conformity. Because many of these professions are now so dominated by people with one point of view, the rising generation of professionals tends to share the same outlook. And where the conformity isn’t genuine, coercion can create its appearance. Surveys reveal that an astonishing share of people in a broad range of professions regularly engage in self-censorship.
I have come to think of this strange coexistence between an unprecedented variety of opinions that are strongly represented in the public square and the rigid worldview that constrains the beliefs of the most influential people in our society as the paradox of infinite voices and narrow minds. Never before have so many opinions been at our fingertips—and never before have so many professionals felt unable to voice theirs. What explains this paradox, why does it matter, and what can we do about it?
The Brooklynization of the Bourgeoisie
It is impossible to understand the recent politics of the Western world without considering a giant sociological transformation—one that, inevitable though it may seem in retrospect, nearly nobody predicted: The bourgeoisie has switched sides.
For much of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the proletariat was the political stronghold of the left. The bourgeoisie was the stronghold of the right. Indeed, the assumption that affluent professionals would tend to be conservative is reflected in the most famous political treatises and pieces of art that the period produced.
Karl Marx called on the workers, not on the lawyers or freelance illustrators, of the world to unite. The origins of Germany’s Social Democratic Party, of Britain’s Labour Party, and even of the modern-day Democratic Party in the United States lie with factory workers and trade unionists. In Jacques Brel’s song “Les Bourgeois,” three young men mock the conservative pieties of their elders by mooning the notaries of a small French town; when, by song’s end, the protagonists, themselves now middle-aged notaries, respond in anger to being mooned in turn, the obvious implication is that they too have turned into conservatives.
But of late, these realities have started to shift, with huge impacts on contemporary politics. It is astonishing, for example, that according to The Economist, the socio-economic profile of the coalition assembled by Kamala Harris, the Democratic presidential candidate in 2024, most closely resembles the socio-economic profile of the coalition assembled by Bob Dole, the Republican presidential candidate, in 1996. (Unsurprisingly, both lost.)
This transformation is even visible in the realm of popular culture. Take, as an example, the most famous American cartoon of the last decades. When The Simpsons first aired, Homer Simpson was likely a Democrat, his pious neighbor Ned Flanders definitely a Republican. But over the three decades that the show has been on air, the nature of America’s partisan divide has shifted so much that any politically astute viewer would now assume these characters to have rather different loyalties. Flanders may be sufficiently alienated by the coarseness of the populist right to vote for the Democrats; Homer would undoubtedly support Donald Trump.
This transformation has been called by a variety of names. Thomas Piketty has described it as the rise of the Brahmin left. David Brooks has written about the rise of the Bobo. Matthew Yglesias has lamented the rise of The Groups. I propose to call it the Brooklynization of the Bourgeoisie: New York’s wealthy used to live on the Upper East Side, to pride themselves on their old family ties, to value markers of high culture like the opera, and to vote conservative; today, they live in Brooklyn, believe that they have earned their place in the upper echelons of society thanks to succeeding in a meritocratic competition, are more likely to care about rock bands or microbrews, and think of themselves as progressive.
That same transformation also helps to explain the Paradox of Infinite Voices and Narrow Minds. The population of the United States, and of many other Western democracies, is now deeply stratified by educational achievement. The affluent and highly credentialed are mostly on the political left. The working class is increasingly drifting to the political right. And that has deeply transformed the composition, the values, and even the actions of the professional class.
Plumbers are right wing but lawyers are left wing. Cab drivers are right wing but university professors are left wing. Police officers are right wing but civil servants are left wing. And though many professions claim to be apolitical, the plumbers and cab drivers and police officers increasingly suspect that the lawyers and professors and civil servants are letting their political values influence their work. The decline in respect for “experts” is in part owed to the blatant lies spread on social media; but it also has its roots in the real ways in which the consensus within these professions has increasingly come to adhere to a narrowly progressive—and often lamentably erroneous—set of assumptions about the world.
