I still do not think Adam gets it. The attack against the professional class doesn't come from some abstract disgust of the professional class. It comes from the fact that the professional class has been so wrong on so many things and yet believe they know what is right and what is wrong because they are credentialed and so they should be the ones everyone should listen to.
Certainly there is a mass anti-elitist feeling since around Trump 2016 & Brexit (often called as an insult, populism).
And certainly that is easy to explain. Bad decisions and particularly a staggering return to 1930s levels of inequality (hence the fascist/communist populism of the 30s).
So how do they PMC avoid maintain their warm liberal opinions of themselves without calling for 75% marginal tax rates - easy - be nice to the minorities - the smaller the minority group the better, transgender is perfect. Be ferociously nice to the tiniest minority.
But of course the other thing is that everyone knows that the media lies about so much. They may not be clear on what the specific lies are but they know they don't make sense. Ukraine reporting does not make sense to anyone who half listens and half remembers for a year. J6, Covid lockdowns, the economy, Gaza, immigration, pretty much nothing makes sense to an occasional thinking person. That triples the level of mistrust for the establishment and the core establishment workforce - the PMC.
One of the pernicious effects of Trumpism is the constant refrain that "everyone knows that the media lies about so much". This isn't right. Trump and Orban lie all the times. Fox lies much of the time, for strategic purposes. Parts of social media are built to lie. But the "mainstream media" are, whether ideologues buy it or not, trying very hard to get the truth out. Of course, they get it wrong some times and sometimes over-weight some stories and the sheer volume of so many stories, so many political lies to fact-check, so many issues (many of which are new and complex and difficult to analyze) makes it hard for anybody to grasp the whole. But denial and denigration of the mainstream media and the "core establishment workforce" compound the problem. If anything "triples the level of mistrust" it is this acceptance of the Trumpistani view of the media, rather than trying to work to sort out the issues to make them make sense to "an occasional thinking person." As indeed, Professor Tooze tries to do with this substack which, alas, probably only reaches card-carrying members of the PMC.
So what's an example of such a "lie"? The product is certainly not perfect, but that doesn't make the imperfections "lies". It's just Trumpist blather to keep saying "lies". At least the MSM undertakes painstaking fact checking. If you're going to claim "lies", a few examples would be in order. (Of course, Trump says the election was stolen and global warming is a hoax, now those are lies.)
You want to pretend that a consistent pattern of failure is somehow exists without a motive for that behavior.
There’s no objective, neutral body that can be counted on to produce objective, neutral data on any subject including the subjects of ‘global warming’ or ‘COVID’ or ‘election results’.
Furthermore, there are no objective, neutral bodies that can be counted on to provide objective, neutral interpretations of data on any subject whatsoever.
All the products of the professions are interested products. They exist to further the interests of the PMC itself or its patrons.
The ‘lie’ is that there any longer exists a body of objective, neutral knowledge outside very specific cases.
No. It's true that there is no fully neutral body that can be counted on infallibly to produce objective, neutral data. But there are lots of academic, media and government organizations that strive mightily to get the data correct, especially on such matters as global warming and COVID (where the facts are highly complex and the methodological problems challenging). As for election results, there there is an objective result, which anyone can see, and which has suffered no serious challenges. It is only Trump and his minions who keep denying the results, thereby undercutting the essential need for people like you and me to accept election results. Otherwise, elections have no meaning. What is the alternative to such efforts, imperfect though they be, to find good data and reasonably objective analysis? If the bottom line is "the medium is the lie", that is nihilism and Trump wins.
This is pretty accurate. Your average person may not know all the details about a given issue but the PMC class has either been so wrong or lied about so many things that now the default feeling among those not part of the PMC is distrust. Also, they trust Trump because he may not know the details of most issues but he has been directionally right about a number of things. Your avg. person does not sit around reading academic papers all day. They make decisions based on gut instinct. That is how Trump tends to make decisions and that is why they trust him more because they can relate to that.
That's right about the gut instincts. One of my favorite Trumpist quotations is, "he thinks like we do". But that only underscores the problem of somehow getting back to a fact-based, analytical approach to problem solving in a very complex society and economy that are facing "poly crisis".
