Who Will Be the New Ruling Class

we really don't have a clue

We all know that back in the day the ruling class was the landed class. Every powerful person had his landed estate, from the king on down to the lowliest baron. And all the people fitted into the landed hierarchy, as landowwners, estate managers, servants, peasants. That was in the days before the nuclear explosion detonated by goldsmith Johannes Gutenberg of the free city of Mainz in about 1440. With the Gutenberg printing press came books and the Age of the Educated Class. With the printed Bible educated people started arguing about religion and conducted the mostly peaceful protest that characterized the Protestant Revolution. Then the educated class moved on to politics. Still, the leading figure in the English Civil War and after was Oliver Cromwell, son of a small landowner.

By the time we get to the American Revolution, we get lawyers in on the action: John Adams and Alexander Hamilton, to balance landowners George Washington and Thomas Jefferson.

Then on to the French Revolution, featuring lawyers Robespierre, Fouquier-Tinville, Danton.

In the US, Abraham Lincoln was a lawyer, but Theodore Roosevelt switched to electoral politics after attending law school. Woodrow Wilson was an academic; Franklin Delano Roosevelt started a law career but soon switched to politics.

World War I completed the rise of the educated class. The regimes of royal landowners in Russia, Germany, and Austria-Hungary were demolished in the war. Thereafter all regimes in the western orbit had a ruling class from the educated population.

Then World War II featured the educated class of the US, Russia, Britain, and France pitched against the educated class of Germany, Italy, and Japan. May the best man win.

Experts agree that what made World War I and World War II possible was the one-way Mass Media that allowed governments to control the Narrative and lead their countries into war. The US had substantial anti-war movements before each world war, but the Wilson and Roosevelt administrations managed to neutralize them and go to war anyway.

But now, according to Martin Gurri in The Revolt of the Public, we have a new media age, the two-way environment of Independent Media.

Experts are already conducting double-blind studies to see if the incidence of war is changed in the new media environment. Stay tuned for the results.

With the help of the genius Karl Marx, the educated class created a flexible political formula in which it represented itself as the ally of Oppressed Peoples against the Oppressors whether the oppressed were industrial workers and the oppressors were capitalists back in the 19th century or whether the oppressed were transgenders and the oppressors were TERFs, trans-exclusionary radical feminists, as right now.

Experts agree that in the middle of the 19th century the educated-class political formula made sense. But today it really means that the rulers are united with supposed oppressed people against the ordinary middle class. Hence the revolt of the ordinary middle class against the educated class that elected Donald Trump president of the United States.

Now I prophesy that the new two-way Independent Media means the end of the rule of the educated class. But then the question arises: who will be the new ruling class? Obviously the old educated class need not apply. At least it need not apply unless it revises its belief system that educated people just know what is good for the rest of us.

If we say that politics and government in the Age of Mass Media were conducted with fake communications between the credentialed cultural and political elite and the credentialed Mass Media elite, then we can say that in the Age of Independent Media politics and government are conducted with vibrant communications between the new political elite and an uncontrolled environment of independent podcasters and online journalists with ordinary people listening to and watching and reading the Independent Media and delivering their judgement on social media.

As President Trump staffs his administration in early 2025 we can see that he is appointing people with independent reputations that are not mere educated-class clones. And he is attracting the attention and support of the tech lords that practice a startup culture that recognizes that the world does not work on bureaucratic administration and regulation but with every lesson learned from a failed startup.

Now, if we say that DEI is the rule of the educated class with subordinate slots provided for selected oppressed peoples vetted and approved by the educated class, we must ask how the patronage game works in the new era.

Will ordinary middle class people get to work the engineer’s dials in the new regime? Will the educated class take the Road to Canossa and beg Pope Trump and the MAGA cardinals for forgiveness and absolution as Holy Roman Emperor Henry IV did back in the day?

Or will the educated class sneak its way back into the corridors of power once again, and return to dominance?

It’s the Great Unknown. We don’t know.