The Brooklynization of the Bourgeoisie also has another side effect. Lawyers, university professors, and civil servants have outsized influence on the rules, norms, and decisions that structure a lot of day-to-day life. And that leaves many less-affluent and less-educated citizens feeling that the democracy they were promised is a sham. “We are the majority,” they complain, “but no one listens to us.”
The resulting state of affairs leaves both sides equally unhappy. Many citizens feel ignored, besieged, and detested by a professional class which believes that it is entitled to rule, and finds the views of many of their compatriots intolerably bigoted. That is of great political significance because, even in highly affluent countries, there are more tradespeople, cab drivers, and police officers than there are lawyers, university professors, and civil servants. Meanwhile, members of the professional class feel bewildered at the lack of respect for their expertise, and fearful that the barbarians at the political gates will soon come for their heads.
What one side perceives as flagrantly unjust domination by the well-credentialed, the other interprets as the perils of revanchist demagoguery.
Barbarians Inside the Gate
There is one group of professionals that I have so far omitted to mention: elected officials. These officials differ from other upper middle-class professionals because voters ostensibly select them for their political views. But in sharp contrast to the past, when many of them, especially on the left, had working-class backgrounds, nearly all of them have also undergone an extensive process of socialization as middle-class professionals. With few exceptions, elected officials in the United States, the United Kingdom, and most of continental Europe, have attended universities, spent long periods of time living in big urban centers of economic opportunity, perhaps worked in fields like the law, media, or academia, and now make upper middle-class wages. If it looks like a professional, talks like a professional, and earns like a professional, then it is probably a professional—with all the cultural and ideological accoutrements that nowadays come with that status.
It should, then, come as no surprise that, as a recent paper by Laurenz Günther shows, a significant gap has formed between the views of elected officials and those of the voters they are supposed to represent. In Germany in 2013, at a time when right-wing populists had not yet made it into the national parliament, for example, the average politician was much more likely than the average voter to say that it should be easier to immigrate to the country. In fact, even the average member of the Bundestag for the Christian Democrats, the most right-leaning party to be represented in that body at that time, was well to the left of the median voter on this question.
Similar gaps of political representation, Günther shows, also held in other countries and for other topics. They are evident in questions about how severe the sentences for violent criminals should be; in questions about whether schools should teach students to obey social authorities; and in questions about whether politicians should prioritize the fight against climate change over economic growth.
There are many partial explanations for the astonishing success of populist parties over the past decade. The rise of the internet and of social media, for example, clearly made it easier for outsiders to storm the political stage and intensified the public’s tendency to see the world in unremittingly negative terms. But as Günther suggests, the big gap in views about cultural topics between most voters and most of their representatives surely played an important role: The most straightforward reason why right-wing populists have gained so much in vote share of late “is that they fill the cultural representation gap.”
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The lack of viewpoint diversity in important professions does real harm to their ability to deliver on their mission. A psychologist who prioritizes the abstract demands of social justice over the well-being of the patient sitting in front of him in his office fails to live up to his duty of healing patients. A social scientist who is so afraid of what her colleagues might say about her latest study if its findings happen to run counter to some sacred article of faith fails to live up to her duty of advancing human knowledge. But these kinds of harms only capture the most immediate impact of the Brooklynization of the Bourgeoisie. Its ultimate harm stems from the representation gap that has opened up between ordinary citizens and those calling the shots in society—and the counterproductive rebellion it inspired.
How Not to MAGA
Populists are able to win power in good part because they promise their voters that they will do what they can to close this representation gap. Legislators, they say, will finally start listening to the views of the people. Professions that have been captured by ideologues enforcing a narrow orthodoxy will be forced to become more representative. Institutions which once had disdain for ordinary people will finally feel their wrath.
There are real reasons why these promises have proven so enticing. Anybody who completely dismisses the fact that this anger is based in real failings of the professional elite is refusing to grapple seriously with this political moment. And yet, the record of populists in India and Turkey, in Hungary and Venezuela suggests that these promises are rarely fulfilled—and the first year of Donald Trump’s second administration in the United States only serves to reinforce that suspicion.
