Civilizational Jenga - Bit by bit, our ruling class is eliminating our societal safety margins

 Politics makes me sad sometimes.

Oh, not just because politicians are doing dumb things.  Not even because politicians are corrupt.  Politicians have always been dumb and corrupt, as any study of history will demonstrate. 

And it doesn’t matter if they hold office by election, inheritance, or swords distributed by strange women lying in ponds.  Stupidity and corruption are human characteristics, and politicians are very, very human.  (Though recent history is strange women lying in ponds distributing swords look better as the basis for a system of government . . . .)

Sometimes their stupidity and corruption make me angry, and sometimes they make me laugh.  But, given my low expectations, it takes a special kind of stupidity and corruption to actually make me sad.

What makes me sad now is the ongoing game of Civilizational Jenga that our ruling class is playing.  One by one, they’re withdrawing the supports of civil society, in a process that will inevitably lead to a collapse.  They’re taking what was a very robust society, and consuming all the safety margins, bit by bit.

Rethinking the Civil Service

 

America’s institutions need structural reform.  We need it in academia, we need it in the corporate world, and we need it in government.  In all of these fields, the structures, incentives, and institutions that have grown up over time have been destructive, and need to be fundamentally transformed.

I’ll be writing about all of these things down the line, but for now let’s start with government.  Though you don’t hear a lot about it on the right, the left is all bent out of shape over the prospect that a Republican administration elected in 2024 might partially deconstruct the existing protected civil service.  I, on the other hand, am excited about that prospect, and only wish they’d go farther.

Prior to the adoption of the Pendleton Act in 1883, government employment operated according to the “spoils system,” which meant that hiring in the executive branch was controlled by the Executive.  When a new administration came in, everyone’s job was up for grabs, at least potentially.  This “rotation in office” had several advantages, which were widely appreciated at the time, and propounded by presidents from Jefferson to Jackson to Lincoln.

“Jackson argued that one serving in government for too long would inevitably lose sight of the public interest and come to use office for personal gain. He also maintained that government was or could be made simple enough for men of ordinary ability and experience, so ‘more is lost by the long continuance of men in office than is generally to be gained by their experience.’”^[i]

Contrary to popular belief, though, the arrival of a new president didn’t mean that everyone left.  Even Andrew Jackson, upon taking office, replaced only about 10% of the federal work force with his own people.  Every president understood the value of continuity, and hiring new people is hard work.

Mike Pence, Dick Cheney, and the Constitution

Glenn Reynolds argues that the Vice President is a legislative officer for the purpose of the constitution. 

Nowadays, we tend to think of Vice Presidents – wrongly – as a sort of junior or co-President, but that’s not actually how it works at all.  As I wrote in the Northwestern Law Review piece:

The Constitution gives the Vice President no executive powers; the Vice President's only duties are to preside over the Senate and to become President if the serving President dies or leaves office.  Traditionally, what staff, office, and perquisites the Vice President enjoyed came via the Senate; it was not until Spiro Agnew mounted a legislative push that the Vice President got his own budget line. The Vice President really is not an executive official. He or she executes no laws--and is not part of the President's administration the way that other officials are. The Vice President cannot be fired by the President; as an independently elected officeholder, he can be removed only by Congress via impeachment. 

While I think Glenn is doing God’s work with his blog and this Substack essay (to which I recently subscribed, and everyone should do the same), I will make a modest objection for the sake of the argument.  When Glenn states that “… presiding over the Senate is surely a legislative function par excellence.” he begs the question.  

A Vice president is unquestionably a “spare.”  But if the Constitution does not specify that the Speaker of the House is a member (Article 1, Section 2), it’s possible that the President of the Senate shall not be a Senator and therefore is not a legislator.  After all, he has no vote unless the Senate is equally divided.  In other words, the Vice Presidency is, for all practical purposes, a Constitutional spare, a baby in the womb waiting to be born.  Neither fish nor fowl nor good red meat.    

Gun Wars: An Interview with Larry Correia

 Larry Correia is a bestselling author of thriller SF/fantasy fiction.  He’s also a gun enthusiast.  Now he’s written a nonfiction work on gun rights and the Second Amendment.  I read an advance copy and found myself flying through the pages – it’s super-interesting and engaging, even to someone like me who’s been a shooter and gun-rights supporter and part of this world for many years.   The book is In Defense of the Second Amendment, and it comes out on Tuesday.

