Class and Cleavages

Class Wars ⟺ Gender Wars ⟺ Culture Wars ⟺ Trade Wars

i wanted a picture of an italian sandwich but severance will do

Back when Donald Trump announced massive tariffs everyone was very normal about it: conservatives started talking about how the Gen Z boss and a mini video justified it. The “Gen Z boss and a mini” post in question was a TikTok post by an Australian cosmetics company from July of 2024 that received major social media “attention” from insane right wing people on Twitter, who made it some sort of unhinged crusade against “wokeness” and “feminism” as part of the same strange psychosexual jihad they view everything through. The tariff reaction largely was “you vill own nozing except ze libs”, but there also was a more, let’s say, unorthodox take: that the tariffs reshoring manufacturing (and I’ll borrow a reaction from Jessica Lange for this one) are also going to “reshore masculinity” and solve the crisis of men. This “MAGA Maoism” comes as part of a long round of strange right-wing sublimations of economic issues into bizarre tangents about gender and sexuality.

But trade isn’t the only issue seen through the lens of the bizarre MAGA omniwar against “woke” - we’ve also seen pretty influential right wing accounts talk about “the longhouse”, and how capitalism invented made-up, do-nothing jobs for women like HR, DEI, or “project management”, who now have all the power and make men feel bad about everything all the time, and how AI will restore the natural hierarchy.

So what’s even going on? Is everyone just insane now?

Having fun…ctional distributions of income

The main thing to understand here is something I laid out in both posts about tariffs: the principle of comparative advantage. Imagine you’re the owner of the Chicago Bulls in ~1988 and you have Michael Jordan, the greatest basketball player in the world, at your disposal. And Michael Jordan is not just the top basketball player in the world, but also the top basketball court polisher (I’ve just found out those machines are called Zambonis) in the world. If you’re the Bulls’ manager: how do you make Jordan divvy up his time? What a preposterous question - of course Michael Jordan, the world’s greatest player, should play instead of cutting hair, that’s much more profitable. That’s, in a nutshell, what comparative advantage means: that people should do not necessarily what they’re best at, but rather, what they would miss out on the least. Comparative advantage, thus, determines the sort of activities that are profitable for any endeavor - from career choices to the world’s largest economies.

In particular, let’s say that there’s four factors of production: capital (machines and buildings), land (space and natural resources), “high skill” labor (people with lots of know how) and “low skill” labor (everyone else). For example, a country with lots of capital and high-skilled labor can specialize in advanced manufacturing, while a country with low skill labor and capital can manufacture consumer goods, and a country with only land and capital will extract natural resources of some kind. What this means is that the country’s exports will be concentrated in the sectors with comparative advantage (that is, the ones with abundant natural resources) and therefore those sectors will be the ones that benefit from trade. The reason why is that, counterproductively, the scarce factor is more expensive. This means that a country’s participation in trade has a correlate in its distribution of income - particularly, that the ownership structure of the factors of production is important to the national income distribution. For example, it’s said that the concentration of colonial land holdings contributed to underdevelopment in Latin America by enriching and therefore empowering a (very small) class of rural landowners (the latinfundistas)- except that, in some cases, their concentrated power made them an effective lobbying force for public services.

This dynamic is the core of the book “Trade Wars Are Class Wars” by Matt Klein and Michael Pettis. Fundamentally, policy positions regarding trade can be said to be determined by the relative position of each factor of production - in the US case, which is a land-abundant, capital-abundant, and high skilled labor abundant country, those industries are the winners from globalization, whilst low skill labor are the losers. Note that the patterns driving international trade are the same patterns driving basic economic specialization - that is, which sectors a given economy has a comparative advantage in. Something worth noting is that the relative scarcity or abundance of a factor of production can change (for example, through investment in the form of capital, discovery of new uses for resources when it comes to land, education when it comes to high skill labor, and migration when it comes to low skill labor), or that technological changes can shift the ratio of each factor required to produce any given amount of output - such that total output can increase, while (the share of) employment in a given sector decreases. What this means is that anything that changes the structure of the economy also changes the distribution of income. This doesn’t necessarily mean that structural economic changes increase income or wealth inequality, because income and wealth inequality are also determined by the distribution of income and wealth within each factor of production - for example, an economy of peasant farmers with few college graduates would see an increase in inequality from the same structural change that decreases inequality in an economy of latinfundistas and a teeming precariat of engineers and lawyers.

