With the seeming deconstruction of the Biden Administration proceeding at a rapid clip, many on the right hope for an end to the conscious stoking of class resentments that has characterized progressive politics. Yet despite the political meltdown, America’s class divides have become so wide, and so bitter, that Biden’s presidency may prove more a prelude than a denouement for the future of class warfare.
Some horrified conservatives dismiss California as the progressive dystopia, bound for bankruptcy and, let’s hope, growing irrelevance. Progressives, for their part, hail the Golden State as the avatar of a better future, the role model for a new, more environmentally friendly and socially just economic order. They often dismiss critiques as conservative misinformation.
By: Rod Arquette
On: The Daily Rundown (iheart radio)
Joel Kotkin, Professor of Urban Studies at Chapman University joins the program to discuss his recent piece for Unherd in which he questions if we have reached the end of progressive America.
“So, here’s the good news. On what sometimes seems the inexorable course towards progressive capture, we can see multiple fronts of resistance, and the early congealing of independent-minded forces, from the rational Right to the traditional liberal-left.”.
Listen to this interview:
America has only a limited feudal past, the plantation aristocracy of the antebellum South and the enormous class chasms of the Gilded Age being pretty much our only examples. Yet today—after decades of social mobility, a digital revolution that was supposed to empower individuals everywhere, and the construction of a vigorous anti-discrimination apparatus that putatively ensures equal rights and status—a rigid new social order with feudal elements has come into view.
This emerging class structure reprises, albeit with far less starvation, the patterns of the Middle Ages, with each class performing distinct social functions and defined economic roles. In this new order, there are two ascendant classes: the oligarchs and the clerisy. And there are two classes struggling to serve the ascendant classes, and to maintain for themselves a decent standard of living: the yeomanry and the new serfs.
The old feudal order evolved gradually, as the last structures of Roman republicanism first weakened, then totally collapsed due to the barbarian invasions. The seizure of Europe by the barbarian hordes upended an entire civilization, including its class structures. The collapse was due as much to the weakness of Roman institutions as to the ruthlessness of barbarian leaders. The feudalism that ensued would simplify society under the rule of two classes, the military aristocracy and the clerical class, while most people lived essentially in bondage to one or the other.
This historical precedent can help us make sense of the socioeconomic trends of America’s last half-century. Since the 1970s, the wealth differential between middle-income and upper-income households in the United States has grown. Data from the Census Bureau show that the share of national income going to the middle 60 percent of households has fallen to a record low. Wealth gains in recent decades have been made overwhelmingly by the top 1 percent of households, especially the top 0.5 percent. In 1945–73, the top 1 percent in America captured just 4.9 percent of total U.S. income growth; in the following two decades, this super-rich cohort gobbled up the majority of it. The combined wealth of the richest four hundred Americans now exceeds the total wealth of 185 million of their fellow citizens. Over the past three decades, the share of household wealth owned by the top 0.1 percent has increased from 7 percent to 22 percent.
This pattern has been accelerated by the pandemic. The number of millionaires around the world jumped to 56.1 million in 2021, with 5.2 million joining the group last year, according to the 2021 Credit Suisse Global Wealth Report. The number of ultra-high net worth individuals—those with a net worth above $50 million—grew by 24 percent, to 215,030. Last year, Amazon tripled its profits and Jeff Bezos made $70 billion; billionaires overall have earned more than $1 trillion since March. Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Microsoft now make up 20 percent of the American stock market’s total value. As one Silicon Valley wag put it, America increasingly resembles “feudalism with better marketing.”
The similarities are not just material. In the Middle Ages, the aristocracy shared common views. Kings and chieftains fought over land and gold, but rarely (until the Reformation) ideas and truths. The ideals of a pluralistic society wouldn’t have meant anything to them, nor would John Stuart Mill’s marketplace of ideas. Now, after two centuries of an Enlightenment-influenced public square hot with dissent and debate, we observe the emergence of a singular mindset among the academy and the media—today’s clerisy—and the oligarchic elite. In the past, political views, religious beliefs, and special interests divided the elite and forced different factions to persuade and cajole and convince the masses of their respective sanctions. Every major city had multiple newspapers with distinct lines on current events, serving as organs for rival powers. Pro-slavery versus anti-slavery, labor versus management, Wall Street versus the farmers, interventionists versus isolationists: It’s a history of ideological conflict.
