The New Class War: Saving Democracy from the Managerial Elite

by Michael Lind

In both Europe and North America, populist movements have shattered existing party systems and thrown governments into turmoil. The embattled establishment claims that these populist insurgencies seek to overthrow liberal democracy. The truth is no less alarming but is more complex: Western democracies are being torn apart by a new class war.

In this controversial and groundbreaking new analysis, Michael Lind, one of America's leading thinkers, debunks the idea that the insurgencies are primarily the result of bigotry, traces how the breakdown of mid-century class compromises between business and labor led to the conflict, and reveals the real battle lines.

On one side is the managerial overclass--the university-credentialed elite that clusters in high-income hubs and dominates government, the economy and the culture. On the other side is the working class of the low-density heartlands--mostly, but not exclusively, native and white.

The two classes clash over immigration, trade, the environment, and social values, and the managerial class has had the upper hand. As a result of the half-century decline of the institutions that once empowered the working class, power has shifted to the institutions the overclass controls: corporations, executive and judicial branches, universities, and the media.

The class war can resolve in one of three ways:

- The triumph of the overclass, resulting in a high-tech caste system.
- The empowerment of populist, resulting in no constructive reforms
- A class compromise that provides the working class with real power

Lind argues that Western democracies must incorporate working-class majorities of all races, ethnicities, and creeds into decision making in politics, the economy, and culture. Only this class compromise can avert a never-ending cycle of clashes between oligarchs and populists and save democracy.

Genres: Politics, Nonfiction, Economics, Sociology, History, Political Science, Society

224 pages, Hardcover

First published May 20, 2017

About the author

Currently Policy Director of the Economic Growth Program at the New America Foundation in Washington, Michael Lind has been an editor or staff writer for The New Yorker, Harper’s Magazine, and The New Republic and writes frequently for The New York Times and the Financial Times. He is the author of more than a dozen books of history, political journalism, and fiction, including a poetry chapbook, When You Are Someone Else (Aralia Press, 2002), Bluebonnet Girl (Henry Holt and Co. (BYR), 2003), a children’s book in verse, which won an Oppenheimer Toy Prize for children’s literature, and a narrative poem, The Alamo (Replica Books, 1999), which the Los Angeles Times named as one of the best books of the year. His first collection of verse, Parallel Lives, was published by Etruscan Press in 2007.

Reviews

[Murtaza · Rating 4 out of 5]

It's quite difficult to explain class dynamics in the United States where people tend to politically identify according to cultural issues and both the parties are more or less controlled by a small business class. The best mechanism for doing so is looking at voting patterns of college educated vs. non-college educated individuals as Lind does in this study of class war in America. As Lind argues, the college-educated mostly white overclass is locked in an economic, political and cultural war with the non-college educated mostly white underclass. The overclass has successfully locked most politically-engaged minorities into its coalition and has upended the old post-1945 social consensus with a neoliberal "revolution from above." They are pressing the case and have control of major institutions including large universities, corporations and the national media.

In the United States and most countries subject to decades of neo-liberalization the political power of ordinary people has been more or less eradicated due to the destruction of intermediary institutions like unions, clubs and guilds. Religious congregations are a final outpost but even they are wavering under declining religious observance in the West. People are basically subjects of corporations and two large political brands that they vote for every four years and mostly keep them entertained in between while serving the interests of a narrow socially liberal and economically libertarian class. People have periodically expressed their displeasure by voting for outlandish populist candidates who sadly are disproportionately grifters. Until intermediary institutions are rebuilt, including through locally-empowered ward politics, the underclass will essentially be denied of power. In addition to the economic effects of that they must suffer the humiliation of watching the steady eradication of their culture in the face of the cultural preferences of the empowered elite managerial class.

I had a few quibbles with some of what Lind wrote and also found that he lumped together statistics in an unclear way to press his argument at times. Nonetheless I found this book to be a useful analysis. He doesn't do the easy thing of warning about impending apocalypse if his prescriptions aren't met; what we're at risk of isn't fascism but banana republicanism. I might interview him and write about this more at length elsewhere.

[Todd Davidson · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book pissed me off, challenged my thinking, gave me righteous anger, changed my mind, hardened my previous opinions, and I laughed. It did not ever make me feel hopeful. If a book does all that it is worth something. His assessment of the challenges are spot on, his solutions are unfathomably ridiculous but they can help us find better solutions.

Michael Lind says the working man has been getting screwed economically, politically, and culturally by the neoliberal elite managerial class for 40 years. They are angry and turning to opportunistic demagogs, like Donald Trump. His descriptions of the challenges working class face are things I saw growing up in a working class family and community. This book gave me more sympathy and underscored a need to see the world from multiple perspectives. Reading it you will better understand why the working class voted for Trump and will again.

Lind is no supporter of populist demagogs like Trump but he saves his most righteous anger for the neoliberal elite --which is the full spectrum from leftist socialists, Clinton, Bush and the free-market right. Many of his critiques of the neoliberal elite are spot on. At times I reveled in his critiques of the pedantic, entitled managerial elite (which I am now one of).

It is worth noting Lind conveniently fails to mention that the last 40 years have been the best time to be alive for the most number of humans, ever. There's been a long peace, billions lifted out of poverty, health improvements, lots of good stuff. While there remain problems with the neoliberal elite's reign, they have done a lot of good. Before we revolt we should weigh the pros and cons, not just look at the cons.

But on to what I found very persuasive and thought-provoking

The working class is getting screwed:
Economically: Immigration and global trade provide cheap goods and services for urban-elite managers. While it provides little benefit to the exurb and suburb working class. The working class has to compete with these foreign workers and as a result American working class wages are held down.

Politically: Mass media has turned politics into a cable TV show. Local parties matter much less. As a result local party bosses, close to the working class have little sway. Meanwhile educated elite consultants have a lot of sway.

Culturally: White elites celebrate multiculturalism but they denigrate the white working class—say the white working class has privilege and is racist. Poor white people are the only people we can ridicule in todays society.

What's the solution?

Democratic Pluralism, I really like... until he gets into the details.

What I liked:

We need to rebuild local institutions to empower the worker and solve problems locally. He made a good argument for limits on low skilled immigration to increase the negotiation leverage of the low skilled American worker. Many of his solutions seek to increase the negotiation leverage of the working class, I think that is the right direction even when I disagreed with his specific idea.

Then things got really silly:

He wants cultural committees that represent a wide variety of creeds, religions, and beliefs to control content and media. In a fractured media environment this is dumb, just change the channel.

He wants to go back to the hey day of local political bosses. He even uses Chicago Alderman as an example. Chicago has had 1,730 corruption convictions against public officials since 1976--the most in the country by a long shot. (Source: U of Illinois, Chicago).

And he wants to end global trade as we know it. We know that nations that trade don't go to war with each other so say good bye to the long-peace and welcome back the world wars.

In conclusion, the working man's ailments are real and do need solutions. The neoliberal elite solutions are often self-serving and unhelpful. We could use this book as inspiration for reforms but we should not take his solutions. His solutions will bring back cultural censorship, rampant political corruption, and world wars.

[Andrew Figueiredo · Rating 5 out of 5]

I had been reading a lot of Lind's pieces in Tablet and American Affairs and knew I would enjoy "The New Class War". It didn't disappoint. Lind gives voice to the ignored segment of our population with culturally traditional views and economically center-left ones, much like my own. Thus, this book takes a rightful place among my favorites. Lind's thesis is that a neoliberal managerial elite challenges the working-class majority in economic, political, and social realms. In the neoliberal era, the college-educated managerial elite has taken it upon themselves to promote policies that undermine the power of the working class. From unfettered free trade to basically open borders, the elite hubs have served themselves at the expense of the heartland. This echoes Christophe Guilluy's writing on France, interestingly enough. I've spent the better part of the last 5 years trying to figure out the rise of populism, and Lind hits it perfectly: "The underlying cause is the same--long-smoldering rage by non-college-educated workers against damage done to their economic bargaining power, political influence, and cultural dignity" (132). That captures the loss of control, the whittling away of social capital, the hollowing out of communities. Well done. And then, those same elites now seek to delegitimize any response to their antics by calling it Russiagate, fascism, or ___phobia, which Lind brilliantly deconstructs.

