I want to riff a bit on this exchange between Kevin Elliot and Samantha Hancox-Li. (I hope they'll forgive that I've played around with formatting and added punctuation.)
Elliot: ...What's changed are norms surrounding representation & aspiration. Being an educated, cultivated person has become widely politicized in a wider environment of transgressive populist contempt for conventional respectability.
Hancox-Li: i think not unrelated to this is that the dems are steadily becoming the party of the professional-managerial class and are incredibly embarrassed about this. this of course mirrors the pmc itself, which instead of achieving class consciousness has achieved "class neuroticism", by which i mean: in practical terms members of the pmc devote much of their life's effort to becoming pmc while also remaining in deep denial that this is in fact their aspiration. i dunno tho i think being well-educated, decent, and prosperous is not a bad thing to aspire to. it might even be good actually. makes u think... i basically blame marx for this. the pmc is convinced that salvation needs to arise from the working class--hence the paradoxes discussed in "ultraliberalism," AND the essay's own prescription "go organize a shop floor".
I'm a person very much of the educated professional class. I encourage people to become educated and cultivated. Education and cultivation should embarrass no one.
(Cultivation, of course, includes moral sensibilities like, "it is cretinous to embarrass people solely for their purported lack of education or cultivation." When the United States was good, much of what made it good was a social oxymoron, promoting cultivation along with ostentatious disdain for putting on airs.)
Nevertheless, I do think that "we" — by which I mean the professional class — fucked up. And we are smart enough to kind of know it. Hancox-Li is right. We are embarrassed about something. But we are not so clear about what, so it comes through as neurosis. I'll suggest what I think we should, in fact, be embarrassed about, not in order to prescribe hairshirts, but so that we can just not do that anymore and then stand proud again.
In 2019, I offered the following tweet. I am unduly fond of it.
alignments and outcomes:
working class + professional class ⇒ social democracy
professional class + plutocrats ⇒ liberal plutocracy (“neoliberalism”)
working class + plutocrats ⇒ fascism
I think that during the period from the middle 1970s through the 2008 financial crisis, we, the professional class made a rather catastrophic error in judgment.
(Obviously I am overgeneralizing — we have always been a heterogeneous and fractious crew — but, you know. In general.)
The consensus among our class — which I shared! — was that our society was imperfectly but sufficiently a meritocracy, and that the basic frame of what came to be called "neoliberalism" was correct. A heavily marketized society was a society we-the-merited could succeed within, and it was also the form of society that would maximize all of our prosperity. The fact that our successes might be generously remunerated was not just a matter of private enjoyment, but reflected genuine social virtue. We had achieved a society in which one did well by doing good.
This was never accurate. But journalists, think-tankers, and academic social scientists who were willing to advance this perspective in their work could count on career success. Which contributed to a consensus (not least but not only within the discipline of economics) that this suspiciously self-flattering perspective was in fact true. It was "science". The people at the top of many fields embraced it. Dissidence became hard to distinguish from sour-grapes conspiracism.
"Liberal professionals" had been recruited into what John Kenneth Galbraith describes as the role of the modern conservative. They were "engaged...in one of man’s oldest, best financed, most applauded, and, on the whole, least successful exercises in moral philosophy. That is the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness."
They had, in other words — we had — become paid mouthpieces for the rich, who always want to be flattered that their wealth is merely a marker of their virtue, and who, more importantly, want their inferiors to believe that. Otherwise reformists, or, God forbid, revolutionaries, might emerge, and confuse among the public their causes for justice.
Some of us did pretty well, for a while. Academics could be surprisingly well paid. Software developers bought ranches. Finance became a philosopher's stone by which one could convert research and a love of mathematics into exorbitant prosperity.
What was not to like? The educated could thrive via the fruits of applying their education. The best educated economists assured us that for all the wealth we appropriated, it was less than the value we contributed. However great our opulence, it was less than our effective generosity. Follow the science.
All of this was bullshit. Society was not well-arranged. Even within the ranks of the professional-managerial class, most of us did not do so well. Like the broader world we helped to justify, our own fates became stratified and increasingly structured as lotteries most of us would lose, but whose outcomes one could rig via certain kinds of institutional attachments and social connections. The information superhighway meant the world was flat. It became more important than ever to go to Harvard.
Most of us ended up pretty miserable along with everybody else.
As Hancox-Li suggests, there is nothing wrong with wanting to be prosperous. We should all want to be prosperous!
But what it means to be prosperous is contested. One definition of prosperity might be a stable income sufficient to ensure a comfortable middle-class lifestyle.
But there is also the fractal definition of prosperity implicit in the behavior of the very rich, under which no amount of wealth is sufficient. Wherever you rise to in the distribution, it looks to you the same as where you last were. You find yourself competing for positional goods, in tournaments whose outcomes become consequential to your actual welfare, not just to your vanity. There are always rivals who have more, or who at least are contesting for more. Either you continually accumulate, or you fall behind. "Prosperity" must always be pursued, but it can never be achieved.
During the neoliberal period, professionals increasingly adopted plutocrats' version of prosperity. First as aspiration, then as desperation. Eventually it became difficult not to join the race. Falling behind would have consequences for ones children. Failure might be forgivable, but opting out was irresponsible. Prestigious academics became consultants, expert witnesses, paid speakers, despite already commanding enviable salaries. Entrepreneurial means good, right? The version of prosperity we adopted was "more" rather than "enough".
