Class Divides and Political Realignments

Examining the roots of the culture war

In 2005 David Brooks wrote “Bobos in Paradise,” which was about a new form of elites that he referred to as “Bobos.” “Bobos,” short for Bourgeois Bohemians, were the new class that replaced the old WASP code. 

As he described them: “they were people with '60s values and '90s money who thought it was gauche to spend money on a yacht but supercool to spend money on a $20,000 stove.”

They defined themselves as rebels railing against the boring incumbent elite. As the classic Apple commercial described it, they were “the crazy ones, the misfits, the rebels, the troublemakers.”

The reality though was that they were countercultural rebels who were also making a lot of money. Because of this, they  were forced  to reconcile their egalitarian ethos with their bourgeois lifestyles. This created a consumption and thinking style that is best explained as “talk left, act right”.

Steve Jobs was an early example of this phenomenon. Jobs epitomized someone who started out on the fringe — buddhist meditations, black t-shirts, drug interests — only to become a corporate titan later on. 

To a lesser degree, this transformation happened to the whole class. This class didn’t just get richer — they got a lot richer. And the chasm between this new burgeoning group and the working class only continued to grow. There are multiple reasons for this:

First, colleges became very skilled at finding and sorting talent. These institutions  became a very efficient sorting hat for IQ, conscientiousness, and inherited advantages (parental wealth, good habits, good schools, etc).

Second, this pool of elite talent started marrying each other in a process known as assortative mating. Assortative mating is when the top talent marry each other and produce children with inherited advantages. 

Third, this elite talent began to consolidate in a handful of cities. This jacked up the cost of housing in these locations,  which subsequently priced out most working class people from the area — further enmeshing the elites together.

If you were optimizing society around identifying the most talented people and encouraging them to live and work together, you’d be happy with this result. 

But that begs the question: what happens to everyone else who isn’t elite talent? Well, they simply get left behind. 

While this talent concentration had some positive effects, it also created deep-seated inequalities and an inherited meritocracy structure. The children of these elite got a huge head start because they were raised in a stable home, had the best-educated parents, and attended the best schools within the best neighborhoods.

As a result, “roughly 72 percent of students at top colleges come from the richest quarter of families. In contrast, only 3 percent of students at top colleges come from the poorest quarter of families”.

In his book “Dream Hoarders,” Richard Reeves enumerated the ways elites rig the game on top of the naturally-occuring causes mentioned above. From college admissions to housing regulations to internship opportunities for their kids, these elites are dead-set on ensuring that their offspring have the highest probability of success.

Ironically, Reeves writes, elites spend the most time vocally arguing against inequality — all while doing the most to perpetuate it. As he quotes a friend: “I've come to realize that I spend all day declaiming against inequality. And then every evening and weekend adding to it.”

Class divides

The result of all this is that the gap between the elites (i.e. college graduates) and non-elites grew significantly over the last 50 years. 

Subsequently, we’ve seen the new lower class cease to participate in American civic culture, while the new upper class has become increasingly isolated from and ignorant about mainstream America. 

As Brooks puts it: “The bobos—or X people, or the creative class, or whatever you want to call them—have coalesced into an insular, intermarrying elite that dominates culture, media, education, and tech….. and now exists as a class that sees itself as better than the rest of the country, better able to make decisions for the rest of the country, and also enjoys a culture of their own. Worse, those of us in this class have had a hard time admitting our power, much less using it responsibly.”

As a result, these elites have come to run the nation: they shape the culture, the politics, and the economy. Increasingly, they also don't have any clue about what ordinary American life is like, since they haven’t experienced it.

As a result, the actions of these elites have made large groups of people all around the world feel disrespected, left out, and poor. This, among other things, has fueled the nationalist populist movements we’ve seen spring up in both the U.S. and in Europe.

As the book “Dignity” chronicles, the difference between being in the front row and the back row of society never used to be so stark. While the front row gave up certain comforts such as a sense of home in exchange for a more cosmopolitan existence; the back row took the opposite deal. But now, the front row have gathered everything for themselves, leaving the back row without jobs or dignity.

The cultural differences between the classes used to be minimal, but now they are significant. The elite and the masses watch different shows, eat different food, and care about different things. 

But even more important than culture differences is that the two classes now have different values: elites care about freedom, flexibility, and moving beyond traditions that have historically restricted individualism, while non-elites value the traditional institutions that serve as their anchors, like church, family, and local community institutions. 