Lind's solution is democratic pluralism, which may sound vague, but which he does a good job of fleshing out. It boils down to empowering forums for the working class to have a voice. Unlike populism, which he calls a counterculture, this would be a counterestablishment, seeking to gain ascendance. For Lind, democracy is about a constant negotiation, the empowerment of various groups, and the recognition that we are a pluralistic country. This model strikes me as healthy and self-correcting. And it's not historically inaccurate! We had democratic pluralism in the post-WWII, post-New Deal era (largely due to the New Deal and its legacy of tripartite bargaining), but left and right converged to promote a neoliberal agenda throughout the 1970s. In this area, his critique of the left and right coming together tracks well with Stoller's, even if his conclusions differ in some ways.

Lind calls for empowering the guild (sectoral bargaining/wage boards/codetermination, the ward (localism, putting power back in legislative hands)(also this reminds me of Stricherz's argument in Why the Democrats Are Blue: Secular Liberalism and the Decline of the People’s Party), and the parish (giving religious groups a say in media regulation, religious liberty) (see also, Tim Carney in Alienated America: Why Some Places Thrive While Others Collapse). Together, this project would build the countervailing power to challenge neoliberal managerial elites. This project is defined by regulating the excesses of globalization. After all, arbitrage is one of the tools used to hollow out middle America. Therefore, Lind endorses a more controlled approach to immigration and trade likely to be unpopular on today's left. But at the same time, I'm pleased to see him recognize that we can't
By doing so, he claims democracies can forge a middle ground and avoid the oligarchy-populism back and forth that currently plagues them. One of the more interesting parts was his critique of simply using redistribution or calling for education or antitrust enforcement. These steps don't challenge the fundamental issues at hand for Lind. I don't fully agree with Lind's passing off the importance of antitrust, however. I find it compatible with his framework to an extent, even if not obvious at first, which he hints at. But in essence, his framework all boils down to power. If you look around you, the simple fact that very few commentators/academics/elites hold the set of populist views prominent among the public should be instructive. He's onto something, and his solution is thoughtful, would bring about change, and reflects a distinctly democratic sentiment.

Refreshingly, he doesn't stake out a reflexively anti-elite stance, recognizing that we're not going to overturn everything tomorrow. Elites have a role to play, but they need to be pushed by global power to take the direction of democratic pluralism. I would personally add that more voices need to read Michael Lind's commentary and amplify publications like American Affairs and groups like American Compass. By challenging the hegemony of neoliberal ideas in academia and professional circles, we can make a place for democratic pluralism to grow.

[Max Berendsen · Rating 4 out of 5]

Review to follow

[Heather Barkley · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wow! It seems the last few years every pundit and their dog has been expounding their theories of populism, Trump, Brexit, etc. I found after a while I started to tune out a bit, everything was getting boring and formulaic and predictable and reading new commentary just felt like Groundhog Day. So this book was such a breath of fresh air. Lind offers a new paradigm for analyzing recent history. I don't know how much of it is totally original thought per se but I was struck by many points I had at least not heard elucidated and put together in this way. I was underlining things on almost every page. I give this book 5/5 stars, not because I even agree with it all. But just because it was so refreshing to just read someone on this planet earth who has something new and interesting to say. Whether you are progressive, conservative, libertarian, or one of the much derided populist working class, I think this book will give you some new ways to think about and look at things. Highly recommended!

[Paul Perkins · Rating 2 out of 5]

The disappointment that dawned on me as my pleasure at what appeared to be a clear, concise and comprehensive 'tour de force' (David Goodhart) emerged instead as a highly readable but ultimately shallow collection of platitudes and generalisations, was as surprising as it was unwelcome.

I have given Lind two stars rather than one, because there is definitely something - albeit exactly what, I'm not sure - in his exhortations to 'democratic pluralism', albeit something that presumably only his thinktank brethren understand, as he says so precious little about what this might actually take/look like. There are also a few pithy one-liners at the end of chapters, which are worth reflecting on.

Beyond this, I would explain my rating as follows:

- The largest and most glaring problem (and one which it has to be said afflicts a perplexing number of books) is the failure of the author to spend any meaningful time or effort in defining terms. For a book entirely focused on (new) class warfare, he spends almost no time defining the classes he references, let alone explaining how his (non)definition relates to changes in class, the intersection of class with other forms of identity, the existence of wider class structure or divisions (the Duke of Buccleuch & Queensbury or Jeff Bezos or the first-time university entrant are all part of the 'overclass') and so on. He assumes he is right and hence does not need to explain his starting point, which dooms most of his subsequent arguments.

- Lind conflates a range of different countries and their respective class structures. Taken with the above failure to define class meaningfully - but still asserting that his undefined 'working class' is the majority in every country on the basis that it is anyone who has not been college-educated (or is it that they can be college-educated, as long as their parents are not?), it makes it very confusing to understand exactly who he is talking about. He then also conflates a whole range of very different civic institutions with the working class, which of course emerged in fundamentally different ways and play different roles in the countries he describes. This means it feels more like a political monologue than anything else.

- Lind critiques a number of the lazy assertions made about 'the working class' or more accurately, in my view, those who have voted for Trump, Brexit and so on. However, in so doing he leans heavily on the same type/level of generalisations and stereotypes which he (rightly) critiques in others. It is a startling blindspot, and suggests that he either lacks this awareness, has not bothered to research what he is writing about properly, or has done research to back up his assertions but cannot be bothered to reference them. Either way, it makes it very difficult to rely on the points he is making, which end up feeling like a series of Spectator blogs.

- Lind fails to read outside of his own narrow channels of political and economic theory, with the inevitable result that his assertions about other areas, for example international relations, lack any credibility.

- Last but not least, it is never helpful when an author's tone is churlish or smug throughout, particularly when it betrays a politics or stance that the blurb works hard to suggest isn't there (i.e. he is neutral). There is also a certain irony in his (fair) allegation of the contempt which the middle classes show towards 'uneducated' classes, in a book which at times feels deliberately written to win a round of academic jargon bingo.

Ultimately, this book feels like a lost opportunity, which is a desperate shame because clearly Lind is trying to tackle an incredibly important subject and one which deserves to be explored meaningfully, rigorously, openly and productively. There are a good few insights and the aforementioned endorsement of a rather woolly 'democratic pluralism'. However, it feels petty, subjective and rushed, so for those with a desire to really engage, learn and explore - go elsewhere.

[Mike Fendrich · Rating 4 out of 5]

I found "The New Class War" to be an interesting and insightful read. Author Lind does a great job describing and explaining the loss of political, cultural and economic power and self determination of our working middle class to a technocratic, managerial class that is not at all interested in people not just like themselves. This is something I have experienced and seen at work in our nation and local area. How many smug, self righteous, college educated (and indoctrinated in Critical Theory) managerial class tweets, talks, protests, Facebook posts, ect do you need to experience before realizing the author is on to something. Lind properly explains Trump not as the problem but the necessary response (chasing after the latest populist demagogue who speaks their language) in a hopeless search to regain some control over their lives.

In the post 2020 election "Trump responsibility movements" to isolate and punish those who supported him, it is very difficult for me to see how Lind's prescription of democratic pluralism would ever come about. Can you imagine Rep. Ocasio-Cortez or others of her persuasion (the managerial class at present) voluntarily giving up political, cultural or economic power to give those whom she detests a little more power and control? I thought not.

Our managerial class is pathetic and unsustainable and they cannot see it. I would love to support something like Lind's democratic pluralism but I do not hold out much hope. There is simply at present to much hubris in our leadership class (I'm right and you are a scumbag if you disagree) to think a reasoned, balanced and reasonable approach to a better and more united nation would be considered.

Which leaves us with wondering who the next Trump will be because they are coming.


05/21/2023 Read again during a short vacation. Well worth reading.
"Counter-majoritarian, rights-based liberalism, pushed too far, becomes antidemocratic liberalism. Many of the institutions important to citizens in democracies are subtly altered or delegitimated in a society in which communal interests must be justified exclusively in terms of this or that individual right. Churches, clubs and families, to name three examples, are impossible to justify on the basis of contracts among rights-bearing individuals, as though they were mere business partnerships." (page 62)

The loss of these immanent mediating structures is crushing us. There is no way to escape the morass we are in without the reestablishment of them. Unless you want the whole country looking like San Fransisco.

