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Notes -
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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