Will the Professional-Managerial Class survive?

The PMC has spent decades throwing the lower orders under the bus. Can it now win the working class back over to rein in the growing power of the ruling class?

Photo by Austin Distel on Unsplash

Video summary

For the past four years, the Left has tried to condemn us as fringe, radical, extreme, and worse. But the truth is that we are mainstream, reasonable, and ascendant. We’re no longer going to let Cluster B leftism ruin our institutions. If that’s your thing, try therapy.
Chris Rufo, X, 21/1/25

From Just Stop Oil to Led by Donkeys, from the madness of genderism to the immigration explosion, from anti-semitism to covering up for rape gangs because it’s just not ‘nice’ to notice… The middle class have their mitts all over the desperate state we are in.
Gareth Roberts, The Age of Stupid, 7/2/25

We are getting a blitzkrieg… The legacy media is simply irrelevant to the public discourse now. The libs are mostly shocked into silence… We’ve won. We’re not partisan raiders, but an occupying force. We aren’t being hunted, but are the hunters. We are not at war with the Regime, because we are the Regime. It will take time to adjust to this, and many will not adjust well.
John Carter, Postcards from Barsoom, 8/2/25

The Silicon Valley digerati don’t care about the old world in Washington churning out meddlesome regulations, laws and taxes. They are cocky about creating a new world, shaped by a new species: AI.
Maureen Dowd, New York Times, 8/2/25

They utterly fail to see themselves; to understand how much they come across as smug, arrogant, condescending, self-righteous shits whose politics again and again ends up favouring people like them and whose recurrent response to disagreement is to de-legitimise, denounce and censor. Their entire view of themselves is they are the oh-so-clever, oh-so-moral people. Nothing they do is ever seriously counter-productive or fundamentally mistaken…

How many people will say: these folk against whom you are shrieking the same terms of abuse you have shrieked at people for decades. Are they making excuses for the mass sexual predation on young girls by migrants we did not want? Are they supporting the hormonal and surgical mutilation and sterilisation of minors? Are they teaching folk to despise their own countries and heritage? Are they pushing the narrative lies of the moment? Have they proved to be incompetent at elementary things, such as fighting crime and managing fire risk? No? Then they sound good to me.
Lorenzo Warby, Lorenzo from Oz, 9/2/25

Few, if any, elections today are determined by party loyalty or abstract notions such as left and right. They are fought between those who abide by institutional wisdom on matters such as gender, race and climate change and those who trust common sense. The great tectonic shift has been changing the political landscape for more than 30 years.
Nick Cater, The Australian, 10/3/25

Leaders are often forced to fight a different dragon than the one they imagined they were elected to slay. George W. Bush was hoping to govern like (a less priapic) Bill Clinton – a compassionately conservative, sensible moderate pursuing a humble foreign policy.

Osama bin Laden had other ideas.

Trump believes he has been elected to head up an anti-woke counter-revolution, and so he has. But Trump walks back into the job facing his own September 11 – the mass penetration of AI and the likely emergence of superintelligence during his second term.

As worked up as everyone, not least me, has gotten about wokery in recent years, it’s insignificant in the grand scheme of things. Or rather, it’s vanishingly unimportant if we are entering the End of History. (Or at least the end of history made by unaugmented humans.)

We are now approaching a tipping point that might very well result in a technofeudalist society. One that places enormous power in the hands of a vanishingly small number of digital economy lords and condemns 99 per cent of humanity to UBI-dependent serfdom. Almost certainly a gilded-cage serfdom featuring lavish ‘bread and circuses’. Think sophisticated sexbots and a pharmacopeia of tranquilising drugs, just for starters.

But serfdom nonetheless.

Can the PMC enter a New Deal 2.0 with the masses?
By my reckoning, there have been two world-changing political inflection points for the Anglosphere over the last century, and we are now at the dawn of a third.

The first seachange was the embrace of Keynesian social democracy. For the sake of convenience, let’s mark the beginning of that era as 1932, when FDR took office.

The second seachange was the abandonment of Keynesian social democracy and the embrace of a form of economic and social hyperliberalism that has come to be known as neoliberalism. For the sake of convenience, let’s mark the beginning of that era as 1980, when Reagan took office.