[Matthew LaPine · Rating 2 out of 5]

Lind's latest puts forth the theory that the way to end the current "class war" is to empower those who have become disempowered, through gaining them representation and membership that they had mid-20th-century but which they no longer enjoy. I agree. We have all experienced loss - offshoring, decline of manufacturing, union membership declines and more have led to a net transfer of power from the people to elites.

Along the way, Lind spews jargon and labels more than a person with the flu spews snot and phlegm. In the Introduction alone, we come across: nationalist populism, promarket neoliberal centrists, working-class populism, interclass compromises, pre-modern agrarian social structure, bourgeois capitalists, democratic pluralism, dominant elite, technocratic neoliberalism, global labor arbitrage, social elite, libertarian economics, managerial elite, disempowered natives, demagogic populists, dominant neoliberal establishments, elite-promulgated multiculturalism, populist rebels, managerial overclass, democratic pluralism, and more. And that's just the Introduction.

Seems there are valid points, and I respect them, but they are well obfuscated by jargon and a fair dose of self-righteousness.

[Bryan Metzger · Rating 2 out of 5]

Not worth it. Lazily written and lacking in nuance. He makes some decent points, but they’re outweighed by all the shallow arguments he makes on other topics.

[Barry · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is a penetrating political analysis of the recent rise of populism— a protest movement against the ruling class by those who believe their contributions to our country are being discounted.

Rather than writing a proper summary myself, I shall indolently and gratefully provide this link to Murtaza’s helpful and well-written review: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...

[Dan Nuxoll · Rating 3 out of 5]

Like any book that uses the concept of class, the analysis is somewhat simplified. Class analysis necessarily assumes some homogeneity within the classes, notably a homogeneity of interests. The key question is not whether the analysis is realistic, but whether the analysis reveals key aspects of what is happening.

This book posits that there are currently two classes in society, the managerial elite and the working class. One could just as well talk about the professional and the working classes or the white collar and the blue collar classes. At one point, the book says the key divider between the two classes is a college degree. At some points, the book concedes that the leadership of the society is almost necessarily from the professional classes because they have the necessary skills. The author contends that in the cxurrent environment, the professional class has taken advantage of their position to create a society which serves their interests. The author focuses on immigration policy and openness to trade, and to a lesser extent tax policy and social programs. Current policies permit the professional classes to benefit from low taxes as well as cheap goods and services. The professional classes firmly believe in a meritocracy, allowing for some discrimination because of race and sex. In their view, progress consists strictly in addressing this mistreatment.

The author observes that in the mid-century America, there were countervailing powers to the professional classes--unions in the economic sphere, grassroots political parties in the political sphere, and churches and other broad-based organizations in the social sphere. He argues that those have been swept away or sidelined, giving the professional classes freedom to arrange society to suit themselves.

The latter part of the book focuses on a solution: something called democratic pluralism. I could not quite understand specifically what is meant by democratic pluralism and how it would solve the problem. The author severely criticizes some attempts to address the inequality in society such as job training, but I am puzzled about which institutions can now serve as a countervailing influence and how we get from here to there.

The last part is the weakest part of the book. The first part reports on a wide variety of polls and academic research to show that there is something like a bifurcation in American society. I tend to agree with much of his central thesis--I know that there is evidence that he does not even consider in the first part of his book, such as the very different trends in life expectancy among the working class and the professional class. Clinton's blithe use of the term "despicables" has been picked up almost as a badge of honor by many people, and the mainstream media seems oddly blind to what is happening with the working class. I hear the constant refrain that the continued support for Trump is inexplicable. Many in the professional class simply don't get the degree of discontent among the working class, and Trump, of course, has capitalized on that.

The term "class war" is an exaggeration, but a small one. Bullets are not flying, but rhetoric certainly is. Certainly, few really try to understand the "enemy." In this environment, I am genuinely puzzled about the path forward. My hope is new leadership who actually tries to reconcile the working class and takes their interests seriously. Any leader who does that will certainly alienate part of their support because they are consorting with the enemy. But it must be done.

[Tiffany Lee · Rating 4 out of 5]

Lind essentially believes that in order for the class war to be resolved, we have to transition from the technocratic neoliberalism, where managerial elites owns power over working class, into democratic pluralism, where both the overclass and working class share the power to negotiate and keep each other in check. He outlined a utopian like social structure, yet the question of “how” remained unanswered. It will have to leave up to the overlords to share power willingly, which is unrealistic.

Besides that, the analysis on immigration and the account of the rise of populism were quite interesting.

[zoë · Rating 3 out of 5]

Interesting analysis of the rise of reactionary populism, the "managerial elites" and geographic implications with relation to class and industry. However, a few sections I took issue with; mainly with relation to unions and the assessment of islamophobia/xenophobia/homophobia as a conflation to mental illness. There was nothing mentioned of the role of identity politics/gender in the distribution of wealth and power, a nuance surely worth giving some heed to.

[Jim Robles · Rating 5 out of 5]

Five stars! I great explanation of our current divide (AKA class war). In my perpetual rant against (pardon the tautology) selfish Baby Boomers, for the rise of Trump, I have always been disturbed by the implication that human nature has changed: it does not. One thing this essay does is explain how Baby Boomers simply found ourselves in a situation that allowed us to achieve a more selfish result, even though we are not so different at the personal level. So much for the diagnosis. The prescription does require that we share, and perhaps more than just a negative income tax.

"Managerial society works best when there are not only concessions to national working-class economic interests—the bribes to the “losers” of neoliberalism—but also genuine economic bargaining power and political power wielded by the many. Far from undermining managerial regimes, Burnham’s “juridical check” and Galbraith’s “countervailing power” make them more legitimate and sustainable" (p. 29).

The evaluation of the economic/military rise of China, does not give consideration to the very real possibility of an environmental implosion there.

I found this one in:

The Opinion Pages | OP-ED COLUMNIST
The Four American Narratives
David Brooks MAY 26, 2017
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/26/op...

In this column, Mr. Brooks concludes: "The mercantilist model sees America as a new Rome, a mighty fortress in a dangerous world. The talented community sees America as a new Athens, a creative crossroads leading an open and fundamentally harmonious world. It’s an Exodus story for an information age."

"None of the dominant political ideologies of the West can explain the new class war, because all of them pretend that persisting social classes no longer exist in the West" (p. 1).
"Fortunately, there exists a body of thought that can explain the current upheavals in the West and the world very well. It is James Burnham’s theory of the managerial revolution, supplemented by the economic sociology of John Kenneth Galbraith" (p. 2).

"Following the Cold War, the global business revolution shattered these social compacts" (p. 3).

The Managerial Elite: Past and Present

"In other Western democracies as well, membership in the managerial class appears to be mostly hereditary, though partly open to talent from below" (p. 5).

National Industrial Consolidation

"All ofthis demonstrates that, in every modern economy, firms in Chandler’s “center” and Galbraith’s “planning system” that are characterized by increasing returns to scale tend to be both large and, if successful, long-lasting, compared to the smaller firms in Chandler’s “periphery” and Galbraith’s “market system,” in which size produces few or no competitive advantages" (p. 7).

National Political Settlements during the Cold War

"In the 1921 Battle of Blair Mountain in Logan County, West Virginia, state officials used planes to bomb armed strikers from the air. . . . . In the ensuing Cold War, every major industrial democracy devised some kind of “settlement” or compromise among business and labor interests within the nation. . . . . The post-1945 settlements in the West and Japan demonstrate countervailing power and juridical defense in action. The result was the golden age of capitalism from the 1940s to the 1970s, combining high growth with a more equal distribution of its rewards than has ever existed before or since" (p. 8).

1921 was the year of the Tulsa Race Riots: it sounds like a heck of a year.

