how the Democrat elite undermined the system

1486721714812Thomas Frank at the Australian Financial Review:

We always overlook the class interests of professionals because we have trouble thinking of professionals as a "class" in the first place. Still, if we want to understand the problems of liberalism, this is where we must look: at the assumptions and collective interests of professionals, the Democratic Party's favourite constituency.

With the rise of the post-industrial economy in the last few decades, the range of professionals has exploded. To use the voguish term, these are "knowledge workers", and many of them don't fit easily into the old framework.In addition to doctors, lawyers, the clergy, architects and engineers, the category includes economists, experts in international development, political scientists, managers, financial planners, computer programmers, aerospace designers …The top ranks of the professions are made up of highly affluent people.

The Democratic Party has other constituencies to be sure – minorities, women, and the young, for example, the other pieces of what they call the "coalition of the ascendant" – but professionals are the ones whose technocratic outlook tends to prevail. It is their tastes that are celebrated by liberal newspapers and it is their particular way of regarding the world that is taken for granted by liberals as being objectively true. Professionals dominate liberalism and the Democratic Party in the same way that Ivy Leaguers and professionals dominated the Obama cabinet (which might, by itself, guarantee closed minds and ideological uniformity).

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