No such broad conflict exists among today’s nobility. They are unified in their progressive outlook on all things social and cultural. In the Middle Ages, the aristocracy often found allies among the Catholic clergy, who were willing to back the great landowners’ laws and swords with doctrines and rationales. There is a twenty-first-century clerisy, though it is rarely religious and operates in a secular consumer society. Its members aren’t priests. They are journalists, entertainers, credentialed professionals, and teachers. They provide the images, narratives, arguments, and artworks that reinforce the binding outlook, and they police dissenters as vigilantly as did the Inquisitors of old (though fortunately, so far, less lethally).
As society becomes more regulated and more dependent on expertise, the clerisy grows. Michael Lind estimates that this “overclass” constitutes some 15 percent of the American workforce, a far larger portion than the membership of the old First Estate (closer to 1 percent of the French population). Charles Murray describes them more narrowly as the top echelons in law, government, university, and media—roughly 2.4 million people in a country of more than 320 million.
Until the last four decades, the yeoman class—James Madison’s small proprietors—were America’s ascendant socioeconomic group. A study covering the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, and the United States shows that all three saw a rapid decline in the concentration of wealth from the 1820s through the 1970s. Never before had so much prosperity and relative security been so widely enjoyed.
Now, the numbers and influence of the yeomanry are declining. They still represent close to 50 percent of the population, notes Pew—a drop from 61 percent in 1971. Globalization has savaged many middle-class jobs, whether in factories or in services, transferring employment to China, India, and other developing countries. In many countries, immigration, much of it from poor countries, has undermined wage rates, particularly for lower-skilled workers, but now for professionals as well. Much of the global middle class is heavily in debt, mainly because of high housing costs.
In the United States, long known as the land of opportunity, the chance of middle-class earners’ moving to the top rungs of the earnings ladder has dropped by approximately 20 percent since the early 1980s. The pandemic has been particularly hard on this class. Though large chains have reported record sales during the lockdowns, more than 160,000 small businesses have closed. A survey by the advocacy group Main Street America predicts that as many as 7.5 million small businesses will go out of business by the time the crisis is over. By some estimates, upwards of one-third of small businesses will close down permanently.
The fall of the yeomanry poses a major threat to representative democracy. Once again, history provides a precedent. In Imperial Rome, small farmers and artisans were steadily displaced by slaves imported from the far ends of the expanding empire. Increasingly, occupations and social status came to be determined by heredity. By the end of the Republic, more than 75 percent of all property was owned by roughly 3 percent of the population, while more than four-fifths owned no property at all. Inequality paved the way for the feudal future.
The great social achievement of the mid- to late twentieth century lay in the movement of working-class, propertyless people, including minorities, into the ranks of business owners and homeowners. Today the flow runs in the opposite direction, as prospects for joining the middle class have declined and opportunities for advancement have dried up for everyone outside the professional and elite capitalist classes.
Working-class people, of whatever race, suffer the worst health-related impacts and have paid the most in lives during the pandemic. The same holds economically. In the U.S., roughly half of all job losses last April were in such low-paying fields as restaurants, hotels, and amusement parks; information and finance jobs were barely touched. Almost 40 percent of Americans making less than $40,000 a year lost their jobs in the pandemic, as the wage gains made during the first two years of the Trump Administration have largely evaporated.
Read the rest of this piece at First Things.
Joel Kotkin is the author of The Coming of Neo-Feudalism: A Warning to the Global Middle Class. He is the Roger Hobbs Presidential Fellow in Urban Futures at Chapman University and Executive Director for Urban Reform Institute. Learn more at joelkotkin.com and follow him on Twitter @joelkotkin.
Homepage photo: ILO Asia-Pacific Flickr under CC 3.0 License.
Throughout history, work has been the common lot of humanity—at least, outside of the idle rich and those who could not find any. It was celebrated by the Calvinist capitalists described in Weber’s The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism as a means for people to achieve their “own salvation.” Labor for its own sake was embraced by the Marxist canon as well—work, wrote Friedrich Engels, “is the prime basic condition for all human existence, and this to such an extent that, in a sense, we have to say that labor created man himself.”
If a man doesn’t have a job or an income, he has neither life nor liberty nor the possibility for the pursuit of happiness. He merely exists.
