I think this is one of the most helpful modern analyses of class I’ve seen! I have seen many political writers trying to conflate the PMC with the PB, and I think your analysis parses these groups out more accurately.
The new PB (educated but downwardly mobile urban dwelling gig workers) really accurately describes myself and many people in my social circle. I also think we are too obsessed with pointing the finger at identity as the source of all our problems because identity can sometimes be a barrier to success within the PMC (even if it doesn’t really explain our relationship to the capitalist class well).
Two big examples of this I see are women who have kids and have to leave their higher paying PMC job for more flexible gig work, and people who become sick/injured/disabled who can no longer work 9-5s (in many cases 8-7s) and have to become creative about how they make an income. There is a resentment among us toward the PMC because we can no longer be a part of it, but we inappropriately frame this resentment using social justice rhetoric (probably because we picked it up at university) — and have even warped feminism or even disability advocacy so that they fit our particular resentments.
This is a good analysis, but I think you missed a point which is more psychological than economic. And very hard to get for anyone who has not worked in a traditional petite bourgeois job, because the capitalists have worked very hard to erase the idea. And this is the idea of free speech. When the idea was first floated in America, it was by petite bourgeois craftsmen and farmers- men whose livelihoods were somewhat independent of their politics.
The Red Scare and McCarthy era of American politics happened at the same time more and more American left or lost family farms or small businesses to become wage workers. My parents were children during the McCarthy era, and have stories of their parents having to take the family to anti-communist meetings to avoid being labelled "pinkos" and black-listed. And my grandparents were college-educated in a time when that was rare and quite well-off. But they had less freedom of expression than many blue collar workers.
Many people fail to understand the precarity of American workers or the anxiety that precarity creates. Workers are forced to perform social conformity to be employable and thus survive, because most of us are at will employees and can be be fired on a whim- which makes it very hard to avoid being fired for being a unionist or having political differences- your boss can fire you for being a unionist, then claim they didn't like your eyebrows and then the employee has to pay to prove in a court of law that their eyebrows were irrelevant.
Unions were the bulwark against this sort of coercive control of the working class. I recommend watching Sean O-Brien's speech to the RNC (he's the Teamster's president). https://youtu.be/0pDnocISOKc?si=84zHj5fabJPxhHnM He talks about how he can come say what he wants in front of the RNC and call out people far more powerful than him because if they come after him and ruin him, he can still just dust off his CDL and union card and go back to driving a truck and getting a fair union wage and real health insurance. That's a sort of freedom of speech very few American workers have- protection not just from government persecution but from economic persecution.
The woke put themselves firmly against this sort of freedom of speech with cancel culture. While there were very few working class targets of cancel culture, the whole idea rightfully offended the working class. The idea that decades of work building a career could be destroyed with an offensive Tweet really riled people who already had to make sure their Facebook profile was acceptable in case a hiring manager at Dollar General cyber-stalked them. The woke cancel culture thing begged the question of whether your boss should be able to fire you for your views and activities outside of work. And in a culture where employment looks more and more like ownership every year, with employees expected to answer work emails at their kids birthday parties, the working class was angry with the idea that there should not be a divide between work and home. Cancel culture was a massive enclosure of the private sphere- a way of saying your home life and free time belong to your employer. It was a way of saying that your employer has not only the right but the responsibility to supervise you all the time. The cultural implication of cancel culture was to replace the paterfamilias with the employer as paterfamilias responsible for the moral instruction and obedience of their employees. That the anti-worker implications of this were ignored astonished me.
And of course, the desire for more jobs is somewhat linked to this. Workers have more power within high demand fields- antivax nurses and racist linemen are basically un-cancellable because their skills are needed too much. However, Americans are foolish to pretend like all jobs can be in demand all the time and so they can be protected by the demand for labor. In the end, only worker's power in the form of unions can really protect workers from the caprice of employers.
And I think this is a lot of what pushed people to support Trump. They knew either party was going to fuck them over- they just didn't want to be expected to fake an orgasm for it. Even still, I think the support for Trump has been rationalized too much. I think there are some other big missing pieces. One being the aging population- the dementia vote is becoming a real thing. I've seen several die-hard union Democrats turn into Trumpers. Some of it I think is legitimately due to the politics and economics. But there is also an aspect of cognitive decline for a lot of them in terms of not being able to keep up or think critically.
