The New Class War: Saving Democracy from the Metropolitan Elite

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In line with much left-wing thinking, Lind takes aim at these powerful managerial elites, arguing that more than thirty years of technocratic neoliberal revolution have created the conditions for a populist revolt. However, this hasn’t given rise to Karl Marx’s “class struggle” between the industrial proletariat and capitalist class . Instead, Lind describes a ruthless Hobbesian war of all against all, taking place in spheres of culture, economy, and politics, in which the working class has little to no agency. This provides some of the main insights of his book — but also an inability to wrestle with the new political realities of our time. Pointing Out Liberal Hypocrisy Toal, Gerard (May 5, 2008). "The Hamiltonian Nationalist: A Conversation with Michael Lind". Geopolitical Discourse. 13 (1): 169–180. doi: 10.1080/14650040701783425. S2CID 143665226. Michael, your analysis makes good sense; it rings true and is probably statistically correct. However, you have neglected to mention the most important bone of contention that sharply divides us Americans: donald trump.

I define democracy differently from most of the people who talk about liberal democracy. I don’t like that term ‘liberal democracy’, because the premise is that it is all very procedural and formal. That is to say, you have free elections, and minorities are not persecuted. But you can still have a very oligarchic society if you have free elections and respect basic civil rights, because most of democracy is about policies and not about rights. I argue that in the middle of the 20th century in all of the Western democracies, there was a substantive democracy – I call it democratic pluralism – in which the power of this managerial elite, which already existed by 1945, was counterbalanced by working-class organisations like trade unions, as well as powerful churches and powerful local political machines. And as those have eroded, by default, the college-educated elites have come to dominate the entire system – not by conspiracy, it is just that countervailing forces have eroded. We need the ability to build consensus because it’s too destabilizing to have one half of the population trying to ride roughshod over the other,” Lind says. “But you can’t get there by appealing to facts.”

If Western societies are becoming transracial melting pots, not multicultural salad bowls, why are government, corporate, academic and media elites doubling down on policies such as diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) based on the false idea that gaps among racial and ethnic groups are permanent or even increasing? The answer is that constant emphasis on racial and ethnic disparities diverts public attention from the growing class divide in the West between the college-educated overclass and the working class, whose members of all races have more in common with each other than with elite members of their own “race”, when it comes to wages, worker power and access to education and health care.

Just as some individuals are genetically superior to others within a race, so some races are genetically superior to other races.The details of this new dispensation varied across national contexts. But in just about every Western country, Lind writes, “power brokers who answered to working-class and rural constituencies — grassroots party politicians, trade union and farm association leaders, and church leaders — bargained with national elites in the three realms of government, the economy, and the culture, respectively.” T he editors have been kind enough to give me space to respond to Michael Lind’s reply to my article on the us Constitution in nlr 232. footnote 1 In contrast to populists, elite fusionist conservatives since the 1950s have privileged 1787 over 1776. They have treated the federal Constitution as the equivalent of the Ten Commandments, teaching the American people, “Thou Shalt Not Have Nice Things,” like a living wage, labor unions, guaranteed access to inexpensive health care, or adequate social insurance. The Founders thus become ventriloquist dummies for rich donors who fund fusionist magazines that few but the same donors read.