Kotkin on Who Made Trump and Brexit: Look in the Mirror, It’s You
11th July 2016
“I’m one of those displaced old Democrats. I’m not an ideological Conservative at all, I see a decent role for government. But I think that what’s happened to the Democratic Party is that it’s become the Downton Abbey party – of the very rich and the very poor. You have these very powerful, very wealthy people who for whatever reason subscribe to a particular worldview. As the working class are deserting the Democrat Party, it becomes less responsive to them.”
What Kotkin identifies is a fastidiously politically-correct middle class – one that’s characterized by its bossiness and intolerance. This class lives in its own virtual reality, and lectures everyone else. This has historical roots, he writes. The rise of a middle class that was removed from everyday concerns was predicted by Daniel Bell in his 1976 book The Coming of Post-Industrial Society.
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Kotkin borrowed an even older term for this new virtue-signalling elite. 180 years ago, the poet Samuel Coleridge described an educated middle class that sought for itself a priestly function in society, “serving as the key organs of enforced conformity, distilling truth for the masses, seeking to regulate speech and indoctrinate youth” as the “clerisy”. And that’s what we’ve now got: a New Clerisy .