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New Class War
 h/t Instapundit[AmericanConservative] Shock gave way to relief this summer as America’s political establishment--rattled by Donald Trump’s success in winning the Republican nomination--reassured itself of his inevitable defeat come November. For a moment Trump seemed to have created a new style of politics, one that threatened to mobilize working-class voters against the establishment in both parties. But in the weeks following the Democratic National Convention, as Hillary Clinton’s poll numbers remained comfortably ahead of Trump’s, pundits discounted the risk of class war. ...Since the Cold War ended, U.S. politics has seen a series of insurgent candidacies. Pat Buchanan prefigured Trump in the Republican contests of 1992 and 1996. Ralph Nader challenged the Clinton wing of the Democratic Party from the outside in 2000. Ron Paul vexed establishment Republicans John McCain and Mitt Romney in 2008 and 2012. And this year, Trump was not the only candidate to confound his party’s elite: Bernie Sanders harried Hillary Clinton right up to the Democratic convention. ...The insurgents clearly do not represent a single class: they appeal to eclectic interests and groups. The foe they have all faced down, however--the bipartisan establishment--does resemble a class in its striking unity of outlook and interest. So what is this class, effectively the ruling class of the country? Some critics on the right have identified it with the "managerial" class described by James Burnham in his 1941 book The Managerial Revolution. But it bears a stronger resemblance to what what others have called "the New Class." In fact, the interests of this New Class of college-educated "verbalists" are antithetical to those of the industrial managers that Burnham described. Understanding the relationship between these two often conflated concepts provides insight into politics today, which can be seen as a clash between managerial and New Class elites. They are the Mandarinate --- where formal education (whose mainstay is education in conformism - the other-thinkers [and thinkers in general] are weeded out during the said education process) is the only qualification ...The New Class plays a priestly role in its alliance with finance, absolving Wall Street for the sin of making money in exchange for plenty of that money to keep the New Class in power. In command of foreign policy, the New Class gets to pursue humanitarian ideological projects--to experiment on the world. It gets to evangelize by the sword. And with trade policy, it gets to suppress its class rival, the managerial elite, at home. Through trade pacts and mass immigration the financial elite, meanwhile, gets to maximize its returns without regard for borders or citizenship. The erosion of other nations’ sovereignty that accompanies American hegemony helps toward that end too--though our wars are more ideological than interest-driven. Regardless of ideology, the results are indistinguishable from pure Nihilism. Possibly a subconscious effort to destroy potential threats: power threats like Russia or intellectual threats like Israel. Posted by: g(r)omgoru 2016-09-11 |
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