The New Class War

1. The West is Engaged in a New Class War.

All three realms of Western society today are fronts in the new class war.

A profound shift. Europe and North America are experiencing a revolutionary wave of political protest, signaling a new class war that has replaced the old left-right spectrum with a dichotomy between "insiders and outsiders." This conflict is not merely about immediate issues like immigration or trade, but fundamentally about power—social power in government, the economy, and culture. The dominant ideologies of the West fail to explain this because they pretend that enduring social classes no longer exist in supposedly meritocratic societies.

The managerial overclass. This new class war pits a college-educated minority of managers and professionals, termed the "overclass," against the non-college-educated working-class majority. This overclass, which has succeeded old-fashioned bourgeois capitalists, now dominates corporations, government, media, and education. They are largely a semi-hereditary elite, with studies showing low intergenerational mobility, meaning that access to higher education and elite positions is often inherited rather than purely meritocratic.

Hubs vs. Heartlands. This class divide manifests geographically as a clash between high-density "hubs" and low-density "heartlands." Hubs, home to the overclass, specialize in high-end business, professional, and luxury services, often relying on low-wage immigrant labor. Heartlands, where the working class resides, focus on goods production and mass services. Their differing interests on issues like environmental policy, trade, and immigration reflect conflicting values and lifestyles, making the hub-heartland divide a proxy for class conflict.

2. Post-War Democratic Pluralism Ended the First Class War.

In one Western country after another, the need to mobilize conscripts and workers for war and the fear of a return to Depression-spawned radicalism had compelled the managerial overclass reluctantly to cut “new deals” with national working classes.

War forged peace. The first class war, born from industrialization's disruption of agrarian society, saw intense conflict between industrial workers and capitalists/managers. This conflict was largely quelled during and after World War II, as the imperative of national mobilization forced Western elites to make concessions to the working classes. This led to the adoption of "democratic pluralism," a system designed to end class conflict and ensure social peace.

Democratic pluralism's pillars. This post-war system, exemplified by America's New Deal, Germany's Adenauer era, and Britain's Churchill era, was characterized by:

• Tripartite bargaining: Power brokers representing working-class and rural constituencies (trade unions, farm associations, church leaders) negotiated with national elites in government, economy, and culture.
• Mass prosperity: Societies enjoyed mass prosperity and reduced inequality.
• Institutionalized negotiations: Class conflict was channeled into structured bargaining, preventing widespread unrest.

Checks and balances. Democratic pluralism was an alternative to both free-market liberalism and state socialism, emphasizing a society composed of many legitimate communities, each with its own institutions and representatives. This system ensured that no single group, including the managerial elite, could achieve total dominance, fostering a state of tension that preserved freedom and prevented class domination.

3. A Neoliberal Revolution from Above Dismantled Class Peace.

Between the 1960s and the present, as declining fear of great-power conflict gradually reduced the incentives of Western elites to make concessions to Western working classes, the postwar system has been dismantled in a revolution from above that has promoted the material interests and intangible values of the college-educated minority of managers and professionals, who have succeeded old-fashioned bourgeois capitalists as the dominant elite.

Elite-driven dismantling. The class peace established after World War II was a temporary armistice. From the 1960s onward, the managerial overclass, no longer constrained by the fear of great-power conflict or depression-era radicalism, systematically dismantled democratic pluralism. This "revolution from above" promoted the material interests and cultural values of the college-educated elite, replacing the old system with "technocratic neoliberalism."

Economic restructuring. In the economic realm, this revolution involved:

• Deunionization and deregulation: Weakening labor unions and removing market regulations, often justified as promoting efficiency.
• Global labor arbitrage: Offshoring production to low-wage countries or importing low-wage immigrant workers to suppress domestic wages and weaken unions.
• Tax and regulatory arbitrage: Firms exploiting differences in tax rates and regulations across jurisdictions to boost profits without increasing productivity.

Political and cultural shifts. In politics, mass-membership parties gave way to donor- and media-consultant-controlled parties, while democratic national legislatures lost power to executive agencies, courts, and transnational bodies like the EU. Culturally, local religious and civic watchdogs lost influence, often due to activism by elite judges and the rise of foundation-funded nonprofits, shifting civic and cultural influence upwards to the managerial elite. This created a "democratic deficit" where elite preferences superseded popular will.

