The twilight of the elite consensus

Is the political realignment of the last decade about to hit polite society?

There are none so blind as those who will not see.
John Heywood, 1546

He who knows only his own side of the case, knows little of that. His reasons may be good, and no one may have been able to refute them. But if he is equally unable to refute the reasons on the opposite side; if he does not so much as know what they are, he has no ground for preferring either opinion.
John Stuart Mill, On Liberty, 1859

It all came back in a rush. Why I do what I do. Defending the defenseless. Protecting the disenfranchised corporations that had been abandoned by their very own consumers. The logger. The sweatshop foreman. The oil driller. The landmine developer. The baby seal poacher.
Tobacco industry lobbyist Nick Naylor, Thank You for Smoking, 1995

Shortly after finishing last week’s post about how a dose of AI-facilitated economic precarity was likely to transform the political attitudes and behaviours of the Professional-Managerial Class (PMC), I came across this post from the German-American political scientist Yascha Mounk on viewpoint diversity.

The post is entitled ‘The Bourgeoisie Has Switched Sides’. A wordier but more comprehensive headline would be, “Both the bourgeoisie and the working class have switched sides, the former veering left and the latter veering right.”

As we’ll get to shortly, Mounk makes a characteristically well-researched case for that proposition. But he doesn’t consider the possibility that the bourgeoisie, with its characteristic ideological flexibility, might switch sides again.

The paradox of infinite voices and narrow minds
Echoing the argument laid out in Martin Gurri’s The Revolt of the Public and the Crisis of Authority in the New Millennium (2019), Mounk observes that digital media has broken the old information monopoly of institutional elites and weakened traditional gatekeepers in government, media, and other hierarchies.

He also points out that though a thousand flowers have bloomed – not least on platforms such as Substack – the range of views PMCers can express without incurring social and often professional costs has long been constrained.

And yet, the unprecedented diversity of viewpoints that is now available to—and to some extent inescapable for—the citizens of modern democracies coexist with a greater homogeneity of thought in key spheres of civil society than has been characteristic of life in the West in any historical epoch since the Victorian period.

While some can survive and even thrive while challenging the official narrative, contrarianism is very much a minority position among members of the PMC.

But if you happen to be a normie professional who simply wants to enjoy a good career and a peaceful life, the incentive to pay lip service to a list of narrow articles of faith remains overwhelming.

Homogeneity breeds conformity. Because many of these professions are now so dominated by people with one point of view, the rising generation of professionals tends to share the same outlook.

The Brooklynisation of the Bourgeoisie
Back when a university education was still a relatively scarce labour-market product differentiator, degree holders leaned right.

Just as the working class – the foundation stone and bedrock constituency of centre-left parties (Germany’s Social Democrats, the US Democrats, Britain’s Labour Party and Australia’s Labor Party) – leaned left.

As is oft-noted, there’s been a swapping of political sides among the two classes in recent decades, something that meant:

The socio-economic profile of the coalition assembled by Kamala Harris, the Democratic presidential candidate in 2024, most closely resembles the socio-economic profile of the coalition assembled by Bob Dole, the Republican presidential candidate, in 1996…

This transformation has been called by a variety of names. Thomas Piketty has described it as the rise of the Brahmin left. David Brooks has written about the rise of the Bobo. Matthew Yglesias has lamented the rise of The Groups. I propose to call it the Brooklynization of the Bourgeoisie.

What happens when an unstoppable populist uprising meets an immovable cultural elite?

Mounk observes:

The population of the United States, and of many other Western democracies, is now deeply stratified by educational achievement. The affluent and highly credentialed are mostly on the political left. The working class is increasingly drifting to the political right. And that has deeply transformed the composition, the values, and even the actions of the professional class.

As Mounk observes, cab drivers, plumbers and police now vote Republican while lawyers, professors and civil servants vote Democrat. What’s more, the plumbers no longer trust the professors because the consensus within PMC-dominated institutions “has increasingly come to adhere to a narrowly progressive—and often lamentably erroneous—set of assumptions about the world”.

This is the central political conflict that’s been roiling the Anglosphere since at least 2016. The working class has the numbers, but the PMC has “outsized influence on the rules, norms and decisions that structure a lot of day-to-day life”.

The end result of this stand-off?

Many citizens feel ignored, besieged, and detested by a professional class which believes that it is entitled to rule, and finds the views of many of their compatriots intolerably bigoted. That is of great political significance because, even in highly affluent countries, there are more tradespeople, cab drivers, and police officers than there are lawyers, university professors, and civil servants. Meanwhile, members of the professional class feel bewildered at the lack of respect for their expertise, and fearful that the barbarians at the political gates will soon come for their heads.

