the theory of the managerial elite explains the present transatlantic social and political crisis. Following World War II, the democracies of the United States and Europe, along with Japan—determined to avoid a return to depression and committed to undercutting communist anti-capitalist propaganda—adopted variants of cross-class settlements, brokered by national governments between national managerial elites and national labor. Following the Cold War, the global business revolution shattered these social compacts. Through the empowerment of multinational corporations and the creation of transnational supply chains, managerial elites disempowered national labor and national governments and transferred political power from national legislatures to executive agencies, transnational bureaucracies, and treaty organizations. Freed from older constraints, the managerial minorities of Western nations have predictably run amok, using their near-monopoly of power and influence in all sectors—private, public, and nonprofit—to enact policies that advantage their members to the detriment of their fellow citizens. Derided and disempowered, large elements of the native working classes in Western democracies have turned to charismatic tribunes of anti-system populism in electoral rebellions against the selfishness and arrogance of managerial elites.
This is a theme of a number of recent essays. In a review of Richard Baldwin’s book on globalization, Christopher Caldwell writes,
But only a tiny fraction of people in any society is equipped to do lucrative brainwork. In all Western societies, the new formula for prosperity is inconsistent with the old formula for democracy.
In the same publication, Angelo M. Codevilla writes,
The 2016 election and its aftermath reflect the distinction, difference, even enmity that has grown exponentially over the past quarter century between America’s ruling class and the rest of the country.
…The government apparatus identifies with the ruling class’s interests, proclivities, and tastes, and almost unanimously with the Democratic Party. As it uses government power to press those interests, proclivities, and tastes upon the ruled, it acts as a partisan state. This party state’s political objective is to delegitimize not so much the politicians who champion the ruled from time to time, but the ruled themselves.
A few remarks.
1. Keep in mind that if a few tens of thousands of votes in key states had come up differently, we would be less interested in essays of this sort.
2. As the authors are aware, the class differences have been simmering for a long time and have been noted by many writers. Lind starts with Galbraith and James Burnham. One could move on to Robert Reich’s “symbol analysts” and David Brooks’ Bobos.
3. I might use the distinction of abstract workers and concrete workers. Concrete workers work with stuff. They are in construction, mining, agriculture, manufacturing, and transportation. They might own small retail and service businesses (think of repair). Abstract workers work with words, numbers, and computer programs. Think of lawyers, accountants, software developers, teachers, and bureaucrats. This abstract-concrete distinction is not a perfect dichotomy (health care, for example, combines a lot of both), but it is useful if we do not get too carried away with it.
4. The status of workers in the concrete sector is threatened in many ways. Outsourcing, machine substitution, ease of firing a non-performer, inefficient firms going out of business, and industries with productivity rising faster than demand all could cause the loss of a concrete sector job.
5. The status of workers in the abstract sector is protected in many ways. A public school teacher or industry regulator need not worry about outsourcing, machine substitution, being fired as a non-performer, having an inefficient employer shut down, or facing a decline in demand. Many abstract workers have protection from having their wages pressured by competition from people who lack their credentials. Workers in the concrete sector believe that their wages can be pressured by competition from people who do not even have citizenship papers.
6. Government and management are mostly abstract functions. So the natural order of things is for the Abstract class to rule over the Concrete class.
7. You have to wonder whether (5) is to some extent a result of (6). That is, maybe the Abstract workers who make the rules have set things up to protect Abstract workers but not Concrete workers. As policy makers rescued the economy from the financial crisis, a lot of Concrete workers lost their homes, but financial executives did not lose their mansions.
8. Lind argues in favor of policies that add protection to workers in the Concrete sector. The libertarian alternative is to provide less protection and government indulgence to workers in the Abstract sector. I do not much care for Lind’s vision. But the libertarian vision is surely a non-starter in reality.