The third seachange is the long-brewing counter-revolution against the economic and social hyperliberalism – premised on the free movement of people, goods and capital – of the last 4-5 decades. I’m tempted to date the start of the anti-neoliberal counter-revolution to 2016, but let’s go with Trump’s re-election in 2024.

Neoliberalism has been mainly marvellous for those at the top of the food chain but mostly shit for those further down it. A lot of attention has been paid to how well the plutocrats have done, and it’s true that figures such as Bezos, Gates, Musk and Zuckerberg enjoy riches and globe-spanning influence that even their Gilded Era counterparts (Carnegie, Vanderbilt and Rockefeller) could only have dreamed about.

But there is only so much any one individual, be they an old-school king, a Silicon Valley gazillionaire, or a Communist dictator, can do themselves. Until recently, these heavy hitters had to rely on a ‘courtier’ class to execute their plans.

There’s broad public awareness that the plutocrat class – the much-discussed 1% – has spent almost half a century enriching itself through the beggar thy (class) neighbour strategies, notably global labour arbitrage. What was less well-understood, at least until the recent ‘vibe shift’, was that the next 19% – i.e. the professional-managerial class – has spent decades frantically feathering its collective nest, also at the expense of the masses.

In Dream Hoarders: How the American Upper Middle Class Is Leaving Everyone Else in the Dust, Why That Is a Problem, and What to Do About It, Richard V. Reeves argues,

The real class divide is not between the upper class and the upper middle class: it is between the upper middle class and everyone else… [and] the practice of “opportunity hoarding”—gaining exclusive access to scarce resources—is especially prevalent among parents who want to perpetuate privilege to the benefit of their children.

Had the PMC merely gone about discreetly enriching themselves, millionaire-next-door style, they might not have antagonised those lower down the pecking order quite so much. But they couldn’t resist the temptation to posture.

As the blurb for Catherine Liu’s Virtue Hoarders: The Case Against the Professional Managerial Class notes,

The PMC stands in the way of social justice and economic redistribution by promoting meritocracy, philanthropy, and other self-serving operations to abet an individualist path to a better world. Virtue Hoarders is an unapologetically polemical call to reject making a virtue out of taste and consumption habits.

Rather than simply accepting they won the lottery by being born with an above-average IQ – typically to parents who were also high-IQ, well-remunerated, high achievers – PMC individuals like to believe their material success somehow flows from their pure-heartedness. The inevitable flipside of this prosperity gospel-like mindset is that the ‘left behind’ and ‘struggling middle’ have brought their grim fate on themselves by bitterly clinging to outdated ideas around gender roles and the desirability of social cohesion.

As has been the inevitable fate of bubble-dwelling elites throughout history, the PMC is now, most belatedly, coming to realise that the hoi polloi don’t see them as heroic moral exemplars but rather as self-dealing shits.

On that point, I can’t resist the temptation to point out I’ve spent the last three years and 150 odd blog posts warning, at some personal and professional cost, my PMC brothers and sisters that an anti-PMC backlash was growing ever closer to messily exploding. And that it would be wise to rethink, for example, turbocharged migrant intakes and ‘nothing to see here’ asymmetrical multiculturalism.

Having chosen not to course correct in the years since 2016, the PMC can now look forward to having that condescending smirk brutally wiped off its face.

The coming class war(s)
For the sake of simplicity, let’s divvy up the populations of, dare I say, late capitalist Anglosphere societies into four broad classes:

The plutocrats (the top 1%)

The PMC (the next 19%)

The masses (the next 70%)

The welfare-dependent underclass (the bottom 10%)

Nearly all of us may soon be members of the welfare-dependent, or at least the UBI-dependent, underclass. However, this class is unlikely to be much of a player in the coming ‘class war’, so let’s focus on the other three.

The PMC, which was much smaller back then, threw its lot in with the masses during the Great Depression.

In the wake of the shitfight that was the 1970s, the PMC then defected from its alliance with the peasants and threw its lot in with the aristocracy circa 1980.

The plutocrat-PMC alliance has worked out fantastically well for plutocrats and many – though certainly not all – factions of the PMC. While there have been periodic and half-hearted attempts to rein in the welfare state, it’s expanded rather than shrunk during the neoliberal era. Surprisingly, it seems the neoliberal era hasn’t worked out too badly for the welfare-dependent underclass, all things considered.

