The details of this new dispensation varied across national contexts. But in just about every Western country, Lind writes, “power brokers who answered to working-class and rural constituencies — grassroots party politicians, trade union and farm association leaders, and church leaders — bargained with national elites in the three realms of government, the economy, and the culture, respectively.” The New Class War: Saving Democracy From The Managerial Elite. Penguin Random House. ISBN 9780593083697. [17] Public policy should encourage the limitation of the numbers of the genetically unfit, by voluntary or involuntary contraception, abortion, and euthanasia. You can even divide the intelligentsia among social scientists, and artists and creative people. When it comes to art, our view of the arts comes from early 19th-century German romanticism. In the arts, instead of focusing on traditions passed on by craftsmen, there is the original genius who overthrows everything done before, and comes up with something uniquely individual. In social science, the premise is that society is a subject of scientific study, like physics. And just as you would not use 1950s physics, why would you use 1950s politics or economics? You make a name as a social scientist by overthrowing everything done before last week. And of course, if you are a corporation, everything has to be new and improved. You have what to my mind is an ultimately unsustainable strategy by an elite which pretty much wants to overthrow all existing cultural traditions as though they were consumer products on the production line. I do not think that is sustainable.

The germ theory wasn’t without precedent. In 1776, Jefferson’s rejected design for the Great Seal of the United States featured Hengist and Horsa, two barbarian chieftains who led the invasion of the British Isles by Teutonic tribes. The Sage of Monticello promoted the teaching of Anglo-Saxon as the supposed language of liberty. Yet it was a century later, and ironically after the Civil War, that the racial component of American belonging increasingly took on a pseudoscientific character. Meanwhile, the extraordinary growth in America’s college-educated population — along with its wildly disproportionate share of disposable income — bends popular culture and corporate messaging towards professional-class sensibilities. And as blue-collar trade unions declined, and progressive nonprofits proliferated, professionals have assumed unprecedented influence over the Democratic Party in general, and its left flank in particular. This is a political liability for Democrats. A majority of voters remain non-college-educated, and that majority is overrepresented in Congress and the Electoral College. In the aggregate, urban professionals and non-college graduates have disparate discursive norms (a.k.a. “ways of speaking”), attitudes, and issue preferences. To the extent that non-college-educated voters come to see Democrats as the party of the professional class — and the professional class as unjustly lording over media, pop culture, and the economy — an increasingly authoritarian GOP will stand to benefit. One need not endorse Lind’s prescriptions for diminishing the professional left’s outsize power to find value in his diagnosis. Lind’s newest essay completes his journey, or at least the current incarnation of it, by calling for a “popular front” to stop the Democrats, who, he claims, have gone mad with power. The Radical Center: The Future of American Politics (with Ted Halstead). Doubleday. ISBN 9780385500456. [26] [27] Instead, Lind insists that the bulk of popular resistance to mass immigration (and thus, support for xenophobic demagogues) is rooted in the native working class’s accurate belief that low-skill immigrants are a top-tier threat to their economic well-being. Here too, Lind declines to engage with the vast empirical literature that contradicts his premise. Researchers have looked for a negative impact on wages or employment from the mass influx of Syrian refugees into Turkey; from refugee migration to Sweden between 1999 and 2007; from refugees immigrating to Denmark in the 1980s and 1990s; from the mass migration of Russian Jews to Israel after the USSR’s collapse; and from Dust Bowl migrants dispersion to other parts of the U.S. during the Great Depression — and, in every case, found none. Meta-analyses of the literature on immigration’s labor market effects have found little to no negative consequences for native workers. There are some individual studies consistent with Lind’s view. And it’s true that native workers in discrete subsegments of the labor force can suffer a loss of bargaining power due to competition with disenfranchised migrant laborers. But Lind’s routine equation of immigration restriction with “tight labor markets” is, to use his own epithet, simpleminded. Immigration increases labor supply, but it also increases labor demand. Fiscal policy, central-bank priorities, and labor regulations do far more to determine workers’ bargaining power and living standards than immigration policy does.ML: The term professional-managerial class was coined by the late Barbara Ehrenreich and her then-husband John in 1977 to mean professionals who are intermediate between workers and capitalists in a three-class system. I don’t use it, instead, for college-educated people in general, I use James Burnham’s term “managerial elite”, or overclass, to avoid the aristocratic or plutocratic associations of “ruling class”. In The Managerial Revolution (1941), Burnham describes the managerial elite