The War on the Liberal Class

Liberalism’s core class is under siege—can the liberal order survive the global backlash against its institutional power?

Is it really the end of the End of History? Is this the demise of the “long” 20th century? To many observers, the neoliberal hegemony that Francis Fukuyama diagnosed a generation ago appears to be over. Both liberal democracy and the globalized free market are in retreat: Anti-establishment, anti-institutional, anti-incumbent politicians skilled at extreme rhetoric have been gaining ground in many advanced democracies. Since returning to power, Donald Trump has governed as an arbitrary tyrant in blatant defiance of the rule of law, threatened the sovereign territory of multiple U.S. allies, and announced exorbitant levies on goods imported from nearly every foreign country, throwing global markets into turmoil. An age of renewed great-power competition and tariff-driven autarky seems to be at hand.

Events are moving with shocking speed, and it’s too early to say if democracy, free trade, and the established geopolitical order really have been irreparably harmed, or if they might all prove more resilient than expected. Trump himself keeps hedging on his own tariff proposals, with haphazard attempts daily to buy time and reassure the investor class. It’s one thing to demagogue against the free-trade consensus of the past few decades or propose gradually decoupling the U.S. economy from China’s and reinvesting in domestic industries—issues that Democrats, Republicans, and the American public are all broadly aligned on. It’s another to impose a shock doctrine on one’s own citizens that risks impoverishing them overnight and expect no backlash. The U.S. remains a consumer society, and consumerism, as they say, is a hell of a drug.

But on at least one crucial front, the many prophecies of doom already reflect something real: Liberalism, always a convenient scapegoat for the unresolvable crises of neoliberal capitalism, is under existential threat—as an ideology, as a temperament, and above all as a class with distinct material interests and political power.

Liberalism has never been merely a set of abstract ideas, and it has never been uniformly experienced within the liberal polity. As Antonio Gramsci observed, cultural hegemony allows the bourgeoisie to maintain its dominant position in society by creating a broad social consensus around its own norms and values, and very often those norms and values have been liberal. Liberalism has always been the ideology of a particular socioeconomic stratum: from the Parisian haute bourgeoisie that declared the Rights of Man in the late 18th century to the New Class of college-educated intellectuals, professionals, and creatives that by the 1970s had come to dominate liberalism in the United States—at least according to its many critics. James Burnham anticipated capitalism’s managerial turn as early as 1941. Christopher Lasch, in his posthumously published 1995 book The Revolt of the Elites and the Betrayal of Democracy, criticized upper-middle-class groups as having alienated themselves materially and culturally from the rest of the population, describing them as “a new class only in the sense that their livelihoods rest not so much on ownership of property as on the manipulation of information and professional expertise.” The right-wing ideologue Curtis Yarvin, a court favorite of Vice President J.D. Vance and the Silicon Valley oligarch Marc Andreessen, calls this cohort “the cathedral.” Nate Silver has dubbed it “the Village.” Musa al-Gharbi, who recently responded in The Ideas Letter to a critical review of his book We Have Never Been Woke: The Cultural Contradictions of a New Elite, has described approximately the same group as “symbolic capitalists—professionals who work in fields like finance, consulting, law, HR, education, media, science and technology.” Less hostile observers might simply say “the establishment” or “liberal civil society” or, as Barbara and John Ehrenreich put it in 1977, “the professional-managerial class.”

It is a version of this class that lives and breathes liberalism and forms its core constituency in any given place and time. And it is this class that is under sustained assault from all directions right now, with both corporate capital and much of the lumpenproletariat targeting its prevailing fashions (often cast as “wokeness”) and the rights (media and academic freedom, the rule of law) that undergird the material basis of its influence (government bureaucracies, elite universities, publishing houses, legacy newspapers and magazines, the entertainment industry). Across many countries, the authority and autonomy of the liberal class is being challenged and undermined; on every front, the liberal class faces precarity, professional frustration, and ambient despair over the state of the culture.