Is it that the PMC has been "so wrong" or that the politicians have taken hold and distorted the response? A purely technocratic solution to the global financial crisis or COVID would have been much more coherent, palatable, and effective. But the political system was incapable of undertaking technocratic solutions and distorted both the necessary debate over such solutions as they were developed and the reaction thereto, resulting in politically convenient "disgust" that served various partisan needs but had little to do with the actual problems or their solutions or planning to avert the next such crisis.
That’s a fair point. It could be less about the PMC being “wrong” about things and instead the incentive structures we have in place leads them towards the wrong decision a lot. I wouldn’t limit it to just politicians. That incentive structure problem is prevalent across media, corporate America, higher learning institutions, etc. However, whether it’s just that they are wrong because they are clueless or because incentive structures are such that they inevitably make the wrong decision the end result is the same which is what your avg person cares about.
The incentive structures are indeed distorting, which is why we have energy companies denying the crushing evidence of global warming. But that indicts only the energy companies and their minions. There are lots of people in the media, in the universities, in the federal and state governments, and even in some corporations that have been doing hard work and pounding the drum for a very long time. They are pushing for the right decisions on those issues, but (a) the economic incentives of those who benefit from fossil fuels and (b) the ability of people like Trump to exploit the suspicions and resentments that arise because some of the solutions are inconvenient for some people thwart making as much progress as is required. The average person will care when he discovers that we have missed the Lampedusa moment (when everything changes so everything stays the same) and we are really headed down the drain of climate change, mass migration, etc., etc.
Adam, I follow your work on LRB as well. All this talk about elites and classes bothers me. Big dark money and Republicans have been working for 60 years to reverse civil rights, social insurance and environment gains by outright lying to a gullible public. After hard work and much spending, they have cornered the legislative, judicial and executive branches of power. Educated, inner-directed people who are not swayed by lies or advertising naturally have shifted toward the Democratic Party because it actually has public policy goals. Right now we're one step from dictatorship. It's an existential crisis for the country, and liberals have tried to prevent it. Big money and small scruples won. Don't get fancy.
I have to agree with you there, Kerry. It was obvious when the Citizens united ruling came down that oligarchs would eventually take total control. Unlimited money+social media= reality distortion = trump. The nation’s founders often pointed out that the American experiment could only survive if the electorate were guided by rationality and a sense of civic virtue.
Health arises from balance. The rights of man arise from a growing middle class. There will always be wealth and poverty, but when a preponderant middle class provides a strong center of gravity, a society prospers. What is needed is a theory of the middle class.
This is the most intelligent thing I have read since the election. There has been much too much repetition of the "Harris lost the working class" trop and too little real analysis around it. This, on the other hand, offers a compelling analysis of the PMC and why a substantial part of the population resents it, but that resentment is in fact rebellion against the complexity of modern society, which professionals are there to try to manage.
One thing that might be added is that the PMC actually looks for technocratic solutions, whether in COVID or in remedying the Global Financial Crisis. (In both of which cases, technocratic solutions have done a lot of good, if not as much good as could have been done with less mindless opposition.)
The analysis is also useful for pointing out the conflict between the PMC and the "business class". In many cases, the lumpen PMC grundoon lawyers and investment bankers and regulators struggle to do the right thing and achieve technocratic solutions against the small cadre of ridiculously paid CEOs and billionaires who always want to dilute bank regulations, water down environmental regulations, or eliminate health and safety regulations for selfish reasons. And then expect the PMCs who populate the government to clean up the mess when crisis strikes (as with the global financial crisis), only to denigrate them when the fix starts working.
I would, however, dispute one analogy: it seems to me the PMC should be called the "gentry" and the "business class" (CEOs and owners of car dealerships alike) the "aristocracy". That would better align the facts to the implicit analogy to early modern England that such terms imply, where the gentry and aristocracy were often opposed, both ideologically and economically.
It’s interesting to note that the PMC is the class most threatened by AI to have their jobs taken. It’s much easier to automate data input and processing than it is to build robots to do skilled manual labor.
That said, AI still can’t (and shouldn’t) make critical decisions for us. AIs still can’t (and probably shouldn’t) design themselves and determine which problems are the highest priority to solve. Highly skilled knowledge workers will always be needed to form and guide these systems, and in turn be informed by their superhuman ability to detect subtle or novel patterns.
