Educated Class Admits It Doesn't Have a Clue

but does anyone have a clue

In the aftermath of the late great Trump election the Educated Class is finally coming around to acknowledging that Houston We Have a Problem.

Ruy Teixeira, he of The Emerging Democratic Majority back in the 2000s, is one of those in the educated class that understands that Trump is making inroads into traditional Democratic blocs.

In short, the rising American electorate didn’t rise, it crashed.

He means that the Democratic Majority of his book hasn’t Emerged. Not as Democrats.

Now The New York Times has joined the chorus, as excerpted by Powerline. The Times looks at the changes in voting by counties. Briefly,

Mr. Trump has increased the Republican Party’s share… in close to half the counties in America — 1,433 in all[.]
. . .
By contrast, Democrats have steadily expanded their vote share in those three elections in only 57 of the nation’s 3,100-plus counties… almost exclusively in America’s wealthiest and most educated pockets.

Let’s not get too carried away. Sure Trump won in the Electoral College 312-226. But the popular vote was practically tied: 77.3 million to 75.0 million, or 49-48 percent. Not exactly the 61-37.5 Nixon election of 1972 or the 60-40 Reagan election of 1984. But still, the GOP also has a majority in both houses of Congress as well as the presidency. That is only the second time since the Crash of 1929. The first was when the GOP had a majority of both Houses for part of the Bush administration.

Why then is everyone declaring that it’s the end of the world for Democrats? I don’t know. I think that it’s just that the Trump 2.0 win was completely unexpected for the Democrats and the educated class. It seems like the end of the world.

Is it the end of the world? Not really, but the outlook is not good for the Democrats.

The problem, as I have developed before, is that the Democratic Party is the party of the educated class. When the educated class advocated for the working class, back in the 1930s, it made electoral sense. The working class was the biggest class, and ended up as a majority when combined with the small educated class. Thus the educated class advertised itself as the ally of the working class in the fight against robber barons in the late 19th century, malefactors of great wealth in the early 20th century, economic royalists in the 1930s, and oligarchs today.

The problem for the ruling class is that today the largest class is probably the ordinary middle class, and the educated class tends to sneer at the ordinary middle class. Also, the cultural agenda of the educated class — particularly anti-racism, LGBT, migrants, defunding police, doing nothing about homeless — does not resonate with the ordinary middle class. Not at all.

But the ordinary middle class is not really mobilized for political activity; it is oriented towards the ordinary life of work and family. It only becomes interested in politics when things start to go wrong.

The educated class came to power in revolt against the old regime of kings and landowners. It has exercised its power and ruled as wise and knowledgable administrators that just “know” what is to be done and that must be obeyed.

In fact, though, that’s not how the human world works, except in wartime. Human society is far too complex to be administered from the top. Instead it works in an uncertain balance between creative disruption and stability, between new ideas that work, and old ideas baked into custom and culture. Meanwhile the prices of the market economy are signaling what works and what doesn’t. In war, of course, the commander-in-chief determines what is to be done and the whole nation follows his orders.

Problem is that every ruling class is tempted to act as though there’s a war to be fought, whether it’s a war on oligarchs, a war on poverty, a war on COVID, a war on Climate Change. And if there’s a war on, then the ruling class must order everyone around, down to the tiniest detail.

And every ruling class likes to moralize its power project. President Wilson wasn’t just fighting the Germans, he was making the world safe for democracy. Liberal activists don’t just want to take power; they fight for justice. The war between Israel and the Palestinians is not just a fight over borders. It’s about “Free Palestine” and “End the Genocide.”

Simply put, ruling to the tiniest detail doesn’t work. The more you do it, the more you bury the economy and society in sludge. There’s an additional problem. The ideas about what needs to be done don’t come from disinterested experts; they come from special interests that fund politicians in return for government contracts. Or, as with climate change, the only scientists that get research grants are the ones that back the climate change narrative.

Then, of course, the rule of the educated class is based up the political formula that it fights for the oppressed peoples against the white oppressors. Thus the stage is set up for corruption, for the rulers to tap the white oppressors to help the oppressed peoples.

In consequence the overall economy and also the prosperity of the majority is damaged by the deliberate taxing of people to fund the distribution programs of the rulers and also by the inflexible and ineffective and wasteful administration and regulation of the economy by administrators and regulators.

All along, it is the natural instinct of political rulers to help their supporters and order everyone around to fight the war-on-whatever-it-is-this-week.

Let us suppose that the rule of the educated class is in trouble, because it does not deliver prosperity and flexibility, and the ordinary middle class resents being tapped for the distribution programs and the regulations of the elite.

I say that the whole history of the last fifty years since Richard Nixon was elected as the president of the “silent majority” is the story of how difficult it is to get beyond the command and control of politics and administration. We had the Morning in America of Ronald Reagan, the Compassionate Conservatism of George W. Bush, and the Make America Great Again of Donald Trump. How much has changed?

Right now, it seem that the Trump administration is dismantling the administrative state as fast as in can and as fast as liberal district judges allow it. But there has been no philosophical discussion of the harm done by the administrative state and the regulatory state. Our liberal friends could put the whole thing back together in a week.

Do you see the problem? On the one hand the educated class gets its jobs and meaning from directing traffic in administration and regulation and wars on climate. On the other hand the ordinary middle class just wants to get on with life. So there is no ideological pushback backed by popular demand against the administrative regulatory state.

That raises the question of the ideological structure of the next regime. It sure would be better if it had an philosophical framework more extensive and detailed than Make America Great Again.

It’s great that our current ruling class is demoralized and doesn’t know what to do to regain power.

But it’s not so great that the Next Regime doesn’t really have its ducks in a row.

For sure, I know what I want: privatization of entitlement programs, neighborhood schools; apprenticeships and internships; welfare run by the neighborhood women; a fundamental distrust of administrators and regulators. And I am confident that it would work like a champ. But it would need a new ruling class that didn’t get its hots from administering and regulating. Something like the tech bros and their startup culture.

Is that the answer? To anchor the new ruling class in the startup culture of the tech bros? But then we need a day-to-day culture of work and friends and family and a face-to-face moral culture. And I don’t know how that would work. Your Trumps, your Musks, your Thiels are not exactly examplars in the cultural and moral department.