## The New New Class? - Author: [[Noah Millman]] - URL: https://gideons.substack.com/p/the-new-new-class > [!Bullhorn's Take] > > Millman is onto something here. Won't prove out for maybe a decade, minimum. But the cultural+technological+political nexe make too much sense. Elon Musk, no dummy he, likely senses the same. Hence purchasing Twitter and planting flag at Mar a Lago. ### Highlights > 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of this, the bourgeoisie—merchants, financiers and industrialists, large and small—individually and collectively superseded the landed aristocracy to become the dominant class of the 19th and early 20th centuries.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](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/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. > **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 ** > 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. ** >**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, *(ed: [[Attention Economy|we are]])* 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. **