~Martin Luther King, Jr. (1968)
Yet today’s baffling shortage of workers in high-income countries may presage something different: a post-work society, in which only a select few labor. For most, economic maintenance would come from some form of universal basic income (UBI). This notion has been tried as part of the COVID-19 relief program and in President Biden’s proposed Build Back Better initiative, which allows benefits for those who could join the workforce but don’t care to.
This idea is arising at a propitious time. A strong majority of people in 28 countries around the world, according to a recent Edelman survey, believe that capitalism does more harm than good. More than four-in-five worry about job loss, particularly from automation. Rising inequality and general fear of downward mobility have boosted support for expanded government and greater re-distribution of wealth.
As early as 1995, author Jeremy Rifkin suggested that automation would eliminate work for most and create the basis for a society where “large numbers of people could be liberated from long hours in the formal marketplace.” This would allow them to focus on “leisure activities,” a kind of technological utopia for the masses.
It’s a compelling vision in some ways, but right now it looks dystopic. The ranks of what Marx called the “reserve army of the unemployed” are simply disengaging. A decade ago, Gallup’s Jim Clifton wrote about The Coming Jobs War, in which he predicted a global struggle for diminishing employment. Now there is plenty of work but people are not interested. In the US, labor participation rates have fallen from 80 percent in 1950 to 61 percent now, down from 64.4 percent in 2010. Nearly one-third of American working-age males are not in the labor force, suffering high rates of incarceration, or drug, alcohol, and other health issues.
And, to be sure, opportunities may be further reduced by technology, which could accelerate the loss of many kinds of jobs that once provided a means of upward mobility: postal workers, switchboard operators, machinists, computer operators, bank tellers, travel agents. For the 90 million Americans who work in such jobs—and their counterparts elsewhere—the future could be bleak. By 2030, Oxford Economics predicts that 20 million factory jobs worldwide will fall to automation—1.5 million in the US, 2.5 million in the EU, and 12.5 million in China.
The pandemic clearly accelerated this process, notably in the service sector. With the shift to online and takeout food, chains like McDonald’s are perfecting electronic delivery systems that reduce the need for human labor. Large capital investments are necessary for such adaptations, which—as France’s Thomas Piketty has noted—favors larger corporations as opposed to smaller family businesses.
A plausible future scenario is a society in which a small, hyper-productive technical and managerial elite delivers food, housing, and pleasure to the plebes, like those in the later centuries of the Roman Empire. Their only role in society would be to take and not threaten the imperial state—a system that only worked due to the presence of slaves and huge territories to pillage.
Read the rest of this piece at Quillete.
Joel Kotkin is the author of The Coming of Neo-Feudalism: A Warning to the Global Middle Class. He is the Roger Hobbs Presidential Fellow in Urban Futures at Chapman University and Executive Director for Urban Reform Institute. Learn more at joelkotkin.com and follow him on Twitter @joelkotkin.
Homepage photo: Henry & Co. via Unsplash.
By: Steven Edginton
On: The Telegraph
“An unholy alliance between big tech and woke is destroying the middle class”.
With wealth inequality soaring and the power of the elites growing, is society returning to the feudal era? The demographer and geographer Joel Kotkin joins Steven Edginton to discuss his theory of “neo-feudalism”.
Listen to the interview on Spotify
Watch this interview:
Like its global predecessors, the COP26 Glasgow conference will usher in a new wave of apocalyptic warnings about climate change. It will also likely prove no more successful, in terms of actually addressing the issue, than its predecessors, particularly as China, India and other developing countries ramp up their emissions.
Nevertheless, none of this will force the climate activists to reconsider how the current strategies against global warming could break the backs of the already beleaguered working and middle class. (For British readers, I use the phrase ‘middle class’ here in the American – less bourgeois – sense.) The climate chorus of celebrities, oligarchs and royals may feel virtuous, but for most people the future could prove to be propertyless proletarianisation. Many of those in Glasgow at the moment pray at the altar of ‘de-growth’. They want to limit the consumption of the working and middle classes, undermine their jobs, raise their energy bills, and inhibit their ability to buy property or travel.