Multinational Corporate Consolidation

"By the early 2000s, within the high value-added, high technology, and/or strongly branded segments of world markets, which serve mainly the middle and upper income earners who control the bulk of the world’s purchasing power, a veritable “law” had come into play: a handful of giant firms, the “systems integrators,” occupied upwards of 50 per cent of the whole global market" (p. 9).

See Boeing and AirBus.

"China, India, Brazil, and other populous developing countries, however, were able to use control of corporate access to their large internal labor forces and consumer markets to pressure foreign capital into promoting projects of national industrial development, by means including local content requirements and technology transfer agreements" (p. 10).

The Economics of Global Arbitrage

"Perhaps the iconic product of the era of globalization is the Apple iPhone. According to Konstantine Kakaes in MIT’s Technology Review, producing every single component of the iPhone in the United States, in addition to assembling it in the United States, would at most add $100 to the cost of the device. But Apple’s profit margin would be much smaller than is the case with its present production of the iPhone in six factories using unfree, low-wage labor in China (plus a factory in Brazil, a concession to Brazilian import substitution policy)" (p. 11).

The Politics of Global Arbitrage
"The areas chosen for arbitrage and harmonization reflect the interests not of national working- class majorities but of the managerial elites that dominate western governments" (p. 12).

"Favorable laws and regulations that corporate lobbyists are unable to persuade national democratic legislatures to enact can be repackaged and hidden in harmonization agreements masked as “trade” treaties" (p. 13).

"On the contrary, in personal terms, today’s managerial elite is for the most part less bigoted and often quite philanthropic" (p. 13).

Globalization: Hobson’s Imperialism?

Immigrants and Oligarchs

"As we have seen, in the late twentieth century, Western managerial elites, by means of transnational corporations, were able to escape from their mid-twentieth-century social contract with national workers by offshoring production, or threatening to do so. Purely domestic companies, like hotels, restaurants, and construction companies, did not have this option. But they could benefit from immigration, because loose labor markets weaken the bargaining power of workers, just as tight labor markets weaken the bargaining power of employers (p. 16).

"The American media reflect the interests of managerial and professional elites in low-wage employees and cheap domestic servants, so the bad news was buried in mainstream reporting. “Immigrants Aren’t Taking Americans’ Jobs, New Study Finds,” declared the New York Times on September 21, 2016" (p. 16).

"Because Hobson envisioned something very similar to the post–Cold War pattern of offshoring, transnational production, and mass low-wage immigration in the age of railroads, steamships, and telegraphs, today’s pattern cannot be viewed as the predetermined result of new technologies like the Internet, global wireless telephony, and container ships. . . . . But between 1914 and 1989, a necessary but not sufficient condition for this kind of managerial globalism was lacking: great- power peace" (p. 18).

From Super-Imperialism to Bloc Wars

"In The Managerial Revolution, Burnham predicted the division of the postwar world among three “superstates” based on the United States, Germany, and Japan—inspiring Orwell’s Oceania, Eurasia, and Eastasia in his novel 1984" (p. 19).

"However, the rise of China is bringing that ephemeral moment to a close—and with it, almost certainly, an end to the present structure of global industry" (p. 19).

Populist Rebellions and Their Limitations

"If I am correct, the post–Cold War period has come to a close, and the industrial democracies of North America and Europe have entered a new and turbulent era. . . . . Following two decades of increasing consolidation of the power of the managerial class, the populist and nationalist wave on both sides of the Atlantic is a predictable rebellion by working-class outsiders against managerial-class insiders and their domestic allies, who are often recruited from native minorities or immigrant diasporas" (p. 20).

"When populist outsiders challenge oligarchic insiders, the oligarchs almost always win. How could they lose? They may not have numbers, but they control most of the wealth, expertise, and political influence and dominate the media, universities, and nonprofit sectors. Most populist waves break and disperse on the concrete seawalls of elite privilege" (p. 21).

Alternatives to Populism

"Neoliberalism plus, also called “inclusive capitalism,” is the preferred response of the transatlantic managerial class to the populist revolts in Europe and America. Essentially, neoliberalism plus is Reagan-Thatcher-Clinton-Blair neoliberalism with more subsidies to the “losers” of globalization" (p. 22).

"In other words, neoliberal economic strategy itself, because of its bias in favor of business models relying on cheap labor at home and abroad, tends to undermine the productivity growth needed to pay for the massive redistribution that, it is hoped, would align the interests of workers and managerial elites" (p. 23).

"Just as managerialism succeeded bourgeois capitalism and feudalism, so managerialism in an age of technological and economic stagnation might give way in turn to what Peter Frase in Four Futures: Life after Capitalism (Verso, 2016) has called “rentism”" (p. 24).

New Developmentalism

"Even before the election of Donald Trump, the United States was already acting as a declining post-hegemonic power with a reawakened sense of strategic economic nationalism" (p. 26).

"By default, then, the economic system in a world of multiple great-power blocs is likely to resemble that of the European colonial empires" (p. 27).

"There would need to be two strategies, one for traded-sector industries like manufacturing with potential foreign markets, and one for nontraded domestic industries that can only be performed in situ, like nursing care and other personal services" (p. 27).

Competition and Countervailing Power

"History demonstrates that ruling classes of any kind are reluctant to share power with the ruled unless they are afraid of the ruled or afraid of rival ruling classes" (p. 28).

See Machiavelli.

"The need to mobilize the population for war, or at least the need to obtain social peace in wartime, has been far more important as a source of democratizing reforms. From the Greek city-states to the Swiss cantons, citizen-soldiers have been able to use their contribution to defense to demand rights and representation. In the United States, the Emancipation Proclamation and the GI Bill were both wartime measures" (p. 28).

"In cold wars and trade wars, even if no blood is shed by the contenders, countries and blocs with empowered and patriotic workers are likely to do better than rival nations crippled by immiserated workforces and selfish, nepotistic, oligarchic elites" (p. 29).

[James · Rating 2 out of 5]

I am a very right-wing person who, like the author, despises the liberals who dominate America's institutions. But I did not like this book.

Scholar Michael Lind proposes that America's political crisis - personified by the rise of Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders - is best explained as the effects of a class war that pits the rich, liberal elites living mostly on the coasts against the poorer, less educated proletarians living in flyover country. According to his view, the new overclass that he calls the "Managerial Elite" is at war with the country they govern, using globalism, political correctness, identity politics, and massive immigration as weapons to isolate, undermine, and smash the more conservative, patriotic working-class into submission and impose its utopian vision on America. Trump is the avatar of this downtrodden, working-class America that until 2016 has generally been fighting a losing battle to defend its class interests.

For Lind, the New Deal era under FDR was the best period for the American working-class. From the 1930s to the end of World War II, a record-high number of Americans belonged to what he calls "mass-membership parties," mostly labor unions but also churches and other worker interest associations. Lind proposes that America recreate these "mass membership" organizations so that workers can defend their interests effectively. The result would be "democratic pluralism," in which each social class has a say, but no single class dominates the others.

"The issue is power," he writes. "Social power exists in three realms -- government, the economy, and the culture. Each of these three realms of social power is the site of class conflict -- sometimes intense and sometimes contained by interclass compromises. All three realms of Western society today are fronts in the new class war." He portrays class conflict almost like a Marxist - a constant that always has and always will exist between social classes.

His thesis can be summarized by the last line in the Introduction: "Demagogic populism is a symptom. Technocratic neoliberalism is the disease. Democratic pluralism is the cure."

I'm not convinced.

Lind simplifies a complex problem, accepts the socialist and egalitarian presuppositions of the debate, and does not provide any real solution.

Mind you, there is some truth to what he is saying. Most of those with real cultural, political, and social power in America (think Hollywood, the NFL, the Ivy League, Silicon Valley, and CNN) generally hate the more conservative, patriotic lower classes. Look no farther than Hillary's "basket of deplorables" comment. With "Black Lives Matter," they are aiming for a Maoist-like Cultural Revolution to overthrow statues, rewrite history, and literally burn down the businesses and houses of anyone who stands in their path.

