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My theory of how society works is that it depends on a competent ruling elite, but there are problems of ossification and egalitarianism, with ossification leading to the rise of egalitarianism. I'm going to make up illustrative numbers. The ruling elite is 10% of the population. Elites don't breed true, but the apple doesn't fall far from the tree. Half the next generation of ruling elite are the children of the current ruling elite. So that is 5% accounted for. Where do the other 5% come from?
One in eighteen of the children of hoi polloi is talented. 1/18 of 90% = 5%. They are the scholarship boys, talent spotted, educated in grammar schools and inducted into the ruling elite.
My theory of how society works generates two opposing theories of how society fails. First ossification or the protection of the failson. Half the children of the ruling elite are downwardly mobile. As time passes the elite fail to change the heritability of the genetics, but they do change society to save their failchildren from social descent. The second generation of elite are 5% true elite, 5% ordinary, while the scholarship boys are locked out of upward mobility. The third generation of elite are 2.7% true elite 7.2% ordinary. (I'm assuming that the child of a failson has the usual 1/18 chance of being talented). Degeneration continues 1.8% elite, 8.2% ordinary; 1.35% elite, 8.65% ordinary. The asymptote is that the ossified elite regress to the mean and end up looking like the original society. The original society was 10% elite, 90% ordinary. Thus the end state of the ossified elite is 1% true elite 9% ordinary. Their badly governed society also has its hoi polloi. That 90% of the population spilts 9% true elite talent, locked out by the loss of social mobility and 81% ordinary. This either ends in revolution as the 9% fight for their place in society, or in collapse, because 1% true elite isn't enough talent to keep society functioning.
Second, egalitarianism. Meritocracy gets rejected. I like the way that @cjet79 puts it here "A job is work to be done" versus "A job is a ceremonial position". Jobs get redistributed to ensure fairness, ending the elites' lock on the best jobs. The 10% of prestige jobs get filled, effectively at random. 1% true elite, 9% ordinary people. There are too few talented people in the top jobs leading to collapse. It could be worse. Maybe, post-revolution the children of the previous elite are locked out of the top jobs. Of the 10% filling the top jobs, only 1 in 18 is talented = 0.55%. That is less than the 1% of a completely ossified society. Dysfunction and collapse come quickly.
The two tendencies, ossification and egalitarianism play off each other. In a partially ossified society, hoi polloi look at the elite, and compare the official story with what they see. Officially a job is work to be done and the 10% top jobs are filled on merit. But many of the elite are ordinary, and their jobs are ceremonial (except that sometimes a failson has a real job that he lacks the skill for, which is even worse). As the generations turn and ossification gets worse, every-one can see that many top jobs are ceremonial. Ordinary people resent that their children are largely locked out of these top jobs. Meritocracy is seen to be a sham for two reasons. Society is functioning poorly (due too little genuine talent in the ossified elite) which undermines the official position that jobs are given to the best candidates. Some jobs are all to obviously ceremonial and merit doesn't even apply. This boosts belief in egalitarianism until DEI seems reasonable.
I think this is happening.
Consider the book Nineteen Eighty-Four. Orwell proposed a theory of history where, from time to time, the middle class overthrows the upper class with the help of the proletariat.
I think there are some similarities to the current situation. 2024 can be seen as a revolution of the middle class tech elite against the upper class deep state. Each side employs its own proletarian armies. The tech elite has rural whites. The deep state has urban blacks and Hispanics. But the lower class armies are largely orthogonal to the intra-elite struggle.
The current upper class traces its status back to WWII. They are now in their third and fourth generation. They are tired, corrupt, and not that bright.
I think the new challengers win for the simple reason that they are far more intelligent and qualified.
The "Middle" in Emmanuel Goldstein's Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism isn't the middle class - it is a potential counter-elite (like the Bolsheviks and their base in the organised working class and the army). Goldstein explicitly says that there is no Middle in Oceania because the regime has successfully prevented a Middle arising - my reading is that Orwell intended it to be obvious that the Outer Party are part of the Low who are fake-promoted in order to compromise them sufficiently to allow them to do particular kinds of dirty work for the regime (such as Winston Smith's day job falsifying history). To use the language of Ribbonfarm's Gervais Principle, the Outer Party in general and Winston Smith in particular (Julia slightly less so) are Clueless.
The tech right isn't the middle-class - it's a relatively small number of billionaires with massively powerful platforms. As Orwell/Goldstein points out, they are a counter-elite, a true Middle who threaten the High. And its story is consistent with one of the two ways of a Middle appearing that Orwell/Goldstein point out - a Middle can split off from the High if a faction of the elite become disgruntled, or from the Low if a newly important class is excluded from power. Musk and Andreesen were absolutely part of the elite in 2015 - we can argue about why they became disgruntled enough to join a movement throwing rocks at the system they had done so well out of, but they clearly did.
The link between Orwell's Middle and the middle class is that the social changes driven by the Industrial Revolution means that there are true Middles arising from the Low consistently from the 18th to the 20th centuries which the High need to co-opt to stay in power. This isn't just the classical merchant bourgeoisie - in many ways it is the class of educated technicians like artillery officer Napoleon Bonaparte that is more dangerous (this is the group which right-populists call the PMC and which Richard Hanania calls elite human capital). Orwell writes about this class as a potential tool to overthrow both the traditional elite and the merchant bourgeoisie in the context of WW2 in The Lion and the Unicorn
Possible essay prompt for someone good at wrangling an LLM: "Compare and contrast how Napoleon Bonaparte and Elon Musk parlayed the ability to land a large rocket on a small target into supreme political power."
Yes, "counter-elite" is a better description than "middle class" in what I wrote.
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I would say it's the upper (propertied) class + the proletariat (workers) overthrowing the middle class and the underclass. Wokism is the religion of HR and managers and lawyers, not business owners or brick layers. But that may be a British understanding of class.
Business owners may be rich, but they are generally not "upper class".
Consider, for example, the person who owns a tire center that gives him an income of 1 million per year. He may be rich, but his class affiliation is middle or working class. On the other hand, a NY Times journalist may only make 100,000 a year but is likely to be upper class because of their inherited wealth and educational background.
Now, as always, the only way to be upper class is to be born into it. It is those people who run the DC blob. The tech elite, on the other hand, is largely self-made.
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