Let’s look at my home country, Argentina: the country has a lot of very fertile and productive agricultural land, as well as very limited amounts of labor in general but skilled labor in particular (especially before the 1890s), resulting in a specialization pattern that favored agriculture and cattle in particular - and one that still remains to this day. If you add in the fact that macroeconomic instability reduced capital formation, what you’re left with is a country where international trade mostly benefits the agricultural sector, which had significant macroeconomic consequences when the main exports were staple products such as wheat, beef, and dairy. This meant that trade liberalization and protectionism had significant consequences for the labor market, especially after considering other political and economic dynamics.

You vill live in ze pod

Now that we’ve gotten cozy with the concept that structural change changes the distribution of income, let’s look at the particulars: the labor market has increasingly split into two tracks over the last few decades: a high skill, high-education, “knowledge sector”, and a low-skill “manual sector”. This was due to changes in technology (particularly automation and the IT revolution), increased competition from China and other developing countries, the Great Recession recovery resulting in lower job creation and extreme competition for available positions (in the US, the “knowledge” track added 8.4 million jobs on net in the following decade, while the manual job track lost, on net, 5.5 million), and a series of other factors (loss of union density, cuts to the welfare state, etc). This meant that, while white collar jobs without a significant educational component (such as bank teller, or the original meaning of “computer) were lost, the service sector increase its demand for both low skill, “routine” labor and for high-skill, high human capital “knowledge” workers.

This changed the distribution of income in two ways. Firstly, and most obviously, by increasing income inequality within workers, that is, because of the growing fortunes of white collar workers and the falling fortunes of their blue collar counterparts - the changes to the labor market benefited the white collar track both in terms of quantities and in terms of wages. It should be noted that this is, in part, because of education: back in 2013, this was the main fact cited by economist Greg Mankiw to justify the rise in inequality - the core of his argument was that the increase in the earnings of the wealthy was due to them acquiring skills (via education) that made them better off, on net, and this is driven in large part by having both access and information of which career decisions are advantageous, and because the skills acquired via education resulted in them being better prepared to take on new tasks after the computer revolution. There was, to be fair, a pretty extensive debate on this question recently, but the question was over how much inequality had increased (both sides conceded it had), not whether it had at all, and it hinged on topics like tax evasion, treatment of income from housing, and retirement benefits (and it’s very complicated in the specifics from which the differences stem).

A second shift is that the distribution of income between all labor and capital has also shifted - in favor of capital: new technologies that replace labor (in this case, the “missing middle” of the labor market) with technology will increase the capital share of income - firstly, for the obvious reason that aggregate payrolls go down, but also because the owners of this capital derive more and more income from it. In particular, it’s notable that the very wealthy derive a lot of their income from capital holdings - ownership of corporations, equity, housing, and pensions, and the wealth shares of the top of the income distribution have increased pretty substantially. The decline of the labor share of income is also driven by a few other factors: firstly, the inflation of housing costs in most developed countries, which manifests as higher equivalent income for property owners; secondly, economic concentration in a few large firms, which reduces the share of income accrued by workers, even though some of these workers also earn disproportionate benefits relative to others (hence, also an increase in labor income inequality), and thirdly, changes in tax policy.

However, it’s also worth noting two things: the first, is that a lot of “capital income” can instead be best understood as a really high earning form of labor, since a significant part of the returns to it are the returns to making correct business decisions on high-stakes moments. This means that the labor share of income is understated, but also that wage inequality is understated as well, since a lot of the labor compensation of the very wealthy is not actually counted as wages. One example of this is the gigantic increase in CEO pay, which is related to the increase in the size of the highest-grossing firms: because big companies need to attract the best talent, and this is in some form a type of work, they have to pay a lot more. The second factor that also confounds the increases in inequality is that the people who are rich from capital ownership and the people who are rich from high wages are, increasingly, the same: this phenomenon, termed homoploutia (terrible marketing), refers to the fact that one in three top 10% capital income earners are also in the top 10% of wage earners, triple the fraction as in 1950. This means that there’s a new economic elite, which has both ownership over capital (as inferred by the paragraph above, this reflects homeownership), an advanced education, and access to highly paid jobs - and the elites have “walled off” all of these, via barriers to construction that raised the cost of housing, via elitism in the labor market and education system that devalued regular people’s credentials, and via a strengthening of the dominance of people with elite backgrounds in elite education and elite professions. It’s no wonder that populism is such a live issue, not just in economic but also in cultural terms.