I thought it would be nice to ask him some questions, which are featured below. As usual, the article is free to everyone, but comments are limited to paid subscribers.

So fiction pays a lot better than nonfiction – as a nonfiction author, believe me, I know – but you took time from writing bestselling fiction to produce a book on gun rights.  Why?  And why now?

Why the left keeps smearing its political rivals as Hitlers or Mussolinis

 

Want to be Hitler? You don’t have to hate Jews, invade Poland or grow a silly mustache. There’s only one thing you have to do: Win an election against the left, or even look like you might.

We’ve seen that for years, of course. Democrats have likened every GOP presidential candidate back to Tom Dewey to the Austrian corporal.

When the Tea Party movement — best known for leaving the sites of its protests cleaner than it found them, in stark contrast to lefty groups like Occupy or BLM — appeared on the scene, they were immediately likened to Hitler’s brownshirts.

To listen to the Democrats and the media (I repeat myself), the Trump administration was a Nazi reign of terror over America, though none of those critics wound up targeted by the Gestapo. (That fell to pro-life activists and Trump supporters under the Biden administration.)

It’s not just in America....

They’re doing it again in response to this week’s election in Italy, which elevated Giorgia Meloni to be Italy’s first female prime minister. She identifies as a mother, a Catholic and an Italian and says she wants what’s best for the Italian people, not what serves the agenda of the Western gentry class.

This makes her . . . well, not Hitler exactly, but since it’s Italy, Mussolini.

Read the whole thing.  

How today’s elites manipulate America’s working class

 Glenn Reynolds "Instapundit"

In the old days, Russia would send communist agitators to rile up the working class. Nowadays, they don’t have to. The West’s ruling class is happy to do the agitating.

Over the past few years — and, really, the past few decades — we’ve seen a steady assault on the well-being, and the social standing, of the working class, and a decline in upward mobility. And as people start to notice and object, the response has been to double down.

While the upper and upper-middle classes, what demographer Joel Kotkin calls the “Gentry Class,” flourished from the initial tech boom to the present, income and general well-being for the middle and lower-middle classes stagnated or declined. Manufacturing jobs went overseas, and those left unemployed were snidely told to “learn to code.” 

Occasionally the mask slipped, as with Hillary Clinton’s “basket of deplorables” remark, or Barack Obama’s snide reference to people “bitterly clinging” to their guns and their religion. Increasingly, though, the mask wasn’t there at all. The upper classes draw a lot of their self-esteem from a claimed superiority to the working class, which requires a lot of put-downs for its maintenance.

Then came COVID. The widespread lockdowns were nice for members of the Gentry Class, who fired up their laptops and worked remotely. They stayed home “keeping safe” while members of the working class brought them stuff.

There were a few glimmers of gratitude — Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau even told people to thank truckers — but those didn’t last long, nor did they conceal what turned out to be the biggest transfer of wealth in human history, as big businesses like Amazon and Walmart thrived while mom-and-pop businesses failed under the lockdowns.

And sometimes when the mask slipped, it literally slipped. As many have noticed, we developed a new convention in which the servant class is masked, while the celebrities and the oligarchs go free, something demonstrated at gatherings ranging from the Met Gala to the Oscars. Elsewhere, stars and politicians flouted the mask laws while small businesses were shut down.

Then the mandatory vaccine rules proliferated even as the vaccines appeared to underperform. Canadian truckers who protested were smeared by Trudeau as racists, sexists, homophobes, transphobes, etc. Trudeau, who took a knee to violent, destructive Black Lives Matter protests, invoked virtual martial law to put the working-class protesters in their place. By arresting people, seizing bank accounts and threatening to take drivers’ trucks, Trudeau was creating his own martyrs.

Polls indicate that most US Democrats support him and would do the same here.

Want the working class to feel isolated, angry and ill-used? The West’s own leadership is doing a better job than any Soviet agitators did.

In the end, Trudeau blinked. Maybe he remembered something important: It’s not the laptop class that brings food to the grocery stores. But will American leaders remember that?

