In the autumn of 9AD, three Roman legions were marching through Teutoburg Forest in Germania when they suddenly came under ambush. Well over 15,000 Roman soldiers were killed in an attack led by a Germanic prince named Arminius, a man who went from being a Roman hostage to serving in the Roman Legions to obtaining a Roman citizenship and commanding Roman auxiliary forces. In the aftermath of Teutoburg, the Roman Empire’s expansion into Germania was permanently halted at the banks of the Rhine River, making the battle one of the most historically decisive in European history.
Despite his promising prospects rising through the ranks of Roman society, Arminius chose to throw away his career among the ‘sophisticated’ Romans and instead focus on liberating his fellow Germanic ‘barbarians’ from subjugation by their supposed betters. By abandoning his Roman citizenship and siding with the barbarians, Arminius was arguably the first class traitor (at least of the good kind) in recorded history.
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While many affluent liberals/leftists today imagine themselves to be on the side of the working classes, there are several key distinctions between a genuine class traitor and your garden variety Limousine Liberal/Champagne Socialist/Brownstone Bolshevik. The first is sacrificing one’s own personal place on the social ladder; in the aftermath of Teutoburg, Arminius couldn’t exactly show his face around Rome. The second is attunement to what the lower classes actually desire, as opposed to some fantasy projection of what the rich/overeducated would prefer the lower classes to desire. As Ruy Teixeira noted in his article “To Beat the Intersectional Left, We Need More Class Traitors!” that largely inspired this piece:
It is not the working class that sees the police as an unnecessary evil and opposes rigorous enforcement of the law for public safety and public order.
It is not the working class that believes public consumption of hard drugs should be tolerated, with intervention limited to reviving addicts when they overdose.
It is not the working class that believes many crimes like shoplifting should be decriminalized because punishing the perpetrators would have “disparate impact”.
It is not the working class that believes you should never refer to illegal immigrants as “illegal” and that border security is somehow a racist idea.
It is not the working class that believes an overwhelming surge of migrants at the southern border should be accommodated with asylum claims, parole arrangements, and release into urban areas around the country.
It is not the working class that believes competitive admissions and job placements should be allocated on the basis of race (“equity”) not merit.
It is not the working class that views objective tests as fundamentally flawed if they show racial disparities in achievement.
It is not the working class that believes America is a structurally racist, white supremacist society.
It is not the working class that sees patriotism as a dirty word and the history of the United States as a bleak landscape of racism and oppression.
It is not the working class that thinks sex is “assigned at birth” and can be changed by self-conception, rather than being an objective, biological reality.
It is not the working class that thinks it’s a great idea to police the language people use for hidden “microaggressions” and bias against the “marginalized”.
And it is definitely not the working class that believes in “decolonize everything” and manages to see murderous thugs like Hamas as righteous liberators of a subaltern people.
Class conflict is an idea traditionally associated with Marxism, however over the past century there have been a multitude of thinkers who noticed that Marxist class categories were hopelessly outdated in modern economies. Modern politics have similarly outgrown the class-based assumptions of yesteryear; left-wing parties around the world have swapped out their formerly working class voter base for a high-income, highly-educated professional worker base. The Democrats in the US, the Liberal Party in Canada, the Labour Party in both Britain and Australia, and pretty much every other mainstream left-wing political party in the developed world have all become parties run by the highly educated, for the highly educated.
As modern media has made a similar turn from a salt-of-the-earth profession to the domain of silver-spoon radical-chic activists, there’s been relatively little mainstream discussion of today’s new class dynamics. Instead we have a lot of fragmented analysis happening around the margins of our institutions.
For example, the while notion of the “knowledge economy” has become a mainstream truism, relatively little discussion has been given to how it has affected modern political coalitions, as Musa al-Gharbi summarizes (also from The Liberal Patriot; a Substack I highly recommend):
The biggest divide in American politics at present is not along the lines of socioeconomic status (SES), nor educational attainment, nor area type (urban, suburban, small town, rural), nor sex and gender—although these factors all serve as important proxies for the distinction that matters most. The key schism that lies at the heart of dysfunction within the Democratic Party and the U.S. political system more broadly is between professionals associated with “knowledge economy” industries and those who feel themselves to be the “losers” in the knowledge economy—including growing numbers of working-class and non-white voters.
