The New Republic makes Charles Murray's argument

Whoa. I didn't see this coming.

The New Republic has long been a creature of the left. For some decades, a creature of the intellectual left. In that period, you wouldn't necessarily find much with which to agree but their articles could be interesting to read because they advanced solid arguments that challenged your own thinking. Post internet, they had a hard run trying to remain relevant. A run that ended up in a ditch when they were purchased by a Silicon Valley wunderkind with more good intentions and money than a viable business model.

Post wunderkind, they scraped bottom. Their articles have tended towards dogmatic Jacobean emotionalism rather than considered argument.

Today I come across an astonishing article from them. From Educated Fools Why Democratic Leaders Still Misunderstand the Politics of Social Class by Thomas Geoghegan.

I returned from growing up overseas in 1976 and one of the early and striking observations was how blind American commentary was to class. Much of what passed as racism in the US was demonstrably classism. As a callow teenager, I just classed it as one of those realities that puzzle but don't have ready explanations. Geoghegan is making the same argument here. Democrats, the former party of the working class, now is the party of racism, sexism, anti-semitism, oikophobia and class revulsion. I have discussed that puzzling transition in the past.

Geoghegan focuses on the oikophobia and class revulsion.

How many of us in the party’s new postgraduate leadership caste have even a single friendship, a real one, of two equals, with any man or woman who is just a high school graduate? It’s hard to imagine any Democrat in either House or Senate who did not go beyond a high school diploma. (And no, I am not talking about Harvard dropouts Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg.)


Still, it’s unthinkable that the college-educated base of the party would trust a high school graduate without a four-year degree to run for or hold a serious office. We don’t trust them, and would never vote for one of them. Why should they trust or vote for one of us?

This has echoes of the kerfuffle a few years ago when some conservative on twitter challenged liberal media reporters to identify whether they had ever owned a pick-up truck or had a single friend who owned a pick-up truck. The backlash was immense. Not in the sense "Of course, I own a pick-up", but the desperate sense of "It means nothing that I have never owned and would not be seen dead in the single largest category of vehicle sales in the US."

Very roughly, 70% of Americans do not have a college degree. Yet in the professional classes, virtually everyone has a college degree. Entire social networks are dense with degrees. To the exclusion, not intentional, of the 70%. Not just the exclusion, but the sheer unawareness of.

After thirty or forty years of rising class disdain from insiders for the middle class and below, they are in a panic when the tide of disdain has reversed. In the US, Britain, France, Germany, Spain, Sweden, etc. the people are beginning to vote in non-oikophobes and more class-tolerant leaders. This is characterized by the panicked insiders as rising populism but that is, I believe, a misdiagnosis. The majority are tired of incompetent, corrupt, intolerant, oikophobic, technocratic, class-obsessives and are looking for leaders to bring down those networks of arrogant ignorance.

Look at that passage again though. Who does Thomas Geoghegan, the Democratic insider, labor union lawyer, sound like?

Sure sounds like Charles Murray to me. Charles Murray the libertarian whose concerns about the rising isolation of the college-educated cognitive elite led him to write . . . The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life .

They also argue that those with high intelligence, the "cognitive elite", are becoming separated from those of average and below-average intelligence.

[snip]

Herrnstein and Murray offer a pessimistic portrait of America's future. They predict that a cognitive elite will further isolate itself from the rest of society, while the quality of life deteriorates for those at the bottom of the cognitive scale. As an antidote to this prognosis, they offer a vision of society where differences in ability are recognized and everybody can have a valued place, stressing the role of local communities and clear moral rules that apply to everybody.

Murray was focused primarily on class (its right there in the title) but he was demonized for his discussion of empirical data related to race.

Reviled as Murray was by the center and the left, his empirical research has been persistently replicated in the quarter century since its publication.

And Herrnstein and Murray's forecast seems to have hit pretty close to home. From 1994 to 2016, the cognitive technocrats without a concern in the world, feathered their nests while turning a blind eye to the wrenching costs imposed on the 70%.

And now the pendulum is swinging back. The 70% are demanding to be taken into account and respected by the 30%. As indeed they should be. One of the fundamentals of the Age of Enlightenment and certainly in the American founding is basic freedoms and universal natural rights. A conviction which has never been fulfilled but has always served as a guiding light for the majority. A guiding light that was shaded by the rise of the self-anointed cognitive elite.

I am astonished to see the New republic now advancing the arguments of Charles Murray, even if they are doing so unconsciously.