Intellectuals have wreaked horrific devastation on much of the world, now it's America's turn

 Related: To quote Neal Stephenson, from In The Beginning Was The Command Line, “During this century, intellectualism failed, and everyone knows it. In places like Russia and Germany, the common people agreed to loosen their grip on traditional folkways, mores, and religion, and let the intellectuals run with the ball, and they screwed everything up and turned the century into an abbatoir. Those wordy intellectuals used to be merely tedious; now they seem kind of dangerous as well. We Americans are the only ones who didn’t get creamed at some point during all of this. We are free and prosperous because we have inherited political and values systems fabricated by a particular set of eighteenth-century intellectuals who happened to get it right. But we have lost touch with those intellectuals.”

That was last century. This century the intellectuals are trying to bring to America what they did to Europe in the 20th.

The ‘cabal’ that bragged of foisting Joe Biden on us must answer for his failed presidency

 

As Time magazine reported shortly after the 2020 election, a “cabal” — Time’s word — of “left-wing activists and business titans” worked to get rid of Trump. It pushed mail-in voting. It moved to block election fraud suits brought by Trump and supporters. It employed social media censorship to mute pro-Trump arguments and amplify anti-Trump arguments. It sponsored protests.

Time calls this a “conspiracy to save the election,” but in truth it was a conspiracy to save the election for the Democrats. The consequences in terms of lost faith in democracy have been severe, but the worst effect is that the winning ticket was never seriously vetted by the media or the campaign process. As a result, we have a president whose mental capacity is openly doubted by much of the nation....

In a normal campaign, Biden’s weaknesses would have been obvious. ...

But the “cabal” ensured that the press didn’t pressure him to leave his basement. Questions about his abilities were silenced. And the press also helped by drumming up and deploying COVID hysteria against Trump, sometimes openly hoping that it would harm him, other times deploying the hysteria to support mail-in ballots and other questionable practices....

Time’s piece says, “It sounds like a paranoid fever dream — a well-funded cabal of powerful people, ranging across industries and ideologies, working together behind the scenes to influence perceptions, change rules and laws, steer media coverage and control the flow of information.”

But that’s OK because, we’re told, “They were not rigging the election; they were fortifying it.”

Were they? Were they really?

America now faces a dangerous time, internationally, domestically and economically, with obviously inadequate leadership at the top. If disaster ensues, the people who openly bragged about their efforts to install the Biden administration may wish they had kept quiet.

The ‘cabal’ that bragged of foisting Joe Biden on us must answer for his failed presidency

 It’s time to admit it. Less than a year in, Joe Biden’s is a failed presidency. Biden knows it, the press knows it, and voters know it. And our foreign adversaries like China and Russia know it.

It’s also time to look at the “cabal” of business, labor and political leaders who foisted the Biden administration on us. That won’t be hard, as they were openly bragging about their efforts less than a year ago.

The failure is obvious. The administration is so desperate, it’s begging the press for better coverage. (What, they’re supposed to lie about gas and food prices? I guess so.) The Chinese and Russians are moving aggressively against the United States and its allies, on the ground, on the seas and even in outer space, because they don’t fear repercussions from a tired, incoherent president who presides over an administration of woke incompetents and Obama retreads.

Read the whole thing.  It's time to expose the cabal and drive them out of public life and out of our elections.

Time’s piece says, “It sounds like a paranoid fever dream — a well-funded cabal of powerful people, ranging across industries and ideologies, working together behind the scenes to influence perceptions, change rules and laws, steer media coverage and control the flow of information.”

But that’s OK because, we’re told, “They were not rigging the election; they were fortifying it.”

Were they? Were they really?

America now faces a dangerous time, internationally, domestically and economically, with obviously inadequate leadership at the top. If disaster ensues, the people who openly bragged about their efforts to install the Biden administration may wish they had kept quiet.

The irrational COVID regime is driving many Americans to a healthy noncompliance

 

Some on the left are calling those who resist the regime names like “domestic terrorists,” but that doesn’t carry much weight anymore. With the left having spent a decade calling everyone Hitler, “domestic terrorist” barely registers. (And given the Biden administration’s craven surrender to the real terrorists in Afghanistan, some Americans might be forgiven for thinking that if they get called terrorist enough, they will be in line for the basket of goodies Biden is giving the Taliban.)

The rich and powerful thrived as the rest of us suffered in the year of lockdowns

 Glenn Reynolds tells the truth about how the Overclass thrived at the expense of everyone else.

It’s been over a year since “two weeks to slow the spread,” and the pandemic is finally dragging to a finish. Cases are down, herd immunity has more or less arrived, and even in deep-blue Boston, Stop & Shop has announced it will end mask requirements before the month’s out.