This growing class schism also extends outside the US; Thomas Piketty noted similar trends in Britain and France in his analysis of the Brahmin Left:
Analysing post-electoral survey data from national elections of the three countries during 1948-2017, he shows that the voter base for socialist-labour-democratic or ‘left’ parties has, over time, shifted from lower education and lower income voters, to higher educated voters…Piketty references the Indian caste system to classify this new ‘multiple-elite party system’ as the Brahmin left (representing the intellectual elite) and the merchant right (representing the business elite). In this new version of the left, low education and low income voters feel abandoned, contributing to populism’s growth.
Consensus around the growing importance of the Knowledge Economy has also greatly changed many assumptions about the role of the traditional blue-collar working class in society, as a writer at Working Class Perspectives noted:
“The idea that the knowledge economy has replaced the outmoded industrial economy suggests that blue-collar workers are stuck in the past or simply irrelevant. A knowledge economy implies that those with less education are less valuable and therefore less deserving of decent wages, benefits, or good working conditions. Worse, this notion blames workers for making poor choices. In the knowledge economy, if you don’t go to school, then it’s your fault that you can’t get a good job. Of course, those who do go to college aren’t necessarily guaranteed better jobs.”
“Middle-class youths strive for a college degree to ascend the social ladder. But because the true elites are always a small group, an excess of college graduates saturates the job market with mid-level managers. As these managers fight for scarce spots at the top, intra-elite jockeying becomes more fierce. Tests of ideological purity become a way of winnowing the competition. Those most insecure in their elite status do the most virtue signaling, and punch down on the “unenlightened” lower white classes as a way of confirming their rank. Ultimately, these people end up filling the ever-increasing number of mid-level positions in government, media, and universities.”
What to Call the New Upper Class
Various writers made attempts in the 20th century to provide updated class distinctions to reflect the ongoing evolution of developed economies. In 1941, ex-Marxist James Burnham wrote about a newly emergent class that was neither owner nor worker, the Managerial Elite:
Whereas in entrepreneurial capitalism the owners are the managers, in managerialism the owners rely upon the technical expertise of the managers and over time cede to the managers effective control of the economy. The most obvious illustration of this trend is the gradual withdrawal of the large bourgeois owners from active business management, to the point where the major corporations are nominally owned by passive shareholders but actually controlled by technically trained and credentialed professionals who own a trivial percentage of stock.
Most unionbusting business tactics, for example, are not carried out by the owners of large companies, but by a bunch of MBA graduates employed in middle-to-upper management at those companies (I’ll never forget the corporate director I once worked for shortly before Covid, who openly referred to himself as ‘woke’ while also schooling me on how to set up a corporate structure that best obstructs unionization attempts in the workforce). So while those managers may still at the end of the day be working for a paycheque, categorizing unionbusting MBA grads as “workers” doesn’t really capture the dynamics in play. As noted above, in 21st century politics the rank-and-file union members increasingly make up the populist electoral base while the MBA-educated managers are now the liberal base.
In 1977, leftie professors John and Barbara Ehrenreich expanded on Burnham’s work and coined the term “Professional-Managerial Class”, who justify their outsized power in society through relentless moralizing. The term “PMC” caught on more than Managerial Elite ever did; as one recent example in Compact shows:
Whereas once we lived under bourgeois rule, we now live under PMC management. This explains much of the response to Covid. The “email-job caste” was able to greatly improve its work conditions—mainly in terms of increased “flexibility” and a greater freedom to work from home. At the same time, Covid became a pretext for suppressing working-class dissent. Populist movements like Brexit and Trumpism were depicted as threats to public health. Anti-lockdown protests were dismissed as “superspreader events,” while causes that the PMC favored politically, such as BLM protests, were endorsed as necessary for saving lives.