These policies are fine with ‘woke’ corporatists like BlackRock, who see enormous profits in the regulated shift in energy, even as they seek to expand their business with the world’s dominant polluter, China. What’s missing is any focus on how to cut emissions without causing high inflation, raising energy prices and destroying the middle class. So far, more palatable options, like increasing remote work, geothermal energy, natural gas, nuclear power and varied new technologies, have not managed to get on to the agenda.
With climate, as with many other issues, the upper classes are inflicting their own preferences on working- and middle-class people. As nonprofits, oligarchs and bureaucrats plot out the future, small business owners and the middle class, as one entrepreneur put it, are ‘not at the table – or even in the room’. This is the very class – what I refer to as the yeomanry – that has driven much of the West’s economic progress and nurtured self-government. Democracy was born when both Athens and later Rome included small property owners in governance. Democracy died when these small owners lost power to what Aristotle labelled the ‘oligarchia’.
After the autocratic Middle Ages, both human progress and self-rule came back as the middle classes began to rise – first in Italy but then more profoundly, and more pervasively, in the Netherlands and the British Isles, before spreading to North America and Oceania, where there was no true hereditary aristocracy. Students of classical experience, such as Thomas Jefferson, James Madison and John Adams, all considered the over-concentration of property in a few hands as a basic threat to republican institutions, an insight shared by such intellects as Edmund Burke, Alexis de Tocqueville and Adam Smith.
After the brutalities of the early Industrial Revolution, and two world wars, the middle class thrived not just in America, but also in Britain, Australia, Canada and increasingly in East Asia. But by the 1970s we began what has become an inexorable march towards an ever more feudalistic structure. The Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development has noted that, across the 36 wealthier countries, the uber-wealthy have taken an ever greater share of national GDP in recent decades, while the middle class ‘looks increasingly like a boat in rocky waters’.
These patterns are clearly evident in the United States, where wealth gains have been especially concentrated among the top 0.1 per cent. The share of national wealth held by those below the top 10 per cent has fallen since the 1980s by 12 percentage points, the same proportion that the top 0.1 per cent have gained. Today, roughly half of all Americans earn less than $35,000 annually, living essentially pay cheque to pay cheque.
Even with their robust social-welfare provisions, over two thirds of European Union countries, including Sweden, have experienced declining social mobility. Germany is significantly less equal than its EU peers, with richer households controlling a bigger share of assets than in most other Western European states. The bottom 40 per cent of German adults hold almost no assets at all; barely 45 per cent of Germans own homes. Even in theoretically socialist China the top one per cent of the population hold about one third of the country’s wealth. Meanwhile, the prospects for the Chinese middle class are fading, particularly in light of the recent debt and housing crisis.
Read the rest of this piece at Spiked.
Joel Kotkin is the author of The Coming of Neo-Feudalism: A Warning to the Global Middle Class. He is the Roger Hobbs Presidential Fellow in Urban Futures at Chapman University and Executive Director for Urban Reform Institute. Learn more at joelkotkin.com and follow him on Twitter @joelkotkin.
Photo: Paul Farmer, via Geograph.org.uk, CC 2.0 License.
What started as a lark, then became an impossible dream—a conservative resurgence, starting in California—ended, like many past efforts, in electoral defeat. With his overwhelming victory in the recall election, California governor Gavin Newsom and his backers have consolidated their hold on the state for the foreseeable future.
The very idea of a recall vote seemed absurd at first in California, this bluest of US states. Yet Californians’ surprisingly strong support for the removal of Democratic governor Gavin Newsom has resulted in precisely that, with the vote scheduled for 14 September. This reflects a stunning rejection of modern progressivism in a state thought to epitomise its promise.
Some, like the University of California’s Laura Tyson and former Newsom adviser Lenny Mendonca, may see California as creating ‘the way forward’ for a more enlightened ‘market capitalism’, but that reality is hard to see on the ground. Even before the pandemic, California already had the highest poverty rate and the widest gap between middle and upper-middle income earners of any state in the US. It now suffers from the second-highest unemployment rate in the US after Nevada.
Today, class drives Californian politics, and Newsom is peculiarly ill-suited to deal with it. He is financed by what the Los Angeles Times describes as ‘a coterie of San Francisco’s wealthiest families’. Newsom’s backers have aided his business ventures and helped him live in luxury – first in his native Marin, where he just sold his estate for over $6million, and now in Sacramento.
