The New New Class?

Is Trump the vanguard of a new class competitor to the meritocratic mandarins?

For most of human history, the landed aristocracy controlled the most important resource: land, on which you can grow food. The capitalist class first emerged in the late Middle Ages, but truly rose to prominence because physical capital—starting with simple machines like power looms, eventually encompassing insanely complex foundries for making microchips—had eclipsed land to become the most valuable economic resource. Because of this, the bourgeoisie—merchants, financiers and industrialists, large and small—individually and collectively superseded the landed aristocracy to become the dominant class of the 19th and early 20th centuries.

In 1941, James Burnham wrote a book called The Managerial Revolution in which he argued that capitalism in America and globally was changing in a fundamental way with far-reaching consequences, involving the rise of another new class. Industrial capitalism had gotten so complex that the means of production were effectively no longer in the hands of the owners of capital but rather of a new class of professional managers and technical experts who were the real decision-makers about how capital and labor would be deployed. Holding the real power, this class, he felt, would inevitably shunt the owners of capital aside into a secondary position much as the bourgeoisie had done to the landed aristocracy. The most important resource, if we are to credit Burnham’s thesis, was no longer physical capital, but human capital: the expertise needed to manage both physical capital and complex organizations.

Burnham thought this transformation would mean a change in the social organization of society. He didn’t think it mattered that much whether the result was more like socialism, more like state capitalism, or something still more apparently rooted in free enterprise; regardless of the form, the substance would be that these credentialed experts would be the class with real power, and so their culture, ethos and way of looking at the world would come to predominate in society.

If you look at the evolution of the world since Burnham’s time, there’s considerable evidence that his thesis was correct, as well as evidence to the contrary. Even though both systems increasingly relied on credentialed professionals to run large enterprises, the differences between the United States and the Soviet Union turned out to be crucial to the one’s success and the other’s failure and collapse, and that difference does seem to have something to do with the difference between having the state own the means of production and leaving that means largely in private hands. Moreover, not all aspects of human capital are developed primarily through education, and managing existing organizations isn’t the only or even necessarily the best route to wealth and power. So the new class has not completely eclipsed the capitalist class; entrepreneurs like Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk were able to achieve far more by starting their own organizations than could have by jumping through the hoops necessary to get to manage existing ones.

Nonetheless, I think it’s indisputable that academic and professional credentials have become vastly more important to determining one’s social class than they were, say, a century ago. There’s substantial overlap between the mass upper-middle class that has become ever more economically dominant and what has variously been called the meritocrats, the new mandarin class, the professional class, and Burnham’s new class: people whose route to economic security and social status began with academic success, which provided them with the credential to hold professional and/or managerial positions, whether in business, in government, or in the not-for-profit sector. I don’t think it’s hard to make the case either that the culture, ethos and Weltanschauung of this class has increasingly come to dominate society.

Well, I think it may be happening again. I think we may be seeing the rise of another new class, and that right-wing populism is the vehicle through which it is currently rising.

To begin with, the right-wing populist revolt that has roiled countries around the world is substantially a reaction to the meritocratic class, to its ethos and its cultural dominance at least as much as to its governance failures (which are real, but hardly worse, I think, than those of previous generations of elites). The revolt is generally rooted in rural areas that have depopulated in the era of economic globalization, among more traditionally-minded individuals and groups that reject the cosmopolitanism of the new class, and most of all among those who did not pursue academic credentials as the route to prosperity. It is, therefore, generally—and in many ways accurately—seen as a reactionary force, a brake on a future that continues, inexorably, to rise.

As a movement and a tendency, right-wing populism could prove durable even if it is nothing more than a reaction by older classes, an alliance of meritocracy’s “losers” with old-money and capitalist “winners” who resent their displacement by the meritocrats. Declining classes are frequently able to sustain political and cultural power well beyond the point that they are actually dominant. Britain is still a monarchy, after all, and revels in its medieval pageantry centuries after real power—not only economic but cultural power—passed to other, rising classes.

But while Donald Trump, to pick the exemplar of the new right-wing populist leaders, is the tribune of these older classes against the meritocratic mandarins, he isn’t really of those classes. Obviously he isn’t “working class” or uneducated, and he didn’t grow up in rural America but in New York City for heaven’s sake. He was a capitalist, that’s true, but he wasn’t a very good capitalist. If the capitalists were going to pick someone to exemplify their ethos, they would have picked someone else—someone like Mitt Romney or Michael Bloomberg. What Trump excelled at—what he always excelled at—was attracting attention to himself.

Once upon a time, this was a mere character trait. But I wonder now whether it isn’t something more. I wonder whether it isn’t the basis of a new path to success, the foundation of a new class, from whom Trump is the first, but likely not the last, leader to spring.

The phrase “attention economy” is a slippery one; it’s not always clear whether those using it are referring to that portion of the economy devoted to “content” that we “consume” or whether it refers to the economy of our attention itself, the competition for our time, one of the few absolutely scarce resources in existence. If it’s only the former, then its size has clearly grown, but it remains a relatively small percentage of the economy as a whole, and far less important than those microchip foundries. But if we’re talking about the latter, than I think it’s obvious that something fundamental has changed about our society in terms of what percentage of our time is spent either seeking attention for ourselves or giving attention to someone who themselves is seeking it. If we measure it that way, in terms of time spent rather than money spent, it’s clear that we’ve lived through a revolution in human behavior. Time is an inherently scarce resource, and as its value has risen, it has engendered a new competition for control of it, with very high social stakes. That, in turn, could be the foundation for a new class.

