It might strike some as odd: The new president of the United States won the election by rallying the working class against the establishment swamp, yet he has placed at the helm of his assault on the elite-controlled Deep State none other than the richest man in the world. But this is only a paradox if you grant a couple of assumptions that the above description presupposes: that the “working class” is actually represented at all in our political system, and that anyone but the “elite” is involved in the power struggles within it. Understanding what’s really happening in the second Trump administration requires disabusing ourselves of both of these notions. What we’re seeing is the latest battle in a long war between two factions of the American elite. The working class are just extras on the set—moral props in a struggle that has nothing to do with them.
“Americans lack the language to talk about social class.”
Americans lack the language to talk about social class. This is partly a result of our country having been founded in opposition to the ancient European class system. But it’s also because the left—the only faction in American politics that talks non-rhetorically about class—has clung for more than a century to an orthodox Marxist definition of class that was becoming obsolete by the 1940s and, by the ‘70s, bore almost no resemblance to the post-industrial status order.
In the 19th century, when Marx wrote Capital, for the most part there were owners and there were workers. The owners depended for their profits, and therefore their social power, upon the exploitation of the workers, which meant extracting more monetary value out of their labor than that labor was worth on the open market, which is to say, more than the wages they paid. While the owners had an inherent material interest in maximizing this margin, the workers had an existential interest in bringing it as close to zero as possible. This was the irreconcilable contradiction at the center of capitalism, and the structural reality that galvanized society into two great social classes confronting each other: the industrial proletariat and the capitalist bourgeoisie.
But as industrialization progressed, so did scientific advancements. As technology became infinitely more complex, industrial production came to require scientific researchers, engineers, technicians, and a dozen other knowledge-based professionals. At the same time, Fordism revolutionized the organization of the workforce, transforming small factory-based businesses into massive corporate bureaucracies. This required the creation of a whole new class of managerial employees to organize the increasingly complex logistics of production.
These new employees weren’t “workers” who sold their labor power for an hourly wage. The owners didn’t derive their profits from exploiting their surplus labor. On the other hand, they didn’t own the means of production, either—their offices, computers, laboratories, instruments and devices were no more their property than the industrial machinery on the assembly line was the workers’. Moreover, “ownership” itself had become a more complicated and slippery concept. Corporations were now owned by hundreds or thousands of distant shareholders rather than the factory boss. At the same time, the corporation’s executives directly controlled the day-to-day means of production more than any shareholder, but without owning them at all.
This new breed of knowledge worker, hovering in a purgatory between the proletarians and the capitalists, was what Barbara and John Ehrenreich, in a 1977 essay, termed the “professional-managerial class”—“PMC” for short. Today, with its affluence and social status, the PMC constitutes the largest fraction of the American elite, and the new base of the Democratic Party.
The late French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu didn’t use the Ehrenreichs’ terminology, but he furnished an essential concept for understanding the PMC’s social position: “cultural capital,” by which he meant the knowledge an individual accumulates that enables him to fit effortlessly into a given social milieu. Cultural capital doesn’t have to be rarified knowledge; it can be, for example, a familiarity with firearms in a rural or exurban working-class social setting. But the cultural capital of the elite is, by definition, the most valuable kind.
Elite cultural capital has changed over time, but a rough index of what it includes at any historical moment can be gleaned from the curricula of a given era’s most prestigious schools. In the postwar years, an elite American liberal-arts education was informed by the pretensions of European aristocrats, with an emphasis on the classics and the kind of fine art that hangs in the permanent collection of the Met. Now it’s more likely to include political treatises by twentieth century anti-colonial intellectuals and social theory by queer deconstructionists. In either case, it constitutes the cultural erudition that enables the well-educated to fit into elite circles.
The trophy of elite cultural capital accumulation is the educational credential. It bestows upon its recipient an officially sanctioned status, like a title for a member of the landed gentry. And like an impoverished English aristocrat with a Sir before his name, it’s a rank one can cling to even in the absence of that ultimate status marker, material wealth.
Generally speaking, members of the elite are relatively affluent in both economic and cultural capital. But the composition of one’s portfolio matters. Within the ruling class, Bourdieu regards those who are far richer in cultural capital than economic capital as structurally subordinate—in his words, “the dominated fractions of the dominant class.” Those with the inverse mix—who are rich in money but don’t necessarily boast the most illustrious educational credentials—are the dominant fraction of the dominant class.
Politics today is the struggle for supremacy between these two segments of the elite. The economically rich seek to convert their monetary riches into political power by bankrolling their favored candidates (or themselves) in elections and by extending the rules of the free market—the arena in which they are hegemonic—into every facet of human activity. The culturally affluent aim to consolidate political power by constraining the influence of the market to purely economic activity, thereby limiting their rivals’ domain of activities, while proselytizing a vision of government led by professional technocrats. Thus, the rich tend to gravitate toward economically libertarian political ideologies, while the credentialed embrace progressive politics that favor the power of government institutions run by experts.
“Politics today is the struggle for supremacy between these two segments of the elite.”
Neither fraction, however, can openly acknowledge these class interests, even to themselves. In a democratic society, one’s political aspirations have to be cloaked in the language of the greater good. Thus, the rich contend (and sincerely believe) that the market serves the best interests of all of humanity, while the credentialed are convinced that increasing the power and reach of the technocratic state is how you improve the lot of the poor and oppressed, rather than their own. Each fraction sees clearly through the pretensions of its rival, while extending none of the same skepticism to the self-flattering ideology that upholds its own worldview.
For decades, this competition has animated the culture wars of Silicon Valley, with the venture-capitalist class dismissing the value of formal education and lionizing the self-taught entrepreneur-turned-billionaire, while their left-wing critics malign the tech titans as power-hungry political interlopers and champion the moral authority of activists and non-profit organizations. The latter had a voice in the Biden administration. Now, under Trump, it’s the billionaires’ turn.
For the last eight years, Silicon Valley’s recent MAGA converts have convinced themselves that the civil service and the intelligentsia it represents are the real elite that runs America, first as the Deep State undermining Trump in his first term, then in the actual seat of power under Biden. Now they have their chance to bring the dominated fraction to heel. And as befits their class, they are exacting their revenge with the swagger of a corporate raider, wielding spreadsheets as weapons and breaking the enemy’s will to resist with the shock and awe of mass layoffs.
It’s a war on the elite, by the elite. But that doesn’t mean the working class has no stake in it. When even the worst of parents divorce, the fallout is still suffered by the children.
In this case, the custody battle is over the institutions of American government. Where the PMC has long treated the state as, alternately, a tool for its social-engineering schemes and a jobs program for surplus elites, the economic elite has regarded it either as a trophy in its political class war or an asset to be liquidated, and is proceeding accordingly. But to non-elite Americans it’s an actual thing in their daily lives, that can work well, poorly, or not at all. The choices that DOGE makes about which programs to freeze, cut, or eliminate will impact their families’ lives, whether for better or for worse. But as usual, they don’t have a seat at the negotiating table.