4. This Revolution Sparked a Populist Counterrevolution from Below.

For the last two generations, in different decades, and in different Western countries, the occasions of populist protest have been different—the white backlash against the civil rights revolution of the 1960s, the traditionalist backlash against the sexual and censorship revolution of the 1970s, populist resistance to the Japanese import shocks of the 1980s, and then, more recently, mass immigration, globalization, deindustrialization, and the Great Recession.

Accumulated grievances. The neoliberal revolution from above, carried out by an increasingly aggressive managerial elite, inevitably provoked a "populist backlash from below." This counterrevolution, though appearing sudden with events like Brexit and Trump's election, had been smoldering for half a century, fueled by a mass of grievances ignored by mainstream politicians. These grievances stem from damage to the working class's economic bargaining power, political influence, and cultural dignity.

A coherent, ignored platform. A substantial portion of the electorate, often non-college-educated and native-born, holds a consistent set of policy preferences that are largely unrepresented by mainstream parties. These "populists" favor:

• Economic protection: Support for generous government entitlements like public pensions and healthcare, combined with opposition to high levels of unskilled immigration and national restrictions on trade.
• Cultural conservatism: Moderate cultural conservatism on social issues.
  This group, often outnumbering neoliberals and libertarians, finds its views neglected by both major parties, creating an opening for demagogic populists.

Demagogues as champions. Populist leaders like Donald Trump, Nigel Farage, and Matteo Salvini opportunistically champion these legitimate, yet ignored, concerns. They denounce neoliberal parties as corrupt and elitist, favor national restrictions on trade and immigration, and deliberately flout "politically correct" norms. While often flawed, these demagogues give voice to alienated working-class voters who feel their political systems are rigged and their interests ignored, leading to a "counterrevolution from outside and below."

5. Elites Demonize Populist Voters with "Scare" Narratives.

It is no doubt emotionally satisfying for members of the embattled managerial overclass to identify antiestablishment populism with pro-Russian treason, fascism, or both.

The "Scare" tactics. Faced with populist uprisings, the managerial overclass often resorts to demonizing populist voters and politicians rather than addressing their legitimate grievances. Two primary narratives are employed:

• The Russia Scare: Attributing populist successes (Brexit, Trump, Yellow Vests) to Russian manipulation of social media and public opinion, implying voters are gullible and easily brainwashed.
• The Brown Scare: Comparing contemporary populists and their supporters to Nazis or fascists, suggesting a latent "authoritarian personality" among working-class voters.

Contempt for voters. These narratives betray a profound contempt for populist voters, dismissing them as irrational, maladjusted, or even traitorous. The Russia Scare, despite negligible evidence of decisive impact, allows elites to absolve themselves of blame for political failures. The Brown Scare recycles discredited mid-20th-century pseudoscience, like Adorno's "Authoritarian Personality" theory, to pathologize differing viewpoints and equate ordinary patriotism with fascism.

Threat to democracy. This demonological thinking poses a greater danger to liberal democracy than populism itself. By equating disagreement with neoliberal policies to treason or fascism, elites create excuses to:

• Increase their near-monopoly of power.
• Freeze out political challengers.
• Censor dissident media.
  This risks triggering a vicious cycle of oligarchic repression and demagogic disruption, leading towards a "banana republic" rather than a genuine democracy.

6. Neoliberal Reforms Are Inadequate and Miss the Core Problem.

But sharing wealth through redistribution and symbolic gestures of respect are unlikely to end the new class war, if the small managerial overclass is not willing to share genuine power with the working-class majority.

Palliative liberalism. Some elites acknowledge populist grievances but propose "palliative" reforms that avoid questioning core neoliberal tenets. These include:

• Education and retraining: Suggesting working-class individuals lack "skills" for the "knowledge economy," despite data showing most future jobs are low-wage service roles.
• Geographic relocation: Encouraging workers to move to high-tech hubs, ignoring the impracticality and high cost of living.
• Redistribution: Proposing cash transfers like Universal Basic Income (UBI), which are often fiscally unsustainable, prone to tax arbitrage, and can incite social conflict.