Another factor is the shift in culture regarding neurodivergence. People tend to focus on the rising rates of ADHD and autism as a measure of alienation or internal mental turmoil. But from a forest-not-trees perspective, it can also be seen as a measure of how tolerant society is of minor differences- a measure of where the line between "weird" and "pathologically weird" is drawn by a society- and this often is related to employability. Relating to cancel culture, how many of the blue collar tradesmen who are afraid of #metoo and woke culture are the hyperactive boys of the 1960s and 1970s who would be diagnosed with ADHD in the modern day. But that was considered a valid personality type back then and they were steered into the trades. They have good reason to fear that they will blurt out something dumb, or be distracted by a woman, and not be able to represent or defend themselves well in the social sphere. For all of the left's lip service to neurodivergence, woke spaces are hell on actually neurodivergent people- think of the autistic person who actually has to understand gender to be ok with it or the ADHD person who interrupts others- being argumentative and interrupting is kind of peak cis-hetero-white-man behavior. Estimates of what percentage of the population is neurodivergent run into the double digits. And neurodivergent people often do very well in a niche which can accommodate their differences- meaning they often become leaders in those niches and exercise an outsize influence. Think of the fear it could inspire in a successful union tradesman's heart to have escaped the confines of school and proper society to become a lineman during the week/ outlaw biker on the weekends and then to have proper society come and insert itself into the union and attempt to take over their niche? At worst, they feel that women and minorities who just want to a good job are actually a vanguard for the corporate enclosure of their surviving niches where skill and getting the job done matter more than a lack of social skills or impulsive idiocy.
I'm just not convinced by the economic arguments for why blue collar workers supported Trump. I'm sure they played a part, but there are so many other ways blue collar workers could have gone, and Trump's promises could only be believed by the very dumbest of people. As someone who has worked blue collar jobs most of my life, I'm aware that many of the people voting for Trump are usually not as gullible and stupid as they'd have to be to take Trump as face value. I see it as far more of a protest vote- cutting off their noses to spite the face of the Democrats. They want to "show the libs"- maybe literally. Show the libs what it feels like to have a crazy megalomaniac in control. Show the libs what it is like to have the reality you can see before your eyes denied from the highest offices of the country.
Question. If someone has an office job but is not in any way a 'manager' in that job, is one then PMC? Because that's me and so many other people. I really don't feel rich and powerful.
Secretaries, telemarketers, receptionists, office admins, and other non-managerial office workers -- especially if they're waged instead of salaried -- tend to fall in the working class or the lower NPB. Tech workers (coders, etc) tend to be in the upper NPB or lower PMC.
Also important to note that a waged worker in a traditional industrial sector job (machinist, for example) can still have a much higher income than a PhD-holding adjunct professor. But the former would be working class and the latter squarely NPB. So, current wages and living situation don't immediate determine class relations (these are always in flux anyway).
Where would non-profit workers fall within this matrix? My town is loaded with them, all college educated, and not making much money (compensated with virtue credits). Some are part-time (gig-type or hourly wage) executive directors often as the singular employee of environmental advocacy groups, urban garden orgs, get out the vote groups, etc.. The mobility I've seen is they achieve elected office or get hired onto an office holder's staff.
Almost all probably New Petite Bourgeoisie, especially in regards to the precarious situation of many of them. Once they get into office, though, they've arrived at their PMC dream goal -- until their term ends...
Where would public school teachers fall within the class structure? Working class, lower PMC? I do know that (in California at least) there's a strong pressure among teachers to conform to PMC ideology, but at the same time, school administrators use said ideology to discipline and pressure the teachers below them. For example, pressuring them to reduce standards and "cook the books" regarding grades-- especially for minority students-- so that on paper the school looks more effective than it is. This is all to secure funding.
And how about managers at chain retail stores? They're managerial obviously, but they seem pretty outside of all this ideological stuff.
Thanks for this post by the way-- you've got my head swimming with thoughts.
Most school teachers fall somewhere between the NPB and the PMC. In fact, teachers were originally seen squarely as part of the PMC by the Ehrenreichs because their specific role is to train and discipline new workers.
But they rarely actually get the pay the PMC get. And you're absolutely right: they're pressured to adopt PMC ideals, despite not getting that pay. Worse, their proximity to actual poor people (literally seeing them every day in class) means they're caught in an awful state where they are expected to manage the poor while also being in a unique position to see the effects of poverty on people.