So what happens to the PMC as their value erodes, both through market and political forces? There are only so many jobs to be filled by skilled manual workers (construction, maintenance, manufacturing). Upward mobility is highly limited by those already in privileged positions (ie the owning class). Oh, and who’s going to pay all those skilled manual workers in the first place, as their well-compensated clients evaporate? (The owning class is already a relatively small group and can only sustain a small portion of these skilled laborers.)
I can’t imagine any sustainable, humane future that doesn’t require some form of Universal Basic Income. The alternatives are too unpleasant to dwell on. I’d love to be convinced otherwise.
So is the real problem deeper? Are the challenges facing the world (polycrisis) too difficult for the PMC to manage, and too dangerous for the anti-PMC crowd to ignore? The near-term implication seems to be the global anti-incumbent wave that tosses out whomever may be in power. But what's the long-term outcome?
I think the categorization of “class” used in this article was not very useful. Income, in particular, is not a very useful defying factor differentiating classes.
I don’t have the data to make a proper analysis of the 2024 Presidential election, but using this method might have yielded interesting results.
The way I understand it, "class" describes one's relationship to the means of production.
I know an electrical contractor who, year and and year out, makes the kind of money that a Goldman Managing Director makes. I can also tell you that this contractor is treated very differently than the guy from Goldman would be treated.
The problem with using “ one's relationship to the means of production” is that everyone who has a job is producing. That is one of the many reasons why the Marxist view of class is not useful.
If you read the linked article, and particularly the first graphic, you will see a more useful definition.
I read the article. Everyone with a job may be producing, but how they produce can be very different, as can their expected outcomes from such production.
Your model has some compelling arguments, but has one glaring flaw. It assumes a far higher degree of permeability and mobility than actually exists. It assumes that one’s life choices, especially during schooling years, is practically the sole determinant of one’s eventual “class” placement.
Thousands of studies over time have borne out how much influence your family and community have over one’s financial outlook. If you’re born working class or lower class, chances are you’ll always be there, sheerly by dint of circumstances.
Upward mobility exists, surely. Some manage to claw their way up or simply get lucky. But if you’re lucky enough to be born into an affluent family, you’re far LESS likely to loose your status. You have layers upon layers of privilege and protection lower classes can’t even imagine.
The classic explanation for the failure of the Democrats is contain in Thomas Frank's masterly analysis in "Listen Liberal" ...in which he bitingly squewers the Clinton era giving up on the NewDeal politics of Roosevelt for an incoherent lauding of inovation and education. A process emulated in UK by Blair. The result we can see. With Globalism the working class, which are in fact still the majority of people, were effectively thrown under a bus. The disinterest in the real welfare of the working classes, by the professional liberals has just been returned in full. Obama came in and let off wall street to the the righteous anger of ordinary people. Yes We Can...became But We wont! The mass of people could see that wealth was all that mattered. Wall Street escaped richer than ever. A society that shows its every man for himself breeds a respect for a man like Trump. He will fail of course but its going to to be interesting...
Every society needs some type of PMC, the one we have set up is failing: here are 3 supporting claims as to why.
1. The PMC is a product of modern liberal higher education. We have to rethink liberal education prevent the failure of the modern democratic nation state.
2. The philosophical underpinnings of such education, the very core of these institutions, produces a class of people who are
A.uncritical of the markets of ideas they operate in,
B. who whose truth claims are purely contingent on currently accepted processes and
C. who are prohibited from generating theories that are exclusionary of other ideas/perspectives.
This type of institution by its very philosophical dna remains dependent on its benefactors ( corporations and the state— the current dem coalitions.
3. The ownership class which is by nature, more pragmatic but still ruthlessly self-interested represents some respite from the gridlock of the PMC to the average voter.
The emphasis on process, what is trending in the market of ideas, and not building theories that are exclusionary (like some forms of Marxism or religious ones) , can be found in the run up to election. The trending debate around polls resulted in a lot of debate around statistics, but no meaningful theories or action of how to address the results of polls effectively. By contrast no qualitative research on voter views seemed be circulating at all, in which the hard interpretive work could be done. On the economic front the PMC/academic class had no narrative for why economic sentiment was so poor despite good economic data. The interpretative work to be done is increasingly being removed from PMC/academic work as the benefactors of higher ed demand less emphasis on humanities and more on stem.
