Kenneth Anderson at the Volokh Conspiracy on The Fragmenting of the New Class Elites, or, Downward Mobility. Christopher Lasch, virtueocracy, downward mobility — what people who write about post 1861 Italian history call the intellectual proletariat. You know, people with university degrees in law and philosophy who can’t find work. Having read about that sort of problem (especially in the Italian mezzogiorno — Naples has always had the largest university in the peninsula, and a low employment rate) has often made me wonder about the goal of university education for all.
The problem the New Class faces at this point is the psychological and social self-perceptions of a status group that is alienated (as we marxists say) from traditional labor by its semi-privileged upbringing. It is, for the moment, insistent not just on white-collar work as its birthright and unable to conceive of much else. It does not celebrate the dignity of labor; it conceived of itself as existing to regulate labor. So it has purified itself to the point that not just any white-collar work will do. It has to be, as Michelle Obama instructed people in what now has to be seen as another era, virtuous non-profit or government work. Those attitudes are changing, but only slowly; the university pipelines are still full of people who cannot imagine themselves in any other kind of work, unless it means working for Apple or Google. … It’s not populism versus the bankers so much as internecine warfare between two tiers of elites.
A lot of our students want to work for non-profits. They don’t even talk much about government work (though Teach For America and the Peace Corps certainly are). Luckily for the survival of the self-perpetuating institution lots of them want to become members of the 1%, too.
