A class guide to the 2020 presidential election: Joel Kotkin – Daily News
JK notes that just about every politician claims to be taking the side of the "working class" and "middle class families". He then gets into class distinctions in US society, making analogies to medieval society.
He starts out with the oligarchs, roughly the top 0.01% in wealth distribution. Oligarchs can fund campaigns, political action committees, and media outlets.
Some pro-Democratic oligarchs: the tech sector, Wall Street, Hollywood. They support economically nonthreatening but socially liberal politicians like Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, and in the 2020 race, Joe Biden, Pete Buttigieg, and Kamala Harris.
Trump, of course, also boasts oligarchal supporters from older sectors of the corporate elite — retail chain owners, builders of single-family homes, manufacturing and energy executives. Given the Democratic embrace of the Green New Deal, massive redistribution of income and reversing corporate tax cuts, a lot of old economy money will flow into Dr. Demento’s coffers this time around.
What JK calls the clerisy, our society's professional class:
What analyst Michael Lind calls the “overclass” — made up of academics, the media and well-paid professionals — represents some 15 percent of the American workforce. This group has done better than the traditional middle class, much less the working class, but over the past few decades has lost much ground against the oligarchs, who have reaped the vast majority of the economic gains.
Like the rising professional classes of the gilded age, many in the clerisy are offended by the huge wealth of the oligarchs.
Elizabeth Warren is a favorite of this one.
The yeomanry, as he calls them:
Most of America sees itself as middle class. But there’s a growing gap between the yeomanry — small business and property owners — and the clerisy as well as a vast, expanding class of permanently landless permanent serfs. Most members of the yeomanry work in the private sector; unlike the clerisy, for them government regulation provides not employment, but a burden.
Though they often prefer Republican policies, they also often find Trump abhorrent.
The serfs, as he calls them, even though they are not legally bound to particular employers:
The property-less working class does not tend to vote as much as the yeomanry, but their numbers are growing. Some are déclassé millennials unable to launch full careers or afford to buy houses. Unlike previous generations, they also have been reluctant to start businesses.
Many of the new serf class inhabit the precariat, a modern proletariat lacking the protections of steady work and trade unions. Many participate in the gig economy as Uber drivers, trainers, personal assistants and contract technicians. Most depend on their gigs for their livelihood income, and they are often lowly paid; according to one study nearly half of gig workers in California are under the poverty line.
They are big supporters of Bernie Sanders, and to a lesser extent, EW.
The other is support for such things as reparations, health care for the undocumented, open borders and virtually unlimited right to abortion. These positions may not play well in blue-collar communities, particularly in the Midwest, Great Plains and the south. Whoever wins the Democratic nomination cannot win based only on support from the clerical and oligarchal elites but also by winning over the serf vote, which they now are in danger of squandering.
Proles who dislike such things are proles who often end up voting Republican, including for Trump.