Here comes the case I’ve made, at this point, a trillion times by now: economic deprivation is substantially associated with the three main factors that, in today’s political environment, are associated with left-wing vote shares: firstly, social trust, that is, trust in institutions and in others - low trust societies have more conservative, self-reliant, and nationalist beliefs, whilst higher trust societies have more liberal, “globalist”, and redistributionist beliefs. At the same time, this leads to a set of values termed moral universalism or particularism, that is, whether people consider “other people who aren’t close to me” morally important, which is a leading indicator of left/right beliefs. Moral universalism is, itself, also strongly correlated with social trust, income, education, and support for democracy. The final element to consider is zero-sum thinking, which means a belief that it’s impossible for people to gain without someone else necessarily losing. People exposed to lower economic growth are more likely to be zero-sum, which is also associated with lower support for, say, trade or immigration, but also with higher support for government redistribution, and for affirmative action (if they’re not white).

Most importantly all of these elements (both economic deprivation and low trust, zero sum, particularist beliefs) are associated with a decrease in support for democracy, which in large part depends on it maintaining higher living standards. The clearest example is the victory of Adolf Hitler, which while not fated, it did benefit from major structural factors - particularly, the support of poor workers but not necessarily the unemployed, who wanted to benefit at the expense of the wealthy, big corporations, and Jews. The fact that the economy became polarized meant that the longstanding association between income and partisanship flipped: in basically every developed democracy, the working class have abandoned the left, and the high-income, high-education elites have abandoned the right. However, this has one caveat: high income elites are left wing, while high wealth elites are right wing (more on this later). This is why only focusing on cultural issues is missing the picture - the culture war is downstream from values which are downstream from economics. For instance, when Bill Clinton signed NAFTA into law, Democrats suffered enormously with working class voters who were conservative because the party didn’t have an economic pitch for them. Similarly, strong economies hurt the left, because there’s less of a clear economic pitch to make to workers who are more conservative, especially since back in the past, workers were kept in the left’s side through a mix of higher social trust, intentional choices to garner the votes of affluent white-collar voters, and the influence of socialist internationalism.

Trump’s manly tariffs

Now, the dynamics mentioned above had large implications for gender relations in particular (yeah yeah it’s more of this stuff, sorry): women have been, on net, beneficiaries of the change in the structure of the economy, and men have been, again on net, the losers of it.

The main thing to consider is that the disappearance of well paying “low skill” occupations were disproportionately occupied by men: this was driven by the fact that a lot of these jobs (in manufacturing but also construction) had a big comparative advantage in, well, physical strength, as well as cultural norms around acceptable occupations for women. Meanwhile, women benefited from the changes in the labor market for a number of issues: firstly, because women experiencing automation risks increased their educational attainment and skill level (as opposed to men), and, more broadly, that women caught up with men in terms of average education and surpassed them in the last decade, at the same time women also began performing better than men academically (for example, women are 10% more likely to go to college, are 10% likelier to complete their degrees, and make up more than a majority of graduates of all program levels), and face fewer disciplinary issues, which also may entail men just not acquiring as many skills as women over their schooling¹. Secondly, the skills required in the cognitive sector aren’t just those acquired in the formal education system, but also soft skills and adeptness at handling social interaction - which women possess at higher rates than men, particularly in conversation, assertiveness, and empathy and positive emotion - but not academics or work. And lastly, a lot of non-professional service jobs are doing “personal care”, things like hairdressing, in which women simply seem to have an advantage over men. You can see this divergence quite easily: out of the 20 fastest growing occupations in the American middle class over the past 45 years, ten are female-dominated and four are split evenly; meanwhile, 18 of the 20 fastest shrinking occupations are male dominated, and a substantial amount are industrial. And at the same time, these shrinking male dominated professions went from being among the best paid in society to among the worst paid: factory foremen used to make around as much as computer programmers in the 1980s, and both made 40% more than nurses and dental hygenists; now, dental hygenists make 20% more than factory foremen, nurses make 40% more, and computer programmers make double.

