The giddy rise and imminent fall of the professional-managerial class

Shit is about to get real. You can thank the self-delusions of our best and brightest for the gathering storm

Photo by Jared Subia on Unsplash

To be progressive is to be against privilege. But today progressives dominate elite institutions like the exclusive universities, the big foundations and the top cultural institutions. American adults who identify as very progressive skew white, well educated and urban and hail from relatively advantaged backgrounds. This is the contradiction of the educated class. Virtue is defined by being anti-elite. But today’s educated class constitutes the elite, or at least a big part of it. Many of the curiosities of our culture flow as highly educated people try to resolve the contradiction between their identity as an enemy of privilege, and the fact that, at least educationally and culturally, and often economically, they are privileged.
David Brooks, New York Times, 6/6/24

Not so long ago, as many of us reeled from the political earthquakes of Brexit and Trump, it seemed sensible for responsible mainstream political parties to adopt tighter immigration control to keep the populist right at bay… something else has happened: an immigration explosion. In response to a volatile public mood, Western elites actually intensified their policy of importing millions of people from the developing world to replace their insufficiently diverse and declining domestic populations… As the public tried to express a desire to slow down the pace of demographic change, elites in London, Ottawa, and Washington chose to massively accelerate it. It’s as if they saw the rise in the popularity of the far right and said to themselves: well now, how can we really get it to take off?
Andrew Sullivan,

The Weekly Dish

, 7/6/24

The attitude was that anyone who defied the liberal consensus on anything wasn’t just wrong but positively evil and beyond the pale. Now, however, millions of Europeans have voted for “hard-right populists”. So are all these millions also beyond the pale? … What the “populists” have in common, and what is bringing them to power, is that they represent a revolt against a homogeneous political establishment that ignores, scorns or punishes eminently reasonable, and indeed necessary, concerns… Liberal society has created a vacuum in which has arisen an anti-Establishment insurgency with a range of political parties. Some of these are quite reasonable; others are a potential menace. The liberal establishment is responsible for them all.
Melanie Phillips, The Times, 10/6/24

The European “far right” (media speak for “wants border control”) made huge gains across the continent this weekend, securing major wins in France, Germany, and Italy. It’s the latest development in a populist political revolution now trending in almost every corner of the developed world… Will our ruling elite get the message, and finally do something? It’s still unclear, but NASA — the federal body that once architected missions to the moon — did just announce its new “intersex inclusive” pride flag, which literally nobody asked for, least of all intersex Americans. So at least we know they’re listening.
Pirate Wires Daily, 12/6/24 (BTW, the bit about NASA’s new intersex-inclusive flag isn’t a rhetorical flight of fancy. Estimates vary, but it appears 0.018 per cent of the population is intersex.) 

Let’s recap, shall we?

Much of Europe has now fallen to the ‘populist’, aka ‘hard’ or ‘far’ Right.

Even many on the Left now believe Trump will likely be re-elected in a few months. And things aren’t looking much better for progressive poster boy Justin Trudeau than for Biden.

Albo will probably merely be forced into a dangerous (for the ALP, at least) coalition with the Greens at the next federal election. But it’s not inconceivable he will suffer the rare indignity of being a one-term PM if his ‘populist’ rival continues hammering him relentlessly about housing and immigration.

Progressive poster girl Jacinta Ardern got out while the getting was good, and the Kiwis elected a Centre-Right government shortly thereafter. Ardern was elected in 2017 in large part because she pledged to fix New Zealand’s deranged property market. Thus far, about 1000 of the 100,000 affordable homes she promised have been built.   

The populist future is here, and it’s evenly distributed
I don’t know how the rest of the 2020s will play out. But I suspect we’ve now passed peak professional-managerial-class (PMC) dominance of Anglosphere and Western European societies. I’d wager serious money that from November 5 onwards, those who are culturally, if not necessarily economically, upper-middle class (i.e. the self-dealing, self-satisfied and increasingly self-parodying ‘elites’ everybody now hates) will soon no longer be able to politically cockblock the rest of the population over issues such as mass/uncontrolled immigration.

The only question now is how ugly the populist backlash will get.

I’m uncharacteristically optimistic that the trauma of a second Trump victory might just belatedly force those who enjoy all the benefits of mass migration while shouldering few of the burdens to rethink their enthusiasm for openish borders. And possibly even their monomaniacal obsession with performative identity politics.

But if that doesn’t happen and polarisation continues to worsen with dismaying results, those who’ve been running the joint for the last half-century – the professional-managerial class – will bear full responsibility.

Political displacement
I’ve long found human behaviour puzzling. But I’ve discovered some explanations for what appear, at first glance, to be bizarre and counterproductive behaviours.

While many of Freud’s theories haven’t stood the test of time, ‘displacement’ certainly has. Here’s how it works.

An employer/manager/customer treats you rudely. You could remonstrate with said employer/manager/customer, but that carries obvious risks. So, you take the soft option of brooding about being wronged for hours, then pick a fight with your partner when you get home, thereby allowing you to redirect (displace) your rage onto a safer target.

Maybe after you’ve finished making your better half feel miserable, they displace their rage by yelling at your child. Possibly, your child keeps the displacement going by kicking the dog. Perhaps the dog attacks the cat, who then goes and eats the guinea pig. In this way, one disparaging remark, which you’ve chosen not to deal with honestly, grows into a world of pain.

Keep displacement in mind as you read this passage from the afore-quoted David Brooks: 

Imagine you graduated from a prestigious liberal arts college with a degree in history and you get a job as a teacher at an elite Manhattan private school. You’re a sincere progressive down to your bones. Unfortunately, your job is to take the children of rich financiers and polish them up so they can get into Stanford. In other words, your literal job is to reinforce privilege.