It is also true that the working class is in crisis. Our Kids by Robert Putnam, Coming Apart by Charles Murray, Hillbilly Elegy by J.D. Vance all demonstrate quite well the social and economic breakdown of America's working-class thanks mostly to collapsing family life and religious practice, but also unemployment, drug use, crime, and disappearing institutions. It is also true that fewer and fewer corporations control more and more of the economy. This can be seen in the decline of the family farm, the decline in the number and employment of small and medium-sized businesses, the constant tendency of corporate mergers and buyouts, and the closing of Mom and Pop stores on Main Streets across America - the Amazon or Walmart effect, if you will.

There are many causes of this crisis. Some are economic, some social, and some technological. But I think it is illogical to blame an entire class for this phenomenon.

People today of all classes are selfish, individualistic, greedy, immoral, and out for themselves at the expense of others. This applies to working-class people as well as the middle and upper classes.

Rather than blame a class, we should blame the egalitarian ideologies of classical liberalism, socialism, and communism for the unraveling of society. They are rampant in all social classes and are at the root of our political crisis. Closely related to socialism is the total breakdown of morals, religious practice, and the American family. The disappearance of family life, in particular, has destroyed working-class America. It is noteworthy that Michael Lind, although he acknowledges the past beneficial role of churches, sees no significant role for religion or virtue in his solution.

Moreover, there is significant divergence within each class in political ideology: a large minority of working-class voters support identity politics, Black Lives Matter, the LGBT movement, abortion, globalism, mass immigration, and other positions embraced by the "managerial elite." Likewise, a significant minority of upper-class Americans with college degrees reject identity politics, are patriotic, detest globalism, and voted for Donald Trump.

Most importantly, the idea of a class war between rich and poor was artificially created by the French Revolution and perpetuated by socialism. Any conservative, traditionalist, Christian, or right-wing American should abhor class warfare.

The existence of a class war and people waging one is a symptom of a deeper problem that cannot be solved by more class war. It is not very different than a race war. The solution to racial conflict (such as the BLM riots in America) is not to give each race the means to defend its "racial interests," but to fight the Revolutionary, subversive ideology behind it. Likewise, the solution to class resentments in America is not, as Lind proposes, giving working-class people the means to more effectively defend their "class interests" against their class enemies.

In the Middle Ages and Ancien Regime, the social classes (called "orders") lived in harmony with each other, each respecting the rights of each other and forming a family of families that later formed the European nations we have today. There were abuses, to be sure, but by and large, society suffered from far fewer problems than America today.

As Lind says in the book, the conditions that allowed class antagonism to flourish appeared in the wake of the Industrial Revolution. Nothing did more to destroy the social fabric of Europe than the Industrial Revolution. In Europe and America in the 19th century, whole industries and ways of life were wiped out by mass production. Any solution to our crisis must focus on the Industrial Revolution and the imbalances it put in the economy and society, not on the upper classes themselves. Lind's resentment towards the "ruling class" (of which, as an academic, he is a member) blinds him, I believe, to other more profound reasons for our malaise.

In his book Return to Order, John Horvat identifies what he calls "frenetic intemperance" as the main culprit of our crisis. This desire to overthrow all restrains and all barriers in the disordered pursuit of unlimited pleasure and money has destroyed the organic, harmonious relationships between members of social classes. He proposes organic Christian society, based on the Middle Ages, as the solution for America.

Paraphrasing the author: "Demagogic populism is a symptom. The Egalitarian Revolution is the disease. Christian civilization is the cure."

[Matteo Mugnaini · Rating 3 out of 5]

I contenuti sono sicuramente buoni e l’idea alla base (“più democrazia”) anche molto condivisibile, il problema è che nell’esposizione e nella disamina i molti alti si accompagnano ad altrettanti bassi.

L’elaborata analisi critica del neoliberismo e delle suo élite è molto accurata ed interessante (anche se un pochino psicotica nel ribattere sempre sugli stessi punti tipo mantra) mentre quella del fenomeno populista è assolutamente superficiale e insufficiente limitandosi ad un “tutta colpa del neoliberismo”, anche condivisibile alla luce del resto del libro ma assolutamente insoddisfacente dal punto di vista intellettuale.

La pretesa di voler narrare del mondo Occidentale nella sua totalità si infrange in una prospettiva e orizzonte di senso prettamente americano-centrica che, per esempio, esclude completamente (o quasi) le sinistre socialiste dal dibattito pubblico (se non per brevi citazioni casuali), forze che in Europa sono anche al governo di nazioni!

La prospettiva esclusivamente economica è molto accurata ma assolutamente insufficiente per dare una visione di insieme del fenomeno populista, anche se alla luce delle poche volte che si avventura fuori da questo campo ha degli scivoloni imbarazzanti, vedasi i discorsi sul “politically correct”.

Last but not least, un po’ frustrante la mancanza di una seria elaborazione per una serie di “soluzioni” possibili al problema, perché oltre all’auspicio di una democratizzazione maggiore della vita pubblica c’è poco altro.

(!! Momento sfogo perché mi ha fatto incazzare come una iena in certi punti: MA CHE VUOL DIRE CHE LA SOLUZIONE AL NEOLIBERISMO SAREBBE IL CORPORATIVISMO MAREMMA LADRA!!)

Ovviamente al netto di queste critiche il libro è molto interessante e apre degli scorci che fanno ragionare, oltre a toccare molti punti fuori dal dibattito pubblico più mainstream ma ecco, si poteva fare di più.

[E · Rating 4 out of 5]

I found this to be an important book to read. I can't agree on everything with Lind. He is too skeptical of global free trade; he is not skeptical enough of labor unions. But he diagnoses the problem well--the managerial overclass, always a small minority of society, holds the power. It despises, hates, the working class (or the "middle class" as it's known in America for whatever reason). It assigns pejorative labels to that class and then antagonizes it to live up to those labels (just think of Hillary Clinton's lovely "basket" comment). If the general populace was united, the elites wouldn't have a chance. But the elites are pros are dividing people (just consider the worldview inculcated in public schools and universities).

So what is Lind's solution? The sharing of power. Of course, elites won't give up said power easily, but they will out of fear--fear of the alternative, which is revolt. Lind sees a broad power sharing cooperative between worker groups, civil society groups (clubs and religious institutions) and government agencies. He doesn't limn his solution nearly as clearly as the problem giving rise to it, but in seed form it would be a more representative and local-level sharing of governing power, based on the need to strip power from those who do not have the heartland's interests at heart.

The topic I haven't mentioned yet is immigration, and here Lind is probably at his best. He rejects the view that an anti-immigrant stance is inherently racist. What it opposes is an unfair playing field, in which immigrants can be abused and underpaid while still availing themselves of government benefits for which they have paid and are ineligible. Of course the way to curb this is to go after the employers who hire them (trust me, if no one hired illegal aliens, we'd have far far fewer of them). But nobody wants to do them because said employers are hugely over-represented in the managerial class mentioned above. And they don't really care, as long as they can have cheap nannies.

[Peter Geyer · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book has various faces: the cover shown here does not fit the book on my desk, even though the publication details appear the same; the subtext here: Saving Democracy from The Managerial Elite, is Saving Democracy from the Metropolitan Elite in another edition.

Both have their relevances. I selected the former title because it fitted more easily with a long-time concern and interest, in which I have participated, however uneasily. The latter title doesn't fit me at all, in that I live on the outskirts of a large city in a working class area and don't really participate in the range of activities that might be placed under that label. What links the two is education.

Michael Lind uses education and occupation to suggest the existence of an overclass, whose interests are at variance with those not so qualified of located. His focus is on the United States and parts of Europe.

This overclass can also be labelled as technocratic neo-liberalism. They live in hubs i.e. large cities, as opposed to heartlands, so regional areas, with different interests and different lives. The overclass demonises the populist orientation of the latter voters. One of the themes of this group (or at least specific proportions of it) is an attack on working conditions – profits before people if you like – including casualisation of work and under- or un- employment. To me, this fits well with the economy of western societies since at least the early 1970s, at least my experience of it, including the encouragement for people to become entrepreneurs in their own right, a kind of precarity.

Lind advocates a democratic pluralism, the latter word a standard in reading about politics some decades ago, and one which personally appeals. His idea is the development of local connections in the heartland groups, part of which e.g. involvement of church, appears more relevant to the USA.