Elites find identity and meaning in their progressive values and high status careers, whereas non-elites find identity and meaning in the love they feel for their family and their country. Elites ask “what do you do?” Non-elites ask “where are you from?”

Elites often meet many of their human needs through their (flexible, interesting) work lives. This is often not the case for everyone else — hence why non-elites are driven to meet those same core needs through different, communal channels (e.g., church).

Elites mark themselves by what they eat, what they read, and what “spiritual but not religious” belief system they follow — in short, they define themselves through active and deliberate demonstrations of their “sophistication” in comparison  to the working class. This does not go unnoticed by the non-elites and it makes them think elites are snobs. 

It’s worth noting that not all class differences are about money. A professor who makes $50K a year is an elite while a plumber who makes $200K is not. If we define elites as college graduates, that means elites makeup ~33% of the population.

In the last decade, the tensions between elites and non-elites have only grown more contentious. Not only has the working class suffered economically, but their dignity has been systematically stripped from them by the elites. The elites do this by characterizing the working class as racist, sexist, and homophobic, (c.f. Hillary Clinton’s “deplorables”). Meanwhile, elite excess has runamuk (e.g. Wall Street bailouts, the opioid crisis, trade agreements hollowing out the middle class).

Political realignments

This class divide has also led to political realignments.

In the past 50 years, a new divider has come to define America’s political and cultural beliefs: whether or not a person has a college degree. Having a college degree means you’re part of the professional managerial (elite) class, or the PMC, while not having one means you’re part of the working class.

The majority of the members of the PMC class have far-left views on socio-cultural issues. That in turn creates a huge amount of tension in our society because 2/3 of the country is working class and 1/3 are elites (i.e. college grads). Hypothetically in a democracy, the side that has larger numbers should win. And yet, while the working class has all the votes, the elites run all the institutions — from the New York Times to the Fortune 500 to Wall Street, Disney, Hollywood, and more. 

What this means is that by and large, elites who run American institutions are out of step with what most people believe. And they are trying to push an agenda that the rest of the country (the working class) doesn't support.

Ruy Teixeira wrote a book in 2002 called “The Emerging Democratic Majority”, in which he predicted that demographic trends would result in the election of Democratic presidents indefinitely. He was subsequently considered a prophet when Obama got elected in 2008.

Over the past few years though, Teixeira has changed his tune, lamenting that the party has gone far too far left on socio-cultural issues to win elections. The left has in effect stopped being a working class party. They’re now a professional class party who caters to the social views of professional elites, which, interestingly enough, are further to the left than the working class. 

According to Teixeira, democrats have gone far left on social issues, but they’ve moved right on economic issues that the working class actually cares about like immigration and trade. As Bernie Sanders once lamented, both of these issues are Charles Koch proposals (a famous right-wing libertarian).

Indeed, it’s interesting to remember that democrats were once anti-immigration — and it was actually a recent thing. Until recently, Schumer, Feinstein, and Pelosi were in favor of a southern border. 

The Left has been more anti immigration towards the right due to the perceived impact it would have on labor and union influence — in other words, immigrants taking jobs from American workers. For instance from 1965 to 2000, 10 percent of liberals favored increased immigration. By 2018, that was 50%.

In a fascinating turn of events, the elites have branded themselves as more progressive (i.e. caring about the working class) than the working class itself, while not sharing the same values or policy prescriptions that the working class believes in. Talk left, act right indeed.  

This is not the first shift of course. Remember that the democrats were the party of the south and segregation until LBJ (Lincoln was a republican — confederates were Democrats). 

The Democratic party today is basically the country club Republicans of the 1970 with a university campus left. Or in other words, democrats today are more socially progressive and more economically conservative than they used to be. They are barely recognizable from Democrats before the 1960s. In contrast, you can make the case that today’s Republicans are actually just former Democrats. 

The Republicans, for their part, have responded to the democratic elite dominance by taking more working class views and attitudes. Brooks wrote in his piece: “If the elite bourgeois bohemians — the “bobos” — tend to have progressive values and metropolitan tastes, the boubours go out of their way to shock them with nativism, nationalism, and a willful lack of tact. Boubour leaders span the Western world: Trump in the U.S., Boris Johnson in the United Kingdom, Marine Le Pen in France, Viktor Orbán in Hungary, Matteo Salvini in Italy.”