The antidote is a reformed philosophy of liberalism touted by someone like Richard Rorty. Someone who understands pragmatism, emphasis on freedom of association and expression. Someone who is alive now who I think embodies this is John Mearscheimer. His emphasis on the focus on developing theories is encouraging people to spend less time- and he certainly is a heterodox thinker against state and corporate interests.
Theodore Vail, early president of ATT, convinced the government that a 'regulated monopoly' would be better than a government monopoly for telephones. ATT did fine for a hundred years. Maybe more of our government monopolies TSA FEMA NASA ... should give that a try. The government can fire a contractor; the government can't fire itself.
Classic diversionary tactic from AT; make a big fuss about an amorphous group/class to avoid having to talk about the big question: how to build a progressive coalition that actually wins elections rather than just protests.
“Scrappy, mid-tech Silicon Valley billionaires crowd behind Trump, because the platform giants favor the corporate liberal synthesis offered by Democrats.”
This is such a well written, readable and thought provoking piece. As a Canadian in Canada, I appreciate the prompts to a wider, historically informed context in my learning about your form of government and your electoral processes.
"The besetting error of the Trump camp, by contrast, is to imagine that the modern world can actually function without the expertise, discipline and labor provided by the PMC."
So, I see the error here. You have adopted the idea that the PMC is somehow different and even a new "class" and that they are consumate Dems, Labor or whatever. Reality: the PMC is merely the old petty bourgeois with delusions of grandeur. Trump has his own petty bourgeois adherents which feels they should run the modern world on behalf of the bourgeois. The idea that the modern world can't work without a petty bourgeois is something only the petty bourgeois believe. It is a delusion.
I still do not think Adam gets it. The attack against the professional class doesn't come from some abstract disgust of the professional class. It comes from the fact that the professional class has been so wrong on so many things and yet believe they know what is right and what is wrong because they are credentialed and so they should be the ones everyone should listen to.
Certainly there is a mass anti-elitist feeling since around Trump 2016 & Brexit (often called as an insult, populism).
And certainly that is easy to explain. Bad decisions and particularly a staggering return to 1930s levels of inequality (hence the fascist/communist populism of the 30s).
So how do they PMC avoid maintain their warm liberal opinions of themselves without calling for 75% marginal tax rates - easy - be nice to the minorities - the smaller the minority group the better, transgender is perfect. Be ferociously nice to the tiniest minority.
But of course the other thing is that everyone knows that the media lies about so much. They may not be clear on what the specific lies are but they know they don't make sense. Ukraine reporting does not make sense to anyone who half listens and half remembers for a year. J6, Covid lockdowns, the economy, Gaza, immigration, pretty much nothing makes sense to an occasional thinking person. That triples the level of mistrust for the establishment and the core establishment workforce - the PMC.
One of the pernicious effects of Trumpism is the constant refrain that "everyone knows that the media lies about so much". This isn't right. Trump and Orban lie all the times. Fox lies much of the time, for strategic purposes. Parts of social media are built to lie. But the "mainstream media" are, whether ideologues buy it or not, trying very hard to get the truth out. Of course, they get it wrong some times and sometimes over-weight some stories and the sheer volume of so many stories, so many political lies to fact-check, so many issues (many of which are new and complex and difficult to analyze) makes it hard for anybody to grasp the whole. But denial and denigration of the mainstream media and the "core establishment workforce" compound the problem. If anything "triples the level of mistrust" it is this acceptance of the Trumpistani view of the media, rather than trying to work to sort out the issues to make them make sense to "an occasional thinking person." As indeed, Professor Tooze tries to do with this substack which, alas, probably only reaches card-carrying members of the PMC.
The mainstream media lies. You just prefer their lies to whatever else is out there. The mainstream media is a crappy product.
So what's an example of such a "lie"? The product is certainly not perfect, but that doesn't make the imperfections "lies". It's just Trumpist blather to keep saying "lies". At least the MSM undertakes painstaking fact checking. If you're going to claim "lies", a few examples would be in order. (Of course, Trump says the election was stolen and global warming is a hoax, now those are lies.)