Managers of most sorts are PMC, though this is also a spectrum. A factory foreman, for example, is usually more in the "overseer" position that existed on many slave plantations. They were themselves slaves, but given a little more freedom in return for keeping the other slaves from running away or shirking their unpaid work.
And maybe important to point out that not everyone in each class has "class consciousness." Just as most workers don't really understand their position as workers versus the owners, plenty of NPB people see themselves as "working class" or plenty of PMC aren't aware of their role in maintaining the capitalist order.
Perhaps you mentioned this, another item is the PMC wailing about restricting “disinformation”, Joe Rogan and others, basically calling for government and corporate run censorship - attempts to do this have been amply revealed- and even complaining about the 1st amendment’s protection of free speech. The jig is up, and a big section of society isn’t obediently swallowing the approved “information” and listening to/reading other unapproved stuff. This is terrifying to our “betters”.
That was a good class analysis, it helped me make more sense of the troubled times we live in! I would like to add some personal observations. Economically I fall clearly into the NPB as you describe it ... and yet what you write about their class standpoint does not fully square with my own experiences. Maybe I belong to a minor subclass that is not that relevant for the whole picture, maybe it has to do with the fact that I live in Europe where there's still a halfway decent social security net, but maybe the change of attitudes within the NPB is already gaining traction.
So, my apologies for the lengthy comment. But it seems like this is a good place to talk about these things, and hopefully you and the other readers can treat this as a case study.
To start with, I grew up in economically rather modest circumstances in the Ruhrgebiet, a declining industrial area in West Germany. None of my grandparents had been born there, though - that's what two world wars and communism can do for you. What my parents taught me about politics was roughly this: 'We vote for the Left, because the Left is at least theoretically for the poorer people, and we're definitely not rich. But don't expect too much from them, they are at best the lesser evil. There was some potential for a change for the better in the sixties, but that is long gone. And never trust anyone who has a big plan to remake all of society. We've seen where that leads. That is where Grandma and Grandpa fled from.'
Now, my father is and my late mother was intensely interested in the world around them, and hungry for knowledge and learning. Not as a springboard into a different economic class (at least not during my lifetime, it's hard for me to tell what motivated them when they were very young) but as some sort of natural drive. My mother, in particular, went to a university but never got a degree because other things had become more important for her. But I must have inherited that drive, and having shown a knack for mathematics I went to university too and got my PhD, the first in the family. (Incidentally, I soon learned that many of my fellow students saw themselves as leftists, but they seemed to mean very different things from the labour-union leftism I had imbibed from my parents ...) The bubble of professors and fellow students I was in pushed me to pursue an academic career, and I put myself under a lot of pressure even though I was not happy at all. Tellingly, my parents did not push me, quite the contrary.
Well, I did not stay in academia, for a number of reasons. I do think that I probably could have made it on terms of my mathematical abilities - but it would have eaten my soul. Now I am on a much bumpier road, earning a fraction of a full professor's salary - but it is honest work that is valued by sufficently many people that they pay me a living, which is an experience I never had at university, where I was paid for the promise professors saw in me and not for the work I actually did.
When I was young and idealistic, I wanted to be a professor - essentially I had a romantic, 19th century ideal of a learned gentleman (I still see a lot of good in that ideal). Over time I realized that while there are still learned gentlemen (and gentlewomen!) among the professoriate, they are such despite their job, not by virtue of their job. Being a professor, today, presses you into serving a technocratic system hostile to true learning and understanding.
I think there is a larger pattern: Those people who study because they love their subject, because they really want to know and understand something and they can think independently and ask new questions, tend to be so frustrated by academia that they either leave and find some other way to earn money (which often lands them in the NPB because they are temperamentally just as unable to work for a corporation or for the government) or stay there and try to live from the professors' breadcrumbs (which also makes them NPB). Those people, on the other hand, who have some talent in their field but are focussed mainly on their career jump through all the hoops and adapt all their opinions and pursue just the kind of boring and uninspired research which fits into a technocratic mass institution, so they become PMC. That's painted with a very broad brush, of course!
Now, I see a clear difference in attitudes between myself, my NPB colleagues, and the people I know who genuinely care about learning or science or art, on the one hand, and the PMC members that I also know (and actually like, because they are still good people) on the other hand: that is, the former tend to be economically left-wing but culturally more conservative, the latter tend to share the PMC ideology to some degree. I've disentangled myself from the annoyingly ideological ones, but even among the thoughtful ones there's a marked tendency.