Somewhat surprisingly, however, the situation of women is not as good as the relative statistics suggest. The position of women has increased relative to men, but it is not better than men’s in absolute terms: firstly, because women are overrepresented among the white collar class and the new care economy, but within the knowledge class, they are underrepresented at the top end. The main reason for this is, of course, the gender wage gap: women make a somewhat lower amount than men, which in some ways could be a result of discrimination against women, but largely results from gendered divergences in economic decisionmaking. The first aspect of this decisionmaking is career choice - in particular, women seem to choose different fields than men, firstly for flexibility (because of the social expectation that women would do most of the work at home and with children), and secondly for meaning: at basically all levels of national income (except for Bangladesh for whatever reason), women put a lower emphasis on wages than men, and put a higher emphasis on flexibility, helping others, and improving society². This also responds to expectations of discrimination and mistreatment in better paying but more male dominated fields, particularly because social norms do still affect women’s decisionmaking to a significant extent. But career choice only explains half to a third of the wage gap, so at least half remains unaccounted for - and the main difference is that women are less likely to work at all and work fewer hours after having children (unless they have some extent of control over their hours and conditions, such as in the informal sector). This dynamic is especially impacted by social norms around gender and childrearing, with more traditional places having bigger penalties, and the penalties being smaller for older mothers³. The importance of working more hours (and the inability or unwillingness of mothers to do so) is especially important in careers that pay more: the gender wage gap at the 90th percentile of income in the United States is bigger than at the 50th or 10th percentiles. This adds to mothers being less likely to be promoted to leadership roles, as well as a lower level of interest in women at the top of the labor pyramid due to expectations that managing a team will be too difficult for women, which is related to issues such as higher risk aversion and other personality differences, a desire not to make waves in ambiguous settings, and lower self confidence - which in large part seem to reflect social factors: women don’t seem less ambitious than men, but they do seem more likely to think that others will think of them poorly for being ambitious. Other factors in wage gaps between women and men include different ways of applying for the same jobs (due to the previously mentioned “personality” factors), lower time spent with coworkers outside of work, and negative career decisions made around sexual harassment (as well as male mentors avoiding working with women to prevent “false allegations”).

But one of the weird factors in the comparison is age: older women clearly fare worse than older men, but younger women are doing around as well as younger men if they have the same job - because older people (with large gender wage gaps) are dying out, but at the same time older men have been just refusing to retire at much higher rates than in the past, so it means that gender differentials in promotion-seeking don’t matter as much because there’s no promotions to seek. But more importantly, young women are doing better than young men on the labor market, on average, because a lot of young men simply don’t have jobs at all. The reason for this is pretty simple: women’s preference for more meaningful, helpful jobs, has been traditionally associated with “care professions” like therapy, nursing, and elder care, which are making up a bigger and bigger share of the world economy: of the previously mentioned fastest-growing occupations, six of 20 were in the care sector; between 2014 and 2024, only 5 of the 20 fastest growing jobs were minority female, and the healthcare sector was among the stablest path into the middle class over the 2010s. This pattern, in fact, is only getting stronger: the July 2025 jobs report was among the worst since the Great Recession, and found job growth of 73,000 positions; this was driven by 55,000 new jobs in healthcare and 18,000 in social services (both “pink collar” sectors), while manufacturing and professional services shrank, and (as mentioned above) the unemployment rate for women is a lot lower than men because of women’s participation in the care economy. This discrepancy in career expectations is observable from early in life, and women tend to go into “pink collar” work at a 4:1 rate versus men, as well as 40% of women who choose a different career path going into it anyways (versus very few men). Men instead prefer STEM fields, which pay more, but make up a much smaller share of total employment, and grow a lot more slowly. Men are also much less likely to be teachers or mental health counselors and social workers than women, and the vast majority of hiring growth in these sectors responds to women joining, due to insufficient interest in both recruiting men but also from the men themselves. But if these sectors are such a goldmine, why don’t men want to join in? The role of training and education, and the difficulty of affording them, are an obstacle, as is the fact that these jobs tend to not pay as well as blue collar jobs - however, they have more job stability, more alternatives, and a pathway for higher wages over time, which are not common in the blue collar track. The main reason why men don’t want to work in the care economy appears to be , by and large, cooties - they think it’s beneath them.

