The War on the Liberal Class

https://www.theideasletter.org/essay/the-war-on-the-liberal-class/


A man walks past a cartoon mural depicting a teenager afflicted by social media being resuscitated by a book, in Mumbai, on November 25, 2022. © Indranil Mukherjee/AFP/Getty

Is it really the end of the End of History? Is this the demise of the “long” 20th century? To many observers, the neoliberal hegemony that Francis Fukuyama diagnosed a generation ago appears to be over. Both liberal democracy and the globalized free market are in retreat: Anti-establishment, anti-institutional, anti-incumbent politicians skilled at extreme rhetoric have been gaining ground in many advanced democracies. Since returning to power, Donald Trump has governed as an arbitrary tyrant in blatant defiance of the rule of law, threatened the sovereign territory of multiple U.S. allies, and announced exorbitant levies on goods imported from nearly every foreign country, throwing global markets into turmoil. An age of renewed great-power competition and tariff-driven autarky seems to be at hand.

Events are moving with shocking speed, and it’s too early to say if democracy, free trade, and the established geopolitical order really have been irreparably harmed, or if they might all prove more resilient than expected. Trump himself keeps hedging on his own tariff proposals, with haphazard attempts daily to buy time and reassure the investor class. It’s one thing to demagogue against the free-trade consensus of the past few decades or propose gradually decoupling the U.S. economy from China’s and reinvesting in domestic industries—issues that Democrats, Republicans, and the American public are all broadly aligned on. It’s another to impose a shock doctrine on one’s own citizens that risks impoverishing them overnight and expect no backlash. The U.S. remains a consumer society, and consumerism, as they say, is a hell of a drug.

But on at least one crucial front, the many prophecies of doom already reflect something real: Liberalism, always a convenient scapegoat for the unresolvable crises of neoliberal capitalism, is under existential threat—as an ideology, as a temperament, and above all as a class with distinct material interests and political power.

Liberalism has never been merely a set of abstract ideas, and it has never been uniformly experienced within the liberal polity. As Antonio Gramsci observed, cultural hegemony allows the bourgeoisie to maintain its dominant position in society by creating a broad social consensus around its own norms and values, and very often those norms and values have been liberal. Liberalism has always been the ideology of a particular socioeconomic stratum: from the Parisian haute bourgeoisie that declared the Rights of Man in the late 18th century to the New Class of college-educated intellectuals, professionals, and creatives that by the 1970s had come to dominate liberalism in the United States—at least according to its many critics. James Burnham anticipated capitalism’s managerial turn as early as 1941. Christopher Lasch, in his posthumously published 1995 book The Revolt of the Elites and the Betrayal of Democracy, criticized upper-middle-class groups as having alienated themselves materially and culturally from the rest of the population, describing them as “a new class only in the sense that their livelihoods rest not so much on ownership of property as on the manipulation of information and professional expertise.” The right-wing ideologue Curtis Yarvin, a court favorite of Vice President J.D. Vance and the Silicon Valley oligarch Marc Andreessen, calls this cohort “the cathedral.” Nate Silver has dubbed it “the Village.” Musa al-Gharbi, who recently responded in The Ideas Letter to a critical review of his book We Have Never Been Woke: The Cultural Contradictions of a New Elite, has described approximately the same group as “symbolic capitalists—professionals who work in fields like finance, consulting, law, HR, education, media, science and technology.” Less hostile observers might simply say “the establishment” or “liberal civil society” or, as Barbara and John Ehrenreich put it in 1977, “the professional-managerial class.”

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