In particular, among myself and the people with a broadly similar situation, I see no disdain of the working class, but there is certainly resentment against the PMC. So, you see, there are some NPB's who see themselves next to the working class and are starting to like it!
I'm a paid subscriber, but I urge you to make this available to everyone! It's the most insightful summary of our current political landscape that I've read. Bravo. Let everyone read it. It's important.
The issue with the tariffs is that there is simply no way they are going to do what Trump wants them to do. In order for tariffs to protect a domestic industry, there has to be a domestic industry to protect, and there simply isn't. So the tariffs are going to hit the working classes the hardest as they're the ones that have to actually buy the stuff that is being taxed.
Yeah the time for tariffs and protection of domestic industry was 30 years ago. Back then WalMart was doing a made in America campaign which they soon quietly dropped. I remember at the same time Pat Buchanan telling the Republican Party that tariffs were needed but they drank the free trade globalist corporate kool aid instead.
It occurs to me a global carbon tax would really help to revive local manufacturing, as it would make local production more cost competitive. Not that I think it's likely to happen.
Putting my response here to keep it anonymous. I would to do a gift subscription for clearly me who made the comment on your latest post. Went to gift subscription and couldn’t figure out how to do it. A proposal I upgrade to founding and you let her piggyback on me or you add the buy me a coffee option and I put 60 there.
Mask mandates and vaccines were necessary to curb the virus, they didn't oppress the working classes any more then any other class. Equating vaccine faith to the eucharist risks verging into anti-science territory, and mirrors whet the right often do with climate change.
You are of course correct that there are very legitimate grievances amongst the working classes, and Trump is skilled at selling his snakeoil, just as Hitler was in late Weimar Germany. The left mostly no longer exist in any meaningful sense.
Tariffs and mass deportations would only massively exacerbate economic problems; they would cause prices to rise, produce to rot and houses to stay unbuilt. Neither are they going to happen - Amazon et al needs cheap labour and cheap imported crap to stay in business.
The working classes need to start educating and organising themselves, because no one is coming to save them.
I think this is one of the most helpful modern analyses of class I’ve seen! I have seen many political writers trying to conflate the PMC with the PB, and I think your analysis parses these groups out more accurately.
The new PB (educated but downwardly mobile urban dwelling gig workers) really accurately describes myself and many people in my social circle. I also think we are too obsessed with pointing the finger at identity as the source of all our problems because identity can sometimes be a barrier to success within the PMC (even if it doesn’t really explain our relationship to the capitalist class well).
Two big examples of this I see are women who have kids and have to leave their higher paying PMC job for more flexible gig work, and people who become sick/injured/disabled who can no longer work 9-5s (in many cases 8-7s) and have to become creative about how they make an income. There is a resentment among us toward the PMC because we can no longer be a part of it, but we inappropriately frame this resentment using social justice rhetoric (probably because we picked it up at university) — and have even warped feminism or even disability advocacy so that they fit our particular resentments.
This is a good analysis, but I think you missed a point which is more psychological than economic. And very hard to get for anyone who has not worked in a traditional petite bourgeois job, because the capitalists have worked very hard to erase the idea. And this is the idea of free speech. When the idea was first floated in America, it was by petite bourgeois craftsmen and farmers- men whose livelihoods were somewhat independent of their politics.
The Red Scare and McCarthy era of American politics happened at the same time more and more American left or lost family farms or small businesses to become wage workers. My parents were children during the McCarthy era, and have stories of their parents having to take the family to anti-communist meetings to avoid being labelled "pinkos" and black-listed. And my grandparents were college-educated in a time when that was rare and quite well-off. But they had less freedom of expression than many blue collar workers.
Many people fail to understand the precarity of American workers or the anxiety that precarity creates. Workers are forced to perform social conformity to be employable and thus survive, because most of us are at will employees and can be be fired on a whim- which makes it very hard to avoid being fired for being a unionist or having political differences- your boss can fire you for being a unionist, then claim they didn't like your eyebrows and then the employee has to pay to prove in a court of law that their eyebrows were irrelevant.
Unions were the bulwark against this sort of coercive control of the working class. I recommend watching Sean O-Brien's speech to the RNC (he's the Teamster's president). https://youtu.be/0pDnocISOKc?si=84zHj5fabJPxhHnM He talks about how he can come say what he wants in front of the RNC and call out people far more powerful than him because if they come after him and ruin him, he can still just dust off his CDL and union card and go back to driving a truck and getting a fair union wage and real health insurance. That's a sort of freedom of speech very few American workers have- protection not just from government persecution but from economic persecution.