This sort of cognitive dissonance often has a radicalizing effect. When your identity is based on siding with the marginalized, but you work at Horace Mann or Princeton, you have to work really hard to make yourself and others believe you are really progressive. You’re bound to drift further and further to the left to prove you are standing up to the man.

This, I think, explains the following phenomenon: Society pours hundreds of thousands of dollars into elite students, gives them the most prestigious launching pads fathomable, and they are often the ones talking most loudly about burning the system down.

This also explains, I think, the leftward drift of the haute bourgeoisie.

The scenario I imagined above involved a pusillanimous individual displacing their anger rather than undertaking the uncomfortable labour of setting appropriate boundaries with the individual responsible for their distress.

Brooks’ teacher is doing something roughly equivalent. This hypothetical chalkie (or academic, artist, journalist, lawyer, public servant) wants to view themselves as a Good Person Doing Good in the World. Historically, people with that lofty ambition have held themselves to rigorous standards and taken practical steps to improve the lives of their fellow human beings.

Or, if they were British, animals. 

But behaving charitably and working towards the betterment of mankind involves buzz-harshing self-sacrifice and hard graft. At the very least, it means volunteering to have a little less so those who have less can have a little more.  

That’s not an attractive prospect for most modern-day progressives. So, they displace their desire to make the world a better place into gesture politics. This allows them to constantly reassure themselves that they are the Noble White People – good allies, if you will – acting as a much-needed handbrake on the unworthy impulses of the far more numerous Bad White People (i.e. bogans, gammon, rednecks).   

Imagine you’re the private school teacher in question.

In contrast to the poorly educated, unenlightened, racist, sexist, homophobic, transphobic, climate-change-denialist, lower-class Caucasians you find so deplorable, you imagine yourself to be a wise, rational and high-minded individual. Indeed, you’ll avail yourself of any opportunity to advertise your righteousness – and right-side-of-historyness – to those around you. You won’t hesitate to post a black square or Palestinian flag on Facebook. Or to announce your pronouns. Or to insist on beginning every committee meeting with a land acknowledgement. Especially if you’re under 35, you’re probably also going to identify as being at least queer, and possibly non-binary, even though you’re an entirely pedestrian heterosexual. 

As an aside, Rod Dreher (check out his Substack here) wrote an excellent article in response to Brooks’. In it, he notes straights are increasingly an endangered species on elite US college campuses, with a third of students at Harvard, Yale and Princeton now telling pollsters they identify as LGBTQ+. At Brown, the figure is 38 per cent – up from an embarrassingly low 14 per cent back in 2010.

As another aside, here’s an amusing bit from Bill Maher about American heterosexuals becoming extinct within the next three decades if present trends continue.

I don’t believe anybody intelligent enough to attend a top-tier – or, for that matter, even a third-tier – university can remain oblivious to the reality that gesture politics rarely do much to bring into being a better world.

If our well-intentioned teacher sincerely wanted to make a difference, they could always teach underprivileged children in their own country or the developing world. It wasn’t uncommon for leftists – frequently ones with no shortage of more lucrative, prestigious and enjoyable options – to do this in the 20^th century. (Bruce, the teacher from the Seven Up docos, taught in London’s East End and then Bangladesh after graduating from Oxford.)

But I fear today’s professional-managerial-class progressives are rarely cut from the same cloth as their efficacious predecessors.

A brief history of the PMC
Until a few decades ago, very few people stayed in the education system for long. If you had an IQ a couple of standard deviations above the mean and wanted to become a doctor, lawyer or engineer, you went to uni. Otherwise, you figured things out on the job. A job you probably started working full-time at 15.

Thanks to the third industrial revolution, an economic boom, a baby boom and an unprecedentedly equitable wealth distribution, many more people started attending university in the post-war era. This created what’s most commonly called the professional-managerial class, a term coined by the late great Barbara Ehrenreich.   

In the mid-1970s, Ehrenreich and others noticed a new class (initially it was even referred to as the ‘New Class’) was emerging. These ever more plentiful university-educated individuals weren’t quite ‘bosses’ (they tended not to own factories or have large landholdings) but nor were they really ‘workers’. They tended to be creative types, or educators, or managers, or administrators, existing in a no-man’s-land between the plutocrats and the proles.

The slacktivist, virtue-signalling displacement I’ve described above, and what Brooks mildly describes as the “curiosities of our culture”, arise out of this indeterminate position. Given their between-two-stools position in the status hierarchy, it’s near inevitable PMCers will lust after both a plutocrat-adjacent lifestyle and sacralised-victim-class street cred.

The common people have spent eight years making their wishes increasingly loudly known to society’s PMC decision-makers. If they are not listened to extremely soon, things may soon no longer be turning out to the best advantage of the Anglosphere and Western European peoples.

It’s decision time, fellow PMCers
Here’s how Brooks concludes his article:

In this [preferable] reality we would face up to the fact that all societies have been led by this or that elite group and that in the information age those who have a lot of education have immense access to political, cultural and economic power. We would be honest about our role in widening inequalities. We would abhor cultural insularity and go out of our way to engage with people across ideology and class. We would live up to our responsibilities as elites and care for the whole country, not just ourselves…

But there is another possible future. Perhaps today’s educated elite is just like any other historical elite. We gained our status by exploiting or not even seeing others down below, and we are sure as hell not going to give up any of our status without a fight. 

Which side of history do you want to be on now?