There are criticisms of this book regarding Lind's inclusion of teachers and the like in the overclass and perhaps the book is over-generalised in that way. Notwithstanding that, the overclass label has a lot of merit and shouldn't be dismissed because of exceptions. No idea is pure and 100% right. I'm also unsure of some of his suggestions on democratic pluralism.

If you want to see how this works in current time, it's useful to look at the Democratic Party in the USA, the internal alarm about the rise of a radical candidate and the youngest candidate as a technocrat with much the same approach as past Democratic candidates. You can even see this in Australia where certain groups who know they are right, wish to impose their views on others, without any engagement or understanding of different lives.

Michael Lind writes clearly and well and he is well-researched. He also has important points to make.

[Heidi · Rating 3 out of 5]

I decided to tackle "The New Class War" after reading an article by Amy Chua reviewing it and another book, "Why we're polarized", by Ezra Klein. Both of these attempt to explain the populist uprising (I can't think of a better word) that is dividing our country, one from the perspective of the left, the other from the perspective of the right. Perhaps mistakenly, I think I already know the left perspective, so I decided to try to inform myself about the one from the right. To be perfectly fair, Michael Lind claims to dislike Donald Trump's character and methods, but he understands the people it appeals to and tries to explain it. Basically, after World War II and up until the 70s there was equivalence between the workers and the bosses, or if not equivalence at least fairness toward those workers; now, he asserts, that is gone, and the result is a tremendous surge of anger and resentment which expresses itself as we currently see. Lind disagrees that it is about racism –in his view it is simply about competition for jobs that is unfairly weighted toward the darlings of the new bosses, which he terms the "managerial elites", those darlings being principally people of color. People of color might very strongly disagree that they have benefited at the expense of the white lunch pail crowd, but they certainly do get more approbation from the elite crowd, and that, from the perspective of the Trump supporters, who are viewed very negatively by the elite is enough. Lind advocates the return of union power, imagining something of the order they have in Europe, where members of the unions actually sit on boards and become part of the decision process.

All this was very interesting and to a certain extent plausible, though Lind's defense of the folks behind the Charlottesville demonstration did undercut my trust in some of his other points.

In sum, still not quite the book that explains in emotionally understandable terms what these folks want and why they want it.

[Umar Lee · Rating 5 out of 5]

I'll review it later in my newsletter. Too many good points to cover here. Lind also used a line I've been using for years. Affluent astro turf activists from affluent backgrounds are more akin to 19th-century Protestant missionaries than the union organizers they're cosplaying. Lind also makes points that should be familiar to city residents; the decline of unions, civil service jobs, and political machines and the rise of influential foundations, academics, and very politically connected nonprofits providing services. What Lind doesn't touch on is how much of this new neo-liberal ruling class is the result of university overproduction churning out vast numbers of grads annually with fairly useless degrees (that we are supposed to all pay for now) who cluster in cities, gentrify them, and create a power base for progressive politics. Lind alludes to this new urban gentry being akin to a new caste system with them on the top.

This is a timely read after the presidential election. In 2016, Democrats simply blamed Russia. No problems here! Perhaps books like this can educate the urban gentry on why they may not be as smart as they think they are and why their ideas have been rejected by half the population (including large segments of populations they proclaim to be the allies and saviors of).

[Daniel Vaughan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Lind’s book is a modern take on the “managerial class” identified most prominently in America by James Burnham. Lind updates that concept Ana brings it into modern America with the election of Trump. The proximity to Trump will likely date some of the takes in this as we’ve moved out of a Trump administration, but the deeper insights he has on what the managerial class is and how it’s impacting politics has longer legs. If you believe that America has things like an aristocratic class, then Lind’s book helps provide ammo. A great book with some solid arguments. I don’t know if I agree with him on things like UBI being potentially bad ideas, but his warnings are worth considering.

[Erik Buttertoast · Rating 5 out of 5]

Micheal Lind is extensively analysing the economical, cultural and political aspects of present western societies in a way that makes it a worthy contribution to one’s understanding about technocratic neoliberalism, executed by the managerial overclass that produces a destructive populist backlash.
The only way out is democratic pluralism, otherwise we will turn into a degenerative high-tech banana republic.

[Hunter Dickerson · Rating 4 out of 5]

There are some parts of this book that I feel weird and unsure about. Sometimes he states things confidently that I think warrant more justification. But as a theory of class realignment based on shared cultural ideals, univeristy-taught manners, and levels of economic alienation, its really strong and convincing

[Miles Smith · Rating 4 out of 5]

Lind is not a literary writer so at first I thought about giving this book 3 stars. But the content is really important and he perhaps makes the most compelling argument against neoliberalism and free trade that I have read. The strength of the book is that he doesn’t offer trite or thoughtless answers in the form of romanticized returns to farcical historic antecedents. His prescriptions are in fact relatively unremarkable which I think is a strength of the work.

[Cgallozzi · Rating 4 out of 5]

Listened to this book via Audible.

This book was recommended as a 'Counter Weight' to Ezra Klein's Book "Why are we Polarized" - in a review of both books by Amy Chua in the July/August edition of Foreign Affairs Magazine.

I first read Ezra Klein's Book "Why are we Polarized" - then I read Lind's book.

I enjoyed this book - it has an interesting premise - but it took a great deal to power through this book - because of the author's "attitude" - in slipping by false equivalencies by the pound to the unsuspecting reader. Proposing that George W Bush's Second Term attempt to privatize Social Security - and Obama changing the Cost of Living Allowance calculations for Social Security both amounted to equivalent actions CUTTING SOCIAL SECURITY - needs work. Others false equivalencies abound - however....

The book's main thesis relates to the 'Class War' - between the university educated elite techno management types - who populate Government, Business - and who create policies which have harmed the middle/working class - NAFTA is one example. Tax Policy is another.

The Class War is fought on three fronts - Government Policies - Economic/Business Policies and within the Country's Culture - and in all of these policies over the last 50 years have, in effect '"pissed off middle/working class people". In Lind's telling these policies were generated, implemented and did them harm - even in the cultural aspect - Lind believes the middle/class' culture is 'mocked and disrespected' by these elites and is justifiably angry.

The 2016 election seems to indicate that there was and is a great deal of anger in the U.S. - and a sense by some of "being left behind"....

Leaving aside the absolute precision and correctness of Lind's thesis - his analysis and proposed solution is worthy of a read/listen. He proposes a system of TriPartite Power Sharing.

Federal Government - All Senate and House Committees - deeply engage citizen committees who have significant middle/working class representation. Imagine if tax policy and trade policy proposals had a review by this audience?

Local Government - he proposes something similar TriPartite committees engaging with Town Committee's to review proposals with these committees having significant working/middle class representation.

Business - He proposes Boards of Directors to include representation from the workers communities.

Culture - He has a similar proposal for entertainment companies, publishers and etc. - so as to represent the cultural models favored by the working/middle class constituents.

These are interesting proposals - however this is about 'Power Sharing' - I'm not sure this type of 'Power Sharing' can be mandated - additionally how would this work? In an company in an industry with a low growth rate and or declining market - the business person's viewpoint would be to exit the industry/change the place of production/supply chains - while the labor model would be to keep the existing jobs as they are - which might not have a market justification in the long term. How would these factions reconcile? Would these factions reconcile? Does this just "shift the problem?"

Bottom Line - an interesting analysis and proposal - partially offset by some stilted blather and very false equivalencies.

Would be of interest to those who read about world wide contemporary issues. The Democratic Presidential Candidate "Mayor Pete" has indicated that...."The Day Donald Trump ends his Presidency- Americans will be (even) more divided than they are now." I believe this to be true. I also believe there are no documented models concerning how Americans could 'reconcile' with one another. I view Lind's book as one analysis and one proposed solution to address the history and condition of a numerically significant constituency.

If not Lind's approach and proposals - where is a reconciliation model for the Country?

Carl Gallozzi
cgallozzi@Comcast.net

[Ietrio · Rating 1 out of 5]

Lind is one of those who think democracy is whatever he wants, and democracy fails whenever his whims are not satisfied.