Culturally, we’re told to expect men to be strong and silent providers, and for women to be caring and nurturing, which creates a significant barrier for men to want to break the cultural norm. This is driven by the fact that women’s success in male-dominated fields has been both actively and passively celebrated, not just as a topic of public policy, but also as a matter of like, day to day life - people see more women at the top. Meanwhile, men haven’t either been recruited or advertised in the same ways to join the care sector, especially because, as research consistently finds, economic insecurity leads to sexist views (for example, among American, Brazilian, European, Chinese, and British men). Some organizations have taken up the mantle of utilizing masculinity was a tool to recruit male nurses, but the research doesn’t find this to be very useful, in large part because society doesn’t actually agree with this set of ideas: more than 55% of Americans think that men who are affectionate, open with their emotions, or caring aren’t valued enough, while 43% have positive values of traditionally masculine men, and more than 60% have negative views of “toxic” masculine traits. In fact, the best way to attract men to these fields seems to be to just pitch them as an economic opportunity, which is what that men value most in a job: they’re secure, decently paying, high-opportunity fields, especially when considering that, if men enter female dominated fields, they tend to pay better.

Surprising nobody, I think these patterns are very politically important. Currently, men’s economic deprivation and women’s economic success tends to mean that men tend to become more conservative: a 25% increase in the number of men laid off increases Republican vote share by 3 percentage points, and when women catch up to to men in labor force participation, their county moves 8 points to the right. The reason for this is both the longstanding fact that men tend to just think women’s gains came at their own expense, but also the decline in the three factors most associated with voting for the left: social trust, positive-sum beliefs, and moral universalism, as relating to economic deprivation. If women are among the winners of the new economy, and men are the losers, then it should make sense for them to drift in opposite directions politically - which is what has been happening worldwide. Trade, immigration, and sexism are the three big issues where these two worldviews diverge the most, which is why they’re the three biggest issues of the present day.

Louise Bourgeois and Louise Proletaire

Back in 2017, New York Times columnist David Brooks went viral on Twitter for a column about “opportunity hoarders”, white collar types who had locked working people out of economic advancements. While he mentioned these factors, he didn’t actually think it was the rising costs of education or housing or tight regulation or a million other things was what mattered. Instead, Brooks wrote that the reason the white collar class and the blue collar class are at odds now is because of cultural distance - that the “white collar” crew has imposed cultural mores and codes of conduct that are too arcane for working people to follow. His example? Brooks recalls taking a “blue collar” (non-college educated) friend to an Italian sandwich shop, where she panicked seeing ingredients like “stracciatella” (TBF I don’t know what that is either). Then, the two of them ran to get Mexican food instead.

Is there truth to this notion? Kind of. This isn’t a new strategy for Brooks, who wrote the exact same article in 2001, about how Blue America had Thai food and Doris Kearns Goodwin and Red America had churches and QVC. And focusing on signals of elite status is not new to Brooks either, who became famous after writing a book titled Bobos in Paradise, which came out in 2000. The book describes a group of people who are economically well off due to their participation in the new information and corporate economy, but because of their education, had preferences that did not match the traditional buttoned down (or buttoned up?) aesthetics of the traditional elite. Out: “summering” in Martha’s Vineyard, dinners ten forks, wearing Brooks (no relation) Brothers, and living in the suburbs. In: hot air ballooning and scuba diving, organic bread, piercings and distressed denim, and living in cool apartments in the city. The term “Bobo” itself refers to this shift: they are bourgeoisie, due to their class position and income, but also bohemian, due to their tastes. This class created new parts of cities, brought “lattes” to the culture, changed perceptions of sex and leisure, and most importantly, changed attitudes towards work, which became more about personal meaning than about money. The “Bobos”, as the new elite of America, also became politically dominant: Bill Clinton was the first Bobo president, and his politics of managerial, milquetoast, compromise-seeking centrism were positively described by Brooks, who also wondered if people would be inspired by that generation.