Of course, there is money to be made in the attention economy—quite a lot of it, judging by Meta’s market valuation of $1.4 trillion. And new paths to earning a living have indeed opened up that never existed before. But I don’t think that’s really the most important thing. The market capitalization of any particular company or of a whole sector isn’t actually the most important measure of the importance of the attention economy to society, anymore than the enterprise value of our universities is a complete measure of their importance. Nor do I think that all that many people will ultimately try to earn their livings as YouTubers or Instagram influencers (or Substack writers for that matter)—and most who do try will fail. But most people who go to college don’t go into academia either; indeed even lots of people who get professional degrees don’t wind up practicing the profession that they trained for all through their working lives.

The real scope of influence is broader and harder to measure. The process of competition to get into college, and of acculturation once there, shapes people and their approach to life before they even go there. Indeed, it has filtered down to a comprehensive restructuring of primary and secondary education even for the vast majority of people who never will go to college, certainly not to one with competitive admissions. And of course those who do go to college bring the sensibilities thus acquired into settings that have no obvious relationship to the academic environment. Similarly, I suspect the pervasive effect of competition in the attention economy is—inevitably—shaping how people relate to each other and to our working life. Zoomers are growing up with the expectation that to be successful in anything they have to be influencers to a degree, have to actively and persistently attract attention to themselves, and hold it. And they aren’t wrong; many of the old structures through which one used to be able to navigate the world have atrophied or been eliminated entirely. The competition for eyeballs is what has replaced them.

Of course self-promotion has always been an important element of success, and of course people’s attention was always valuable. Hollywood and Madison Avenue were 20th century cultural phenomena; a film like It Should Happen To You from 1954 satirized something already extant, albeit in its infancy compared to what it has become. But that, I think, is the point: the attention economy has become something much more important than it was, because with greater competition attention has become such a scarce and valuable resource. Capitalism didn’t change society overnight; bit by bit it caused a value shift in which all relations in principle should become money relations, everything should in in principle be commodified. Even when some relations resisted commodification, they had to resist because our default assumptions had changed such that commodification was the norm. So, too, with the attention economy. What were once specific industries (entertainment and advertising) are now paradigms for social relations generally, central to how we conceive of ourselves as personalities in the world. It’s the pervasiveness of the change that suggests, to me, the possibility that we may be seeing a rise of yet another new class.

And just as Bill Clinton was our first meritocratic president—the first one whose path to success and power ran from someplace like Hope, Arkansas to Georgetown and Oxford rather than from Hope to the army and the local party machines—Donald Trump is our first attention-economy president, our first influencer president. Not Ronald Reagan; Reagan was an actor, and his acting experience served him well as he became the Great Communicator, but he came up as an actor in the old studio system, served as a union president and worked for General Electric before entering California Republican politics as a party man. He was a natural talent, but he was the product of institutions. Trump isn’t really the product of institutions, but neither, for all that he ran a variety of (mostly unsuccessful) businesses, is he the creator of institutions. He is and always has been first and foremost someone good at drawing attention to himself. Everything else flows from that.

He’s also shown a penchant for advancing other exemplars of his class, whatever other talents they have. JD Vance earned a reputation for seriousness and substance as a senator, but he’s also the first man to ride a bestselling memoir all the way to the Vice Presidency. Elon Musk has proved himself an extraordinary institution-builder in the private sector—but he’s also an incredibly effective attention hound, and I think the latter has more to do with his recent prominence than the former. Pete Hegseth’s primary qualification for his job is that he built a fan base around himself as the scourge of a woke military; RFK Jr. and Tulsi Gabbard are political entrepreneurs not known so much for their achievements as for their talent for drawing the limelight to themselves by throwing rhetorical bombs at those who have power.

Members of the influencer class might prove exemplary foils for the meritocratic class—more so than traditional capitalists or the products of older institutions like unions or the military—because they have a kind of quasi-democratic imprimatur. We’ve all already voted with our eyeballs, after all, to give them a certain kind of power. It’s only natural for more formal titles to accrue to them with time. The left-leaning tilt of the meritocracy may be one reason why the new new class first achieved such prominence on the right rather than on the left, why it was Donald Trump rather than Oprah Winfrey who first blazed this path—though, it’s worth noting that Barack Obama, in many ways a classic meritocrat, was also a man whose first (and real) book was a memoir a meditation on his personal destiny; a man who, while still serving in the Illinois legislature, parlayed a single (admittedly great) speech first into the U.S. Senate and rapidly thereafter the presidency; and a man who built his own parallel campaign infrastructure outside of the party and therefore failed to build up his party’s institutional strength in the way that he built up his own popularity. Obama’s formal power came from being president, but his informal power as well as his success in achieving that office owed much to his being a self-made brand, and he knew it.

Trump really is the thing itself in a way that nobody before him has been, though. I hope he’s not a harbinger, because whatever the faults of the meritocratic class (and they are many), I think the talents of a world-class influencer are even less well-suited to the needs of the state. “Look at me!” is not a great principle of governance. I’m not sure what the talents of an influencer are well-suited to other than winning the attention economy game, but as that game gets more and more central to the way we live our lives, its winners will not only have a leg up in achieving more formal kinds of power and status, we will increasingly believe they deserve them. Even once we’ve seen the last of Trump, I doubt we’ll have seen the last of his class.