To return to my little tweet, we professionals had effectively aligned ourselves with the plutocrats. The result was an economy that immiserated an ever growing share of the nonplutocrats, the less-educated, but also those in our own ranks who did opt out of the insatiable contest for more, or who simply failed at it.
That immiseration left the alignment democratically untenable. The less-educated, along with a so-called "downwardly mobile" fraction of the professional class, grew restive, hungered for some outsider to overthrow a game that made them losers and then insisted it was their own fault.
The wise decision would have been for professionals, as a class, to join the working class in a muscular play for social democracy. Unfortunately, the professional class was famously divided (cf the neverending 2016 Democratic primary), while plutocrats coopted a growing share of the working class via the person of Donald Trump. The result of a working class + plutocrat alignment has been and is fascism.
Hancox-Li is right to question paleo-Marxisms that presume the only way forward is the one conceived while the emerging form of work was tending steam-powered machines in labor-intensive factories. An objective alignment of workers' material interests against their bosses might still exist, but labor conditions under which that alignment would ever be likely to translate to effective organization have largely disappeared.
It is no answer, however, to imagine that Democrats should become the party of the professional-managerial class alone. Under a two-party system, the obvious problem is that people with advanced educations are unlikely to constitute a majority.
Plutocrats have long understood democracy is a system that inherently renders them naked and vulnerable, so they must somehow coopt sizable elements of other groups. In postwar, post-GI-bill, America, professionals do constitute a mass constituency, which can encourage a kind of hubris. A mass constituency we are, but still a minority. Our challenge should be more tractable than plutocrats': We are a greater fraction of the public, and we share a greater alignment of material interests with the rest of the public than plutocrats do. But plutocrats have outsize resources and a cohesiveness born both of commonality of interests and smallness of scale. Socialists proclaim solidarity. Plutocrats practice it, despite their personal rivalries and soap operas of mutual detestation.
Further, plutocrats will always be able to divide us. We are a class defined by pursuing unusual excellences on behalf of those willing and able to pay us. We are the people who perform the actual work of contesting politics on behalf of plutocrats, even where that politics is at variance with our own class interest. (Plutocrats pay handsomely to align our individual interests with their politics.)
We do have a weapon, though. What is it that Trumpists seek to undermine more than any other thing? What is their kryptonite? It the capacity for any form of authority to emerge whose pronouncements resist being bought. The standards and ethics of our professions, imperfect and compromised though they are, remain a constant threat. They are a threat not because we are numerous, but because despite the firehose of shit they flood the zone with, the liberal professions are institutions whose core purpose is to distinguish virtues from falsehoods in each of their many domains, and when we do that well, a broader mass public might find our views persuasive.
During the neoliberal era, we really did let our standards lapse. Yes, the anti-vaccine movement is catastrophic bullshit. But the medical profession really did allow itself to go along with the pretense that oxycontin was a not-so-addictive miracle drug, and that was never a supportable claim. Our vulnerability to the former is not unrelated to the latter. In a variety of ways, over the past few decades, we allowed ourselves to be seduced into a kind of betrayal of the bargain that must bind a democratic society to its experts and professionals:
We, the broad public, generally defer to your authority. You, the professionals, exercise that authority competently, in the interests of the public, in a manner structured to maximize rather than override the scope for individual and democratic choice under the actual objective constraints.
I think that if we want to recover the trust of the broader public, we need to acknowledge that we did succumb to the corruptions inherent in the increasingly unequal society whose emergence we helped to justify. We need to enact institutional changes that would make such failures less likely going forward. (I have ideas.)
Moreover, I think we need to overtly reconceive of ourselves. The connotations of the word "professional" contain a contradiction we must definitively resolve. Do we define ourselves as inheritors of great bodies of knowledge, bound by and stewards of ethical and epistemological standards which have been developed and refined over generations? Or do we define ourselves as people who do stuff for money, careerists essentially?
During the neoliberal era we pretended there was little contradiction in those two roles. That's about a clever an idea as the safety of oxycontin.
I'll end all this a bit pathetically, by proposing the lamest remedy imaginable, a rebranding. But maybe there is some mitigation in a rebranding whose intent is not to persuade customers, but the rebranded providers themselves, that they now are, or ought to be, different. I propose that the class formerly known as professional adopt the word "fiduciary" as its defining characteristic.
We are not in the business of selling our capacity to apply expert skills, to whomever is willing to pay us most, in our own interest. We are in the business of applying expert skills in the public interest, which we have an obligation to put before our own. Professionals, as a class, must be fiduciaries, not (just) to our own clients, but to the democratic public writ large.
That must go beyond mere aspiration. We must reshape our professions so it becomes plausible that our obligations to the public interest override our own interests. That means altering the structure, and ultimately compressing the potential scale, of compensation. Excellent professionals should prosper. There should be a degree of incentive to encourage activity and capability. But when extrinsic incentives become too strong, too "high-powered", they undermine virtue. We need a flatter structure of outcomes, one that does not so heavily penalize pursuit of excellences that are not so rare or novel, like teaching, care work, or the tedious, meticulous aspects of science. Among the most important thing professionals do is help adjudicate complicated tradeoffs. At best, outside incentive providers misunderstand these tradeoffs, and risk accidentally skewing outcomes. More often, incentive providers have parochial stakes in outcomes, and so the skewing is not accidental. We need to dramatically reduce the role of outside incentive providers in shaping how professionals behave.
2026-05-13 @ 06:45 AM EDT