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The Two Middle Classes


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2020 Feb 29, 4:57pm   960 views  4 comments

by Patrick   ➕follow (55)   💰tip   ignore  

https://quillette.com/2020/02/27/the-two-middle-classes/

Politicians across the Western world like to speak fondly of the “middle class” as if it is one large constituency with common interests and aspirations. But, as Karl Marx observed, the middle class has always been divided by sources of wealth and worldview. Today, it is split into two distinct, and often opposing, middle classes. First there is the yeomanry or the traditional middle class, which consists of small business owners, minor landowners, craftspeople, and artisans, or what we would define historically as the bourgeoisie, or the old French Third Estate, deeply embedded in the private economy. The other middle class, now in ascendency, is the clerisy, a group that makes its living largely in quasi-public institutions, notably universities, media, the non-profit world, and the upper bureaucracy. ...

In contrast, the clerisy has a far less adversarial relationship with the uber-rich, since they operate in large part outside the market system. Like the Catholic Church in Medieval times, this part of the middle class enjoys something of a symbiosis with the oligarchal elites, the main financiers of NGOs, and the universities, and dominates the media and culture industries that employ so many of them. They are often also beneficiaries of the regulatory state, either directly as high-level government employees, or as consultants, attorneys, or through non-profits. ...

Since the industrial revolution, the clerisy has expanded and become ever-more secular, essentially replacing the religious clergy as what the great German sociologist Max Weber called society’s “new legitimizers.” ...

Today’s clerisy are concentrated in professions whose numbers have grown in recent decades, including teaching, consulting, law, the medical field, and the civil service. In contrast, the size of the traditional middle class—small business owners, workers in basic industries, and construction—have seen their share of the job market decline and shrink.2 Some professions that were once more closely tied to the private economy, such as doctors, have become subsumed by bureaucratic structures and—in the United States, at least—shifted from a dependable conservative lobby to an increasingly progressive one.

These shifts are, if anything, more pronounced in Europe. In France, over 1.4 million lower skilled jobs have disappeared in the past quarter-century while technical jobs, often in the public sector, have sharply increased. Those working for state industries, universities, and in other clerisy-oriented positions, enjoy far better benefits, notably pensions, than those working in the purely private sector. To be sure, members of the clerisy have to suffer Europe’s high taxes on the middle class, but they also benefit far more than others from the state’s largesse. ...

Like their Medieval counterparts in the old First Estate, members of the contemporary clerisy insist that they are motivated not by self-interest but rather by pursuit of the common good. They constitute “the privileged stratum,” in the words of French left-wing analyst Christophe Guilluy, operating from an assumption of “moral superiority” that justifies their right to instruct others.5 This power is greatly enhanced by their control of culture, most media, the education systems—eight in 10 British professors are on the Left—and throughout the bureaucracy.

The embattled yeomanry

The perspective of the traditional middle class generally differs from that of the clerisy, and constitutes what Piketty labels the “merchant Right.” These people make their living in the marketplace, and that often places them in conflict with both the oligarchs, who continually seek to crush or absorb their businesses, or with the clerisy, which hands down environmental and other regulations that inhibit their activities. Generally speaking, larger firms are far more adept at adjusting to these strictures than smaller firms. ...

Land ownership in Europe is also increasingly concentrated in smaller hands; in Great Britain, where land prices have risen dramatically over the past decade, less than one percent of the population owns half of all the land. On the continent, farmland is increasingly concentrated while urban real estate has fallen into the hands of a small cadre of corporate owners and the mega-wealthy.

Growing corporate concentration, in both the US and Europe, has now seeped into the once dynamic tech economy. In Silicon Valley, the renowned garage culture is being supplanted by a gargantua of giant firms that have achieved market power unprecedented in modern times, controlling in some cases 80 – 90 percent of their key niches like search, social media, cellular, and computer operating systems. One online publisher uses a Star Trek analogy to describe his firm’s status with Google: “It’s a bit like being assimilated by the Borg. You get cool new powers. But having been assimilated, if your implants were ever removed, you’d certainly die. That basically captures our relationship to Google.” ...

The decline of the yeomanry threatens the future of democracy as we have known it. Faced with growing assaults on their businesses, and in some cases, their communities, they have begun to fight back against many of the policies, notably climate policy, that are widely supported by the oligarchs and the clerisy. A policy to force the rapid replacement of fossil fuels with heavily subsidized renewables requires the development of the kind of largely unaccountable bureaucracies that both employ and empower the clerisy while providing the oligarchs both in the US and Europe with a unique opportunity to cash in on energy “transitions.”

In contrast, for large parts of the yeomanry, a call for a rapid, radical shift towards renewables imposes much higher energy prices. It also threatens to diminish industries in which many of them work and undercut the sustenance to the Main Street merchants in smaller cities and the countryside. Already attempts to impose such policies have led to yeoman rebellions in a number of countries. ...

But the chasm between the yeomanry and the clerisy also extends to broader issues, from border control to national identity, immigration, and the locus of political control. For the most part, the yeomanry favor local authority over more distant rule, while the clerisy favors the opposite. This was evident in the Brexit vote and the recent UK parliamentary elections, where the cosmopolitan clerisy, London-based and highly educated, largely rejected Brexit while the middle, as well as much of the working class, particularly outside the South-East, and property owners, favored Brexit and its implementer, Prime Minister Boris Johnson. ...

As America prepares for its quadrennial presidential marathon, these divisions are painfully evident. No president has ever incurred the wrath of the clerisy—the media, the entertainment industry, academia—more than Donald Trump. But Trump retains record support among the small business people on Main Street, particularly in the manufacturing and energy-dependent parts of the country. The climatistas’ appeal is not likely to improve as they increasingly advocate the elimination of ownership of single-family houses, preferred by most middle class people, in order to promote an allegedly climate-friendly density regime.

The struggle between the two middle classes is not just a matter of wealth and power, but also of retaining the social basis for democracy itself. Without a strong, independent middle class operating outside the control of large institutions, be they tech giants or governments, we may be heading towards a technocratic future, that as one Silicon Valley wag put it, resembles “feudalism with better marketing.”

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1   Ceffer   2020 Feb 29, 5:19pm  

I think this analysis is spot on. Yeomanry are enemies of the Globalists, while clerisy are are a narrower class of highly paid apparatchiks and maintenance personnel aka butlers, fixits, brown nosers and intelligence whores/brain trusts, promoters to the ultra rich, bankers, and corporate elites.

The traditional middle class have always been regarded as the strength of countries, and have enough wizardry, industry and creative clout to keep a country vital. If you think that countries and borders don't matter any more, then they are an obstacle to be weakened, undermined and controlled, or simply trammeled into the undifferentiated class paste of the ignoble masses.
2   MisdemeanorRebel   2020 Feb 29, 6:32pm  

Genius post.

Having a PhD in International Law or International Relations should bar one from serving in the State Department.
3   Ceffer   2020 Feb 29, 6:40pm  

NoCoupForYou says
Having a PhD in International Law or International Relations should bar one from serving in the State Department.


Heh, Heh, the Stanford and Harvard degrees of my ole college acquaintance who went up the State Department hierarchy. If you win the conformity lottery and have some brains, you might be gifted to enter the clerisy.
4   HeadSet   2020 Feb 29, 8:25pm  

So which of the two middle classes would Military Officers be in? How about retirees?

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