False solutions. These panaceas are flawed because they:

• Misdiagnose the problem: They attribute working-class problems to personal shortcomings or market forces, not systemic power imbalances.
• Are impractical: UBI, for instance, would require massive, sustainable revenue streams and strict immigration controls to avoid becoming a welfare magnet.
• Undermine productivity: Reliance on cheap labor (offshoring, low-wage immigration) reduces incentives for domestic investment in productivity-enhancing technology.

Antimonopolism's limits. A rising anti-monopoly movement, while well-intentioned, also falls short. Breaking up large firms into smaller ones would not necessarily increase worker bargaining power, as small firms often pay poorly. Furthermore, in a globalized economy, aggressive antitrust policies could simply push production overseas, accelerating deindustrialization rather than empowering domestic workers. These reforms ultimately offer workers the chance to become something other than workers, aiming for a "workerless paradise" rather than empowering the working class itself.

7. Genuine Democracy Requires Countervailing Power for the Working Class.

Only a new democratic pluralism that compels managerial elites to share power with the multiracial, religiously pluralistic working class in the economy, politics, and the culture can end the cycle of oscillation between oppressive technocracy and destructive populism.

Beyond elections. Electoral democracy alone is insufficient for genuine democracy, as wealth and education inevitably concentrate power within elite factions. True democracy requires "social federalism," where territorial representation is supplemented by occupational or communal representation. This means delegating policy areas to institutions that represent specific community segments, such as organized labor and business in wage-setting bodies, or religious and secular creeds in cultural oversight commissions.

Magnifying citizen power. Democratic pluralism empowers ordinary citizens by offering multiple modes of representation beyond infrequent elections of politicians from arbitrary districts. Citizens can be represented by:

• Labor/business representatives: In tripartite economic bodies.
• Cultural subculture members: In cultural commissions.
  These non-legislative bodies, while not replicas of democratic legislatures, ensure diverse stakeholders have a voice. This system, though susceptible to corruption, allows for easier exposure and containment of abuses compared to centralized, elite-dominated regimes.

Reducing alienation. By incorporating all classes and major subcultures into policy-making across economic, governmental, and cultural spheres, democratic pluralism can mitigate the sense of isolation and powerlessness that fuels populist demagoguery. This approach dissipates interclass tensions through numerous small-scale negotiations, preventing the accumulation of grievances that lead to large-scale explosions. It offers a stable, institutionalized alternative to both technocratic neoliberalism and demagogic populism.

8. A New Democratic Pluralism Needs "Guilds," "Wards," and "Congregations."

Although the old parties, unions, and churches cannot be restored in their historic forms, the restoration of working-class power on both sides of the Atlantic requires the establishment of membership institutions to serve as their functional equivalents.

Functional equivalents. To restore working-class power, a new democratic pluralism must establish modern equivalents of past mass-membership institutions. These can be conceptualized as:

• Guilds (economic realm): New forms of business-labor-government tripartism.
• Wards (governmental realm): Local units of microdemocracy.
• Congregations (cultural realm): Creedal groups defending diverse values.

Economic guilds. In the economy, tripartite bargaining should replace the outdated notion of individual workers negotiating with giant corporations. This involves:

• Sectoral bargaining: Negotiations between labor and business representatives at national or regional levels, with binding decisions for entire sectors.
• Codetermination: Worker representation on corporate boards.
• Wage boards: Setting wages and working conditions in industries with many small employers, like fast food or care services, offering a more effective basis for negotiation than traditional site-based unionization.

Political wards and cultural congregations. In government, a partial restoration of localism through "ward republics" would allow ordinary people to participate directly in politics, ensuring local working-class interests are heard. Culturally, "creedal congregations"—broadly defined to include religious and secular groups—should have legal rights to self-governance and participation in public policy affecting their missions. This means ensuring diverse representation on government boards overseeing media and education, preventing the imposition of a single overclass moral imperialism.

