Look Out for Obama’s Legacy
20th October 2014
Joel Kotkin sounds the alarm.
In “The New Class Conflict,” I describe this alliance as the New Clerisy, which encompasses the media, the academy and the expanding regulatory bureaucracy. This Clerisy already dominates American intellectual and cultural life and increasingly has taken virtual control of key governmental functions, as well as the educations of our young people.
The Clerisy’s ascendency was predicted more than 40 years ago by the great sociologist Daniel Bell. The rise of knowledge-based industries, he predicted in his landmark 1973 book, “The Coming of Post-Industrial Society,” would establish the “pre-eminence of the professional and technical class.” This new “priesthood of power,” he suggested, would aim for the rational “ordering of mass society.”
Although usually somewhat progressive by inclination, the Clerisy actually functions much like the old First Estate in France – the clergy – helping determine the theology, morals and ideals of the broader population.
Nowhere is this function clearer than in the university itself, from which Barack Obama sprang, and which has become an essential part of his political coalition.