California’s well-connected rich are predictably rallying to Newsom’s side. At least 19 billionaires, mainly from the tech sector, have contributed to his extraordinarily well-funded recall campaign, which is outspending the opposition by roughly nine to one.
There is little hiding the elitism that Newsom epitomises. In the midst of a severe lockdown, he was caught violating his own pandemic orders at the ultra-expensive, ultra-chic French Laundry restaurant in Napa.
Newsom insists California is ‘doing pretty damn well’, citing record profits in Silicon Valley from both the major tech firms and a host of IPOs. He seems to be unaware that California’s middle- and working-class incomes have been heading downwards for a decade, while only the top five per cent of taxpayers have done well. As one progressive Democratic activist put it in Salon, the recall reflects a rebellion against ‘corporate-friendly elitism and tone-deaf egotism at the top of the California Democratic Party’.
Much of this can be traced back to regulatory policies tied to climate change (along with high taxes). These policies have driven out major companies – in energy, home construction, manufacturing and civil engineering – that traditionally employed middle-skilled workers. Instead, job growth has been concentrated in generally low-pay sectors, like hospitality. Over the past decade, 80 per cent of Californian jobs, notes one academic, have paid under the median wage. Half of these paid less than $40,000.
Read the rest of this piece at Spiked.
Joel Kotkin is the author of The Coming of Neo-Feudalism: A Warning to the Global Middle Class. He is the Presidential Fellow in Urban Futures at Chapman University and Executive Director for Urban Reform Institute. Learn more at joelkotkin.com and follow him on Twitter @joelkotkin.
In America and across the globe, COVID-19 is diminishing people’s prospects, exacerbating inequality and creating ever-more feudal societies as the pandemic ravages the health and the pocketbooks of the poor and the poorly educated.
Globally developing countries are suffering from what The Nation describes as “a gargantuan north-south vaccination gap” between developing countries where fewer than 10 percent of people have been vaccinated compared to around 70 percent in Western Europe, Israel, Canada and US. And within affluent countries, there’s nearly as wide a gap between well-off and well-educated populations, and rural and urban backwaters still suffering from “a pandemic of the unvaccinated.”
In the long history of pestilence and plague, French historian Fernand Braudel noted, there was always a “separate demography for the rich”. As today, the affluent tended to eat better and could often escape the worst exposure to pestilence by retreating to country estates, while the poor have been left to fend for themselves as “victims of the urban graveyard effect” that’s persisted since the fall of Rome.
Despite attempts in the media to deny or downplay the links between density and disease, COVID death and infection rates remain worse in dense urban counties where poorer residents often have to navigate insufficiently ventilated enclosed spaces that their more affluent and mobile counterparts have been mostly able to avoid.
Generally speaking, educated and affluent city and suburban dwellers recovered their incomes within the first year of the pandemic, even as millions of Americans have fallen into poverty or are on the verge of destitution, and the federal moratorium on evictions is about to expire. Overall, upper-income workers recovered completely while lower-wage workers suffered major income declines.
As of May, employment for those making $60,000 a year or more is up by 7.4 percent since the pandemic began, while employment for those making $27,000 a year of less has plunged by 21 percent, according to tracktherecovery.org. The drop in low-wage employment has been even steeper in affluent areas, like Manhattan, as the high-wage workers who had clustered there are now dispersed while working remotely and buying services in their new locales.
This trend could accelerate if new pandemics emerge in the near future, as many fear they will. But for now, at least for developed countries, vaccinations offer a way out. Since January, COVID-19 has dropped from the leading cause of death in America to the seventh leading cause. But even here, the widely varied inoculation rates suggest future social problems, particularly as COVID-19 is becoming “hyper-regionalized” in communities with both low vaccination and low immunity rates, according to former FDA commissioner Dr. Scott Gottlieb.
These come primarily in two very different, but historically impoverished and poorly educated populations: rural America, where the national media has mocked the people getting sick as Trumpist rubes, and inner-city America.
Read the rest of this piece at Daily Beast.
Joel Kotkin is the author of The Coming of Neo-Feudalism: A Warning to the Global Middle Class. He is the Presidential Fellow in Urban Futures at Chapman University and Executive Director for Urban Reform Institute. Learn more at joelkotkin.com and follow him on Twitter @joelkotkin.
Homepage photo: MCJ1800, via Wikimedia under CC 4.0 License. Composite, R. Howard.
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