Personally, I prefer Laptop Class to email-job caste:
The point about the new upper class being totally disconnected from the logistical realities of how our economies and societies work was explored in much more detail by NS Lyons in his seminal analysis of the Freedom Convoy. Lyons, riffing on Christopher Lasch’s The Revolt of the Elites, labeled our class divide as the “Physicals”, who have jobs delivering tangible goods and services, vs. the “Virtuals” who have careers organizing intangibles such as ‘expertise’ and ‘social justice”.
“The first [Physicals] is a class that has been a part of human civilization for a really long time. These are the people who work primarily in the real, physical world. Maybe they work directly with their hands, like a carpenter, or a mechanic, or a farmer. Or maybe they are only a step away: they own or manage a business where they organize and direct employees who work with their hands, and buy or sell or move things around in the real world. Like a transport logistics company, maybe. This class necessarily works in a physical location, or they own or operate physical assets that are central to their trade.
The second class [Virtuals] is different. It is, relatively speaking, a new civilizational innovation (at least in numbering more than a handful of people)…They don’t interact much with the physical world directly; they are handlers of knowledge…neither the inputs nor outputs of their role has any direct relationship with or impact on the physical world.
[The Virtuals] are informational middlemen. This class can therefore do their job almost entirely from a laptop, by email or a virtual Zoom meeting, and has recently realized they don’t even need to be sitting in an office cubicle while they do it.
There is an obvious irony here in the fact that ostensibly left-wing parties, like Trudeau’s Liberals, have everywhere turned viciously on the working class – an observation that is now widespread, as far as I can tell thanks mainly to the satirists at the Babylon Bee – but this is merely the culmination of a long, inevitable political realignment that’s occured across the West as the “left” became the party of the Virtuals, the socialist revolution became a revolution against fixed reality, and the Physicals became the backwards, reactionary others standing in the way of Progress.”
Across the pond, David Goodhart used the terms “Somewheres vs. Anywheres” to describe a “Somewheres” British working class with strong economic and social roots in a particular geographic community, vs. an “Anywheres” cosmopolitan upper class that feels more socioeconomically comfortable relocating between big cities across different regions/countries than they ever would moving to a small town near where they grew up. The Somewheres/Anywheres framework lines up fairly closely with the populist framework of Patriots/Globalists, with Globalists painted as big-city liberals who design their politics to pander to fellow big-city liberals of other countries, with little regard for the needs or wants of their salt-of-the-earth fellow countrymen. World Economic Forum retreats in Davos have been describedat length as a caucusing of globalists from around the world, with Klaus Schwab holding the unofficial title of “capo di tutti capi of the global expert class”.
Other honourable mentions abound for how to label the new upper class, from Coastal/Laurentian Elites to Yuppies to Virtue Hoarders. For the sake of simplicity, throughout the rest of this piece I’ll refer to 21st century class distinctions as follows:
The Shareholder Class. The billionaires and centimillionaires. Numerically insignificant for electoral purposes, but wielding outsized economic power.
The Laptop Class. Affluent but not necessarily wealthy; they manage and oversee the bureaucracies/corporations/foundations owned by the Shareholder Class. A politically dominant plurality in major cities across developed countries, but nowhere near a national majority in any country. They do however have hegemonic control over nearly all major institutions and sites of cultural production.
The Physical Class. They don’t have the luxury of working from home, and don’t hold your breath for them to be able to name 70 different genders, but they’re the reason modern societies are still able to function. They’re the largest voting demographic by class, though they typically don’t vote as a single bloc for various reasons such as urban/rural divides.
The Welfare Class. Chronically unemployed for various reasons, they are entirely dependent on the state (or else live off petty crime) and have skyhigh rates of substance abuse. Voter turnout is generally low to nonexistent.
Why the Laptop Class is….Problematic
The Laptop Class prefers to live deep in an informational bubble, where anyone who offends their sensibilities gets exiled to the hinterlands of conservative and/or alternative media. One of the exiled, Charles Murray, assessed that the most impenetrable epistemic bubbles are those of liberal strongholds:
“It's not just any old bubble that I'm interested in, but the bubble in which too many members of the new upper class live. The reason their bubble poses problems whereas the bubble in an ethnically homogeneous small town does not is an asymmetry of power. The people in ethnically homogeneous small towns don't affect the lives of the new upper class. The new upper class pervasively affects the lives of all Americans everywhere, through their effects on the nation's politics, economy, and culture.”