9. National Sovereignty is Indispensable for Democratic Pluralism.

Cross-class compromises among labor and business, for example, are pointless if businesses can unilaterally annul the contracts at any time by transferring operations to foreign workers or bringing foreign workers into the country to weaken or replace organized labor.

The trilemma. Economist Dani Rodrik's "impossibility theorem" posits that democracy, national sovereignty, and global economic integration are mutually incompatible; only two can be fully achieved simultaneously. For democratic pluralists, global integration must be subordinated to the need to preserve and strengthen the class peace within nations. This means abandoning the ideal of a rule-governed global market for a more selective, "à la carte" approach to cross-border integration.

Developmental state model. Countries should be allowed to pursue national developmentalist strategies tailored to their specific needs, prioritizing widespread national productivity and widely shared national prosperity. This involves:

• Strategic trade policies: Governments actively shaping trade to benefit domestic industries and workers.
• Selective immigration policies: Managing immigration to support national labor markets and social cohesion.
• Collaboration: Government, business, and organized labor working together to promote technological modernization and ensure shared gains from growth.

Rejecting neoliberal globalization. The neoliberal argument that governments cannot interfere with globalization, only compensate its losers, must be rejected. The trivial benefits to consumers from cheap imports from low-wage countries do not outweigh the devastation caused to industrial workers and regions in developed nations. A world safe for democratic pluralism will not be a neoliberal world order, but one where national economies serve their working-class majorities, and the global economy serves national economies.

10. Global Labor Arbitrage Undermines Worker Power and Welfare States.

Global labor arbitrage in the forms of offshoring and immigration is not the only cause of rising inequality and stagnant wages in the US and similar nations, or even the most important.

Weakening institutions. While not the sole cause of inequality, global labor arbitrage—through offshoring and immigration—significantly exacerbates it by weakening two crucial institutions that bolster worker bargaining power: labor unions and the welfare state. The mere threat of replacement by foreign workers or immigrants can intimidate a much larger group of domestic workers, suppressing wages and deterring unionization.

Union decline. Union membership has plummeted across the OECD, directly correlating with increased wage inequality. In countries with high union coverage, like France and Denmark, a much smaller percentage of workers are in low-wage jobs compared to the US. Offshoring and the use of immigrants as a "reserve army of labor" have been well-documented tactics to undermine unions and their ability to secure better wages and conditions.

Welfare state strain. High levels of low-skilled immigration can also reduce public support for welfare state services. Libertarian and progressive economists alike acknowledge the incompatibility of a generous welfare state with open borders, as low-skill immigrants may not pay enough taxes to cover the benefits they receive, leading to resentment and political backlash against the welfare system itself. A pro-labor immigration policy must therefore prioritize strengthening worker bargaining power and ensuring identical rights for all working-age immigrants, while deterring illegal immigration through strict penalties on law-breaking employers.

11. The Future is Either Shared Power or Dystopian Oligarchy.

If there is not to be perpetual conflict among the two permanent classes of technological society, the new class war must come to an end in one of two ways.

The stark choice. The new class war, if left unchecked, will end in one of two ways: either a new cross-class compromise through democratic pluralism, or the triumph of one class over the other. Given the working class's current disorganization, the most likely outcome, absent reform, is the successful repression of the numerically superior working class by the managerial minority, which holds a near-monopoly on wealth, power, expertise, and media influence.

Dystopian outcomes. The triumph of either extreme would be calamitous. A West dominated by technocratic neoliberalism would become a high-tech caste society, resembling Brazil or Mexico with affluent metropolitan oligarchies surrounded by derelict hinterlands. Conversely, a West dominated by demagogic populism would be stagnant and corrupt, trapped in a cycle of hucksters and mobs. Both paths lead away from genuine democracy.

Fear as a motivator. History shows that ruling classes only share power when compelled by fear—either of the ruled or of rival nations. Renewed great-power competition, or "trade war," might motivate patriotic factions within the overclass to prioritize national solidarity and productivity over short-term class self-interest, leading to a new national developmentalism combined with cross-class negotiations. The example of East Asian democracies, which avoided the West's neoliberal rupture, suggests that alternative models for high-tech democracy exist, offering a path away from the "high-tech banana republics" of a dystopian future.

Last updated: February 17, 2026