The woke put themselves firmly against this sort of freedom of speech with cancel culture. While there were very few working class targets of cancel culture, the whole idea rightfully offended the working class. The idea that decades of work building a career could be destroyed with an offensive Tweet really riled people who already had to make sure their Facebook profile was acceptable in case a hiring manager at Dollar General cyber-stalked them. The woke cancel culture thing begged the question of whether your boss should be able to fire you for your views and activities outside of work. And in a culture where employment looks more and more like ownership every year, with employees expected to answer work emails at their kids birthday parties, the working class was angry with the idea that there should not be a divide between work and home. Cancel culture was a massive enclosure of the private sphere- a way of saying your home life and free time belong to your employer. It was a way of saying that your employer has not only the right but the responsibility to supervise you all the time. The cultural implication of cancel culture was to replace the paterfamilias with the employer as paterfamilias responsible for the moral instruction and obedience of their employees. That the anti-worker implications of this were ignored astonished me.
And of course, the desire for more jobs is somewhat linked to this. Workers have more power within high demand fields- antivax nurses and racist linemen are basically un-cancellable because their skills are needed too much. However, Americans are foolish to pretend like all jobs can be in demand all the time and so they can be protected by the demand for labor. In the end, only worker's power in the form of unions can really protect workers from the caprice of employers.
And I think this is a lot of what pushed people to support Trump. They knew either party was going to fuck them over- they just didn't want to be expected to fake an orgasm for it. Even still, I think the support for Trump has been rationalized too much. I think there are some other big missing pieces. One being the aging population- the dementia vote is becoming a real thing. I've seen several die-hard union Democrats turn into Trumpers. Some of it I think is legitimately due to the politics and economics. But there is also an aspect of cognitive decline for a lot of them in terms of not being able to keep up or think critically.
Another factor is the shift in culture regarding neurodivergence. People tend to focus on the rising rates of ADHD and autism as a measure of alienation or internal mental turmoil. But from a forest-not-trees perspective, it can also be seen as a measure of how tolerant society is of minor differences- a measure of where the line between "weird" and "pathologically weird" is drawn by a society- and this often is related to employability. Relating to cancel culture, how many of the blue collar tradesmen who are afraid of #metoo and woke culture are the hyperactive boys of the 1960s and 1970s who would be diagnosed with ADHD in the modern day. But that was considered a valid personality type back then and they were steered into the trades. They have good reason to fear that they will blurt out something dumb, or be distracted by a woman, and not be able to represent or defend themselves well in the social sphere. For all of the left's lip service to neurodivergence, woke spaces are hell on actually neurodivergent people- think of the autistic person who actually has to understand gender to be ok with it or the ADHD person who interrupts others- being argumentative and interrupting is kind of peak cis-hetero-white-man behavior. Estimates of what percentage of the population is neurodivergent run into the double digits. And neurodivergent people often do very well in a niche which can accommodate their differences- meaning they often become leaders in those niches and exercise an outsize influence. Think of the fear it could inspire in a successful union tradesman's heart to have escaped the confines of school and proper society to become a lineman during the week/ outlaw biker on the weekends and then to have proper society come and insert itself into the union and attempt to take over their niche? At worst, they feel that women and minorities who just want to a good job are actually a vanguard for the corporate enclosure of their surviving niches where skill and getting the job done matter more than a lack of social skills or impulsive idiocy.
I'm just not convinced by the economic arguments for why blue collar workers supported Trump. I'm sure they played a part, but there are so many other ways blue collar workers could have gone, and Trump's promises could only be believed by the very dumbest of people. As someone who has worked blue collar jobs most of my life, I'm aware that many of the people voting for Trump are usually not as gullible and stupid as they'd have to be to take Trump as face value. I see it as far more of a protest vote- cutting off their noses to spite the face of the Democrats. They want to "show the libs"- maybe literally. Show the libs what it feels like to have a crazy megalomaniac in control. Show the libs what it is like to have the reality you can see before your eyes denied from the highest offices of the country.
Question. If someone has an office job but is not in any way a 'manager' in that job, is one then PMC? Because that's me and so many other people. I really don't feel rich and powerful.
