The "working class" put "their guy" in a certain colored house in the US and got together to tell the EU to screw off in the UK. They might not be using their political power for things we all agree with or you could argue they're all being duped but they certainly aren't powerless.
Furthermore, I think the author is over stating the homogeneity of white collar political professionals. Tech and academia are very homogeneously blue/left leaning (relatively speaking) but other industries less so.
The author seems to be very confident in his predictions of where politics will move over the next decade or two but I see some massive variables that are not controlled for. Things could go any which way.
I'm not even so sure as to how homogeneous tech i if the drama at Google is any indication. Academia probably is as they have a financial interest in the federal government expanding.
I think that what you see here may be some amount of bitterness after watching how events play out and what actually changes. The working class he decries as powerless were his people (he grew up in a small town in South Dakota); it's just that now that we've had 3 years of Trump he sees just how ineffective it's been.
But once in office their guy maintains the status quo even though populist rhetoric got him into office.
So far this theory appears to be true. Historical data corroborates. What is less certain imho is that grassroots activism has ceased to be ineffective. Nobody expects the pitchforks and guillotines until they show up on their doorstep.
However, the poor person in the city is unlikely to vote at all, and the poor person in the country is likely to vote against their own economic interests in favor of perceived social narratives. As long this remains true, I wouldn't hold my breath on a working class awakening anytime soon.
The middle class helped spark the revolution hoping that the proletariat would come around eventually.
The fact that the article, and many of the commenters here are mentioning this again makes me wonder if socialist movements have always been primarily middle class movements.
At a time where the majority of people in Georgia got 4 years of part time schooling at best he spent over 10 years in education.
That resulted in several decades of false starts by what Krein would call the Russian "secondary elite", in the form of the Narodniks, in the 1870s and 1880s. They had almost zero experience with the real "narod", only an idealized mental picture, and when they moved out of the big cities into the countryside (where the majority of the poor, Russia being vastly unindustrialised, lived), most of them got homesick and went back again.
If by "talking to each other" you mean "increasingly consuming only whatever media the machine learning has been trained to foist onto them", yes.
> uncoupled from professional barrier.
This was true ten years ago, but not today. The recommendation algorithms run by the big tech companies are the window most people use to look into the Internet now.
On the off chance some unsubscribe from their media streams to create then platform X is well prepared to flag their ideas as too similar to other quarantined fake news items.
I remember working a temp job at a polling call center and although I was just doing grunt work of calling people, it was clearly obvious they were doing polls to hear what they wanted. There was only 1 survey out of maybe 200 that was what I would consider unbiased and didn't have any leading questions or pre-picked answers.
You would screen out people in the beginning of the survey that were obviously not interested in whoever candidate you were calling in regards to, and more often than not the survey itself would have leading questions to get the answers they want so they can take the results and be like, "See our Candidate is winning!!!" - yet they only called people and did the survey with those who were already willing to vote for said candidate.
Polls are literally circle jerking people who were voting democrat and those regarding republican candidate were always negative.
It also could be that the particular call center I was working out of only had contracts with Democratic parties/PACS but from my time there it was clear that polls are a racket.
Yet I think as the public discourse among this group continues to grow in sophistication it will develop a more nuanced worldview and will assert its power with greater wisdom.
A big part of the issue is that people have different definitions for all the various social classes, so it's hard to compare things correctly.
This more affluent middle class of information workers are leading the rest of the folks who punch a clock for a living to a better life. It's not everyone though, there's older folks who are fully committed to a dog eat dog existence, because it worked out easily and well for anyone willing to even try their hand in the post-WW2 era. It's understandable that they don't see the connection between relatively easy prosperity, and destroying all of your industrial competitors. Some of the younger conservatives don't have the life experience of being exploited and tossed out to form well-informed views on labor, and are often afraid of challenging their tribe's view, with their fathers often being the aforementioned Boomer. Then you lose another chunk from those who are not very capable, but inherited wealth. Insecurity that they couldn't duplicate their position in life from scratch leads to extremely anti-social behaviors that we see from the capitalist class.
Claiming some defectors from each of those groups, add in the blue collars who know the score, and add in the "Bernie Sanders" educated folk and I definitely am seeing more support for the movement in American society today than I do for any other grassroots movement. Judging from the strength of support of someone like Sanders, the only competent base of support that rivals it is Trump's. It may not be tomorrow or next year when it succeeds, but we're definitely seeing what you're describing and I suspect it'll continue to build until big money can't stop it any longer.
Why do you say "even though"? Sanders and Warren target upper middle class and people aspiring to it.
Sanders’s left-wing challenge to Clinton found significant support among educated, relatively affluent voters, especially younger ones (similar to Obama’s). As one 2016 Vox headline put it, “Bernie Sanders’s base isn’t the working class. It’s young people.”32 Within any given age group, the article explained, higher-income voters were actually more likely to support Sanders.
Elizabeth Warren’s campaign more explicitly appeals to the professional class, both in form and content.
>This underappreciated reality at least partially explains one of the apparent puzzles of American politics in recent years: namely, that members of the elite often seem far more radical than the working >class, both in their candidate choices and overall outlook. Although better off than the working class, lower-level elites appear to be experiencing far more intense status anxiety.