The pandemic saw a huge amount of power and money transferred to what Michael Lind calls the “overclass” of politicians, corporate managers and bureaucrats. Small businesses shut down while big-box stores deemed “essential” remained open. The laptop class worked from home — to the delight of many of its members — while the working class brought them stuff. Federal money flowed like water to the connected. The national debt went from scandalous to essentially absurd, an amount of money that no one expects to be repaid.

The Chinese Communist Party used the threat of the pandemic and lockdowns to crush a rebellion in Hong Kong. The American powers-that-be did something similar: People who demonstrated for the wrong causes were called granny-killers and shut down; people who demonstrated for overclass-approved causes (like New York’s “Black Trans Lives Matter” rally, featuring thousands and endorsed by Mayor Bill de Blasio, even as he welded the gates of a Jewish park closed) received letters of support from “public-health” people who assured us that racism is a bigger public-health problem than COVID, even as they used COVID as an excuse to remake American society.

Ongoing COVID lockdowns cost countless jobs

From the beginning, of course, the public-health crowd itself failed to perform. First we were told not to worry about the Chinese virus (media outfits freely used the term until the Chinese government complained, then dutifully decided any mention of China was racist). Then we were told masks don’t help, then that they do and we must wear them — preferably two or three — to survive. They emphasized handwashing and other “hygiene theater,” even though, as The Atlantic later admitted, the theater had little use in preventing the disease and was mostly just a way of making people feel better.

Gov. Andrew Cuomo ordered infectious COVID patients into nursing homes, exposing vulnerable elderly people to the virus and resulting in hundreds of extra deaths. His punishment: an Emmy for his news conferences and $5 million-plus for a book on what a great job he’d done, a book that sold only 50,000 copies. Consequences are for the little people.

Though we were originally told that the virus came from a “wet market” in Wuhan, it now looks likely that it came from a Chinese lab in Wuhan — one that reportedly got funding from Anthony Fauci’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases to do “gain of function” research, which looks at ways to make existing viruses deadlier or more infectious. Fauci’s role here has gotten surprisingly little comment.

President Donald Trump launched Operation Warp Speed, a program to develop a vaccine in less than a year. He promised mass vaccinations by April, and media outfits like The New York Times informed us Trump’s claim was made “without evidence” and experts were dubious. Then-candidate Kamala Harris warned people she’d be reluctant to take a vaccine developed under Trump.

States with strictest lockdowns ruined livelihoods

Yet vaccines appeared on schedule, and many Americans got them, just in time for the press to praise President Joe Biden’s skill in getting them out.

Lockdowns — where the laptop class stays home while working-class people bring them stuff — were enacted in many states. States that had them did no better, and often worse, than states that did not. This became obvious early but resulted in no change of policy.

According to the American Institute for Economic Research, lockdowns did more harm than good on multiple levels. Businesses died, mental-health problems abounded, people missed important “elective” procedures such as cancer screenings with long-term consequences, and many kids effectively missed out on a year of education.

But no politicians or government employees missed a paycheck. Consequences are for the little people.

So is it fair to call the overclass response to the pandemic a failure? Well, certainly not for the overclass, whose members are richer, more powerful and more secure in their positions than a year ago. For America? Well, that’s another story.

The suicide of expertise: Glenn Reynolds; Americans might look back on the last 50 years and say, “What have experts done for us lately?”

 

It was the experts — characterized in terms of their self-image by David Halberstam in The Best and the Brightest — who brought us the twin debacles of the Vietnam War, which we lost, and the War On Poverty, where we spent trillions and certainly didn’t win. In both cases, confident assertions by highly credentialed authorities foundered upon reality, at a dramatic cost in blood and treasure. Mostly other people’s blood and treasure.

And these are not isolated failures. The history of government nutritional advice from the 1960s to the present is an appalling one: The advice of “experts” was frequently wrong, and sometimes bought-and-paid-for by special interests, but always delivered with an air of unchallengeable certainty.

In the realm of foreign affairs, which should be of special interest to the people at Foreign Affairs, recent history has been particularly dreadful. Experts failed to foresee the fall of the Soviet Union, failed to deal especially well with that fall when it took place, and then failed to deal with the rise of Islamic terrorism that led to the 9/11 attacks. Post 9/11, experts botched the reconstruction of Iraq, then botched it again with a premature pullout.

