The New Class

For John, BLUF:  I don't think the Progressives yet understand this.  I think they still think it is just ignorance and bigotry.  Sadly, they are misinformed.  Nothing to see here; just move along.

---

Donald Trump is a symptom of a new kind of class warfare raging at home and abroad

Here is the sub-headline:

What’s happening in America is an echo of what’s happening in democracies around the world, and it’s not happening because of Trump.

From USA Today, by Law Professor Glenn Harlan Reynolds, 15 January 2019.

Here is the lede plus three:

To understand events around the world today, one must think in terms of the class struggle.

This sentence sounds like something that could be written by a doctrinaire Marxist.  But it is nonetheless true.  Much of the current tension in America and in many other democracies is in fact a product of a class struggle.  It’s not the kind of class struggle that Karl Marx wrote about, with workers and peasants facing off against rapacious capitalists, but it is a case of today’s ruling class facing disaffection from its working class.

In the old Soviet Union, the Marxists assured us that once true communism was established under a “dictatorship of the proletariat,” the state would wither away and everyone would be free.  In fact, however, the dictatorship of the proletariat turned into a dictatorship of the party hacks, who had no interest whatsoever in seeing their positions or power wither.

Yugoslav dissident Milovan Djilas called these party hacks the "New Class," noting that instead of workers and peasants against capitalists, it was now a case of workers and peasants being ruled by a managerial new class of technocrats who, while purporting to act for the benefit of the workers and peasants, somehow wound up with the lion’s share of the goodies.  Workers and peasants stood in long lines for bread and shoddy household goods, while party leaders and government managers bought imported delicacies in special, secret stores.  (In a famous Soviet joke, then-leader Leonid Brezhnev shows his mother his luxury apartment, his limousine, his fancy country house and his helicopter only to have her object:  “But what if the communists come back?”)

I am not sure the New Class sees the problem here.  Maybe the increasing number of working homeless on the Coast will help them visualize the problem.

Hat tip to the InstaPundit.

Regards  —  Cliff