Modern politicians are overwhelmingly drawn from the PMC, which means they are more fiscally conservative and socially liberal than their voters.

In Germany in 2013, at a time when right-wing populists had not yet made it into the national parliament, for example, the average politician was much more likely than the average voter to say that it should be easier to immigrate to the country. In fact, even the average member of the Bundestag for the Christian Democrats, the most right-leaning party to be represented in that body at that time, was well to the left of the median voter on this question… as Günther suggests, the big gap in views about cultural topics between most voters and most of their representatives surely played an important role: The most straightforward reason why right-wing populists have gained so much in vote share of late “is that they fill the cultural representation gap.”

The perils of populism
Mounk, an associate professor at Johns Hopkins University, is, inevitably, himself a PMCer. While he clearly sympathises with the disenfranchised masses, he’s only willing to take the class traitordom so far.

His article concludes with a call for the PMC to be a little less censorious and self-righteous. But Mounk’s main concern seems to be that a “counterproductive” populist uprising won’t achieve its goals. At most, he avers, it will merely result in MAGA dogma replacing the current progressive one.

Mounk appears to believe the low-hanging fruit, when it comes to addressing the growing social fault lines he maps so meticulously, is the PMC becoming more accepting of viewpoint diversity.

It is this tendency towards convergent evolution [elite institutions coming to resemble each other] which makes it so hard to sustain a genuine variety of thought and opinion within the professional class. If one prestigious university applied different standards for admission and hiring than another, if the culture of one law firm radically diverged from that of another, if the journalistic enforcers of ideological orthodoxies still had genuine debates among themselves, if scientists were not beholden to a tiny number of funding bodies, and if professional associations were less quick to impose their ideological certainties on their members, professionals with dissident—or merely diffident—views would find it much easier to sustain thriving careers and speak their minds.

I’m all for an end to the suffocating ideological monoculture evident in elite institutions. But I don’t expect it to narrow social fault lines much.

The problem is not just that elite institutions exclude dissent. It is that they express the moral tastes and material interests of the class that staffs them. You do not fix that by sprinkling in a few dissenters. You fix it when the incentives facing that class change.

My argument is that the PMC’s incentives have now changed for two reasons: the populist backlash that erupted in 2016 and which has only gathered momentum since, and the emergence of a technology that is beginning to proletarianise the PMC.

Both developments will dampen PMC’s more utopian urges.

Is the bourgeoisie in the process of being de-Brooklynised?
Many PMCers describe themselves as “fiscally conservative and socially liberal”.

The PMC, at least until very recently, has advocated for market capitalism, globalisation, credential-based meritocracy and technocratic management. While it will occasionally lament growing wealth inequality, it’s certainly not in favour of any policies that will seriously threaten asset values, elite institutions, or upper-middle-class lifestyles.

But PMCers do not see themselves as cynically self-interested, let alone as the moral equivalent of “sweatshop foremen”.

That’s because they have all the right opinions about environmentalism, feminism, LGBT rights, trans inclusion, anti-racism, mass migration and multiculturalism.

Sure, the PMC isn’t keen on wealth redistribution. But it’s indefatigable – self-harming, even – in its pursuit of status redistribution. Hence the emphasis on inclusion, diversity, representation and harm reduction.

But to return to my opening point, the bourgeoisie has long proven capable of discreetly crab-walking away from once passionately held beliefs to adjust to changing circumstances.

Of course, it’s entirely unthinkable that well-educated, highly intelligent, unquestionably virtuous ‘elite human capital’ could have been wrong about anything, and even more unimaginable that the dumb, reactionary proles could have been right.

But I will note the PMC has softened its stance on a range of hot-button culture war issues of late.

• The once unshakable commitment to net zero – to prevent an imminent ecopocalypse – is increasingly morphing into a preference for a gentler and more pragmatic approach to decarbonisation

• High/Mass/Illegal immigration is no longer being championed as an unquestionable social good

• Parts of the Brahmin Left are even shifting from an unqualified celebration of vibrant diversity to an acceptance that integration, cohesion and a higher-trust society might be desirable

• On trans issues, at least in youth medicine, the rhetoric has become more evidence-first and less purely affirmational

• DEI appears to have been consigned to the ash heap of history

Pace Mounk, the real story of the next year or two may not be elite institutions embracing viewpoint diversity.

It may be the spectacle of the PMC pretending it never really believed in the socially hyperliberal positions it spent the last decade enforcing so uncompromisingly.