You want to pretend that a consistent pattern of failure is somehow exists without a motive for that behavior.
There’s no objective, neutral body that can be counted on to produce objective, neutral data on any subject including the subjects of ‘global warming’ or ‘COVID’ or ‘election results’.
Furthermore, there are no objective, neutral bodies that can be counted on to provide objective, neutral interpretations of data on any subject whatsoever.
All the products of the professions are interested products. They exist to further the interests of the PMC itself or its patrons.
The ‘lie’ is that there any longer exists a body of objective, neutral knowledge outside very specific cases.
And none of those cases involves ‘the new’.
The medium is the lie.
No. It's true that there is no fully neutral body that can be counted on infallibly to produce objective, neutral data. But there are lots of academic, media and government organizations that strive mightily to get the data correct, especially on such matters as global warming and COVID (where the facts are highly complex and the methodological problems challenging). As for election results, there there is an objective result, which anyone can see, and which has suffered no serious challenges. It is only Trump and his minions who keep denying the results, thereby undercutting the essential need for people like you and me to accept election results. Otherwise, elections have no meaning. What is the alternative to such efforts, imperfect though they be, to find good data and reasonably objective analysis? If the bottom line is "the medium is the lie", that is nihilism and Trump wins.
This is pretty accurate. Your average person may not know all the details about a given issue but the PMC class has either been so wrong or lied about so many things that now the default feeling among those not part of the PMC is distrust. Also, they trust Trump because he may not know the details of most issues but he has been directionally right about a number of things. Your avg. person does not sit around reading academic papers all day. They make decisions based on gut instinct. That is how Trump tends to make decisions and that is why they trust him more because they can relate to that.
That's right about the gut instincts. One of my favorite Trumpist quotations is, "he thinks like we do". But that only underscores the problem of somehow getting back to a fact-based, analytical approach to problem solving in a very complex society and economy that are facing "poly crisis".
Is it that the PMC has been "so wrong" or that the politicians have taken hold and distorted the response? A purely technocratic solution to the global financial crisis or COVID would have been much more coherent, palatable, and effective. But the political system was incapable of undertaking technocratic solutions and distorted both the necessary debate over such solutions as they were developed and the reaction thereto, resulting in politically convenient "disgust" that served various partisan needs but had little to do with the actual problems or their solutions or planning to avert the next such crisis.
That’s a fair point. It could be less about the PMC being “wrong” about things and instead the incentive structures we have in place leads them towards the wrong decision a lot. I wouldn’t limit it to just politicians. That incentive structure problem is prevalent across media, corporate America, higher learning institutions, etc. However, whether it’s just that they are wrong because they are clueless or because incentive structures are such that they inevitably make the wrong decision the end result is the same which is what your avg person cares about.
The incentive structures are indeed distorting, which is why we have energy companies denying the crushing evidence of global warming. But that indicts only the energy companies and their minions. There are lots of people in the media, in the universities, in the federal and state governments, and even in some corporations that have been doing hard work and pounding the drum for a very long time. They are pushing for the right decisions on those issues, but (a) the economic incentives of those who benefit from fossil fuels and (b) the ability of people like Trump to exploit the suspicions and resentments that arise because some of the solutions are inconvenient for some people thwart making as much progress as is required. The average person will care when he discovers that we have missed the Lampedusa moment (when everything changes so everything stays the same) and we are really headed down the drain of climate change, mass migration, etc., etc.
You were right the first time. The 'professions' have become as corrupt and self-serving as the Catholic priesthood in the era of indulges.
Adam, I follow your work on LRB as well. All this talk about elites and classes bothers me. Big dark money and Republicans have been working for 60 years to reverse civil rights, social insurance and environment gains by outright lying to a gullible public. After hard work and much spending, they have cornered the legislative, judicial and executive branches of power. Educated, inner-directed people who are not swayed by lies or advertising naturally have shifted toward the Democratic Party because it actually has public policy goals. Right now we're one step from dictatorship. It's an existential crisis for the country, and liberals have tried to prevent it. Big money and small scruples won. Don't get fancy.