Bobos in Paradise was neither the first book to talk about this phenomenon, nor the best one, or the most influential one. I just wanted to bring in the sandwich anecdote. The work that first codified the idea is probably the essay The Professional Managerial Class by Barbara and John Ehrenreich. Their starting point is traditional Marxism, which defines two social classes: the proletariat, and the burgeoisie. According to Marx, as capitalism progresses, profits will fall, prompting “proletarianization”, the concentration of ownership of capital and worsening of living conditions for workers. This polarized society between the wealthy and a homogeneous, unified working class would eventually revolt and create communism. This, of course, didn’t happen; interestingly enough, though, a “middle caste” of workers emerged, who were salaried workers, but were also wealthy and culturally bourgeois. The Ehrenreichs called this group “the professional managerial class”, made up by managers, engineers, academics, journalists, social workers, and other skilled workers whose jobs involve control, ideology, or technical/management work. This class emerged because of two trends: first, large scale production and capital deepening enabling and requiring detailed planning, as well as the need to police and control society through ideas and education and not just force. The PMC being a class of salaried workers means that they have common interests with labor, but them being wealthy also means they can make common cause with capital, meaning they’re kind of a stick in the wheel to both, and their main political interest appears to be to keep things running smoothly. However, the concept of “the PMC” became less useful even to the Ehrenreichs themselves, because the phenomenon of labor polarization plus increases in inequality in the white collar sector (notably, education) has in fact cleaved the “PMC” in half in recent years and made it a lot more traditionally proletarian.

However, the best book on the topic is The Rise of the Creative Class by Richard Florida. Written in 2002, the book takes the shift of the economy from manufacturing to high-end services to the realization that this post-industrial economy is driven by innovation and human capital, provided by a new class of workers, the “creative class”. This creative class is comprised of scientists, engineers, artists, professors, as well as other white collar, ancillary professionals like doctors, lawyers, or business managers. These workers, in Florida’s telling, have had two major influences: the first is in work culture, demanding flexible schedules, casual dress codes, and blending leisure and labor. This comes from deeper values of autonomy, authenticity meritocracy, and deriving meaning, not just money, from work. The second influence is on cities: creative class workers have very specific preferences around what they want to do and how, and in particular seem to value cultural experiences, diverse and new spaces, and overall prize "authentic" communities with cultural vibrancy, versus uniform and generic commercial spaces. For Florida, creative class “hubs” like San Francisco (the global capital of these types, basically) focus on the “three Ts”: talent, technology, and tolerance (of immigrants, LGBT people, non-white people, etc), and places that want to appeal to them should focus on these areas and reap benefits. A decade later, Florida revisited the book, with some significant changes: his opinions on the importance of not just skills and resources, but also ambiance, amenities, and attitudes had become extremely widespread and extremely influential. However, Florida also admitted a darker side to the rise of the creative class: a lack of pathways for entrance into its rank for the abandoned members of the manual class, fueling inequality, as well as gentrification since cities were pricing out the working and “service class” that made them livable.

The most important commonality between the three books are their opinions on culture: call them any of the three names, the white collar class is very straightforwardly affiliated with liberalism, diversity, pluralism, and more general urbanist attitudes. Twenty years later, even the centrist David Brooks admitted that the culture-obsessed, economics-blind approach of the creative class led the world astray. All three of these approaches to the white collar class highlight a major hypocrisy: those people just don’t care very much for the economic inclusion of the working class. This is also highlighted by the fact that the two groups don’t share cultural touchstones: for example, Barbara Ehrenreich recounts how 1970s left wing organizing had major disputes over whether to carry Twinkies and other processed foods in their food drives. Even though weird sandwich-related stories are not very indicative of anything, Brooks is onto something: the same structural drivers of letting project managers buy a five dollar latte and a sandwich with fancy foreign ingredients also led to resentment and exclusion from the American precariat. The current culture war, as a manifestation of tensions between universalism and particularism, makes perfect sense: it’s just a proxy war between the white collar class and the blue collar class. The creative class’s extreme grip over cities can also explain the bizarre culture war against cities and urban living, and the rise of faux homesteaders and tradwife charlatans - it’s just a straightforwardly material conflict taking weird dimensions. Even the recent Twitter dispute over why women love to travel so much is just an extension of this: women are disproportionately part of the PMC, which is disproportionately cosmopolitan given its high score in universalism. Men are neither.

