The PMC isn’t going to enjoy its looming status downgrade

A class that derived its status from meritocratic achievement and moral authority is now losing both

I love the poorly educated.
Donald Trump, 23/2/2016

Members of our class are always publicly speaking out for the marginalized, but somehow we always end up building systems that serve ourselves… Or, as Markovits puts it, “elite graduates monopolize the best jobs and at the same time invent new technologies that privilege superskilled workers, making the best jobs better and all other jobs worse (my emphasis).”
David Brooks, New York Times, 2/8/25

The key to understanding wokeness, al-Gharbi insists, is the struggles of “symbolic capitalists” – “professionals who traffic in symbols and rhetoric, images and narratives, data and analysis, ideas and abstraction”… It is a social stratum that attempts to entrench itself within the elite, elbowing out others already there, by using the language of social justice to gain status and accrue “cultural capital”…

This is not simply cynicism or hypocrisy, Al-Gharbi argues. Symbolic capitalists have constructed myths about their social roles that allow them genuinely to believe in fairness and equity while entrenching inequality and injustice, myths that have been accepted by many social institutions and power-brokers.
Kenan Malik, The Guardian, 10/11/24

I think there was a certain way of talking about [cultural] issues for Democrats where we sounded like scolds… there was a virtue signalling that made it seem as if ordinary folks, if they did not say things in exactly the right way, or meet this litmus test, that they were being chastised, pushed away.
Barack Obama, Medium, 15/2/26

I recently came across the term ‘status downgrade’. It’s related to, but not quite the same as, status anxiety – a more familiar concept, largely thanks to the 2005 Alain de Botton book.

A status downgrade occurs when the ethnic majority of a society starts to feel it is losing its position as the society’s default group. This happens because it senses a decline in relative power, cultural centrality, and social prestige as demographic change shifts who is visible, influential, and politically courted.

The feeling is less ‘we have nothing’ than ‘we are no longer unquestionably on top’, which tends to produce resentment, anxiety, and backlash – even if material conditions have not deteriorated noticeably.

The post-2016 political vibe shift means the Professional-Managerial Class has been experiencing a class (rather than ethnic) form of status downgrading since 2016.

Technological change — specifically AI’s growing capacity to do more white-collar cognitive labour — is likely to turbocharge that status downgrade between now and 2030.

The rise of the technocrats
Many of those quoted or referenced above – al-Gharbi, Brooks, Markovits – are the intellectual descendants of proto neocon James Burnham.

As a one-time Marxist, Burnham was familiar with class analysis and noticed something noteworthy happening to pre-WWII America’s class structure almost a century ago.

While businesses had previously been run by the people who owned them, they were increasingly being run by a managerial class – university-educated administrators, bureaucrats, executives and technical experts.

As Burnham noted, even though these managerial types (usually) didn’t have an equity stake in the businesses they worked for, they nonetheless (largely) controlled them.

This was the thesis of Burnham’s influential work, The Managerial Revolution (1941).

However, Burnham was writing at a time when less than five per cent of the US population was university educated. Technocrats might have been growing disproportionately influential, at least in business circles, but there were simply too few of them for them to have much impact on the political agenda.

Class antagonisms
The real rise of what Barbara Ehrenreich labelled the Professional-Managerial Class didn’t happen until the 1960s, when historically unprecedented numbers of Boomers flooded into rapidly expanding university systems across Western nations.

Like their pre-WWII forebears, post-war PMCers found themselves caught between two class stools.

Like the working class, they were (typically) wage slaves who could, in the final instance, have their wishes overruled by the plutocratic class for whom they laboured.

But – and this is the crucial difference between the old-school leftists and contemporary progressives – they didn’t much like, let alone romanticise, the working class.

After all, in a meritocratic society, non-PMC individuals have clearly failed to demonstrate sufficient merit to get a “good education” and, subsequently, a mid-to-high-status “good job”.

There was also the small matter of the proletariat failing to rise up and seize the means of production during the first half of the 20^th century, and its failure to get the memo about the moral imperative of identity politics during its second half.

The PMC’s relationship with the class above it has also always been conflicted, if rarely as openly antagonistic.

A not insubstantial proportion of PMCers, especially the more ambitious and accomplished, dream of making the leap from wage slavery to independent wealth, and ascending from the PMC into the plutocrat class.

Such rarefied upwards social mobility isn’t easy, but it’s hardly unheard of either.

But while PMCers typically have a more respectful attitude towards the plutocrats than the proles, they regard themselves as morally superior to both the classes they’re sandwiched between.

However, impressive the plutocrats – the much-referenced one per cent – might be in terms of IQ scores, top-tier educational credentials and wealth accumulation, PMCers find them morally lacking.

PMCers take considerable comfort in the belief that while they might be outranked and out-earned by the wealthy, they are less self-interested and therefore more virtuous.

I’ve previously argued the PMC anointed itself as a (secular) priestly class. At the very least, PMCers saw it as their role to vigorously police the Overton Window, particularly in relation to any hint of racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia or climate-change denialism.

But until recently, they were remarkably insouciant about wealth inequality reaching Gilded Age levels.

The reckoning
The PMC had a good run, stretching from the mid-1970s until 2016.

For around half a century, governments of both the centre left and centre right pursued policies – globalisation, financialisation, mass migration, the favouring of university over vocational education – that benefited the PMC.

As many a Substacker has observed, these policies weren’t nearly as beneficial for those on the lower rungs of the socio-economic ladder and a populist backlash inevitably arrived.

But this backlash isn’t the only, or even the most diabolical challenge, now facing the PMC.

For (largely PMC) tech workers have invented “new technologies that privilege superskilled workers, making the best jobs better and all other jobs worse”.

PMC work largely consists of tasks AI is increasingly good at: drafting, summarising, research synthesis, documentation, analysis and coordination. So now it’s the PMC’s jobs that are being made worse, or simply eliminated.

PMCers now confront their deepest, darkest fear – an abrupt and vertiginous status downgrade.

For decades, the PMC championed a social order that celebrated disruption, ruthlessly sorted winners from losers, and treated the ‘left behind’ with contempt.

It will now be subjected to that same merciless logic.