Within the Laptop Class bubble, Luxury Belief grandstanding leads to faddish but idiotic political movements that get adopted into public policy, like:
The list goes on. Because journalism is now overwhelmingly a Laptop Class profession, whenever Physical Class backlash flares up, it invariably gets handwaved away as racism.
A recent study of Americans with postgraduate degrees and six-figure incomes living in large cities found a “Grand Canyon-sized chasm” between Laptop Class political views vs. Physical Class political views, as Rob Henderson summarized:
Among the elite, the vast majority (74%) say their finances are improving, compared with just 20% of ordinary voters. The share is 88% among Ivy plus graduates.
Elites have a far more favorable view of journalists (79%) than non-elites (44%).
91% of Ivy graduates, 78% of elites overall, and just 49% of ordinary voters have a favorable view of lawyers.
86% of Ivy graduates, 67% of elites, and only 28% of non-elites have a favorable view of members of congress.
Among the elite, President Biden has an 84% approval rating, roughly twice as high as among the general public.
70% of Ivy grads, 55% of elites, and just 22% of non-elites are in favor of banning non-essential air travel “to fight climate change.”
The majority of Ivy graduates and elites are also in favor of banning private air conditioning, gas powered cars, gas stoves, and SUVs “to fight climate change.”
Finally, the vast majority of elites say they’d prefer a political candidate who said teachers and educational professionals, rather than parents, should decide what children are taught.
Roughly half (47%) of Laptop Class respondents in the study agreed that “society has too much individual freedom”, compared with just 16% of registered voters. The original report authors concluded by saying:
“Given the influence they wield, the overall views of the Elites represent an existential threat to America’s founding ideals of freedom, equality, and self-governance.”
The Laptop Class really is quite comfortable stripping away political and economic freedom in the pursuit of utopian goals (though they typically exempt themselves from any such restrictions, a topic NS Lyons has also covered quite well). Trumpian populists promising to save their countries from the tyranny of the elite is not, as they say, a nothingburger. As Postcards from Barsoom put it:
That the Regime is waging war against its own subject population is not metaphorical…elite opinion is firmly in favour of an across-the-board 85% reduction in the standard of living of Western countries – meaning you will not fly, you will not eat meat, you will not heat your home, you will not own your home, you will not buy new clothes, you will not own cars. This is indistinguishable from the effect of losing a major war; in fact, the consequences of defeat in war are not usually so dire.
(to be fair, I have tried grasshoppers some years ago and I recall them as being pretty good)
Book Learnin’ vs. Common Sense
Part of what makes the woke echo chamber so impermeable is the way the Laptop Class have embraced runaway credentialism to justify why they deserve to rule over the Physical Class and Welfare Class, the way Roman patricians ruled over both the plebians and the provinces. While there is some merit to relying on expertise…
During Covid mania in particular, “Trust the Experts™” became a self-serving article of faith for the overeducated Laptop Class, as a way to sideline Physical Class pushback on destructive policies like mass school closures. To make matters worse, the Laptop Class has become proficient at suppressing speech they disagree with by labeling it misinformation and/or hate speech, which naturally only a suitably credentialed Expert™ can properly identify.
It’s not a coincidence that economic lockdowns disproportionately affected Physical Class jobs like running restaurants; government bureaucrats never saw a dime of lost income (in fact they got a new perk of working from home). Similarly, Defund the Police was a movement supported by ivory tower progressives who lived in low-crime gated communities and/or had the means to hire private security. Where the Laptop Class believes that credentialism is the sole path to wisdom, the Physical Class gives much greater weight to what Nassim Taleb calls Skin In The Game. What makes the pilots in the New Yorker cartoon trustworthy isn’t just that they went to flight school, but also that they’re onboard the same plane as the passengers, so if the plane crashes the pilots die too.
