Class increasingly defines America’s new Culture Wars, pitting the rising power of well-educated, and self-regarding, supermen (or should I say super-people), against those they regard as less cognitively gifted. This clerisy – the media, academia, the well-funded progressive non-profits – is now waging what the Atlantic recently called ‘a war on stupid people’, which, of course, extends particularly to those who back the loutish Trump. As a group, this educated caste shares increasingly uniformly progressive social views and are almost 50 per cent more likely to be Democrats than Republicans.
There are good reasons for the new cognitive class to like the progressive status quo. Along with the corporate aristocracy who fund the Democratic Party, the hyper-educated have thrived under Obama. In contrast, the bulk of the working and middle class have seen their incomes stagnate or decline.
The new class has little stake in the traditional economy – agribusiness, energy, manufacturing, suburban home-building – that has traditionally provided decent employment to the working and middle classes. Some among them, notably the environmental zealots, even decry rising living standards for ordinary Americans as the primary threat to the environment. The entire progressive agenda increasingly constitutes an attempt to drive poverty out of the centre of cities and into the middle class. And in Trumpian fashion, they want to make the middle class, with their tax dollars, pay for the privilege.
What does Trumpian mean?
To state the obvious: Trump famously wants to “build a wall and make Mexico pay for it”… which clearly Mexico does not want & would not benefit from… so in Trumpian fashion, the articles suggests the lefties want to make the middle class, with their tax dollars, pay for the privilege of things they also clearly do not want & do not benefit from.
No, you shouldn’t say “super-persons.” The correct term, “supermen,” works just fine for anyone with any comprehension of and regard for English. You might, of course, say “superpersons,” but let’s don’t. :>)
With that out of the way, Mr Kotkin seems not to care for Mr Trump. On this our hearts beat as one. He also seems less than thrilled with the Proggies. Hearts, one, ditto.
It’s unfortunate that the so-called “well-educated” or “hyper-educated” clearly aren’t. They certainly do have stakes in the traditional economy, but they seem too uneducated to know it.
PS. The verb “to thrive” is conjugated thus: thrive, throve, thriven. Just like drive, drove, driven and even strive, strove, striven. These are so-called “strong verbs,” see. So one expects to read “the hyper-educated have thriven under Obama.” Speaking of being educated.
Shoot. Edit: “No, you shouldn’t say ‘super-people,’ etc.” [snarls at self]
Amen to this. Knowing which nonsense pronoun to use for men who believe they’re lesbians and a penchant for believing your every opinion represents a “settled” question doesn’t make you educated. These people are simply well-credentialed. That’s of supreme importance when your intention is to join the media-academia-government axis.
Julie:
Übermenschen also works, although it has some unfortunate connotations. 🙂
In Britain certainly, and to the best of my knowledge in the US also some 40% of young people are getting degrees. These people have been told all their lives that they are clever and well educated, and they’ve even got a certificate to say so.
But what have they done to deserve this? Well they’ve accepted everything they were told, and remembered at least 40% of it for the exams. They have rarely if ever questioned what they were told, and will vote at least to start with according to how they were taught, in part because they know nothing else, and in part because it maintains their self image as part of an elite. It mostly wears off after a decade or so but it’s still a useful plus for whatever politics teachers/lecturers favour.
The good news is that college costs are rising a lot faster than inflation, which will eventually drive a lot of people out of college, mostly people who shouldn’t be there.
Absolutely, Pat. They are capable of absorbing but not of thinking. Credentialed rather than educated.
I remain convinced that proper apprenticeships and, for many accountants, solicitors, etc., articled clerkships would yield better results, make many more employable (and earlier) and free them from the debt burden.
Well educated? In what, and by who’s standards?
The Pursers? (Bursar in US)
Let’s not confuse, or conflate that with “Certificate of Attendance”, or “Certificate of Participation”, shall we?
Joel Kotkin (of my son’s generation) is an observer of, and commentator on, what is basically clustering; how people cluster, the effects of clustering.
So, some additional observations may be in order:
In the clusters now forming (since about 1965) the commonalities of “tastes” are less predominant than those of “distaste.” There seem to be more concerns with avoidance of things one objects to than there are for the quests of things to like.
There has been a proliferation of those clusters (at all levels) in which there are NO strong beliefs (of any kind).
The fragmentation (into other clusters) of the urban clusters formed after WW I (when the “Age of Mobility” began)has probably been driven more by distastes than common objectives.
Kotkin, and even Charles Murray, have not as yet zeroed in on how these clusters affect and (more importantly) are affected by the differences in the ways in which the motivations of the individuals comprising them come to be formed initially and develop.
The “new” class of cognitive elite can be better understood as nothing of the sort. They are mostly Thomas Sowell’s Self Anointed drawn largely from those credentialed by the hierarchal structures of our “Educational Systems,” which are now degenerating into administrative “experiences,” more than stages of learning.
In the context of this description, I don’t like the term “educated”. I think “schooled” works better. Likewise, the term “supermen” has Nietzschean connotations and the people being described are far closer to the “slave morality” end of the spectrum.
I am no friend of the “liberal” elite – but there is something about this quotation that makes my heart sink.
There is nothing in it about principles – just “class” interests (are all sides).
It disgusts me.
State principles plainly – and not so much about “class interests”.
Yes they, class interests, exist – in the sense of certain groups of people, but to obsess about them so much that one forgets about principles is to descend into the pit of Hell.
Too often it is a cover for lazy, indeed evil, thinking – such as racialism and protectionism.
A “cure” for the “liberal” elite that is as bad as the disease.
When it comes to the so-called “educated elite”, I’m always reminded of the withering rejoinder (and I paraphrase, because I can’t remember who said it), “Your argument is so patently ridiculous, it could only have been made by an intellectual.”
As a fairly well-educated person myself, I would tend to side with those who favor a governing class made of really smart people, except that really smart people are more given, it seems, to wishful thinking — hence intellectuals’ support for impractical and unworkable socialist economic principles (Marxism, Keynesiasm), dreamy and impractical social precepts (“free love”), and a total disregard for history vis-a-vis the total failure of both the above whenever attempted. In other words, they disregard principles such as “there’s no such thing as a free lunch”, and “something that can’t go on forever, won’t” and in general try to replace the Gods of the Copybook Headings with “if only”.
Then they are astonished when “unexpectedly” (which is surely liberalism’s keyword), what ensues is epic failure. Of course, to those of us who have ever studied history and more importantly, learned from it, their epic failure is anything but unexpected. And when this is pointed out to them, the best (satirical) summation of the intellectuals’ argument is: “No fair bringing facts to an argument!” Whether gun control, climate change or cradle-to-grave welfare (to name but some of liberalism’s pet projects), the outcomes are the same, and the only counter-argument seems to be “But it failed because it wasn’t done properly!” which in turn leads to the inevitable, “Next time we’ll do it better!”
Compared to this bunch, a little breath of Farage-style nationalism and/or Trump-style populism would be a welcome change.
Kim du Toit (September 8, 2016 at 3:18 pm), you may be thinking of the following from George Orwell: “I have heard it confidently stated for instance, that the American troops had been brought to Europe not to fight the Germans but to crush an English revolution. One has to belong to the intelligentsia to believe a thing like that; no ordinary man could be such a fool.” from his essay [Notes on Nationalism, 1945]