On Syria, experts in Barack Obama’s administration produced a policy that led to countless deaths, millions of refugees flooding Europe, a new haven for Islamic terrorists, and the upending of established power relations in the Mideast. In Libya, the experts urged a war, waged without the approval of Congress, to topple strongman Moammar Gadhafi, only to see — again — countless deaths, huge numbers of refugees and another haven for Islamist terror.

It was experts who brought us the housing bubble and the subprime crisis. It was experts who botched the Obamacare rollout. And, of course, the experts didn’t see Brexit coming, and seem to have responded mostly with injured pride and assaults on the intelligence of the electorate, rather than with constructive solutions.

By its fruit the tree is known, and the tree of expertise hasn’t been doing well lately. As Nassim Taleb recently observed: “With psychology papers replicating less than 40%, dietary advice reversing after 30 years of fatphobia, macroeconomic analysis working worse than astrology, the appointment of Bernanke who was less than clueless of the risks, and pharmaceutical trials replicating at best only 1/3 of the time, people are perfectly entitled to rely on their own ancestral instinct and listen to their grandmothers.”

Then there’s the problem that, somehow, over the past half-century or so the educated classes that make up the “expert” demographic seem to have been doing pretty well, even as so many ordinary folks, in America and throughout the West, have seen their fortunes decaying. Is it any surprise that claims to authority in the form of “expertise” don’t carry the same weight that they once did?

If experts want to reclaim a position of authority, they need to make a few changes. First, they should make sure they know what they’re talking about, and they shouldn’t talk about things where their knowledge isn’t solid. Second, they should be appropriately modest in their claims of authority. And, third, they should check their egos. It doesn’t matter what your SAT scores were, voters are under no obligation to listen to you unless they find what you say persuasive.

And you know what makes you less persuasive? The kind of contempt displayed by Foreign Affairs. If expertise is dead, it’s because those who claimed it overplayed their hands. It’s not the death of expertise, so much as a suicide.

Officials like Fauci have undermined trust in government institutions

 Glenn Reynolds:

We now have several COVID vaccines. All work, all have passed safety testing, and all are in wide distribution.

This is a huge accomplishment, but there’s one problem: A lot of people aren’t taking the shot. 

Are they just ignorant anti-vaxxers?

No. As a recent focus group by Frank Luntz, reported in The Washington Post, demonstrates, a lot of people who won’t take the vaccine aren’t skeptical about vaccines in general. Just about this batch.

So maybe they’re just Red State Luddites?

No. In fact, it’s a worldwide phenomenon. Yes, there’s resistance in the United States: Gallup reported in February that 34 percent of front-line health workers said they wouldn’t get the vaccine, with another 18 percent unsure; fewer than half said they would definitely get jabbed. Only 65 percent of Americans as a whole said they would get the vaccine.

But there’s also resistance abroad. Reuters reported that only about half of French care-home workers are willing to get the vaccine; the rest prefer to wait and see if it’s safe. Reuters quotes a union official who says “there’s a complete lack of trust.”

Reuters reports similar numbers in Germany. Also in Germany, and in Italy, thousands of health-care workers have refused the AstraZeneca vaccine, even though it’s approved in Europe. In the German state of Saarland, The Wall Street Journal reports, over half of health workers slated to get a shot simply failed to show up.

Alarming number of US health care workers are refusing COVID-19 vaccine

PBS NewsHour reports similar vaccine-skepticism in India. And NBC reports that thousands of serving US military personnel are opting not to take the vaccine.

So what’s the problem? For so much of the lockdown period, we heard the words “until there’s a vaccine.” Now we have a vaccine — several, in fact — and in record time, thanks to Operation Warp Speed. Why are so many people, including health-care workers who should know the most and care the most, refusing it now?

I think it comes down to, in that French trade-union official’s words, “a complete lack of trust.”

Trust is the single most important asset that the public-health community has. Public health involves getting people to change behaviors, and accept vaccines and medications, to control disease.

For most of my lifetime, that has been an easy task: People trusted the public-health authorities, in part because they had a long track record of making people’s lives better. And, of course, people trusted institutions in general.

But now trust is harder to come by. Institutions in general are less trusted, as one legacy of the Trump era has been the revelation of just how politicized (and sometimes corrupt) so many of our major institutions are.