“It is hard to imagine a more stupid or more dangerous way of making decisions than by putting those decisions in the hands of people who pay no price for being wrong” - Thomas Sowell
Someone who stands to actually lose their income in a pandemic lockdown has a much more visceral understanding of the downsides involved than those aforementioned sheltered bureaucrats, as Francis Collins, Director of the National Institute of Health, belatedly admitted. Parents in particular have far more skin in the game when it comes to the longterm wellbeing of their own children than do schoolteachers, who cycle through a new crop of students each year, or Lorenz’ “Education Experts™” for whom actual flesh-and-blood children are largely an abstraction. When Matt Taibbi reported on the parental backlash to woke school policies in Loudoun, Virginia, he also commented on the gubernatorial race, saying:
“When [Terry] McAuliffe stood up in a debate and said, “I don’t think parents should be telling schools what to teach” [it was] the political equivalent of using a toe to shoot your face off with a shotgun”.
When progressives sideline parents on the basis of insufficient credentials, they drive those parents into the welcoming arms of populism.
To summarize, the Laptop Class does not have the proverbial Working Man’s best interests at heart, and they have weaponized credentialism to politically marginalize the Physical Class, cut them out of decisionmaking, and censor their speech. Where the Laptop Class claims nobody is equipped to discern male from female without a PhD in biology, the Physical Class is comfortable saying “I’m not a vet but I know what a dog is”.
The Laptop Class has great pretensions when it comes to being “On the Right Side of History”, but really they’re on their own side and nobody else’s. Teixeira is on the mark when he says the world needs more traitors from the ranks of the Laptop Class.
What it Takes to be a Laptop Class Traitor
If you have a university education and a managerial career, but your nagging conscience and/or sense of self-preservation compels you to side with the Physical Class, there are a few things you need to know about throwing your lot in with the masses of the Great Unwoke. First, you will be called many nasty names by your erstwhile Laptop Class peers. Racist, fascist, transphobe, white supremacist, far-right extremist, misogynist, conspiracy theorist, Nazi, sexist, science-denier, we all know the list at this point. Ironically, the same people calling you a Nazi for questioning entrenched Laptop Class interests will also accuse you of being “divisive”.
More than anything else, you will be called a populist, something that until recently was viewed as a bipartisan phenomemon but has now been declared right-coded and a Threat to Democracy by, you guessed it, self-serving Laptop Class Experts™.
Openly expressing heterodox opinions doesn’t just require a thick skin for being smeared as an ‘extremist’ (even when you have majority public opinion on your side). It also requires a career plan that doesn’t rely on a paycheque from any mainstream institutions. If you side against Luxury Beliefs, no matter how faddish, you will be unpersoned at any university campus, media outlet, Fortune 500 Company, Hollywood studio, museum, or anywhere else claimed as a Safe Space for the Laptop Class. If you’re seriously considering going against the grain of elite virtue-signaling, you have to be prepared to chart a financial course through the wilderness (e.g. by leaving the New York Times to publish a Substack).
Fortunately, the most unaffordable places to live in western democracies are the coastal/Laurentian bastions of the Laptop Class. Whether driven by people fleeing cancel culture and lawlessness, or just seeking affordability, the last few years have seen a significant exodus from overpriced urban Laptop Class strongholds. Anyone considering becoming a Laptop Class traitor would be wise to jump on that particular migratory bandwagon.
The less you care about rubbing shoulders with fellow highly-educated elites, the easier it is to live somewhere affordable. Decamping from urban centers like New York, London, Toronto, etc. in favour of lower-priced heartland cities/towns goes a long way towards achieving financial security without having to falsify preferences for the sake of an elitist career.
Besides affordability, decamping to the Heartland also makes it much easier to maintain a social and professional circle that includes members of the Physical Class. Personally, I cut my teeth professionally by applying straight out of college to work at a major international conglomerate (think multi-billion dollar annual revenues with hundreds of offices in well over 100 countries around the world), and worked my way up to a comfortable white-collar middle management role. I’m glad I got the experience I did, but I’m also glad I parlayed that experience into a career working at various small-to-midcap companies over the years, where I worked very closely with people who actually build stuff. Years of proximity to the Physicals has been both eyeopening and rewarding; I quickly learned I’d rather have an office on the other side of the wall from a welding shop than work in a glittering office tower surrounded by “angels jostling to out-angel one another”.