[Daniel · Rating 2 out of 5]

Michael Lind
The New Class War: Saving Democracy from the Managerial Elite
Portfolio
224 pages
5.1

[Sylvester Snowshoe · Rating 4 out of 5]

Michael Lind’s The New Class War is an ideological continuation of Lind’s “The Next American Nation” and is a hard-hitting and intellectually coherent critique of the collapse of democratic governance in the West since the mid-20th century. Written with clarity and urgency, it delivers a sweeping yet grounded analysis of how working-class power has been systematically dismantled; economically, politically, and culturally by a credentialed managerial elite. This is not a nostalgic lament for the past, but a strategic manifesto calling for the reconstruction of democratic pluralism from the bottom up.

At the core of Lind’s argument is the contention that the post-WWII settlement between working-class institutions (unions, civic organizations, religious communities) and national elites has been undone. In its place, technocratic neoliberalism emerged, not by conspiracy, but by the cumulative effect of elite-driven reforms that eroded mass institutions. The result has been a massive power shift: away from ordinary citizens and toward an overclass of university-credentialed professionals in government, business, media, and NGOs.

Lind traces this erosion across three domains:

Economically, the shift from national production to global labor arbitrage has decimated wage bargaining, job security, and domestic prosperity. Corporate profits now rely on exploiting low-wage labor abroad and suppressing wages at home, aided by offshoring, tax avoidance, and mass immigration strategies. Instead of investing in the productivity of American workers, firms have pursued profit through mobility, leaving workers behind.

Politically, Lind shows how mass political parties, once vehicles for working-class representation, have atrophied. Their collapse has left space for billionaire populists and technocratic governance by courts, regulators, and NGOs. This technocracy is insulated from democratic input, often shaping policy through elite consensus rather than public deliberation. The shift from parliaments to judiciaries, and from grassroots parties to media-driven personalities, reflects the hollowing out of democratic pluralism.

Culturally, the transfer of civic influence from churches, unions, and membership associations to think tanks, foundations, and academia has replaced participatory democracy with managerial paternalism. Instead of governing with the people, elites now govern for them, often with contempt or detachment from the everyday realities of working-class life. The rich tapestry of American civic life has been reduced to curated nonprofit networks and professional activism.

Lind is unsparing in his critique of liberal reformism. Redistribution, education, and antimonopoly efforts are, in his view, “palliative” measures, treating symptoms while leaving the core power imbalances intact. These policies win elite approval precisely because they do not threaten elite rule.

But the book does not descend totally into despair. Lind’s solution is a revival of democratic pluralism: tripartite bargaining between labor, business, and government; the rebuilding of mass membership institutions; and a national economic policy grounded in democratic nationalism. He supports labor rights, economic sovereignty, and cultural pluralism rooted in shared civic identity, not in nostalgia or exclusion.

On immigration, Lind adopts a realist position. He calls for limiting low-wage immigration, abolishing guest worker programs that resemble indentured servitude, and ensuring that immigrants receive equal rights if admitted. His framework isn’t driven by xenophobia but by a defense of labor solidarity, social trust, and political coherence in a democratic society.

Ultimately, The New Class War is more than a policy critique, it’s a sobering warning. Without restoring countervailing institutions that allow ordinary citizens to check elite power, Lind warns that populist rage will only intensify, potentially leading to authoritarian outcomes. The choice, he implies, is not between technocracy and chaos, but between rebuilding pluralism or watching democracy rot from within.

Whether you agree with every recommendation or not, Lind’s thesis is impossible to ignore. In an age of political polarization and economic disillusionment, The New Class War offers one of the clearest roadmaps for democratic renewal grounded in solidarity, sovereignty, and shared power.

Top Quotes

“Demagogic populism is a symptom. Technocratic neoliberalism is the disease. Democratic pluralism is the cure.”

“Today's Western managerial elites often pretend to be `citizens of the world,’ and signal their virtue by disdaining the democratic nation-state as parochial or anachronistic. But most are deeply rooted in their home countries.”

“The new class war is not a global class war. It consists of struggles in particular Western nations among local over-classes and local working classes, struggles that happen to be taking place in many nations at the same time.”

“The social liberalism of these high-end service meccas cannot disguise their extreme inequality.”

“Partisan geographic differences tend to be proxies for class conflicts, with the interests of hub city overclasses and heartland working classes colliding when it comes to environmental policies, trade, immigration, and values.”

“The fortunes of many San Francisco tech executives depend on legions of underpaid factory workers in China and other countries, on energy hungry server farms located in remote rural areas, and on massive communications and transportation infrastructures stretching over vast distances among cities and nations and maintained by blue-collar workers.”

“Members of the mostly white overclass elite in the US often personally benefit from lax enforcement of immigration laws.”

“Unfortunately, under the logic of asymmetrical multiculturalism, appreciation of minority and immigrant traditions is often coupled with elite contempt for the ancestral traditions of white native and white immigrant subcultures, which are alleged by overclass intellectuals to be hopelessly tainted by white supremacy or colonialism.”

“Needless to say, the double standard of Western establishments when it comes to sentiments of ancestral pride provides recruits for racial and cultural nativism and demagogic populism.”

“The move away from regulation and the weakening of organized labor at home helped to boost corporate profit margins. So did global arbitrage the strategy of taking advantage of differences in wages, regulations, or taxes among different political jurisdictions in the world or among states or provinces in a federal nation-state.”

“Whatever its minor benefits, legislation by treaty represents a massive transfer of power from democratic legislatures to corporate managers and bankers.”

“The economist David Autor and several coauthors have shown that `the China shock’ the flood of Chinese imports into the US following China's entry into the WTO-did far more damage to US manufacturing employment than the previous consensus had held, destroying 2 million to 2.4 million net jobs in manufacturing and manufacturing-related industries between 1999 and 2011 and contributing to the employment sag in the US in that period.”

"The proprietor of stock is properly a citizen of the world, and is not necessarily attached to any particular country.”

“Many of the institutions important to citizens in democracies are subtly altered or delegitimated in a society in which communal interests must be justified exclusively in terms of this or that individual right.”

“Reliance on courts instead of legislatures to shape public policy has shifted power from working-class voters to over-class judges.”

“Government by judiciary tends to be a dictatorship of overclass libertarians in robes.”

“Again and again, because of their lack of wealth, power, and cultural influence, the populists have lost, becoming more alienated and more resentful.”

“In the United States and similar Western democracies there are two political spectrums, one for the college-educated managerial-professional overclass minority and one for the non-college-educated working-class majority of all races. Each of these class-based political spectrums has its own `right,’ its own `left,’ and its own `center.’ The overclass political spectrum is bounded on the right by extreme free market libertarianism of the kind associated with the economist Milton Friedman and promoted by the Koch brothers and the Cato Institute in the US. The elite political spectrum is bounded on the left by moderate, market-friendly neoliberalism of the kind associated with the Clintons and Obama in the US, Blair and Brown in the UK, and Schröder in Germany. The center of the elite political spectrum is occupied by moderate business-class
conservatives like the Bush dynasty in the US.”

“The Democratic Party in the US is now a party of the affluent native white metropolitan elite, allied with immigrants and native minorities brought together by noneconomic identity politics rather than by class politics.”

“The exclusion of the views of large numbers of voters from any representation in public policy or debate has created openings in politics that demagogic populists have sought to fill.”

“Where populists have succeeded in Western countries, they have done so because they have opportunistically championed legitimate positions that are shared by many voters but excluded from the narrow neoliberal overclass political spectrum.”

“The startling adoption by the American center-left since the 1990s of support for high levels of unskilled immigration, a position historically associated with right-wing libertarians and business lobbies, is partly opportunistic, based on the hope that immigrant voters and their descendants can make possible permanent one-party Democratic control of the US government.”

“Popular constituencies include many workers in manufacturing districts hit hard by foreign competition, including China's subsidized `social dumping,’ and others who view immigrants as competitors for jobs, public services, or status.”

“Many populist voters until recently voted for prolabor, center-left parties like the Democrats in the US, Labour in the UK, and the Social Democrats in Germany, before leftism and progressivism were redefined to mean a combination of open-borders globalism, antinationalism, and radical race and gender-based identity politics.”