When populists rise to power, they tend to assail institutions that have lost the trust of the population. In the United States, for example, Donald Trump has exploited the unpopularity of universities like Harvard and Columbia by subjecting them to an unprecedented assault from the federal government. The ostensible purpose of this assault was to right the ways in which they had become inhospitable to opinions which violated rigid campus orthodoxies. And in certain particulars, those complaints really were well-founded. It is now, for example, well-documented that the mandatory diversity statements which many universities used in their hiring processes over the course of the past decade in practice forced applicants to pay lip service to the mantras of critical race theory (with anybody who refused to comply excluded from serious consideration).
But it has also quickly become obvious that the White House was never truly interested in broadening the range of views which would be permissible, or even those that would be commonly represented, on the nation’s most prestigious college campuses. Instead, it seems to have two goals, which may stand in slight tension with each other, but are equally inimical to the true cause of viewpoint diversity.
To the extent possible, recent executive orders and other administrative actions by the White House have sought to replace one set of dogmas with another. Instead of pushing back against the forms of ideological coercion which do persist, they have simply created a new set of do’s and don’ts. If it was previously taboo to criticize the nostrums of critical race theory, a raft of new laws, executive orders, and administrative fiats attempt to stifle academics who teach these ideas. And instead of mandating that virtually all research must in some way promote the cause of diversity, public funding bodies have indiscriminately cut grants which commit the faux pas of mentioning such terms in any way—in the most absurd cases, even if they used them in a wholly unpolitical context.
At the same time, the White House also seems to have recognized that no amount of pressure from the federal government will transform the ideological leanings of most faculty at leading universities. And so, its recent activity appears to aim as much at weakening as at transforming these institutions. The point is not to change the culture at institutions which populists rightly recognize as hostile to their worldview; increasingly, it is to weaken the power bastion of their ideological adversary at any cost.
From a purely partisan standpoint, this is probably a shrewd judgment. The cynics in the White House who have concluded that the cause of the MAGA movement is better served by besieging than by reforming universities may be right about how difficult it would be for legislative fiat to undo the long-term effects of a much deeper sociological transformation of the professional class. But anybody who cares about preserving institutions that actually allow a broad range of people to do science, to argue about the world, and to criticize the powerful in honest and intelligent terms should be appalled by what is being sacrificed in the process. To undermine the great contributions that the United States has made in fields from computing to neuroscience in the service of undermining the department of comparative literature is both bad for humanity and for anybody who genuinely aspires to make America great again.
Diversity of Institutions (Within and Between)
It is hard to see a quick way out of the Paradox of Infinite Voices and Narrow Minds. This political moment increasingly resembles a Greek tragedy whose protagonists, unable to grasp the larger forces that determine their actions, are quickly gaining ground on the abyss. The professionals whose values are so far out of keeping with those of the rest of the population and the populists who are promising to use all the power they can amass to let the will of the people prevail see each other as mortal enemies; what neither seems to grasp is that they are actually one another’s biggest assets. And whoever ends up winning, it is the goal of viewpoint diversity—and the deeper values, like freedom of speech and freedom of conscience, with which it is intimately intertwined—which is likely to perish as a result.
The technological forces which have allowed such a great variety of viewpoints to enter the public square are unlikely to subside. The sociological transformations which have created a professional class beholden to an ideologically narrow set of nostrums are unlikely to reverse. And the populists who have been empowered by the resulting gap between the actions of key social institutions and the views of ordinary people are, despite their promises, likely to keep limiting true diversity of viewpoints in their own ways. It’s easy to see how things could go from bad to worse.
For the most part, the solution to this narrow problem hinges on the solution to a much broader set of problems. Institutions that want to sustain broad legitimacy must recall that they should be more beholden to their founding missions than to the ideological predilections of their members. This applies to institutions from Harvard to NPR and from the Ford Foundation to Coca-Cola. It also, of course, applies to political parties: If mainstream parties cared deeply about basic constitutional values, and were able to close the cultural representation gap, they would leave much less oxygen for demagogues who blithely reject those commitments.