So while I wouldn’t necessarily recommend severing all ties with large institutions, anyone considering becoming a Laptop Class Traitor should expect their affiliations with those institutions to come with an expiration date once it becomes known you hold what today’s elites consider the ‘wrong’ politics. Rather than waiting around to be ignominiously cancelled, you’re better off being proactive and seeking professional opportunities that are both geographically and economically insulated from elite opinion. Getting out of the woke echo chamber and interacting directly with the Physicals also provides a bulwark against creeping paternalism in your own political views.
While it may seem daunting for highly-educated professionals to abandon career prospects at elite institutions, it’s likely safer in the long run to flee the sinking ships early rather than being the last one looking for a lifeboat. Elite aspirants in the current era are like wannabe Roman patricians - trying to asskiss their way into what is mostly a closed (and slowly crumbling) system. Most who try to climb the ladder and reach the upper echelons of institutional success will fail to get past the assorted barriers to entry - the realities of Elite Overproduction mean the odds will never be in your favour no matter how much you sell your soul to the Luxury Belief moralism that is wokeness. As George Carlin put it “It’s a big club and you ain’t in it.”
The name I chose for this Substack reflects my belief that there’s more dignity and integrity in being a proud barbarian than a wannabe patrician. The first step towards truly being on the right side of history is not giving a shit whether the Ivy League crowd thinks you’re uncouth. Who knows, you may even learn to enjoy seeing Laptop Class pearl-clutchers get triggered by your newfound barbarian swagger.
One final tip for being a Laptop Class traitor; you can’t let yourself be bogged down by cultural or nostalgic ties to any one political party. Most political parties default to caring more about the priorities of their donors and staffers than their voters, so which party has a better platform for the Physical Class can and does vary from election to election. As Batya Ungar-Sargon recently put it:
When it comes to the questions of politics and policy, their [Physical Class] opinions are a lot less diverse than I was expecting…neither political party represents these positions that unify most Americans. The Democrats support taxing corporations and expanding healthcare, while also supporting the medical transition of teenagers, the expansion of the [chronically exploited] welfare state, and an open-border policy that allows an unlimited supply of low-wage competition to enter the country. The Republicans want to restrict immigration and limit [runaway] welfare, while also supporting corporations and lowering taxes on the rich—and its representatives never utter the words universal healthcare except as a slur.
Given the circumstances, never let anyone give you shit about being a swing voter.
Hope for the Future
At a recent Munk Debate on the subject of whether or not mainstream media was still trustworthy as an institution, Malcom Gladwell argued the affirmative by pulling out two of the most devastating of smear accusations known to the Laptop Class - first that he was debating RACISTS, and then that those questioning the trustworthiness of mainstream media “sounded like CONSPIRACY THEORISTS!”. No doubt expecting the opposition to quake in their boots at being tarred with these most dreaded of accusations, instead Douglas Murray and Matt Taibbi stood their ground….and won the biggest blowout in Munk history. As Matt Taibbi recapped:
The Munk audience was solidly upscale-Toronto-intellectual, an MSNBC producer’s wet dream and as close to a pure home crowd as “mainstream media” could have. We won anyway. Voters moved from 48-52% against to 67-33% for, a 39% shift that was the biggest in the history of the event.
It felt like a watershed moment where, as ex-CBC journo Tara Henley recapped, “attendees were able to witness public trust being eroded in real time”. Douglas Murray recapped the way Trudeau attacked the Trucker Convoy with “All the modern excommunications. They were Nazis. They were white supremacists. They were antisemites. They were probably homophobes. They were misogynists. They were probably transphobes. Et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. He did all of the things you do in the modern political age if you just want to defenestrate someone who is awkward to you.” When Malcolm Gladwell attempted to run the same playbook on stage, it backfired spectacularly.
