This patronising view extends to Hispanic voters, Lind claims, noting that 29% of them voted for Trump in 2016. “If those groups vote for Republicans, they’re accused of betrayal or of suffering from false consciousness.” Therefore, measured by education, I fall into the Democrat classification; but since 1978, having turned to Christ and spending many decades of fellowship with evangelicals, I would thereby be classified as conservative, and/or Republican.

I’ve been appalled to see Republicans as much as Democrats refuse to take this seriously and call out the SEC, because obviously, they have major donors in each. Citadel’s probably the largest donor and the worst offender.Even after World War II, significant political subcultures in the United States ignored the cult of the Founding Fathers. Squabbling Marxist sectarians identified with Lenin or Trotsky or Bukharin or Luxemburg or Kautsky, not Madison or Hamilton or Jefferson. Libertarians had little use for either Jefferson’s agrarianism or Hamilton’s developmentalism and neomercantilism, and found their prophets in modern émigrés from Russia (Ayn Rand) or Austria (Ludwig von Mises and F. A. Hayek), not the early American republic. Instead, Lind insists that the bulk of popular resistance to mass immigration (and thus, support for xenophobic demagogues) is rooted in the native working class’s accurate belief that low-skill immigrants are a top-tier threat to their economic well-being. Here too, Lind declines to engage with the vast empirical literature that contradicts his premise. Researchers have looked for a negative impact on wages or employment from the mass influx of Syrian refugees into Turkey; from refugee migration to Sweden between 1999 and 2007; from refugees immigrating to Denmark in the 1980s and 1990s; from the mass migration of Russian Jews to Israel after the USSR’s collapse; and from Dust Bowl migrants dispersion to other parts of the U.S. during the Great Depression — and, in every case, found none. Meta-analyses of the literature on immigration’s labor market effects have found little to no negative consequences for native workers. There are some individual studies consistent with Lind’s view. And it’s true that native workers in discrete subsegments of the labor force can suffer a loss of bargaining power due to competition with disenfranchised migrant laborers. But Lind’s routine equation of immigration restriction with “tight labor markets” is, to use his own epithet, simpleminded. Immigration increases labor supply, but it also increases labor demand. Fiscal policy, central-bank priorities, and labor regulations do far more to determine workers’ bargaining power and living standards than immigration policy does. Made in Texas: George W. Bush and the Southern Takeover of American Politics. Basic Books. ISBN 9780465041213. [25]

They are clustered in what I call “hub cities” such as New York, San Francisco, Washington DC, London and Paris, and they tend to be born into families with at least one college-educated parent, making the “meritocracy” semi-aristocratic, though more diverse in race, religion and national origin than older Western social establishments. The culture of this transatlantic elite is secular and combines social liberalism with moderate economic libertarianism. Institutions that used to magnify the power of working-class people – trades unions, local political parties and religious congregations – have all dissolved for different reasons. By default, power has siphoned upwards in the culture, politics and the economy,” he says.JR: This relationship of culture, class and ­economic power cuts to the heart of your understanding of the causes of political realignment, which is the conflict between the working class and a professional-managerial class. How would you describe the managerial class? But I wonder if you could just describe what you think are the other cultural divides between these two classes in terms of the approach to identity politics or the approach to questions of social liberalism? Do you see huge divides over some of those fundamental questions of culture and society in relation to this class war? Will’s effort to save the right from statism brings to mind the critic Kenneth Tynan’s description of T.S. Eliot’s midcentury bid to revive verse drama, which Tynan compared to the exertions of a swimming instructor demonstrating various moves while standing in an empty pool. The call for judicially imposed anti-statism represents the desperation of elite libertarians who are beginning to lose some of their influence on the American right after having masqueraded for decades as conservatives.

As for high-achieving ethnic groups, Sowell, Amy Chua, and Joel Kotkin, among others, have demonstrated that “middle-man minorities” like European Jews, overseas Chinese, diaspora Armenians, Parsees, Phanariot Greeks, and others were preadapted by culture for success in modern, industrial, urban societies in which the skills and values of premodern landlords, warlords, and peasants were anachronistic. Often members of specialized diasporas have achieved more than their fellow ethnics of all classes and occupations have done in their own homelands, which suggests that their success is the result of environment and culture, not genes.This is really being driven by elite whites, not by members of minority groups necessarily. They pose as saviors and champions of victimized groups and take a highly melodramatic view of politics.” The classic petite bourgeoisie class of small business owners still exists; the full-time self-employed are about 10 per cent of the workforce in the US. But many of the successful among the self-employed are in fact consultants or contractors working for large corporations or government agencies. They can be viewed as outsourced employees of large entities, even if in their own flattering estimation they are sturdy yeomen. Lind makes routine contributions to American Affairs, a journal of the nationalist right, and American Compass, a putatively pro-worker conservative think tank that champions collective bargaining and industrial policy. The fullest expression of Lind’s current worldview can be found in his 2017 book, The New Class War, in which he argues that the ascent of the populist right in the U.S. and Europe is a symptom of the de facto disenfranchisement of the Western working class during the neoliberal era.

Not only are progressives a minority of American voters, they are also a minority of Democratic voters. According to Pew, in 2020 only 47% of Democrats described themselves as “liberal” or “very liberal”. The majority of Democrats are “moderate” (45%) or “conservative” (14%). Brazil’s President Jair Bolsonaro and his US counterpart, Donald Trump, are both symptoms of an out-of-touch metropolitan class, Lind argues. Photograph: Kevin Lamarque/ReutersAn American Manifesto for a Desirable Future" (review of Lind, Michael, The Next American Nation: The New Nationalism and the Fourth American Revolution). Bernstein, Richard, The New York Times, July 5, 1995.