It is impossible to understand the recent politics of the Western world without considering a giant sociological transformation—one that, inevitable though it may seem in retrospect, nearly nobody predicted: The bourgeoisie has switched sides.
For much of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the proletariat was the political stronghold of the left. The bourgeoisie was the stronghold of the right. Indeed, the assumption that affluent professionals would tend to be conservative is reflected in the most famous political treatises and pieces of art that the period produced.
But of late, these realities have started to shift, with huge impacts on contemporary politics. It is astonishing, for example, that according to The Economist, the socio-economic profile of the coalition assembled by Kamala Harris, the Democratic presidential candidate in 2024, most closely resembles the socio-economic profile of the coalition assembled by Bob Dole, the Republican presidential candidate, in 1996. (Unsurprisingly, both lost.)
This transformation is even visible in the realm of popular culture. Take, as an example, the most famous American cartoon of the last decades. When The Simpsons first aired, Homer Simpson was likely a Democrat, his pious neighbor Ned Flanders definitely a Republican. But over the three decades that the show has been on air, the nature of America’s partisan divide has shifted so much that any politically astute viewer would now assume these characters to have rather different loyalties. Flanders may be sufficiently alienated by the coarseness of the populist right to vote for the Democrats; Homer would undoubtedly support Donald Trump.
This transformation has been called by a variety of names. Thomas Piketty has described it as the rise of the Brahmin left. David Brooks has written about the rise of the Bobo. Matthew Yglesias has lamented the rise of The Groups. I propose to call it the Brooklynization of the Bourgeoisie: New York’s wealthy used to live on the Upper East Side, to pride themselves on their old family ties, to value markers of high culture like the opera, and to vote conservative; today, they live in Brooklyn, believe that they have earned their place in the upper echelons of society thanks to succeeding in a meritocratic competition, are more likely to care about rock bands or microbrews, and think of themselves as progressive.
That same transformation also helps to explain the Paradox of Infinite Voices and Narrow Minds. The population of the United States, and of many other Western democracies, is now deeply stratified by educational achievement. The affluent and highly credentialed are mostly on the political left. The working class is increasingly drifting to the political right. And that has deeply transformed the composition, the values, and even the actions of the professional class.
Plumbers are right wing but lawyers are left wing. Cab drivers are right wing but university professors are left wing. Police officers are right wing but civil servants are left wing. And though many professions claim to be apolitical, the plumbers and cab drivers and police officers increasingly suspect that the lawyers and professors and civil servants are letting their political values influence their work. The decline in respect for “experts” is in part owed to the blatant lies spread on social media; but it also has its roots in the real ways in which the consensus within these professions has increasingly come to adhere to a narrowly progressive—and often lamentably erroneous—set of assumptions about the world.
The Brooklynization of the Bourgeoisie also has another side effect. Lawyers, university professors, and civil servants have outsized influence on the rules, norms, and decisions that structure a lot of day-to-day life. And that leaves many less-affluent and less-educated citizens feeling that the democracy they were promised is a sham. “We are the majority,” they complain, “but no one listens to us.”
The resulting state of affairs leaves both sides equally unhappy. Many citizens feel ignored, besieged, and detested by a professional class which believes that it is entitled to rule, and finds the views of many of their compatriots intolerably bigoted. That is of great political significance because, even in highly affluent countries, there are more tradespeople, cab drivers, and police officers than there are lawyers, university professors, and civil servants. Meanwhile, members of the professional class feel bewildered at the lack of respect for their expertise, and fearful that the barbarians at the political gates will soon come for their heads.
What one side perceives as flagrantly unjust domination by the well-credentialed, the other interprets as the perils of revanchist demagoguery.
How Not to MAGA
Populists are able to win power in good part because they promise their voters that they will do what they can to close this representation gap. Legislators, they say, will finally start listening to the views of the people. Professions that have been captured by ideologues enforcing a narrow orthodoxy will be forced to become more representative. Institutions which once had disdain for ordinary people will finally feel their wrath.
There are real reasons why these promises have proven so enticing. Anybody who completely dismisses the fact that this anger is based in real failings of the professional elite is refusing to grapple seriously with this political moment. And yet, the record of populists in India and Turkey, in Hungary and Venezuela suggests that these promises are rarely fulfilled—and the first year of Donald Trump’s second administration in the United States only serves to reinforce that suspicion.
by Yascha Mounk, Persuasion | Read more:
Image: Getty
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Lind’s response, which I am sharing with you today, makes a strong point: that we should, really, be distinguishing between two different segments of the middle class. The first segment includes lawyers, doctors, academics, and others who have advanced to their positions by accruing formal meritocratic credentials; the German term for it is the Bildungsbürgertum (roughly: the bourgeoisie of the educated). The second segment includes business owners and prosperous artisans who have advanced to their positions by competing more directly in the free market; the German term for it is the Besitzbürgertum (roughly: the bourgeoisie of the owners). Without preempting Michael’s fire, I will just note that the way in which I used the term “bourgeoisie” in last week’s essay was primarily meant to refer to the first group, since that—perhaps to the detriment of our collective conceptual clarity—is how that term now tends to be used in the United States.The Two Bourgeoisies
Yascha Mounk’s essay “The Bourgeoisie Has Switched Sides” is as insightful as his phrase “the Brooklynization of the bourgeoisie” is memorable. His analysis could be elaborated by acknowledging that there is more than one bourgeoisie in the contemporary West.