Secretaries, telemarketers, receptionists, office admins, and other non-managerial office workers -- especially if they're waged instead of salaried -- tend to fall in the working class or the lower NPB. Tech workers (coders, etc) tend to be in the upper NPB or lower PMC.
Also important to note that a waged worker in a traditional industrial sector job (machinist, for example) can still have a much higher income than a PhD-holding adjunct professor. But the former would be working class and the latter squarely NPB. So, current wages and living situation don't immediate determine class relations (these are always in flux anyway).
Where would non-profit workers fall within this matrix? My town is loaded with them, all college educated, and not making much money (compensated with virtue credits). Some are part-time (gig-type or hourly wage) executive directors often as the singular employee of environmental advocacy groups, urban garden orgs, get out the vote groups, etc.. The mobility I've seen is they achieve elected office or get hired onto an office holder's staff.
Almost all probably New Petite Bourgeoisie, especially in regards to the precarious situation of many of them. Once they get into office, though, they've arrived at their PMC dream goal -- until their term ends...
Where would public school teachers fall within the class structure? Working class, lower PMC? I do know that (in California at least) there's a strong pressure among teachers to conform to PMC ideology, but at the same time, school administrators use said ideology to discipline and pressure the teachers below them. For example, pressuring them to reduce standards and "cook the books" regarding grades-- especially for minority students-- so that on paper the school looks more effective than it is. This is all to secure funding.
And how about managers at chain retail stores? They're managerial obviously, but they seem pretty outside of all this ideological stuff.
Thanks for this post by the way-- you've got my head swimming with thoughts.
Most school teachers fall somewhere between the NPB and the PMC. In fact, teachers were originally seen squarely as part of the PMC by the Ehrenreichs because their specific role is to train and discipline new workers.
But they rarely actually get the pay the PMC get. And you're absolutely right: they're pressured to adopt PMC ideals, despite not getting that pay. Worse, their proximity to actual poor people (literally seeing them every day in class) means they're caught in an awful state where they are expected to manage the poor while also being in a unique position to see the effects of poverty on people.
Managers of most sorts are PMC, though this is also a spectrum. A factory foreman, for example, is usually more in the "overseer" position that existed on many slave plantations. They were themselves slaves, but given a little more freedom in return for keeping the other slaves from running away or shirking their unpaid work.
And maybe important to point out that not everyone in each class has "class consciousness." Just as most workers don't really understand their position as workers versus the owners, plenty of NPB people see themselves as "working class" or plenty of PMC aren't aware of their role in maintaining the capitalist order.
Perhaps you mentioned this, another item is the PMC wailing about restricting “disinformation”, Joe Rogan and others, basically calling for government and corporate run censorship - attempts to do this have been amply revealed- and even complaining about the 1st amendment’s protection of free speech. The jig is up, and a big section of society isn’t obediently swallowing the approved “information” and listening to/reading other unapproved stuff. This is terrifying to our “betters”.
That was a good class analysis, it helped me make more sense of the troubled times we live in! I would like to add some personal observations. Economically I fall clearly into the NPB as you describe it ... and yet what you write about their class standpoint does not fully square with my own experiences. Maybe I belong to a minor subclass that is not that relevant for the whole picture, maybe it has to do with the fact that I live in Europe where there's still a halfway decent social security net, but maybe the change of attitudes within the NPB is already gaining traction.
So, my apologies for the lengthy comment. But it seems like this is a good place to talk about these things, and hopefully you and the other readers can treat this as a case study.
To start with, I grew up in economically rather modest circumstances in the Ruhrgebiet, a declining industrial area in West Germany. None of my grandparents had been born there, though - that's what two world wars and communism can do for you. What my parents taught me about politics was roughly this: 'We vote for the Left, because the Left is at least theoretically for the poorer people, and we're definitely not rich. But don't expect too much from them, they are at best the lesser evil. There was some potential for a change for the better in the sixties, but that is long gone. And never trust anyone who has a big plan to remake all of society. We've seen where that leads. That is where Grandma and Grandpa fled from.'
Now, my father is and my late mother was intensely interested in the world around them, and hungry for knowledge and learning. Not as a springboard into a different economic class (at least not during my lifetime, it's hard for me to tell what motivated them when they were very young) but as some sort of natural drive. My mother, in particular, went to a university but never got a degree because other things had become more important for her. But I must have inherited that drive, and having shown a knack for mathematics I went to university too and got my PhD, the first in the family. (Incidentally, I soon learned that many of my fellow students saw themselves as leftists, but they seemed to mean very different things from the labour-union leftism I had imbibed from my parents ...) The bubble of professors and fellow students I was in pushed me to pursue an academic career, and I put myself under a lot of pressure even though I was not happy at all. Tellingly, my parents did not push me, quite the contrary.