What’s more, while the Laptop Class still controls culture and media, it’s becoming increasingly clear that the Physical Class holds functional veto power over the modern economy, as Malcom Kyeyune has pointed out:
“Covid revealed something very important about our societies: They are fantastically vulnerable to even tiny and temporary disruptions, especially when it comes to the circulatory systems of commodities, goods, transport, and services”
“Because our systems are now so fragile, even tiny groups of workers can cause serious damage to the smooth functioning of the economy, as long as they are located in strategic sectors.”
“Logistical chaos—at airports, rail junctions, and ports—is an indicator of the massive veto power accrued by people whose wage labor is necessary to prevent chaos. It is only a matter of time before angry workers exercise that power on a grander scale.”
During the height of the Canadian Trucker/Freedom Convoy, Laurentian Laptop Class Leftists reacted to working class protests on their doorsteps like they were witnessing barbarians sacking Rome, which in a metaphorical sense I suppose is arguably what happened. The protests saw the most draconian Covid restrictions hastily rolled back at both the federal and provincial level, in addition to planned fertilizer caps for the agricultural sector walked back to being “non-binding” and “aspirational”. In terms of policy accomplishments, the protests were highly successful.
While the farmers of each country have specific national issues galvanizing them, they are united – and consciously so – by their opposition to EU policies intended to dramatically reduce agricultural productivity ‘for the climate’. As with the Canadian truckers, Regime media has of course characterized the farmers as far-right blood-and-soil ethnonationalists, however this has had no effect. Recently the EU has been crying uncle (or at least pretending to) on various issues – pesticide bans, policy goals aimed at reducing meat consumption, and so on – in a desperate attempt to make the pain stop (Narrator: the pain didn’t stop).
Getting debanked can definitely mess up your day ... but use of this tactic on a large scale has its own destabilizing effects. The account freezes used against the Canadian truckers (which, notably, did not stop the convoy) were lifted after a few days, because foreign investors were getting spooked and pulling their money out at a rate that was threatening to cascade into a bank run.
Pervasivelabourshortages from mass retirement of Baby Boomers will further strengthen worker bargaining power for the foreseeable future, and Physical Class workers, as we learned during Covid, are much more ‘essential’ than Laptop Class workers.
In terms of electoral politics, Laptop Class oriented political parties are on the backfoot in the US, in Canada, prettymuchallacrosstheEU, in Australia and in New Zealand. Turns out it’s tough to win elections while writing off the entire Physical Class as deplorable bigots who should just Trust The Experts™ over their own lying eyes.
Populism is ascendant. The Barbarians are at the gates. The coming years will only make it more clear that the woke Laptop Class left is a paper tiger. That doesn’t mean life is going to get better necessarily (as the entire western world has a giant debt bomb to look forward to)…
But it does mean that the years of political power being consolidated within the Laptop Class are coming to an end, and the Physical Class is about to see a resurgence of their political and economic importance. Don’t let yourself be caught on the wrong side of the class struggle in the approaching Teutoberg-esque moment of reckoning.
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I grew up with Physical friends and family. I was one of the only one of my high school friends to get a degree, which I paid for myself after 4 years active duty Army.
I’ve always felt a distance between myself and my laptop class colleagues who have tenuous to non-existent contact with Physicals outside of requesting/demanding services.
I’m still friends with my high school buddies. After years of living abroad and in other states, I chose to raise my family near my hometown so I could keep this support network of friends who I know will be there for me.
Also, having buddies who have real world skills comes in handy. You can’t really call your laptop class colleagues when you need help with anything non-digital.
I grew up with Physical friends and family. I was one of the only one of my high school friends to get a degree, which I paid for myself after 4 years active duty Army.
I’ve always felt a distance between myself and my laptop class colleagues who have tenuous to non-existent contact with Physicals outside of requesting/demanding services.
I’m still friends with my high school buddies. After years of living abroad and in other states, I chose to raise my family near my hometown so I could keep this support network of friends who I know will be there for me.
Also, having buddies who have real world skills comes in handy. You can’t really call your laptop class colleagues when you need help with anything non-digital.
Fantastic breakdown of the situation. The runaway credentialism and expert worship are especially harmful.