The class that’s really copped an arse raping over the last 50 years is ‘the masses’. That is, the great bulk of the population suspended between the affluent, enlightened PMCers and those who’ve resigned themselves to being dependent on the state.

During the last US presidential election, there was occasional reference to a 2020 RAND study that found, had wages increased in line with productivity gains from 1975-2018 – as was the arrangement during the pre-neoliberal era – the bottom 90% of US workers would have collectively earned US$50 trillion more.

As is often highlighted by those on both the Left and Right, both wealth and income inequality have increased significantly in recent decades. The US is back at Gilded Era levels of inequality.

Much of the wealth redistributed upwards in recent decades has ended up in the coffers of the plutocrats. However, a goodly amount of those ill-gotten gains were deposited in the bank accounts of the PMC.

That’s not something PMCers care to reflect on too deeply. But it seems the Average Joes and Joannes – the twentysomethings who despair of getting ahead no matter how many qualifications they acquire and how hard they work, the thirtysomethings who can’t afford to get into the property market or even start a family, the fiftysomethings who can’t afford to flee a neighbourhood rendered disorientatingly foreign by open borders – have belatedly cottoned onto the PMC’s long-running grift of switching between sticking their snouts in the trough and lecturing their bigoted inferiors.

Scenes from the class struggle
Imagine a minimalist game of chess involving one king, one queen, and 16 pawns (that are all on the same side). As you’ve probably intuited by now, in this analogy the King represents the plutocrats, the Queen represents the PMC, and the pawns represent the masses.

Like Elon, I fear mankind is summoning the demon with AI and that there’s at least a 50 per cent possibility we all end up turned into paperclips before the decade is out.

But let’s leave that possibility to one side for now and concentrate on how recent technological advances have destabilised the class equilibrium of Anglosphere societies.

Up until five seconds ago, all the pieces on the board disliked but needed each other. Specifically, the king needed the queen to make sure the pawns keep toiling away in the salt mines. (This chessboard has a salt mine attached to it – I don’t have time to get into the details right now.)

But now the plutocrats are starting to use AI to disintermediate the PMC. Many tech companies have been quietly shedding mid-level staff and, where necessary, using AI solutions to automate their roles.

It’s a testament to the PMC’s galactic arrogance that, having spent 40 years antagonising the masses – chiefly by enthusiastically supervising the outsourcing of decently paying jobs and importation of cheap, compliant labour from the developing world – they then opted to piss off their plutocratic masters by getting ideas above their station.

Whenever I see an alpha tech bro, like Zuck or Andreessen on Rogan, what strikes me most is their bemused rage over having had mere PMCers – unremarkable bureaucrats and politicians – telling them how to run their businesses. (The contemporary equivalent of a junior council worker knocking back one of Howard Roark’s majestic development applications.)

Can the masses and the plutocrats unite against the PMC?
Yes, they can! Indeed, this is precisely what happened in the last US presidential election, not to mention the UK general election of 2019. (Most of Kamala’s and Corbyn’s support came from the PMC or welfare-dependent underclass). I wouldn’t be surprised to see the Antipodean masses join forces with the plutocrats to dispatch Albo in the coming months, and something similar will almost certainly happen in Canada later this year. (I also suspect Sir Starmer’s new Labour Government will fall apart within the next 12 months and that my namesake may be the next UK PM. But let’s not get ahead of ourselves.)

However, apart from hating on the insufferably self-important PMC, the masses and the plutocrats don’t have much in common. As illustrated by the recent H-1B visa brouhaha, their economic interests frequently conflict even when they are on the same page culturally.

After half a century of, at best, treading water economically, the masses want a pay rise. In contrast, the oligarchs want continued access to cheap and compliant labour and get extremely upset at the thought of this arrangement ending.

Plus, while it’s the PMC’s ‘brain’ jobs that will first be automated away by AI, many of the ‘brawn’, or ‘brain plus brawn’, jobs the masses do will be next in line. Once the bosses have automated away the overseer class, why wouldn’t they do the same to the workers who were being overseen?

While they’ve never had much in common and have become especially hostile recently, it would seem to be in the long-term interests of the masses and the PMC to join forces to rein in the plutocrats before they wreak mass-automation havoc.

Is there any possibility of such an alliance being forged after the PMC’s uncritical embrace, and ceaseless championing, of “Cluster B leftism’?

We are about to find out.