I have to agree with you there, Kerry. It was obvious when the Citizens united ruling came down that oligarchs would eventually take total control. Unlimited money+social media= reality distortion = trump. The nation’s founders often pointed out that the American experiment could only survive if the electorate were guided by rationality and a sense of civic virtue.
Health arises from balance. The rights of man arise from a growing middle class. There will always be wealth and poverty, but when a preponderant middle class provides a strong center of gravity, a society prospers. What is needed is a theory of the middle class.
This is the most intelligent thing I have read since the election. There has been much too much repetition of the "Harris lost the working class" trop and too little real analysis around it. This, on the other hand, offers a compelling analysis of the PMC and why a substantial part of the population resents it, but that resentment is in fact rebellion against the complexity of modern society, which professionals are there to try to manage.
One thing that might be added is that the PMC actually looks for technocratic solutions, whether in COVID or in remedying the Global Financial Crisis. (In both of which cases, technocratic solutions have done a lot of good, if not as much good as could have been done with less mindless opposition.)
The analysis is also useful for pointing out the conflict between the PMC and the "business class". In many cases, the lumpen PMC grundoon lawyers and investment bankers and regulators struggle to do the right thing and achieve technocratic solutions against the small cadre of ridiculously paid CEOs and billionaires who always want to dilute bank regulations, water down environmental regulations, or eliminate health and safety regulations for selfish reasons. And then expect the PMCs who populate the government to clean up the mess when crisis strikes (as with the global financial crisis), only to denigrate them when the fix starts working.
I would, however, dispute one analogy: it seems to me the PMC should be called the "gentry" and the "business class" (CEOs and owners of car dealerships alike) the "aristocracy". That would better align the facts to the implicit analogy to early modern England that such terms imply, where the gentry and aristocracy were often opposed, both ideologically and economically.
It’s interesting to note that the PMC is the class most threatened by AI to have their jobs taken. It’s much easier to automate data input and processing than it is to build robots to do skilled manual labor.
That said, AI still can’t (and shouldn’t) make critical decisions for us. AIs still can’t (and probably shouldn’t) design themselves and determine which problems are the highest priority to solve. Highly skilled knowledge workers will always be needed to form and guide these systems, and in turn be informed by their superhuman ability to detect subtle or novel patterns.
So what happens to the PMC as their value erodes, both through market and political forces? There are only so many jobs to be filled by skilled manual workers (construction, maintenance, manufacturing). Upward mobility is highly limited by those already in privileged positions (ie the owning class). Oh, and who’s going to pay all those skilled manual workers in the first place, as their well-compensated clients evaporate? (The owning class is already a relatively small group and can only sustain a small portion of these skilled laborers.)
I can’t imagine any sustainable, humane future that doesn’t require some form of Universal Basic Income. The alternatives are too unpleasant to dwell on. I’d love to be convinced otherwise.
So is the real problem deeper? Are the challenges facing the world (polycrisis) too difficult for the PMC to manage, and too dangerous for the anti-PMC crowd to ignore? The near-term implication seems to be the global anti-incumbent wave that tosses out whomever may be in power. But what's the long-term outcome?
I think the categorization of “class” used in this article was not very useful. Income, in particular, is not a very useful defying factor differentiating classes.
I don’t have the data to make a proper analysis of the 2024 Presidential election, but using this method might have yielded interesting results.
https://frompovertytoprogress.substack.com/p/understanding-class-in-american-society
The way I understand it, "class" describes one's relationship to the means of production.
I know an electrical contractor who, year and and year out, makes the kind of money that a Goldman Managing Director makes. I can also tell you that this contractor is treated very differently than the guy from Goldman would be treated.
The problem with using “ one's relationship to the means of production” is that everyone who has a job is producing. That is one of the many reasons why the Marxist view of class is not useful.
If you read the linked article, and particularly the first graphic, you will see a more useful definition.
I read the article. Everyone with a job may be producing, but how they produce can be very different, as can their expected outcomes from such production.
Your model has some compelling arguments, but has one glaring flaw. It assumes a far higher degree of permeability and mobility than actually exists. It assumes that one’s life choices, especially during schooling years, is practically the sole determinant of one’s eventual “class” placement.
Thousands of studies over time have borne out how much influence your family and community have over one’s financial outlook. If you’re born working class or lower class, chances are you’ll always be there, sheerly by dint of circumstances.