The term “New Class” originated with the Yugoslav government minister and intellectual Milovan Djilas in 1957. It was initially meant to describe the real beneficiaries of the Russian Revolution and the communist satellite regimes the Soviet Union later imposed across Eastern Europe: the growing class of educated technocrats, not the proletarians in whose name those technocrats purportedly ruled. But starting in the early 1970s, American intellectuals associated with the neoconservative tendency—among them Irving Kristol, Norman Podhoretz, and Daniel Patrick Moynihan—began using the same term to describe the expanding cohort of college-educated liberals who they saw winning a factional war against blue-collar labor for control of the Democratic Party, as evidenced above all by the nomination of George McGovern as the party’s candidate for president in 1972. The New Class, according to a 1979 study, consisted of disparate groups that “produce or deal in ‘ideas’ or words and hold their positions by virtue of possession of analytical and literary skills usually obtained through formal education.” These were, in other words, people who highly prized the cultivation of critical-thinking skills and the institutions that promoted and rewarded such skills.

Though proponents of the term “New Class” often disagreed on its precise definition, broadly speaking they viewed the New Class as spanning everyone from college professors and magazine publishers to the public-interest lawyers and regulatory bureaucrats staffing the good-government agencies that proliferated under the auspices of the Great Society. They were observing a version of what the German student radical Rudi Dutschke in 1967 termed “the long march through the institutions”: the gradual takeover of every part of the establishment by people at least sympathetic to the New Left’s adversarial critiques of mainstream American culture. The neoconservatives regarded this long march with apprehension, and they contended that the American New Class, no less than its Soviet counterpart, was cynically enriching itself at the public’s expense. For more than half a century now, the American right has maintained versions of this basic criticism, but in recent years it has itself produced, via the tech industry, its own vastly wealthier New Class, which now has the potential to dismantle what the liberal New Class spent decades building.

The crisis facing liberalism begins with the crisis of basic literacy. It was the expansion of literacy after World War II that made the ascent of the New Class possible in the first place, and it’s only slightly hyperbolic to say that liberals today confront a society in which no one under 30 reads serious books or newspapers. A much-discussed article in the Atlantic last fall flagged that even undergraduates at the most elite universities struggle to read whole books that their counterparts a decade ago were able to handle. Their attention spans have been eroded since childhood by social media addiction, and now the social media they consume is no longer text-based.

In the 2000s and 2010s, the dominant social media platforms were Facebook and Twitter, both of which, whatever their faults (including Facebook’s central role in bankrupting traditional news media), primarily circulated the written word. Both of these platforms are currently controlled by Silicon Valley billionaires in hock to Trump, and both have become increasingly degraded, poorly functioning, and saturated with scammers and hatemongers. Even more salient, both are losing market share to the Chinese social media platform TikTok, which prioritizes short-form videos that obviate any need for more than nominal literacy, much less for the critical-thinking skills that liberals have always regarded as essential to a healthy democratic polity. Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, is increasingly copying TikTok’s approach.

Meanwhile, tech firms in both China and the U.S. aggressively compete to develop AI, which functions in part by plagiarizing, synthesizing, and undercutting the reliability of original written work while promising to render human-generated writing redundant and unmarketable. The combination of video-based platforms, AI, and algorithmically “enshittified” text-based social networks that suppress links to actual writing has rendered the internet fundamentally hostile to anyone who crafts words for a living. This is a threat not just to the basic finances of professional writers but also to their ability to socially reproduce a receptive public for what they’re selling.

The same tech oligarchs who bankrolled Trump’s victory have been using their unprecedented fortunes to fund alternative institutions to compete with, and ultimately sideline, the established ones. As Eoin Higgins documents in his recent book Owned: How Tech Billionaires on the Right Bought the Loudest Voices on the Left, venture capital–backed platforms like Substack have been instrumental in creating lucrative new career opportunities for veterans of mainstream media, especially those who parrot the reactionary views of their funders. While these platforms are available to writers of any political persuasion, it is reactionaries who disproportionately get the most lucrative deals: Independent blogging doesn’t tend to reward robust newsroom cultures and traditional editorial standards as much as invective and audience capture.