And then there’s the record of the public-health establishment itself in the COVID era, which has been untrustworthy. Just over a year ago, in early March 2020, Dr. Anthony Fauci was telling us it was safe to go on a cruise, and experts said that masks wouldn’t be of any use for most people.

Both of those statements were quickly reversed, but when it came out that the mask recommendation was really just meant to ensure supplies for health-care workers, Fauci’s — and the World Health Organization’s — trust levels took a major hit.

Fauci also told us last April that it would be at least a year to 18 months before we saw a vaccine, when in fact one was deployed as early as November of the same year. When asked about herd immunity, Fauci moved the goalposts, when experts were saying that the threshold for herd immunity was 60 percent of the population being vaccinated or immune. Then he revised the number up to 70, 75 and eventually 85.

Why? As Fauci admitted, he was manipulating us: “When polls said only about half of all Americans would take a vaccine, I was saying herd immunity would take 70 to 75 percent. . . . Then, when newer surveys said 60 percent or more would take it, I thought, ‘I can nudge this up a bit,’ so I went to 80, 85.”

People noticed, partly because he was bragging to a New York Times reporter when he said that.

Likewise, lockdowns were widely prescribed, and continue to be, even though the World Health Organization admits they don’t work. (A recent paper in Nature came to the same conclusion.) Where’s the science?

It doesn’t help that Democratic politicians like Joe Biden, Kamala Harris and Andrew Cuomo were expressing vaccine-skepticism during the runup to the 2020 elections.  Sure, they changed their tunes afterward, but that doesn’t inspire trust either.

When you manipulate people, they notice, and they trust you less. Do better.

Comey's Under DoJ Scrutiny for Leading Probe While Misleading Trump

It looks like the whole thing was a set-up from the start.

Sources tell RealClearInvestigations that Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz will soon file a report with evidence indicating that Comey was misleading the president. Even as he repeatedly assured Trump that he was not a target, the former director was secretly trying to build a conspiracy case against the president, while at times acting as an investigative agent.

Two U.S. officials briefed on the inspector general’s investigation of possible FBI misconduct said Comey was essentially “running a covert operation against” the president, starting with a private “defensive briefing” he gave Trump just weeks before his inauguration. They said Horowitz has examined high-level FBI text messages and other communications indicating Comey was actually conducting a “counterintelligence assessment” of Trump during that January 2017 meeting in New York.

In addition to adding notes of his meetings and phone calls with Trump to the official FBI case file, Comey had an agent inside the White House who reported back to FBI headquarters about Trump and his aides, according to other officials familiar with the matter.

Glenn Reynolds (Instapundit) is a law professor:

If Comey lied to Trump — who is, after all, a federal official — it’s prosecutable as a False Statements Act violation. It would be lovely irony if Comey wound up facing one of those, after engineering them for others.

Glenn Reynolds on the new class struggle

It sounds like a Marxist explanation of the situation, but it's just a little different.

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.

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?”)

Djilas’ work was explosive — he was jailed — because it made clear that the workers and peasants had simply replaced one class of exploiters with another. It set the stage for the Soviet Union’s implosion, and for the discrediting of communism among everyone with any sense.

But the New Class isn’t limited to communist countries, really. Around the world in the postwar era, power was taken up by unelected professional and managerial elites. To understand what’s going on with President Donald Trump and his opposition, and in other countries as diverse as France, Hungary, Italy and Brazil, it’s important to realize that the post-World War II institutional arrangements of the Western democracies are being renegotiated, and that those democracies’ professional and managerial elites don’t like that very much, because they have done very well under those arrangements. And, like all elites who are doing very well, they don’t want that to change.

The postwar era saw the creation of international institutions ranging from NATO to the United Nations to the World Bank, along with a proliferation of think tanks and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) to accompany them. It saw the vast expansion of higher education in the United States, and the transformation of academic degrees into something close to must-haves for the upper-middle class. It saw a great expansion of power on the part of media organizations, and on the part of government bureaucrats and lobbyists, both of whose numbers increased enormously.

But after the turn of the millennium, other Americans, much like the workers and peasants in the old Soviet Union, started to notice that while the New Class was doing quite well (America’s richest counties now surround Washington, D.C.), things weren’t going so well for them. And what made it more upsetting was that — while the Soviet Union’s apparatchiks at least pretended to like the workers and peasants — members of America’s ruling class seemed to view ordinary Americans with something like contempt, using terms such as “bitter clingers,” “deplorables” and flyover people.