I’ve written much here, maybe to the point of boring you, about the Professional Managerial Class and its historical origins. This is a milieu I know better than any other, because I grew up in it — indeed, in one of its Emerald Cities: Berkeley, California. Much of my alienation from the postmodern Left was the consequence of recognizing, particularly during the pandemic, the classist disdain that festered beneath the contempt nursed by so many of my social and professional peers for anyone to the right of Beto O’Rourke.
Obviously, I’m far from the only one to have traveled this path; there were enough in my cohort for it to be dubbed an elite cultural movement. And I don’t think we were wrong about the PMC. But a few things have begun to become evident to me that probably should have been clear from the start. First of all, the current critique of the PMC, which is to say my own critique of it, is just a rehash of an old and hackneyed conservative harangue. That doesn’t make it empirically wrong, just not particularly novel. Second, the chauvinism I have long deplored in this social class goes in both directions, and always has.
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