In Germany, there has long been a distinction between the “educated middle class,” or Bildungsbürgertum, which includes lawyers, doctors, academics, clerics, and civil servants, on the one hand, and the “propertied” middle class, or Besitzbürgertum, which includes business owners and independent bankers (large and small), and prosperous, self-employed artisans, on the other.
This social division, if not the terminology, is familiar in the United States. The politics of “expert progressivism” has been based in America’s educated bourgeoisie, who since the 1900s have favored variants of would-be enlightened technocratic government as an alternative to the dreaded extremes of mob rule and plutocracy. Meanwhile, for a century, American businessmen and the politicians and pundits they have funded have denounced “meddling bureaucrats” and “long-haired professors” in pseudo-populist campaigns to delegitimize rival non-capitalist elites.
The growth of giant corporations run by managers rather than founders, and the bureaucratization of higher education and philanthropy in the United States and Europe, has greatly expanded the offices that can be filled by professionals educated and credentialed as members of the Bildungsbürgertum. These meritocratic managers can easily circulate among the bureaucracies of business, banking, government, and the nonprofit sector, and they tend to share common values instilled in them by prestigious universities.
Today’s propertied bourgeoisie is made up both of small business owners and of entrepreneurs who found companies that grow to immense size. Big and small owner-operators alike tend to share the view that their firm is their personal property. They feel attacked and insulted by government regulators, tax authorities, and workers who try to organize unions or simply demand higher wages.
Right-wing populists on both sides of the Atlantic claim to represent “the people” against “the elites,” when in fact they merely represent the propertied bourgeoisie in its century-long battle against the managerial-professional overclass. A model for today’s anti-intellectual, anti-tax, anti-state demagogic populism can be found in postwar poujadism—the revolt of small proprietors in France in the 1950s led by Pierre Poujade. While demagogic populists like Donald Trump and Nigel Farage can win over working-class voters upset with immigration or alienated by cultural progressivism, their core constituents and donors are the petty bourgeoisie as well as super-rich tycoons who answer only to themselves, like oil men and tech-company founders, as opposed to the CEOs and other temporary, professional managers of bureaucratic corporations and megabanks with many stakeholders.
If I am right, the pattern that Mounk has described so well can be described as a clash of the two bourgeoisies. On one side, technocratic professionals in large organizations of all kinds appeal to science and reason as they define them. On the other side, small capitalists and big entrepreneurs hire demagogic politicians to represent them while posing as anti-system populists. Except in the run-up to elections when they need working-class voters, both of the two bourgeoisies tend to ignore working-class majorities in the West.
Yascha Mounk’s essay “The Bourgeoisie Has Switched Sides” is as insightful as his phrase “the Brooklynization of the bourgeoisie” is memorable. His analysis could be elaborated by acknowledging that there is more than one bourgeoisie in the contemporary West.
In Germany, there has long been a distinction between the “educated middle class,” or Bildungsbürgertum, which includes lawyers, doctors, academics, clerics, and civil servants, on the one hand, and the “propertied” middle class, or Besitzbürgertum, which includes business owners and independent bankers (large and small), and prosperous, self-employed artisans, on the other.
This social division, if not the terminology, is familiar in the United States. The politics of “expert progressivism” has been based in America’s educated bourgeoisie, who since the 1900s have favored variants of would-be enlightened technocratic government as an alternative to the dreaded extremes of mob rule and plutocracy. Meanwhile, for a century, American businessmen and the politicians and pundits they have funded have denounced “meddling bureaucrats” and “long-haired professors” in pseudo-populist campaigns to delegitimize rival non-capitalist elites.
The growth of giant corporations run by managers rather than founders, and the bureaucratization of higher education and philanthropy in the United States and Europe, has greatly expanded the offices that can be filled by professionals educated and credentialed as members of the Bildungsbürgertum. These meritocratic managers can easily circulate among the bureaucracies of business, banking, government, and the nonprofit sector, and they tend to share common values instilled in them by prestigious universities.
Today’s propertied bourgeoisie is made up both of small business owners and of entrepreneurs who found companies that grow to immense size. Big and small owner-operators alike tend to share the view that their firm is their personal property. They feel attacked and insulted by government regulators, tax authorities, and workers who try to organize unions or simply demand higher wages.
Right-wing populists on both sides of the Atlantic claim to represent “the people” against “the elites,” when in fact they merely represent the propertied bourgeoisie in its century-long battle against the managerial-professional overclass. A model for today’s anti-intellectual, anti-tax, anti-state demagogic populism can be found in postwar poujadism—the revolt of small proprietors in France in the 1950s led by Pierre Poujade. While demagogic populists like Donald Trump and Nigel Farage can win over working-class voters upset with immigration or alienated by cultural progressivism, their core constituents and donors are the petty bourgeoisie as well as super-rich tycoons who answer only to themselves, like oil men and tech-company founders, as opposed to the CEOs and other temporary, professional managers of bureaucratic corporations and megabanks with many stakeholders.
If I am right, the pattern that Mounk has described so well can be described as a clash of the two bourgeoisies. On one side, technocratic professionals in large organizations of all kinds appeal to science and reason as they define them. On the other side, small capitalists and big entrepreneurs hire demagogic politicians to represent them while posing as anti-system populists. Except in the run-up to elections when they need working-class voters, both of the two bourgeoisies tend to ignore working-class majorities in the West.
by Michael Lind