Well, I did not stay in academia, for a number of reasons. I do think that I probably could have made it on terms of my mathematical abilities - but it would have eaten my soul. Now I am on a much bumpier road, earning a fraction of a full professor's salary - but it is honest work that is valued by sufficently many people that they pay me a living, which is an experience I never had at university, where I was paid for the promise professors saw in me and not for the work I actually did.
When I was young and idealistic, I wanted to be a professor - essentially I had a romantic, 19th century ideal of a learned gentleman (I still see a lot of good in that ideal). Over time I realized that while there are still learned gentlemen (and gentlewomen!) among the professoriate, they are such despite their job, not by virtue of their job. Being a professor, today, presses you into serving a technocratic system hostile to true learning and understanding.
I think there is a larger pattern: Those people who study because they love their subject, because they really want to know and understand something and they can think independently and ask new questions, tend to be so frustrated by academia that they either leave and find some other way to earn money (which often lands them in the NPB because they are temperamentally just as unable to work for a corporation or for the government) or stay there and try to live from the professors' breadcrumbs (which also makes them NPB). Those people, on the other hand, who have some talent in their field but are focussed mainly on their career jump through all the hoops and adapt all their opinions and pursue just the kind of boring and uninspired research which fits into a technocratic mass institution, so they become PMC. That's painted with a very broad brush, of course!
Now, I see a clear difference in attitudes between myself, my NPB colleagues, and the people I know who genuinely care about learning or science or art, on the one hand, and the PMC members that I also know (and actually like, because they are still good people) on the other hand: that is, the former tend to be economically left-wing but culturally more conservative, the latter tend to share the PMC ideology to some degree. I've disentangled myself from the annoyingly ideological ones, but even among the thoughtful ones there's a marked tendency.
In particular, among myself and the people with a broadly similar situation, I see no disdain of the working class, but there is certainly resentment against the PMC. So, you see, there are some NPB's who see themselves next to the working class and are starting to like it!
I'm a paid subscriber, but I urge you to make this available to everyone! It's the most insightful summary of our current political landscape that I've read. Bravo. Let everyone read it. It's important.
Hear hear! I want to send this to everyone.
The issue with the tariffs is that there is simply no way they are going to do what Trump wants them to do. In order for tariffs to protect a domestic industry, there has to be a domestic industry to protect, and there simply isn't. So the tariffs are going to hit the working classes the hardest as they're the ones that have to actually buy the stuff that is being taxed.
Yeah the time for tariffs and protection of domestic industry was 30 years ago. Back then WalMart was doing a made in America campaign which they soon quietly dropped. I remember at the same time Pat Buchanan telling the Republican Party that tariffs were needed but they drank the free trade globalist corporate kool aid instead.
It occurs to me a global carbon tax would really help to revive local manufacturing, as it would make local production more cost competitive. Not that I think it's likely to happen.
Putting my response here to keep it anonymous. I would to do a gift subscription for clearly me who made the comment on your latest post. Went to gift subscription and couldn’t figure out how to do it. A proposal I upgrade to founding and you let her piggyback on me or you add the buy me a coffee option and I put 60 there.
Sure! A few others do the same as well. It's a really cool thing.
I've just put in a one year full access subscription for her.
Not clear what I am supposed to do, buy a 60 dollar coffee or upgrade to founding.
Your choice! But please note with the sale the yearly subscription is 20% off (48 instead of 60).
Bought 10 coffees
Mask mandates and vaccines were necessary to curb the virus, they didn't oppress the working classes any more then any other class. Equating vaccine faith to the eucharist risks verging into anti-science territory, and mirrors whet the right often do with climate change.
You are of course correct that there are very legitimate grievances amongst the working classes, and Trump is skilled at selling his snakeoil, just as Hitler was in late Weimar Germany. The left mostly no longer exist in any meaningful sense.
Tariffs and mass deportations would only massively exacerbate economic problems; they would cause prices to rise, produce to rot and houses to stay unbuilt. Neither are they going to happen - Amazon et al needs cheap labour and cheap imported crap to stay in business.
The working classes need to start educating and organising themselves, because no one is coming to save them.