The New Class War - American Affairs Journal

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The Cold War has been followed by the class war. A transatlantic class war has broken out simultaneously in many countries between elites based in the corporate, financial, and professional sectors and working-class populists. Already this transnational class conflict has produced Brexit and the election of Donald Trump to the American presidency. Other shocks are likely in store.

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. Neoliberalism—the hegemonic ideology of the transatlantic elite—pretends that class has disappeared in societies that are purely meritocratic, with the exception of barriers to individual upward mobility that still exist because of racism, misogyny, and homophobia. Unable to acknowledge the existence of social class, much less to candidly discuss class conflicts, neoliberals can only attribute populism to bigotry or irrationality.

Like neoliberalism, mainstream conservatism denies the existence of classes in the West. Along with neoliberals and libertarians, conservatives assume that the economic elite is not a semi-hereditary class but merely an ever-changing, kaleidoscopic aggregate of talented and hard-working individuals. Meritocratic capitalism is threatened from within by a “new class” consisting of progressive intellectuals—professors, journalists, and nonprofit activists—who are said to be vastly more powerful than CEOs and investment bankers.

Marxism at least takes classes and class conflict seriously. But classical Marxism, with its secularized, providential theory of history and its view of industrial workers as the cosmopolitan agents of global revolution, has always been deluded.

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. Burnham’s thought has recently enjoyed a revival among thinkers of the center and center-right, including Matthew Continetti, Daniel McCarthy, and Julius Krein. Unfortunately, Galbraith’s sociology, along with his economics, remains out of fashion.

In their politics, Burnham and Galbraith could hardly have been more different, despite their shared friendship with William F. Buckley Jr. The patrician Burnham was a leader in the international Trotskyist movement before becoming zealously anticommunist and helping to found the post–World War II conservative movement. Galbraith, in contrast, was a passionate liberal throughout his life.

Yet both believed that a new ruling elite had displaced the old bourgeois and aristocratic estates. Burnham, following Adolf Berle and Gardiner Means’s The Modern Corporation and Private Property (1932), coined the term “the managerial elite” in his worldwide bestseller The Managerial Revolution (1941). Later, in The New Industrial State

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