“The New Class War: Saving Democracy From the Managerial Elite”
By: Michael Lind
S E E D E D C O N T E N T
America’s wealthy and educated classes come in for another condign drubbing in Michael Lind’s “The New Class War: Saving Democracy From the Managerial Elite” (Portfolio, 203 pages, $25). Mr. Lind is far, I believe, from being a Marxist, but his account of 2016’s populist revolt feels to me like economic determinism. What makes his book work so brilliantly, though, isn’t so much his economic interpretation of our political quandary as his acid analysis of “technocratic neoliberalism.” One salient component of that worldview, Mr. Lind writes in a passage I particularly relished, “is to medicalize politics and treat differing viewpoints as evidence of mental and emotional disorders.” Hence the “phobia” suffix: Islamophobia, homophobia, transphobia and so on. This habit of mind he finds as far back as Richard Hofstadter’s 1964 essay “The Paranoid Style in American Politics,” surely among the most overrated and malign political compositions of the 20th century.
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A very brief review, but one that is relevant because it is class which divides the nation. What Adam Smith long ago called the "masters of mankind" are today's ruling class. They rule from Washington DC, Silicon valley in the west and Wall Street in the East. They have many surrogates in media & academia. They have regained control.
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