“The weakness of populism is that it is literally reactionary. Populists react against what the dominant overclass establishment does, rather than having a positive and constructive agenda of their own.”

“From the perspective of democratic pluralism, technocratic neoliberalism and demagogic populism represent different highways to the hell of autocracy. According to technocratic neoliberalism, an elite of experts insulated from mass prejudice and ignorance can best promote the public interest. According to populism, a single Caesarist or Bonapartist figure with a mystical, personal connection to the masses can represent the people as a whole.”

“Pluralists see them as antibodies protecting the culture of democracy from infection.”

“Populism is a symptom of a sick body politic, not a cure.”

“When a society is trapped in a vicious circle in which selfish oligarchs alternate with populist hucksters, economic growth and the rule of law are all likely to be casualties.”

“But a world of decaying democracies dominated by oligarchic factions, in which alienated mobs now and then use elections as an excuse to demonstrate inchoate rage, is dystopian enough.”

“The appropriation of terms from psychology to discredit political opponents is part of the modern therapeutic culture.”

“The purpose of describing political adversaries as `phobes’ is to medicalize politics and treat differing viewpoints as evidence of mental and emotional disorders.”

“My purpose is not to defend populist demagogy, which can be harmful and destructive without being totalitarian or traitorous. Contemporary populism is a kind of convulsive autoimmune response by the body politic to the chronic degenerative disease of oligarchy.”

“If redistribution of income or assets were not accompanied by redistribution of power, the feelings of powerlessness that drive much working-class anger would remain.”

“For working-class Americans and Europeans, the jobs of the future are mostly low-wage jobs, many of them in health care. In most of these jobs, the low wages are caused not by a lack of university education, which is not needed, nor by a lack of vocational skills, but by a lack of bargaining power on the part of workers.”

“Just as a UBI cannot work without stringent and strictly enforced limits on immigration, so a neo-Brandeisian antimonopoly policy cannot work except in a much more protectionist and autarkic US economy, which could only be created by measures that cosmopolitan, open-borders progressives, like their newfound libertarian allies in matters of trade and immigration, would be sure to denounce as xenophobic, racist, and nativist.”

“Like homeopathic medicine, all of these alleged cures treat the ills of the market with doses of more market.”

“What the racially and religiously diverse working-class majorities in the Western nations need is what they once possessed and no longer have: countervailing power.”

“No longer restrained by working-class power, the metropolitan overclass within Western democracies has run amok, provoking a belated populist rebellion from below that has been exploited, often with disastrous results, by demagogues, many of them opportunists from elite backgrounds, like Donald Trump and Boris Johnson.”

“While institutionalized pluralism benefits society as a whole, it is particularly important for members of the working-class majority. Because they lack money and status, working-class people have only one source of power: their numbers. They can affect politics only through disciplined mass organizations answerable to them, of which the most important in the past have been mass-membership parties, trade unions, and churches.”

“The restoration of working-class power on both sides of the Atlantic requires the establishment of membership institutions.”

“In the mid-twentieth-century West, once the whistle blew, the proletarian could leave the factory gate for the safety of a world that excluded the bosses, a world of working-class neighborhoods, churches, clubs, and taverns. Under technocratic neoliberalism, however, the boss class pursues the working class after the workday has ended.”

“In order to discourage overclass moral imperialism from provoking popular backlashes that can be exploited by populist false messiahs, the modus vivendi in a democratic pluralist society must guarantee coexistence among different creeds and subcultures.”

“Restoring the countervailing power of the multiracial, religiously diverse working-class majorities in Western democracies means defying familiar categories of right and left.”

“Like their working-class constituents, contemporary membership-based movements would mix sentimental patriotism with economic egalitarianism and religious communalism with support for social insurance entitlements and free public goods. They would probably combine crude demotic speech and civic rhetoric in ways quite alien to managerial-class conservatives, centrists, and progressives alike. In the best sense, they would be vulgar.”

“For democratic pluralists, the state usually a nation-state, but sometimes a multinational state or independent city-state is not a mass of individuals to whom a general will can be attributed, but a community made up of smaller communities.”

“Global integration should be sacrificed to the need to preserve and strengthen the peace treaty among the classes at home.”

“The neoliberal argument that governments must not interfere in globalization, and can therefore only compensate the losers or help them to adapt, must be rejected.”

“Selective globalization. They should adopt strategic trade policies and selective immigration policies in the interest of national productivity, national solidarity, and the bargaining power of citizen-workers and legal immigrants in negotiations with employers.”

“The two forms of global labor arbitrage have had their effects multiplied by weakening two institutions that reinforce the bargaining power of workers: unions and the welfare state.”

“Labor unions can be weakened or destroyed by offshoring or the threat of offshoring, or in some cases by the use of immigrants, legal or illegal, as a reserve army of labor.”

“The most fundamental labor right is the right to quit a job and find another, without needing to leave the country. For this reason, indentured servitude in the form of guest worker programs, which bind a worker to a single employer as a condition for working in a country, is a political abomination. Guest worker programs threaten all workers in the sectors in which they are permitted by allowing employers to hire bound serfs instead of workers who can respond to mistreatment or low pay by quitting. For this reason, all or most temporary guest worker programs that allow employers to hire foreign nationals as indentured servants should be abolished.”

“Rather than deny welfare-state benefits to low-wage workers, it is better not to import low-wage workers.”

“In the era that succeeds neo-liberalism, the four freedoms of neoliberalism freedom of movement for people, goods, services, and capital should be replaced by the four regulations.”

“If today's technocratic neoliberalism is succeeded in the future by a new democratic pluralism, it is likely to be in the context of renewed great-power competition. In order to compete effectively with rival powers, patriotic factions within the overclass who put long-term national solidarity and national productivity above the short-term self-interest of their class may lead to the replacement of globalist neoliberalism with a new national developmentalism.”

“Managerial elites are destined to dominate the economy and society of every modern nation. But if they are not checked, they will overreach and produce a destructive populist backlash in proportion to their excess.”

“The alternative the triumph of one class over the other, be it the overclass led by neoliberal technocrats or the working class led by populist demagogues would be calamitous. A West dominated by technocratic neoliberalism would be a high-tech caste society. A West dominated by demagogic populism would be stagnant and corrupt.”

“Only power can check power. Only a major reassertion of the political power, economic leverage, and cultural influence of national wage-earning majorities of all races, ethnicities, and creeds can stop the degeneration of the US and other Western democracies into high-tech banana republics.”

[Julian Rico · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very relevant analysis of what Lind sees as the 'new class war'; i.e. metropolitan neoliberals vs the working class. Lind seems at pains to differentiate this supposedly new class war from previous class antagonisms, even where those differences with the old class wars of the previous decades are minimal, except perhaps for the newfound enthusiasm of the neoliberal class for the issues of identity politics.

That being said, the criticism Lind makes of the collusion between the international neoliberal classes (politicians, tech gurus, financiers) to drive down the prospects of the industrial working class by undermining social cohesion, trade unionism, cultural networks and organised religion is compelling and well-argued. The analysis of how wages have been depressed due to the globalisation and outsourcing of the economy by the neoliberal class is particularly timely. Is it surprising that people voted for Trump in an attempt to reverse these trends? It serves little purpose to write off massive swaths of the population as fascists.

As Lind argues, the Democratic party has fully committed itself to being a party of the wealthy, propped up by the votes of black and other minorities.

It was refreshing to read a criticism of universal basic income, as well as a condemnation of those who prefer to shout accusations of extremism to anybody who does not agree with the new world order.

In all a very worthwhile read, though certain sections were lacking depth, while the solutions that Lind suggests (pluralism) were a little unclear - or perhaps I did not understand.

[jt · Rating 3 out of 5]

Starts out strong but sours as it goes. Becomes mostly a (partially well-argued) case for resentment against the Professional Managers who take the role of technocratic elites under neoliberalism. He's not imaginative enough re: solutions, or Where We Go From Here. Instead, Lind falls in to the trap of Time-befor-ism, where if we could only get union membership and immigration to 1940s-70s levels everything will be fine. I'd prefer a more rigorous critique, and a more thoroughgoing prophylactic.