Since 2011, Peter Thiel has been handing out fellowships to undergraduates “who want to build new things instead of sitting in a classroom”: Last year his foundation gave five Harvard undergraduates $100,000 grants each in exchange for dropping out of college and launching startups. Echoing Yarvin, Thiel wrote in a press release announcing the latest fellowship class that, “Today’s universities are as corrupt as the medieval Catholic Church. The Reformation is underway.” Right-wing billionaires have bankrolled an anti-woke startup campus, the University of Austin, that among other roles is intended to serve as a pipeline to their own companies. The idea behind all these efforts is to bypass the Ivy League and mainstream media outlets, building out a new and lavishly compensated intelligentsia that renders the traditional liberal one obsolete.

The Trump administration is fully aligned with the project of sidelining the old establishment. It now turns away journalists from the Associated Press from the White House press pool and doles out scoops to influencers from the emergent right-wing ecosystem. And those very same traditional liberal institutions are pivoting rightward to comply with the new regime. A significant part of the editorial board of the Washington Post, owned by the tech billionaire Jeff Bezos, stepped down when management overruled the board’s traditional prerogative to endorse a candidate in the 2024 election; left-leaning op-eds have been all but banned.

The situation in academia is at least as grim. Last year, the presidents of Harvard, the University of Pennsylvania, and Columbia resigned under pressure from congressional Republicans and ideological donors for permitting pro-Palestinian demonstrations on campus. Since then, Columbia has expelled students and pushed out a faculty member who had demonstrated for Palestine; turned its campus into a fortress sealed off from the surrounding neighborhood; hired Trump’s former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo; handed over international students to immigration enforcement to punish them for free speech; and succumbed to administration blackmail by agreeing to place its Middle East studies department under receivership, among other invasive demands. (Harvard, to its credit, maintained a shred of dignity in refusing to comply with similar demands this week.) Support for Palestine has been a particularly effective wedge issue against academic freedom—in addition to most Republicans, many Democratic politicians are eager to go along. New York Governor Kathy Hochul recently ordered that the publicly funded City University of New York remove an open position for a Palestinian studies professorship, in the name of combating allegedly antisemitic theories.

The publishing industry is feeling the pressure as well: Hachette, one of the handful of remaining corporate publishing conglomerates (and one owned by a right-wing French billionaire whose media empire has facilitated the rise of Marine Le Pen in France), debuted a new conservative imprint in the wake of Trump’s election; it is to be run by a fellow at the Heritage Foundation, which produced Project 2025, the Republican blueprint for comprehensively disrupting the federal government. As for the entertainment industry, the Walt Disney Company, ABC’s owner, settled a frivolous defamation lawsuit from Trump ahead of his inauguration and paid $15 million in what amounts to protection money. Meta, Amazon, and other media giants have also paid settlements to Trump, and Paramount, which owns CBS, is currently navigating a lawsuit the president brought days before the election over what he claims was the deceptive editing of a “60 Minutes” interview with then-Vice President Kamala Harris.

The technique of using lawfare to bankrupt critical media outlets and terrorize journalists was honed a decade ago by none other than Peter Thiel, who used it to destroy Gawker Media, and now the same tactics are being wielded by the Trump administration against much larger entities. At the same time, Trump has appointed his own hand-picked commissars to lord over elite cultural spaces, ranging from Hollywood to the Kennedy Center. And the administration’s effort to block trillions of dollars in federal grants, which is currently held up in court, threatens universities, the arts, and nonprofits, and has already prompted hiring freezes at institutions like Stanford as well as a hold on new PhD admissions across the country. Similar mafia tactics are being deployed to great effect against prestigious law firms that have engaged in pro bono public-interest legal work, a traditional New Class priority; one after another, such firms have yielded to Trump’s financial pressure.