The reversal is striking. Quoting Brooks again: “Suddenly, conservative parties across the West—the former champions of the landed aristocracy—portrayed themselves as the warriors for the working class. And left-wing parties—once vehicles for proletarian revolt—were attacked as captives of the super-educated urban elite.”

Balaji Srinivasan once shared a framework for understanding political realignments in a podcast interview. In 1865, Republicans gained moral authority from winning the civil war and that moral authority then turned into economic authority.

But by 1915, the Republicans had become the party of the rich, and the Democrats realigned as the party of the poor under FDR. This led to the Republicans beginning to lose moral authority.

By 1965, the Democrats regained moral authority after winning civil rights. Democrats turned that moral authority into economic authority.

By 2015, Democrats had become the party of the rich, complete with membership from all the top actors/professors/tech CEOs. Meanwhile, the Republicans became the party of the poor.

Now, it’s worth noting that today’s revolutionary left often becomes tomorrow’s institutional right over time — meaning that while the world often moves more left, some groups stop moving left after a while and end up being categorized as right-wing as a result.

To generalize wildly: revolutionary leftist movements often stir up a group of people to fight power and tear down order and those groups sometimes kill and destroy everything. Examples include Pol Pot, the collapse of the Roman Empire, and the 30 year war.

New equilibrium is ultimately reached when people pay some indulgence, going through motions of religion but not substance. Examples include Christian kings, “protestant work ethic,” Islamic finance, or capitalists in the Chinese communist party.

The revolutionary ideology turns into hierarchical ideology.

• Maoist China— capitalist communist China

• Christianity — Holy Roman Empire

• Luther’s 95 theses — protestant work ethic

• American puritans — WASP establishment’ 

Not left vs right. It’s about class. 

Despite this re-positioning, it would be a mistake to say this is about Democrats vs Republicans. Similarly, it’s not about the state vs corporations either, as many libertarians have mistakenly believed for years. Fundamentally, this is about a class divide: the elite vs the non-elite.  

It’s about the PMCs who have more in common with elites in other countries than they do with the working class in their own homeland. It’s about the top and the bottom fighting against the middle. More precisely, it’s about the top 1% claiming to speak on behalf of the underclass while at war with the middle. 

Why is this not a Democrat vs Republican divide? Rich elites used to mostly support Republicans, now they support Democrats. As we’ve mentioned, the parties realign themselves every half century or so, and they’ll likely realign again. The party allegiances are not as sticky as the group allegiances themselves. What’s important about elites isn’t that they’re democrats, it’s that they’re elites and not normies.

Why is elite allegiance most important? Richard Hanania has a provocative piece on this: as people get richer, they seek to isolate themselves with people as rich and smart as them, because:

“For the upper class, living around poor people is unpleasant; they tend to be louder and more criminally inclined, and less appealing as friends, conversation partners, and potential mates. Hence when those with money can afford to do so, they move away from them. “

According to Richard Hanania, this desire for elite clustering is what the culture war is about. It’s neither Thomas Frank’s thesis that the working class is voting against their own interest, nor Vivek Ramaswamy’s thesis that corporations got everyone focused on identity politics a decade ago to deflect the demands of Occupy Wall Street. Instead, it’s that elites are constantly looking to distinguish themselves from non-elites, and egalitarian ideology prevents them from using the normal differentiators (e.g. intelligence, industriousness), so they use other status signifiers (beliefs, taste, language).

As we said in our last piece, our elites used to be lions, now they are foxes. They used to justify their power by being the best, but since it sounds inegalitarian to claim their relative superiority, they justify their power by claiming they care the most about the downtrodden and they’re the best ones to help them. They don’t actually prioritize the downtrodden of course, the downtrodden are mostly an abstraction in their minds. They care in the abstract about the downtrodden, but they don’t befriend them, they don’t marry them, they won’t even live near them. 

This is why elite allegiance is more important than political party allegiance: Elites need to distinguish themselves from the lower and middle classes in order to find each other, so they do so with credentials and esoteric language and taste. But once everyone starts using the same esoteric terms, elites need to find new ones. Richard’s theory claims that the culture war is only partly about beliefs, but it’s more so about tribes. 

“The culture war as such will not be won or lost, as it is not about deep philosophical differences regarding the good life, but the product of unhappy people seeking status at the expense of others, and the tribes that form around the great antagonists in this battle.”

It’s fitting that the culture war would be in theory about egalitarianism and in practice about status hierarchy: talk left, act right.