as not only the executives of large private companies, but also civil servants, military officers and careerists in the non-profit sector. The overlap between libertarianism and eugenic conservatism can be considerable. In public, libertarians usually defend their anti-statist creed in terms of individual rights or Benthamite utilitarianism, arguing that a minimal state would produce the greatest good for the greatest number. Yet eugenic conservatism and libertarianism have often complemented each other. For libertarians at a loss to explain why wealth and power are concentrated in market societies, eugenicons have an answer: Rich people and rich families are genetically superior. And for eugenicons in search of a political program short of radical “ethnostate” proposals, libertarianism provides a second-best solution. The danger that resources will be redistributed from the productive, eugenic rich to the parasitic, dysgenic masses can be minimized by shrinking the state and lowering taxation. So can transferring functions from the government, where numbers count, to the market, dominated by a small number of wealthy capitalists defined as “the cognitive elite.” When Hanania, outed as “Richard Hoste,” declared that he had seen the light and abandoned eugenic racism and classism for “classical liberalism,” that is, libertarianism, this was just flipping the same coin over to the other face. Modern Founders-ism is a relic of the second half of the 20th century. It served two purposes for the American nation-state: providing a nonracist definition of the American nation during the civil-rights revolution, and supplying the American state with a missionary creed that could rival Marxism-Leninism during the Cold War. As for high-achieving ethnic groups, Sowell, Amy Chua, and Joel Kotkin, among others, have demonstrated that “middle-man minorities” like European Jews, overseas Chinese, diaspora Armenians, Parsees, Phanariot Greeks, and others were preadapted by culture for success in modern, industrial, urban societies in which the skills and values of premodern landlords, warlords, and peasants were anachronistic. Often members of specialized diasporas have achieved more than their fellow ethnics of all classes and occupations have done in their own homelands, which suggests that their success is the result of environment and culture, not genes. In The Next American Nation (1995) Lind foresaw the political realignment in class politics years before it erupted in the surge of national populism and right-wing demagoguery. He has more recently developed his ideas in The New Class War (2020).

But, Lind warns, technocratic neoliberals (the said managerial class of culturally privileged voters) and demagogic populists like Trump are roads to the same autocratic destination.Although the quote is actually from Kant, it is taken out of context and used in a way that is closer to the classic Burkean critique of rationalist restructuring and reform. footnote 7 Rationalism is unrealistic, this view holds, because it tries to impose abstract notions of what should be on a reality that is both richer and messier than anything ‘petulant, assuming, short-sighted coxcombs of philosophy’ can come up with. In its desire to make a clean sweep of things, it can only wind up doing violence to that which it purports to help. Real reform, by contrast, must come from within. It must develop organically out of the society of which it is a part. One needn’t be a genetically superior genius descended from generations of aristocrats to understand that “race realism,” and the libertarianism that is frequently its natural political expression, are utterly incompatible with broadening the appeal of the Republican Party to working-class Americans of all races. From the standpoint of the eugenicons, “the multiracial working class” is doubly damned—it is working class and multiracial: two forms of dysgenic inferiority rolled into one. The eugenicons can have no policy program for the working class, other than encouraging its members to consider availing themselves of contraception, abortion, and assisted suicide to ensure that there are fewer of them on their side of the “bell curve” to drag down the high-IQ elite on the other end. First, and most strangely, while he identifies some extreme ideas in circulation among progressive elites and intellectuals, he does not identify a single initiative of the Biden administration, or the Democratic Party generally, anywhere in his piece. The closest he comes is citing a statement by Julián Castro during his 2020 campaign, which sunk without a trace. Yet, Lind shows little interest in going beyond this landscape of hypocrisy — instead taking it for given that working people have no interest in environmental protection. Telling, in this regard, is his failure even to mention the fact that ecological damage is most likely to impact lower-income communities; shamefully, he doesn’t even mention plans to combine the green transition with job creation, as in Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s “Green New Deal.” In contrast to populists, elite fusionist conservatives since the 1950s have privileged 1787 over 1776. They have treated the federal Constitution as the equivalent of the Ten Commandments, teaching the American people, “Thou Shalt Not Have Nice Things,” like a living wage, labor unions, guaranteed access to inexpensive health care, or adequate social insurance. The Founders thus become ventriloquist dummies for rich donors who fund fusionist magazines that few but the same donors read.