Silicon Valley is rock hard

The tradwife homesteader types I mentioned above are, unsurprisingly, all conservative. But, some what surprisingly, they are all very wealthy. If the war against urban living is downstream of a material conflict, then between whom?

A fourth book comes to mind: The Managerial Revolution by James Burnham. The book is actually the first treatment of the “PMC” phenomenon, and it was written in 1941. A former Marxist, Burnham starts off at the same point as the Ehrenreichs: Marx, the dialectic, class struggle. However, he takes it somewhere else - in fact, his claim is that the “PMC” will completely overtake the government and the economy and abolish capitalism. Burnham’s thesis is that the rise of economic complexity and the separation between ownership and management of corporations gave more power to pure managers, who push for an expansion of the state (including Nazism, Soviet Communism, and bizarrely enough the New Deal) as a way to expand the efficiency of economic production via increased expertise and state-directed planning. This would eventually lead to the abolition of nations and the creation of a centralized world government, particularly after a predicted Axis victory in World War Two and the death of capitalism as replaced by the “managerialism” of Stalin, Hitler, and FDR.

Burnham is extremely influential - 1984 by George Orwell was literally written to make fun of him, and Orwell wrote a pretty extensive takedown of his book back in the day, especially focusing on how Burnham discounts ideology over the class interest of managers too much, is incorrect about the New Deal being managerial and the similarities between Stalin and Hitler, as well as his various overconfident predictions. Fundamentally, Orwell objects to Burnham’s classification of society into two groups, a brainless mob of blathering morons, and the power elite that manipulates them (he was a huge fan of Machiavelli, if you hadn’t guessed). However, despite Burnham’s significant intellectual stature, I hadn’t heard of him until relatively recently - when it came out that (technofascist billionaire) Mark Andreessen had named his hard right group chat the James Burnham Fan Club. Andreessen is only one of Burnham’s admirers in Silicon Valley: most of its leading thinkers, including Curtis Yarvin, are deeply influenced by his thinking. The far-right Manhattan Institute had a 2022 article titled “Wokeness, the Highest Stage of Managerialism” that makes roughly the argument you’re thinking it makes: that wealthy PMC middle managers imposed “woke” on everyone else by controlling the media, universities, office politics, and bureaucracy. It is, then, unsurprising, that Burnham’s ideas have been a significant driver of recent political moves: Trump’s war on the American civil services and universities, Peter Thiel’s funding of the defamation lawsuit by the recently deceased Hulk Hogan, Elon Muks’s “Twitter files”, Trump trying to bankrupt every single American university, and of couse the ridiculous panics over “DEI” and other trifles. Fundamentally, the “New Right” has a completely insane theory of power: in the terms of that dipshit Yarvin, there’s something called The Cathedral that tells everyone what to believe (like, for example, wokeness) via education and the government and media and whatnot, and because most people are “hobbits” they obey - so, to counter the “elves” of the PMC left, the right has to develop “dark elves” that wreck everything.

Yeah, these guys are all complete morons and clowns. But they’re also pretty scary. Burnham’s vision was, ultimately, pretty much to abolish democracy and replace it with kayfabe stage-managed by billionaires. He justifies this by saying real democracy doesn’t actually exist and it’s already like that, so it’s just swapping out one elite for another. In the Abundance agenda post, I mentioned the people inspired by this pretty clearly: tech billionaires like Peter Thiel and Mark Andreessen who go around talking about how democracy constrains the wealthy too much. These people are extraordinarily powerful given their direct control over massive corporations and technologies - Elon Musk is trying to create a Nazi AI to spread propaganda to the users of his social media sites. The reason for this comes, somewhat bizarrely, from liberalism - particularly Friedrich Hayek (and also a lot of second-tier Hayek imitators).

Hayek emphasized the importance of the free market and democracy, and was concerned about whether people would decide to just vote for a totalitarian government - so he took a somewhat restrictive view of democracy. Later on, during his old fart days, he developed a variety of extremely tedious and repetitive nature metaphors (including, uh “iron fillings magnetized by a magnet under the sheet of paper on which we have poured them”) for why some cultures didn’t vote themselves into prosperity, which rapidly got very racist. This created a set of libertarian-adjacent hard-right politics that believe in hard borders (to prevent social contamination) and hard-wired determinations of human nature: there is a natural hierarchy of talent and ability, which puts white men at the top and everyone else second; any improvement in position by any other group is, in fact, a product of the degenerate actions of the state. Hence the profound hatred of the New Right of not just anti-racism, but feminism particularly: Elon Musk has shared last week a tweet about women being “brainwashed” and having been “built” to be traded as property.