There is, however, one more direct change that advocates of viewpoint diversity can try to bring about in the meantime: One of the reasons why a diversity of viewpoints could so quickly have eroded within the professional world has to do with the fact that there has been a concerted attack on the ability to express different opinions in places like Harvard or Columbia. But another big reason is that there is so little true diversity between institutions, with many colleges and law firms and corporations adopting increasingly similar cultures, policies, and operating procedures. And this suggests that one of the partial solutions lies in establishing new institutions that differ radically from the old.
There are over two thousand colleges in the United States. At the lower end of social prestige, there is a great variety of such institutions, from community colleges serving heavily immigrant communities to religious schools preaching the Good News about Jesus. But all the schools at the top range of prestige have over the past decades come to resemble each other to a remarkable degree. However much their respective college tour guides may wax lyrical to visiting high school seniors about their idiosyncratic local traditions, Harvard and Princeton, Yale and Stanford, Duke and Columbia are all examples of what biologists call “convergent evolution.” It is not just in the substance of their prevailing views that they constantly copy and emulate each other; it is also in the design of their curricula, in the way they finance their institutions, and in the criteria they use to select their undergraduate classes.
The same holds true in many other realms. There are tens of thousands of law firms in the United States. But the culture at the most prestigious, from Cravath to Skadden to Wachtell, is much more similar than that variety might suggest to a naive observer. Even the mainstream press suffers from the same malady, especially when it comes to proudly progressive publications. A few decades ago, there were distinctive differences in style and content between Dissent, The Nation, and The New Republic; a well-versed reader could probably have guessed with a high degree of accuracy which article had appeared in which of these publications. Today, these magazines have largely lost their distinctive identities; just about any article which appears in one of these publications could just as easily appear in another.
The situation is, of course, even worse in those areas in which one or two institutions hold outsized sway. Top-level researchers in the natural sciences need to plan their research, more or less, in such a way that it meets with the approval of the National Institutes of Health or the National Science Foundation. Psychologists must abide by the dicta of the American Psychological Association. And researchers in global health better make sure that their proposed work fits the agenda of the biggest private philanthropists in the field, such as the Gates Foundation.
It is this tendency towards convergent evolution which makes it so hard to sustain a genuine variety of thought and opinion within the professional class. If one prestigious university applied different standards for admission and hiring than another, if the culture of one law firm radically diverged from that of another, if the journalistic enforcers of ideological orthodoxies still had genuine debates among themselves, if scientists were not beholden to a tiny number of funding bodies, and if professional associations were less quick to impose their ideological certainties on their members, professionals with dissident—or merely diffident—views would find it much easier to sustain thriving careers and speak their minds.
Thankfully, there are some incipient signs that those professionals who have grown uncomfortable within mainstream institutions, or been cast out for daring to speak up, are starting to organize. Across the country, new universities and alternative media outlets and rival professional associations are forming. It is too early to know whether they will succeed in establishing genuine alternatives to existing structures, and even whether they will actually stick to their ostensible mission of promoting viewpoint diversity. But they are a small green shoot amidst a devastating drought.
The cause of viewpoint diversity remains much imperiled. One of the best ways to serve this embattled cause is to widen our understanding of what its success will require, both now and when the political constellation shall change: true diversity, both within and between institutions. If we want viewpoint diversity, we must not only protect dissenting voices—but also cultivate dissenting institutions.
This essay originally appeared in “Viewpoint Diversity: What It Is, Why We Need It, and How to Get It,” co-edited by John Tomasi and Bernard Schweizer, and published by Heresy Press.
I see a different shift. Many of the most highly educated used to ally themselves with the interest of the working class. Now they ally themselves with the oligarchs. Or is this the same shift you see?
Same. I also wrote about this among energy and climate elites: www.climate of contempt.com