Upward mobility exists, surely. Some manage to claw their way up or simply get lucky. But if you’re lucky enough to be born into an affluent family, you’re far LESS likely to loose your status. You have layers upon layers of privilege and protection lower classes can’t even imagine.
You have an interesting take in this Note - almost like we read two different Notes.
The classic explanation for the failure of the Democrats is contain in Thomas Frank's masterly analysis in "Listen Liberal" ...in which he bitingly squewers the Clinton era giving up on the NewDeal politics of Roosevelt for an incoherent lauding of inovation and education. A process emulated in UK by Blair. The result we can see. With Globalism the working class, which are in fact still the majority of people, were effectively thrown under a bus. The disinterest in the real welfare of the working classes, by the professional liberals has just been returned in full. Obama came in and let off wall street to the the righteous anger of ordinary people. Yes We Can...became But We wont! The mass of people could see that wealth was all that mattered. Wall Street escaped richer than ever. A society that shows its every man for himself breeds a respect for a man like Trump. He will fail of course but its going to to be interesting...
Every society needs some type of PMC, the one we have set up is failing: here are 3 supporting claims as to why.
1. The PMC is a product of modern liberal higher education. We have to rethink liberal education prevent the failure of the modern democratic nation state.
2. The philosophical underpinnings of such education, the very core of these institutions, produces a class of people who are
A.uncritical of the markets of ideas they operate in,
B. who whose truth claims are purely contingent on currently accepted processes and
C. who are prohibited from generating theories that are exclusionary of other ideas/perspectives.
This type of institution by its very philosophical dna remains dependent on its benefactors ( corporations and the state— the current dem coalitions.
3. The ownership class which is by nature, more pragmatic but still ruthlessly self-interested represents some respite from the gridlock of the PMC to the average voter.
The emphasis on process, what is trending in the market of ideas, and not building theories that are exclusionary (like some forms of Marxism or religious ones) , can be found in the run up to election. The trending debate around polls resulted in a lot of debate around statistics, but no meaningful theories or action of how to address the results of polls effectively. By contrast no qualitative research on voter views seemed be circulating at all, in which the hard interpretive work could be done. On the economic front the PMC/academic class had no narrative for why economic sentiment was so poor despite good economic data. The interpretative work to be done is increasingly being removed from PMC/academic work as the benefactors of higher ed demand less emphasis on humanities and more on stem.
The antidote is a reformed philosophy of liberalism touted by someone like Richard Rorty. Someone who understands pragmatism, emphasis on freedom of association and expression. Someone who is alive now who I think embodies this is John Mearscheimer. His emphasis on the focus on developing theories is encouraging people to spend less time- and he certainly is a heterodox thinker against state and corporate interests.
Theodore Vail, early president of ATT, convinced the government that a 'regulated monopoly' would be better than a government monopoly for telephones. ATT did fine for a hundred years. Maybe more of our government monopolies TSA FEMA NASA ... should give that a try. The government can fire a contractor; the government can't fire itself.
Classic diversionary tactic from AT; make a big fuss about an amorphous group/class to avoid having to talk about the big question: how to build a progressive coalition that actually wins elections rather than just protests.
colourful categories make for colourful restatements. something is happening here and we don't know what it is,do we?
Adam, can you check this sentence, please?
“Scrappy, mid-tech Silicon Valley billionaires crowd behind Trump, because the platform giants favor the corporate liberal synthesis offered by Democrats.”
This is such a well written, readable and thought provoking piece. As a Canadian in Canada, I appreciate the prompts to a wider, historically informed context in my learning about your form of government and your electoral processes.
🤣
"The besetting error of the Trump camp, by contrast, is to imagine that the modern world can actually function without the expertise, discipline and labor provided by the PMC."
So, I see the error here. You have adopted the idea that the PMC is somehow different and even a new "class" and that they are consumate Dems, Labor or whatever. Reality: the PMC is merely the old petty bourgeois with delusions of grandeur. Trump has his own petty bourgeois adherents which feels they should run the modern world on behalf of the bourgeois. The idea that the modern world can't work without a petty bourgeois is something only the petty bourgeois believe. It is a delusion.