So, fundamentally, the capitalist class is entering the fray on the blue collar versus white collar culture war on all the usual fronts of immigration, gender, and education - first, on the side of white collar workers in the 2010s, but later turning away realizing that they actually meant the part about raising taxes on the rich. Corporate America “going MAGA” was not necessarily an outgrowth of the excesses of Lina Khan and the Hewlett Foundation, but rather, a reaction to managers “stepping out of line”: in Silicon Valley, the only issue the elites are not progressive on is government regulations of labor and corporations. The war on managers is pretty interesting because it does, unlike basically all else in here, follow reality: CEOs are generally conservative, but a growing share of them are increasingly left-wing. The reasons for this are that “CEO” is the quintessential PMC job, and as such they are also increasingly associated with the left; here’s where the previously mentioned dichotomy between the income rich and the capital rich gets resolved - people with an education all become left wing, and people without become right wing, regardless of how much money they have. This is verified by the fact that the traditional base of the New American Right is actually owners of family-run companies, such that current American election function as a proxy war between universalism and particularism as applied to the world of business - the New Right is mad that the owners don’t call all the shots, and instead have to actually give in to their employees, who have cultural cache that they don’t. This actually explains why companies “went woke” is that it made money: as mentioned a million times above, people have increasingly turned to work to derive not just money but also personal satisfaction, particularly since value dissonance between work and beliefs reduces performance. In turn, this meant that companies saw “wokeness” as a way to get workers to work harder for free: they could make people happy not by improving any tangible aspects of the job or its compensation, but rather by adding a rainbow filter to their logo a month a year.

The last point I want to mention is that there’s a new front opening up on the war between capital and the white collar class: AI. By and large, large companies seem intent on replacing all managerial workers with technology, whether or not this makes economic or even practical sense; in the first half of 2025, spending on data centers was more important to the US economy than all consumer spending put together. In fact, especially considering that LLMs don’t seem that economically effective (and don’t seem like they will cause infinite economic growth or entrench a class of capital owners in eternal economic power), but nevertheless are being treated as if they were, Big Tech comes off as it betting the “integrity” of the entire US financial system on data centers, as well as other stupid speculative venues like cryptocurrency, buy now pay laters, cryptocurrency again, sports betting, cryptocurrency for a third time, and, well, scammy AI ventures (as well as, you guessed it, cryptocurrency again).

Conclusion

The economic statistics that came out this week paint a pretty weird picture: the only thing growing the economy is spending on data centers and the only thing growing the job market is changing old person diapers. We’ve had the better part of a decade been a tug of war between the low social trust, morally particularist, zero sum mindset blue collar class, and the high trust, cosmopolitan, positive-sum white collar class. The interesting part is that there’s now two new classes joining the fray: first, a growing and thriving “pink collar” class of disproportionately female, urban, and not necessarily educated care services workers, and an increasingly radicalized and reactionary capitalist class that wants to replace human labor with AI. I don’t really know who will have the upper class here, but new, insane fronts in the culture war are sure to open - as they have for the previous iterations of the “class war”.

1. It’s kind of funny that 10-15 years ago it was a common refrain that women did worse in math and sciences than men because of biology and meanwhile now that men are doing worse than women in basically all subjects we’ve become deconstructionists who think that it’s all how too many teachers are female and neurological differences among boys.

2. This is also why I think solutions for declining birth rates that focus on making women not work are very stupid - women just care about their jobs a lot more than men do, so the financial incentives should focus on men, who are more interested in money.

3. There was a paper that made rounds a bit ago finding that successful IVF mothers didn’t have a wage gap relative to men, but I think that IVF couples purposefully trying to get pregnant (even the subset that was similar to average families) also meant that they were very consciously planning out their schedules around having kids, which has been associated with lower gender pay gaps. In fact, during the COVID pandemic, men started taking up more domestic labor and the wage gap for remote couples fell.