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Liberal capitalism enabled the many to improve their condition and form a robust middle class, but we are reverting to a more stratified society, with concentrated wealth and limited social mobility. A new, higher-tech feudalism is emerging.
Atop the neo-feudal order are Wall Street managers and tech oligarchs who control information pipelines and tools of surveillance. If they correspond to the aristocracy or Second Estate of pre-revolutionary France, today’s First Estate is a secular clerisy who dominate universities, the media, cultural institutions, and nonprofits. They largely, though not always, share a worldview and an agenda with the oligarchs.
Everyone else constitutes the Third Estate. One part is a property-owning middle class—crucial to democracy but now in decline. Lower down is an expanding class of new serfs, including well-educated young people, with little chance of owning property. Cities once offered many avenues for upward mobility, but the world’s major cities are now bifurcated between the super-wealthy and, far below them, gig workers and urban poor. While the clerisy wage war on middle-class suburbia, tech oligarchs expect the masses to have a constricted existence.
The contemporary version of peasant rebellion is a political reaction from both left and right against our new aristocracy. If we recognize how neo-feudalism is developing, we can push back on it without dismantling liberal democracy itself.
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Liberal capitalism enabled the many to improve their condition and form a robust middle class, but we are reverting to a more stratified society, with concentrated wealth and limited social mobility. A new, higher-tech feudalism is emerging.
Atop the neo-feudal order are Wall Street managers and tech oligarchs who control information pipelines and tools of surveillance. If they correspond to the aristocracy or Second Estate of pre-revolutionary France, today’s First Estate is a secular clerisy who dominate universities, the media, cultural institutions, and nonprofits. They largely, though not always, share a worldview and an agenda with the oligarchs.
Everyone else constitutes the Third Estate. One part is a property-owning middle class—crucial to democracy but now in decline. Lower down is an expanding class of new serfs, including well-educated young people, with little chance of owning property. Cities once offered many avenues for upward mobility, but the world’s major cities are now bifurcated between the super-wealthy and, far below them, gig workers and urban poor. While the clerisy wage war on middle-class suburbia, tech oligarchs expect the masses to have a constricted existence.
The contemporary version of peasant rebellion is a political reaction from both left and right against our new aristocracy. If we recognize how neo-feudalism is developing, we can push back on it without dismantling liberal democracy itself.