If the right’s assaults on the media and the academy have been going on for years now, its assault on the federal bureaucracy has stepped up dramatically since Trump’s inauguration. Trump has dispatched Elon Musk to do to federal agencies what Musk spent the past few years doing to Twitter: overturning diversity initiatives, laying off thousands of workers, and willfully undermining functionality. Musk, as the head of the new Department of Governmental Efficiency (DOGE), has particularly focused on organizations like the U.S. Agency for International Development and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau that were founded by, and have always been staffed by, quintessential New Class liberals who believe in wielding government for benevolent ends. Trump’s cabinet appointees are likewise dismantling state capacity: The significant staff cuts ordered by Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. imperil the federal government’s ability to collect essential public health data.

For workers in these and similar agencies, the impact has been acute—and this was by design: Russell Vought, Trump’s director of the Office of Management and Budget, said before the election, “We want the bureaucrats to be traumatically affected.” To Musk, Kennedy, and Trump, firing earnest professional-class civil servants, shuttering whole sectors in which they’ve built their careers, and inflicting a regional economic crisis in the once-prosperous (and disproportionately New Class) Washington, DC, metro area is its own reward. In this case, the cruelty, as the journalist Adam Serwer famously put it, really is the point.

Taken together, the right’s attacks on the liberal New Class can be seen as a unified project to diminish its influence, disassemble its institutions, and immiserate the people with the educations and temperaments to work in those institutions. This project exacerbates long-term trends that not only precede Trump but may have helped bring him to power. The precipitous decline of humanities departments at American universities, for instance, has been apparent for more than a decade, as students have increasingly opted for the more remunerative STEM and business educations valued by Silicon Valley and Wall Street (though STEM itself is now likewise endangered by Trump’s threats to grant-funded research). Full-time employment in any of the traditional creative occupations is increasingly scarce and nearly untenable for anyone without independent wealth. This in turn ensures that the remaining participants in liberal civil society are socially alienated from the wider public—a dynamic reflected in exit polling in the 2024 election, which showed white college graduates trending toward Harris while virtually every other demographic trended toward Trump. The institutions of Cold War liberalism—which, whatever their flaws, helped create a mass of literate Americans among whom intellectuals and experts held prestige and wielded influence over several generations—are all in perhaps terminal decline. Liberals face the threat not just of isolation but also of irrelevance, or even extinction.

The New Class was a product of the New Deal, with its expansion of the administrative state and of higher education aimed in part at staffing that state. The New Class predates the neoliberal turn of the late 1970s and early 1980s, and in many cases championed it: For a long time, knowledge workers benefited from the growth of finance and tech capital while others paid the price for the contraction of heavy industry. Ultimately, however, the beneficiaries of the immense fortunes built out of four decades of neoliberalism have found that the New Class’s essentially liberal values are a hindrance to their ambitions to dominate America, and the world, in a kind of neo-feudal oligarchy. Perhaps this was predictable. In 1999, Immanuel Wallerstein said in an interview that “the upper-middle class professionals and middle-level managers who form an intermediate stratum between workers and top executives or owners” were overrepresented as a share of the U.S. population and might be a drain on productivity, and he warned that, “In 20 to 40 years, that economic crisis will be even more painful as corporations try to become competitive by eliminating costly middle managers and as government programs are cut to lower social expenditures.” To the emergent ruling class, defined by men like Musk and Thiel and Andreessen, liberalism and liberals themselves have outlived their usefulness.

It’s true, as Ivan Krastev argued in these pages last year, that ideas never die; it’s also true that socialist ideas long disregarded at the height of liberal hegemony, some of them potentially salient to the current moment, have revived among a younger generation of progressive intellectuals over the past decade. But that cohort is both small and disproportionately comprises the downwardly mobile heirs of the traditional liberal class, and its anger at the status quo is often as much about its own diminishing prospects as about more generalized demands for social justice. It still remains for this cohort, and the larger liberal milieu to which it belongs, to articulate a more productive and positive vision for its own social role that does not trap it in the derogatory framings of the right. Whether the liberal New Class can survive the crisis posed by the ascendent illiberal right is far from clear. But if it cannot be for itself, how can it be for anyone else?

This essay was first published by The Ideas Letter